Mr. In-Between

by Neil Cross

  Jon could think of no satisfactory answer. He began to doubt the wisdom of coming here.

  The doctor changed tack. The burr became infinitesimally more inquisitorial, more authoritative: ‘Are you an intravenous drug user, Jon?’

  ‘Occasionally,’ Jon admitted.

  ‘What drugs?’

  He listed them.

  ‘And how often?’

  He answered.

  ‘Would you describe yourself as an addict?’

  He didn’t know. He didn’t think so.

  ‘And how do you pay for all these drugs? I don’t have to tell you how expensive drugs are.’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Are you a practising homosexual, Jon?’

  He replied not.

  ‘Have you been tested for the presence of the HIV virus?’

  No, he hadn’t.

  ‘Have you ever suffered from a psychiatric illness?’

  This time he hesitated. The doctor looked directly at him.

  ‘Have you had any mental problems?’ he elaborated. ‘Have you received treatment for a disease such as schizophrenia?’

  Such as, thought Jon. What else was there? He knew that the doctor had access to his medical records. He had not thought to lie to the receptionist and was anyway unclear as to whether this would have achieved anything. Indeed he could imagine it being counter-productive. He was too exhausted and in a deal too much physical discomfort to extricate himself from what, were he to present anything like a belligerent attitude, might prove to be an insurmountable problem.

  He told the doctor all about it, or at least as much about it as he had told any other doctor.

  ‘I see,’ said the doctor. He chewed the end of his pen. ‘Jon,’ he said at length, ‘I’d like you to agree to remain here for a few days, under observation.’

  Jon grimaced. ‘What I’d really like to do is go home to bed. Can’t you just prescribe me some painkillers and let me go?’

  The doctor prodded again at the bruising on his neck with the end of the pen. ‘That might be possible,’ he said, ‘but you’ve taken quite a battering. It couldn’t hurt to keep an eye on you for a couple of days, could it?’

  Jon looked away. ‘And what if I were to discharge myself?’

  ‘I think you probably know,’ replied the doctor, ‘that I have the power, should I believe that you represent a danger either to yourself or the public …’ He let the sentence drop. ‘And let me be candid, Jon. As yet, I am not entirely convinced that you do not represent a danger to yourself …’

  ‘Or the public?’

  ‘Not so much that, Jon. Not so much that.’

  Jon lay back and looked at the ceiling. It occurred to him that he had spent no more than a few hours of this young year outside the company of strangers. He had learned of his fundamental lack of freedom, the fallacy of his sense of autonomy.

  He was wheeled to an observation ward. It was the culmination of all he had come to suspect. Its darkness, its twin rows of anonymous, sick bodies, suspended somewhere between death and the recovery of identity. Equally likely to move in either direction. A kind of limbo.

  How wrong he had been. What an idiot he was. Confined to limbo. Denied freedom and identity.

  It smelled, as he always knew it would, neither of life nor sterility, but something that itself hung between the two. A cretinous dybbuk hung over them all.

  He fell asleep, and did not dream of Cathy.

  8

  In Limbo, Attended by Angels

  Keith Chapman would not have been surprised by the accuracy of Jon’s assessment of him. Rather than preternatural insight, however, he would have ascribed responsibility for its precision to the miraculous capacities of the human memory.

  He wondered if Jon remembered him.

  Less than half-consciously (perhaps even with a malodorous undercurrent of carnivorous aggression) he and Jon had sized each other up. They had circled one another, seizing upon the remnant of an old scent, a fractured recollection of a gesture, the expansion or contraction of a pupil too fleeting to clutch at and hold.

  Chapman had withdrawn from Jon at the point when his curiosity had compelled him to know more, to find out. He had moved away from Jon in order to protect him.

  He leaned back in the swivel chair. The monitor at which he stared remained impassive and flicker-free. Curtains stirred gently behind it. His morning responsibilities were complete. This was his favourite part of the day. He enjoyed the season of solitude in which he was relieved of the imperative that God be the sole object of reflection.

