Hawthorn and Child (21 page)

The sky.

A police car turned the corner, silent but the lights flashing. He watched it creep towards him, its tyres hissing on the soft tarmac. He stood on the kerb and the car passed him. He stamped his foot. It stopped. A man got out looking bored but well equipped. He could smell plastic, and fresh sweat seeping through old deodorant. He stamped again. The man affixed a complicated belt to his waist. Tightened it. Fastened it.

– Hello, sir.

He said nothing. Looked at him. White man with red lips, cold skin. He smelled so clean. His arms met his body in a tuft of scented turf and he was straight from the television. Or the gym or the back of a magazine.

– We had a call about some shouting?

He stamped his boot.

The shopkeeper appeared. The taste of butter. The small ankles of his wife’s bullshit figurines. There was chatter by his left ear. Back there somewhere. His wife would be sitting in the armchair. She would be clutching the first of her
Coca Colas
and marking out the television in the
Standard.
Back there somewhere. He moaned. He raised his mouth to the sky and wanted to wail and nothing came but moaning.

– Right. Sir. Can you tell me your name please?

Some boys had gathered opposite.

– What is it, bruv? What’s he done, man?

The driver emerged and gestured and walked around the car. Circumauto. Another belt. Their shirts were white but they wore … things over them. Chest pieces. Armour. The sky’s pink darkened. The sky. He must forget about the sky for the moment.

Vests. Stab vests. He flexed his right thigh.

– My wife, he said.

– What’s your name please, sir?

He didn’t want to give his name.

– My wife is at home.

– Good for her.

He looked straight up. He was afraid that he wouldn’t do it. If he didn’t do it, no one would know that he’d planned to do it.

– Been having a bit of a shout have we?

He could hear the shopkeeper at his shoulder, giving an account. This and this. The boys across the road wheeled in tiny circles on a tiny bike, bounced a football, dislocated their hips, pushed laughter between themselves like a pool game – angles, ricochets, trick shots. Hats. Were they not too hot? The shopkeeper spoke low but he could hear the accusations and the falsehoods and the traps. Menace. Shouting. A disturbance. Scaring customers. Creating a scene.

He wouldn’t argue.

His wife was diabetic.

He would not shift. His toes on the edge of the kerb. His heels on the path. His hands by his side. His head tilted upwards.

– Can you move over here a little, please?

– My wife is diabetic.

– All right. What’s your name?

– I don’t want to tell you.

– You know why I’ve stopped you?

– You haven’t stopped me.

They had notebooks. They wore tags and emblems. Little silver pokes of office, he supposed. Their fabric was soft black, their shirts crisp; there were various things on their belts. He was straining his eyes. Peeking. He returned to the lowering sun and thought of naked boys by the stable, running knives through each other’s hair. He could smell bare skin.

– Are you arresting me?

– I’m trying to talk to you.

– I’m armed.

There was a gap.

– With what?

– Leave me be.

Oh Jesus! He was a small framed creature now, with his hair longer than the other boys, longer than his mother liked, and he ran in the evenings by the river with the other boys, with their low calls and whistles, a little language of the river at sunset that they had invented for themselves, and Jesus ran faster than them all, and they stripped and spent time in the water, and still stripped they crept up on the girls in the new dark, the girls around the … campfire? He didn’t know. He saw the girls around a little fire. Working on clothing. They were working on clothing somehow. Mending clothes and making clothes. Robes and gowns and the things people wore then. And he saw the boys in the dark, and the girls knowing the game and thinking it, for the most part, boyish and disgusting and stupid. But sometimes they peered into the gloom at the naked shapes, and held their breath at the moans and the laughs and the gulped air. Jesus liked to listen with his eyes closed. He could hear the breath of everyone, and knew what it meant. He knew how their minds were directed, their disguised intentions, their thoughts. One boy always stood close to him, always sought him out. One girl was sick, her head reeled in the flickering light and she wanted to be dead. Another girl battled with herself and prayed, her heart split open, flooded with fear and despair, thinking that this was her test. This was not her test. Most of the girls breathed bored or excited breaths, their words matching their thoughts, for the most part. Most of the boys breathed excitement, though there was some doubt too, and fear, and one boy hated himself and his friends and his hate wrestled with his lust, and both of them were strange to him, and he spat on his hand as if spitting on an enemy.

