Mr. In-Between (16 page)

The Tattooed Man took a slow step forward. ‘You know,' he muttered. He gripped the edge of the table. Jon saw that his knuckles, the scarred and twisted knobs of an arthritic old pugilist, were white. ‘Don't tell me you don't know.'

Jon thought of the cottage. He looked at the floor.

Clint the Alsatian whined and twitched in its sleep.

The Tattooed Man relaxed his grip on the table's edge. Jon saw his knuckles redden as blood rushed to fill starved capillaries.

‘Nevertheless,' said the Tattooed Man. He seemed to be holding the table for balance, as if he felt faint. He closed his eyes for a second then stood abruptly upright and turned his back once more on Jon. His voice was louder and he waggled an admonishing finger like a melodramatic defence lawyer in an American courtroom drama. ‘Nevertheless,' he repeated, ‘I might have understood. You haven't been yourself since this friend of yours turned up. And don't think that it's escaped my attention that you did away with Rickets the day this friend's—'

‘Andy,' said Jon.

‘This
friend's
,'
emphasised the Tattooed Man, ‘wife and child were returned to their maker. Don't think I haven't noticed that. So don't think I'm stupid enough to assume that you did
that
to Rickets—' with the word ‘that' his lip curled with distaste: the look of a puritan reacting to decadent self-indulgence, ‘—because the stupid bastard got drunk and decided to beat you up one night.

‘What you did to him was a
weak
thing, Jon. It was childish and petulant. Don't pretend to yourself that I imagine for a moment that it had anything at all to do with Rickets. I know you, remember. I
thought
I knew you.

‘It had nothing to do with Rickets. If you wanted to get Rickets, you would have scared the shit out of him. You'd have terrified him. You'd have made him piss himself with terror.

‘You wouldn't have done what you did. You did it because this woman was dead and you were furious about it. You stupid bastard.'

Jon pressed his palm to his cold lips and closed his eyes.

‘What's wrong?' the Tattooed Man scoffed. ‘Did you
love
her, Jon?'

Slowly Jon shook his head. His eyes were tight closed.

‘What, then? What was it? Were you
fucking
her? Is that it?'

Jon felt giddy. He reached out for the comforting plane of the table.

The Tattooed Man was shouting now, accusatory and violent. ‘You weren't even
fucking
her?
What,
then? What could possibly have caused you to do all this? You
dreamed
about fucking her? Is that it? You wanted to fuck your friend's wife so you got him a job to get him out of the house? Is that it? Or did you just hope that his gratitude would be so overwhelming that he'd
pass her on
to you? How much did you want to humiliate that poor fucker?'

Jon's testicles shrivelled tight to his groin. Behind his palm, he opened his eyes. He saw the light shining red through the web of skin where his fingers met.

It occurred to him to him that the Tattooed Man was reacting as if he had rehearsed every word of what he said, as if to calculate passion rather than surrender to it. The Tattooed Man had taken Olly to Jon's house that evening not as a calculated warning. He had taken Olly simply and singly because Jon disliked him. He wanted Jon to see how he trusted others whom Jon could not bear.

The Tattooed Man was jealous.

Jon had tried to be too clever: he had tried to psychologise, he had tried to second-guess. Even now the Tattooed Man, perhaps despite himself, was hinting to Jon the truth. But Jon had been arrogant. He knew the cost of everything but the value of nothing.

He lost his footing. He was exhausted and disorientated. He stumbled forward, against the table.

‘Oh, for Christ's
sake
,'
the Tattooed Man spat with exasperated venom, as if the very sight of Jon disgusted him. ‘Sit down before you fall down.'

Jon pulled back a chair and fell on to it. He rested his elbows on the table, and buried his face in his hands. ‘I'm sorry,' he said.

‘Can't you even
look
at me when you speak?'

Jon looked up. His fingers dragged down his lower lids, revealing much of the lower half of his eyes, which were raw and dry and red. ‘I'm sorry,' he repeated.

