The Low Road (17 page)

T
hey left the railway yard and walked along a dirt road with the trudge of a retreating army. Lee imagined an occasional dull clank, soft creakings of leather. The ghostly, panting step of hundreds. Drizzle had insinuated itself again into the air. They hadn't spoken, but somehow agreed on a direction. Occasionally, Wild looked over his shoulder and Lee sensed his impatience at their sluggish progress.

Come on, Wild urged every so often. We need to keep going. We need to get away from here.

Lee clasped his jacket about him. Where are we? he murmured, and then again, louder. Where are we? Dark hair was plastered to his forehead. He licked his lips. The tart, metallic flavour of his bullet wound had leached throughout his body into his mouth. He opened and closed his mouth idiotically, trying to isolate taste. Cordite, blood and metal, the flavours of violence. He spat until his throat was raw, but was unable to rid himself of it. It was embedded in his very teeth and jaw. He imagined Josef like a blunt force somewhere behind them.

Don't worry, Wild was saying. I'll take care of you.

Wild hoisted Lee with each step and was shocked at how light and frail he was. How weighty blood must be. He fancied he heard Lee's bones knocking together like the loose, wooden armatures of a puppet, but it was just the noise of the morphine vials clocking around in the suitcase when it banged against his leg. It was clear Lee was dying. He had that smell about him. He wondered what he could do. He recognised occasional portions of the countryside around them from the times he had spent at Sherman's house: the soft rise of a hill; the stand of pine trees next to a broken fence. Encouraged, he tried to walk faster.

They continued. Mostly, Lee walked with his head down, concentrating on the ground before him, but every so often he looked around. It was an alien place, another country altogether. The road was muddy and uneven. Occasionally, their shoes sunk with sucking noises. Waterlogged potholes reflected the low, grey sky. Across the horizon to their right a mountain range slumped like a herd of sleeping animals.

Apart from their breathing and the sound of their shoes on the road, the silence was vast and unearthly. Lee wondered, for a minute, if some massive natural disaster had occurred, or the world had moved away in the night. Surely the combined hubbub of millions of people stirring cups of tea, watching television or murmuring in halls made more sound than this, no matter how distant? They passed clusters of small, leafless trees; birds the size of a child's fist shivered upon their frail branches. It was dreamish, he thought.
Dreamish
? Was that even a word? Like a dream. It was like a dream.

They moved as one single, lumbering creature. The air was wintry and turbid. The few trees had the tangled architecture of lungs. It was like moving through a sparse forest of bronchia, Wild thought. Some strange, internal world. Beside him, Lee murmured to himself, just halfformed words, like the beginnings of language. Or, possibly, its end. They tottered and rolled on the road. Wild was forced to grab him tighter to prevent them both from falling to the ground. He murmured noises of encouragement and sympathy.

Then, bubbling up through the silence, Lee heard a low sound. A rumbling, perhaps some impossibly huge machine, accompanied by a faint, almost indiscernible vibration through the earth. He thought at first that it must have been the sound of a train passing nearby, or an airport. He stopped. What's that?

What?

That noise. The taste of his breath was bitter, like that of another man. He remembered reading that the flavour of garlic would infuse his mouth if he rubbed cloves of it on the soles of his feet. Was this what had happened? Had the sense of the man from whom he'd taken these clothes somehow passed into him, or was it just the bullet?

Again he spat, and was dismayed to notice swirls of blood in his spittle. He wanted to cry out, but no sound came. He imagined Wild and himself from a great distance, two tiny figures on a road in flat, featureless countryside. There was no sign of other people. Where had they gone? He listened for a long minute. The world was shrinking, becoming something frightening, something intimate.

Lee was aware of Wild at his side and was concerned, momentarily, at the prospect of bloodying Wild's coat. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to end up like this. I'm sorry.

Wild's voice was close by his ear. Come on, son. We're nearly there. Come along, now. Not much further.

He wished he could curl up and sleep in that warm, dark voice. He tried to turn and face Wild, but only succeeded in unbalancing them both.

It's OK, Wild was saying. We're nearly there. This looks familiar to me. We're nearly home.

They walked on. The afternoon drew breath, preparing for evening. The sound Lee had heard seemed not to come any closer, nor to grow fainter. It emanated from no particular point, but rather existed in the air around. He expected to see something appear from the murky distance: a tractor, or a truck of some sort. Perhaps it was the train they had travelled on?

But there was nothing. There was nothing.

He was overcome by fatigue, along with something else, an even heavier sensation that surfaced from some hidden part of him; despair and its terrible twin, hope. He detached himself from Wild's grip and, clutching at his side, lay on the ground, stage by stage. Despite the rain, the ground was hard and brittle. Pebbles and rocks dug into his hip and the palm of his hand, the places that bore his weight. He held a hand in front of him, gloved with blood, dark in the wan light. His own blood, abandoning the wreck of this body, seeping into the earth.

The hem of his trousers was damp and frayed. A pulse fluttered beside his mouth. The effort of his breathing swayed his body as he propped by the roadside, a clumsy fucking insect attempting something indecipherable. He groaned, but it made no impression on the silence. Even his senses were fleeing his body, leaving him in darkness, mute and unfeeling. He was aware, but only dimly, of weeping. He scrabbled through his pockets, located his gun and tossed it away. It clattered on the gravel.

Then Wild heard something. A horse-drawn cart rattled up behind them. Amazed, he squinted at it. The elderly man driving the contraption offered them a ride and waited patiently while Wild helped Lee onto the wooden bench.

The man had milky eyes and every so often his beggarly frame was racked by a barrage of coughing that sounded like cardboard shredding. Consumption, he said matter-of-factly, wiping flecks of spittle from his chin and lower lip with the back of his hand. Kept me out of the war, at least.