Jesus was surrounded by the breath of others.

The policemen had taken a step back, and the shopkeeper had disappeared.

– I’m going to ask you to put your hands behind your back, OK?

– You arresting me?

– Yes, I’m arresting you.

– No.

He spun to his left with his arm extended and he thought he did it fast but he met only empty air and then something had a hold of his wrist. He raised his arm, raised it, raised it, and the policeman let go and he turned and he ran. He ran. His legs were strong. His shirt flapped and his jeans caught on his thighs and his boots were imperfect. But he ran. He could run. He could run faster than any policeman. He smiled. He was going towards the tube. At least one of them was after him. Perhaps both of them. No, only one of them. The other would be on the radio. He slammed into a woman at the entrance and she went flying and he turned a sharp left and he could hear the boys shouting and laughing
Yeah man, run bruv, run blud run! Fuck the feds man, fuck em!
and he came out of the second entrance and ran through the bus park to the main road and right, under the bridges, and he was just warming up now. He glanced back. Still there.

People looked small and still when he ran.

His wife had started with cartoon characters. Not so many. That was fine. Then she had gone on to historical personages. Little things. Made of something or other. Porcelain. A couple of inches high. Six inches high. On pedestals or bases made to look like scenes. Tree stumps. Motor cars. Robin Hood. Dick Whittington. Peter Rabbit. Florence Nightingale. Princess Diana. The first time they had sex they were fifteen years old and it was summer like this. She had Barack Obama now.

He could taste the trains.

He took the road at a long angle and the cars parted for him.

He went left again, into the park. Up the little hill. Left again. He cut the grassy corners. Jesus would run for hours. He would run what we would call marathons, all around his village. Longer than that. Bursts of speed when he wanted. Past the skateboard place where a couple of shirtless white boys stopped in the gloom and stared at him, but they had short hair; and past the tennis courts where some people turned and looked. He glanced back again. The policeman was flagging.

He needed someone to talk to.

He went left again. He was making a circle. He went across the narrow bridge over the railway tracks. He screamed a woman with a pram out of his way. When he got to the other side he stopped. He ducked to the right and he drew the knife. Then he stepped out and faced back across the bridge. The policeman. No one else. The policeman, red-faced, distorted. He started to run. Towards him. Fast. His knife flashing in the dusk, catching yellow from the track lights. The policeman slowed, hesitated, stopped, turned, shouted something, ran back the way he had come.

– Don’t cross this fucking bridge. Hear me? Set foot on this fucking bridge I fucking kill you.

He stopped. He kicked the sides. He kicked the fucking sides. He walked backwards. He could hear the click and hiss of the radio. He could taste his own breathlessness rise in his throat. Say it. He swallowed.

– This bridge is mine. Mine, you hear me? Step on and I shoot.

He went back to the other side. He could see the policeman’s head peering at him. Just the head, set
perpendicular
, bobbing with his breathing like a ball on water. He stepped out of sight, waited, stepped back into sight. The policeman’s head withdrew, then re-emerged. His fringe. He did it again.

When Jesus was asked questions he didn’t answer. Yes. Rarely. He would stop, and carry the question inside, like a doctor with a sick child. Time would open up a new room, and he would consider, and refer to things that had happened and had not yet happened, and to things that had been said and written down. And he would stare out of the window of this new room to see what it overlooked, and to measure the weather there, and the geography of the land, the grasses and the plants there, the animals in the foreground small and rustling, in the distance large and bellowing, so that all animals seemed the same size and to make the same noise. And he would wait. And sometimes he slept, or found himself reading, and he would forget that an answer was awaited, or he would pretend that he had forgotten. Eventually, slowly, with his voice, he would come out of the room with a healthy child. And he would provide his audience with something that was not an answer, but was instead a reflection and expansion of the question, a puzzle, something they could wander in and feel a sense of where he had been, and of what there was just out of their sight but within their reach.

