The Low Road (12 page)

He swings around and sits on the side of his bed. He lights a cigarette, which burns unsteadily, damp from his sweaty fingers. Someone sings in the tier below.
Oh, my daaaaarling Clementine
.

Then Simon speaks from his bunk above, as if he's read Lee's thoughts: Today's Thursday.

Part Two

12

L
ee woke in the semi-darkness of late afternoon and instinctively searched it for intimations of light. His tongue lay in his mouth, heavily, as if just placed there. If not for the absence of noise, he might have assumed he was in prison still. Even the machinery of his own body, with its myriad grumbles and burrs, was silent.

After some time the world came back to him, apportioned sense by sense: a shaft of pale light; the electrical hum of powerlines directly outside; the smell of a cold afternoon; the dull weight of pain across his body. He remembered he was in a motel somewhere, but this didn't make him feel any better. After all, he was in a motel somewhere earlier today. Or was that yesterday?

Gasping with pain, he wrenched himself into a sitting position. The suitcase was beside him on the bed. He opened it and checked the contents. The money, his money, all there. He closed the warped lid, patted it and lurched into the bathroom. The fluorescent light hummed. After pissing, he stared at his reflection in the cracked mirror on the wall, leaning on the basin's cold rim for support. He splashed water into his eyes. He prodded his cheeks, ran a palm over his features, heard the soft crackle of his boyish whiskers. The man in the mirror did the same, a visual echo. Again he ran a palm over his face. The small sound of skin upon skin is like no other, has no equivalent in nature or art. His reflected selves regarded each other with interest and envy. Men fear other men in a way women never could, because they alone know what they are capable of.

Lee looked old, as if time had crept up on him while he slept and committed secret acts. He was unshaven and his eyes were red and rimmed with moisture. Water dripped from his chin. A sudden, unwelcome thought: he was looking at the face that, for one man, had been the final human landscape he ever saw. What would it be like to carry an image of that face—his face—across that particular distance?

He became aware of a dim, human burbling and held his breath to listen. Low, furry voices from the neighbouring room. A man and woman, perhaps. A gasp of laughter, a woman's throaty laugh. He thought of that expression—what was it?—that his mother used to say:
Laughed like a drain.
The woman laughed like a drain. He pressed his ear closer to the wall.

He listened some more and, by his twilight divination, conjured an image of her: the brown and curling hair, always with a rebel strand dangling across one eye; thin lips; the dark cream of her throat; the habit of putting a hand to her mouth when she laughed, usually at one of her own jokes. The elements that constitute a person, the trail of a thousand crumbs. The way she sat on the couch with bare legs folded beneath and her cheek resting on the cushion of her upper arm, how she rubbed at an eyebrow when she was thinking.
Hey, Tom. Grab me a drink will you, honey?

Unconsciously, Lee leaned in as if aboard a listing vessel, until the soft shell of his ear was flush with the wall. Although he was unable to make out actual words, some primal human seismograph enabled him to discern the rhythm of narrative through intonation alone. He closed his eyes. The man was telling a story, perhaps recounting the time he fell asleep on a park bench on New Year's Day, or else mimicking his mother-in-law. The woman's laughter grew louder, unravelled from her red mouth, and Lee found himself, as the story corkscrewed to its conclusion, smiling along with her, inhaling the intimacies of strangers. He imagined the tangle of their limbs in bed, probably only a few feet away, on the other side of this flimsy wall. Strange that people could be so close and yet utterly unaware of him. He could tap on the wall, or cry out. A small act was all that was required, a small, dense and difficult act. A flexing of muscles, an explosion of air from his mouth. A signal from one human being to another.

After a while the next-door conversation petered out and silence took hold once more. Lee was unsure how long he stayed with his ear to the wall, but soon enough the pain across his torso reminded him of himself. His body demanded attention.

It was only when he returned to the bedroom that he realised Wild was gone. The other bed had been slept on, but otherwise there was no trace of him. Bastard. The bastard's run off. And there was no sign of that bag he carried, his doctor's bag or whatever it was. Lee checked the suitcase of money again. It was all there. He still had the money. That was the main thing. With money, he could at least get to Claire's and she would help him.

He opened the door as far as he dared to peer outside. Wild's car was still where he'd parked it. He couldn't have gone far. Probably gone to get food. Hopefully just gone to get food. He looked again around the room. The car keys were on the dressing table but they were no good to him. Meanwhile, he needed to do something about his wound. The dressing Wild had applied earlier was sodden with blood and needed to be changed. He would just have to take care of it himself.

Slumping on the end of the bed, he removed his blood-heavy t-shirt and lay back to access the dressing, which tore away with a marshy sound. A dark and medieval pain muscled through him. His hands shuddered, his body shuddered and he held his breath and ground his teeth and eventually the shaking subsided, but not before it had run its course. He exhaled.

Lee switched on the old-fashioned box radio beside the bed. An announcer told of a distant war, an election, the sale of a painting, news familiar to any moment in history, a bulletin that could even be from some version of the future. The news segued into a ragtime tune. He listened to its nasal trombone and jittery rhythm, the soundtrack to a nervous breakdown.

