Mr. In-Between

by Neil Cross

  ‘All right,’ he said, wriggling from the embrace, ‘steady as you go. Watch the neck. Watch the neck.’

  Andy stepped back. ‘What happened to your eye?’

  ‘I cut it.’

  ‘I’d say! How many stitches? Jesus bloody Christ. What happened, like?’

  Jon lifted a gentle finger to the wound. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks.’

  ‘I should hope not. Where have you been? What happened?’

  Andy’s bonhomie struck him as grotesque and inappropriate.

  ‘Never mind that,’ he said. ‘I’ve been away. It couldn’t be helped. More to the point, how are you? You look well.’

  ‘You know how it is,’ said Andy, ‘you can’t wallow in these things. You’ve got to pick yourself up.’

  ‘Good,’ said Jon. ‘I’m glad for you.’ The words were dry in his mouth.

  ‘Cathy wouldn’t have wanted me to be sad for the rest of my life.’

  It’s months, thought Jon. It’s only months.

  ‘She would’ve wanted me to carry on. You know how it is.’

  It occurred to Jon that his friend no longer had need of him.

  ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Really, that’s good. That’s all for the best.’

  Andy looked away, ostensibly to grind out his cigarette.

  You bastard, thought Jon.

  ‘So,’ said Andy. With one hand he opened the packet of cigarettes that lay on the desk, removed one and lit it.

  ‘You’ve lost weight,’ said Jon.

  ‘Have I already?’ Andy patted his diminishing gut. ‘I’ve started going to the gym with Derek. I need to get myself in shape.’

  ‘I see,’ said Jon. He took one of his own cigarettes and lit it with his own lighter, squinting as the smoke curled into one eye. ‘Good. Good. And your mum and dad?’

  ‘Oh, they’re fine,’ said Andy, adjusting the position of the ashtray. ‘They’re on holiday at the moment. In Wales. The break’ll do them good, you know. It was hard on them.’

  Thank me, thought Jon. Thank me. Have you any idea what I’ve given up for you?

  He hated himself.

  ‘So,’ said Andy. ‘What are you up to now? I take it you’ve got another job.’

  He squinted through a plume of exhaled smoke. ‘Why should I want another job?’

  Andy shrugged. ‘He said you’d told him it was time for you to move on.’

  ‘Who said?’

  ‘The boss,’ said Andy. ‘He came to have a chat. Have you seen his tattoos?’

  Jon had seen his tattoos all right.

  ‘When did he come and see you?’

  ‘A few weeks ago. A month and a half?’

  While I was in custody, thought Jon. Before he did this to me.

  ‘He’s an excellent bloke,’ said Andy. This was his highest form of praise. ‘Excellent bloke. He had me in stitches. You didn’t tell me he was so funny.’

  Jon held the back of his neck, massaging it gently. ‘Oh, he’s funny,’ he said.

  ‘He was dead nice. He said that in your absence he felt responsible for my well-being and that he’d put little bits of extra work my way now and again. Just odds and sods when they come up. What an excellent bloke.’

  Jon shook his head. Seduced. That was the exact word that came to him. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good.’

  ‘Right,’ said Andy. ‘No rest for the wicked—’

  Once more, Jon was dizzied by déjà vu.

  ‘Best be getting on with it. You know how it is.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jon.

  ‘Look after yourself,’ said Andy.

  ‘I will,’ said Jon.

  ‘Give me a call,’ said Andy. ‘Keep in touch. We should go for a pint.’

  ‘We should,’ said Jon and left the office.

  ‘See you,’ said Gibbon. ‘Look after yourself.’

  Jon was unable to answer. He did not want his voice to shake when he did so.

  Inside, he perched on the edge of the sofa, elbows on knees, chin cupped in hands. He was unable to move. For the first time since he had first realised that (from one upper-storey window at least) the Tattooed Man could see his house, he kept the curtains closed.

  He wondered how it was that he had come to be here, losing control of his own past.

