Looking for Mrs Dextrose (22 page)

And again. Nothing.

Not a dicky bird.

Fuck. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?”

“Not sure,” he said quietly.

Frantically, I pulled at the wires behind the ignition. Bare ends. Unconnected.

BANG! A ripping sound above my head.

In the doorway of the office, Hilda sat pointing a shotgun towards us; Eustace was standing behind her, a hand on her shoulder. Above us, the corrugated awning was now peppered with holes.

“Come on, boys, come inside,” she called out.

“We do get lonely,” said Eustace.

“We do,” she echoed.

“Dad, we’ve got to run,” I told Dextrose.

I had entered a strange state of calm that took me by surprise. The adrenalin still flowed yet the panic had subsided and it felt as though someone else, someone in control, had taken charge of
my actions. An out-of-body experience.

BANG! The shot cut in half one of the struts holding up the awning, which began to tilt precariously as the others felt their age.

“Shit!” I heard Hilda curse.

As I helped Dextrose out of the sidecar, I saw she had uncocked the shotgun and was fumbling with two fresh cartridges.

I took his hand in mine. “Come on, Dad, we’ve got to go.” As we left the shelter of the awning the rain spattered our faces. I noticed some of Importos’ blood, tiny drops
on my arm, watched it become diluted and roll off into the sand.

But Dextrose could not run. He could not even jog. Though I tugged at him, urging him on, it was like dragging a mattress through a hole half its size. “Come
on
!
Please!
” I urged.

Twice he fell over and I had to haul him to his feet, newly drenched and soiled, before we made the tarmac of the Nameless Highway. Behind me, over Dad’s shoulder, I saw Hilda had started
towards us, one hand on her steering knob, the other holding the gun; she was straining her head forward, as if that might encourage the wheelchair to go faster. It didn’t.

Neither though was I able to motivate Dextrose into anything above a tortuous pace, and when we were 50 yards up the road I saw Hilda reach the road behind us, in tepid pursuit.

Suddenly I was back in my own body, all out of ideas and bravado. We could not continue like this for much longer, and she was battery-powered. A hopeless shot, she might have been, but she
would soon begin to gain on us and we would be done for.

Then Dextrose stopped and would not move. He was bent over, gasping like an asthmatic jackass. “What… the… mink… is… going… on?” he went, between
wheezes.

“The old woman killed Importos and now she wants to kill us!”

His brow crumpled. “Importos?”

There was no time to explain. “Look!” I said, pointing back down the Nameless Highway.

Hilda had stopped, too, not 20 yards from us. She levelled the shotgun at us. “Ready boys?” she called out.

“GET DOWN!” I yelled, screwing my eyes shut and throwing myself to the ground.

BANG!

BANG!

“Damn you!” Hilda’s voice.

BANG!

“Mink you!” (No guesses.)

BANG!

(Hang on. How many shots in a shotgun?)

BANG!

I dared to open one eye and glance up. Dextrose had his revolver out, cursing under his breath; Hilda was reloading. Everyone was still alive.

BANG! Dextrose fired again, but his hand was shaking and his entire body gyrated unsteadily on its feet.

Back down the road I saw Hilda cock the shotgun. She held it out and looked vaguely down the barrel, more myopic than markswoman. Dextrose began shuffling towards her, pistol raised.

Burying my face in the road, I covered my head with my hands and let the smell of the wet tarmac return me to England.

BANG!

Then:

I sensed something flying over me.

After that, debris started raining down, clattering about the road around me. I did not dare open my eyes, waiting for something painful to hit me, knock me senseless or shatter a bone. Nothing
did. For those few seconds, someone was looking after me, and he did not wear a tweed overcoat in the sunshine and he did not stink of booze.

When the unnatural shower had ceased and only the rain remained, I opened my eyes, removed my hands from my head and rose to my feet.

Devastation.

Lonely Bush Gas Station had simply vanished, replaced by the sort of crater a modest meteorite might have made. My father lay further up the Nameless Highway, blown there by
the explosion. My concerns for him were allayed when he struggled to his feet and began wandering around looking perplexed, which was normal.

For her part, Hilda, the aged murderess, had been deposited some distance onto the sandy scrubland opposite her former residence, and lay bundled and unmoving nearby her upended wheelchair. I
remembered Importos’ dying expression; her demise did not trouble me.

We had lost everything bar that which we carried on us. The bike was gone, Importos was gone, my luggage was gone… But we had survived, Dad and I.

It was all too much. The shock, the fear, the dicing with death, they all collided inside my stomach. I bent double and was sick among the slew of rubble that littered the scene.

When I had finished, by chance the cursed rain stopped too.

“Mink me! Eh?” went Dextrose as I approached him. He was sitting in the middle of the road supping from a bottle of beer. Where he had found it, I had no idea.

He held the bottle out to me. It was the first time I had ever seen him share his booze. I took it, tipped my head back and gulped down the warm, frothy brew, savouring the liquid and the
numbness it promised.

“Alright! Stop! Mink me! That’s enough!” he gasped, motioning urgently for its return. He snatched the beer back, drained it and lobbed the bottle away.

I sat down next to him.

“Thanks,” I mumbled.

“What for?”

“For saving us.”

He was barely recognisable. A deep graze obscured his left cheek, seeping blood among the sand and grit, and his hair was matted with blood, no doubt the result of his crash-landing. The other
side of his face was no worse than before, which was still shocking. His tracksuit bottoms were ripped at both knees, fantastically stained, and his overcoat was losing a sleeve.

“I’d forgotten you had a gun,” I said.

“Us too,” he replied.

“So how…”

“Went into me pocket to find that beer. Found that instead. Decided us might as well take a pot at the old cobweb on wheels. Couldn’t take no chances – another day or two
an’ she’d have been in danger of hitting one of us!” He chuckled throatily to himself.