He fumbled in his pockets. In full view. Patting his pockets. He pulled out a box of cigarettes, lit one. Dropped out of sight again. As if he was just pacing. To and fro. Came back. The policeman’s head was all he could see. Respecting his wishes. He did it again. Out of sight. A different pause. Back in sight.

Then he went out of sight, threw away the cigarette and ran, faster than before, up the old path towards Highgate, by the backs of people’s houses.

He was by instinct cruel.

He sat one afternoon in a café in a covered market. By the window, looking out at the stalls. Where was his wife? Cruising the knick-knack tables, examining the junk like diamonds, haggling with smelly little men over two quid off a matching choirboy and choirgirl, or a dog wearing a hat, or Churchill clutching his lapel. The high roof of the place let the cold air circulate and nothing heated it, and it felt like outdoors but it was covered and dry and the rain was kept out and he didn’t give a shit about his wife any more. He didn’t. He half hated her. He looked up from his soup and saw a woman looking in, wondering about a coffee maybe, a quick sandwich, a treat. Nice woman. She held an open umbrella over her head. He stared at her. And his eyes glanced up at the roof, and she saw him, and realized what she was doing, and laughed. She laughed, shook her head,
what am I like?
and lowered the umbrella. He could have smiled. He could have smiled and shook his head back at her –
what are you like?
or smiled and shrugged –
what are we all like, sometimes, sister?
or laughed aloud, kindly. Any of these things would be like a touch. A simple human touch. But he did none of these things. He stared at her. He stared and moved his hand slowly between the plate and his mouth. He stared and closed his face, and made himself as a wall, and he said aloud the words
dumb bitch,
and her smile faltered and broke on the stones and she hesitated and was ashamed and she turned and walked away. And when she was gone he smiled. And he tried to tell himself that he had no access to time, and that his smile had simply come too late, that he was awkward and troubled and it wasn’t his fault, that he was socially disadvantaged and that he was alienated from the community of ordinary people, and that it wasn’t his fault.

But the truth was cruelty.

He needed someone to talk to.

Between the houses and the roofs the sky was black and purple, and past its edge was an egg yolk strip of the last of the sun, but at his feet there was darkness and around his body gloom, and nothing bright. The bushes came and went. There were some walkers. Things like that. He shouted. He looked into the gardens.

She would be on her second Coca-Cola. She said the
sugar-free
wouldn’t hurt her. She would be watching
Millionaire
and wondering where he was.

There were windows lit. He saw a family in front of a television. He saw a couple cooking in a kitchen. Sirens behind him. Somewhere. He glimpsed lights. More sirens further away. He left the path, moved to his right, through grass and then a tangle of bushes and small trees down the
embankment
. He stumbled on a sharp decline, let himself slide on his arse and was poked in the face by a branch. He had to rip his way through the thickest of it, and came eventually to a wooden fence, the top coiled with wire. He turned and kicked at the middle with his right foot like a horse. It gave on the fifth. He turned again and made the hole usable and peered through it. A long garden. A kids’ swing and slide set, cheap. A light in an upstairs window. Downstairs nothing, but the doors to the living room were glass. He climbed through the fence and sprinted towards them. Something moved in the window, upstairs. He swerved. He jumped the little
flowerpots
to the patio. He glimpsed a cartoon face on the floor – a T-shirt or a toy or something, staring at him. He got to the doors. Locked. He turned and kicked once and a panel shattered neatly. He squeezed through sideways and cut his stomach. Why hadn’t he reached through and opened it? Why was he so stupid? He walked fast. He needed to get out of the room. He tripped on a low table and nearly fell. There were feet on the stairs, running. He found a door, opened it. A hallway. Light. There was a boy at the front door, leaving, struggling with the locks. He was about fifteen. Long hair.