Mr. In-Between Read online

  Andy laughed. ‘That was twenty quid well spent, wasn’t it?’ he said with gregarious sarcasm. ‘If I remember right, she ended up going off with some bloke from Exeter and you ended up getting sick all over the shirt I loaned you.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ said Jon. ‘I forgot about the shirt.’

  ‘Rum and black,’ said Andy. ‘My mum went mad.’

  In this manner they passed the afternoon. Regret for the things they had not done was reserved for the unspecific haze of inebriation; an empty carton of cigarettes, a fresh pack open on the table. Andy leaning on his palm, his elbow wet with spilled lager. A sigh, the death rattle of nostalgia. ‘It’s good to see you again,’ he said. ‘No, I mean it,’ he insisted. ‘It’s really good to see you again. It really is. I didn’t know how much I’d forgotten. What a laugh we had, like.’

  ‘It wasn’t all a laugh,’ Jon reminded him. ‘Most of it was fucking diabolical. I wouldn’t be seventeen again for anything.’

  ‘No, it was,’ Andy agreed. ‘I mean, it was fucking diabolical and all that, but we made it a laugh. You can make things a laugh when you’re a kid.’

  ‘Come off it, Andy. What have you got to be maudlin about? You’re married. You’ve got Cathy wassname from the year below.’

  ‘Reynolds. No, don’t get me wrong.’ He waved his cigarette a little too expansively and frowned. ‘Don’t get me wrong, like, she’s smashing. I love her to pieces. She’s my best friend. And Kirsty. It’s smart being a dad. Fucking smart having this tiny little thing that you’ve made. I’d do anything for her. I made her alive, like. Me and Cath made her alive. That’s a smart feeling. S’amazing if you think about it. But it’s not having a proper mate, is it? It’s not like having a mate.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jon said.

  ‘You will,’ said Andy with assurance. If he could have known how much, in that second, in that tone of voice, in that expression, he resembled his father, he would have been filled with something like hatred. Then he laughed out loud and said, ‘There must be somebody who’d have you.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. Of course there is. There’s someone for everyone somewhere. Having someone,’ he regarded the smoked-out stub of his cigarette with disdain, and lit another, ‘who knows everything about you. That’s smart.’

  Jon thought of the Tattooed Man. ‘I suppose it must be.’

  ‘Someone you can really talk to, like. I’m not just talking about someone you can fart in bed next to. Someone you can talk to.’

  ‘You’re a lucky man.’ Once it was said, it sounded absurdly adult and paternal. Andy didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Am I fuck,’ he said, with resignation. ‘I’m skint. I’ve got a kid being brought up on the social and a car that packs up every fucking fortnight. I’m losing my fucking hair and I’m getting fat.’

  ‘You’ve got Cathy Reynolds from the year below.’

  Andy pressed his lips together and hung his head. ‘How long for, though? That’s the question, innit? How can you keep it going when you’re in each other’s way twenty-four hours a day and you haven’t even got the cash to nip out for a pint? Cath gets all her clothes handed down from her sister. I’d kill for a few quid in the bank. Kirsty needs new clothes every other day. How can I keep it going when it’s like that?’

  Jon knew nothing of such things. The people with whom he fraternised spoke of their wives seldom and, if at all, disparagingly.

  Suddenly he was possessed by a memory so powerful and immediate as to verge on the tactile. A school corridor, a pulsating crowd pressing claustrophobically close as he curled on the floor around the savage boot of Christopher Aitken. The crowd parting. Andy, broad-shouldered and tall, the fashionable shoes he was so proud of, the skinny tie, the blue blazer with the unravelling school badge. He looked first at Jon, grazed and dishevelled on the floor, then at Christopher Aitken. Christopher Aitken, two years their senior, never knew what hit him. This vivid image of his friend began gradually to fade until once more Jon saw him as he had become. His blond hair was cut short, and was thinning at the temples. At the crown, the pink skin of his scalp was visible. Once effortlessly athletic, he was now heavy-set with pasty skin and the beginnings of a gut hanging in small rolls over the edge of his jeans.

