Mr. In-Between (5 page)

‘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', sub-headed ‘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 scars 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.

He was cold, and hugging himself produced no warmth. He ran the tap and poured a tooth-mug full of stale water, pain­stakingly rinsing his mouth although his etiolated frame begged to bend to the lightly musical flow, to let the water pass uninterrupted into his cramped gut, to let the urgency of osmosis spread in a visible bloom of colour from his guts to the soles of his feet and the curve of his skull, to inflate the withered lobes of his ears and mother-of-pearl nails. Obscurely, he longed for the taste of vinegar. For a delirious moment, in which he had to extend a hand to the cistern to steady himself he was visited by two images, sufficiently intense as to be hallucinatory. They were simultaneous, like one piece of scratched film played over another. He heard the parched, crucified Christ beg for water, for release from his torment, only to be mocked by a sponge soaked in bitter vinegar. He saw the American soldiers who, upon arrival in Dachau, numbed by the horror that had transpired there, brought with them a talismanic offering, a fragment of the reality in which they had believed and which this terrible place had proved a lie. Young men who had travelled across the sea to witness history spasm and twist in ways no God could have allowed, offered to colourless, hairless skeletons in striped rags and wooden clogs the gay talisman of American candy bars. Half-human, wretched things, whose presence in such a place made them appear in newsreel as ghostly, saintly creatures with eyes that testified not to the fact but the meaning of what had happened there, were offered chocolate bars. There was no JHVH to avenge them nor Christ to caress their shaved and fleshless heads with hands wounded in the name of all who had died here and all who had killed. Instead there was American candy. Out of the mighty came forth sweetness. The sweetness of freedom, the primary coloured gospel of abundance, of a mythical place where goodness was enough and innocence sacred. Although starved for so long, although deprived of sweetness of any kind, the survivors had no need of American candy. Instead they asked for vinegar because they craved the familiar bitterness of that which was used to mock Christ in his death agonies.

Jon had an image of a young soldier, so intense the rips and stains and repairs in the boy's uniform could be discerned, the scuffs in the leather of his boots, not yet old enough to shave, yet who had encountered carnage on a scale hitherto undreamed, gazing at the unwanted candy bar in his hand. He saw there the true nature of the horror which would never leave his dreams. He had never seen this image, either in newsreel or newspaper, but knew none the less that it was true. For a moment he felt the whisper of the soldier's ghost pass through him like a breeze, raising a thrill of goose bumps the length of his spine. He knew that it was the weight of such memories, of things that should never have been which happened on a scale that should not have been possible, which had somehow formed the creature that he was. He thought for the remains of that giddy moment that he might be an angel, an agent of vengeance against those who had used up all the love there was and rotted in a miasmic superfluity of hatred and wilful idiocy. He thought of the Tattooed Man and longed to curl himself beneath that fierce and paternal arm and find solace there. The hallucination faded.

He ran his head beneath the tap, cursing and spluttering, then allowed himself to swallow a mouthful of water.

He showered, washing the dried faecal matter from his inner thighs and buttocks and the blood from his forehead, hands and feet. Clear-headed beneath the massaging flow, he supposed that in the passion of hallucination, he had clawed the marks of Christ into his own flesh and was glad that the thing which felt such things had left him.

As the daylight gathered strength, it became clear that the damp summer had slipped into another winter that was little more than an administrative convenience, the bureaucratic memory of seasonal shift. The evenings would be darker and the meagre drizzle would become not so much colder as marginally more irritating. The planet, meanwhile, continued to wobble unsteadily about its fat axis like an alcoholic bag woman. He saw through the window that most of the leaves had fallen from the tree in his neighbour's garden, and those few that remained were gold and russet and as good as dead. The world was the washed-out grey of a bad water-colour.

After showering and towelling dry he took a set of electric hair-clippers and shaved his head to an eighth of an inch of stubble. Then he lathered and shaved his new beard. The reflected face he saw displayed nothing but the most academic interest in itself. Shaved and drained of personality, it might have belonged to a demonic statue churned up by a spade or a boot in the deserts of the Middle East.

It was some time before he was fit enough to leave the house, which he would not do until the full sense of solidity in the world had returned to him. For days he continued to slip into mildly hallucinatory states, which were marked by an uncharacteristic willingness to make metaphysical suppositions. He heard voices in the corners and saw movement in the periphery of his vision. He imposed on himself a regime of bastardised yoga. The muscle fibre beneath his skin had the consistency of wire rope coiled about itself, like a nest of cybernetic snakes. The small puckered wounds that dotted his shoulder and upper arm had begun the slow fade from rude purple to the lividity of white scar tissue. He felt like he had sucked time into himself, solidified it by exercise of an ego-less will.

