Road Kill

by Hanna Jameson

  He dropped his cigarette to the ground and stamped on it, and as we were about to go inside we heard someone call to us from the shadows.

  ‘Hey! Hey, mister! Excuse me…’

  I looked over Eli’s shoulder into the dark. There were four kids in their late teens loitering beside a vending machine; three boys and one girl. They were all dressed in black, two of the guys had long dreads and piercings, and the girl had light blue hair.

  ‘If we give you some money, can you buy us some beers?’

  Eli waved a hand. ‘Get lost.’

  ‘Aw, come on, it doesn’t cost you anything,’ the girl said, pouting.

  ‘Yeah, no.’ I laughed, glancing at Eli.

  He had one hand on the door, but he was smiling a little.

  ‘Maybe it doesn’t cost us anything.’ He indicated his head at the storefront. ‘Say we buy you some beer. You should come and share it with us in the park.’

  I saw the group exchange glances, sizing us up. What was our threat? Probably nothing. We looked rich after all. We had no reason to want anything from them really.

  ‘You want us to come to the park with you?’ one of the guys checked, hoisting his rucksack further up onto his shoulders.

  ‘Yeah.’

  I wasn’t sure what Eli was doing, but I decided to let it play out.

  Another pause. A silent conferral.

  ‘Well, um… yeah OK, I guess.’ Another of the guys shrugged. ‘Let’s go.’

  I shot Eli a questioning look – What’s going on here? What is this game? – but he ignored me. He continued ignoring me walking around the store.

  The man behind the counter didn’t seem to suspect anything. I suppose he couldn’t imagine that someone would spend upwards of forty dollars on a bottle of brandy for a ramshackle band of youths.

  When we went back outside the group had moved further afield, towards the other side of the road.

  Eli took the brandy out of his paper bag and handed it over.

  They had probably never held a bottle of anything so expensive.

  ‘Come on then,’ Eli said, walking up to the edge of the park and neatly stepping over the low wire fence.

  ‘What are your names?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Eli.’

  I glared at him as I stepped over the fence after them.

  ‘Mark,’ I said, hesitating. ‘What are yours?’

  ‘Jade.’

  The boys’ names I didn’t really absorb, but I was sure one of them was called Martin, maybe Simon. It didn’t matter. The girl was sort of attractive. But then it was dark and her voice was husky, which probably accounted for about forty per cent of what I found attractive about her.

  Eli had jumped onto one of the swings and was propelling himself back and forth.

  ‘What are you guys doing in town?’ one of the boys asked, stepping up onto the one beside him.

  The other two guys had found the tyre swing.

  ‘Yeah, you on holiday?’

  ‘You picked a shit place for it.’

  ‘What are you visiting here? Family?’

  Eli leapt into the air and launched the swing over the bar back onto itself. He landed with a dull thwack, like a gymnast, and turned to look at us. ‘No, we’re on business.’

  ‘What sort of business?’

  One of the boys, pushing his friend with one hand, took a gulp of brandy with the other and coughed. ‘Must be important if you can spend this much on brandy for a bunch of strangers? You just have money to throw away?’

  The boy standing on the swing had one of those annoying miniature beards sitting on the bottom of his chin.

  ‘You should never keep hold of money,’ Eli replied. ‘It’s not that important.’

  ‘You’d only say that as a privileged capitalist,’ Jade said, taking up residence on the swing that Eli had vacated, swinging it back over the bar with a clang.

  ‘Yeah, check your privilege, Eli,’ I said, amused.

  I watched them climbing onto the various structures and didn’t feel moved to join in. Eli handed me the brandy on his way past, on the way to the red rope climbing frame in the shape of a pyramid.

  ‘You’re capitalists, just as much as us,’ he said, hoisting himself up onto the ropes and swinging under and over.

  A derisive snort came from the swings to my right.

  ‘What makes you say that? We don’t exploit people, we don’t drive cars, we’re vegan, our carbon footprint is less than zero—’

  ‘But you still came here on a transaction. You did what I said on the promise of something, that’s a transaction.’

