Mr. In-Between (7 page)

‘Everyone likes Southern Comfort,' said one of her friends confidently, as if such a statement represented a logical necessity. Jon looked at the speaker, who was looking to the woman at her right. They were sharing a private joke. Southern Comfort apparently had a peculiar significance to them that could never truly be articulated. The full implications of being the solitary man in a room full of slightly drunk heterosexual women, all of whom were friends and neighbours, probably utterly conversant in the minutiae of each other's sex lives or lack thereof, began to dawn on him. He was an object of sexual curiosity. This was an extraordinary situation, not an altogether unpleasant one, but he genuinely wished that they'd tire of it soon, or that someone better-looking or more charismatic might come along and start telling risqué jokes or whatever it was he was expected to do.

‘I thought you told me,' said Jon.

‘I don't think so.'

‘You must have. Or Andy.'

‘Either that or you've got a bloody good memory,' she said, and when she smiled he saw that there was a small lipstick stain on her front teeth. It broke his heart.

‘That's possible I suppose,' he said, self-consciously raising an eyebrow that was intended to be ironic and enigmatic but felt grotesquely distorted. He reached out and grabbed the vodka by the neck, tucked it under his arm, hand burdened both by the cigarette and the half-finished can of lager. He leaned across the table and with his free arm removed from the bag the third of the four bottles therein. ‘I'd best be off to see the birthday boy,' he said. ‘Does he still like this stuff?'

She laughed and said: ‘He loves it. With a bottle of that in his hand he feels like a teenage punk-rocker on heat …'

‘My God!' screamed the woman at the far end of the table, ‘get a couple of glasses down him quick!' and once again there was much shrieking and table slapping and low-heeled shoes being stamped against the floor.

‘Birthdays are a time for fantasies to be fulfilled,' Jon said. He did a little wave and walked from the kitchen. During another break in the music (a diminuendo as some absurd American rock ballad prepared to crank up the bombast to a blood-vessel-threatening­ level), he heard one of them comment on his passing, ‘He's got a lovely little bum, hasn't he?' He wondered if people often passed such comment without his noticing. For a moment, when the music burst into its guitar-and-voice-and-drums-and-a-heart-so-big-the-world-will-end-should-it-be-broken crescendo, carrying him away on an emotional level too basic to be modified by ironic distance, he rather hoped that this was the case. He knew it was not. Being in the presence of Cathy and Andy had solidified him. He knew that even for the women who had striven in such a calculated fashion to find something in him which they found physically attractive (it was, after all, a party), he would never again cross any of their minds unless he was mentioned by Cathy, and even then would not be pictured with any clarity. In this house, within these walls, they had trapped something of his essence like a genie in a bottle.

As he entered the front room, more couples were dancing half-time as the aspirant operatic rock star's voice trembled with grandiose passion. Andy, with three friends, was head-banging. John grabbed him by the back of his cowboy shirt. His face was flushed and beaded with sweat. He looked like an anthropomorphised tomato from some ill-conceived advertisement. His hair was in sweaty spikes, and he was breathing in a strained manner that might have been alarming had Jon known a little less about how people breathed before they died. ‘You'll give yourself a brain tumour,' he shouted. Then he held out the Jack Daniels and said, ‘Many happy returns, you sack of shit.'

Andy looked at the bottle with an almost feral intensity and broke the seal with his teeth. ‘I love this stuff,' he yelled, the metal lid still between his teeth. A bead of sweat had gathered like a dewdrop at the end of an eyelash, and the disco lights were reflected there in miniature. He took a swig, then with drunken pride gave an honest and comprehensive introduction of his friend Jon who he'd told everyone about, which was drowned by the music. Most of them got the gist: some nodded their heads and smiled, or raised a glass or can or bottle. The young girl caught his eye, smoothed her skirt with her palms and wriggled deeper into her chair, and attempted to light a cigarette in a flirtatious manner that, in its lack of practice, spilled over into Hollywood melodrama. Andy put his hands on his knees and bent to face her. ‘You'll lose your bloody eyebrows if you carry on like that,' he shouted, ‘you stupid little mare. Your mum'll have my bloody guts for garters.'

