The Low Road (24 page)

T
he following morning, or the day after, or perhaps it was a different day altogether, Lee wandered into the lounge room expecting to find Wild still asleep but there was no sign of him apart from the crumpled dent in the couch where he'd slept. Logs smouldered in the fireplace and grey sunlight spilled through the windows and coated the furniture like ash.

The dining table had not been cleared of the debris from the operation. Scattered over its surface were scraps of bandages, empty glass ampoules, a strangely hooked needle and a tray of scalpels and long-beaked implements patterned with thumbprints of blood. On the floor a circle of blood, its wrinkled skin like that of cold gravy.

The lamp Wild had slung from the chandelier had leaked a small puddle of kerosene onto the table where Lee had lain. The stain of oil was a continent upon the polished surface, the smell of it layered and dark. Lee shuddered as he recalled the table's wooden surface pressed against his shoulder blades, Wild's whiskery voice circling like a crow far above him and the sensation of fingers digging beneath the layers of his skin.

In a kidney dish were bloodied wads of cotton and the bullet shard Wild had removed from him. The scrap of metal rattled around the dish when Lee shook it. He tipped the bullet into the centre of his palm and held it to his face, but it revealed nothing. Just a bloody blob, the size and shape of a rotten, snaggly tooth.

He heard footsteps and turned to see Wild standing on the far side of the room with a metal bucket in one hand and a length of chain in the other.

Lee dropped the bullet into his jacket pocket. What are you doing with those?

Wild's entire body tilted and his eyes were barely open. He resembled an abandoned building, flickeringly lit, perhaps someone moving around inside. Even from across the room, Lee could see the polish of sweat upon his forehead. Obviously, he'd been awake shooting morphine all night. He was crazy with it.

Is the offer still open?

What offer?

Again the thick silence. To come with you. To your sister's. I can't stay here by myself. I just can't.

Lee looped a length of chain several times around the metal frame of the bed and then around Wild's wrists, securing each end with a padlock. The loop wasn't large enough to slip over Wild's large hands but would have some play along the length of his forearm. He was unsure of this whole idea, but Wild seemed certain it was the only way.

Chain me up, he'd said. Chain me up.

At the moment, though, he seemed uninterested in what was happening until he looked up and said: God, I'm frightened.

Lee paused. Secretly, he hoped Wild would reconsider. Of what?

Wild lifted a handful of chain. It made a medieval clank. I'm afraid of everything. Of what might happen to me.

Lee looked at him but was silent.

The trouble is, Wild went on in his slurry voice, it never seems easier to give up drugs than when you're stoned out of your mind. Like now.
Anything
seems possible then. That's why you've got to strike while the iron's hot, so to speak. You sure you don't mind me coming with you?

Lee hesitated. No. It will be fine. They have a big house. Bigger than this one, even. Besides, we should stick together after all this.

And your sister won't mind? I am sort of, you know, on the run after all. I'm not exactly—

Don't worry about that. I'll sort that out with her. It's my house, too. Our parents left it to both of us.

I need a break, that's all. I need a fresh start so I can face everything.

Wild scratched his neck and Lee saw the marks of many other such scratchings.

I destroyed the rest of my dope, Wild said. Cracked the little bastards open and poured them down the drain. Nearly broke my heart. Cut my hands. Sometimes those ampoules are buggers to snap off. I should have quite a few hours though, before it all begins. Gorged myself. Probably won't feel the pinch until this evening or so. And he displayed the backs of his hands and the crooks of his arms smeared with bruising and blood from recent hits before he sagged and appeared to fall asleep, only to jerk upright again a moment later. What happened to your friend?

What friend?

The one in jail. The one you tied to the bed? Lee? Your friend.

Lee shook his head to give the impression that either he didn't know or it was so inconsequential it wasn't even worth discussing. He crouched down and laid wood in the fireplace, assembling it in a teepee shape like his father had taught him. You'll be OK. It's just a few days. Then we'll get out of here.

Was he OK? Your friend? Was he alright afterwards? After you helped him detox?

Lee stood and jammed a cigarette into his mouth. His fingers carried the smell of oil and rust from handling the chain. Wild was looking up at him expectantly, nodding as if trying to generate a positive answer by enthusiasm alone. When he was a boy, Lee had been taken to a circus that had been set up in a local park. There was a crowd of lights, an elephant and the damp smell of hay. He had been inexplicably depressed at the sight of a bear galloping around the ring with a fez jammed upon its great brown head. The bear had appalled him and he focused on the other happenings around the ring—the trapeze artists and clowns—unwilling to look at the bear in the same way he was now reluctant to look at Wild.

He lit his cigarette and stooped to toss the still-burning match into the fireplace. The paper caught fire immediately and soon the kindling began to burn. He watched the flames curling and stretching. He nodded. Yeah. He was fine afterwards.

What was his name?

It doesn't matter what his name was, does it?

Curious, that's all.

Well, I can't remember.

I thought he was your friend?

He wasn't really a friend, I hardly knew the guy.

You said he was.

I just shared a cell with him.

What was his name?

Fuck. Simon, OK? Simon was his name.

Wild appeared satisfied with this scrap of information.

Lee smoked and the cigarette fizzled in the air. Outside it was raining again. He was fine. He was fine afterwards.

Wild nodded and stared into the fireplace where the fire had grown.

Lee doubted he had even heard what he said.

Lee retreated to the lounge room, which, with the fire blazing, was at least warm. He lay on the couch and stared at the ceiling or flicked through old copies of
National Geographic
. He was disturbed by the thought of Wild shackled to the bed and occasionally heard a low groan or sneeze, even snatches of conversations.

