Mr. In-Between Page 5

  ‘I take it that you’re aware that Andy’s a friend of mine?’

  Gibbon paused in the act of pouring boiling water into a cracked mug. He and Rickets exchanged a momentary glance. Something passed between them.

  ‘No,’ said Rickets. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘I thought you might like to.’

  ‘Yeah. Right. Thanks.’

  ‘Then I can assume that it goes without saying that he’ll be treated with a great deal of respect.’ He glanced out of the office window, which was so grimed with exhaust-fume grit it framed the garage in haze like a Victorian photograph.

  Gibbon spread his hands. ‘Of course. No need to ask.’

  Jon nodded, looked at Rickets, who scratched his woolly head then nodded in return.

  ‘Nice one,’ said Jon. He left the office struggling with a small smile.

  Through the grimy window, Rickets watched his retreating back. ‘Wanker,’ he said, raising a rigid middle finger at waist height.

  Jon squatted and tapped Andy’s shin. ‘Hello, tosser,’ he said. ‘Fancy a pint?’

  Andy wriggled from beneath the car. He sat up, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. ‘Is it lunch already?’

  Through the window Andy caught Gibbon’s eye and performed a short mime that somehow communicated exactly this: ‘I know I’m not finished yet but would it be OK if I went for lunch?’

  Gibbon raised an affirmative thumb and smiled before half-turning and exchanging rapid words with Rickets. Andy returned the gesture, which Gibbon acknowledged with exaggerated bonhomie before turning once more.

  He and Rickets continued to convene quickly and quietly. They did not look at Jon.

  The pub was busy with lunchtime custom. Jon perched on a stool with a worn velveteen cover, elbows resting on the dark varnish of the round table while without comment Andy bought them drinks and a sandwich each.

  Andy chinked his glass against Jon’s. ‘Cheers,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you sorting me out like this.’

  ‘As long as you’re sorted.’

  ‘Well, put it this way: I’m more sorted than I was.’ He tore a chunk from the sandwich. A tiny sliver of ham rode on his chomping lips like a cowboy in some hellish rodeo. ‘At least there’s light at the end of the tunnel.’

  Jon bit from his own sandwich and tried to chew without expressing the dry disgust he felt. ‘Do you owe money?’

  Andy shifted. ‘A bit here and there. You know.’

  ‘How much is a bit here and a bit there when it’s at home?’

  Andy told him.

  ‘I didn’t know it was that bad,’ said Jon. He took a sip of tepid bitter, then reached into his jacket pocket.

  Andy raised his hands before him. ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘No way. I can’t accept anything else from you.’

  ‘Don’t be a moron,’ said Jon. ‘I’ve got more money than I know what to do with. Let me help.’

  Andy averted his eyes and ground his teeth. ‘I couldn’t,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t just take your money. It’s a lot of money, for fuck’s sake. It’s a lot of money. I couldn’t.’

  Jon sighed. He was unaccountably irritated. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘once you’ve got yourself together you can start to pay me back. If you want I’ll take interest, for Christ’s sake. The money might as well be doing something useful in the meantime. I’m never going to spend it.’

  He watched as Andy silently debated with himself. The agonies of pride that cannot be afforded. The relief of being shown a way out, of surrendering a responsibility that cannot be met.

  There was something foreign inside Jon. It was not pity because there was within it a complex thread of pleasure, a satisfaction to which he did not want to admit because he feared to understand it. He did not know how best to compose his face. In a moment it had passed. He had no wish for it ever to return.

  Andy met his eyes. Tentatively: ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say it if I wasn’t.’

  ‘I’d pay you back.’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘It would make a difference.’ Andy conceded quietly. ‘It would make all the difference.’

  Jon opened the chequebook, scribbled in it with a black Biro. ‘Buy Cathy something,’ he said. ‘Some clothes or something. I don’t know. A dishwasher or something.’

  Andy took the cheque, smudged its edges with oil. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said. Jon reached across the table, placed a hand on his shoulder and said nothing. Somebody walked into the pub and for a second they were frozen in this meagre intimacy.

  Later, Phil was noticeably nervous as he and Jon dressed head to toe in black bikers’ leathers. Before he squeezed his head into the helmet, he said, ‘What’s he up to with this one? It doesn’t make any sense.’

