Hawthorn and Child (11 page)

The whistles somehow get through everything else and someone to his left strikes out at one of them and there is a tight scuffle and he sets his feet steady, pushes, feels the men behind him push against his back, lean into him. He is behind his shield. A face appears and spits at him. Another does the same. He is looking through a film of saliva. He swings his truncheon upwards from underneath and it hits something soft, but he can see no reaction on the selection of faces in front of him so he pulls it back, goes again. It hits something hard and there is a cry, but he cannot see which face has made it. He extracts his arm and brings it over his head and leaves it there. A face says ‘Ooooooh’ in a camp voice, and laughs at him. He finds those eyes and stares at them and they falter and the face turns away.

The fat man’s body is disgusting. Parts of it brush against Hawthorn. There is more of him. Too much to avoid. He rolls and quivers and his shape heaves itself like a sea, and his face is sickly sweet and grinning in the half dark like a giant child’s face, slurping, kissing the bearded man all wrong, and his belly spreads across Hawthorn’s like a flood, and Hawthorn feels small and brittle and on the verge of something. He pushes at the weight, and his hands are like sticks in sand. This is not like him.

*

He finds the piggy eyes again. The arsehole eyes. The hood is fallen back now, and the hair is buzzed short like Hawthorn’s. The scarf still covers the mouth. Hawthorn pushes the button, speaks, describes the fat boy. He has to repeat his number three times. He has to describe the boy twice. Someone tells him to move that way, to push out. He pushes. He roars and pushes. He shouts. He remembers the button and stops shouting. The men on either side follow him. He holds the piggy eyes in his. The eyes dart a little. They snap back to Hawthorn, hold for a second. He gets the impression that they’re smiling. Then the hood comes back up and the piggy head ducks and disappears. Shit. The men are still at his shoulder. He pushes his button. He is about to redirect them all when he sees a short-haired girl in front of him with a sneering face and a black scarf around her neck and a red hoodie.
Red hoodie,
he shouts. He grabs her. She hits his arm. He brings his truncheon down on her shoulder, hard. The men at his side clear a space. He holds her again, by the fabric on her chest. She is screaming. A boy is trying to protect her. Hawthorn sees him hit from the side by a shield edge. His head snaps backward, and falls forward again, dripping blood. Hawthorn drags the girl towards him. She is half crouched, half sitting. He wants to drag her by her hair but her hair is short like a boy’s. She is crying. She wears tight black jeans and her nose is pierced and he can see a tattoo on the skin of her hip where her clothes have parted. Everything about her makes Hawthorn furious. He drags her for a few yards. Someone comes to him, touches his arm. They lift her between them and walk her towards the arrest point. She is clutching her shoulder where he hit her, and she is sobbing, weeping, and looking behind her, for her boyfriend, crying.

– Fuck off, Hawthorn hissed.

– What?

– Fuck off, I said. Go lose some fucking weight.

They both looked at him.

The bearded man smiled.

– Who’s he talking to?

– You, obviously.

– You sure?

– Well it can’t be me, can it?

– I think he’s talking to both of us.

– I think he is.

They turned away from him and faced each other.
Something
in his arm jerked and he had to bite to stop it. He pulsed. He let it recede. He turned around and left the room. He went and stood in the shower. He stayed there.

Later they make fun of him.

– Whorethorn thought he’d got himself some nice fucking anarchist cock.

– Whorethorn was hoodwinked by a titless dyke.

– Whorethorn loves the smell of testosterone in the mornings.

– Whorethorn’s got a hard-on for truncheon fucking.

– Whorethorn is a fucking fascist faggot.

He sat in his brother’s garden watching the kids. He called out to them.

– Where’s your paddling pool?

The boy shrugged.

– Dunno, said the girl.

– Will we find it? Set it up? It’s hot enough.

The kids looked at each other. The girl frowned.

– I don’t think so, said the boy.

They went on with whatever it was they were doing. Something with plastic blocks and the seat from the broken swing. They talked to each other quietly so that he couldn’t hear. His brother and Tess were in the kitchen getting the dinner ready. His father was watching the second half of the match.

