Hawthorn and Child (29 page)

I drew a breath. In my high disfigured room, looking out at Mr Malik’s poplar tree, I imagined the small pleasures of success. A house. Silence. Travel. A clean face. No noise from downstairs in the evenings. No noise from upstairs. No
cockroach
corpses in the hallway. My own paint job in the bedroom, art on the walls, a new computer. No scratching in the wall space as I lay awake. A new jacket, new boots. A
spontaneous
train to Paris. My own name set down in the big book.

– Good morning everybody! I’m Sally! Welcome to London 2012!

The journalists laughed. The Olympics people beamed.

Sally herself welcomed me, looked me in the eye, looked at my passport, and then at her clipboard. She wrote my down passport number.

– It’s so good of you to come Clive. So good.

Next, a young man took my photograph. I was passed to the next young man. He searched my shoulder bag, taking out everything, putting everything carefully back. I walked through a scanner of some sort. Not quite like an airport scanner. There was no need for taking off shoes or belts or removing wallets. But they had a look at my phone. Then I had to sign two forms. Insurance, I was told. Finally, one of them, calling me by name, gave me a hard hat and a bright yellow jacket with VISITOR emblazoned on the back, while another handed me a laminated card, still warm, with the photo they had just taken of me, my name, date of birth, nationality, and the legend NOVELIST (FREELANCE).

I could not be anyone other than myself.

– This is a print journalists’ visit, so we ask you please to refrain from photography. This is purely a security measure. Thank you!

There were perhaps a dozen others. Most of them seemed to be Italian or Spanish. We were all good-naturedly processed and then directed towards a small bus, a coach I suppose, parked inside the gate. There was a commotion behind us. A latecomer, it seemed. Sally moved to intercept him and I heard her laugh, and the husky laughter of a man. It delayed us a little. Then everything was fine again.

The coach was a comfortable thing, far too big for our small group. I found a window seat near the front. I watched Sally and a couple of her team stand outside and compare notes. A fair haired, good looking man who seemed somehow familiar walked nonchalantly towards them, pulling on his
hi-vis
jacket. He had no bag. He seemed to say something to Sally as he passed her and she laughed and was distracted for a moment from the clipboards. He hopped aboard and smiled at everyone. He gave me the slightest of nods and sat down directly across the aisle.

We set off.

I began to wonder why I’d bothered. Sally spoke to us through a husky microphone and a young man passed amongst us handing out brightly coloured brochures and maps, designed to fill in the gaps which took up most of the actual view. It was a building site. Structures loomed in the mist, but the place seemed most like a germinal suburban housing estate with pretensions towards community.

I took notes. I ran my eye over the documents, tried to line up the plan with the current reality. I noticed that the fair haired man was not taking notes, and that the handouts lay ignored on the seat beside him. He seemed to be texting. It annoyed me, for some reason.

There were questions – few of them anything to do with what Sally was telling us or showing us. They were instead about the costs, the funding, the amount of government money which would be required, about over-runs and contracts and timescales. Someone asked about the rumours of poison on the land. Another about the removal of
allotments
and the destruction of wild habitats. Sally was very good. She gave no impression of dissemblance or reticence, answered as fully as she was able, and was not shy about admitting, or claiming, that she didn’t know. She’d find out. She took notes. I glanced at the fair haired man. Still no interest. A news anchor, maybe. Still texting. I looked again, at his phone. He seemed to be holding it sideways, and was squinting at it. He was keeping it low, but he was pointing it out the window. He was not texting, he was filming.

Ridiculously – like a good schoolboy – I gasped, or twitched somehow. Whatever it was, he turned his head and looked at me. He still had on his face the affable half smile that he’d worn since I’d first seen him. He smiled more broadly now. Then he gave me a big wink, and looked back to his phone.

It went on far too long. Eventually we stopped at a mound of rubble beside a cleared space. We took Sally’s word for it that this was the stadium itself. She went through its various meaningless statistics, and I looked at the artists’ impressions. I found it hard to imagine anything so large existing in a space which seemed now so small. And I was having a great deal of trouble imagining how a group of people – who it was up to me to create – would go about attacking something that not only did not exist, but which seemed, at this moment, so unlikely.

