Hawthorn and Child (6 page)

He kept walking. He drank more coffee in an all-night McDonald’s. He dozed off for a while. By the time the staff woke him up he was almost late. He started walking back towards Finsbury Park.

He stood outside the house on Nestor Lane. There was silence. The night was dark and the street lamps were like hoods. He looked up at the windows. He expected to see Walter Andone looking back at him, his face against the glass. Then he expected to see Walter Andone’s silhouette. Reaching out to him. The windows were all curtained. The upstairs ones seemed frosted with condensation. The date sat in the corner of his eye, on the right, like a time stamp in a photograph. The house did not look that old. It did not look like shelter. It did not look like a place where you might go to be warm, to sleep, to sit with loved ones and retreat from the day and from the city. It looked like something you would grit your teeth to enter. It looked like all the city surrounded it as an
antechamber
, a place to rest, and it was the building that contained all the work and the toil and the pain of things.

He walked. He walked with his hands in his pockets. He pretended that there was nothing in his mind.

Things come out of the past.

They had taken down the tape on Hampley Road and it was open to traffic. There was no traffic. There were incident boards.
Shooting. Witnesses. Serious injury. Please call
. He
looked
up towards Plume Road and paused. Cars in the distance sounded like other things, natural things. Waves on water. The wind in leaves. He walked along the path and listened to his footsteps.

He came to Daniel Field’s blood, dried on the path like old chewing gum. There was a discarded swab stick in the gutter. At the foot of the wall lay the yellow marker, fallen from the place where the stray bullet had struck. He stared at the silver shutter. It was dull in the gloom. It was cold. He looked at his watch and retraced his steps a little. Then he pretended he was Daniel Field and walked as if on his way to the tube station. He imagined he was carrying a shoulder bag. His head
naturally
turned towards the ground. He looked at the little bit of London at his feet, at the smudges and marks, the scuffs and scratches, the tiny scraps of paper stuck to the stone. Tiredness allowed everything to flow into everything else. There was nothing distinct. A head full of condensation. He moved over the black marks of dropped liquids, cigarettes, spit, blood, dog shit, pollen and rain. In a thousand years this would all be buried. He halted at the stain. He heard a car come up behind him.

He didn’t turn. He looked ahead. The car edged into his field of vision, slowly and smoothly, its wheels turning in the corner of his eye like a thought. It was dark. A dark car. But it was not black. There were no running boards. There were no silver handles.

– Detective. Hello there. Detective?

Hawthorn turned. He looked back up Hampley Road. It was empty. He looked towards Plume Road. Then he looked down at the car in front of him. He had to drop to his haunches to talk to the driver.

– Hello, Mr Jetters.

– How is he? Daniel, I mean.

– He’s good. He’ll be fine. He’s expected to make a full recovery.

Jetters turned briefly and looked ahead. He smiled.

– That is great. That is great to hear.

– His mother, said Hawthorn. She asked if she could contact you. Do you mind if I give her your details?

– No, no. Not at all. I’d quite like to visit him I think.

Hawthorn nodded.

– And have you caught anyone?

– Arrests have been made. Can’t say too much about that.

– Of course. Well. That’s all very good news.

– Yeah. Yeah it is.

– What has you out here then?

Hawthorn shrugged.

– It would be good to have another witness. Someone who might walk this way in the mornings. That kind of thing.

Jetters nodded. He wished Hawthorn luck. He drove to Plume Road and turned left.

Hawthorn stood at the corner of Hampley Road and Plume Road, beside one of the incident boards. It was five minutes or more before anyone appeared. He showed his ID card. Then he showed the pictures. The pictures of the cars.

– Have you seen anything like this? Perhaps not exactly. But something like this. Or this one? Does that mean anything to you?

People shook their heads. Squinted. Took the pages from his hand and held them up to the light. People took out their reading glasses. They thought about it. They wanted to help. But none of them had seen anything like that.

– Or any sort of vintage car. Old car. 1930s probably. Like in the movies.

