Hawk's Cross Read online

  I didn’t want to get up and walk away as it would be obvious that I was moving after he’d spotted me so I sat there, eating my breakfast and hoping he’d turn his attention elsewhere.

  Near to where I sat there was a copy of The Metro, a free newspaper, on the steps. I reached across, grabbed it and pretended that I was interested in what it had to say.

  It was yesterday’s edition and I found myself reading through all of the adverts. After a few minutes I looked up and was relieved to see that he’d gone.

  The next couple of hours were fairly mundane. I had a few people interested in my drawings, one who couldn’t speak any English at all and walked off without giving me anything but a smile and a nod, and another woman who insisted that I draw her as she specified.

  She looked like Rosie O’Donnell but was quite happy with the picture of a dark-haired version of Uma Thurman I gave her. She asked me if I thought it was a good likeness and I said it was eerily so.

  She gave me a twenty pound note.

  I checked through what I’d made this morning; thirty-five pounds. Some people give me a lot, some just a few coins. It doesn’t really matter.

  Despite the risks of living on the street, the biggest enemies of any homeless person are boredom and loneliness. My drawings keep me from both and so I’m quite happy sitting down all day earning enough for dinner. As I carefully folded the money together and tucked it into my sock I became aware of someone close to me.

  “Not a bad morning’s work, Matthew.”

  I looked up. Standing to my side was the guy in the grey suit. He must have been about five-eleven, his thinning hair slicked back above two piercing blue eyes. A wry, thin smile spread across his lips as he regarded me with a look that seemed to burrow into me.

  I looked up at him and shielded my eyes from the bright sky: “Sorry?”

  “Your money. You seem to have had a productive morning’s work. No?” he asked.

  “Um, yeah. It’s OK,” I replied. I’ve always been highly articulate.

  He continued to stare at me and I continued looking up at him with one eye closed against the glare until I became uncomfortable, looked down, gathered my stuff and stood up.

  “Sorry, I have to go,” I said and started to walk off.

  “I’d like to talk to you for a minute. Do you have a minute, Mr Hawk?”

  For the first time I realised that he’d used my name. Twice. Both names. I stopped and turned around to look at him. He continued to stand with his hands crossed in front of him, regarding me with that piercing, half-amused stare.

  “Talk about what?” I asked.

  He paused briefly and then he seemed to come to life. Uncrossing his hands, he reached into his jacket pocket and fished out a card. He walked over to me and held it out.

  “My name’s Ethan Connelly, as it says on the card.”

  I took the card from him and examined it.

  There was a line drawing of a human head with a question mark inside it. At the top were the initials ‘CRM’ and underneath the words ‘Con-Way Research and Metrics’. At the bottom of the card was the name ‘Ethan Connelly’ with a number and an email address.

  “We’ve been watching you very closely, Matthew. One of our employees had one of your cartoons done for him and was very impressed at how accurate they are. May I?” He held his hand open towards my folder. Unsure of what else to do, I handed it to him.

  Watching me closely he unzipped the folder, opened the pad to the first page, still holding my gaze and then looked down.

  Inside the pad were drawings that no one wanted or those which I just wanted to do for myself.

  He flipped through the book, sometimes raising an eyebrow, occasionally looking over the top of the pad at me. Eventually he lowered the pad and closed the front cover.

  “They’re very singular,” he commented, looking directly at me again. “Usually when I see caricatures people have had done I find them fairly generic: boys playing football, girls riding ponies, men in dune buggies etc. These are specific; each unique. For example, this one.”

  He opened the pad again and turned to a drawing of a man in the sea. The waves were big, blown by a storm with lightning and rain.

  I shrugged.

  “Did this man not want his rendering?”

  “I don’t think so. I can’t remember,” I replied.

  “Maybe if I hypothesise it might jog your memory. How about if I take a stab in the dark and suggest that you saw this in him and drew this rendition without him being aware of it? Maybe after overhearing him in a café, at a bar, on a phone?”

  “Um.” Articulate as ever.

  “You didn’t want to share this with him because you knew what it meant. That he was done with life and there was nothing else for him in this world. To show him this would possibly be to nudge him over the edge; maybe to do something foolish?”

  I stared at the picture: “He was a troubled man; I don’t choose what people are.”

  He regarded me closely with those piercing eyes and finally cracked a thin smile: “Of course not.” He closed up the folder and handed it back to me. I zipped it up.

  Ethan went on, “Let me move this along a bit. We believe that you have a remarkable gift, Mr Hawk, and we’re very interested in you. Specifically, we’re not just interested in your ability to identify people’s motivations but also in your ability to determine which are beneficial and which are harmful. For example, that large woman who believes she looks like Uma Thurman, good or bad?”

  “I don’t know. I just see what people want. Anyway, all she wanted was a picture. I didn’t see anything from her,” I replied.

  “I see.” He didn’t just see, he stared straight into me with those piercing grey-blue eyes.