  Jon had loved this person, or the person this man had been, more than he had ever loved another human being.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Fuck it,’ said Andy. ‘I think I must be a bit pissed. I shouldn’t go on like that.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Christ. Look at the time. She’ll be thinking I’ve run off with a stripper.’ He stood and picked up his jacket.

  ‘Well, it was good to see you,’ Jon said, for lack of anything better. ‘Take care, mate. Look after yourself.’

  With the jacket half on his shoulders, Andy paused. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you my address. Why don’t you come round for tea tomorrow?’

  Jon shifted in his seat. This is what people did. What mates who had grown up together did. He doubted his capacity to function in such a context. The world in which he moved had become so familiar he had almost forgotten that it was not his, that he despised Fat Dave and Jagger and Jimmy the Scot. ‘Tea?’

  Andy leaned on the table. ‘Yeah, you know. Meet Cathy and Kirsty and that.’

  Weren’t children supposed to have a sense of things that bordered on the psychic? Would the child be scared of him? He determined to decline, to bite down on his embarrassment until Andy had walked through the pub door and back into that other world. He even opened his mouth to answer, then again he remembered those eyes enraged by his pain and humiliation. ‘Of course,’ he said.

  ‘Nice one.’ Andy stooped and ripped open the empty cigarette packet. He patted his pockets, made a face and wove to the bar, returning with a red Biro. He scribbled for a second, then handed the dissected fag packet to Jon and said, ‘Give me a call tomorrow.’

  ‘About lunchtime,’ said Jon.

  Andy paused at the door, fumbling with the buttons of his denim jacket. ‘Nice one,’ he said again, and stepped outside.

  Jon drank alone until ten thirty, then walked into the damp but tepid summer evening, drawing his jacket about him and huddling within as if for protection. He walked to Fat Dave’s flat. The door was answered by Jagger, who had his hand on his zip.

  ‘All right, Jon?’ he said. ‘You’ve just caught me on the way to the bog, mate. Go through and they’ll deal you in.’

  Dave’s flat was ripe with the grey odours of unwashed humanity and malnourished dogs. A desiccated turd lay in the hallway against the skirting board, from which peeled wallpaper that had once been garish but was now a step away from dust. In the front room, Fat Dave and friends were huddled about a table with affected looks of intense concentration. Dave glanced up and offered a can of Special Brew. ‘What happened to you this afternoon?’

  Jon shrugged. ‘You know.’

  Much nudging and winking.

  He sat at the table, sipping thick, catarrhal beer, and picked up the cards Dave dealt him. They were unpleasant to the touch. They began to play, and steadily he began to lose a great deal of money.

  He was full of unspecific and inappropriate shame as he stepped from the taxi the following afternoon. Andy’s house was an identikit council property surrounded by shabby clones which lined a shabby street in the middle of a shabby estate. It was definitively the kind of place where one might end up. It was not a place of transition. It was a place where one made the most of things. It was the kind of place where neighbours burgled neighbours, or accused neighbours of burgling neighbours, where a car was, at best, a temporary purchase, where playgrounds were littered with the detritus of hopelessness, used condoms like eviscerated slugs, the odd glue bag fluttering in the breeze as if at the racial memory of flight, where children with Victorian faces smoked stolen cigarettes while ogling stolen pornography.

  He walked up the garden path and rapped on the doo
r. He was excruciatingly aware of something in the house going tense. Andy answered the door. They smiled at one another.

  ‘Come in. Take off your coat.’

  The living room was small, almost filled by a brown corduroy three-piece suite and a television. There were pictures on the wall that Jon knew, with an ache in his testicles, had been hung there to brighten up the place.

  ‘Sit down.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  While he was half-way to sitting, Cathy walked into the room. Her hair was washed and pulled into a ponytail and she was wearing a sweater and jeans. She smiled and said ‘Hello’ and Jon said ‘Hello’ back and she said, ‘Make yourself at home,’ and he sat. Then she bent, heel to haunch, and poked her face around the corner of the door, into the hallway. ‘Are you going to come in, now?’ she asked. Then she turned to Jon and said, ‘She’s ever so shy.’