  ‘Yeah, but we could leave if we wanted.’

  ‘Could you?’

  Eli stood at the top of the pyramid, surveying the area.

  It was impossibly warm. I was starting to miss a change in temperature.

  ‘Yeah, we could,’ Jade said.

  I walked up to a roundabout and gave it a shove. It rotated, empty.

  Eli held out his arms for a moment, Jesus watching over Rio de Janeiro, then he started climbing down.

  He said, ‘You are capitalists. You are privileged. Look at you, you’re white. You’re straight, I assume. Three of you are men. You think you’ve dropped out of society because you don’t have a Facebook account and don’t drive or have jobs? You think anyone who lives on Skid Row would congratulate you? Do you think any of them give a shit what your carbon footprint is when your parents probably make five- or six-figure salaries? In fact, do you think they can afford to give a shit what their carbon footprint is? Or what they eat when they don’t know when they’re going to eat next?’

  The boys had stopped swinging.

  Jade didn’t, but her feet were scuffing the ground.

  They didn’t contradict him.

  Eli’s feet touched the floor.

  ‘But we could leave,’ one of the boys said, eventually, standing up like he had authority.

  ‘And I ask again, could you?’ Eli spread his hands and as he did so his jacket pulled back from his hips to flash the gun tucked into his waistband.

  At first I didn’t think any of them had seen it, but Jade gasped.

  The boys looked to her first, then to where she was pointing.

  ‘Fuck, man, chill out, what the fuck!’

  ‘What?’ Eli stood dead still.

  ‘You didn’t say you had a gun on you!’

  ‘Why have you got a gun?’

  ‘Look, calm down—’ Jade started.

  ‘I thought you guys were leaving?’ Eli looked at me, smiling.

  The boy with the stupid beard took a step forward and put the bottle of brandy on the floor. ‘Hey, man… just don’t hurt us, OK?’

  ‘What makes you think I would hurt you?’

  Eli didn’t improve the tableau by taking out the gun and holding it out, making all four of them retreat several steps.

  ‘Look, we didn’t mean to piss you off!’

  Eli frowned.

  I didn’t move, transfixed by the sight. They probably assumed I had a gun too.

  ‘Leave, if you want.’ Eli had his finger around the trigger. ‘Or stay and play.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Try to leave… or play?’

  The kids looked at each other, hands shaking, eyes wide.

  ‘What?’ Jade asked again.

  ‘If you’re going to stay, then swing!’ Eli snapped.

  ‘Eli, come on,’ I said, laughing but not quite feeling it.

  ‘What?’

  He looked at me and I swore there was something wrong with his face.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, meaning it. ‘Carry on.’

  Jade shrank back against the chains, a few tears leaked from her eyes, her feet scuffed the ground for a moment as she pushed herself forwards and backwards on the swing. There was a creak, a scrape of iron. The boys were frozen.

  Eli turned to them. ‘Well? I thought you wanted to play on the roundabout?’

  They cowered.

&nbs
p; ‘Then play!’ Eli said. ‘Play.’

  I’ll never forget that sight, I thought; the sight of four young ’uns all dressed in black and trembling, crying with fear as they swung back and forth on the swings, pushed each other around the roundabout, climbed the climbing frames with weak limbs.

  I started laughing. I couldn’t help it.

  Eli stood in the middle of the park with his gun outstretched, like a conductor.

  Every so often I would catch his eye and he would grin, his face splitting open with utter glee at the nightmare playground he’d created.

  We must have been there for almost an hour.

  I was crying with laughter – yes, definitely laughter – sitting on the ground with tears streaming down my cheeks.

  Jade was sobbing just over from me, swinging back and forth the whole time. There was a tiny pool of urine on the ground below the swing.

