Keith Ridgway - Hawthorn & Child

He is fucking some guy in the dark. His towel over his shoulders, his head back, his eyes closing and opening, everything coming at him through his cock and his hands. He is distracted by the music, by its beat. He is trying not to match it. Some other man is there. He thinks about taking the guy he’s fucking to a private cabin. He thinks about coming or not coming. Everything is possible. He runs his hands over his own body. He slaps the guy’s arse. He presses his hand to the man’s back, all bone and muscle. He concentrates on containment. On keeping things from getting out of hand.

There is a burst of drums in front of him, a sudden clatter in the steady rhythm, as if something’s fallen over. Heads flick to the left. There is a new line of men behind him. Everything rattles in the near distance. Focus comes and goes. Everywhere he looks he seems to have just missed something. OK. There are two lines of men behind him now. He leans on his neighbour, who looks at him. He reaches down to pull a knee pad tighter. A plastic bottle hits his shield. He looks up. The first face he sees is covered by a black scarf and hood. It sits on a small plump body. He can see the eyes looking at him. Piggy eyes. Stupid fucking piggy eyes. He shouts into his helmet. He is gone from himself and he knows it and he thinks about going back but he doesn’t really want to.

*

The dark moves and he lets it move over him and he doesn’t care. He isn’t fucking anyone now. He is in the half dark on a soft pallet. He is kissing a man with a beard. The man has a beautiful mouth, a relaxed way of kissing, a stillness in his shoulder muscles. The music is quieter. Or he has lost it. It doesn’t matter. There are others.

All the men move forward. He hears a laugh somewhere behind him. His eyes are on the same eyes. He steps on the bottle. They will meet now. The lines. They will touch. They will press up against each other. All the anticipation will rebound on them and there will be a kind of sigh, a relief. A sort of love. He laughs. He still has his erection. It presses against his belt or something, and there is a marvellous sharp discomfort that makes him moan. He shouts into his helmet. He loses the eyes. There is a stir of faces. They meet. The lines. There is a sigh, a relief, nothing happens. There’s a hush. As if everyone is suddenly a bit embarrassed.

He finds himself being caressed, on the back, the hips. The kissing is doing him a lot of good. He would be happy to have it continue for a long time. There is a pause. He opens his eyes. The man with the beard is kissing another. The fat man. Hawthorn looks at him. His fat shoulders and his fat arms. His chins. The fat of his chest. The fat man has his hand on Hawthorn’s arse. Hawthorn pushes it away. He reaches for the bearded man’s cock, and sets his shoulder sideways.

The whistles somehow get through everything else and someone to his left strikes out at one of them and there is a tight scuffle and he sets his feet steady, pushes, feels the men behind him push against his back, lean into him. He is behind his shield. A face appears and spits at him. Another does the same. He is looking through a film of saliva. He swings his truncheon upwards from underneath and it hits something soft, but he can see no reaction on the selection of faces in front of him so he pulls it back, goes again. It hits something hard and there is a cry, but he cannot see which face has made it. He extracts his arm and brings it over his head and leaves it there. A face says ‘Ooooooh’ in a camp voice, and laughs at him. He finds those eyes and stares at them and they falter and the face turns away.

The fat man’s body is disgusting. Parts of it brush against Hawthorn. There is more of him. Too much to avoid. He rolls and quivers and his shape heaves itself like a sea, and his face is sickly sweet and grinning in the half dark like a giant child’s face, slurping, kissing the bearded man all wrong, and his belly spreads across Hawthorn’s like a flood, and Hawthorn feels small and brittle and on the verge of something. He pushes at the weight, and his hands are like sticks in sand. This is not like him.

*

He finds the piggy eyes again. The arsehole eyes. The hood is fallen back now, and the hair is buzzed short like Hawthorn’s. The scarf still covers the mouth. Hawthorn pushes the button, speaks, describes the fat boy. He has to repeat his number three times. He has to describe the boy twice. Someone tells him to move that way, to push out. He pushes. He roars and pushes. He shouts. He remembers the button and stops shouting. The men on either side follow him. He holds the piggy eyes in his. The eyes dart a little. They snap back to Hawthorn, hold for a second. He gets the impression that they’re smiling. Then the hood comes back up and the piggy head ducks and disappears. Shit. The men are still at his shoulder. He pushes his button. He is about to redirect them all when he sees a short-haired girl in front of him with a sneering face and a black scarf around her neck and a red hoodie. Red hoodie, he shouts. He grabs her. She hits his arm. He brings his truncheon down on her shoulder, hard. The men at his side clear a space. He holds her again, by the fabric on her chest. She is screaming. A boy is trying to protect her. Hawthorn sees him hit from the side by a shield edge. His head snaps backward, and falls forward again, dripping blood. Hawthorn drags the girl towards him. She is half crouched, half sitting. He wants to drag her by her hair but her hair is short like a boy’s. She is crying. She wears tight black jeans and her nose is pierced and he can see a tattoo on the skin of her hip where her clothes have parted. Everything about her makes Hawthorn furious. He drags her for a few yards. Someone comes to him, touches his arm. They lift her between them and walk her towards the arrest point. She is clutching her shoulder where he hit her, and she is sobbing, weeping, and looking behind her, for her boyfriend, crying.

— Fuck off, Hawthorn hissed.

— What?

— Fuck off, I said. Go lose some fucking weight.

They both looked at him.

The bearded man smiled.

— Who’s he talking to?

— You, obviously.

— You sure?

— Well it can’t be me, can it?

— I think he’s talking to both of us.

— I think he is.

They turned away from him and faced each other. Something in his arm jerked and he had to bite to stop it. He pulsed. He let it recede. He turned around and left the room. He went and stood in the shower. He stayed there.

Later they make fun of him.

— Whorethorn thought he’d got himself some nice fucking anarchist cock.

— Whorethorn was hoodwinked by a titless dyke.

— Whorethorn loves the smell of testosterone in the mornings.

— Whorethorn’s got a hard-on for truncheon fucking.

— Whorethorn is a fucking fascist faggot.

He sat in his brother’s garden watching the kids. He called out to them.

— Where’s your paddling pool?

The boy shrugged.

— Dunno, said the girl.

— Will we find it? Set it up? It’s hot enough.

The kids looked at each other. The girl frowned.

— I don’t think so, said the boy.

They went on with whatever it was they were doing. Something with plastic blocks and the seat from the broken swing. They talked to each other quietly so that he couldn’t hear. His brother and Tess were in the kitchen getting the dinner ready. His father was watching the second half of the match.

He didn’t know what to do.

He thought about faking a phone call and going home.

He thought about going to the sauna. He hadn’t been in months.

The kids were skinny and they looked like his brother when he’d been their age. Hawthorn watched them. He remembered going with his brother to the swimming pool. He remembered them holding their breath. They would duck underwater and see who could hold their breath the longest. He had forgotten. It was something they did. He remembered being under the water, with his goggles on, looking at his brother a foot or two away from him, both of them by the wall, with their hands on the bar, holding themselves under, staring at each other, not breathing, waiting, and waiting, and not breathing; looking at his brother’s mouth, seeing a bubble escape; waiting, waiting, waiting. He couldn’t remember surfacing. Only his brother’s face, changing. Waiting.