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

reach and he looked at the notebook. It was full of writing in different coloured inks. Pages covered in strange script. There was a photograph of a small girl, taken in the black-and-white past. Shit. He went back to the corner and picked out a shy-looking schoolboy and gave him the notebook and told him to give it to one of the Japanese outside the gallery, and to do it immediately and to do it right or he’d fucking kill him, and he gave him a couple of quid. Then he took off his shirt again, counted the cash from the purse and pocketed it, and threw the purse in a bin, and the sunglasses as well.
    She was sitting up, dazed, staring in to the water. He kissed her and stroked her back, but she was too hot and she shrugged him off. She picked up her things and they walked towards the road, and he hailed a taxi and they went home and she got in the shower and he gave her a few minutes, then he climbed in beside her and they stood together in the cool water and they held each other skin to skin, and he was the happiest he had ever been, again, and he had no worries, none, and he worried about that.
     
    He stole from tourists. Everyone steals from tourists. He stole honest. He put his hand in their pockets. And he had arrangements with the night managers at a couple of hotels. Maybe twice a week he’d get a call. Sometimes he worked as a driver for a man called Mishazzo, but that was irregular. Mishazzo was a gentleman. He was small and thin like a teenager, so he always wore a beard and an expensive suit, and sometimes he carried an umbrella when there was no sign of rain, and he sat quietly in the back with his legs crossed, smoking or reading the paper or talking on the phone. There were other men who worked for Mishazzo. There was Price. Some younger ones. They would pile into the car without Mishazzo and direct him somewhere and then they would pile out and be gone for a while and sometimes he heard shouting.
    He didn’t like violence.
    *
     
    She was younger than him. They had friends; that was how they’d met. Her brother used to go out with his friend Derek’s sister, when they were kids. They all went to the same two pubs and the same shitty club in Waltham Cross. Noisy friends, and their voices in the middle of all that, and their voices went quiet when they met. And their friends knew quicker than they did. Her mother said it was a bad crowd, but it wasn’t.
    She hated her name. He hated his name.
     
    Price was a professional.
    – I am a professional. You hear me? You need to be a professional too. You hear me? You need to show up shaved and showered and wearing a shirt. No fucking trainers. You will never show up after you’ve been drinking or smoking or taking whatever the fuck it is you take. Never. If I call you and need you, and you’ve been drinking, you fucking tell me. I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine, Mr Price. I’ve just smoked a fat spliff, Mr Price. I’m out of my fucking mind on meth, Mr Price. The inconvenience this will cause me is as nothing to the fucking mess I will make of you if you ever turn up anything less than stone-cold fucking sober. You hear me? Pro-fuckingfessional.
    He nodded, smiling.
    – You are, needless to say, completely fucking deaf, blind, mute. You are a stone. You are stupid. You understand nothing. You remember nothing. You drive the fucking car. And that is all you fucking do. You hear me?
    – Yes, sir.
    His father had put him in touch with Price. He didn’t know the story. His father knew a lot of people. His father came and went. His father thought he was soft. He didn’t trust his father.
     
    They couldn’t talk. They were not good talkers, either of them. And once, long ago now, she had bought a notebook for a course. It lay empty and forgotten on the kitchen table until one afternoon, when she had gone out to the shops and he was worried that she would be killed by a bus or by lightning, he opened the notebook and he wrote lines about how he loved