Under the Blue

by Oana Aristide

  When they complain about how tricky it is to change gears, or to start the engine on a slope, he lists all the driving skills they never need to bother with, the fact that they really only need to know how to start, change gears and brake. He imparts knowledge scrupulously and reluctantly, feeling miserably virtuous, like some ancient martyr pinned in torture to the passenger’s seat.

  ‘Us and the 9/11 terrorists,’ Ash mutters. ‘They never bothered to learn half the things.’

  Jessie, he should have guessed, being much more physical than Ash, gets the hang of it straight away, and after a few missteps, which make him feel sorry for the poor car, she feels like a reliable, confident driver. Ash has a strange, otherworldly style of driving: at every turn it seems as though she has forgotten she needs to move the wheel, and he worries they will crash, but then miraculously at the last moment she makes the requisite movement, still not in a hurry, but airily, distractedly, and they avoid the tree or the ditch. He can’t figure out whether it’s a shortcoming or a supreme skill, reducing driving to the smallest possible number of manoeuvres.

  They go up and down the same strip of road – it’s better, he tells them, that they know what’s ahead. When they’re done, he ignores Jessie’s protestations, and follows a sign and a side-alley to a waterside restaurant. In the boot they have some dried, thin sausages that he took from a cellar a few days ago, a shirtful of apricots, and six bottles of someone’s homemade wine. The sausages and fruit won’t last for ever; they may as well have a picnic now.

  ‘Picnic?’ Jessie repeats, as though he’d said ‘interstellar travel’.

  ‘Picnic. And a drink.’

  The restaurant is a glassy building perched on stilts by the side of a river. He parks the Lioness on the bank, right by the water’s edge. There are trees and shade there, and a pleasant view of rolling hills.

  Two of the wine bottles he puts in the river to cool, then he goes inside the restaurant looking for the bar. But the place has been raided. All that’s left is some Curacao, poison blue, and a couple of other hard spirits. He finds some fruity-smelling syrups as well. It will have to do.

  The girls relent, follow him in, and he plonks two tall drinks in front of them, even finds a packet of straws.

  ‘I offer you Apocalypse Blue,’ he says. The liquid is cloudy blue.

  Ash takes a sip. She smacks her lips.

  ‘Hm. Tastes of death and sunshine.’

  They linger at the bar, watching the sunset. By the second round there is no Curacao, and their drinks are a sickly yellow-green. The sky goes from orange to faded pink.

  He leaves the fire and the food to the girls and he sets about washing the Lioness with a sponge and some washing-up liquid. She is scratched all over and covered in dust and soot from the fires; it breaks his heart to see her like this. They couldn’t have chosen a better car. ‘The Lioness,’ he shouts to the girls, ‘I can feel she’s on our side.’ Slowly, the dirt comes off, little rivulets of black mud stream off her sides, looking like the bulging, taut veins of the earth once they reach the ground.

  The girls are lying on a blanket, and now and then Ash gets up and sees to the fire. They’ve become experts at making fire. It’s easy, in this heat. Everything tinder-dry: wood that will catch at an angry glance.

  Soon, the sausages start smelling, and he hurries to finish with the car.

  He sits down next to them in the shade, leaning against a tree. He eats greedily with his hands, licking his fingers in between bites. Ash skewers a sausage on a fork and blows on it, trying to cool it. Jessie wolfs hers down. They’re mutton, and very fatty, but it’s been a long while since they had anything like this. Bread would have been nice. They’ll have to learn how to make bread.

  He hadn’t realised how tired he was.

  The wine is on the sour side, but it’s so nice having something cold that they finish two bottles in no time. And then it doesn’t matter whether it’s cold or not. Jessie gets up and brings another bottle from the car, and then another, and without deciding it they’re getting pissed on this warm plonk.

  He’s out of practice, and the wine has an easy time with him. He welcomes it as an old friend, lets it settle in, envelop joints and weigh down limbs. The grassy smell of sun-baked earth, of tree bark and past summers. His feet out of their sandals, toes splayed to catch the breeze. The girls lying on their backs, Jessie clinging with one hand to a bottle as though for support. Ash staring into the foliage above. For a long time now summers have reminded him of summers past; everything new, really, being a more or less successful version of an old original. He’d put it down to growing old.

