Mr. In-Between (6 page)

This time, Jon thought he might get the joke.

He arrived at Andy's and Cathy's at ten o'clock in the evening because he wished to avoid any possibility of being the first to arrive. The thought of sitting with the two of them, excited and a little apprehensive, anxious that all would go well, making stilted conversation which fell silent every time a car slowed outside, filled him with a dread whose depths knew no bounds. He had actually woken in the middle of the night in a clammy sweat at the thought of it.

He could hear the music from half-way down the street. There were lights flashing in time with the bass drum, intermittently illuminating the living-room window, behind the darkness of which he could discern shifting figures. There was already a smattering of pleasantly strained, atonal singing rising above the music. The song he recognised as a 1970s' disco hit to which, at his first school disco, he had tried to dance. He had been so heroically inept at producing anything even vaguely recognisable as what might, even with charitable intention and in the dark, be called a dance, that—as he devoted the entirety of his concentration to willing his arms, legs and hips not only to do what he wanted them to, but to do it in a co-ordinated fashion and, if possible, in time—his schoolmates, one by one, had stopped dancing and gathered in an awe-struck circle about him. His ineptitude was such that his audience which, after all, was comprised of adolescents whose savage sense of humour knows nothing of the sensibilities of others, were struck dumb for the duration of the song, which perchance, was called ‘He's the Greatest Dancer (that I've ever seen)'. As it faded to silence, somebody (he never knew who) said, in a paradigm of perfect comic timing, ‘I bet his mum does the laundry by throwing him in the bath with it and turning the radio on.'

He hadn't been the kind of sensitive child driven to solitude and ultimately adult bitterness by such an event. He had forced himself to laugh along because he perceived, accurately as it turned out, that this would be the best way to diffuse the situation, a pre-emptive strike against the prolonged agonies that would follow a public display of humiliation, of being a little boy in front of all those little girls who at the time seemed like impossible, unattainable ideals of Womanhood. Still, he had never danced publicly again. Possibly he was saved from the worst traumas of adolescence by the fact that by the age of thirteen he had spent a good deal of his life in institutional care.

This train of thought, the association of images and smells led from thoughts of events once so important, now sufficiently distant to be gently amusing, invoked other, gentler memories: as an adolescent Andy had danced with an utterly arrhythmic yet blatantly unselfconscious series of pneumatic thrusts and wiggles. Somehow he convinced all who gazed in wonderment upon him that this obscurely pornographic series of jerks and grunts was actually dancing. He carefully calculated his entrance to school discos, which were held in the sports hall. He swaggered in late, brandishing a half-bottle of vodka which he had taken great pains to smuggle in with the express intention of producing it as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and from which he swigged with fire in his throat but impassive stoicism on his face. For a while he wore the worst footballer's perm Jon had ever seen. He had bought the kit from Boots one Saturday, and when it had gone awry had called in maternal aid. He looked, Jon recalled, like an absolute wanker. With his disastrous hair, blue shoes and ecstatic pelvic thrusts, Jon actually used to feel sorry for him on such occasions, until the night when, extraordinarily, Andy lost his virginity. What had really rankled Jon is that they'd taken out a bet on that very occurrence. ‘Tonight's the night,' said Andy. ‘Now or never, innit?'

‘A tenner on it,' said Jon amicably, making no attempt to hide his scepticism. To
plan
the loss of one's virginity was a quixotic crusade indeed. Come midnight he was in debt to Andy to the tune of forty-five pounds. Only six months later (six months representing a considerable passage of time to teenage boys, for whom the transition from climbing trees to obsessive interest in the cut of one's trousers might measure to the outside world the length of perhaps one Easter holiday, while representing to the subject an almost geological time-shift), Andy himself had been horrified at what he called his ‘Kevin Keegan stage'. He referred to it, under duress, in an embarrassed mutter, and always qualified it away into nothingness with surprisingly creditable sociological contextualisation: ‘Everyone dressed like that. It was fashion, innit?', and so on and so forth, until his embarrassment became so palpable the subject was changed. He had the perm cut into what he considered to be a kind of punk look, but not so much as to upset his mum, and which nevertheless resembled, for a period at least, nothing other than a radically trimmed home perm. Once, a group of them, drinks barely touched, was forced to leave a pub because Andy caught sight of the girl to whom he had lost his innocence and by whose favour he so extravagantly won a bet. He didn't want to speak to her. He was embarrassed. He was ashamed. Not by any of the usual catalogue of post-adolescent cringeworthy memories, premature ejaculation, terror-stricken, limp penis, Marks & Spencer's underwear with a Yogi Bear legend revealed to history at the bottom of a school field. He was embarrassed about the clothes he had been wearing. Jon suspected that his disproportionate shame about the Kevin Keegan period actually constituted a genuine trauma in his life. It was one of the key events by which he would always understand and measure himself.