  The night passed. When the house was suffused with a dilated pink light, like a palm held up to a glowing bulb, he stood and walked upstairs to the Oblivion Suite. Closing the door behind him he squatted, fully clothed, hugging his knees to his chest. He saw nothing more than a room full of mirrors, a private, ironic funhouse which endlessly reflected the identical, embarrassingly dumbfounded and grieved expression. Dizzy with vertigo, he stood and paced the reflective floor. Splinters of him fell in all directions. Advancing from the rear, retreating to the fore. Above and below they kept perfect pace, head to head and foot to foot.

  He had long been discreetly proud of the way he had gone about doing the things he had done. As an institutionalised child he had always been fully aware that his mother was alive. Although it seemed necessary that those who sought to understand what he did thought otherwise, she had not even gone so far as to cause in him some formative psychological trauma.

  With hindsight it had long ago occurred to him that despite their academic disavowal of innocence as anything other than a sentimental Victorian fantasy, they had acted with transparent desperation to apportion blame to something other than Jon, to something outside him. It was immediately upon the spurious establishment of his fundamental innocence that they began to concentrate on making him better. On letting him go.

  Jon never saw his mother again. He often pitied her the necessity that she spend the remainder of her life racked by the mistaken assumption of neglected responsibility and worse, of being the object of hatred. He had in fact borne her neither ill will nor malice.

  Sometimes he wondered where she was and hoped she was well, although he expected she was not.

  He wondered now if the things he had chosen freely to do were an attempt at definition, to make of himself a single, fixed point about which raged an incandescent maelstrom of universal fury.

  He closed the door on the Oblivion Suite, padded downstairs and turned on the television. He had an appetite for a curry.

  On the third day he gasped and lifted his head, as if from a doze. He saw that the room was a mess. He had no recollection of how this had come to be. Ashtrays were overflowing. Unwashed plates made a semicircle before the sofa. The television flickered moronically and silently in the corner, a crushed cola tin adorning its crown. Time had leaked into this time-free place. The mess terrified him. The thought of time terrified him. The thought that he had lost control of it.

  He felt beached, dumped into a mundane continuum.

  He ran yellowed fingers through a short but unruly thatch of hair, gingerly stood on bare feet and picked up plates that lay cultured with dried sauce and tinned spaghetti, the end of a sausage lying like the tip of a mummified penis between a knife and fork crusted with egg yolk. With the plates balanced like a poor piece of conceptual art, pinned in place with the tip of his chin, he stumbled to the kitchen, upon the work surfaces of which were distributed opened and fragrant cartons of milk, undiscarded tins, the peelings of potatoes, Cellophane wrappers and Styrofoam containers in which lay pooled the drying, watery, bloody residue of the flesh of a pig. From the bin issued a thick, sweet smell, like banana liqueur. Jon felt little fronds of panic in his intestines, like the lazy shifting of a parasite that might reside there.

  From a high cupboard he withdrew a roll of black bin-liners, and with hands that shook with distaste withdrew two bags from the roll, opened their flimsy lips by rubbing them between his palms, and in three or four grand sweeps, scooped into their innards all the junk, all the detritus of the time that he had not observed passing. He sealed both of these, as well as the bag that lay corpulent and bursting in the red plastic frame of the swingbin. Frantically, he rinsed his hands under cold ru
nning water. They were still dripping when he opened the front door to deposit the bags in the concreted front garden. He noticed cracks in the cement where sickly weeds were beginning to nestle.

  He regimented lines of cleaning solutions: disinfectants, bleaches, sprays, foams and mousses, and lines of cleaning utensils: a mop, sponges, scouring pads, dusters, a vacuum cleaner which had a tube-laden chrome exoskeleton like the sculpture of some beast’s digestive system. It had been a gift of the Tattooed Man. He had thought Jon would enjoy cleaning it.

  He began to clean. First the kitchen. Floor, windows, corners, skirting boards, doorframes, his countenance grim and his pace merciless in its efficiency. He emptied cupboards and cleaned their interiors, then examined their contents to ascertain if they, too, needed to be disinfected. He cleaned the rims of ketchup bottles. He washed the inside and outside of the plastic bin. When the cupboards were dry he replaced their contents, spending half an hour of determined satisfaction arranging them in the way that the space surrounding them seemed to demand; catalogued by type and labels facing straight forward. He washed work surfaces and pulled freezer, washing machine, drier and—with a degree of effort—cooker from their respective niches in order to clean each surface. Then he washed up the remaining utensils; pans, knives, forks, spoons. He dried them and replaced them in their proper place, taking great care not to mark cutlery with thumb-or fingerprints. Then he washed and disinfected the sink and taps.

