by Neil Cross
When he had done, he stood and, reaching into the bath, let sufficient water flow away for him to immerse and clean himself. He stepped out for a moment, one foot on the carpet, the other in the water, to retrieve from a low shelf a shaving mirror, razor and foam. He dipped the mirror in the water to wash the obfuscating steam from its reflective surface, then soaped and very carefully shaved his face. After drying himself, he ran the electric hair-clippers over his head, brushing the clippings into the sink. He felt he was beginning to recognise himself again, although he didn’t look quite as he had always imagined. It was as if he had been looking, all these years, not into a mirror but at a slightly callous caricature, the authorship of which was obscure. He ran his hands across the smooth suede of his scalp.
He stood at the bathroom window and with one finger lifted the blind a notch. He looked at a slate-grey drizzle being kicked irritably this way and that by a petulant wind.
He began to plan his redemption.
When he was ready he knew time to have passed in the world external. It was dark outside. He sat in the blackest of shadows near the phone and lifted the receiver, blowing non-existent dust from the mouthpiece.
Chapman answered on the third ring. His voice was muffled, and Jon could picture him cradling the phone in his neck, a cigarette clamped in the corner of his mouth as he looked about for an ashtray.
‘It’s Jon,’ he said. ‘Jon Bennet.’
His name was an exclamation of something like joy in the priest’s mouth. ‘I’ve been hoping you’d call,’ he said, ‘I’ve tried to call you many times but there’s never any answer. I even called round once or twice but you were out. It’s really good to hear from you. How’ve you been keeping?’
‘Fine.’ He wet his lips with the tip of his tongue. ‘Listen, I’m sorry to bother you at this time of night—’
‘Not at all.’ The last word was distant but clearer; the head turning from the receiver, the cigarette being removed and its tube of ash deposited into an ashtray, a sigh as the priest eased himself into an armchair and crossed his legs, upon which uneven surface he balanced the phone. ‘What can I do you for?’
‘It’s Andy,’ said Jon. ‘I wanted to speak to you about Andy. Have you seen much of him lately?’
A moment of silence, a whisper of interference. Chapman sighed clicked his tongue. ‘I’ve popped by once or twice,’ he confirmed. There was something guarded in his response. ‘Have you not seen him since—’
‘Since I got better. No. He doesn’t call.’
‘Perhaps he’s been round. You’re very difficult to get hold of.’
‘No,’ said Jon. ‘I’d have known. I haven’t been out that much.’ Sensing Chapman’s eyes narrowing with concern, he added, ‘I still looked like Frankenstein’s monster until recently. I didn’t want to scare any children.’
Chapman laughed, or tried to. He said, ‘I hope you’re fully recovered by now.’
‘I’m on my way,’ said Jon.
‘That’s good,’ the priest told him. ‘Good for you. Keep it up.’
Jon scratched the base of his skull. ‘Anyway, like I said, it’s really Andy that I want to speak about.’
‘So you did, so you did. How can I help?’
He gritted his teeth. ‘How did he seem the last time you saw him?’
‘Oh, you know Andy,’ said Chapman. ‘He’s fine, all things considered.’
A passing car threw a dirty, sweeping arc of yellow light through a crack in the curtains and across the room, bathing him for a moment in its glow.
With gentle but sufficient emphasis, Jon said, ‘This is important.’
‘I know how important he is to you …’
‘That’s not the issue. Just a second.’ Half-blind in the darkness, he reached out a hand, snagged a cigarette packet, removed and lit one. The end glowed fiercely and the half-glimpsed smoke taunted him as he expelled it with the faces it refused to draw. ‘I want your honest opinion,’ he declared, ‘unmediated by the need to spare my feelings.’
‘I’m not sure it’s for me to say,’ answered Chapman directly. ‘You know Andy far better than I. Would it not be easier for you to pop round and see him at work in the morning—’
‘That’s not possible.’
‘Or to phone him in the evening, then? I’m sure he’d jump at the chance at going for a drink. Especially as it’s been so long since you saw each other.’
