Hawthorn and Child by Keith Ridgway Read Free Book Online Page A

Hawthorn. She asked if she could contact you. Do you mind if I give her your details?
    – No, no. Not at all. I’d quite like to visit him I think.
    Hawthorn nodded.
    – And have you caught anyone?
    – Arrests have been made. Can’t say too much about that.
    – Of course. Well. That’s all very good news.
    – Yeah. Yeah it is.
    – What has you out here then?
    Hawthorn shrugged.
    – It would be good to have another witness. Someone who might walk this way in the mornings. That kind of thing.
    Jetters nodded. He wished Hawthorn luck. He drove to Plume Road and turned left.
     
    Hawthorn stood at the corner of Hampley Road and Plume Road, beside one of the incident boards. It was five minutes or more before anyone appeared. He showed his ID card. Then he showed the pictures. The pictures of the cars.
    – 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.

Goo Book
     
     
    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