Mr. In-Between

by Neil Cross

  ‘Stand up. Come here.’

  Jon stood and faced him. His fingers traced the wooden surface of the kitchen table as if it might be the last surface he would ever touch.

  The Tattooed Man closed his hand across the back of Jon’s neck. With the remorseless leisure of something industrial he began to tighten his grip until the pressure there became unendurable. Jon bent double. His fists clenched into his stomach. An inarticulate groan forced itself through lips rigid with pain.

  Jon imagined with stupefied detachment that, should the pressure increase by even the tiniest increment, he would hear the sticky crunch of his spine being crushed an instant before a fragment of splintered bone severed his spinal column and his vision faded, the bright colours behind his tight-screwed lids fading with the speed and finality of flowers rotting in time-lapse.

  The Tattooed Man forced him straight (he thought he might pass out then) and put his lips close to Jon’s ear, so close Jon could not tell if they brushed his flesh as he whispered through gritted teeth, ‘Did you think you could hurt me, Jon? Did you think you could damage me? Did you think,’ and here his hand tightened a further increment on the back of Jon’s neck, ‘did you think you could frighten me?’

  He began to exert downward pressure, forcing Jon to his knees. He shifted his grip so that his spatulate thumb was pressed tight to the weak spot at the base of Jon’s skull. Jon imagined it cracking bone like a crust of ice formed over a pool of dirty water, pressing through his meninges, inexorably tunnelling through to the secret tissue of his cortex.

  The pressure was such that he thought his knees might splinter against the hard kitchen floor.

  ‘Do you know what I could do to you?’ the Tattooed Man said. ‘Do you have any conception of what I could put you through?’ Maintaining the pressure on Jon’s neck, he stooped heel to haunch and whispered. Over the bass roaring in his ears the Tattooed Man’s whisper was like an internal voice, like a possessive demon speaking through the very beat of his tissues, inseparable from his own flesh.

  ‘Not even you can imagine, Jon,’ he said, ‘not even you can imagine what I could put you through.’

  Jon pissed himself. Hot urine flooded his crotch and the length of his legs. The Tattooed Man looked at the small yellow puddles the piss made, watched them spread and embrace one another, making a single pool which spread round Jon’s shoes and towards his own. He whispered, ‘I can see you think you’ve got some idea,’ before releasing his grip and standing straight.

  As the restricted blood seemed to erupt in a wave against the back of his eyes, Jon gasped and fell face down on the floor. In a puddle of cooling urine he curled around himself, nursing the back of his neck and moaning. He sobbed. The pain was such that he wanted to thrash this way and that, as if to shake it from his body. It was also such that he was unable to move beyond a gentle, almost neonatal rocking.

  Arms crossed, the Tattooed Man waited until this rocking had stopped. He tapped Jon’s shoulder with the toe of his shoe. ‘Stand up,’ he commanded.

  Jon struggled to his knees then slipped to the ground like a boneless thing. One hand closed about the cuff of the Tattooed Man’s trouser. The Tattooed Man shook it off. ‘Get to your feet,’ he repeated.

  Somehow Jon regained his footing, although he could do no more than bend double, his hands knitted at the base of his skull.

  ‘Stand straight.’

  Jon obeyed. He thought again that he must faint. He felt his eyes roll in their sockets as his vision faded at the corners. He felt himself tip sideways. He corrected himself, reaching out for the edge of the table. Something solid: something outside the metallic bolts of bright light being shot through his spine, flashing shapes across the inside of his skull.

  His eyes refused to focus. When finally they did, he saw that the Tattooed Man held a kitchen knife at the soft skin between his clavicles.

  ‘Do you know why I’m not going to do any of those things?’ he said.

  Jon could not have spoken even if he knew how to answer.

  ‘Do you think it’s because I’m scared?’

  Jon shook his head as far as he was able; a tiny shift in one direction. He screamed.

  ‘Do you think it’s because I love you?’

  Once again, the agonising half-shake of his head. He bit his lip this time. He bit through it—teeth met teeth. His mouth flooded with saliva and blood.

  ‘Quite right.’