– Sally, may I?

– Lloyd, yes?

It was him, the filming anchor man.
Lloyd
rang no bells. I watch enough news, but I couldn’t place him. His laminated badge was stuck somewhere behind his jacket.

– I presume that since the site was chosen, all access to it has been strictly controlled. But what stops – what prevents – one of our more imaginative villains from having already, miles from here, where they make those huge girders so neatly piled to our left, stuffed one of the things with C4 or
plutonium
or what have you, ready to detonate in the middle of the opening ceremony, just as the Beckhams light the flame?

There was much laughter. Sally laughed as well. Lloyd smiled widely, and glanced at me, and gave me another of his winks. I glared at him.

– Well, said Sally, you can be assured that the materials that arrive on the site are subjected to security checks, just as the people are.

– How so?

– How?

– Yes, what happens to them? Are they X-rayed, analysed? How are they checked?

– I’m not quite sure Lloyd. I can get someone in site security to get in touch with you if you like.

– Oh, yes please.

– So, the seating …

– Are they all checked?

– All what?

– All the materials? Will each girder in that pile have been examined, or will you just test a representative sample?

– You know Lloyd, I have no idea. But it’s an interesting question. I’ll get Matt Grainger to get in touch with you. Is that OK?

– Yes, Sally, thank you so much.

I stared at him, a cold patch of shock spreading out over my insides. He was not an anchor. I was beginning to fear that he was … I must have been looking at him very strangely, for he glanced at me, and then looked again, and raised his eyebrows and half shrugged, questioningly. I shook my head, looked down at my notes.

We arrived at a large temporary structure, not unlike a circus tent. We were ushered in for a video presentation. A man talked to us. We were given tea, coffee, biscuits. We were allowed to mingle with some engineers, a couple of sporting people, someone on the organizing committee. It was all a blur to me. I kept my eye on Lloyd. Perhaps not very discreetly, as Sally appeared at my side out of nowhere, insisting that she introduce me.

– Clive, this is Lloyd Page. You two should compare notes. It’s the first time I’ve had two novelists on the same tour.

He shook my hand firmly, and when he heard the word novelist he smiled, and clasped my hand in both of his.

– Clive …?

– Drayton.

– Clive Drayton! Of course! What a pleasure to meet you. I very much enjoyed your last book. Very much. I simply don’t understand why it wasn’t shortlisted.

– Thank you, I said. Quietly. I was stuttering in thought. Novelist. What was he talking about? Shortlisted for what? Sally drifted away.

– Well, I’m intrigued I must say. As to your interest. How fascinating. It’s no surprise to hear of interest from the genre chaps, the hacks like me. But from a literary writer such as yourself, to be focussing on an event like this … well, it’s intriguing, as I say. I don’t suppose you want to tell me what your angle is?

– Angle?

– I’m presuming it’s a novel of course? Am I wrong?

– No, I, yes, it’s a novel.

– Well well. How fascinating. And good too. At last a writer who won’t be in direct competition with me.

– I don’t … I don’t understand.

– Oh, well, you know the type of thing I write. My DCI? Billy Flint? Ex S.A.S.? You probably haven’t read the books. I’m not surprised. I don’t read the bloody things myself, I just write them.

He laughed loudly, and I remembered him from the
television
. Late Review. Maybe that books quiz on BBC 4. Sometimes he reviewed the papers on Sky News. I swallowed some sort of giant knot of misery. It stuck in my chest.

– Third time I’ve been on this damned tour. It’s useless, but I like to keep an eye on how the details change. And they do. The figures alter every time, just a little. And from my point of view – how to blow the place up – it’s full of
deliciously
tempting holes. Full of them. My Billy is a lummox really, but he gets things done, as they say. I’m going to have him stumble over a plot. An hunchy sort of thing. Ephemeral. He senses it. Then there’ll be disbelieving superiors, woman trouble, all of that. Tends to be a high body count in the Billy Flint books. This one might just top them all.