‘I’ve tried to phone him. He never seems to be in.’
More silence.
‘No,’ agreed Chapman. ‘No, he doesn’t.’
‘Have you any idea—’ Jon began.
The priest pre-empted him. ‘Jon, I’m sorry. I know your concern’s genuine but I don’t feel comfortable talking like this over the phone. I know it’s nothing of the sort, but I can’t help but feel like I’m gossiping. Why don’t you come round for a cup of tea in the morning? We’ll have a chat.’
Jon straightened in the chair, almost dropped the phone. Something about the peculiar intonation of that innocuous final word had jarred him. He frowned, and with the hand that held the cigarette pinched the bridge of his nose.
‘—Jon?’
‘Sorry,’ he said distantly, then, ‘Yeah. Thanks. That’s a good idea. When would it be OK? Don’t you have confessions and masses and whatnots to get out of the way?’
‘Don’t you worry about that. Come round when it’s convenient. If I’m busy then someone’ll let you in, I’m sure. You can make yourself at home. How’s that?’
‘Thank you,’ said Jon. ‘I appreciate it. I really do.’
‘It’s nothing. It’ll be a pleasure to see you.’
No it’s not, thought Jon, as he hung up. And no it won’t be.
He finished the cigarette and ground it cold in the ashtray, which he carried, still in darkness, and ran beneath a kitchen tap. How he wished to lift the blinds and stand there, bathed in electric lamplight and weak starlight, exposed to the enquiring gaze of the Tattooed Man.
You finally taught me what I am, he thought.
He would not lift the blind because of a childish fear that the Tattooed Man would be standing there, just the other side of the glass, closer than his own reflection, sodium haze casting him in half-formed silhouette. What expression would Jon read there, what form could he not help but impose on that void?
His scrotum crawled with fear and anticipation. For the first time in many weeks he felt charged with energy, unable to keep still. He paced the floor for a while, then began to gather about him all the things he thought he might need. Over a black t-shirt, black shirt and faded blue jeans, he pulled on his overcoat, shrugging himself into it as if to re-establish an old fit. His keys hung from the keyhole in the door. He locked the house behind him.
It was long past one a.m., on what day he did not know, nor even in which month, although he knew the winter had passed its nadir. He took in a lungful of air which tasted faintly of the city. He knew that he had been gone a long time when he could taste the air so specifically—the exhaust fumes, the take-aways, the carrier bags, the sweat and deodorant, the cheap shoe shops, the sterile supermarkets, baby talc and vomit, cigarettes and alcohol, all passed briefly across his nose and palate, lining up to re-introduce themselves. The street was dark and lined with cars. Some bedroom lights still shone, but each house might as well have been a mausoleum like his own for all the vitality it projected. He lit a cigarette, pleased with the sound and scent of the petroleum flame whipping in the wind. He was followed by the reverberations of his footsteps.
It took over an hour to walk to Andy’s. There were silent streets then the brief, flickering bacchanalia of backstreet nightclubs and snooker halls ejecting customers to the harsh mercy outside. He saw the Greek, Chinese and Asian owners of late-night take-aways steeling themselves for the racial and physical humiliations that accompanied their nightly commerce. He was affected by their ability to do so. He stepped over pools of vomit, dogshit, discarded chips and through at l
east one violent altercation between three men around which hovered four women of varying age screaming encouragement. He passed between two of the combatants even as one brought down a broken bottle towards the face of the other, slipping between them as effortlessly as smoke through a crack in a door. He did not seem to have disturbed the tableau in any way. He was filled with a sense of incalculable well-being.