When he was ready, he dressed and jingled his keys in his pocket as he stepped outside. Cars drove past and did not register that he existed. Strangers passed him on the street, and did not guess that he had for a time stepped out of the world. A mongrel pissed against the stem of a lamp-post and did not whimper and scuttle from him. He had to sidestep to avoid curled turds and deep roadside puddles that a bus might run through, soaking him. He carried a handwritten list in his pocket that read ‘batteries, shaving-foam, new razors', because for some reason these were things he often forgot to buy. He waited at the corner while the traffic passed, then, when the red man was replaced by his green counterpart, he crossed amidst a small crowd of others. In the shop he thought he had the right change but didn't, and after painstakingly counting out coppers, found himself eight pence short. He checked all his pockets in turn before producing a twenty-pound note and some clucks of impatience from the queue behind him. Walking back into the world was like walking into a sandstorm. There was no way to protect yourself from it. A composite of sheer, abundant power and insidious intrusiveness, it found every crack and crevice. By the time he lit his first cigarette, what he had undergone began to seem distant. He wondered at the fact that the wounds of Christ had reduced him to tears, although he knew that Christ had been nothing more than another revolutionary megalomaniac who died mocked and deserted, unable to make sense even of his own suffering. Whatever it was that had been in him, leading him to believe such things, had passed away into the private infinity of the Oblivion Suite.

When he got home, he opened all the windows in the house to let out the dead smell, put the shopping in the cupboards (neat ranks of tins and sauces and bottles, labels forward), then phoned Andy. The phone was answered on the fifth ring. He heard the clearing of a feminine throat, slightly impatient, a half-whispered, ‘Hello?'

‘Hello Cathy wassname from the year below,' he said. ‘It's Jon.'

He heard her smile, found himself picturing her eyes folding into crow's-feet at the corners, her scrubbed skin, her hair pulled into a practical but deliberate and neat ponytail. The faint smell of baby on her clothes. He was a little surprised to find out that he was smiling in response.

‘Where have you been?' She spoke in the same cracked whisper, exasperation and perhaps, he thought, surprised pleasure raising its tone half an octave. ‘We thought you'd been kidnapped by aliens or something. Andy's been out of his mind with worry.' She stifled a laugh. ‘Pacing up and down the room calling you a bastard and wondering where you'd gone.'

He laughed. ‘I'm sure it wasn't that bad.'

A muffled snort, like a hand was pressed across her mouth between the receiver and her lips. ‘Sorry,' she whispered, ‘I've just got the little one to sleep.'

‘She's not ill, I hope.'

‘No, just a bad-tempered little madam. Where have you been?'

‘Not far. I'll explain when I see you both. How are things?'

This time he heard or thought he saw her smile spread right across her face, dimples in her cheeks, and he knew that her eyes twinkled within their nest of crow's-feet. Oddly, he thought of Father Christmas. Although her answer was confined to a single word, ‘Yeah,' Jon was almost shocked at the depth of fondness he heard there. He wanted her to say ‘Yeah' like that while Andy stood at her side, with his burgeoning beer gut and his thinning hair and his wispy gingery-blonde moustache, and he wanted to be able to smile back and hold them at arm's length, one shoulder each, and look in their eyes and see himself reflected there. He very badly wanted nothing bad ever to happen to either of them. He did not want for them ever to have to say anything but ‘yeah' in that precise tone of voice ever again.

‘Listen,' she said, ‘I don't know if you realised, but it's Andy's birthday a week Tuesday. Next Saturday we're having a bit of a do round our place. Not much: you know, Kirsty at my mum's, a few friends round. Andy would be chuffed to nuts if you were there. He really would.'

His hand was cold round the phone. ‘Of course I'll be there,' he said. ‘The last time I celebrated one of Andy's birthday's he was about half as old …'

‘And half as fat,' she finished. He could smell her perfume, a warmth just beneath and behind the lobes of her ears, and Andy's smell, fresh sweat and grease that was ingrained into the whorls of his hands.

‘What time?'

‘Any time. Seven. Half past.'

After confirming, he ran out of things to say. He had nothing to talk about. He wasn't even sure what day it was. He found himself wondering why he had phoned when Andy would obviously be at the very job Jon himself had acquired for him. There was a curious feeling in his stomach.

With the phone back in its cradle, he perched on the edge of the coffee table watching a triangle of light cast by a window shift slowly across the carpet. He thought about himself. When this was no longer absorbing, he walked to the bookshelf and surveyed the ranked volumes which the Tattooed Man had given him. Some were handsome hardback editions, some of them, he knew, worth some money, while others were cheap paperbacks apparently picked up on a whim. He thought of the Tattooed Man queuing in W.H. Smith's, a paperback in one hand, a packet of mints in the other and a
Daily Telegraph
folded beneath his arm, while those queuing before him and those queuing behind him did not suspect for an instant the nature of the thing in whose shadow they stood. He smiled fondly. The book he chose was one of these paperbacks, one which fell open at a particular page, as if the Tattooed Man had passed on a well-used volume. It was perhaps another of the self-referential in-jokes that brought the Tattooed Man such evident pleasure: Milton's
Paradise Lost.
Jon let the book fall open in his hand. One line was underlined, and in the margin next to it was a meticulously inscribed exclamation mark. ‘Which way I fly is hell,' it read; ‘Myself am hell.'