Keith Ridgway - Hawthorn & Child

He dreamed he was sleeping, and Child was driving. Driving but not moving. He was sleeping on the passenger seat and Child wrestled with the wheel, but the car was still. It was the city that was moving. It was dark. The city rushed past them like words on a screen, and he would have read them but they went too fast. He was filled with sorrow. It trickled through him and filled his eyes. He wept and he didn’t know why, and he was embarrassed by it but he could not stop. He cried so much that his face disappeared. He dreamed that the siren was on, and it was so loud that it woke him.

He awoke. Child was driving. The city was still and they rushed through it. That was the difference. A finger across a page, taking corners not turning them, hopping little hills, drawing zigzag ciphers on the wide, empty intersections.

His shoulder was pressed into the door and pulled away from it and he touched his seat belt. He had an erection. He wiped at his eyes. Child was smiling at the road. He wouldn’t drive like this at any other time of the day. He wouldn’t be able to.

— Has he run?

As soon as he’d said it the stupidity of the idea roared back at him. Mishazzo. Running.

Child glanced at him and laughed.

— Shot fired off Seven Sisters, he shouted.

He didn’t quite believe him, such was his grin and his mouthing of the corners, gleeful as a roller-coaster. He looked around for something to indicate official business, permission, and shook his head violently, trying to get the sleep to go. He sat up, and was pressed down again. He looked at his crotch. His chin was wet. He saw the radio, and only when he saw it did he hear it, feeding them information in short regular bursts, calm and close together. He couldn’t understand them. Their pattern indicated some sort of emergency, declared, somewhere or other.

— What? he asked the radio.

Child said something that he couldn’t hear. The streets were deserted. What time was it? There was next to no traffic. Why was the siren on? He switched it off.

— Someone needs to do bad before we can do good.

— Shot fired. That it?

— One male injured. Local unit just arrived. Ambulance arrived. Shot fired from car. Armed response imminent. Rivers raised from his bed. All hands on deck! Scramble! Scramble!

Child was cackling at the footpaths, leering at the kerbs.

— Finally we get to do something other than sit on our arses.

He tried to manage his arms. They wanted to stretch but they were tensed up against the roll of the car. In his dream there had been ghosts as well, he thought. Around the car. Small dark ghosts with wings and muscles. Flapping. He became aware of a pain in his neck. And a headache. He opened the window an inch. Two inches. Ghosts like little birds, tough little tattooed birds. Bad things. His erection began to subside.

They turned a corner somewhere near Wood Green, into the cold canyon of the shopping street. Child punched the siren as they passed some taxis and a pedestrian crossing. He drove with his glasses slipped to the end of his nose and his head thrown back so that he could see through them.

— What?

Child was muttering.

— It’s near where I used to live, he shouted. With Amy. When I lived with Amy.

— What is?

— Hampley Road.

— Hampley?

— Road. Scene of the crime. Stick your head out the window or something.

He stared at the clock and looked at his watch and fumbled in his pocket, and then couldn’t remember what he was fumbling for. Five twenty-nine. 0529. 5.29 a.m. Shot fired, Hampley Road, Finsbury Park, man injured. He wasn’t fumbling, he was fixing his cock.

— Why are we going this way?

Some people stepped away from a car as they passed. Three men, one woman, maybe more, young maybe, he couldn’t see, scattering as they passed, and he turned in his seat and watched them re-form into a group in the middle of the road and stare after them, and he kept on looking backwards even after Child had turned another corner and there was nothing more to see because he liked the way the stretch in his back and his chest and his shoulders made him feel. It eased his headache and it pinched the pain in his neck. He yawned again and listened to the radio, monotone, scripted. You fire a gun in this city and certain things inevitably follow. Hampley Road. Armed response on scene. Ambulance off scene. Victim off scene.

He was awake.

— We’re going the wrong way, he shouted. Child looked at him. The siren wasn’t on. The shout had sounded insane.

— We’re not going to Hampley Road, Hawthorn. We’re going to the hospital.

He was in his twenties and his hands were slick with blood. Then a nurse was wiping them with a cloth and they became a faded pinking, stuck in the air, his arms bent at the elbow for no reason, flapping a little. For no reason. Not flapping. Turning at the wrist, like a sock-puppet show stripped naked and scalded, doing a little dumb show over the prone body on the table. He was a body on a table. Weight of flesh and bone. Wound and contusion. Half a dozen people gathered around him with what you would swear was ill intent, such was the way they shouted and darted and snapped. They poked and peered at the body. They tubed the body and they hooked it up. They shifted and bound the body. They cut and pressed and injected the body. They worked on it as if furious.

Hawthorn was sweating and cold.

— Lay your arms down, Daniel, that’s it, lay them down. Daniel? Daniel! Put your arms down for me darling, that’s it.

— Move please.

Early twenties, average build. He was moaning and shockingly alive, and his socks were still on his feet, and there were drops of blood, splatters, on his legs somehow, his bare legs, raw looking. His underpants too, still clinging to him, but halfway down his thighs, where they’d been pushed or pulled. His genitals looked out of place, as if they were the last thing you’d expect to find on a naked body. The rest of his clothes had been cut from him and lay in a sodden heap on a side table. All the attention was focused on his stomach, his abdomen, around there somewhere. Hawthorn tried not to see too much.

Child moved over to look at the clothes. Hawthorn stood off to the right, glancing at the discarded bloody things that littered the floor — bits of bandages and padding from the ambulance, yellow needle caps, little torn open packages.

— Move, please.

— Can’t get at it there.

— All right, Daniel. Don’t move if you can.

— Move, please.

— Watch it. Clamp … pack here. Here.

He shrieked. Daniel. A short painful burst of non words, and his arms were up again, and Hawthorn found himself looking suddenly for his face.

— OK, Daniel, OK, easy. That’s the worst of it. The pain will ease now. Daniel? You OK, Daniel?

His face was smeared in blood. His chest was covered in bits and pieces. They were using it as a table. His eyes were opening and closing. His mouth was making shapes.

— OK, he said. OK OK OK. OK.

Child reappeared.

— Can I ask him a few things?

— He’s going straight to surgery.

— Hang on, said a nurse.

— Daniel? I’m police.

— Hang on, I said.

Hawthorn had his notebook in his hand. He looked at it. He rummaged for a pen. Child was leaning over the boy’s head.

— Daniel, can you remember what happened? Can you tell us what happened?