Hawthorn and Child by Keith Ridgway Page B

has not fallen all the way. Then for a second he thinks he’s holding it up, because his arms are above his head somehow, and the underside of the vehicle is pressing against his elbows. But of course he knows he’s not holding it up. But he can’t move his arms. And he’s trapped.
    – His mobile phone is in his trouser pocket but he can’t move his arms. There’s no one else in the garage. The garage is in the corner of a half-abandoned industrial estate. There is a plastics workshop at the other end. Out of shouting distance. There is a scrapyard where they sometimes hide cars, but that is even further away. On the other side of the yard wall there is simply open ground, waste ground, and then the trees start.
    – He hears a voice. Close to him. Far too close to him. Palmer is his best hope but this isn’t Palmer. Palmer isn’t back. For a moment he cannot understand this voice. It seems too quiet, or too loud, too close, as if it is coming from a mouth that is beside his head. It is a low whispering voice, it sounds foreign, it’s unsettling, odd, as if the voice of someone unused to speaking.
    – The vehicle will fall, fully, shortly, and you will be killed. It is prevented from falling by a small amount of metal, upon which the weight of the vehicle rests, but this small piece of metal is slipping, and the vehicle will fall, and because the wheels are off, the full weight of it will fall on you and you will undoubtedly be killed.
    – Ashid doesn’t know what to say. He whimpers. He thinks that maybe this is God talking to him. Or maybe it’s part of himself. Maybe he is so close to death that part of him is already dead and this part of him is talking to him from the other side of death, telling him calmly what to expect. He feels very cold. He’s worried about pain. He finds that he is pressing his elbows painfully into the underside of the Land Rover. He realizes that this is ridiculous and he tries to stop doing it, but he’s afraid that if he relaxes his arms he will die.
    – Save me, is what he says. Save me . He doesn’t even know if there is really someone there who can hear him or whether he is now praying, for the first time since childhood, or whether he is talking to the dead part of himself and in fact asking for death to come and save him.
    – We can save you, says the strange voice, with no hesitation. And this confuses Ashid. He can hear only one voice, but now that he thinks about it, the voice sounds like it might be more than one voice, speaking at exactly the same time, with exactly the same inflections and emphasis and melody, and he says Save me again, and this time he is definitely speaking to whoever is speaking to him, and he hopes, he has hope.
    – First , says the voice, say the voices, you must promise us something.
    – Anything , says Ashid.
    – You must hear our story. We will tell you our story. You must listen to our story. You must listen to all of it. From the start at the old sun, to the end at the black ditch. You must listen to the tale of Estator and his brethren, to the story of their lives, and you must hear the tale of Whigs and Haft. You must listen to it all. From start to finish. You must remember it all. From start to finish. And you must set it down so that it is known.
    At this point Trainer stopped talking. He looked at his sirloin. Sniffed it. Poked it around the plate with his fork. He ordered more tea. We were in a café in Hackney. He didn’t eat any of the steak. I think he’d ordered it as a sort of joke. Rare and bloody on a white plate.
    – It is unknown, he said, and then paused. It is uncertain, debated, in dispute, as to whether Ashid heard the story of Estator at this point, while still trapped beneath the Land Rover. Or whether he was saved first and was then told the story. What is known is that Palmer returned to the garage to find the Land Rover belly down on the floor of the yard, with the jacks buckled and crushed, and Ashid nowhere