‘You're
sorry
.'
The Tattooed Man turned back to the cooker and stirred furiously. He turned off one of the hobs. ‘Listen to him,' he said to the ceiling. ‘He's
sorry.
I don't care how fucking sorry you are,' he said. ‘
Sorry
isn't a pacifier.
Sorry
doesn't make anything better.
Sorry
doesn't undo anything.' He threw the wooden spoon into a copper pot. Even from across the room, Jon could see that he fought to control his upper lip. It trembled as he sipped his wine.

The Tattooed Man looked almost small. For the first time in their acquaintance, Jon wanted to protect him. He ran his hand through his greasy, cropped hair. ‘Bill,' he said, ‘What can I say? I'm sorry. I'm really, really sorry.'

The Tattooed Man turned on him, and immediately Jon regretted using his name. His fists were clenched and Jon remembered, or perhaps imagined the power of those arms. The Tattooed Man, he thought, might smash the heavy wooden table with a single punch, might pick him up by the throat and, with the other hand, pulp his head like a ripe apple.

The dog whimpered in its sleep and its legs twitched with an urgency which seemed to suggest that in its dreams it was pursued rather than pursuer.

The sun had slipped beneath a bank of high cloud that sat on the horizon. From this elevated perspective it looked like a tidal wave on the point of crashing over the city, crushing it with the force of the hand of God. The dim light in the kitchen was faintly pink.

‘I might have forgiven this,' said the Tattooed Man, ‘because I understand something of your motivation. I warned you once that sentimental love was the worst, the most profound weakness, and I knew that you understood not one word. I allowed you your dalliance with your friend and his wife because I knew that sooner or later you'd come to understand what I meant. I thought experience of its,' he waved his hand, looking for the word, ‘debilitation would eventually strengthen you. Obviously I've been stupid. It made an idiot of you. It made you act like some spoiled brat wailing because a bigger kid stole his favourite toy.' Sadly he shook his head. ‘I warned you, Jon. You didn't listen. Even this I might have allowed to pass. But you have been so stupid, have acted in such a fashion …' He broke off. ‘I warned you once—it was the same day, I think, part of the same conversation—that, for all that I love you, if ever you were anything but loyal and trustworthy, if you were ever anything but
useful,
then I'd have not the slightest hesitation in—' with theatrical finality, he clicked his fingers. He raised an eyebrow.

‘Not only,' he continued, ‘did you
strike
me. Not only did you
raise your voice
to me. You tried to
threaten
me. Did you think your behaviour with the police was
clever
?'
He had, by now, regained his composure. The momentary glimpse Jon had been given of his vulnerability might have been calculated to emphasise the frigidity of his current malevolence. Jon was dismayed that he had been sufficiently stupid to think that the Tattooed Man would ever let him see anything but what he wanted him to see. The idea that the Tattooed Man had acted through jealousy seemed now absurd and childish—selfish, even, as if Jon had wilfully dampened his fear by attempting to convince himself that he was somehow more
important
that he was. He felt manipulated and frightened.

‘Do you think,' resumed the Tattooed Man, ‘do you
imagine,
for a second, that even if you were to confess to everything you've done in my name, that your confession would ever leave the room in which you made it? Do you think you'd be alive to repeat it? Do you imagine,' his mouth twisted into a viscously supercilious sneer, ‘that even if there was one policeman—just one, unlikely as that might be—who for some reason felt the desire to pursue what he had heard, do you imagine that he or she might be brave enough to do so?

‘Or do you imagine, Jon, that they would try and forget e
verything
in their own best interest? Do you imagine them requesting a transfer? Do you imagine them leaving the police force? Do you imagine them finding an as yet undreamed of imaginative capacity as, every time they close their eyes, they picture the terrible things that could happen to their children; and then the horror as they remember for—what?—the hundredth time that day, that for every terrible thing that they can imagine, for every unspeakable thing they feel ashamed for even being able to conceive, there are things that defy even the worst excesses of their imagination, and that there are people willing—people longing—to do these things to their family, these things the like of which they can't begin to conceive?' He walked towards the table, stopped in a pink patch of sunlight.

‘Stand up. Come here.'

