Mr. In-Between (11 page)

He went to see Jagger. Although the pubs were yet to open, Jagger was already drunk. Since Jon had seen him last, he had yellowed and shrunk around his bones. Spores of corruption had found root in Jagger's bowels, wrapped tight about the insides of him. He was dying. He was dead already. Jon followed him into his house. The half-light of curtains across windows and endless hours of solitude and bitterness and silent recrimination. Jagger offered a beer. They drank in silence until lunchtime when, upon unspoken agreement, they left the oppressive stink of cancer, and went on to Fat Dave's, substituting the stink of sluttishness and corpulence. The three of them played cards and drank cheap sherry. Gambling was joyless and the drunkenness was of the worst kind: the steady-handed, sour-faced inebriation of people for whom there was joy neither in the world nor in escape from it. At seven in the evening they staggered to the pub to spend their winnings from one another on one another in a bitter communion, a malevolent fraternity. The pub was thick and humid with pressed bodies and the residue of breath. Nausea overcame Jon. He walked unsteadily to the lavatory. A thick, yellow stream of urine oozed the length of the urinal. Excrement had dried to concrete on the walls of the cubicles. Jon poured horribly bitter amphetamine sulphate down his throat, then stepped unsteadily to the tiny sink and washed it down with handfuls of water. He stood with his head over the grimy bowl, watching water spiral down the plug. Eventually the trembling began to subside. Waves of cramp passed over his stomach and he dry-retched, knuckles whitening at the edges of the sink. Eventually there came a point when his inebriation subsided. Physically he was still unsteady but his mind sharpened behind the dull pillow of drunkenness. He thought with distant, crystalline clarity, along arbitrary and tangential lines, but each of these paths converged to a vanishing point. The Tattooed Man, naked, wearing faces, the syringe in his hand. The infinite purity of the Oblivion Suite. The Tattooed Man, holding the sweating creases of his own palm to the flame of one of those massive candles, grinning at him with incomprehensible malevolence. ‘Darkness is alien to me, Jon. I'm a creature of infinite illumination. I'm the bringer of light.'

Jon splashed water on to his face, rubbed himself damp with a filthy loop of blue cotton which hung from a battered dispenser. There were two drinks waiting for him: a pint of stout, impenetrably black with a white head, and a whisky chaser like a urine sample in chipped glass. He listened to Fat Dave and Jagger and tried not to think, or remember.

Jagger's wife had left him. This despite the malignancy squeezing the life from him. How she must have hated him. Fat Dave was in trouble with a loan shark. Exponential interest rates whose prodigious fertility he lacked the capacity to understand had grown at the rate of Jagger's tumour. Fat Dave too feared for his life.

As he listened to them, trying to imagine what it was to be like them, to be inside those heads which were closed to him, a hand fell heavily on his shoulder. He turned his head. At the end of the arm which rested on him with aggressive familiarity was Rickets. He wore jeans and expensive, very new trainers. He smiled wide. ‘All right, Jon? I didn't know you drank in here.' His smile indicated that this was a deliberate lie.

‘Now and again,' said Jon. He glared a warning, but Rickets was drunk and stoned. His eyes were red, bloodshot and unspecific. He was accompanied by a group of perhaps fifteen other young men, kagouls and trainers and baggy denim. Each of them was a stranger to the pub. Jon understood such young men. To enter a strange pub in numbers was, if not a challenge, then at least an indication of aggressive intent. The pub fell silent.

Rickets swayed and grinned. ‘Aren't you going to introduce me to your mates?' His teeth seemed very white.

Jon glared into his glass. ‘Not today,' he said, ‘if you don't mind.'

Rickets leaned over and spread his hands across the table, lowered his head such that he was able to stare directly into Jon's eyes. ‘What is it with you?' he said. ‘Are you a miserable cunt or is it just me you don't like?'

An intense cone of silence focused on Jon. Fat Dave and Jagger shifted subtly sideways. Rickets's companions looked on, pint glasses pausing at lips. One or two wore knowing smiles. Jon scowled, seemed to think. He knew what was going to happen. He knew that a man like Rickets was incapable of nurturing a dislike—a jealousy—of the magnitude of that which he nursed for Jon without acting on it some day. He exhaled as he resigned himself. ‘It's just you,' he said levelly.