  Jon pulled on a gauntlet. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted, checking that the glove was snug. He squeaked when he moved, a bathetic note of low comedy to offset his sinister appearance. ‘He’s beginning to move in mysterious ways.’

  Phil concurred with a muffled grunt. ‘Fucking right he is. This is just beyond me. Way above my head.’

  Jon pulled on his own helmet. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

  They walked from the derelict house, pushing aside the creaking iron gate. Phil mounted a black Suzuki motorcycle, kicked it into life, and Jon settled behind him. They leaned into the curve as the bike turned right, then straightened and weaved like an irritable meat-fly through the congested traffic of a main arterial road. Half a mile further, they pulled up across the road from a high-street building society.

  ‘They’re late,’ said Phil with a note of panic.

  Jon clapped his shoulder reassuringly. ‘It’ll be OK.’

  ‘We’re a bit obvious here, aren’t we?’

  ‘One minute,’ said Jon. ‘We’ll give them one minute, then we’ll leave.’

  Phil gunned the engine. Jon was uncomfortably aware that its roar had attracted the attention of several of the bored customers who formed the building society queue, and perceived the minute flickers of trepidation which passed among them. One or two of the staff, alerted by the slight shift in the hormonal balance of the air, glanced up with more recognisable anxiety. Jon dismounted and, kneeling, made a mime of fiddling with the bike’s exposed chromium engine. Phil was tapping his feet.

  A red Ford Escort pulled up outside the building society. Jon tapped Phil’s leg. From the car spilled four men in ski masks, hurried and spiky with adrenaline. Carrying sawn-off shotguns, they bustled clumsily through the smoked-glass doors of the office. From the street the pandemonium inside was pantomimic and surreal: pensioners freezing, hands on heads, women scooping children from the floor, young men emasculated and terrified, muzzles waved and brandished and gloved fingers pointing this way and that.

  Jon took a moment to get his breath, then stood, opened the bike’s saddle-bag and withdrew a conscientiously oiled semi-automatic pistol. He tucked it under one armpit as he dodged traffic, then held it aloft as he walked through the smoked-glass doors. For an extended fragment of time, all activity froze. He held the pistol high and steady and let it bark twice. The first of the ski-masked men folded violently at the waist as the impact drove him into the wall. A fine spray of blood rained slowly upon the customers who by now were stretched across the floor. Hands over heads, arms folded protectively about children too scared to sob. The second burst of fire, as decisive an exclamation as the first, sent the second man spinning on his axis like a spastic ballerina, sawn-off spinning gracefully from his hand. The third was in the process of turning, raising his gun, when a third burst, more accurate, shattered much of his head. The fourth had been given perhaps two seconds in which to react: he spun on his heel, gun in one outstretched hand, and discharged both barrels. Although the shots hit the wall behind him, something hot and sharp, like a tiny meteor shower, rained on Jon’s back, pittering and pattering against the motorcycle helmet. He drew an unhurried aim on the fourth man, w
ho was running for the door. Glass shattered in his wake like crashing surf and cascaded in jewelled shards about his head as the jumping muzzle pursued him. When the line of fire crossed his shoulders, he was rammed head-first through plate-glass and on to the pavement, coming to a twitching halt across the bonnet of the red Escort. The horrified, pasty-faced young man at the wheel, who only that morning had woken thrilled with his new role as Driver, reversed with a smoking banshee wail into the traffic, letting the corpse slide from the bonnet into the gutter.

  It had taken considerably less than ten seconds. Jon turned and sprinted on to the street, the beginnings of a crowd scattering like water the moment he did so. He clambered on to the back of the revving motorcycle, and Phil accelerated away. At the appointed place they dumped the bike, clambered over a fence and into a trading estate where a van was waiting. The back doors opened as they approached, and closed behind them as they threw themselves in, to the smell of white spirit and stripped pine and the hammering of exhilarated hearts.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ said Phil. ‘There were four of them. I admit that I was ready to call it a day there and then, I mean there were four of them and we were only expecting two, but Jon here walks in, cool as a bloody cucumber, and takes them all out before you can say Jack Robinson. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It was beautiful. It was like a film.’

  The Tattooed Man grinned wolfishly, and poured Phil a whisky. Jon had spent much of the afternoon having shrapnel removed from the back of his arm. He was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, both of which had been taken from the Tattooed Man’s wardrobe. Jon’s own clothes had blood on them and had since been incinerated in the basement.