  After a pause, he said, “How would you like to make some real money, Matthew? We’d like you to spend a day at our research facility taking part in a measured experiment.”

  “An experiment?”

  “Ha!” he laughed and I started. “Don’t worry, we’re not going to wire you up and do weird tests on you, Matthew. We’d just like to have you assess two people, talk to them and see if you can identify what their core wants are. Then we’ll ask you to say which of the two has the potentially damaging desire. It should take no more than an hour and for that hour we’re willing to pay you two thousand pounds.”

  “Why?” It seemed like a reasonable question.

  “Most of our research is carried out following people’s habits. We gather data on people’s shopping habits, their purchases, trends etc. Most of it is reactive. If we could work out what people want before they demonstrate the behaviour it would be extremely important for us. What we’d like to do with you is to see if your ability could be measured. Then we’d see if it exists in other people.”

  Twenty minutes later and I was sitting in the back of a black cab with Ethan heading through London towards the Docklands. I wasn’t quite sure why I’d agreed; I guess boredom counts for a fair bit and the thought of some real cash didn’t hurt.

  Eventually we got out of the cab, Ethan paid the driver and he left. Ethan led me into a building, towards a set of lifts and up to the fourteenth floor. We stepped out of the lift and into an open-plan office space. There were two other people here: a rather large man in his forties with a thick, bald head and a woman about the same age who looked European and better suited to a James Bond film than a research office.

  “Welcome to our offices, Matthew,” Ethan said. “Most of our staff work in the field at universities etc., so this is often fairly quiet.”

  He didn’t introduce the two other people but instead led me around the back of the lift block to a set of offices. Ahead of me there were three doors. He led me to the centre door and we walked in.

  On either side of the room were two wi
ndows allowing us to see into the other two rooms. In each room there was a person sitting in a high-back chair, looking around.

  “We’ve randomly selected two people to take part. What we’d like you to do, Matthew, is to go to each room for five minutes and talk to the people. We’d then like you to come back here and answer some questions. Is that clear?”

  As Ethan had been talking I’d been looking around. It was clear that the two people couldn’t hear us as the walls were thick and obviously sound-proofed. Ethan’s voice sounded unusually muffled with no echo in the room. I also surmised that the windows were two-way mirrors; that we could see the people in the rooms but they couldn’t see us.

  “OK,” I said, “that seems clear.”

  Ethan led me out of the centre room and indicated the door to the left. I went in.

  Sitting in the first room was a woman in her late twenties. Slightly podgy with dyed blonde hair and dark eye makeup.

  The chair she sat in was slightly tilted backwards so that she naturally sat back with her head in a rest; not unlike a dentist chair.

  We talked for a while. She told me about her trip to Spain three weeks ago and how her boss was an idiot. She then explained about her sister’s upcoming wedding and then it came to me. Suddenly I had a mental image of her wearing a lab coat in a hospital. No… a university. She was studying and people around her were clapping whenever she wrote something down. Then she got up and walked to a podium where she was handed a certificate and everyone cheered.

  The second room was pretty much the same layout, just in reverse. Sitting in the chair was a man in his mid-thirties. He wore a T-shirt and jeans and had tight curly brown hair.

  He wanted to talk about music and told me how he always wanted to be in a band and had wasted his time in a dead end job rather than following what he wanted to do. He explained that he would have been able to do the band thing but his brother let him down. Then it hit me. I had a mental image of him standing on the balcony of a huge house on the side of a hill. Behind him was an outdoor pool surrounded by women in bikinis. It was a bland, mundane desire that I’d seen many times before in different disguises in small-minded people with no real depth or ambition.

  After a few minutes more tolerating this guy’s faded dreams of being in a band, I excused myself and left the room.

  I met Ethan and we walked back into the centre room. He asked me to describe what had happened and he listened, staring at me the whole time, never interrupting.

  When I was done he said, “So, Mr Hawk, did either of our participants seem more valuable in terms of their wants and desires?”

  I explained that the woman seemed to have the most potential as she seemed to have a genuine goal but the other guy was too bland and generic.

  Satisfied with this, Ethan held my stare for a while and then clapped me on the shoulder. “Right, let’s go break the good news, eh?”

  He led me to the room where the woman sat waiting. The woman who I’d seen when we first arrived joined us and stood at the back, against the smoked-glass wall.

  Ethan addressed the woman: “Thank you for completing today’s assessment. Monique will show you out and make sure you get paid.”

  We walked out and waited as Monique led the woman to the lifts and downstairs. Ethan then led me to the wall-height windows opposite the lifts and pressed his head against the glass so he could see down.

  “There she goes,” he said, “just blending into the crowd. Just one more person among many.”

  He turned and caught my eye. I thought I saw something else in his stare but it was gone as soon as it arrived and the moment escaped me. It struck me then that I hadn’t formed a picture of Ethan but sometimes that happens when I’m not focusing.

  “Right then,” he went on, “time to put the other guy out of his misery, eh?” He slapped me on the shoulder and led me around to the rooms at the back.

