Keith Ridgway - Hawthorn & Child

— 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.