  He knelt at the ostentatious vacuum cleaner and polished the complex, curved planes of its chrome surface before taking it into his front room (the living room, people called it—he snorted and smiled). He kneeled in order to push the three-pin plug into its socket.

  Since it was time that he sought to eradicate, it was meaningless to attempt to measure the interval between embarking upon and completing this project. Like a shy guest, time slipped away while he was otherwise engaged. He was unaware that it had left until he began to look for signs of it.

  Eventually the house resumed its habitual state, that of a perpetually preserved moment, like a snapshot upon which he was projected as if by a special effect. When it was thus, he felt something in his stomach uncurl like a fern, and begin to dissipate through the pores of his skin. When the sensation had passed he felt light again, like a ghost in this timeless place, a quiet spirit.

  He was sweaty and not clean. Dust and fluff had caked on his hands and face, attached themselves to the burr of his beard. His jeans were rumpled and his armpits dark with sweat.

  Loose-limbed and with the beginnings of a familiar contentment, he walked to the bathroom. He looked for a long time at the reflection of his face; uncouth, bearded and damaged, like a man escaped from some hellish nineteenth-century penitentiary. Tiny black knots of dissolving stitches traced the semicircular purple scar that echoed the orbit of his right eye, the centrepiece of a fragile yellow bloom that had been a fierce, black bruise. He prodded the scar just beneath his Adam’s apple. He pictured himself in the Tattooed Man’s kitchen, pink-edged by the sunset, hands clasped about his throat as his traitorous heart pounded harder with his terror, pumping the thickness of his essence from him in a gushing black plume.

  His legs went weak and he sat on the edge of the bath. He opened the hot and cold taps. Steam rose, for a moment suggested form then thinned and split, condensing and rolling on the ceiling.

  He undressed, hastily pulling the dirty shirt above his head, the sweaty socks from his pale feet which were purple in places, indented by the seams of his boots. Finally, jeans and underwear: he slipped them over his hips and stepped from them, kicking them from his feet and prudishly stepping from the malodorous pile they made.

  He pushed damp hair back from his brow and looked with unspecific melancholy at the diary of violence that had ripped and gashed and broken and spilt and crushed what he supposed might have once been the purity of his body. There was a sense of loss in the thought. Gently, almost with reverence, he ran the tip of two fingers along a ragged white scar that ran across the flat of his stomach, left by the slash of a carpet knife. He remembered looking down at it, vividly recalled the electric moment of certainty that the wall of muscle was split through, that when he moved his guts would spill through the hole and fall like Victorian skirts in a mess about his knees.

  The scars left by the jaws of dogs, by broken glass and baseball bats, by the carefully applied ends of burning cigarettes. Even damaged nipples where, on one occasion he had failed to forget, electrodes had been attached. The sewn, puckered mouths of two gunshot wounds that had just failed to kill him. The grim zigzag and hairless patch of knee that testified to shattered patella.

  Without disturbing the rising steam, a chill passed through the room. Goose bumps raced up his legs and he felt the flesh on his back tighten as they advanced on his spine and came to a tickling halt at the down at the base of his neck. He shivered.

  Then warmth settled on him from above, as if by the gentle draping about his shoulders of a soft, warm towel. He thought for a moment to detect the faint trace of the scent of fabric conditioner. His nostrils dilated but the elusive aroma was gone. He found himself moved by a sudden hollow pity of which his patchwork body was the vehicle but somehow not the object. He wanted to hug himself, to step outside of this frail, damaged frame and envelop it, to forgive and protect it.