  Here, then, is a summer to reset the count.

  ‘What if’ – Ash sits up on the grass – ‘we’re just replaying everything at a smaller scale?’ She makes a sweeping movement with her arm. She’s drunk. ‘We should be dying, just dying, to get as damn far as possible. We shouldn’t even stop to sleep. And look at this. Picnics, drinking, resting. So damn sure there’ll be another day.’

  Yes, he thinks, she’s right. He is making the same assumption: there is time.

  ‘I was adopted,’ he says.

  ‘You want to talk about it,’ Jessie says.

  ‘Tim’s grandparents were my adoptive parents.’

  The sky doesn’t fall in, but he feels as though in the midst of a minute and silent explosion, unaccountable thin air between his cells.

  ‘And they were poor. Hang on, what do I mean? I mean, much poorer than I was at the time my sister died and Tim was orphaned.’

  Ash frowns; he can see her struggle to make the connection.

  ‘Your nephew died in a car crash, right?’ she finally says.

  ‘It’s not his death I blame myself for.’

  ‘Mr Painter here wants something undone.’

  ‘No, Jessie. I want something I didn’t do, done.’

  Jessie swigs from the bottle. She doesn’t seem to have heard him. ‘We don’t want anything undone.’

  ‘You’re lucky then.’

  ‘And yet’ – she puts the bottle down – ‘we’re not so lucky. Not at all. You’re the lucky one here.’

  ‘Why the hell do you always say “we”, Jessie? You’re not conjoined. I was Ash’s neighbour for a year and never saw your face.’

  ‘We had an even tougher choice,’ Jessie says.

  ‘Guys,’ Ash says.

  ‘We did that, we believe that, we want that,’ he says in a mock voice. He stands up, staggers to the car.

  A failed confession, by any measure.

  They stay there for two nights and a day. It is easily done. They feel comparably safe, and there is nothing to do, save for the routine of eating and sleeping. No challenges, no roadblocks, no panic over the petrol gauge. No one says the word ‘meltdown’. They can even watch their provisions dwindle without any alarms being triggered. They are on their way towards becoming catatonic. In the end he packs their things without asking the girls.

  In the morning, before they start, Jessie worries the calendar. ‘I don’t understand – it’s like we’re driving in glue. We don’t seem to get anywhere.’

  Europe, he thinks, maybe her last act before nuclear Armageddon is to confound her roads and their map; force them to witness her end.

  The girls get one hour of driving each day, for practice mainly. The next days are an anticlimax. Jessie and Ash get used to the driving, and it becomes a chore. When Ash drives, Jessie is slouched in the back seat, her feet hanging out of the window, while he is watching Ash, ready to intervene. Her driving remains eerie, light-touch, as though she’s not really driving, and as though any crash wouldn’t be a real crash. He is relieved when the girls swap and Jessie takes the wheel, but then Jessie discovers a passion for speed. He has to ask her to slow down any number of times, it doesn’t work. He tries to frighten her. ‘It would be the dumbest thing in the history of humanity to die like this. In our situation.’

  ‘There’s nothing,’ Jessie says, waving a ha
nd at the empty road.

  ‘In the entire state of California,’ he says, ‘in 1897, there were exactly two cars. They had a head-on collision.’

  It’s a Trivial Pursuit question he has memorised, he found the fact funny. Do the girls even know Trivial Pursuit?

  ‘In the entire world,’ Jessie says, ‘there is only one Lioness.’

  And, at long last, they get their fix of cold. It’s still hot outside, but the rivers in Italy are icy; he guesses they must flow down from the mountains. They stop to wash in a river crawling with small fish, end up spending hours there, swimming at first and then just sitting on the bank with their feet in the water. It feels like love, like a blessing, to be cool again, and it is all he can do not to drink the cold water. Jessie, in one of her doctor moods, reads his thoughts. ‘Don’t even think about drinking,’ she says. ‘Your insides will rot.’ He sits with his feet in the water until he thinks he can feel tendrils of frost growing on his bones. Drink me, he can still hear through the pain.