He didn’t know what to do.

He thought about faking a phone call and going home.

He thought about going to the sauna. He hadn’t been in months.

The kids were skinny and they looked like his brother when he’d been their age. Hawthorn watched them. He
remembered
going with his brother to the swimming pool. He remembered them holding their breath. They would duck underwater and see who could hold their breath the longest. He had forgotten. It was something they did. He remembered being under the water, with his goggles on, looking at his brother a foot or two away from him, both of them by the wall, with their hands on the bar, holding themselves under, staring at each other, not breathing, waiting, and waiting, and not breathing; looking at his brother’s mouth, seeing a bubble escape; waiting, waiting, waiting. He couldn’t remember
surfacing
. Only his brother’s face, changing. Waiting.

He watched the kids; breathed out.

Trainer told me this story.

– Ashid lives in Walthamstow, somewhere around there, east, used to be a steward at White Hart Lane years ago. Anyway, now he works further north, up outside the M25 somewhere, for a bloke called Palmer, who has this garage. Called Mastersons, for no reason I know of. They beat panels, they cut and splice, pull apart, put together. They
spray-paint
. Most of their business is stolen cars. They have an arrangement with a man called Gull. Ashid’s role is mainly paperwork. A clever man with documents. Log books, bills of sale, transfer records, service records, repair reports. He does the accounts as well. Various accounts. The presentable and the bottom drawer, you know.

– So. All is well. They’re making a living. They keep an eye out. They pay careful attention to visitors they don’t know. They hire a local boy, they hire his brother, they pay them well, look after them, tell them nothing very much. They are circumspect. Canny. Smart as old goats. Palmer and Ashid. They’re never stupid. Never rash. Gull is happy. Every Christmas he gives each of them a hamper. Things for the kids. He remembers birthdays. Every so often little gifts – watches, computers, holidays. He will call Ashid on a Thursday, tell him that there are tickets at the airport for him and his wife, that there is a hotel booked in Cyprus or Budapest or Paris – go, have fun, have a good time, send me a postcard. Ashid always goes. He never says no. He’s a careful man.

– One day, one cold day in the winter, one afternoon, in January, in the bitter cold, Ashid is alone at the garage. He’s doing the paperwork for a car that’s come in the previous night. A four-wheel drive. A Land Rover. Palmer is out, he’s not there, he’s off somewhere on business. The yard is locked, the gates are secured, because of the Land Rover, which has been painted, which has had various changes made to the interior – it’s new, it’s about two weeks out of factory, it couldn’t be newer, and it’s sitting there, jacked up in the air, without wheels, without plates. Ashid needs to read some numbers from the engine. Some serial numbers. On various parts. He needs to know what they are before he decides what they will be. The boy has gone home early. Ashid can’t remember why. The boy plays football. He’s always going to football matches, maybe that’s it. His brother is sick at home. There is flu and there are various other winter ailments. Ashid’s wife is at home coughing, complaining about a draft in the bedroom at night. Their new windows, from Gull. They don’t all fit. Ashid has arranged for someone to come and fix them.

– He sighs and lies down on the flat trolley and slides himself under the Land Rover. He has a torch and a pen and a notebook. He’s not sure he’ll be able to see all the numbers he wants to see from here. He’ll have to wait until it’s off the jacks before he can get all of them.

– He hears a sound. He hears it but he doesn’t notice it. There are always sounds.

– He shines the torch up on the underside and sees a small plate to his left and squints at it, because the lettering is very small. He squints at it and it seems to come closer, and it does come closer. It comes closer because the whole Land Rover has come closer, it has fallen off its jacks, which is impossible, and it has crashed down on top of Ashid, knocking the pen and the torch and the notebook from his hands and pinning him to the ground. For a second he thinks he is dead. But he isn’t dead. There’s enough room beneath the Land Rover. It does not crush him. It has not fallen all the way. Then for a second he thinks he’s holding it up, because his arms are above his head somehow, and the underside of the vehicle is pressing against his elbows. But of course he knows he’s not holding it up. But he can’t move his arms. And he’s trapped.