  The Tattooed Man drove the knife forward. It slit the delicate skin beneath Jon’s throat and entered him a millimetre or two. The Tattooed Man withdrew the blade. Jon felt the skin of his neck clinging to it as it slipped away.

  ‘Not at all,’ confirmed the Tattooed Man. ‘It’s because there’s no need to do those things. I would be doing them not because they served any purpose, but because I want to,’ on the word want, his visage decayed momentarily into such bestial savagery that Jon found himself praying for relief, for the knife to slice his neck open and have done. ‘And that would be weak of me—that would be for me to commit the same mistake as you. And I’m nothing,’ he said, ‘if not a man who practises what he preaches.’

  Jon fought the flutter of relief in his intestines, fought to remain stock still.

  ‘However,’ the Tattooed Man said, ‘there’s clearly a problem. I’m not about to let you go unpunished. I have held you in such high regard that it seems only reasonable to allow you to display the contrition I’m sure you feel.’

  Jon’s breath left his nose in short, sharp bursts. His chest barely inflated. He and the dog, twitching in its dream-filled sleep, beat perfect respiratory time.

  ‘I take it,’ the Tattooed Man said, ‘that I’m correct in assuming you want to make amends?’

  He took Jon’s dry swallow as an affirmative.

  ‘Open your eyes.’

  Jon was unaware that he had closed them. When he opened them the point of the knife hung unfocused and double before his right eye.

  ‘Keep them open,’ said the Tattooed Man, ‘and stop shaking.’

  When the knife bit minutely into the nerveless tissue of the white of his eye, Jon fell still. Only his eyelid moved, fluttering against the tip of the intrusive blade like the wings of a moth.

  The knife, in the Tattooed Man’s grip, remained perfectly unmoving. ‘Walk on to it,’ he commanded.

  Jon’s eyelids flickered more erratically.

  The Tattooed Man smiled. ‘Walk on to it. Take one good step forward. It won’t hurt much if you do it that way. If you’re weak, if you’re indecisive, it’ll take one or perhaps even two steps more before the point pierces your frontal lobes. I don’t think you could take that, Jon. I think that’s too terrible a thing for you to do yourself. Do yourself a favour. Take one good step, and it’ll be over. I’ll be able to think good thoughts about you.’

  Jon found himself fighting to lift his leg.

  ‘You know you’re going to die.’ the Tattooed Man insisted. ‘How much better to do so a free man? How much better to take your destiny in your own hands than surrender it to those of another? One free act, Jon. One final act of redemption. One step, one firm step forward, one act of self-love. It’s a fine choice I offer you. It’s a freedom most human beings are denied, or choose to deny themselves. It’s my parting gift to you. If you refuse it, you know I’m going to kill you anyway. For your own sake, and for the sake of my memory of you, don’t let me down again.’

  Jon’s head was suffused with a bright, directionless light. He clenched his fist, and lifted his foot. Before the thought had formed to do so he thrust himself firmly forward, towards the blade.

  There was no pain. The Tattooed Man was pulling the knife away even as he sought, for his sake, to impale himself upon it. The Tattooed Man was smiling a dead smile, the look of a fox caught for a sweeping instant in a car headlight.

  What strength remained in Jon chose that moment to leave him. As he fell the Tattooed Man, with a delicate flourish, carved a half-moon into the flesh ben
eath his eye, scraping across the bone of its socket. Blood burst like flak behind his eyes, blood oozed warm into them, into his nostrils, his mouth.

  The Tattooed Man poured another glass of wine and drained it.

  ‘Get out of my sight, Jon,’ he said. ‘Pull yourself together and get out of my sight.’

  Jon did not know how he managed to stand. As he leaned against a kitchen chair, the Tattooed Man regarded him with a distant, removed disdain.

  Jon stumbled the length of the hallway, his hand finding purchase on the beautifully cool brass handle of the front door. The Tattooed Man watched him from the kitchen doorway. ‘You’re worse than dead, Jon,’ he said. ‘I cast you out.’ He seemed unable to resist a final act of self-indulgence. ‘You lack the intelligence even to carry the responsibility and freedom of your own sins,’ he said. ‘And finally, I must accept the fact that your sins are in fact my sins: since you are a fool, since you are incapable of accepting responsibility for your own actions, I cast you out. There is no hell for fools, Jon, but there’s no Heaven either. There’s neither punishment nor reward.’

