– So you won’t help us?
– You don’t need help. You’re panicking. You’re being stupid. They are not suspicious. They like you. They’re being friendly.
He tried to tell her to tie him tighter. To hit him harder. To yank his head back by the hair. He wanted her to spit in his face, in his mouth. He wanted her to hit him. But he was no good at talking. He tried to make her guess things by the way he reacted. She seemed to get it. But not enough. She was too careful, too considerate. She checked too much. He thought about writing it in the book. Like instructions. But the book was not for that.
Price called him on the Friday.
– Don’t need you today after all.
– No?
– I’ll pay you half.
– OK.
– You coming on Sunday?
– Sure.
– Good boy. I’ll get Pawel to pick you up about midday. What’s the girlfriend’s name again?
He looked at the curtain. The day was making it bulge. She had gone to work. He pressed his thumb against a bruise on his ribs.
– Mary.
– Right. Mary. Informal. Bring a bottle.
And he hung up. Without asking for the address. Not even which number flat. Nothing.
– You’re not going to help us.
Hawthorn sighed again.
– What do you want me to do?
– Money. At least some money.
– For what?
– To get away.
Hawthorn laughed.
– Where are you going to go?
– Morocco.
– Morocco. What are you talking about?
– Or Spain. Morocco or Spain.
Hawthorn crossed his arms. He looked like he was going to cry, but his body was angry and his voice was cold and he was laughing at him. They sat in Hawthorn’s kitchen, at Hawthorn’s table. He felt like he had never been there before.
– You want to run away to Morocco or Spain because a couple of dodgy geezers have invited you to a barbecue?
Hawthorn’s voice was quiet. There was a shake in it. He couldn’t tell if it was laughter or anger.
Fuck. Fuck it.
He tried to hit Hawthorn. He threw his left arm out – why his left arm he didn’t know, all his strength was in the right – and Hawthorn simply leaned away from it, and it glanced off his shoulder, maybe his ear, and Hawthorn had stood and his chair was clattering to the floor, and he had stood up too, apparently, and he threw the right and Hawthorn caught it, and something hit his stomach and he clenched, and then Hawthorn was smothering him, his arms around him, clamping him down so that he could not hit again, couldn’t raise his hands, and he tried to butt with his head and break the hold, but he was just jerking in Hawthorn’s arms like a crying child and he could hear sobs, and he looked for the door, he just wanted the door, and he struggled and he shouted
Let me fucking go,
and he had made no impact at all, none, and they broke from each other and he could not look back, and there was just a simple gap where there had
previously
been something complicated. On the stairs he wiped his cheeks but they were dry.
She was watching television. He stood in the doorway. Eventually she looked back at him.
– What is it?
– We have to go.
– What?
– Pack, he said. Quickly.
She stared at him. He could see her start to feel afraid.
It was the way he looked.
–
EastEnders
, she said, very quietly.
– Pack. Now. Not much. Basic stuff. Money. Passport. Some clothes. We might not be back … for a while.
– What the fuck?
– Just do it.
He went to the bedroom. He threw things on the bed. Clothes. He couldn’t think. He pulled bags from the top of the wardrobe. He took the shoebox from the bottom drawer, tipped it out on the dresser. Her passport, his, the other half of his drivers’ licence, a credit card he never used, some euro notes. He stopped. He took off his shoes, his jeans. He walked back into the living room. She was on the phone.
– Who are you talking to?
– My mother.
He didn’t know what to say.
– Tell her you’ll call her tomorrow.
He went to the bathroom. He took off the rest of his clothes and switched on the shower. He was sweating. He stepped in and stood under the water and he thought about trains. Trains, hotels, money. He thought through all of it again. He knew he wasn’t thinking straight, but he didn’t know how to fix that. After a few minutes she came in.
– Where are we going?
– Paris.
– What’s happened?
– I’ll tell you when we get going. Please go and pack.
When he got out she was still there.
– It’s OK, he said. Everything will be OK. Just fucking pack, will you.
– You have to tell me.
– I fucked up. Stay if you want to. I have to leave. I’m going in about ten minutes.