  I couldn’t stop laughing, no matter how much I tried.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  We didn’t find a place to stop after that. Eli just drove, with manic sleepless eyes. We could have been going in circles for all I knew. On and off I kept laughing, then after a while it was just tears of exhaustion, dry and acidic.

  He had drunk too much brandy to be allowed on the roads, but it was as though he’d burned the alcohol up with his insides. I noticed his hands twitching up and down the wheel. The world must have looked like a video game.

  ‘If I fall asleep, you won’t crash, will you?’ I mumbled.

  He shook his head.

  I sank down in my seat and looked at my emails but there was nothing.

  It felt unlikely that I’d sleep, so I pulled Trent’s Bible, notes and postcards through from the back seat.

  I glanced at Eli, giving in to a restless need to provoke something.

  ‘Why didn’t you mention that Melissa was your ex-wife?’

  Nothing.

  His expression didn’t even change.

  I shuffled the papers. ‘Eli.’

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘It was on her Facebook page.’ I wished he would look at me. ‘I checked it out because… Well, something about this wasn’t adding up. This whole thing isn’t about her, is it?’

  He ignored the question.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, you can’t just pull your usual shit of pretending not to hear me.’

  Nothing.

  ‘Eli.’ I sat up. ‘Eli!’

  ‘If it was about her, why would you care? She was on the list anyway.’

  ‘Oh, shut the fuck up about the list. If this has all been about settling a score with your ex I’ll run this car off the fucking road!’

  ‘Why would it bother you?’

  ‘I left my family for this!’

  ‘You would have left them anyway.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Yellow light flashed across his face. ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘No, explain.’

  He smirked. ‘You get married because your parents and a book written by the Latin-speaking elite tell you that’s what you should do; you reproduce; you cater to this forced unit and repress everything that makes you human—’

  ‘I doubt you have much insight into what makes people human.’ I rolled my eyes.

  The car wobbled for a moment and I checked he was still looking at the road. He was still looking at it, only he was grinning now.

  ‘I think my idea of what makes people human is more advanced than what your book says.’

  ‘Why are you calling it my book?’

  ‘Your book preaches pure violence, you know. Joy in atrocity! That’s the beauty of the Bible, really. That’s its genius. It creates the very concept of the sin that it claims to have the solution to.’

  The car wobbled again and I involuntarily held onto the door handle.

  ‘It describes humans revelling in excess and sin and degradation in a way that can only make it sound appealing. It shows you a way of life we relate to more than any moralistic self-denial.’

  ‘I don’t agree.’ Knuckles tightening. ‘You don’t believe in anything, that’s your problem.’

  ‘I’m just not delusional. Humans are animals. We’re just grey squirrels who have been lucky enough to invent guns so we aren’t reduced to ripping each other’s throats out with our teeth.’

  ‘We’re more than that, Eli. Squirrels are just vermin, they don’t know right from wrong.’

  ‘And yet we choose the latter anyway, almost every time! What does that say about us?’

  ‘Not all of us do, if we can help it.’

  He laughed. ‘Ron, you enjoy violence more than anyone else I know.’

  ‘I don’t enjoy it.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ Now he looked at me, as we shot underneath a bridge and into a tunnel. ‘You know that when you’re causing pain, killing someone, you are more yourself than you’ve ever been.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Then why haven’t you spoken to your children since you’ve been out here? Why have I never heard you speaking to your precious Rachel or even your parents telling them you miss them and that you can’t wait to be back? Because it’s a lie. They’re there for theatre, to show the outside world and pretend that’s who you are. You haven’t spoken to them because this is what you enjoy. This is who you are.’

  ‘You’re talking rubbish.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘You haven’t slept in two days!’

  We were drifting closer to the wall and Eli’s gaze was turned on me.

  ‘Eli.’

  He stared at me.

  Drifting. A jolt.

  ‘Eli, for fuck’s sake!’ I made a grab for the wheel and the vehicle juddered left and right.

  He pushed me in the chest, to my side of the car, and swung us back across the divide. G-force punched me in the chest and I stared into oncoming headlights.