  The study was modest enough but he suspected nevertheless that it represented not only something of an indulgence but even an affectation. It was one for which he hoped he might be forgiven. The walls, of course, were lined with books, mostly (he would smile, with self-deprecation, which was indicative at the same time of humourless intellectual and spiritual depths which his drollery could not penetrate) business related.

  A Protestant friend of his (he suspected that sometimes he dropped this classification into the conversation in much the same way that he had heard selfconscious liberals drop their association with individuals who represented groups with which they neurotically strove to prove they had no problem: a Gay Friend of mine; a Black Friend of mine; an American friend of mine) had suggested that too much theology obfuscated the unremitting vitality and immediacy of religious conviction. All that was required, she maintained—he imagined that she was quoting or paraphrasing—was a newspaper in one hand and a Bible in the other. Chapman respected but was unable to fully accept this. He read Catholic liberation theologies, much of which concerned the fact that the concerns of the Catholic Church in the Third World were often identical with the political and economic concerns of the West—and arguably exerted a genuinely evil influence. He thought it fitting, since it was the Catholic Church at its conservative, intransigent worst which perpetuated the problems of the Third World, that it be the Catholic Church at its most politically radical which addressed, in a revolutionary fashion if necessary, problems for which the Church itself was responsible. He saw reflected in the radical politicisation of a spiritual paradigm grown corpulent and mundane an echo of Christ’s own mission.

  This surrender to a conservative status quo, he had once or twice drunkenly opined to his intimates (who were few), was the cause of the Church’s waning influence in the West. He feared it to be only a matter of time before it became fully eclipsed by the ascendant pestilential star of evangelicalism. Evangelicalism offered a vulgar, user-friendly method of worship which was devoid of anything recognisable as theology: an image of Christ not as the profound, singular manifestation of God’s Love for His Creation, but as someone to talk to, someone who would listen, someone who would always be there. Evangelicalism’s odious politicism came a poor second to this, like a baby brother brought along on a date at the last minute and accepted with resignation as part of the package. Accept Jesus as Friend and Jesus as Friend in unthinking bigotry came as a second, added bonus.

  Chapman loathed this tendency. He loathed the vulgarity with which it sought to portray the depthless profundity of the Primal Universal Power wilfully become suffering man. It lacked the ferocity of love he understood to be necessary in order to surrender oneself to God’s will. It lacked rage.

  Chapman cultivated his rage. It was indivisible from the ferocity of his love of God. This was the heaviest of his burdens. To continue, in the name of others, to love God while he himself sometimes feared he hated Him.

  His favourite Jesus was the Jesus of the Gospel according to Mark. This was the figure most recognisable as man: Mark’s Christ was prone to anger and even impatience, such that the treatment of his disciples smacked sometimes of unfairness, of being fundamentally uncalled for. It was this man who had died, rejected and despised not only by those who had claimed to follow him, not only by the Romans who nailed him to a cross for unspecified crimes against the state, but by the very God whose will he ha
d striven only to serve. ‘My God, My God,’ he had cried. ‘Why have you forsaken me?’

  For Chapman, this had lost nothing of its terrible power. It maintained an ability to make him weep. The Jesus of Luke moved him in what he recognised as a slightly sentimental way. The Jesus of John excited his intellect. But his was the Jesus of Mark. Meditating as he prayed on that despairing outburst of an unbearably suffering, unbearably alone man, filled him with a love and desire to serve, the intensity of which on occasion had led him to question his sanity. The suffering servant, the rejected servant. The notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.

  He realised that Jon had perceived this conflict within him between fury and forgiveness, and that this had not been a consequence of the frightening mental aptitude which sometimes accompanied mental disturbance. (He was aware that schizophrenics were remarkably attuned to minute unconscious signs of aggression. He considered it to be a hollow irony that their fears of persecution were not altogether irrational: they saw the violence and fear manifested in others, even in those who were unaware that they ever experienced such turbulent emotion.)

