Mr. In-Between

by Neil Cross

  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 selfconsciously 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 whi
ch he knew she was acutely conscious. ‘How did you know I like Southern Comfort?’

  ‘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, selfconsciously 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 nightclub 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 nightclub, 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 indance 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.’