Jon stood and faced him. His fingers traced the wooden surface of the kitchen table as if it might be the last surface he would ever touch.

The Tattooed Man closed his hand across the back of Jon's neck. With the remorseless leisure of something industrial he began to tighten his grip until the pressure there became unendurable. Jon bent double. His fists clenched into his stomach. An inarticulate groan forced itself through lips rigid with pain.

Jon imagined with stupefied detachment that, should the pressure increase by even the tiniest increment, he would hear the sticky crunch of his spine being crushed an instant before a fragment of splintered bone severed his spinal column and his vision faded, the bright colours behind his tight-screwed lids fading with the speed and finality of flowers rotting in time-lapse.

The Tattooed Man forced him straight (he thought he might pass out then) and put his lips close to Jon's ear, so close Jon could not tell if they brushed his flesh as he whispered through gritted teeth, ‘Did you think you could
hurt
me, Jon? Did you think you could
damage
me? Did you think,' and here his hand tightened a further increment on the back of Jon's neck, ‘did you think you could
frighten
me?'

He began to exert downward pressure, forcing Jon to his knees. He shifted his grip so that his spatulate thumb was pressed tight to the weak spot at the base of Jon's skull. Jon imagined it cracking bone like a crust of ice formed over a pool of dirty water, pressing through his meninges, inexorably tunnelling through to the secret tissue of his cortex.

The pressure was such that he thought his knees might splinter against the hard kitchen floor.

‘Do you know what I could
do
to you?' the Tattooed Man said. ‘Do you have any conception of what I could put you through?' Maintaining the pressure on Jon's neck, he stooped heel to haunch and whispered. Over the bass roaring in his ears the Tattooed Man's whisper was like an internal voice, like a possessive demon speaking through the very beat of his tissues, inseparable from his own flesh.

‘Not even you can imagine, Jon,' he said, ‘not even you can imagine what I could put you through.'

Jon pissed himself. Hot urine flooded his crotch and the length of his legs. The Tattooed Man looked at the small yellow puddles the piss made, watched them spread and embrace one another, making a single pool which spread round Jon's shoes and towards his own. He whispered, ‘I can see you think you've got some idea,' before releasing his grip and standing straight.

As the restricted blood seemed to erupt in a wave against the back of his eyes, Jon gasped and fell face down on the floor. In a puddle of cooling urine he curled around himself, nursing the back of his neck and moaning. He sobbed. The pain was such that he wanted to thrash this way and that, as if to shake it from his body. It was also such that he was unable to move beyond a gentle, almost neonatal rocking.

Arms crossed, the Tattooed Man waited until this rocking had stopped. He tapped Jon's shoulder with the toe of his shoe. ‘Stand up,' he commanded.

Jon struggled to his knees then slipped to the ground like a boneless thing. One hand closed about the cuff of the Tattooed Man's trouser. The Tattooed Man shook it off. ‘Get to your feet,' he repeated.

Somehow Jon regained his footing, although he could do no more than bend double, his hands knitted at the base of his skull.

‘Stand straight.'

Jon obeyed. He thought again that he must faint. He felt his eyes roll in their sockets as his vision faded at the corners. He felt himself tip sideways. He corrected himself, reaching out for the edge of the table. Something solid: something outside the metallic bolts of bright light being shot through his spine, flashing shapes across the inside of his skull.

His eyes refused to focus. When finally they did, he saw that the Tattooed Man held a kitchen knife at the soft skin between his clavicles.

‘Do you know why I'm not going to do any of those things?' he said.

Jon could not have spoken even if he knew how to answer.

‘Do you think it's because I'm scared?'

Jon shook his head as far as he was able; a tiny shift in one direction. He screamed.

‘Do you think it's because I love you?'

Once again, the agonising half-shake of his head. He bit his lip this time. He bit through it—teeth met teeth. His mouth flooded with saliva and blood.

‘Quite right.'

The Tattooed Man drove the knife forward. It slit the delicate skin beneath Jon's throat and entered him a millimetre or two. The Tattooed Man withdrew the blade. Jon felt the skin of his neck clinging to it as it slipped away.