Hawk's Cross

by David Collenette

  Then the realisation that I’d been led to this; someone had put those pictures in my room, and the note. Then I recalled waking up after being drugged. The pictures had pushed that out of my immediate thoughts but now it came rushing back and suddenly the link between the events came unravelled again.

  I got out of the shower, dried myself and went back to sit on the bed in a towel.

  The news was repeating itself and they were interviewing some woman who was talking about care homes.

  Over and over in my head went the images and the thoughts, none of them connected, and I was beginning to shake. I had no idea what to do and no idea how to make these thoughts go away so that I could clear my head.

  I tried to focus on the TV. I forced myself to watch the Scottish weather lady discuss how we’d have a fairly good day today, with high temperatures and low wind across most of the South East.

  My breathing got easier and I continued to focus on the TV until they once again switched to local news and the story of the ‘Tower Bridge Suicide’ came on again and I suddenly felt angry at the TV, as if it had some evil agenda for plunging me back into my torment.

  I scrambled around the bed looking for the remote to change the channel, checking the tables. Failing to find it I decided to switch it off at the wall but as I approached the TV I stopped.

  An item in the news report that I’d dismissed the first time around suddenly hit me like a train: “Ms Geller leaves behind her son, Oliver.”

  Oliver.

  The boy I was supposed to abduct from the school. Images from that day came flooding back into my thoughts and I struggled to remember what Ethan had said.

  “That’s it? I can just go home?” I’d asked when he told me what would happen if I’d failed to abduct Oliver but then Ethan had said, “Your choice, Matthew. However, if you choose the second option then something worse will happen. This is your second option.”

  As these words slithered around my head like some oily serpent my eyes focused on the card lying on the table: ‘Choices’.

  Looking back at it, I’m surprised it took me so long to draw the connection. All I can say is that being in that situation is very different to looking at it in hindsight.

  Suddenly it all clicked together. It was like one of those magic-eye puzzles where you struggle for ages, staring at random tight patterns of colour on a piece of paper and then all of a sudden your eyes refocus and you can see a whale jumping out of the sea in 3D.

  This was the “something worse” that Ethan had talked about. This was my punishment for not abducting Oliver. Instead of a couple of days of missing his mum, now he would have the rest of his life. Instead of Karen having the mental torment of not knowing where her child was for a couple of days she would no longer be any part of his life and it was my fault.

  Ethan was punishing me for being weak; for not taking the lesser choice, just as he had punished me for choosing between the two people in the test. But this was different. In the test I had to choose one and there was no lesser choice. In this case I could have been strong and chosen to do something bad to save something worse. I’d failed.

  I’d failed a mother and her child, and I felt the weight of that burden. Suddenly from nowhere the image of Clive Grundy came back to me.

  In my mind’s eye I could see him hanging in the bathroom, his lower arms purple-black from the pooling blood, his face contorted and red. The patch of foul liquid beneath him where he’d lost control over his bodily functions. I remembered how he gently turned as if on some macabre display turntable and seeing the stain on the back of his trousers where he’d committed his final posthumous humiliation.

  Suddenly I felt responsible; somehow I knew that it was me that caused this. He’d hated me much more than he hated anyone else and just as it had taken some time for me to understand my involvement in Karen’s death, so I couldn’t fathom my involvement in Clive’s, but it would come.

  At some point I would understand how I’d been complicit in his needing to take his own life. At some point it would click like another magic-eye puzzle and I’d realise why I was responsible and how I could have behaved differently to spare him.

  Having switched off the TV, I lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. I was feeling calm now.

  I was feeling calm because it all made sense; I could link the random thoughts together. However, the calm came at a price and that price was the revelation that I was not the person that I thought I was.

  I’d always assumed that, on the whole, I was a decent person. I never tried to do anyone any harm. I opened doors to let people through, picked things up for people if they dropped them, gave up my seat on the Tube for old people etc. but these were passive things, things that anyone would do.

  I’d always revolved about a common point of inactivity.

  I’d never taken any positive action. I’d never been conscientious in trying to be a good person; to try to help. I’d always wanted to. When I saw adverts on TV for people who needed help, I always wanted to help. I felt sorry for the people who didn’t have enough and I wanted their children to get their vaccinations and their clean water. I wanted the cruelty to children to stop. I wanted all of these things but I’d never done anything to make a difference.

  I’d always made excuses: I didn’t have a credit card, I didn’t have an address, I didn’t have much money. I’d seen people sleeping on the streets like me but without the knowledge to help themselves as I did and I’d pass them by, more concerned for my own safety and protecting my own little world than offering to help. I’d felt sorry for them but hurried past them, especially at night, and hoped they’d be OK. I was disconnected from the human race and always assumed that it was someone else’s responsibility.

  What was that phrase? ‘Good intentions pave the way to hell’, and it certainly made sense. None of my good intentions or my feelings for any of these people made one scrap of difference.