His cigarettes had become stale, like relics preserved by desert tombs with crumble when exposed to the air. After passing through the nightclub district, he paused to queue at a twenty-four-hour petrol station. A group of young drunks in off-the-peg suits or jeans and expensively distressed leather jackets loudly jostled one another. The last three or four of them turned to taunt a gangling young man in army-surplus parka and long dreadlocks and his similarly attired girlfriend, who wore orange tights and purple boots. She managed, somehow, to look both overweight and undernourished. She and her boyfriend fought to ignore the drunks in front. He busied himself constructing a miserly, thin roll-up. She gazed glassily ahead. A car drew up, uncomfortably loud, repetitious music pulsating from its windows, a sampled drum break and a one-line chorus. From the car emerged a man in a suit he should have been unable to afford. He scanned the queue, the proud angle at which he held his head defying comment, and pushed in front of the young black man who stood directly before Jon. The young black turned and expressed his exasperation not at Jon, but at whoever was behind him. One of the drunken young men in front unzipped his fly, appeared for a moment to be unable to find his penis, then pissed in a high arc which terminated on the wall of the garage shop outside which they queued. His friends laughed and scattered and one expressed his approval by delivering a rich fart. The dreadlocked couple exchanged a brief but eloquent glance.
Presently Jon bought his cigarettes and moved on. The streets became darker, the lamp-posts smaller and more infrequent. The pavement was bucked and cracked by erstwhile frosts, and in the front gardens of identical houses lay the rusting hulks of cars and the skeletal remains of motorcycles. Now and again a security light blinked on as he walked by, startled awake by his passing. He passed patches of scrubby grassland where had been erected climbing frames and roundabouts, decayed and vandalised now into obsolescence, although one such fractured construction doubled as a convenient bench for a gang of luminously moon-faced children of indeterminate sex who silently shared between them a bag of glue and a couple of inexpertly rolled joints.
A man hunched deep into his jacket collided with Jon’s shoulder as he passed. Jon could not be sure if the action was deliberate. Other than this he saw no one, although he sometimes heard voices emanating from the houses he passed, and twice a distant scream that might have been rollicking teenagers, and equally likely something worse. Once he was disturbed from his reverie by an aeroplane passing so low overhead he feared it might crash; he twisted beneath it as it passed, and wondered at the everyday acceptance of so unlikely a thing.
It was two thirty a.m. when he stopped outside Andy’s house. No lights were on. He watched the house’s blank windows for long minutes before admitting that Andy was not yet home. Andy kept new hours now.
Jon looked briefly left and right, then bent at the knees and folded himself into his coat, a localised pool of shadow in the deeper shadow thrown by a domestic hedge.
He might have drifted off to sleep. His calves screamed with cramp when the car disturbed him. He bit his tongue against crying out, held back his breath. The car was a fifteen-year-old Jaguar, whose bodywork was in need of some attention although its engine was mellow and smooth.
Three men emerged from it, two with a small degree of difficulty and one with a great deal of protestation from the tiny space at the rear. All wore suits. One of the men was Andy, although clean-shaven and considerably thinner. He wore a suit well, although even from across the street Jon could detect the faint trace of an overdose of aftershave. The man emerging from the back seat was Derek Gibbon, his suit so well fitted to his odd frame that clearly he employed a skilful tailor. The third man, who seemed to take an age to wholly unfurl himself from the car, like a bat stretching its leathery wings, was Olly, the driver whose face Jon had slashed.
They conversed in throaty whispers, softly laughing. Andy produced and jingled a set of house keys. Olly patted his breast pocket. Gibbon murmured something to him and they laughed as they entered the house.
Jon watched the downstairs lights come on, then heard the faint sound of a stereo or television.
He sat, took in the longed-for breath and stretched out his legs across the pavement. His ankles hung over the gutter. He massaged blood into his thighs while smoking a cigarette. Then he stood and approached the house. He stopped outside the living-room window. There was no gap in the curtains through which to peer. He put his ear to the cold glass, keeping a routinely watchful eye on the street. He heard voices and occasional laughter above the music. (It was American rap, for which Andy had previously no taste and which Jon could not help considering juvenile. Olly liked it. It was a big thing with Olly.) He could not hear what was being said, or guess what was being laughed at, although the laughter had a particular tone that he recognised. It was the secret, pornographic laughter of men alone late at night. Women were inevitably its core subject. Jon found himself wondering what Cathy would have thought if she could overhear this, overhear her husband laughing in precisely that tone. He wondered at the humiliation and shock she would have suffered, at the embarrassment and shame for not being able to stop listening. He winced for her. He hurt in his stomach.
