Devastation Road
Authors: Jason Hewitt
By Jason Hewitt
The Dynamite Room
Devastation Road
First published in Great Britain by Scribner,
an imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Jason Hewitt 2015
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
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TPB ISBN: 978-1-4711-2745-8
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To my brother
This only is denied to God
,
The power to make what has been done undone
.
Agathon
He woke to the insistent pip of a bird, its distant trill coming to him through a dream. He felt heavy, lying on his back, as if every organ within him had sunk to its lowest
position and now could not be lifted. One hand on his chest, head turned, not a position he usually slept in, and now he could feel an awkward crick pulling in his neck. He lay for a while, mind
groggy, the last remnants of sleep still swilling in his head. He was cold but the sun was warm on him. He listened but there was no sound of traffic or distant voices, just the stir of leaves and
the pip of the bird. He shifted and a pain shot through his head as something crinkled against his ear.
His eyes opened.
For a moment he was blind but for a sharp light that wouldn’t shift, even when he tried to blink it away, and then its brightness slowly receded as a watery sun burnt through. The sky was
blue and blurred above him with wisps of cloud hanging, duplicated. His fingers flexed and there it was again, the tickle and lick of grass.
He sat up. The pain pulled.
He was not in a bed. He was in a field.
He was in a field and sitting in the grass.
He looked around, unsure. Everything was smudged and ill-defined: the field tilting away from under him, the blurry line of trees on every side, and nothing between him and them but the shifting
grass and occasional blink of a daisy. The pain sharpened, and a wave of nausea washed through him so that he was forced to hold his head between his knees as a sour taste filled his throat.
Head still swimming, he stared down at his hands, scratched and stained with tidelines of dirt. A button was missing from the linen shirt he was wearing – not a shirt he recognized, but
nevertheless it hung open at his belly like a lopsided mouth.
He looked about again, carefully twisting right around this time, and thought that for some reason he was in one of the fields behind his parents’ house in Hampshire, but he couldn’t
understand why and nothing looked familiar anyway; there was just the hazy perimeter of trees and the sudden streak of a chaffinch that blurred into two and then one again. He rubbed his eyes. He
was still asleep. But the ground felt real and the bird was real, and so was the breeze and the ache in his head. When he brought his fingers to it he could feel a swelling against the back of his
scalp, and a pain biting beneath his ribs.
In a field in Hampshire, he told himself. He couldn’t think where else. He’d see his father in a minute come huffing through the hedge in his tweeds and brandishing one of his
walking sticks, Cedar bounding on ahead. There would be some explanation.
I should be at work, he thought. Mr Camm would be having kittens.
He struggled to his feet and squinted at the flaring sun. He wavered for a moment, unsure if he could move, then checked his pockets, looking for something – wallet, keys, papers –
but there was nothing but grit and some red cotton threads; and the jacket wasn’t his anyway. It was a blue-grey serge and tatty. Not at all like something he’d wear. No bag, he
thought. Nothing lying about. Nothing fallen from his pockets. He tried to focus on a pair of sparrows as they darted over the grass at the bottom of the slope and disappeared into the trees in a
furious bluster of wings. Then, unsure what else to do, he decided to follow after them. It seemed as good a direction as any.
As he took his first uncertain steps he could feel the ache in his head expanding, groping into every corner of his skull and fingering its way down the back of his neck. He felt bruised all
over, the waistband of the trousers rubbing at a soreness at his hip, and his bottom lip split and swollen and crusted with dirt. Another wave of nausea flooded through him, and when he stopped and
hunched over his knees, a sticky liquid seeped from his nostril and was salty in his mouth.
As he set off again, the grey flannel trousers flapped at his ankles and pinched around his crotch. These couldn’t be his trousers. Even the shirt was too tight, the sleeves not even
reaching his wrists; and the jacket, though it fitted, was ripped and scuffed at the shoulders.
He cautiously glanced back, hoping something might jog his memory, but there was only a trail of trodden-down grass. It wasn’t far to the edge of the field where a rock with a painted face
sat half buried among the undergrowth: white rings for eyes and a snout and teeth. It watched him, hunched like a stone golem. Beyond the trees he could hear the rippling of water, so he pushed his
way through the branches, the ground steady for the first few feet but then quickly tumbling away, until before he knew it he was crashing through a mesh of twigs and spasms of light, falling out
on to a narrow and stony riverbank.
The river was fast-flowing, with rocks protruding here and there. He stood for a moment taking it in: the weeds coasting through it like long lingering thoughts and the bank on the other side
rising up over him. He crouched at the edge and cupped water over his face, washing the blood and dirt from his hands and pressing his fingers over his eyes. He took a few deep breaths, feeling the
pain pull beneath his rib as he breathed. But when he looked again he was still there, the sun splashing down on him, the river’s slop and swill and leap of droplets spattering over the
stones. As he watched, strange bits of debris drifted past: branches with sprigs of leaves still attached; clothing – a grey cap, a shawl, a handkerchief; the sodden pages of a newspaper; a
single book; another branch; another shawl; a flimsy shoe. He would wake in a minute. Perhaps he
was
awake. If he saw someone he might call out and ask them where he was.
He lifted the side of his shirt and looked at where the pain was, but he could see no mark. He cupped his hands in the river again and drank, and for a time at least the water quelled the empty
ache of his stomach. The river drifted away.
He made his way upstream, picking his way over the narrow streamlets that threaded out from the trees and lost themselves in the flow. He tried to think of the names of
tributaries, as if in the finding of a name he might then find himself, but the only thing that came to him was the line of a hymn that looped in his head, something about redeemers and
pilgrims.
He stopped and listened. He scanned the trees. Nothing seemed real.
He rubbed at his eyes, trying again to clear his vision, but everything looked watery and barely there at all. The swill of the river slopped in his head; it was hard to keep his balance.
You’re being bloody ridiculous. You know where you are
, he thought.
You just need to think
.
As he walked on an empty crate floated into view, bobbing and turning in the water, a magpie strutting around its rim and peering in; and then the smeared shape of a handbag, a half-eaten apple,
and a pamphlet, and there, glinting in the shallows, a tin with its label washed off. He stepped gingerly in to retrieve it, and for several minutes he tried to smash it open on a rock, denting and
bashing it out of all shape, and then looked for something to pierce it with before, with frustration, he flung it back into the river. If he could have found a voice somewhere within him he would
have shouted out.
He barely noticed it at first, thinking it to be nothing more than an oddly shaped rock wedged up against others on the opposite bank. It was only as he drew parallel and his
vision cleared a little that he saw that what he had also assumed was a trapped branch pulling in the water was in fact an arm. A turned face, grey and bloated, was staring at him. His chest
tightened. He glanced around. He couldn’t see anyone to call out to. He stared closer, not sure what to do. He had never seen a dead body before, but there it was, still floating, the shirt
ballooned with air.
He carried on, walking faster, his heart banging. But barely minutes later he came across two more. They were tangled together on his side of the river this time, caught among the overhanging
foliage. One might have drowned, he thought, but surely not three.
He searched the trees, seeing nothing in his hazy vision but the blurring of leaves. Cautiously he edged nearer and saw that they were two men, both smartly dressed: one in shirt, trousers and
braces, another in a sodden jacket, his arm sprawled across the other as if they had been lovers. As he dared to lean closer, he saw that beneath the water the face of the first was smashed and
raw, while the other floated on his back, a line of ribs bursting through his shredded, bird-pecked shirt.