  I wasn’t a good person and I wasn’t a bad person. I was worse: I was a passive person.

  At least a bad person has an agenda. At least a bad person can be identified and stopped. I just existed for myself. I took what I needed, disassociated myself from the rest of the human race and lived my life, uninvolved and irresponsible for everything that happened around me.

  I remembered going to the Natural History Museum and spending the whole day there during one particularly cold day in January, and I read nearly every exhibit they had. I remembered one section had a description which said, “An organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host.”

  This seemed to suit me perfectly. My host was humanity. I have grown, fed and sheltered myself on this organism and have contributed nothing to its survival.

  I am a parasite.

  I must have fallen asleep because when I opened my eyes and focused on the clock next to my bed it was telling me that it was 9.45am.

  I heard a tapping and realised it was the door. Wrapping the towel around me tighter I opened the door and was greeted by a man carrying a tray.

  “Breakfast, sir?”

  Surprisingly hungry, I’d wolfed down the scrambled eggs, toast, yoghurt, fruit and coffee that had been sent up, dressed, brushed my teeth and packed what I wanted to take with me into my pockets, and what I couldn’t put into my pockets I put into the toiletries bag.

  Having stopped at my ‘house’ to drop off the bag I headed into Trafalgar Square. I’d no real idea of what I was going to do and so I seemed to be acting on auto-pilot, doing what I often do, although today I didn’t bring my sketchbook.

  I sat on the steps and watched people and traffic come and go. Years ago there used to be thousands of pigeons here and people would feed them. You could buy pots of food and they’d land on your hand to eat from the pot. Today that w
as gone. Causing a nuisance, the food vans had gone and most of the pigeons too; whether they’d just moved on to find more food or had been actively removed I had no idea. They were just gone. The pigeons went where they could find what they needed, just like me.

  It was late morning now and the day was really beginning to warm up. I watched as people seemed happy as they went about their day. Some walked alone, others with friends. A group of tourists gathered beneath the lions to take photos. It was a pretty normal day.

  My thoughts about the Natural History Museum earlier had given me the idea to go back. It would kill some time and give me something else to think about so I headed for the Tube as I didn’t like the idea of walking too far in the heat.

  I crossed the Square and headed for the subway that would take me to Charing Cross Tube station. When I got to the top of the steps to head down they seemed a bit more congested than normal. I kept myself to the left and edged down the steps as other people seemed to be doing the same. When I got halfway down I realised why everyone was pushing to the same side.

  A woman was crouched over on the steps; a pool of vomit was on the step in front of her and she was groaning. My first thought was that she was drunk, as this happens a lot, but it didn’t seem this way. She had what looked like an expensive handbag and she seemed to be dressed well. Everyone was pushing past to avoid her and she was gripping the side rail for support.

  I carried on down with the crowd but when I got to the bottom and the crowd spread out I stopped.

  From here I could take a better look at the woman. She wasn’t drunk, she was ill. You could see by the way she was dressed that she’d come out to go somewhere with a purpose. Her right hand clutched the railing and in her left hand was a mobile phone but she was trembling too much to use it.

  I watched for a while as people carried on pushing past her. No one was helping. In fact, no one was even reacting; choosing to pretend it wasn’t happening so as not to interfere with their day.

  I could feel my instinct urging me to do the same; walk away, this is not your problem. I knew that in this moment I was at a crossroads; what I chose to do now would determine the rest of my life. I was a parasite; I lived off humanity and contributed nothing to it. I could behave according to my nature or I could try to change my nature. Was this even possible?

  I turned to walk away and started walking. I took a few steps but already knew that I wouldn’t walk far.

  There are moments in our lives when we realise things will never be the same again. Every now and then something small happens and it’s usually something so seemingly insignificant that to the world around you nothing has changed.

  The moment that it struck me that I was, up to that point, a parasite my life had changed; I had turned a corner.

  All of those people are like me; they keep walking because they are all passive people doing what they can to get what they can. They might contribute to humanity but only on their own terms. They might give to charity to make themselves feel better but when they find someone who really needs help they do as much as they can to remove themselves from the situation. Charity’s fine as long as it’s not messy.

  I turned around and as I did so I felt something inside of me that I’d not felt for a long time: hope.

  I’d felt it when I first arrived in London, cold and alone but for the first time in control of my future. In the few years that passed since then my life had become mundane as I had slipped back into the passive state that I’d adopted.

  Before I was even aware of it I was walking back to the steps; vaguely aware of people brushing past me I was focused on the woman on the steps.

  It was fairly easy to reach her as the crowd seemed intent on being as far as possible from her, which to be fair was quite an achievement on these cramped stairs. I crouched down in front of her, being careful not to stand or kneel in anything nasty, and put my hand on her arm.

  She slowly lifted her head and looked at me. Tears were running down her face and she looked grey and washed out.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked around to see a woman in her forties hand me a pack of tissues. She gave me a thin smile as I took them and she turned and walked away.