  He has taken to holding Ash’s hand at night. He only dared because the impulse to do so was innocent: once, when Jessie was sleeping on the back seat and Ash was next to him, he was woken up by her whimpering, and he grabbed hold of her right hand. She didn’t wake up, and it calmed her. They haven’t talked about it, but she always sleeps in the passenger seat now, even when she has been driving or spent the day in the back seat, and he always takes her hand after she falls asleep. It works; there are no new scratches and the old welts look gradually less angry.

  Another tombstone – the last love.

  They speak out loud what they think. Sometimes he feels the intimacy of the car and the fact that they’re always together, that it blurs the difference between them. His thoughts could be Jessie’s thoughts, or Ash’s thoughts. ‘Let’s not have any more apples. It upsets my stomach.’ ‘My hair stinks. Yours, too.’ This is the spirit in which they speak. In this state, he imagines the girls can access the sight of him, night after night, bending over the road with the spray-paint, that they know what he’s up to and don’t really mind. That he and the girls agree by osmosis.

  Sometimes, though, the differences are reasserted.

  ‘This situation we’re in, it’s like limbo,’ he says. Then, ‘Are you Catholic?’

  ‘No one wants to talk religion,’ Jessie says, without looking at him. ‘Ever again.’

  ‘This, what’s happened. It’s pretty religious.’

  But the girls mean it. They really don’t want to talk religion.

  One night, when they’re all cooped up and ready to sleep, he says something he’s had on his mind for a week. That thing Jessie said about art, comparing it to fetching a stick for dogs, it still bothers him. It felt like something so obviously wrong he shouldn’t even have to explain. But he has decided now he’s going to try. ‘Art,’ he says, ‘or whatever you want to call it.’ He feels the girls stir in the car next to him, not knowing whether he wants to start a fight. ‘When you’re working on something that feels right, when you are near that mythical thing, inspiration, it’s like wandering around on a cold winter’s night and you know there’s a fire nearby, and all you want is to sit by that fire. It’s an experience that’s touched by the divine.’

  He realises he’s holding his breath waiting for a reply.

  ‘We used illusions to fuel illusions.’ To his surprise, it is Ash who speaks. ‘We’re special, we’re brilliant, we’re better than everything else. Monkeys will never compose a symphony. This world is ours, to destroy if we so please. We’re invincible, we’ll get away with anything.’

  ‘That’s not what I was talking about.’

  ‘But that’s what all this is about,’ Jessie says. ‘You can wax lyrical all you like.’

  In the sullen silence that follows, a forgotten memory suddenly comes to his mind: a woman he briefly dated – tall, rich, soft-spoken and casually cruel – and her reaction after visiting an exhibition of his. ‘It’s like you have two sets of eyes,’ she said. ‘One set for the artist in you, with which you see to the core of things, and one for plain human interaction, which is very nearly blind.’

  10

  He desperately wishes for rain, but will the first cloud they see bring death? Will they wake up one morning and see a new and frightening sky, clouds unlike any seen before?

  For some days now they’ve advanced less than a hundred miles per day in the direction they want to go. Blocked roads everywhere; sometimes it’s overturned cars, or else proper military blockades with machine-guns perched on sandbags, and deserted tanks in camouflage still pointing their cannons at the empty roads. Never any movement save for the odd squirrel poking its head out of a cannon muzzle, but whichever of them is driving slows down when approaching a tank. It’s a strangely familiar sight: the tanks could be an open-air museum exhibit on the Cold War.

  The many blockades get him thinking: people clearly thought there was a point to keeping others out. This place they’re going to, maybe half of the world is already there.

  ‘We don’t really know what happened,’ he tells the girls. ‘We don’t know that everyone is dead. They might just be elsewhere.’

  He is constantly afraid they’ll run out of petrol. That because of the roadblocks they’ll be forced to turn around, drive on narrow country lanes, and get stuck somewhere with an empty tank. He has been looking for a small trailer they could hitch to their car and tow. They could fill it with petrol cans. The girls think that’s too risky.