  A small child toddled into the room, on the edge of balance, stubby arms stretched horizontally, massive head lolling, her sticky face radiant with the joy of her achievement. In one fist she clasped a lollipop, which had smeared sugar around her mouth. There were even sticky bits of it in her hair. Jon was discomfited by the confidence with which Cathy scooped her up and into her arms. ‘Say “hello”.’

  The child gurgled. ‘Lo,’ she said, and buried her face in her mother’s breast.

  Absurdly Jon found himself wanting the child to like him. He wished he knew how to make it happen. He imagined some simple conjuring trick might be appropriate, such as producing a fifty-pence piece from behind her ear. Instead he smiled a rictal smile and gave a single, staccato wave. ‘Hello,’ he said.

  ‘Lo,’ said the child.

  ‘Hello,’ repeated Jon. He felt frozen in a moment he could not escape. He sensed that something was required. ‘She’s lovely,’ he said. He could scarcely believe that he had voiced the word ‘lovely’ without caustic intent. His voice sounded comical and clumsy, as if the words were the wrong shape for his lips.

  Cathy laughed. ‘She’s a little terror.’ She nuzzled her daughter’s face. ‘Aren’t you? Aren’t you a little bloody terror?’ She set the child on the floor and Kirsty staggered precariously behind her father’s legs. Andy made a neat manoeuvre and scooted behind her, took her beneath her chubby arms and swung her in an arc above his head. Jon caught Cathy’s eye as the child yelled her delight: the danger of falling, the safety of her father’s arms. The exquisite uncertainties of childhood.

  ‘I know,’ Cathy said. ‘He’s an idiot.’

  The child showed Jon her dolls, all of which were unclothed, and only some of which had heads. Andy sat across from him and they talked. Cathy produced a pot of tea on a tray and sat, largely in silence until Andy related the circumstances of their meeting, when she contradicted him and once slapped him on the arm in mock outrage.

  ‘He thinks I fancied him when we were at school,’ she told Jon, ‘but I thought he was a poser and a big-head.’

  Jon confirmed that Andy had been just that.

  ‘He used to have these shoes,’ she said. ‘These blue shoes with buckles on them.’

  ‘They were good shoes,’ protested Andy.

  ‘They were bloody horrible,’ Cathy corrected him. ‘They were like something out of Star Wars.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ Andy answered. ‘If you didn’t fancy me, how did you come to notice my shoes, for God’s sake? Do you always pay such attention to people’s footwear?’ He looked at Jon for confirmation of this minor victory.

  ‘I wasn’t looking, especially,’ Cathy pointed out. ‘You just couldn’t miss them. They were that horrible. People laughed at you on the street.’

  Jon agreed that this was not an unreasonable point.

  Andy protested with further circumstantial evidence: ‘She wrote my name on her biology book,’ he told Jon.

  ‘I did not.’ This was when she slapped his arm.

  ‘He probably hasn’t told you this,’ Jon told her, ‘but one night I spent a whole evening watching him get drunk so he could find the courage to phone you. In the end he passed out.’

  She seemed unsurprised, indeed vaguely affronted. ‘He used to follow me around school as well,’ she shuddered. ‘It was a bit creepy.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Andy. ‘Who’s full of herself tonight?’ He looked very pleased.

  Presently she left to bathe the child, and put her to bed before preparing the dinner. She declined Jon’s offer of some help, which he had assumed would be expected and welcome. She was, according to Andy, ‘funny about the kitchen’.

  They drank Jon’s wine with the traditional Sunday meal. When Jon expressed his appreciation there was a slight awkwardness and he regretted opening his mouth. He couldn’t seem to find the right thing to say. He felt himself to be an accessory to their conversation rather than a part of it, someone whose function was to listen to the jokes and appreciate occult references to years past without ever actually being central to the discussion.

  Cathy wouldn’t let him wash up. She brought them a beer and a glass each, and disappeared into the mysterious kitchen, about which she was funny, but in which way she gave no clue.

  They lapsed into silence. Andy’s joblessness fell heavily between them, like an unspoken bereavement. Eventually Jon spoke. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a few friends here and there. I might be able to sort you something out. It won’t be much.’

  Andy set his beer on the floor. ‘What sort of stuff?’