  ‘You played your part, too, Phil,’ said the Tattooed Man. ‘That was a beautifully arranged get-away. Pretty impressive all round.’

  ‘Cheers,’ said Phil. He was still shaking.

  Jon sipped whisky.

  ‘You shouldn’t be drinking,’ said the Tattooed Man. ‘Not on top of all that medication.’

  ‘Come off it,’ protested Jon. ‘I’m toasting myself.’

  ‘And so you should,’ said the Tattooed Man. He stood, glass in hand. ‘To Jon,’ he proposed.

  ‘To Jon,’ agreed Phil.

  Jon wiggled his glass beside his ear. ‘To me.’

  ‘You did a good thing today,’ said the Tattooed Man.

  ‘I know,’ admitted Jon. ‘And after that I killed some people.’

  The Tattooed Man frowned. ‘Enough booze, I think.’

  Jon waved him off. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t try to joke. I’m not very good at it.’ He raised his glass. ‘To the good thing.’

  ‘To the good thing,’ echoed the Tattooed Man and Phil.

  The next day, the newspaper headlines were exactly as the Tattooed Man had predicted, indeed seemed to want. Perhaps even require. They were variations on a theme of ‘Bizarre Gangland Murder Puzzles Police’, subheaded ‘Lone Gunman Kills Three, Injures One’, jazzed and teased into varying degrees of vulgarity dependent upon the price and size of the paper in question. He was third headline on the television news, at least until the afternoon when a corrupt government arms deal and the death of a minor television personality shifted him in the running order. In the Sun the last paragraph of the leading article was devoted to unashamed celebration of the previous day’s deed. The next day speculation had spread to the broadsheets. Eye-witnesses were interviewed by television journalists and asked the inevitable question: ‘How did you feel?’ More than one, interviewed in the safety of their warm house and with more than a day’s hindsight, spoke of feeling oddly safe the moment Jon burst in and started firing. By the following week, the subject of vigilantism was the talking point of a daytime television discussion programme. The gang-war speculation quietly ended. The popular mind wanted something else and relentlessly pursued its desire until it took on tangible form. It was revealed by an eager media that the three dead men had boasted two sentences for rape and one for murder between them, not to mention a string of convictions for robbery with violence.

  At short notice and with little preparation, he was asked to complete two broadly similar jobs. It was as if they represented a last-minute idea of the Tattooed Man’s: as they were about to board a ferry to Zeebrugge Jon put to sleep a Dutch child pornographer and two of his entourage. Phil did well to get him away. Two days later he dumped on the steps of Bristol Crown Court the shattered corpse of a hit-and-run driver who, after drunkenly ploughing through and killing two of a queue of children at a bus stop, had been released from custody to national disgust after serving six months in an open prison. By the end of the third week, a figure clad in leathers and brandishing an Uzi stood behind a cowering, indecisive Prime Minister in a Times cartoon, the word ‘justice?’ in gothic script scrawled across a war-torn banner which fluttered behind them.

  Jon was mystified, but not unamused. He kept the Times cartoon. He had no idea why the Tattooed Man had wanted such a thing done, since it served no purpose nor furnished any advantage of which he was aware. He half-suspected the whole project to be an exercise in whimsy. Perhaps the Tattooed Man, for his own reasons, perhaps with no motivation other than the amusement afforded by secret, skilful manipulation of others, was playing a game with British public opinion. Perhaps he was doing it merely because it had occurred to him that he could. Jon found the idea intriguing and oddly disturbing. He thought of the Tattooed Man’s smile, of that mixture of atavistic savagery and intellectualised ironic distance. And then he thought of him saying, ‘You’ve got to revel in what you are.’

  At this, the strange joy left him, replaced by a fragile, distracting unease, so that, during the self-imposed quarantine he undertook to allow his recuperation, he would often find himself in the bedroom or the kitchen or the hallway, wondering why he was there, and what was the nature of the thing he had come here to do, but had forgotten.

  Finally, as he stood, confused, in the hallway, the telephone rang. Passively, he stared at it. The receiver seemed to shiver with its impatience to be held. With its craving to discharge the voice of the Tattooed Man into the hollows of his cranium.