  Jon had remembered him, if not consciously, as he had remembered Jon.

  It had taken him a while, weeks, during which time his mind returned again and again to the man he had first noticed at Cathy’s funeral and to whom he had been introduced at the wake. Jon had possessed a quality that disturbed him. Partly it lay in his manner, in the rigidity and tension the priest intuited beneath his demeanour of quiet fortitude and support for his bereaved friend. In a way, Chapman suspected that he had recognised himself there: beneath his attitude of support, beneath even the primacy of the love which Chapman did not for a moment doubt Jon genuinely felt for Andy, he was filled with fury. This fury, Chapman knew—and again, he was reminded of himself—was not the passing, occasional rage to which every individual is prone, particularly at such times. Rather, it was like (and at first he had been almost embarrassed to voice the word to himself) wrath. He had taken the opportunity to annex Jon’s gaze and had been chilled by what he saw there. Jon’s response to his conversational gambit, though guarded, had served only to confirm his suspicions. It was as if Jon had been seasoned by the bitter vinegar of the world, as if he had imbibed it with his mother’s milk, as if it had hardened him to all sense of mercy.

  It was this image, which was uncharacteristically hyperbolic and which seemed to enter his mind unbidden, that finally alerted him to the nature of his concern for this young man.

  He had lain awake, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the dawn, and remembered.

  He had been introduced to Jon’s mother by a social worker. She had expressed a desire to speak to a priest, and Chapman was well known to the social services. She arrived in a taxi, from which she emerged clutching a handbag to her chest. It had been raining. He led her through to his office, which at the time he had (rather arrogantly, he supposed, but with the best of intentions) decorated in such a manner that it resembled that of a doctor or a psychologist: brown-panelled walls, a desk (upon which he had arranged photographs of his family and their children because, naturally, he was unmarried and without children of his own) and two rather opulent sofas arranged to face one other. She wore a raincoat, and perched on the sofa with the handbag balanced on her knees. He offered to take her coat and she leaped abruptly and startlingly to her feet. She looked about herself as she slipped her arms through the sleeves and shrugged the coat from her, as if ashamed that she wore it.

  He offered her a cigarette, which she took and lit from a lighter he kept on the coffee table between the two sofas. He provided tea and biscuits.

  He had worn a neater beard, then. It was shot through with white, but not yet the rather prophetic tangle he now wore. (At least he always thought of it as prophetic and rather fierce. There were those who had said he reminded them of Father Christmas, and he was fond of it for this reason, too.) He had crossed his legs and leaned earnestly forward.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ she said. He watched her collapse slowly into tears. Her head sank to her chest and she began gently to shake. Her hand went to her mouth before she broke into shuddering sobs of guilt and contrition. She had needed a priest to witness this. It was as if she believed that God required word of her sorrow.

  He waited. She wasn’t a particularly young mother, he remembered, perhaps five years older than he had been then. He had been thirty-five.

  When the tears had abated he offered her a box of man-sized tissues, with which she dabbed at her calamitously run mascara.

  She requested confession. Chapman replied that of course he would be willing to administer it for her, but that she might find it beneficial to first have a chat (that had been the word he had used, and it was one which he continued to use; he had yet to come across a satisfactory alternative). So she had chatted, and Chapman had listened and consoled and felt a terrible, helpless pity for her and her child.

  It had been three days later that he met Jon. The boy had been in custody then for nearly nine months. He was a slight child, though this came as no surprise since the priest understood that he seemed unable or unwilling to stomach more than a little food. He was reserved and anti-social, unwilling rather than unable to bond with any of the other children with whom he shared this place. This place. Chapman could not help but think of it as a pen, a place for children who had done terrible things, things of which children should not have been capable, and in the name of which there were equal and contradictory demands for punishment and rehabilitation. It was a limbo for lost children while unseen forces decided upon their nature: sinner, to be punished, or sinned against, to be cured.

