Keith Ridgway - Hawthorn & Child

He pulls the strap on his helmet. He adjusts the grip on his shield.

He opens the towel around his waist and pulls it a little tighter and ties it again, tucking one edge of it under another, breathing in, his shoulders lifting and falling against the wall.

There is a man he wants nothing to do with. There are things he doesn’t want to do. He manoeuvres to avoid. He aligns his body just so. He exerts pressure in a different direction. The music. And with it, out of mouths all around him, noises prior to language. Movement from before language. Everything here is before language. How can his mind help him with that?

He feels a hand on him. He doesn’t know how it’s connected. He feels a face next to his. He doesn’t know whether the hand and the face are linked, how to see them, how to know if what he wants is anything to do with it any more. He pushes. He pushes harder. There is another hand on him, or maybe it is the same hand.

A voice crackles in his earpiece and they hold a line. There is a smell of sweat and the heat shimmers above the bodies in front of him and they swirl like they are simmering, cooking, about to boil, and the man beside him shouts something that Hawthorn can make no sense of but for its excited anger and its eagerness, and he feels his heart thumping and is surprised and immediately not surprised to find that he has an erection.

He feels a mouth on him. He thinks it is a mouth. In the soft dark his cock is being sucked by someone he cannot see. He tries to decipher shapes. Hands are on him. He doesn’t know whose hands. He closes his eyes. There is a shape by his shape, a high sweet smell, a cock pressing against his thigh. He takes the cock in his hand. He cannot see anything. He opens his eyes. There are shapes and sounds. He tries to see shapes behind the sounds. No one uses language. He cannot see the fat man. He pulls his hips back gently, puts his hand on the head that is sucking him, makes it stop. It is doing it too well. There is too much to do. He sinks to his knees to see what will happen. He is presented with two cocks, and he sucks one and holds the other. He moans and the darkness tumbles around him and he moves his hands above his head. There are flat bodies. He closes his eyes. He is swimming in the river and the river is on his skin. He is partaking of a comfort that predates anything his mind might think about it.

He feels a hand on his cock somehow. He smiles towards a laugh, and has to pause his sucking. His pause is taken for something else, and the cock in front of his mouth disappears and is replaced by its obverse and the cock to his left becomes a pair of helping hands and he is back on the riverbank with the scent of the earth and the rough close clamp of the soil, and he declines, in this dark, just now, amongst strangers, and he stands up grinning.

The crowd surges and they hold the line. Faces are roaring at him. At him personally. Some of the faces are the sort of thing he expects. Others seem too young and fresh for this. Or too old and smart. Too cunning. He can feel the pressure on his shield, and it all comes through his hands. He adjusts his feet to lean forward, to take some of the strain off his arms. It brings his face closer to their faces. They can’t see his face though. They see his helmet and his chin strap and his neck guard and his eyes. They all look him in the eye. Every face he turns to seeks out his eyes. He blinks.

There is a roar to his left, localized, and the line seems to break for an instant. There is a uniform on the ground, and the focus is suddenly there, everyone is staring at the man down, man down, and the crowd wheels around him. In his helmet he laughs. Man down.

*

The fat man is still there. He stands against the wall, and Hawthorn sees only his shape — a bulge of cold grey with a whiter band around his middle, like something ready for the oven. Hawthorn is having his cock sucked by a skull with a buzz cut on top of hard shoulders, and he is trying not to come. Another man is investigating his arse. He laughs out loud. The sucking man mistakes this for a signal, and moves his head back and uses his hand instead, which Hawthorn taps with his own, and everything winds down. Taking a break , he says, smiling, and is not sure whether he has said it out loud or not. He goes towards the showers.

They have their orders. In his earpiece he hears the calm voice. They stand, they stay, they move, they wheel, they retreat. Someone is playing them like snooker. Moving them around like an arm. He waits for a bottle to hit him. None do. They fall short. They hit others. He stands there, in a trained stance, braced.

Hawthorn’s father brought drinks out to the garden. His brother was fussing over his son, Hawthorn’s nephew. Hawthorn scratched his cheek and smiled at his father and took the beer.

— How’s work?

— It’s all right.

— Still with Child?

— Still with Child, yes.

His father laughed. Hawthorn smiled and nodded. His brother was talking about sweets.

— Close as you’ll ever get to making me a grandfather again.

All the old jokes. His father liked it.

— John and Tess are the ones you need to talk to about that.

— Don’t even think about it, said his brother grimly, fixing his son’s shoe. They laughed. The boy wanted to know why.

— What? What? Tell me.

— Go annoy your sister.

He glared at them all and ran off. Tess came out of the house, still on her phone. She walked behind Hawthorn and ran her hand across his shoulders. The sun was warm and the beer was good. He looked at his father. He was still handsome. He looked strong and healthy. John was getting fat. He had the pear shape of a cabby and his mother’s smile.

Hawthorn squinted. Rubbed his eyes. He put on his sunglasses.

— Are you ever in uniform these days? Tess said to him. She was off the telephone. She was looking at him as she poured herself another glass of wine.

— No, not working. Just functions. Formal things. I had to wear it to a funeral the other week.

— I miss it. The uniform.

— Who died? his father asked.

— I didn’t know him. Ex-detective. Retired I mean. Fairly young still. Fifties.

— You were always handsome in the uniform. Wasn’t he, John?

— What did he die of?

— He drowned.

— He drowned?

— On holiday in … the Canaries. I think. Went in the sea somewhere odd, you know. Somewhere he shouldn’t have. Got in trouble.

— Suicide?

— Nah, don’t think so. There was no talk of it.

— I know a guy who drowned in the Canaries and all.

Hawthorn looked at his brother. He expected a joke. But John sipped his beer, waiting to be asked.

— Go on then. Who?

— Cabby. Freddie … something. Freddie Cohen or something. Big guy. Quiet guy. Nice man. But quiet, you know. Nervous type. Daytime driver only, ever. Nervous shy guy. Not what you’d expect from looking at him. Big belly, Jewfro, great big bushy beard. Gentle giant sort. Weakling really. Anyway. It wasn’t Cohen. I can’t remember what it was. Anyway. He went to the Canaries with his wife, and his two brothers and their wives, and a plane full of kids and the elderly mother and half of Stamford Hill or whatever. And they had practically a whole floor of some seaside hotel, and every morning they annexed a big section of beach with rugs and blankets and picnic baskets and sunshades and god knows. Kids’ toys, clothes, hampers, whole bloody extended family support system and paraphernalia. So one morning, Freddie is wandering from the little showers, you know the little stand-alone shower nozzles they have at the edge of a beach, and he’s been sitting in the sun and he’s sweated a bit — fat Freddie — and he’s just taken a turn under the shower thing, and he’s wandering back towards the hotel for his morning shit when