Hawthorn and Child (12 page)

And then he reappears. He comes home one morning, and his crying wife can get nothing out of him. And she calls Palmer. And Palmer calls Gull, but Ashid will see no one.

Trainer was pale. He looked at the door a lot.

He pushed a large envelope across the table.

*

My living room overlooks the park. As does my office. At night I see men in the bushes by the north railings. In all weathers. I see dogs roam the open spaces. Sometimes there is a human with a leash hovering nearby. Sometimes there isn’t. I see lost children, regularly, wandering in the same few square feet, crying inconsolably. Even after a parent reappears, dashing down the paths for a hug, the child continues crying.

Trainer is a strange man.

The manuscript is almost damp, as if it’s been left outside. Some of the pages are curled and stained, and they don’t sit down pat on top of each other. They are much more like loose leaves. The whole thing smells. It’s in Times New Roman though, double spaced. There are no marks, no corrections. The stains are tea and coffee and grass and earth and god knows. A few pages are torn, ragged, but everything is legible. It has the feel of something treated, weathered, aged – to serve the text.

Jesus Christ.

There is a secret London apparently, hidden in plain view, populated by wolves and ravens and wild dogs and foxes and a network of rats, and other, stranger animals, and by the people – the humans – who communicate and work with and profit from the tumult. There are tensions, moments of violence, battles, alliances, pacts, treaties. There is peace, subterfuge, balance, chaos, war. There are two religions and a dozen sects. There is a lineage of wolves stretching back to the early twelfth century.

An occasional car crawls around the crescent sometimes in the middle of the night, looking for business of one sort or another I assume. I don’t think there’s anything like that. I have seen foxes, of course.

I am almost unspeakably bored with every aspect of my life.

Estator, it seems, is a noble sort of wolf. He lives, he tells us, in the gaps, with his fellows. His fellow wolves. They live in the gaps between things. Buildings. Motorways. Where we don’t look, I presume, is the point. Why is it that these things are always filled with snow and moonlight? Meetings on bridges. Rooftops. Frozen lakes. The chief currency appears to be honour.

It is very badly written.

What on earth is an ‘executive memoir’ anyway? I don’t know which way the adjective is facing. The whole thing is full of dangling, rotating, reversible qualifiers. And neologisms and obfuscations and tripe. It is inordinately concerned with physical and geographical description and the naming of ancestors. It lingers over complicated and tedious faux
legalistic
alliances, agreements, disputes and arbitrations. It leaps, both logically and chronologically, from one absurd set-up to another, painstakingly mapping out the ground upon which some action then briefly and violently takes place in a blur, without detail.

I quite like the rats.

It might, with a lot of work, make do as an overwrought piece of fantasy for teenage boys. But even then, a lot of the language would need taming. Or maybe not, I have no idea these days. But what Trainer is thinking of, handing the thing to me, I have no clue. His pitch is surely better suited to an editor half my age and with twice my cynicism. Someone who understands this kind of thing. Autism and body odour.

I skim the middle third. Remarkable overuse of ‘cunt’.

Perhaps if it was rewritten as an urchin adventure. With the gangs calling themselves the wolves and the rats and the dogs etc. Estator himself could be the cripple king of the underworld. Where am I getting that from? I am
remembering
something. The humans would simply be adults. Perhaps that would work. Destitute children always work. Sentiment and holes in the clothes. Bands of brothers, clutching each other through the cold night. It would get rid of the tiresome genealogies accompanying each new
character
. All urchins come from the same place.

I take the final third and a Scotch to bed with me. It peters out in a feud with a man called Haft, chief ally of a crow called Whigs. It seems, at the end, unresolved, though Estator loses his brother, the handsome and swift Kona, ripped apart by a pack of dogs in, from what I can make out, a Homebase car park in Tottenham. They bury him, the Alliance Of The Moon, in the depths of Hampstead Heath, his body laid to rest on the rock of his ancestors in the Hollow Of The Third River, below the Hill Of Signs.

Jesus, as I say, Christ.

Well. I don’t quite know what to think. Trainer is dead. Hung in his attic from a rafter. Though the police are
unhappy
, Morgan tells me excitedly from his noisy car. And have been in touch. They want a word. I may have been the last person he saw.

The drama.

I had always rather wanted that sort of death for myself. Though when it comes to it I’m much more likely to knock back a couple of dozen Percocet with a single malt chaser. Probably in Scotland. A rented house, or a hotel. Some terrible carpeting and cheap furniture and a print over the bed.
The Stag in the Glen
. Through the window a view of something or other. I should have been a father. Or a better person. Maybe I’ll take my bottles up a mountain and find a sheltered overhang with a view of water and do it there. Last night I dreamed of someone very young, and I was his age, and he spoke to me kindly as if he liked me, and we walked by a river and nothing bad happened. Perhaps it was a memory. Though if it was it’s not available to me while awake, thank goodness. I have succeeded in forgetting most people.

We’ve never had the police around before.

I take the bus and look out at the shops and think about Trainer. There’ll be a funeral now, and I’ll have to go. Morgan can drive. There’s a wife, somewhere, I think. Children? I have no idea. Men like Trainer always seem to have short lives. He wasn’t much younger than me I suppose. But
featureless
. Without landmark. Like a stretch of bland road between one town and another. Whereas I of course – I am all scenic route.