  He took half a step towards it. He knew that the Tattooed Man was at the other end of the line. Jon could picture exactly his stance, the way he clasped the receiver loosely at his ear in an almost effeminate posture. After five or six rings, the brow knitting darkly with frustration. After ten or eleven the redundant consultation of a wristwatch. Dumping the receiver heavily back into its cradle and stalking moodily into the kitchen to brew a cup of tea.

  He knew that he should answer. His stomach knitted in fondness and fear and he wished that he might merely reach out and lift the receiver, but he could not, although he could not be sure why. After a while the ringing stopped. Jon remained unmoving, a helix of remorse twisting through his intestines. He knew that the Tattooed Man would not enquire after his whereabouts. The Tattooed Man understood the necessity of retreat, but he understood the subtleties of betrayal also, the minutiae of contempt.

  Something began to gather at the base of Jon’s skull, in the darkness at the back of his mind. It was pre-orgasmic and dizzying, like the precursor to a madness which might build in his head before exploding with the furious beauty of napalm.

  There was within him a kaleidoscopic multiplicity of things he did not understand. He did not feel able to contain it. He did not feel able to bear it, that he was capable of even such tiny betrayal.

  He removed his clothing and walked upstairs and into the Oblivion Suite. It was like dying.

  4

  The Oblivion Suite

  The Oblivion Suite was a place of indeterminate dimension. Every surface was mirrored. Dim, concealed lighting allowed unbroken reflection. Some of the mirrors were flat and flawlessly reflective. Others were warped, producing distorted monster images. Still others were cracked and crazed, creating tiny homunculi, perfect in every detail, the sparse hair on Jon’s chest, the many sca
rs that marred his skin, the dark thatch of pubic hair, so that it was impossible to judge which image was tiny and close and which was large and distant. Naked, the frigid glass numbed his flesh as he lay flat and spread his arms in a gesture of welcome or surrender. His image spiralled infinitely about him, like the heavenly host in some lunatic’s rendition of heaven. As the chill numbed his bones he began to lose sense of a physical self. He became nothing but eyes regarding an endless parade of selves that would never be, or which had been and had passed away. They regarded him with the passionless pity of a Renaissance Christ.

  For a period without thought and thus without time he levitated, a single fixed point about which the cascading, vertiginously regressing images revolved. He underwent movements of epiphanic intensity. He and the multitudes of himself wept as he surrendered his hold on the guilt that had begun to fruit in his stomach like a tumour. Hallucination followed epiphany, and he was visited by armies of demons and legions of angels, each of which burned his corneas with their majesty and unbearable beauty, and each of which wore a parody of his features. These twisted doppelgängers burned with an unbearable mercy or were tortured and twisted by hatred but each, in its way, mocked and taunted him with what he was and what he was not, with what he had been denied the freedom to be. He underwent the stigmata, bled from hand and foot and side. He displayed the crown of thorns in negative, a succulent perspiration of berries oozing forth across his brow, ripe juice spilling in thin rivulets the length of his nose, the curvature of his lips, into his hair, the line of his jaw. He underwent the torments of hell, and wept and tore at his flesh because he knew he endured it in the name of others, who he did not and could never know. He burned for the sins of those he had killed and for the evils of those he loved. His flesh blistered and split and his throat parched and he brought time to that timeless place with a cry, by imploring the mercy of a God who could not have been more distant.

  At some point time returned, leaking into the Oblivion Suite like odourless gas. He came back to himself. He became aware of the stiffness of his limbs against the mirrored floor, which had again become substance beneath him. He felt, for a second, that he had recreated the world. He crawled like a babe to the door, which was like a portal into corporeality, opening on to a dawn-lit, deep-carpeted hallway which seemed absurd and half real. Standing and taking tiny, painful steps, his muscles knotted with cramp, he walked to the bathroom and turned on the light, revealing a room lightly sugared with a trace of dust, his own ancient skin cells fallen still as if in memoriam. In the mirror he saw that he had grown a short, scruffy beard, and that his hair was tangled and knotted with sweat and blood. He was desiccated to a kind of newsreel emaciation, as if his living skin had mummified on his bones, dried to leather. His cheeks were hollow and shadowed. Eyes that had become accustomed to gazing into a space that was not truly there testified to a mixture of listlessness and vague reproof, as if the things they had gazed upon rendered all else pitiable. He moved as if possessed by the malevolent spirit of an old man.