Her brow clouded with a potent, unstable mix of rage and worse, the humiliation of someone whose deepest, dearest, most heartfelt wish is to be considered an adult and whose endlessly rehearsed, endlessly considered, agonisingly gauche pretence has been ridiculed by adult thoughtlessness. She looked venomously at Andy and hissed, ‘Grow up, you wanker,' taking a defiant draw on the Silk Cut, expelling smoke through tight lips.

It occurred to Jon that he had more in common with this girl than anyone else present. Each was feeling their way tentatively through a world of which they had little knowledge, to which they feared they could never truly belong. Except, of course, that she would one day grow up and such parties as this would bore her in a way she could never now begin to comprehend, whereas he would always be a spook in the corner whose smile fell from his lips the instant there were no other eyes to see it. He sat next to her. She moved to one side to accommodate him. ‘What are you doing hanging around with a bunch of old farts like this?' He nodded at Andy, who sat on the floor in front of them. ‘You should be in some flashy night-club or restaurant being wined and dined by some millionaire who lights your Silk Cut with a gold lighter.' Without really intending to, he had said almost exactly the right thing. She perked up visibly. If there was one thing that makes isolation in a social situation bearable, it was to be convinced (by oneself but preferably by another) that the reason you were so out of place was that nobody there had the wit or insight to understand you. When she asked for a sip of his vodka, he could hardly do anything but oblige, but he diplomatically took the bottle from her the moment he observed that her throat had closed, effectively refusing admission to any more alcohol. Andy watched all this with a nodding, village-idiot smile. It was a very old smile, belonging to a young man. Jon upended the bottle down his throat, then reached to swig from the Jack Daniels. He and Andy passed the bottles between them and effectively ignored everyone else, with the exception of the girl, who was attending with the intensity of the very drunk and who, having more cunning than either man had ascribed to her, swigged from a cider bottle she had concealed down the side of the sofa every time she judged herself to be in their blind spot. After a while, Andy was so drunk that he was actually trying to push cigarettes on her. She began to slide into the chair, her eyes rolling in her sockets. She tried to draw on the cigarette and missed, her hand flopping limply over the side of the sofa.

Cathy and her friends descended upon the party proper. Obviously they had merely beaten a tactical withdrawal to the kitchen in order to get some serious drinking out of the way before descending upon the makeshift dance-floor like a murder of crows behind a tractor. There was a brief, brilliantly organised
coup
wherein the stereo was reclaimed from the ruling powers and Thin Lizzy's ‘Whiskey in the Jar', a song for which, happily enough, Jon nurtured a groundless but passionate dislike, was stopped mid-chorus. Within another five seconds, Diana Ross was singing ‘Where Did Our Love Go', and the women had embarked on what was to prove to be something of a danceathon. Individuals left to pour drinks, run to the toilet, light cigarettes, but the group danced all night. To Jon, the fact that people genuinely seemed to extract pleasure from the act of dancing with friends, not as some atavistic mating ritual (which he understood only a little more), or even as a form of aerobic exercise, but for the sheer joy of clumping together into a loose group whose boundaries might be confined to a dance-floor upon which there was barely room to shuffle, or more diffusely spread across an entire night-club, was absolutely and singularly unaccountable. He associated dancing with one thing: young men ineptly attempting to signal to young women their sexual availability, as if the virtue of a spotty youth out in his best shirt and tanked up on cider had ever actually been in question. That just sort of standing in a loose circle with a couple of friends, shuffling with an occasional twist of the hips when there was a favourite bit, could constitute anything like fun for its own sake distantly troubled him.

He and Andy sat talking over what it soon became clear was Cathy's favourite tape (she appeared to know every word to every verse of every song, and occasionally broke off from an in-dance conversation to dance alone, eyes closed, mouthing the doggerel to herself as if it were scripture). As they became more drunk, Jon found his gaze increasingly drawn over Andy's shoulder, to the group of dancers, whose exuberance and enthusiasm to be together seemed limitless. Their almost uniform choice of
the classic little black dress
added an obscure element of poignancy of which he was aware, but which he did not fully understand. In such a small group, that there was such wide variation of hair and skin colour, of posture, of shape, of size, of sense of rhythm, of elegance and clumsiness, all tied together by a shared dress sense, made something in his stomach ache. All dancing in different ways to the same song. He ran his palm over the stubble on his head.