Rickets stood straight and laughed, half-turning to his friends. ‘Did you
hear
that?' He made an expansive gesture of disbelief. He picked up a half-full pint glass and brought it down across Jon's head.

Like all such events, it was quick and savage and prosaic. Jon fell heavily to the floor and with a flurry of kicks Rickets beat him half-unconscious. Jagger and Fat Dave stood, but were held in check by Rickets's mates, each of whom was evidently eager for escalation, but each of whom, equally, seemed to acknowledge tacitly that at least a nominal excuse was required to embark on such action. Drained of colour, under the weight of too many eyes, Fat Dave and Jagger sank back into their seats and watched.

It was over in half a minute. Jon lay curled on the floor among shards of glass and cigarette butts.

Rickets wiped a hand across his lips and prodded Jon with the toe of a trainer, the pristine white of which was flecked with blood. He swore to himself and spat on the floor. Jon cupped his face and stomach and curled tighter about himself and groaned. Rickets and his entourage left all but immediately. One or two pointedly lagged behind draining their glasses before swaggering towards the door.

The pub had fallen silent and watchful. Fat Dave and Jagger helped Jon to his feet, hands heaving beneath his armpits. His legs hung limp beneath him.

Shirt-sleeves rolled to reveal inappropriate, amateur blue tattoos representing the crucifixion, the landlord waddled to their aid.

Bemused and furious, he addressed Fat Dave. ‘What the fuck was all that about?'

Fat Dave looked back at him. ‘I dunno, Ted,' he said. ‘The black bastard laid into him for nothing.'

The landlord looked at Jon. ‘I'd best call you an ambulance, mate.'

Jon shook his head. A shallow, half-inch gash ran across his temple, oozing the blood which had smeared across his face and neck. His eye was beginning to swell and he suspected, in the oddly logical haze of mild shock that he would be pissing blood for days. ‘I'm all right,' he said. His voice trembled. ‘I just need to clean myself up a bit.' He tried to stand unaided and staggered, falling against Jagger.

‘Come through,' said the landlord, ‘there's a first-aid kit. Do you want me to phone the police?'

Jon shook his bleary head and allowed the landlord to support him through the pub, behind the bar and into his flat, where he gave Jon a red plastic first-aid box and a half-bottle of whisky. ‘On the house. To steady your nerves.'

‘Thanks,' said Jon.

The landlord shrugged. ‘Any mate of Fat Dave's,' he said. Then, ‘It was obvious they were out for trouble tonight. I had my eye on them. I should have been more careful.'

‘There was nothing you could do,' said Jon.

‘Fucking black bastard,' spat the landlord. The four of them passed the whisky round to steady their nerves.

In the bathroom, Jon washed and disinfected the wound across his head. It was not as dramatic as it looked. Then he stripped to the waist and washed his body, which was grazed and bruised and dotted here and there with black spots of caked blood, marking tiny wounds where he had rolled across broken glass. The blood hardly showed on the dark cotton of his shirt. He drained the remnants of the half-bottle of whisky and returned to the pub. He drank for free for the remainder of the evening. The landlord, by way of Matehood, guilt and gratitude that there was no police involvement, allowed the first few pints on the house. The remainder were supplied by Dave and Jagger.

Jagger: ‘I don't know what's wrong. Everything's fucked up. Everything's fucked. Everything's gone wrong.'

Jon could not bring himself to speak.

They left the otherwise empty pub at midnight. The landlord bolted the door behind them, and they staggered unsteadily in the direction of Fat Dave's squalid flat, by way of the Taj Mahal take-away. Still incensed and impotent, Fat Dave called the man who served them a fucking Paki monkey. It occurred to Jon for the first time that Dave was eaten with self-loathing, that he woke every morning or afternoon hungover and filthy with a dull throb of misery in his guts and only himself to blame.

They sat cross-legged upon Dave's bitty and malodorous carpet, faded and worn, and drank tins of super-strength lager and ate vindaloo curry and yellow rice. Jagger talked for the first time of his cancer, Dave of his financial tribulations. There was an exhausted despair in everything that was said. There were things they had wanted to be which they had never been, things they had done they wished they had not.