One of them is called Child. Would you believe it? I think of Byron.
Whilome in Albion’s isle there dwelt a youth.
The other is almost called Harold, but not quite. Hardiman or
something
. They are terribly polite. And not ragged, not drab. I expected, I don’t know why, something out of
The Sweeney.
But of course they’re all smartly suited these days. Good shoes, shiny little phones, neat leather notebooks.
Spooks
. No … that’s spooks, obviously. I can’t think of any police dramas.

– And why did he want to see you?

– A book. He wanted to pitch a story at me.

He hesitates, the Child man. The other one looks at him.

– A story?

– A story, yes.

I wonder what the name leads him into. Bad jokes, of course. Wordplay. But do people make a metaphor of him? Or of themselves in front of him? Not that he would notice, in all likelihood, being inured.

– This was the first time you’d seen him? In a while?

– In about a year maybe. And not much before that. I used to … well I knew him when he was at Southern. Then there was drink, I heard, I believe. Though people are terrible talkers. As far as I know he’s been doing freelance bits and pieces, and some ghost writing. That sort of thing.

– You were never particularly close then?

– No, no. Not at all. He’s just been somebody, you know, in the business.

A telephone rings. It’s the one who isn’t Child. He shakes his head, retrieves it. Pokes a button.

– Sorry.

– So he had a story to tell you?

– To pitch to me. Yes. Yes he did. A silly fantasy thing.

– You weren’t interested?

– Not my sort of bag at all I’m afraid.

– Can you say what it was about?

– A wolf. A band of wolves. And their adventures and conflicts with …

The policemen exchange a glance.

– … with various other groups. Foxes. Dogs. Ravens. What is it?

– Nothing. Please go on.

The one that isn’t Child is writing furiously in his notebook.

– Well that was it really. Battles and so forth.

– He told you this?

– Yes. The outline of it.

– Did he show you a … er …

– Manuscript?

– Yes, was there a manuscript?

I travel as much as I can. I can afford it. I like hotel rooms. I like airports. I like train stations and large towns. I like cities. My French is good, my German passable. I travel alone. I enjoy art galleries. Museums, sometimes. I read for pleasure, for a change. I grow a beard, or I cut my hair very short. I hire prostitutes. Male or female doesn’t matter. I like them to be thin.

– No. No manuscript. He described, merely. So … I can’t remember the details.

– Had he actually written anything, did he say?

Oh they are very much at sea, these policemen. They both look at me. They look terribly trusting. I’m sure they aren’t – not really. But they can look it. I wonder how skilled they are at managing their looks. Their expressions and their tone. I have spent a lot of time wondering what policemen will be like.

– I’m sorry. I haven’t made myself clear. It was not
his
idea. It was not his story. He was presenting it to me on behalf of another. An author.

– Who?

Once, in Bucharest, I assaulted a boy. He was skinny and pale and he arrived with a black eye and I found him
uncooperative
and sullen and I hit him first and he laughed. I hit him again, a number of times. I kicked him. I threw a
bathroom
glass at him, and my toothbrush disappeared under the bed. I beat him with a bedside lamp. I hit him on the fucking head until he blacked out and then I cut his skin with broken glass and for a while I thought he was dead.

– I can’t remember the name. Asian, I think. But no, I can’t recall it.

– Ashid?

– Yes. Yes that was it. Ashid.

– You’re sure.

– Positive. It was on the tip of my tongue.

– What did he tell you about Ashid?

– Nothing.

– Nothing at all?

– Nothing at all.

– There is a written version though. It’s been written?

I roll that round my mouth for a moment.

– I believe so. Yes. Certainly, yes. There is a manuscript. And if I had been interested he would have brought it to me, I presume.

– He didn’t have it with him?

– I don’t think so. He would have shown it to me I’m sure, if he had. Wouldn’t he? He would have got me to read the first couple of pages or something.

Child does a little shrug, a sigh. He is quite handsome. He considers me for a moment.

– The wolves, he says.

– Yes. The wolves.

– Did they have names?

– Oh. Goodness. Yes. There was one name. Certainly one name. The whole thing was a sort of memoir of this one wolf. Estragon? Escargot?

I laugh.

– Estator?

This is the other chap. He has something wrong with his face. Or perhaps it’s just a bad shave. Sleep scars. Something or other. He looks somehow off kilter.

– Why, yes. I think so. Say it again?

– Estator.

– That’s the one. How on earth did you know?

He ignores me and goes back to writing in his little book.

– It would be very helpful to us, says Child, if you could remember any more of the story. Names. And if there is anything else Trainer told you about the author. That would be particularly … well, it would be very helpful.

– I have to admit being immensely curious. You don’t suspect foul play, do you?

They shrug, both of them, at precisely the same time, with exactly the same movement. It’s quite comic. Child rubs an eye.

– No. Not as such. He didn’t mention anything about expecting someone, or about having an appointment or
anything
, did he? Last night I mean, after he left you?

– No. Nothing like that.

– Have you ever been to his home? asks the non-Child.

– No.

– Did he mention that he’d been talking about this story to anyone else? Child again.

– No.

– Did he mention the name Gull?

The boy in Bucharest spat out a tooth and let them clean him up and dress him and walk him out, all the time with his eyes on me, blank and empty, nothing in them, like
painted-on
eyes. I wish I had killed him. I am sure he is dead by now anyway. A life like that doesn’t last. But still. It could have been me that ended it. But it was blown about instead by others – stepped on and kicked and thrown across rooms by dumb, ignorant others. Not by me. But I was afraid, in the hotel, that I would be caught.