– His mobile phone is in his trouser pocket but he can’t move his arms. There’s no one else in the garage. The garage is in the corner of a half-abandoned industrial estate. There is a plastics workshop at the other end. Out of shouting distance. There is a scrapyard where they sometimes hide cars, but that is even further away. On the other side of the yard wall there is simply open ground, waste ground, and then the trees start.

– He hears a voice. Close to him. Far too close to him. Palmer is his best hope but this isn’t Palmer. Palmer isn’t back. For a moment he cannot understand this voice. It seems too quiet, or too loud, too close, as if it is coming from a mouth that is beside his head. It is a low whispering voice, it sounds foreign, it’s unsettling, odd, as if the voice of someone unused to speaking.

–
The vehicle will fall, fully, shortly, and you will be killed. It is prevented from falling by a small amount of metal, upon which the weight of the vehicle rests, but this small piece of metal is slipping, and the vehicle will fall, and because the wheels are off, the full weight of it will fall on you and you will undoubtedly be killed.

– Ashid doesn’t know what to say. He whimpers. He thinks that maybe this is God talking to him. Or maybe it’s part of himself. Maybe he is so close to death that part of him is already dead and this part of him is talking to him from the other side of death, telling him calmly what to expect. He feels very cold. He’s worried about pain. He finds that he is pressing his elbows painfully into the underside of the Land Rover. He realizes that this is ridiculous and he tries to stop doing it, but he’s afraid that if he relaxes his arms he will die.

–
Save me,
is what he says.
Save me
. He doesn’t even know if there is really someone there who can hear him or whether he is now praying, for the first time since childhood, or whether he is talking to the dead part of himself and in fact asking for death to come and save him.

–
We can save you,
says the strange voice, with no hesitation. And this confuses Ashid. He can hear only one voice, but now that he thinks about it, the voice sounds like it might be more than one voice, speaking at exactly the same time, with exactly the same inflections and emphasis and melody, and he says
Save me
again, and this time he is definitely speaking to whoever is speaking to him, and he hopes, he has hope.

–
First
, says the voice, say the voices,
you must promise us something.

–
Anything
, says Ashid.

–
You must hear our story. We will tell you our story. You must listen to our story. You must listen to all of it. From the start at the old sun, to the end at the black ditch. You must listen to the tale of Estator and his brethren, to the story of their lives, and you must hear the tale of Whigs and Haft. You must listen to it all. From start to finish. You must remember it all. From start to finish. And you must set it down so that it is known.

At this point Trainer stopped talking. He looked at his sirloin. Sniffed it. Poked it around the plate with his fork. He ordered more tea. We were in a café in Hackney. He didn’t eat any of the steak. I think he’d ordered it as a sort of joke. Rare and bloody on a white plate.

– It is unknown, he said, and then paused. It is uncertain, debated, in dispute, as to whether Ashid heard the story of Estator at this point, while still trapped beneath the Land Rover. Or whether he was saved first and was then told the story. What is known is that Palmer returned to the garage to find the Land Rover belly down on the floor of the yard, with the jacks buckled and crushed, and Ashid nowhere to be seen. Palmer called in the boys, sick or not, football or not, and they lifted the car, they winched it up, Palmer expecting to see the crushed body of his friend, but there was only the snapped flat trolley, a torch, a pen and a notebook. And a smell, like dogs or donkeys.

Ashid disappeared for two weeks. Neither his family nor his friends, nor Palmer, nor Gull, nor anyone, heard a word from him or saw or laid eyes on him or caught a glimpse of even his shadow, anywhere across all of North London. The police were not informed, as Gull expressed a certain
nervousness
at the idea. To make up for the lack of an official search, Gull utilized all of his not inconsiderable resources to track Ashid. But he turned up nothing. Nothing at all. His friends knew nothing, and then his enemies knew nothing, and why would they lie? They’re businessmen like him. They’re not wild gangsters. They’re not TV-show baddies. They’re calm, conservative men, and they like a mystery as little as he does.