  Jon set his jaw and pulled open the door to the dead air outside. Behind him, the Tattooed Man said, ‘Look outside, Jon. No freedom. No responsibility. A limbo for fools. It’s all yours.’

  Jon slammed the door closed behind him, and ran in a half-balanced stumble the length of the gravel driveway, past the lewd topiary cockerel, and into the wide, straight street. He did not look back over his shoulder, nor was he able to fully ascertain in which direction he moved. It was dark now, and the night air was a series of icy lacerations in his parched larynx. He saw no one, nor any hint that there was anyone to see. It was as if even God obeyed the demands of the Tattooed Man, and had removed everyone from the world. Even the windscreens of the parked cars were frosted and opaque.

  He feared to look at the sky because he understood the distance of the stars. They were dead things, their light gone cold.

  He leaned against then slid down a lamp-post. His feet folded beneath him.

  It might have been hours before the yellow Ford Orion, patched with rust and filler, slowed to a halt alongside him. Its nearside tyres interrupted the flow of water into the gutter. By then the sky had clouded and it had begun to rain, great fat icy globs, that had first pittered and occasionally patted against the crown of Jon’s head like insistent fingers reminding him to wake, then gushed in an icy torrent upon him. He was drenched.

  Phil stepped from the Orion and walked around it. He was wearing jeans, a woollen sweater and an old sheepskin flying jacket that stank when it was wet. He bent in the gutter, resting one forearm across his knee. He squinted in the rain. Water dripped from his brow, in rivulets alongside his nose, channelled by the deep furrows that ran from the corner of his nostrils to dangle from the line of his jaw. Then he whispered ‘Jesus Christ’ through his teeth. He stood and jogged to the car, fiddled impatiently with the boot, finally removing an oily blanket from beneath a toolbox and various assorted spanners.

  This he wrapped about Jon’s shoulders, muttering all the time, ‘Jesus Christ. What did he do to you?’

  Jon could move his jaw only with great difficulty. The top half of his body was rigid. To turn his head he had to swivel at the waist. Even this was painful. ‘Did he send you?’

  ‘Did he fuck,’ spat Phil.

  Jon attempted to extricate himself from the blanket in which Phil had wrapped him. Phil helped him to his feet. ‘Don’t talk to me, Phil,’ said Jon thickly, as through an anaesthetised tongue. ‘Don’t let anybody see you with me.’

  Phil dismissed him. He opened the door of the Orion and bundled Jon inside. The roar of the rain subsided to a pleasant background percussion. The car smelled of stale biscuits and unemptied ashtrays. Phil sat beside him, throwing his sopping hair from his eyes as he turned the ignition. The car started on the third attempt. Phil looked over his shoulder as he reversed from the awkward position in which he had parked. He had searched the streets for some hours and his trepidation had become a terrible tension. When he caught sight of Jon, sitting like a tramp in the rain, he had hit the brake so hard he barked the skin of his ankle.

  He leaned to peer through the rain. ‘What did he do to you?’ he repeated. Before Jon could begin to answer, he spat, ‘I don’t know who he thinks he fucking is, sometimes. I really fucking don’t. Does he think he’s royalty going about treating people the way he does? The fucker.

  ‘Remember how those blokes spoke about you at that cottage? Remember how effing proud he looked? Then what does he do? You overstep the mark a bit—just once, after all you’ve done for him—look what he does. I can hardly believe it. Look at the state of you. Are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jon through stiff jaw. ‘Apart from my neck—’

  ‘Your neck!’ The Orion came to a halt so abruptly that Jon bent double the nail of his index finger as he threw his hand out to steady himself against the dashboard. He did not find this surprising. ‘Fuck this,’ said Phil. ‘I’m taking you to hospital.’ He reversed the car with all the lack of care of the professional driver.

  ‘Phil—’ insisted Jon. ‘You don’t want to be seen with me. He won’t like it.’