  ‘It’s too damn hot to drive around with lots of petrol,’ Jessie says.

  ‘We’ll just walk until we find another car,’ Ash says.

  But what about being caught by a fire on foot? The further south they’ve driven, the more fires they’ve seen. The girls explained that people set fire to fields and forests in the hope of killing whatever animals might be carrying the disease.

  They don’t attempt to drive through the blockades. They retreat, find alternative routes through wooded hills and blackened sunflower fields. They are in Eastern Europe somewhere, lost in a sun-baked maze of bad country roads and Cyrillic. Storks roosting on chimneys. The old map is no good now. They’ve picked up a new one from a service station, a map that stretches from the western border of Bulgaria all the way to Antalya, but they have only a vague idea of where in Bulgaria they are. What’s missing is the red dot saying ‘You are here’ from so many urban maps. That was a good thing to have, the ‘You are here’ dot.

  ‘I think we’re near the Danube,’ Ash says about the sudden onset of mosquitoes.

  He is afraid their bites can spread the disease, and against the girls’ protests he wants to sleep with the windows closed. They arrive at a compromise: they leave two windows half open and drape wet shirts from the roof of the car over the gap. It holds against the mosquitoes, and still allows them some air. But nature keeps giving them a hard time: he goes to have a shit in a forest and happens to crouch among some kind of nettles. They don’t look like nettles, but they give him a red, painful rash; he takes so long to stop swearing and rub at his skin that the girls call after him, alarmed. It is not even funny; he is in pain.

  It becomes hard to keep a clear head.

  The following morning, Jessie crosses out the twentieth circle on their calendar, and gives them each two small white pills. ‘Iodine,’ she says. ‘In case it’s started.’

  ‘Why didn’t we just take them from the beginning?’

  ‘Because we need to take them every day of exposure, and we’ll run out. And because it has side effects. You, being an old man, are particularly at risk.’

  She flashes him a smile.

  He swallows the pills wearily. He will not ask about the side effects.

  ‘Are we out of the woods, then?’

  ‘We are probably far enough not to die right away. We’re not nearly safe until we reach an area that’s sheltered from contaminated winds.’

  They go on, driving for hours along a narrow, tree-lined road, the t
ree trunks painted white up to about chest-height, making them look bizarrely like mushrooms. The churches they drive past are no longer hard-edged and spiky, but with rounded, whirly contours. They are on their way out of Europe.

  The EU–Turkey border, when it comes, is a hole in a ten-foot chicken-wire fence that they reach by driving on a dirt road alongside the blocked motorway.

  ‘Yay,’ Ash says.

  The landscape that follows is hilly, rocky and dotted with haphazard constructions. Sumptuous-looking villas are surrounded by half-finished houses with bare concrete fences and unpainted window frames. Everywhere, bizarre open-air storage sites: furniture, construction materials, boxes of plastic tricycles stacked as for imminent pick-up. A large mosque, white, still under construction, with a shiny, silvery aluminium dome pinned to the spot by the rickety wooden scaffolding surrounding it. He’d been worried about what they’d find in Turkey, but it’s all very developed, if somewhat chaotic. In towns, innumerable cables criss-cross the air above the road, converging on overburdened electricity poles here and there, making great black sinewy nests.

  You can’t look anywhere without seeing evidence of people and their lives, and yet it’s completely empty of people. They haven’t even seen any corpses.

  ‘Maybe it was the Rapture,’ he says, ‘and we missed it.’

  Jessie requires an explanation.

  ‘Bodies sucked up to heaven?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Whatever makes you happy,’ she says.

  Day after day the Lioness plays her losing game against the sun. It is probably even hotter than in Europe, but he’s less bothered by the heat now. His skin feels thicker, and he has learned to move with economy, even to breathe shallowly, so as to minimise exertion and heat. His face in the rear-view mirror has the weather-beaten, leathery look of professional fishermen, or coastal Mediterranean residents.

  What message will he leave on the tarmac, once they pass Istanbul? The drones will miss their date.