Wild looked at him. Which war?

The old man shrugged. Some damn war.

The man expressed faint surprise when Wild asked if he knew Doctor Sherman's place, but nodded and said he would take them there. The man asked them nothing about themselves and appeared not to notice Lee's bloodied condition.

Wild slumped on the hard bench, Lee against his thick shoulder. The nag pulling the cart halted every so often to catch its breath, whereupon the driver would coo until it pulled again. The cart rollicked on the uneven road like a boat upon angular waters.

Memories roamed the corridors of Lee's body like unruly children, searching for ways to surface, knocking here and there, clamouring for attention. There was the dry smell of his mother's hands. There was the dark silence of a childhood home. There were alleyways and cars.

He strode into a living room and a woman raised her head from a book. Her expression was as clear and open as a cloudless sky, just a tug at her eyebrow betraying any uncertainty at seeing a stranger in her house. She was reading the collected works of William Shakespeare. It was four in the afternoon. Her name was Mary. It was inscribed in the front of the book when it fell open on the floor.
Dear Mary, Happy Birthday and best wishes. With love, David.

He played with the skin at Isobel's shoulder, squeezing it gently between thumb and forefinger. She watched him intently. There was the damp click of her eyelashes opening and closing. Her breath across his cheek. He loved that it was perfumed with her interior, with parts deep within her body. Unconsciously he had altered his breathing to inhale as she exhaled, to draw something of her into him. What's it made from?

What?

Skin. What is skin made from?

She continued to watch him. Her voice was plain and dry. It's just skin.

Skin is like no other thing?

Yes. Like no other thing.

Skin is just skin, then?

She shrugged. Just, you know, cells and whatever.

It seemed amazing, beyond possibility. Lee stayed with his head supported in the cupped palm of his left hand. Her body seemed to have a glow of its own. Even without any lights on, and with no illumination from outside, he could see the shine of her body, where her breasts collapsed to either side. The very rise and fall of her. Isobel wasn't even her real name, but he didn't really care.

She had a scar below her hipbone that peeked over the rim of her knickers. He showed her his own scar and explained that when he was a boy he was in a car accident in which his parents were killed. The girl didn't say anything and Lee wondered if she had heard him at all. He turned away, suddenly exhausted.

Wild adjusted his position on the cart's hard wooden bench. They passed through a small town or village, with low houses scattered about and a church on a hill. Creamy light spilled from the windows of houses. The valiant cry of a rooster. A pair of freckled children walking in the opposite direction stopped to watch them pass. They said nothing and offered no greeting or acknowledgement, even when he nodded and waved. One of them sucked thoughtfully on a length of grass.

Darkness and a swirl and blur. In the headlights the tree trunks look soft. A woman's short cry, like that of a bird. Squalling tyres and the crunch of metal. A boy on the back seat, in silence, now an orphan.

A girl of sixteen makes sandwiches for her little brother's lunch, careful not to destroy the bread with the force of her buttering. Her dark hair is worn in a ponytail and the tip of her tongue protrudes from compressed lips as she concentrates. Her brother watches from the kitchen doorway. They are both silent. Now they are always silent. After all, what can they say?

A phone rings in an empty apartment.

Two kids, one of them ten years old, the other a few years older, hold a spitting competition beneath a cathedral of trees in the backyard, sniffing and hawking at an empty paint tin.

They left the village and about a mile the other side turned through a high hedge onto a rutted driveway. Wild glimpsed segments of Sherman's weatherboard house through brief partings in the heavily overgrown garden. The crumbling staircase with stone urns on either side leading up to the front door. Looping tendrils of vine clung to the cast-iron latticework and embroidered the verandah. He grinned. They had actually made it. Water dripped from a rusted gutter and pooled on the gravel path. Although it had always been somewhat chaotic, the garden was more overgrown than he remembered.

The cart clattered to a halt in front of the house. The horse snorted and tossed its head. Wild helped Lee from the cart and shouldered him to a stone bench beneath a tangled arbor where he managed to prop him with his chin upon his chest, his upper body rolling as if trying to detach from the waist. Wild's hands and the front of his coat glistened with blood. He looked around, hoping to see someone, some assistant or nurse or something. Perhaps even old Sherman himself. Just someone to take over. He imagined a flutter of capable hands, the comforting sounds of busyness. Again his face broke into a grin. They'd made it. They'd made it.

The old man in the cart coughed wetly and leaned over the side of his cart to squeeze a pendulous glob of spit from his thin lips. Course, you know Sherman's gone.

Wild wheeled around. What? Where?

Gone. Dead six months. Look around at the garden and the house. Rack and bloody ruin, if you ask me. Nobody to look after the place.

The man clucked his tongue at his horse, turned and left. Dumbstruck, Wild stood and watched until the sound of the cart shrank and was finally absorbed by the silence. Sherman dead? The suitcase filled with drugs and money was at his feet. Lee groaned and spluttered. Wild was suddenly filled with hatred for him, and watched as he fell sideways onto the bench. This little bloody crim. This dying punk. What was he going to do
now
? Should just let him die. He gnawed at his thumb and spat out a hard sliver of nail. His eyes roamed in their sockets, searching for something on which to alight. Parked here and there in the garden were ancient cars huddling beneath green canvas tarpaulins. Three that he could see. A rusted wheel in long grass. An entire engine, like the greasy ribcage of an alien creature. Clouds of insects buzzed through the air. Rack and bloody ruin.

But still that sound. The low hum. The sound of the world turning in space; a terrible, dumb machine. Revolving.

A billion years from anywhere.

But there were other things, too. Lee remembered other things.

17