  ‘I don’t know, this and that.’ He seemed to think. ‘You’re good with cars, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about good …’

  ‘You can make cars that don’t go, go, can’t you?’

  ‘Well, yeah. I suppose so. Yeah, I can. I’m all right at that. If it can be done, like.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. I’ll have a word with somebody. It might just be a bit of temporary cash-in-hand. Off the books, you know.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘Anything.’

  ‘It could lead on, though,’ said Jon. ‘Depending on how things work out.’

  ‘Course,’ said Andy. ‘Course.’

  He looked at Jon with embarrassingly naked gratitude and something like wonder before calling for his wife. She walked into the room drying her hands on a dishcloth. Andy explained to her almost word for word what Jon had told him.

  She looked at Jon with newly serious appraisal, an indication that she was aware that relationships had changed, that he was moving from Andy’s past into their present. He sensed for one illogical second that she had some intimation of the future this would involve, and that it frightened her.

  Later that week he sat at the Tattooed Man’s kitchen table, a mug of coffee in one hand, a newspaper spread open before him, upon which the Tattooed Man dropped an A4 jiffy bag. Jon removed the documents it contained, examined them. Names, addresses, photographs.

  The Tattooed Man waited for him to digest the contents, then said, ‘I went out of my way to promote good will with these wankers. They’re part of a Welsh separatist movement, would you believe.’ Jon nearly choked on his coffee, spat some across the paper. The Tattooed Man indicated with a wave of his hand that he thought he had seen everything. He tapped the side of his aquiline, much-broken nose and smiled with singular malevolence. ‘I don’t think any particular subtlety is called for in this instance,’ he said. ‘I think it would be best all round if you just kicked the living shit out of them. You might as well leave them alive to tell the tale. But not necessarily psychologically intact.’

  Two days later in a tower block in Cardiff Jon spent fifteen tiring minutes beating three men senseless with a series of blunt objects. First there was a baseball bat, with which he struck at knees and ribs and necks, then, when this was finally torn from his grip, a short rubber cosh kept in his back pocket. Finally there was a sock filled with snooker balls, which he was forced to intercept and wrest from the hand of one of the men, shattering bones in the process. The man lost his bala
nce, fell into the sofa. Jon swung the makeshift cosh in a wide arc that terminated in the side of the man’s head. The man collapsed with astonishing certitude, like a cow stunned in a slaughter house. The dreadful, dull concussion brought a momentary stillness to the room. Jon was out of breath and in a degree of pain. He took a moment to regain his breath, half-crouched in the mess of upturned and broken furniture, between the remaining two men and the door. Each of them was exhausted and clearly terrified. There were flecks of blood on the walls.

  When Jon had done, he taped the oldest of them, half-conscious and dishevelled, to a kitchen chair, then sat and smoked a cigarette. The first man was still and silent. It was possible that Jon had swung the snooker-ball cosh with too much prejudice. The other man lay quietly on his back gazing blankly at the ceiling, one arm crossed loosely on his chest. He would require a short convalescence, and perhaps counselling. He had begged for his life and Jon had let him. He had shit his trousers and Jon had laughed.

  When the cigarette was smoked, Jon kneeled before the man taped to the chair and said, ‘This was a goodwill gesture. If I have to come back I’ll cut out your tongue so you won’t be able to scream, and so I’m able to really take my time and enjoy myself. Do you understand?’ He took a knife from his back pocket and unfolded it before the man’s eyes, so close they crossed trying to focus on it. The man whimpered and struggled. He was trying to say ‘please’. Very quietly, Jon said, ‘I’ll cut your fucking face off. Do you understand?’

  The man was unable to nod. He lacked the strength. His head lolled on his chest and he shuddered and wept for his humiliation. Jon lifted his face and spat in it.

  As Phil chauffeured him home he became aware of a pain deep in the muscles in his back, as if something had ripped there. It was an unfamiliar pain and a nagging one, present even in his dreams that night, absurdly and comically symbolised by a pair of lurid blue shoes with buckles on the side.

  3

  The Good Thing

  Grey rain lashed the bay window. The topiary cockerel in the garden had its spindly bones whipped this way and that. A pleasant whistling emanated from the chimney, like that made by a child blowing across the rim of a bottle.