  We walked into the second room where the guy sat, waiting.

  Monique didn’t follow us in this time, maybe she’d been detained downstairs. Ethan directed his attention to the guy sitting in the chair: “Thank you for completing today’s assessment.”

  Still no Monique.

  Ethan reached inside his jacket, pulled out a gun and aimed it at the participant’s head, whose eyes shot open in surprise and fear a split second before Ethan pulled the trigger. The bullet went into his forehead just above his nose and the back wall of the room was splattered with red and pink gunk.

  Suddenly the world seemed unreal. Stunned, I sank to my knees and stared at the guy in the chair, holding onto the table to steady myself.

  Fixed in a look of surprise, he looked exactly as he had moments before except for the hole above his nose and that his right eye had turned to look to the side. Looking back at it, this was for some reason the most grotesque part.

  The air smelled of burned-out fireworks and iron, thick like soup. I was finding it hard to breathe and could feel myself gagging.

  I turned to look at Ethan who was watching me with a smile. He lifted his hands next to his face, made a face of mock horror and said, “Surprise!”

  I leaned over and threw up. I heaved onto the floor and when I drew a breath to recover I drew in more of the acrid air that seemed to cloy at me and heaved some more.

  Eventually the heaving reflex subsided and I was left staring under the table at the bottom half of the dead participant.

  His right foot was twitching and I could see thick blood dripping from the side of the chair onto the floor.

  I couldn’t move and actually felt grateful when Ethan grabbed the back of my jacket and lifted me up.

  “Come on, soldier, we have work to do,” he said, and dragged me out of the room.

  3

  He let go of me near to the windows and I slumped onto the floor. I couldn’t get the image of the guy’s face out of my head.

  “Why?” I said, more a statement than a question.

  “Why not?” Ethan replied. “You think it makes any difference to anyone?”

  Kneeling on the floor I was breathing hard, trying to keep myself from gagging again. I didn’t know what to say or do. I knew in that instant that my life had changed forever. The thought crossed my mind that I might be next; that the square, black carpet tiles on the floor might be the last things I ever saw and at this moment I didn’t really care. I became aware that Ethan had walked over and was standing in front of me.

  “Come on, no use crying over spilt blood,” he said and hauled me to my feet. “Look!”

  He pulled me over to the window and shoved me to the glass.

  “Do you see anything different? Has anything fucking changed? At all?”

  I looked through the window but little registered. I was aware of my faint reflection in the glass due to the clouding sky but outside was just a blur of moving objects and grey shapes.

  “People died yesterday, the day before and are dying right now. Did you puke your guts over them? No, you did not. You carried on in your own little world, blissfully unaware of the misery and chaos all around you. Today you saw it. Today it appeared up close and suddenly it was real to you. But, that’s the only difference: distance. You’ve been living in a macro world, Matthew Hawk. Today it became micro, just for a moment.”

  I looked at Ethan, his face seemed to have gone from passive to a combination of manic and aggressive.

  “You’re insane,” I managed.

  He turned to me and said, “Not true. I just have a reasonable perspective. Come on, Matthew, don’t take this shit so seriously.”

  “I should call the police.”

  I expected a violent reaction or at least a threat but instead Ethan laughed: “Go for it, cowboy. Call the cops. Here.”

  He threw me his phone. I looked down at the phone and back at him. I punch
ed ‘999’ into the keypad and pushed the call button.

  The phone rang twice. “Emergency services. Which service please?”

  “Police.”

  “Thank you. Connecting. Police, how may I help you?”

  Ethan snatched the phone from my hands. “Hi. I’m calling from the Docklands. There’s a van outside Liverpool Street station that seems to have been there a while with no one inside. I’m concerned that it’s been abandoned.”

  While he was talking, Ethan grabbed hold of my jacket and dragged me back to the room with the corpse. I could no longer hear the other side of the conversation but Ethan said, “No, I’m not there any longer I had to go but it was there a few minutes ago.” He kicked open the door and pushed me inside. The room was completely empty; no chair, table or corpse.

  “OK,” he continued, “thank you.” He hung up.

  He threw the phone at me again. “I think I just saved you an embarrassing conversation. Try again if you like.”

  I stood and stared at the empty room, dumbstruck. My first thought was that it was a different room but I quickly dismissed the idea, as the rest of this side of the building was bare except the three rooms. Could my mind have been playing tricks on me? Was the whole incident just some elaborate joke? That didn’t make sense either.

  Ethan opened the door and indicated for me to go through. I led the way and he followed, overtaking my slow amble and striding towards the tall glass walls offering a view across Liverpool Street station and the rest of London.

  “We have a very efficient cleaning crew,” he said as he turned to me, a wry smile spreading slowly across his face.

  All I could manage was, “What happened?”

  He seemed delighted by my question. “What just happened, Mr Hawk, is that you’ve just been introduced to the consequences of your behaviour.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”