He felt the subtle vibrations that testified to somebody approaching the window. He slipped back into the shadows and skirted the borders of the house with neither ostentatious caution nor casual confidence. He assumed that he would not be heard in much the same way that a fakir, wandering across a bed of hot coals, assumes that he will not burn.
He looked in through the kitchen window. Through the window into the kitchen he had bought as a desperate gift.
It was the same kitchen, spotless and ordered and new, but on the door of the fridge, the very fridge above which he had stashed his coat as Cathy and her friends sat at that very table discussing the bottle of Southern Comfort he had bought, was pinned a pornographic calendar. It hung from a small magnet in the shape of an upper case A.
He strode with a firmer stride to the front of the house. Pausing only to light another cigarette, he pounded three times on the door.
He felt it go quiet inside. He felt the three men exchange glances. If Andy knew these men well enough to socialise with them, then he knew by now that an unannounced visitor at such an hour was not an event in which to rejoice. He hoped Andy was scared. He hoped Andy’s eyes followed Olly’s hand as it slid inside his jacket and for luck briefly touched the butt of the small pistol he kept there, pearl-handled and ostentatious. He hoped Andy had never been more scared than he was just at that moment, that frozen and indivisible instant.
One of them turned the music down. He heard voices: one exclamatory, another monosyllabic, voicing consent with a muffled grunt. Olly explaining to Andy what to do. Andy agreeing, pale-faced and desperate to piss. He heard the creak of floorboards, two men walking in careful time attempting to sound like one. Stopping.
‘Who is it?’ Andy’s voice. Half an octave deeper than usual.
In the distance a siren.
Jon savoured the idea of Olly and Andy exchanging a glance of terrible apprehension.
Then he said, ‘Open the door. It’s Jon.’
Even as he heard Andy exhale with relief, he could sense Olly tensing, Andy’s hand moving automatically to the latch, Olly’s cool hand closing about his wrist. Andy’s eyes widening suddenly, remembering what he had been told about Jon.
What had he been told about Jon?
Jon scuffed his feet. ‘Are you going to let me in or what?’
Andy opened the door. Olly stepped from behind it, retreating a step in order for it to open wide enough to
admit him. The light reflected on his spectacles so that Jon could not see his eyes. Although Olly’s eyes were not Jon’s concern, this did not make him comfortable.
Andy had not only lost fat but added muscle. His neck was beginning to disappear into his shoulders. His jawline had become square and firm. Jon hated to look at him. He stepped aside, allowing Jon to squeeze past his bulk and the cloying Paco Rabanne and into the house. As he entered he pretended to gaze through the glare on the lenses of Olly’s spectacles, right through to the delicate orbs beneath. Jon smiled and Olly took an automatic, precautionary step back. His fingers went briefly to the scar that traced one side of his face. Jon stopped for a moment. He gazed at Olly from under his brow and felt his mouth split wide in a feral and predatory grin.
‘How’s your face?’ he said. ‘The smile suits you.’
The reflection on Olly’s spectacles shifted as he tilted his head in sardonic acknowledging silence.
Jon laid an ushering hand on Andy’s shoulder. He felt him tense, as if his flesh crawled.
‘I think Olly had best wait out here,’ Jon said.
Olly opened his mouth. He was silenced by Jon’s intervention. ‘He probably needs the toilet anyway. Don’t you need the toilet, Olly?’
Olly went half-way to raising an index finger. Before he could reply Jon had guided Andy through to the living room and closed the door. Against the far wall stood Gibbon. If it would have been possible to get further away from Jon whilst being, as obviously commanded, in the same room, he clearly would have done so. Although he attempted a casual demeanour, a can of Stella Artois clasped in one ginger paw, it looked as if he was trying to push himself through the wall and into the garden. Jon rather liked Gibbon.