  Blinking, he imagined that he saw diaphanous tendrils of steam beginning to converge about a point just before his eyes, to grow milky and opaque. He tried to focus on the movement as with agonising grace it slowly appeared to spiral, falling towards a discrete, localised gravity, as if he were observing the unthinkable rotation of a distant galaxy, a spasm of cosmic savagery and explosive grandeur whose impossible heat, in crossing unmappable voids, had exhausted itself, become meagre illumination by the time it reached his eyes. Then, with a heavy, wet thud of his heart, Jon thought that he saw the suggestion of a human face, trailing off to a neck and shoulders that faded transparently into curtains of water vapour. He feared to blink and dispel the image. Indistinct, perhaps a construction of reflecting light and the play of shadow cast by his own form across the steam, he began to recognise the face. It was a face of which he had been dreaming. It was like the projection of an over-exposed film in an over-illuminated room against a white wall. There was a suggestion of movement where he thought her mouth might be struggling to find density, as if she were beginning to smile, and he thought that soon the vaporous sketch in which he saw the formation of her lids might finally pool, then open to reveal indulgent eyes that gazed fondly upon him. He reached out his hand.

  There was a click, and the bathroom door sprung open on its latch.

  The steam rippled and billowed and split and whipped lazily this way and that. It began to pour from the room, withdrawing to another space.

  His heart thudding quick and steady, Jon sat once more on the edge of the bath. He thought of Cathy and something within him broke in two, something improperly mended. With an aching, urgent intensity, he needed to masturbate. It did not take long. He sank to his knees and thought of the smudge of lipstick on her front tooth, of the shy and forgiving way she broke his gaze, flicking a strand of hair from her face and looking at the ceiling when, dancing with her friends, she had glanced over her shoulder and seen that he had been watching her. The vividness with which he recalled the softness of the flesh of her wrist, gently compressed by the strap of the watch Andy had given her as a fifth anniversary present. The way he had wondered with schoolboy shame if she knew or suspected the existence of the urge he had pretended to himself had been a struggle to control, to reach and trace the curve of her breast with a gentle index finger, then cup its full weight in the palm of his hand, and take a step towards her, to nuzzle into the space behind her ear and in one long inhalation which made his lungs ache, to take into himself that scent and hold it inside, where it might flow through his veins like fresh air through the window of a long unoccupied house. How he had even imagined that she migh
t allow him—how she might want him—to gather the hair at the base of her neck gently, like twine in his fist, and ease back her head so that her throat was taut and kiss her neck and shoulders and eyes and mouth, luxuriating in each contact, gulping her in like he was parched. The knowledge that, had he attempted to do so, she would in fact have taken a step back, embarrassed, surprised, possibly even pleased, but insistent. The suspicion that, even so, she would have been breathing more rapidly, shallow and quick, and that she would cover the shaky way she caught her breath by coughing into her fist. The knowledge that she had wrapped him naked in her arms and wanted what had happened to him never to have happened.

  All of this in a second or two, like a pile of photographs thrown into the air and caught in slow motion, blank side turning to reveal image, image to reveal blankness, upon none of which his mind was allowed to settle: from one incomplete image his mind flitted to the next, the next, the next, desperate both to fix the instant in eternity and to reach the next plateau, for it to be finished.

  He spasmed when he came, like a cripple trying to find his feet. The lumps of his spine crashed against the side of the bath, down which he slowly slid, with a moan, until his forehead rested against his knees. Pearly beads of jism rested on the thick, wiry mattress of his pubic hair, between his fingers, had made a pool in his navel. He wiped his palm on one knee and watched intently as the small, glutinous drop of seminal fluid began to form into the temporary jelly state of whose purpose he had little idea. He rubbed the jelly between the tips of his thumb and forefinger, his head full of the concussion of fully open taps emptying water into a bath that was full to capacity. He wondered for the first time in his existence if he was sterile. The thought that it might be possible for him to play any part in the perpetuation—the creation—of life was abhorrently comical.

  He thought of Cathy, and the first sob gathered in him, rushing down his spine like flood water and gathering under increasing pressure in his stomach until, before he became aware of what was happening, it exploded from within, forcing open his clenched jaws, gushing through his open mouth. It was an expression of an agony that he had been unaware lurked within him and, as if he had accidentally belched aloud in class, his hand went to his mouth and his eyes opened wide in surprise and humiliated shame. He groaned again, and began to shudder and sob, rocking on the pivot at the base of his spine, all the while holding his face to his knees to muffle the sounds that issued from him, although it took a long while to subside and although there was no one to hear.