Jon began to doze, warmed by the unfamiliar intimacy and rhythm of their voices. He had loathed these men. Now he was lulled as, in the face of their extinction, they spoke to one another with something not unakin to tenderness. As Jon slipped from consciousness, he was aware of Jagger tucking a blanket about him and slipping a stained and coverless pillow beneath his head. He was unable to speak. He wanted to say that he understood and forgave them both, but could not.

He woke bathed in dishwater daylight, the glow of impossibly distant, exploding hydrogen filtered through a gap in the rotting curtains. Letting light in.

Fat Dave and Jagger were unconscious and snoring, one on the sofa, the other flat on the carpet, both with forearms crossed against their eyelids. He looked at them with something like pity as he stood, then stumbled unsteadily to the bathroom. He bolted the door and leaned against the peeling wall, shaking and groaning. He kneeled before the filthy toilet and hacked and strained until he vomited a bitter yellow-green liquid that dangled like an umbilicus of egg yolk between his lips and the water. He waited until the shivering had passed. The dressing was crusty brown. His eye was swollen and purple. His mouth felt fetid and his clothes were rumpled. He knew he smelled of cigarettes, of alcohol, of Fat Dave's filth and Jagger's cancer. He loosened his jeans, which fell about his ankles as he squatted on the toilet, his face buried in his hands. After interminable peristaltic waves of agony, he passed a thin, malodorous diarrhoea. Squirt groan. Squirt groan. His piss was thick and yellowy orange, like half-set jelly. It reeked. He retched and puked more thick bile into the avocado bath.

There were perhaps four grammes of speed left in the small plastic bag in his pocket. He wrapped some into a square of toilet tissue which he dry-swallowed like a pill. He could find no toothpaste. He splashed his face with cold water. Another wave of cramps passed across his guts, and again he dropped his trousers and passed burning liquid shit, biting his lip against crying out in pain. When the attack had passed, he tiptoed into the front room, arranging his belt and flies, and retrieved his jacket from the floor. Quietly he left the flat. Outside the speed began to take effect. He shuddered with borrowed energy, beneath which he could feel his body protesting. He needed rest, he needed to eat. He needed to soak in hot, soapy water. He needed to sit across the kitchen table from the Tattooed Man as Phil read a tabloid in the corner and talk to them about cricket, or that day's leader column in the
Daily Telegraph.
He needed to retrieve some normality. He needed the thought of that cottage and that gathering of men, the memory of Rickets kicking him to the floor, the inexplicable tenderness he had felt towards Jagger and Fat Dave, to be assimilated in memory, where everything could be contextualised and understood. While he shivered with a combination of the hangover, the speed he had taken to eradicate it and the exhaustion of the body from which he felt so distant, these things remained part of the present.

The winter sunlight hurt his eyes. He had speed-freak eyes: wide pupils, pools of blackness that allowed in too much light, more light than he needed to see by. Details were crisp and immediate and the world dizzying with signs whose meanings and relationships were supernaturally clear. He knew that if people were staring at him, if heads turned in cars as they passed, if people looked over their shoulders at him, if people spoke about him in hushed whispers, it was because he reeked of alcohol and sweat and puke and shit, because the filthy dressing on his head marked him out as something peculiar and threatening. It was not because everyone sensed what he was, and what he had done. Yet the urgent eruption of a siren nearly caused him to lose control of his bowels. He found himself avoiding people's gaze with a transparent desperation.

He stopped in a café to drink a cup of coffee and smoke a cigarette, but the weight of all the eyes, of all that perceived insight, was too great. He staggered into the street and walked from nowhere to nowhere, ricocheting from lamp-posts, moving aggressively onwards. He looked at himself reflected in a department store window, the hollows of his eyes in juxtaposition with the smiling mannequins within, modelling ski-gear and winter coats. People swerved to avoid him. He looked at their reflection behind his own, two layers of perception reflected in the unreal window of commerce.

He remembered the favour he had asked of his friend. Something within him warmed. It was a long time before a taxi would stop for him.

Cathy's first reaction upon seeing him was a bright smile. Then her face fell. The toddler, Kirsty, stood behind her, in cotton vest and knickers, a doll dangling from her sticky fist. ‘My God,' said Cathy, ‘what happened to you?'

Jon stumbled over his words, shivered. Found himself unable to speak.