He walked, dripping, through to the bedroom. In the doorway he froze. It took him a second or two to realize that it hadn’t been ransacked, that he’d made the mess himself.
In the taxi she called her mother and told her they were flying to Barcelona for a couple of days on a cheap last-minute deal. At St Pancras they had to rush. It hadn’t cost much, he told her. He ran up the escalators with both their bags. He could hear himself wheezing. Cigarettes. They had two seats facing the wrong way. When they were settled he kissed her. Then he told her. He told her about Mishazzo, that he was a big deal. He told her about the violence. How they went and beat people up. He told her about Price. He told her about the gunshot. He told her about the two policemen who had picked him up by the Emirates. He told her about the deal they gave him. This was the story. He told her about the hotel jobs. He told her that he’d had no choice. He told her that Price was a psycho. He told her that the cops were psychos too. He told her that Price had become suspicious. He didn’t know why. Maybe he’d heard something. That the cops were talking to someone. He didn’t know. Price was on to him, he thought. He’d tried to keep her out of it. But Price knew where they lived.
– I didn’t tell them anything about you. Nothing true. They think you work at an estate agent’s. They think you’re called Mary.
– What the fuck?
– They fucking kill people. You understand? They kill people. I’m driving this guy around and I’m telling the cops where I take him and he has people beaten up, killed. You understand that? This is the fucking story.
He was speaking through his teeth, trying to be quiet. Around them were couples just like them. Couples went to Paris on the train – it was what they did.
She wanted to know why he hadn’t told her about the hotels. Then she wanted to know more about the violence. She wanted to know what Mishazzo did.
– He’s a businessman. Resources. He puts people together.
– What are you talking about? What resources?
He told her about the cars.
– He steals cars?
– No. He sells them on. Stolen. Or he trades them. That’s part of it.
– What’s the other part of it?
– I don’t know. He’s a broker.
– A broker?
He nodded.
– What the fuck is a broker?
He told her again about the shot. About Mishazzo’s face in the rear-view mirror. He mangled things. They sounded slight in his mouth, like nothing. Like he made them up. But this was what was happening to them. They had to get away because of what mattered. And nothing else mattered. Why couldn’t she see?
He stopped suddenly. The book. He remembered the book. He had left it. It had slipped his mind. He stopped talking in the middle of a sentence and he looked at her. Jesus.
– What?
– The book.
He could not feel them moving. He could feel nothing. He was encased in something, buried in something, smothered or drowning. His hand was shaking and he could not focus his eyes and he stared at her for a second and then he could not see her.
She moved towards him as if he was disappearing, and her face became something he could see, and she reached out to him and she held his head.
– I have it. I have it.
She made him look at her.
– I have it. It’s in my bag. I have it.
He breathed out but could not breathe in. He let himself slump against her. There was no relief. He fell down inside himself. He had forgotten it. He had run and left it behind. He had run. All those words.
The men are solemn and he wants to laugh. They stand singly or in small groups, by the wall, waiting for the action to begin. The thump of the beat is not so loud here. But the air is dense and viscid and connects them to each other, so that he feels a man could push him over without touching him.
There are certain things Hawthorn wants to do. There are things he doesn’t want to do. The line between these things tickles him, like the bead of sweat down his back. His mind imagines situations. Certain situations. Certain possible
conjunctions
. Certain pictures arise in his mind, and he flits from the pictures to the scene in front of him, and constructs paths from here to there, across the pulse of the drums and the thick air. He doesn’t trust his mind.
He knows how it’s supposed to be done.
At a signal they move away from the wall. They move towards the others. It is always a confrontation. It is always a
stand-off
. Hawthorn is shoulder to shoulder with men like himself. He is eye to eye across the air. He is picking out certain faces. He is making calculations. There are certain things he wants to do. There are things he doesn’t want to do. These things are always people. He accepts or declines each face. Each set of shoulders. He is agreeing to and refusing each body in turn. His mind is ahead of him. He is saying yes to that one, no to that one. He is choosing. Choice is an illusion.
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.