The bullet hole itself was small, but very black, as if an opening to a much larger world. The bruising had faded but had been replaced by a soft, pink stain. The area immediately surrounding the entry wound was swollen and the skin had a tight, shiny quality, like a fleshy drum. He seemed to have stopped bleeding for now, although the stain of dried blood extended below the waist of his jeans. Blood even in his navel. Lee prodded the area with a grimace. It was tender and hot to the touch. He groaned and swore. Fuck. Where the hell was Wild?

He wanted this bullet, this vestige of his former life, gone. He swivelled his torso slowly back and forth to try to locate it within him. In prison he had seen a man sew up another man's partially severed throat with a guitar string.
Shut up, you cunt. Shut up.
He wondered if he could squeeze it from himself like a hard, black pimple. Just press his thumbs together really tight. When talking about splinters or insect stings, his dad used to say
It will work itself out
, as if the body could force out such a thing, like villagers rounding on an invader. He doubted the same was true for a bullet, although you heard of old soldiers carrying portions of shrapnel around in their bodies for years because it was safer than an operation. He didn't want that. He certainly didn't want that. He wanted this piece of fucking metal gone.

Lacking anything more suitable, he moistened shards of toilet paper and attempted to clean some of the skin surrounding the actual wound. Again that foghorn of pain sounded through him. Blinking back tears, he dabbed at himself, taking his time between each foray to catch his breath. He cleaned blood from the wiry hair on his stomach and stuck a wad of paper to the wound as best he could. It was better than nothing. Where in hell was Wild?

He stayed on the edge of the bed for several minutes, catching his breath before riffling through the bag he'd taken from the crash for fresh clothes. Awkwardly, unable to raise his left arm much higher than his sternum, he changed into a white shirt and dark-blue suit, leaving his own bloodied clothes in a pile on the floor. It took some time. He noted with dismay that his underpants were soaked with blood. His blood was everywhere. There was even a patch of it on his thigh, God knows how, in the shape of a country, a dark-red country.

The suit smelled of mothballs, of special occasions laid to rest. It possessed another smell—indefinable—of another man, but was a comfortable fit. As a boy he had often worn hand-me-downs donated from around the town and had enjoyed the illusion of slipping, if only for a moment, into someone else's self, like a disguise. Then, as now, it was a visceral relief, almost a holiday.

He shrugged within his new suit and looked at his bare toes wriggling on the mustard-coloured carpet. A new man, he thought. A new man. Ready to go. Dressed for a wedding. He stood for a moment in the room, slightly bent at the waist as if preparing to fold in half, before crossing to the window and looking out into the street. The day had slunk away. It was almost dark. A streetlight fluttered to life. An elderly man locked the newsagency opposite, tested the door with a tug and walked away with his hands thrust into his pockets. His fading footfalls were audible as he strolled past the darkened chemist and closed-for-thenight fish-and-chip shop. The radio played some sort of dirge, complete with wailing bagpipes.

A car cruised past, then returned. Shit. A police car. It slowed and parked opposite the motel. Two dark shapes conferred inside the car and, after a couple of minutes, two cops stepped from it. They swaggered across the road towards the motel, looking around, their hands hovering about their holsters. Lee squatted down and lowered the blind until he had the barest space to see through. The cops stopped at Wild's beatenup old car. One of them checked the licence number against a notebook, then peered into the car with his hands cupped around his eyes. Lee licked his lips and crouched down further. The cops spoke again and nodded. One of them indicated the motel with a jab of his young chin. He swore and shrugged away from the window. The radio tune faded out, followed by the announcer's toffy voice.
Ah, what a marvellous tune. That was—let me see if I can find the record here—ah
, Loch Lomond
.

Lee scrabbled in the stolen bag, located a pair of shoes and pulled them on. He grabbed the suitcase and stepped into the cold air. He didn't know where Wild was but he had a fair idea.

13

W
ild breathed heavily. Pebbles of sweat leaked from his armpits. His body had become foreign and unlikable, at odds with itself, the skin swarming with life of its own. He scratched his neck and face, then raised and lowered the sleeve of his coat, which had become heavy and abrasive. His teeth brawled in his mouth and a clump of pale hair stood out from the side of his head. His body was fraying at the edges.

He crossed the road and sneaked to the rear of the row of shops lining the main street. The afternoon was drawing to a close; it was already nearly dark. His body was absorbed into the shadows. The lone page of a newspaper crabbed across the asphalt and flattened itself against a redbrick wall. An empty beer bottle rolled to and fro, as if fraught with indecision. He paused to listen.

He had woken in the motel room and realised with panic that his bag was missing. The bag contained many things: instruments, personal papers, a packet of biscuits. But these were just things. With the sensation of a wave breaking through him, he had realised that the bag also contained his morphine and his other backup drugs. He had rummaged frantically through the room, even, idiotically, through the drawers of the bedside table. Nothing useful, just a Bible. Meanwhile, curled slightly on his narrow bed, Lee had slept on. People and their sleep. Wild had watched him enviously for a moment before lurching out to the car to make sure it wasn't in the boot, or back seat. Damn. He must have left it by the road at the crash. Lee had been right; they should never have stopped. Damn, damn, damn. Standing in the car park, Wild had hefted the small crowbar he kept in the boot for such moments. He had hoped he wouldn't ever have to do this again.