  He had his own little room, a cell really, with a low bed upon which was spread a blue candlewick bedspread. There was a little wardrobe and a child-sized desk. In nine months the child had made no attempt to stamp his personality on the room. It was so tidy, so transparently institutional, he might have moved in yesterday.

  Chapman remembered the childcare assistant as an immensely tall young man with a fright-wig of curly hair, a pair of canary yellow loon pants and a very tight t-shirt that rode above his hairy belly button. He had gently rapped on the (open) door to Jon’s room. ‘Jon?’ he said. ‘This is the man I told you about. The man who’d like to speak to you. His name is Father Chapman.’

  Chapman stepped into the room. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I think it would be all right to call me Keith. What are you reading?’ He glanced briefly over his shoulder. In response the gangling assistant nodded ‘OK,’ and left, pulling the door closed behind him.

  ‘Spiderman,’ said Jon, lowering the comic. He lay on the bed. Chapman’s first impression was of the quiet beauty whose root is a spiritual peace, rather than an accident of genetic make-up, and which only children truly seemed to possess. This quality was called innocence by some, but in the world Chapman perceived, innocence of this kind did not exist. All were born into sin. Innocence was merely lack of information and experience with little to commend it. He hitched his trousers and sat in the child-sized chair, which he had lifted easily in one hand and placed alongside the bed. He hoped he looked faintly comical there.

  ‘Spiderman!’ he enthused. Back then, he had spent as much time in the company of children as he was able. For children he suffered a sense of envy and joy, alongside a terrible, crippling need to protect them. ‘Is Spiderman your favourite?’

  Jon closed the comic and shrugged.

  ‘I know who my favourite is,’ Chapman persisted. ‘My favourite is the Human Torch. I like it particularly when he says, “Flame ON!”’

  Jon seemed to ponder upon this. ‘I like it when he fights with Spiderman,’ he concluded.

  ‘The Human Torch fights with Spiderman?’ Chapman sounded astonished, perhaps even put out. ‘I thought they’d be friends.’

  Jon tutted. ‘They are,’ he said, in the exaggerated tone of a child stating the patently obvious. He sighed and rolled his eyes, then rolled over so t
hat he hung over the edge of the bed. From a neat pile of comics he withdrew a slightly larger edition. He sat up again and showed it to Chapman. ‘It’s an Anniversary Special. That’s why they fight.’

  Spiderman hung precariously by one hand from the spike of what Chapman suspected to be the Empire State Building. One arm was withdrawn, about to deliver a terrible blow to the Human Torch, whose long trail of fire told that he had circled from behind Spiderman. The Human Torch’s manner was such that he seemed about to deliver a piledriver blow, fists clenched at shoulder height. He looked absolutely furious about something or another.

  ‘Mayhem Over Manhattan!’ the blurb read. ‘Spidey and the Torch do Battle Above the Streets of New York! You’d be a Fool to Miss it!’

  Chapman asked if he might take the comic and made a great show of admiration. Although it was practically mint, he noted that the child indicated no concern that he might damage it. He found this lack of concern troubling.

  ‘Do you like the Thing?’ asked Jon.

  Chapman felt something like relief, something like trepidation. Perhaps the child was beginning to trust him, and he was proud of that. The child might open up to him the contents of his mind, and although this was what Chapman sought, he feared it too.

  ‘Do you?’ he asked, cautiously.

  Jon shrugged. ‘Sometimes. He fights the Hulk soon.’

  ‘The Thing and the Hulk? Goodness, what a mess that’ll make.’ He returned the comic to Jon. ‘Who bought you these?’

  ‘Bendy.’ Bendy was the gangling man in the yellow flares. He evidently took great pleasure in this: Bendy! someone would shout as he walked past, and he would fold at the knees and proceed to perform a comical walk that lampooned his own peculiar, heron-like qualities.

  ‘I see. That’s very kind of him.’

  Jon shrugged.

  ‘Who used to buy your comics? I bet you spent all your pocket money on them.’