Mr. In-Between Read Online Free PDF

forgotten that it was not his, that he despised Fat Dave and Jagger and Jimmy the Scot. ‘Tea?’
    Andy leaned on the table. ‘Yeah, you know. Meet Cathy and Kirsty and that.’
    Weren’t children supposed to have a sense of things that bordered on the psychic? Would the child be scared of him? He determined to decline, to bite down on his embarrassment until Andy had walked through the pub door and back into that other world. He even opened his mouth to answer, then again he remembered those eyes enraged by his pain and humiliation. ‘Of course,’ he said.
    â€˜Nice one.’ Andy stooped and ripped open the empty cigarette packet. He patted his pockets, made a face and wove to the bar, returning with a red Biro. He scribbled for a second, then handed the dissected fag packet to Jon and said, ‘Give me a call tomorrow.’
    â€˜About lunchtime,’ said Jon.
    Andy paused at the door, fumbling with the buttons of his denim jacket. ‘Nice one,’ he said again, and stepped outside.
    Jon drank alone until ten thirty, then walked into the damp but tepid summer evening, drawing his jacket about him and huddling within as if for protection. He walked to Fat Dave’s flat. The door was answered by Jagger, who had his hand on his zip.
    â€˜All right, Jon?’ he said. ‘You’ve just caught me on the way to the bog, mate. Go through and they’ll deal you in.’
    Dave’s flat was ripe with the grey odours of unwashed humanity and malnourished dogs. A desiccated turd lay in the hallway against the skirting board, from which peeled wallpaper that had once been garish but was now a step away from dust. In the front room, Fat Dave and friends were huddled about a table with affected looks of intense concentration. Dave glanced up and offered a can of Special Brew. ‘What happened to you this afternoon?’
    Jon shrugged. ‘You know.’
    Much nudging and winking.
    He sat at the table, sipping thick, catarrhal beer, and picked up the cards Dave dealt him. They were unpleasant to the touch. They began to play, and steadily he began to lose a great deal of money.
    He was full of unspecific and inappropriate shame as he stepped from the taxi the following afternoon. Andy’s house was an identikit council property surrounded by shabby clones which lined a shabby street in the middle of a shabby estate. It was definitively the kind of place where one might end up. It was not a place of transition. It was a place where one made the most of things. It was the kind of place where neighbours burgled neighbours, or accused neighbours of burgling neighbours, where a car was, at best, a temporary purchase, where playgrounds were littered with the detritus of hopelessness, used condoms like eviscerated slugs, the odd glue bag fluttering in the breeze as if at the racial memory of flight, where children with Victorian faces smoked stolen cigarettes while ogling stolen pornography.
    He walked up the garden path and rapped on the door. He was excruciatingly aware of something in the house going tense. Andy answered the door. They smiled at one another.
    â€˜Come in. Take off your coat.’
    The living room was small, almost filled by a brown corduroy three-piece suite and a television. There were pictures on the wall that Jon knew, with an ache in his testicles, had been hung there to brighten up the place.
    â€˜Sit down.’
    â€˜Cheers.’
    While he was half-way to sitting, Cathy walked into the room. Her hair was washed and pulled into a ponytail and she was wearing a sweater and jeans. She smiled and said ‘Hello’ and Jon said ‘Hello’ back and she said, ‘Make yourself at home,’ and he sat. Then she bent, heel to haunch, and poked her face around the corner of the door, into the hallway. ‘Are you going to come in, now?’ she asked. Then she turned to Jon and said, ‘She’s ever so shy.’
    A small child