He wandered through the hallways and rooms of the house, ran his hands over the red wallpaper decorated with pale flowers. The entire place was damp, as if underground, an impression compounded by the murky light. Not only was the arrangement of the rooms idiosyncratic, but the items within them as well. Atop a cabinet in the ancient laundry was a glass jar containing the curled, restful shape of a baby possum in fluid with its tiny paws folded beneath its chin; romance novels were scattered over the examination room's vinyl couch; in one of the two bathrooms half-a-dozen plastic dolls sat in a puddle on the tiled floor, their smiles fixed as if hoping to avert some dreadful fate; a small, potted forest of withered ferns in the rear sunroom.

He passed through a dingy anteroom beside the kitchen and reeled at the sudden appearance of a shambling figure beside him. He swore, spun awkwardly and stood, face-to-face, with a man of his own height and age bent slightly at the waist. The stranger's eyes widened and he stepped back. He held a hand to his ribs and stared but even as Lee realised it was merely his own image reflected from a mirror, he was disbelieving. He laughed nervously. Himself. Of course.

The mirror was enormous, set within a thick, gold frame. It reached from floor to ceiling, like something you'd see in Europe. Lee considered himself and tried to stand straighter, but was restricted by the pain at his side. His borrowed and stolen clothes hung from his skinny frame and were stained with blood and dried mud. He looked a complete wreck.

Of course he'd inspected himself in mirrors before. He was aware of a small mole on his right cheek, that his left shoulder sloped slightly and that a hairline crack bisected a front tooth. He looked around. Shyly, in the quiet afternoon of a cold and derelict house, Lee allowed his hands to fall and rest at his sides. He stepped forward and brought his face so close that it frosted the glass when he breathed. So this was what people saw. He tried to imagine meeting this person for the first time. What would he think? A young man with a dark dusting of beard across his face and black, choppy hair perhaps more accustomed to being worn short. Dried and peeling lips. Dark eyes. And despite his leanness, the unmistakable doughy quality of youth.
He's just a kid
, Marcel had hissed when Josef brought him in.
No use to us. Just a fucking kid.
Was it possible not to be disappointed at such a sight? He swallowed and his Adam's apple lurched in his throat.

Did his father look like this at the same age? His grandfather? People used to say that he had his grandfather's chin, but he never knew what that meant and anyone who might have known was now dead. He tried to recall photos of him, but nothing definite came to mind. Perhaps a man wearing overalls and a white hat leaning against a weatherboard house, a shy bride and groom on some church steps, snapped in black-and-white with their eyes closing at the moment a handful of confetti rained over them.

Lee's father, Tom, worked in a printing workshop when he met Jean, the woman who would later be his wife and Lee's mother; there was a story of Lee's suspicious grandmother grabbing Tom's finger and comparing it with an inky print found on her daughter's skirt. Later, when the old woman was long dead, his father would mimic his mother-in-law, would dance around the kitchen squawking and hunching witchily: Is that Tom's thumb? Lee never knew her, couldn't even remember her name anymore. Already she had been consigned to history.

It seemed an act of forgiveness to imagine your ancestors at your own age, to think of them as painfully human as Lee felt right now. Could any of them ever have foreseen this moment, guessed that someday he, Lee, would stand before a mirror in a strange house and think of them, miss them, wish none that had happened had happened? He flinched inwardly. His father seemed too practical to have regrets, but what of his mother, frozen forever in his memory with arms crossed in front of her, a smile trembling at the side of her mouth?

When he was six or seven, Lee had been obsessed with the notion of becoming a sailor, of going to sea. His father had indulged him by buying several books with colourful drawings of ships pounding through waves as large as buildings and being menaced by a square-headed sperm whale. He dreamed of the Amazon River and the Suez Canal, and talked of clambering up masts to look for land. He would wear something stripy and have some sort of hat. There would be scaly monsters. They had visited an aquarium and seen roaming sharks, jellyfish and plankton floating in tanks like pollen.

What happened to all that? The thought of his childhood was so remote that Lee wondered if, in fact, he was trying to imagine a version of the future rather than recall a past. He inhaled and tried to stand taller but again was compelled to slouch. He placed a palm on the mirror, as if peering into some other place, and then his forehead on the glass. It was cold and smooth, entirely without smell.

24

W
ild knew there were bombers flying somewhere over hairy, jungled continents and releasing their payloads into the sky. Could hear their low drone. Animals with fangs made of bamboo and steel, their snouts smeared with matter and blood. Machines that crunched chicken carcasses to pulp. Cancer with teeth and hair in an elderly man's lower back, crouching like a snickering homunculus.

The world was full of terrible things. It was armed, it curled and massed against him, like an enormous wave preparing to break. He could feel these things upon his skin, smell them through his teeth, almost taste them directly through his hands and feet. Indeed, he felt as though his skin were attempting to shuck itself free of him altogether. To be rid of this impossible body. He couldn't blame it. It's a terrible thing to be in horror of one's very self, to be aware of one's own stench.

How did that Psalm go?
I am a worm, and no man. A reproach of men, and despised by the people.
Something like that.

He scratched at himself, from arm to toe to thigh to ribs, seeking spot fires of discomfort and irritation that swarmed across his goosebumped skin. His bones were of ice, his eyeballs lumps of salt, his teeth like gravestones sunk into his gums. An itch in the back of his throat, the exact place impossible to locate: he would need to drill through at a point somewhere beneath his right ear to reach it. And then another, deep in the knuckles of his right hand. His nose and eyes streamed. Some dull explosion was taking place within but it would take a lifetime—incremental, interminable, an eternity—to be finished with him.