‘Why the skinhead, then?' said Andy.

Jon shrugged, belched the unpleasant taste of neat vodka and stomach acid. He was grinding a cigarette into an overspilling ashtray. ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘Practical.'

‘Bollocks,' said Andy. He pointed a wavering finger like a drunk in a bus station, addressing somebody only he could see. ‘I wanna know what you've been up to. Where've you been?'

‘Nowhere interesting.'

Andy struggled to open a pack of cigarettes, removed two and placed one butt-first in Jon's mouth. ‘Your problem is,' he said, and waved the cigarette like a mini baton, the drunk's rhetorical tool, ‘is that you haven't told me anything about what you do or what's happened to you in the last few years. I'm your mate, right,' he said, and patted Jon on the shoulder, thereby crushing the as yet still unlit cigarette. ‘And I don't give a shit about what you do. I don't care if you're a fucking lollipop man or … It's just, you know, you've done so much …' His face brightened. ‘Seen the kitchen? That's down to you. Bought the kitchen. Cath couldn't believe it at first, you know, you turn up out of the blue and bingo whatsit, I've got a job … We couldn't believe it. Saved us, like. Proper mate. Kind of friend who don't ever let you down. Might take the fucker ten years to pop up like Indiana fucking Jones and save all and sundry, but you can be fucking sure he'll be there. Trust you, like,' he said with surprising vehemence, and emphasised his point, such as it was, by striking the carpet with the flat of his hand. ‘I told Cath all about you,' he said, ‘only about a month before you turned up. When she found out I met you that afternoon, she was worried you'd be a bad influence.' He lifted the half-empty bottle and tipped it, his ironic laughter causing some to bubble from his throat and down his chin. ‘That's a laugh. Bad influence. Bless her.'

‘Christ,' said Jon. ‘Give you a couple of drinks and off you go. You've got a world full of best mates until you wake up.'

Andy buried his face in his hands. Jon was slightly scared that he was going to start crying in his drunken sentimentality, which was not without historical precedent, but it was a false alarm. Somebody walking back from the toilet nudged Andy forward and he rocked like a weeble. Jon saw that he was stretching the skin around his tired, blood-red eyes with his yellowed fingertips. ‘We were worried,' he said, in a very small and very sober voice. ‘We didn't know what had happened to you.'

Jon knew that this was something that Andy had to be drunk in order to say, rather than that he was saying it because he was drunk. The distinction, ostensibly subtle, was fundamental, and opened before him a vertiginous abyss, threatened to transport him to an undiscovered country for which there were no maps. ‘Come on, mate,' he said. ‘Don't be dumb. Stop it now. Shut up.'

Before anything else could be said, a hand closed around Jon's wrist and one of the black-dressed dancers was trying to pull him to his feet, jerking her head in the general direction of the dance-floor. Jon groaned so that, if she was especially sharp sighted, she might have seen a slight flutter of contempt pass across his lips. He looked despairingly at Andy, who winked and mouthed the eternal credo, ‘I think you're in there, mate.'

She looked back at her friends and laughed. Dancers paused and gave a round of applause. She had very big, very even teeth and bent forward slightly when laughing, clasping her thighs. She couldn't believe she was doing this, her laugh said, she really couldn't believe that you lot of drunken mares had put her up to this. I'll get you back, the laugh said. The dancers clapped louder. She pulled Jon to a half-crouched position. He had yet to think of something that might enable him to escape the hell that this woman was trying to lead him to. She turned once more to her friends, ‘This is like trying to unblock a bloody sink …' and back again to Jon. He could see a wickedly confident light in her eye, fuelled both by her own surprise at doing what was clearly for her an unusual thing and the approval of her friends, who continued to look on and clap their encouragement. Jon had no choice but to allow himself to be pulled to his feet. For some reason, he was surprised that she was shorter than him. Looking down, he could see the crown of her head, and felt a stab of ambiguous pity for her that she had made such public efforts to entice to the dance-floor the one man who for all the world could not be made to dance.