He winked, again. I was silent, the flood in my chest obstructing all thought.

– That makes six now.

– Six?

– Yes. That I know of. No doubt there are others of course. But Sally has told me of three, I know Candy Frame is working on something, and now you. Six, isn’t it?

– Six novelists?

I thought I was going to be sick.

– Yes. Not a single original idea between us. Still, it’s big enough. And obvious enough. Of course people want to do it. Though you’re the first non-genre one as I say. That I know of. Fascinating.

I didn’t hear much more of anything Lloyd Page said. Something inside me went under. I watched his mouth move. I watched his good looks animate and express, his fair hair falling over his tanned skin like sand on a distant shore, becoming more distant with each flailing moment.

I wanted to kill him.

I made the complicated journey home, and it seemed to take days, and I saw nothing.

My private excitement had become public and banal. There was nothing unique about my idea, or about me. I was just another writer, predictably chasing what was already a cliché. My thrilling secret, so jealously nourished and protected, had turned out not to be a secret at all. Everyone knew about it. They laughed about it. As if it meant nothing to them. And I was convinced that Lloyd Page was laughing at me. That he had seen the distress in my eyes, had interpreted it immediately and accurately as the shock of discovering that you are just like other people.

I climbed into my bed almost as soon as I retuned home. I curled up and slept and gave no thought for anything. I no longer cared.

And I might have stayed there forever, had I not arranged with Rosemary to spend my Sunday afternoon meeting with her policeman. She had done me the favour, and had made much of the trouble she had gone to. I could not cancel. Rosemary hovered over me in judgement and – much to my annoyance – that still mattered. Perhaps it mattered more.

And the man’s name was Child. Despite – or because of – the pit into which I had fallen, there was something too
attractive
about that to ignore. I wanted to meet a man called Child. As I cowered in what could only be described as a childish abjection, furious at the unfairness of the world, I wanted to know what it was like to be an adult called Child. I lay on my bed and wished for nothing more than to be back in my mother’s arms, behind my father’s legs, and I desired the company of children. I wanted to be a child. I lay there in the dawn, after twelve hours of post-traumatic sleep, and the appointment took on the hallucinatory shape of a play date, an adventure with sticks and streams and fields and trees. I fell asleep again to the clatter of children’s voices, urging each other simply on.

I expected him to be black, this Child. I don’t know why. But there were not many people in the café and the only man on his own was a pasty white. I regarded him from the doorway, disappointed. He looked like a policeman. He looked tall and solid and gormless. He was crouched over a tabloid lying open on the table. Chewing. He had a coffee cup in front of him, and a can of Red Bull. I was irritated. I looked around again. There was a woman on her own. I hoped for half a second that I had misunderstood, or not listened to anything Rosemary had said to me, and that Child was a woman. But Child was definitely a man. I looked back at him. He had stopped chewing and was regarding me, his can of Red Bull held in mid air. He raised his eyebrows. His face was pale and slightly twisted somehow. His dark hair was cropped very short and his nose looked like it had been broken a couple of times. He looked like a thug. I walked over to him. As I did he folded his paper, wiped his hands on a napkin, and stood up. He was tall. He wore jeans, and a cheap shirt that seemed to cling to him in an unattractive, wrong-size kind of way.

– Detective Child?

His hands were large, but his grip was surprisingly gentle.

– No, actually.

I looked at him, confused. He seemed to blush.

– Child couldn’t make it. He asked me to come along instead. I’m Hawthorn.

– Oh.

– I hope that’s OK. I work with Child.

– I’m … I … Hawthorn?

– We’re the same rank, he said.

I stared at him. He looked like an idiot.

– Right. OK. I was expecting … Is Child black?

He tilted his head a fraction and paused. It annoyed me.

– Why?

We were still standing. I looked down at the table. It was the
News of the World.
His coffee cup was empty. Policemen love suspicion.

– Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I won’t keep you long.