As Jon walked up the short garden path, he remembered that he had actually owned some photos of Andy wearing that very disreputable bubble-cut. Although, like the Tattooed Man, he had always been compelled to preserve any image of the past, he had ripped them into tiny pieces which he burned in an ashtray until they were nothing but ash. It was a solemn occasion, a proof to Jon of the depth of his friendship. He had forgotten all about it.

It was pissing down. He rang the bell. Andy opened the door. Still chubby, a couple of days' growth of gingerish stubble, his face lit up like a baby shown a shiny rattle. His eyes were crystal blue and beautiful. ‘Fuck me,' he exclaimed. ‘It's Bod!' He sang the theme tune to this very cartoon, the protagonist of which was a bald-headed boy with a very round head. Andy found this unbearably amusing. He was wearing what was clearly a new shirt, purple cotton with white cotton detail like Roy Rogers, open at the neck to reveal the links of a St Christopher medallion. He had a packet of cigarettes in his top pocket, a half-smoked filter­tip in the corner of his mouth and a bottle of Newcastle Brown ale in his fist. He extended his arm, bottle still in hand, and rested it on Jon's shoulder. He leaned forward, put his beer-and-fag-and-aftershave smelling face next to Jon's and said, ‘What on earth have you done to your fucking hair?' He fell into Jon with the unbalancing force of his amusement. ‘You look like Mr Fucking Potato Head,' he said. ‘Like something from One Flew Over the Whatsit Nest. Cuckoo.'

‘Are you going to invite me in out of the rain,' said Jon, ‘or do you expect me to stand here and get pissed on while you stand there and laugh at my haircut?'

Andy placed his arm fully about Jon's shoulder and Jon allowed himself to be led inside.

There were brightly coloured crêpe-paper streamers hanging from the banisters and balloons parading the hallway and stairs. The front room was almost dark, but he could see that there were perhaps thirty people in there. Some of the furniture had been pushed to the edges of the room, some of it moved upstairs and out of the way. Hired disco lights throbbed red yellow blue red in the corners. In the middle of the floor a woman of perhaps sixty who had clearly already drunk more than was good for her was dancing too close to a youth of possibly seventeen whose face, even in the darkness and intermittent flashes of coloured light, was clearly rigid with terror and embarrassment. Her wide buttocks, in a black dress, shifted sinuously and drunkenly in half-time to the music, attempting to make a smooch of some Hi-Energy confection, while his bony and still childishly narrow arse was set rigid, moving through an arc of about twenty degrees, and that obviously under some protest.

Small groups of people gathered around the stereo, attempting to read cassette boxes as they talked and drank and spoke and occasionally listened to each other. Others sat on the carpet or the three-piece suite, which now lined the walls, or stood in corners. Jon guessed that most were either relatives or neighbours. The party had that particular spread of ages, not to mention a certain degree of salacious cackling, which characterised such a milieu.

A girl whom Jon assumed to be the youngest at the party swept her fringe from her eye and swigged from a bottle of cider, a cigarette held self-consciously in her other hand. She was taking advantage of the opportunity to flirt in absolute safety with one of the younger married men. The man's wife glanced at him. Jon could tell she felt sorry for him as well as irritated. The girl took an almighty puff on the Silk Cut followed by another swig from the bottle. Her parents had allowed her to come, Jon guessed, because they knew that Andy and Cathy would let her enjoy herself without letting her do
anything stupid.
She was going to be so ill tomorrow, it was quite possible that she might have learned her limit, and bear it in mind at future parties where no adults would be present, thereby saving on all the expense and bother of taxi fares and a Boots' home pregnancy-testing kit.