It was too early for me to find any of it funny. “Why are you laughing?”

“Well, I’m no marksman meself. Must have missed her and hit the petrol pump. What a minking bang! Eh?”

I shook my head.

“Ah come on, lad!” persisted Dad. “Harrison Dextrose has been through worse than this!”

It didn’t seem possible. “But you’ve just wiped off the map…” – quick mental arithmetic – “16 per cent of the landmarks on the Nameless Highway.
Lonely Bush
no longer exists
.”

He shrugged. “You heard the old mink. They’ll plant another one.”

“You’re forgetting that the ‘old mink’ is dead.”

He nodded thoughtfully and we sat there in silence for a while.

I was stunned at how he had come to the rescue, having seemed so screwed up and lost within himself. Granted, his primary concern was doubtless his own safety, and his rescue had been all luck
and no judgment… Yet, thinking about it, that’s how he had come across in
The Lost Incompetent
. Good fortune fell into his lap, whatever the levels of his womanising and
debauchery, and his complete disregard for the conventions of preparation and planning. He sort of explored by default.

What drove him? Surely not purely the chance of fame and/or notoriety? Or even the whoring? I simply couldn’t work him out.

Harrison Dextrose was such a mass of contradictions. And I couldn’t help feeling some admiration for him seeping back.

“Why are you helping me?” I asked.

“Is I?”

That’s what I’d thought: my own safety was a mere byproduct of his. Or was that the old braggadocio? The bluster he concocted to obscure his sensitive side? Because he did have one,
I felt fairly certain.

“Alright,” I said. Let’s see how deep he went. “What have you been thinking. While we were quiet just then?”

He shot me a queer look. “What’s this? Lady-talk?”

I said nothing.

“Oh alright,” he conceded. “I’ve been thinking I wish I’d saved two minking bottles, not one!” And he laughed.

This time I joined in. Our eyes met, his far from sparkling, but I dared not lean in for the family hug, not with one so determinedly macho.

The gaiety petered out and we fell silent.

I reached out for a nearby shard of metal. It was turquoise on one side, unpainted on the other; I suspected it had come from that old petrol pump. I began passing it between my hands.
“So, what are we going to do?”

“Well,” he said, exhaling. “We’re minked!”

“Do we just sit here?”

He shook his head, shrugged.

“That heat’s gone, at least,” I said. I looked at my watch. “Nearly five o’clock. We could always walk a bit?”

“Where to?” There was nothing to be seen in either direction, just that never-ending road, straight as a stiff one. “How far to Mlwlw?”

Ah. That old chestnut. And we’d been getting along so well. Should I come clean? He was in no state to throttle me, after all.

“Actually we weren’t heading to Mlwlw.”

His neck stiffened.

I continued: “We were heading to Pretanike, to find your wife. Mrs Dextrose.”

No response.

“My mother.”

He placed a palm on the road surface and pushed out a creaking leg. He put the other palm down and heaved himself onto all fours. Gradually, groaning, he pulled his torso upright and stood up.
He dusted off his hands.

“Yer coming, then?” he said.

And we started trudging, away from the setting sun, off towards Pretanike.

It had soon become clear that he could not trudge and talk at the same time. The former took too much effort. But I was happy: any progress was progress, and it took us further
away from the nightmare of Lonely Bush.

Without control, I replayed Importos’ death over and over again in my head. So brutal and swift. That sweet-seeming old lady and her hard-of-hearing husband. Tea, cake and homicide.

I kept wondering whether there was anything I could have done, and was relieved to conclude each time, no matter how I twisted it, that there was not. He had been opposite me, across the table,
and it had all happened so quickly.

Detritos gone, and now his brother, each time with the same star witness: myself. What would their parents think? I trusted I would never find out.

Imagine their heartbreak. Both sons, outlived. No parent should have to experience that.

Importos’ distraught visage came back to me and I dry-heaved.

The fact that his passing also alleviated my retribution concerns kept surfacing and I had to repeatedly batter it back down, fearing for my own morality. How could my mind even countenance such
dirt? Yet, like a guilty past, it would not go away.

I was feeling exhausted and couldn’t begin to imagine how Dextrose must have felt. That pensioner with his habits. He wheezed and muttered, shuffling along, like the one
at the back of a chain gang.

At one point he tripped and fell. I was a little way ahead at the time – my subtle way of compelling him onwards – and I heard the stumble and turned around. He was lying on his gut,
limbs splayed out, as if he’d been run over in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. As I approached him, he rolled onto his back and lay there staring at the sky. He grinned at me ruefully.

“Want a hand?” I asked.

He lifted his right arm; I grabbed him. And something strange happened.

Something… almost magical.

His hand was soft, far softer than I might have expected for one so coarse by nature, and it felt so much larger than mine, though in reality it was not. It was the first time I had held him,
touched his skin, and I became lost in imaginings.

I saw myself as a young boy; the colours were washed out and the movement flickered, with odd flares of white light, as if I were viewing the scenes on an old cine projector. I was wearing
shorts and a T-shirt, bare feet on a lawn, very blond-haired, skipping around a paddling pool.

The scene switched. Dressed as a cowboy now: plastic chaps, felt hat, waistcoat, sheriff’s star and a silver pistol, hiding behind a tree and emerging to fire at an unseen assailant.

Another switch: a swimming gala, myself in too-tight trunks, lined up against competitors, ready to dive off the edge of the pool.

Again: birthday party, wearing a paper hat, eleven lit candles on a cake, preparing to blow. I stare into the camera eye, a child smiling, expression frozen in time.

Then I realised there had been adults in each montage, lingering on the periphery. A man and a woman, not Father and Mother.