  Eli wrenched the wheel to the right and I felt the force of the van we had been driving into whip past us. I saw an image of my own shattered bones, human flesh welded into dashboard.

  A horn wailed and faded.

  ‘Are you fucking crazy?’ I shouted.

  The Bible and postcards had fallen into the footwell. My right leg was twitching as the bright-eyed face of Audrey Hepburn stared up at me from the front of a postcard.

  For a moment all I could hear was my heart, then the steady hum of the engine again.

  We left the tunnel into natural darkness, out of the psychedelic nightmare of lights.

  Eli rubbed his eyes, as if he had shocked even himself, and said, ‘Maybe we should pull over.’

  ‘Maybe we should.’

  ‘Could you sleep here?’

  ‘I don’t know, not the best fucking time to ask.’

  He smiled. ‘You know there’s no reward, Ronnie. There’s nothing in the afterlife waiting for us, to absolve us or punish us. There’s just… nothing. You must know that.’

  ‘Stop it, I’m too…’ I couldn’t even finish the sentence. ‘I can’t listen to this shit right now.’

  ‘How shit would it be to realize that you’d lived a life devoid of fun and experience to appease someone who doesn’t exist, to prepare for a reward that doesn’t exist?’

  I don’t whether we’d just been driving for too long, or whether I was too tired to expect any rational reaction, but the idea almost made me want to cry. Those dry tears of tiredness were still coming, but only from one eye now.

  Eli started looking for a rest-stop, and I realized he had managed to dodge my questions about his ex-wife.

  I said, ‘I think you’re lying to me.’

  No confirmation from him either way. He started undoing the bandage around his ear with one hand.

  I checked my pocket and I didn’t have many Ormus capsules left.

  *

  We had pulled into a lay-by with a pay phone and some portaloos, the sort used by long-distance lorry drivers, couriers and armed sex offenders.

  It
didn’t surprise me that Eli could sleep sitting up. It was a nice gesture, by his standards, to let me lie down on the back seats. If I twisted my face away from the window I could avoid the yellow glare, but sleep was impossible.

  Eli’s ear was healing much better than I thought it would. I entertained the idea that it might have been the Ormus, even if it was unlikely.

  I sat up and my limbs had atrophied in the stiff attempts at sleep. Eli didn’t move. He was like a shark; I doubted he ever entered any kind of oblivion, just floated forwards, barely changing position until prey entered his line of vision.

  Rubbing my eyes, I opened the back door and swivelled until I could manoeuvre myself out and shut it again quietly. Outside, it was cool. I took my jacket off and let goosebumps rise along my arms. If a nuclear bomb were to drop on one of the big cities, it might not even affect us here. We were that far out. It was a comforting thought.

  When I’d been younger I thought World War Three was starting every time I heard helicopters over my house. I thought within a matter of minutes my windows would explode inwards, the street and the bodies of my neighbours coming through into my room. War had seemed a lot more real back then, weirdly, when I had less concept of it as something that happened to other people in other countries. Getting older had made me complacent, allowed me to indulge in fantasies about the collapse of society and civilization without worrying about having to experience it first-hand.

  I took out some pot that Eli had confiscated from the kids, before he had finally let them flee the park in tears, and rolled a joint.

  My mobile started to ring.

  My first guess was that it might be Melissa, but it wasn’t. It was my UK landline, and I didn’t want to answer it.

  ‘Come on,’ I whispered, looking down at it in my hand.

  Home.

  ‘Come on.’

  Home, calling.

  My stomach felt tight, invaded and toxic with guilt. The sensation crept up my neck and across my shoulders into my forehead.

  What was I doing, staring at the call like it was unwelcome?

  Home, calling.

  It rang off.

  Relief, for a moment.

  A pair of headlights appeared in the distance and hummed their way towards me. The car passed with a penetrative growl, speeding up at the sight of me, and then there was calm again. I imagined the driver wondering what I was doing standing by the side of the road staring at my phone.