  ‘Him?’ said Phil. ‘Fuck whether he likes it or not. He can fuck right off. I’ll tell you this,’ he said, ‘if I hadn’t sold my soul to him years ago, I think I’d be seriously considering alternative employment prospects at the moment.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Watch that neck,’ he said. ‘Try not to move it. Keep still.’ He couldn’t tell if Jon was laughing or weeping.

  Naturally, there were doctors to whom Jon and Phil were familiar clients, but each of them knew that to approach any of this private network of clinicians would serve only to further raise the ire of the Tattooed Man. Jon tried to convince Phil to drop him in the car park of the nearest casualty department and go.

  ‘Look,’ said Phil, ‘I can do what I want on my nights off. He doesn’t own me, you know.’

  It was the wordless reply in Jon’s look that convinced him to leave, though not without five more minutes of ‘Are you sure you’ll be OK?’ and, ‘Do you need any cash or anything?’

  Jon accepted a fifty-pound note, and stood in the rain watching the yellow Orion aggressively negotiate the various obstacles of the car park, before screeching on to the road. Distance and the rain washed it away. He walked towards the casualty department with some difficulty. A great nothingness inflated him from inside and a great nothingness outside pushed down upon him. Between these pressures there was the thin shell of his skin, defining his form like a toy soldier stamped in tin.

  It had been many years since last he had experienced the oddly lit, disinfected carnival that was a National Health Service casualty ward after dark.

  As he gave the disinterested receptionist details he did not think to fabricate, he realised that it had been with Andy. They had both been fifteen. Or perhaps Andy had been sixteen then. Jon pictured him wearing those blue shoes. A friend of theirs, whose name he had forgotten and whose face he feared he might be inventing, had slipped drunkenly on a broken cider bottle which had been thrown from the upstairs window of a party they were leaving. It was a Saturday night during the Easter holidays, that dreadful run-up to the ‘O’ level examinations that had seemed so monstrously important. He remembered because it was a shirtsleeves’ night. Andy in a short-sleeved white shirt and jeans and those blue shoes. Jon could not remember what he had been wearing. Their friend, whose name and face were forgotten, hadn’t seen the broken bottle. Andy and Jon watched him fall flat on his arse and slide along the points of glass as if it were a patch of ice, opening a shallow but singularly unpleasant-looking gash that ran from above his Achilles tendon to the back of his knee and along to the flesh of his buttock, where the glass shard found final purchase. Even though the blood flow had been copious, even though the injured boy was howling (to his later chagrin) for his mother, Jon remembered that his first thought was: Oh, no. What are Mum
and Dad going to think?

  He smiled at the memory, then found himself wondering if it were true. Perhaps it was a sentimental distortion. Perhaps he had made of his childhood something akin to a false idol, a golden calf in which he banked a little of his belief even though the bulk of that account had gone to the Tattooed Man. Perhaps the Tattooed Man had known this and tired of it. Perhaps the Tattooed Man had encouraged Andy’s reliance on Jon in order that the idols of his memory be brought up to date, removed from their museums and temples and dragged into the unforgiving scrutiny of the present. Two biblical passages came to mind; ‘I am a jealous God’ and ‘Thou shalt not bow down before any graven image, nor worship at any false idol.’

  But as the woman behind the desk continued to enter his details into the computer he remembered that he and Andy had sat in this very corridor while very similar nurses wearing very similar uniforms pushed about very similar trolleys and wounded drunks made wounded drunken fools of themselves. Jon remembered their immense, unspoken pride in each other that they had taken control of the situation, that Andy had not hesitated to call an ambulance, while Jon had attempted (without great success) to fashion a tourniquet to apply to the grisly leg wound, that they had sat silently and grimly in the back of the ambulance, jostling this way and that, as it made its way to hospital. Not everything was a lie.

  Then he remembered the circumstances in which he had encountered Andy once more. He had been merely one of a docile crowd which stood dumbly by and watched an old man die in the street. Perhaps the boy he remembered was an inaccurately sentimental construction after all. This way of meeting again seemed to reflect too perfectly what Jon was sure the Tattooed Man had been trying to tell him but which he had secretly resisted.