He stayed there an hour. It was cold. He was tired. He could not think. He lost count of the number of people he stopped. He wasn’t sure. Afterwards he thought he had possibly been crying. With some of them. Not all of them. Some of them. Then he realized that it was getting busier and that there were too many – too many people. He was missing most of them, and he thought that he might look like he was crying. Because he was so tired. And no. No one had seen anything like that. And they’d remember, they said. They’d remember something like that.

He went home. He wept in his bed, out of tiredness, he thought. Merely tiredness. That was fine. He fell asleep.

He dreamed that he slept in a house that moved, and that was not his, and that was not now.

It was fucking hot.

He could feel something on his thigh, a bruise. It felt like a bruise, sweet and small, and he poked it with his finger a couple of times. He didn’t know how he’d got that. He rolled it around his body like a taste.

Sometimes he found cuts where he thought he was only bruised.

Car fumes grimed his skin. He moved through the arches with his shirt hanging from his back pocket and a pair of stall sunglasses biting his nose, the pads missing. He weaved around the pillars and the statues and he stopped by the drinking fountain and watched for a while, but there were only schoolkids and builders and one or two guys like him. Tourists never drank from the drinking fountain.

He had left her by the canal, dozing on the grass in the shade with his tobacco and his weed and his lighter and his keys and his wallet, and she was probably snoring now, dreaming. Or she was being robbed, raped,
murdered
, bullied, torn apart, and if the canal had a tide she would drown, just for him, just because of him, because he had thought of it, and then he would have that instead of her.

You can love someone too much.

He scratched his armpit and poked the bruise and tried to stop thinking about her.

By the gallery doors there was a group of old Japanese or Chinese or something tourists, and they all had bags hanging off their shoulders. He slapped himself on the face a couple of times and worked up the bright smile, and put on his shirt and patted down his hair, and he slid through them like Jesus through children, smiling at them and saying
ciao ciao
, and they smiled back at him and one or two clutched their cameras and laughed, and he lowered his arms and paused for the entrance and they forgot about him and he came out the other side with a box purse and what his fingers had thought was a wallet but which turned out to be a notebook. Not very fucking good then.

He stopped around the corner where the cameras didn’t reach and he looked at the notebook. It was full of writing in different coloured inks. Pages covered in strange script. There was a photograph of a small girl, taken in the black-and-white past. Shit. He went back to the corner and picked out a shy-looking schoolboy and gave him the notebook and told him to give it to one of the Japanese outside the gallery, and to do it immediately and to do it right or he’d fucking kill him, and he gave him a couple of quid. Then he took off his shirt again, counted the cash from the purse and pocketed it, and threw the purse in a bin, and the sunglasses as well.

She was sitting up, dazed, staring in to the water. He kissed her and stroked her back, but she was too hot and she shrugged him off. She picked up her things and they walked towards the road, and he hailed a taxi and they went home and she got in the shower and he gave her a few minutes, then he climbed in beside her and they stood together in the cool water and they held each other skin to skin, and he was the happiest he had ever been, again, and he had no worries, none, and he worried about that.

He stole from tourists. Everyone steals from tourists. He stole honest. He put his hand in their pockets. And he had
arrangements
with the night managers at a couple of hotels. Maybe twice a week he’d get a call. Sometimes he worked as a driver for a man called Mishazzo, but that was irregular. Mishazzo was a gentleman. He was small and thin like a teenager, so he always wore a beard and an expensive suit, and sometimes he carried an umbrella when there was no sign of rain, and he sat quietly in the back with his legs crossed, smoking or reading the paper or talking on the phone. There were other men who worked for Mishazzo. There was Price. Some younger ones. They would pile into the car without Mishazzo and direct him somewhere and then they would pile out and be gone for a while and sometimes he heard shouting.

He didn’t like violence.