  I plucked a tissue out of the packet, wiped the woman’s mouth and threw the tissue away. I took her phone out of her hand and she seemed to become agitated, probably thinking I was going to steal it.

  “It’s OK,” I said, “I just need to help you get up and I don’t want you to drop it.”

  I unzipped her bag, slipped the phone inside and zipped it back up. She seemed to relax.

  I stood up, gripped her arm with one hand and picked up her bag with the other. Trembling, she got to her feet.

  I knew that we had to go up, to get out of the subway, so I turned around and reversed my hands so that I could help her turn and face up the steps.

  With her left hand on the rail and my hand under her right arm I helped her to lift her foot onto the next step. People crowded past and our way ahead was blocked as a constant stream of people headed in both directions.

  I felt something inside of me rise up, a feeling that was new. I’d been angry before but this was different. I felt angry for someone else.

  “Get out of the way!” I yelled. “Move!”

  Now I knew how Moses felt, as the sea of people ahead of me parted to let us through.

  I helped the woman up to the next step. By now the crowd had stopped and the people around were staring at us.

  “Someone help me!” I shouted and, as if awoken from a dream, a man trotted down the steps and took the woman’s other arm. Between us we helped her up to the top of the steps.

  She was trembling quite badly at this point and so I sat her down with her back to the railings at the top of the steps.

  I sat next to her and looked at the crowd, trying to think of what to do next. I pointed at a woman wearing a T-shirt and white cotton shorts.

  “You, phone an ambulance,” I barked. The woman slid her phone out of her pocket and dialed 999.

  “Someone get me some water,” I shouted and I was handed a half-finished bottle of Evian. I helped the woman take a drink and wiped her mouth with another tissue.

  I had no idea what I was going to do next; I had no idea of anything medical. I’ve seen programmes on TV about emergency medical stuff but I had no idea what I was supposed to do. So, all I could do was sit there with her and hold her hand. A faint squeeze of my hand and I looked at the woman who was trying to smile at me. She mouthed “Thank you” and then rested her head back on the railing. I guess that just being there is sometimes all that it takes.

  The woman in white shorts came over and said, “They’re on their way and they want to talk to you.”

  I took the phone from her and answered some questions about her condition. The operator asked to be handed back to the woman who passed me the phone, which I did. They operator obviously wanted to stay on the line and after a few minutes I could hear a siren.

  The siren got louder and then the crowd parted as an ambulance motorcycle pulled up. At first I thought this was stupid as there was no way she could get on a motorbike, but then I realised that he was just the first one here.

  By the time a proper ambulance arrived the motorbike guy was already tending to her. I stood up to let them do their thing. They got a chair on wheels off the back of the ambulance, lifted the woman onto it and covered her with a blanket.

  As one of the crew was checking her over before they got her into the ambulance the woman caught my eye. She smiled weakly and a tear trickled down her face.

  A few minutes later and the ambulance and motorbike were gone. The crowd resumed its procession as if nothing had happened.

  I stood quite still and watched them all walk around me. Something had happened; something huge.

  In
the time it took for me to turn around at the bottom of the steps the whole world had changed. My whole world had changed.

  I knew what I had to do.

  8

  Maybe that was a bit of an over-exaggeration. I knew where I had to be. To describe that as a plan would be similar to jogging down to the corner shop and describing it as an Olympic event.

  I needed to confront Ethan; what happened after that was anyone’s guess. I didn’t even know where he was.

  I knew that he was possibly in a tower block somewhere around Liverpool Street station, but that was it.

  I wasn’t that familiar with the business district and aside from managing to blag my way into the Gherkin and failing to get to the top one time, I wasn’t familiar with the area at all. How I planned to find Ethan or even the building I was in with him was anyone’s guess. I should have taken more notice.

  Unperturbed, I trotted down the steps into Charing Cross station once again and headed for the Northern Line. A couple of stops north I switched to the Central Line heading east towards Liverpool Street station.

  Until now I’d always kept myself to myself on the Tube. I’d sit with my head down, limiting eye contact to just what was necessary. However, now I felt that I wanted to be involved with my surroundings. I scanned the carriage. The lunchtime surge hadn’t started yet and the car was only half full. Across from me was a young woman reading a Kindle with headphones on and two seats away from her was a black man in a coloured hat tapping his hands on his legs.

  He caught me looking at him and gave an upward nod. I smiled back. Near to one of the doors stood a woman with a small boy who was swinging himself on a pole. His mother kept trying to stop him swinging to no avail.

  We clattered along the tracks, the lights going out briefly every now and then as we hit dead parts of the track, and I watched the train snaking around the bends through the windows in the interconnecting doors.

  We stopped at a station and the woman and boy got off, to be replaced by two Chinese girls chattering away in a language I didn’t understand. They sat opposite each other, one two seats away from me and one next to the black man. One of them took a photo of the other with her phone.