‘Wanna drink?' said Andy, slurring a little more with every swig. ‘Inna kitchen. Help yourself, mate.' He patted Jon's back between the shoulder blades.

Jon walked through to the kitchen, where Cathy and a small group of friends were sat around the table sharing two-litre bottles of wine. He plonked the carrier bag he was holding on the table. A slightly expectant silence fell among the women. The woman to Cathy's left took a gulp of wine and wiped the back of her hand across her lips. ‘This is Jon, is it?' she said in a whisper that was meant to be heard, nudging Cathy with vaudeville exaggeration. ‘You're right,' she said. ‘He's
lovely,
isn't he?' The women cackled and howled and screamed and slapped the table and spilled wine.

Jon panicked. He fought a momentary urge to run, acknowledged that such a course of action was all but impossible and resigned himself to the novelty of the situation. It was a long time since a woman had claimed to find him attractive. Indeed it was the first time in many years that his presence had been fully registered by those who didn't know him by professional reputation alone. Attempting to be charming was not something he was accustomed to, but he hung his head modestly and said, ‘If that's what you think, I'd better have a glass of what you're drinking,' and the table erupted again into laughter. To avoid meeting anyone's eyes, he looked around the kitchen. Everything was new. He glanced at Cathy and her look confirmed what he had perhaps arrogantly assumed. He had paid for this. He had given someone a kitchen. A kitchen. Cooker and freezer and fitted cupboards. A portable television. A microwave oven.

‘I'm glad you could come,' said Cathy.

‘Wouldn't miss it for the world.'

‘Plenty of booze in the fridge,' she said. ‘Help yourself.'

‘We've all got a head start on you,' said the woman who had passed comment upon him. ‘You'll have to go some to catch us up, love.' Raising of bottles and a spontaneous chorus of approval.

He opened the fridge. It was taller than him by several centimetres, and a good deal wider. It was a peculiar kind of excessively technological white, as if it had been carved from a single gigantic denture. From its cavernous maw he withdrew a can of lager, one of a regiment that stretched in an orderly fashion back to the fridge's far horizons. The doors were filled with wine and spirits, and mixers lay flat across the bottom shelf and in the salad compartment. There was also a carton of Lo-Fat yogurt and a green apple.

Cathy peeked into the bag he'd brought. ‘More wine?' she said.

Jon shrugged. The music in the front room silenced for a moment, and there was a brief interlude where all the human social noise could be heard in its comforting familiarity. ‘I haven't been to a party like this for a long time,' he said, and cracked the can of lager. He poured half of it down his throat in a sequence of oesophagus-freezing gulps, then burped into the back of his hand.

‘Well, take your bloody coat off at least,' said Cathy, looking up from the bag of booze. ‘People'll think we're so desperate for friends we're letting in the local dossers.'

He shrugged off his coat, looked for a place to drape it before stuffing it on top of the fridge like hand luggage in an overhead compartment. He had to stand on tiptoe to do it properly. As he did so, punctuated by small groans as he stretched and reached and stuffed the overcoat into the small gap, he said, ‘There's a bottle of Johnny Walker in there and I brought some Absolut as well, but I'm afraid I've already started on that. And a bottle of,' he was grateful that his back was turned as he worried the overcoat further into the gap than was absolutely necessary, ‘Southern Comfort.'

He heard the bag rustle as she removed the liqueur. The table in unison cooed something approximating ‘ooooh, Southern Comfort,' as if it was as rare as bananas in wartime.

‘I
love
Southern Comfort,' Cathy said.

He had no choice now but to turn and face the table, so he busied himself first by lighting a cigarette then passing the packet round. When this was done, he said, ‘Yeah, I know. It's a present.'

He had not yet properly looked at her. Her hair had been cut into a chin-length bob which he knew was probably practical, but because tonight was a party, it framed her face and gleamed a deep mahogany. She was wearing the type of little black dress and carefully chosen accessories that she read about in
Cosmopolitan,
and which she believed to represent a level of sophistication to which she could aspire but never truly possess. She was wearing make-up that she had painstakingly applied, and had gone out of her way to mask the mole on her right cheek of which he knew she was acutely conscious. ‘How did you know I like Southern Comfort?'