*

She was younger than him. They had friends; that was how they’d met. Her brother used to go out with his friend Derek’s sister, when they were kids. They all went to the same two pubs and the same shitty club in Waltham Cross. Noisy friends, and their voices in the middle of all that, and their voices went quiet when they met. And their friends knew quicker than they did. Her mother said it was a bad crowd, but it wasn’t.

She hated her name. He hated his name.

Price was a professional.

– I am a professional. You hear me? You need to be a
professional
too. You hear me? You need to show up shaved and showered and wearing a shirt. No fucking trainers. You will never show up after you’ve been drinking or smoking or taking whatever the fuck it is you take. Never. If I call you and need you, and you’ve been drinking, you fucking tell me.
I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine, Mr Price. I’ve just smoked a fat spliff, Mr Price. I’m out of my fucking mind on meth, Mr Price.
The inconvenience this will cause me is as nothing to the fucking mess I will make of you if you ever turn up anything less than stone-cold fucking sober. You hear me? Pro-fuckingfessional.

He nodded, smiling.

– You are, needless to say, completely fucking deaf, blind, mute. You are a stone. You are stupid. You understand nothing. You remember nothing. You drive the fucking car. And that is all you fucking do. You hear me?

– Yes, sir.

His father had put him in touch with Price. He didn’t know the story. His father knew a lot of people. His father came and went. His father thought he was soft. He didn’t trust his father.

They couldn’t talk. They were not good talkers, either of them. And once, long ago now, she had bought a notebook for a course. It lay empty and forgotten on the kitchen table until one afternoon, when she had gone out to the shops and he was worried that she would be killed by a bus or by lightning, he opened the notebook and he wrote lines about how he loved her, the way he loved her, about his fucking heart and crap like that, about his body brimful and his scrambled head. All that. She came back from the shops. He left the notebook where it was, and he didn’t mention it. And it wasn’t until about a week later that he noticed it again, and he flicked it open, and he saw his lines followed by lines from her. She’d written words that she had never said. He sat down. He read them over and over for a long time. Then he wrote a
paragraph
for her to find.

This went on for ages before either of them said anything about it. But he thought that maybe they touched each other differently. It was like the book freed stuff up, allowed it to happen, that the tenderness was covered, they had it covered, they had all the love and kindness and gentleness covered, and the sex became something else.

*

He had never seen anyone die. He’d never seen a body.

Sometimes when it was just Price and some of the others they would get back in the car and laugh and shout and punch the back of his seat.

– Did you see his fucking face?

– Thought you were going to have his fucking arm off!

– I swear I’ve broken a fucking finger!

He thought that this was probably for his benefit. That they’d done nothing other than have a chat or maybe shout at someone a bit.

He drove Mishazzo to a meeting in a suburb where he had never been before, to an industrial estate that seemed
abandoned
, but only temporarily, as if it was the weekend, even though it was a Tuesday. He sat in the car waiting. He read a newspaper. Then there was a shot – a sound like a shot – and he looked around but he couldn’t see anybody, and he wasn’t sure if it had been a shot at all. What does a shot sound like? He saw Mishazzo in the rear-view mirror and he started the engine, and he saw Mishazzo hurry, and he frowned at the frown on Mishazzo’s face, and as he drove off he waited for something to be said, but nothing was said. It was only when they were some distance away that Mishazzo spoke.

– Slow down.

Hours, sometimes. He sat in the car outside somewhere or other. Warehouses, electrical shops, pubs now and then. A lot of the time he had to wait around the corner, on a side street, his eyes peeled for wardens. Sometimes he just had to drive around in a circle, waiting for Mishazzo to emerge. Furniture shops, little lawyers’ offices, cafés, a house in East Ham. A minicab place in Walthamstow. He would smoke with the windows open. He’d get out and lean against the door. He wasn’t allowed to go anywhere. He sent texts. He started
keeping
an empty plastic bottle under the driver’s seat. He thought of things to write in the book, and he would try to remember them until he got home. It was like trying to hold water in his hands, and sometimes he made it back and sometimes he didn’t. He decided that whenever he forgot something it wasn’t a loss but a correction.