He looked in the first two bedrooms he came to and they were dirty and disorganised and wet with rainwater and rotten and long abandoned. He pulled open the cupboards frantically and took from the wardrobe several items of child’s clothing and ran into the bathroom at the end of the hallway and spun the taps but nothing came out and he tried the shower and again nothing. He looked in the cabinet but there was only an old razor and some mouthwash and a hairbrush matted with black hair.
He grabbed the mouthwash and the old bottle of toilet bleach from beside the cistern and ran back down the hallway and tossed them down to the Dutchman and turned on his heels and went inside the child’s bedroom. A plastic toy truck was sitting on the side unit and had collected a couple of litres of rain water which had been coming in through the smashed window. He stuffed the other items under his arm and lifted the truck up carefully with both hands so as to not spill the water and walked as fast as he could back to the landing and set it down next to the American on the floor.
The American’s eyes had glazed over and he was sweating through the blood and it had soaked through his hair and over his face and the kid wiped it from his eyes and the American didn’t react. The Dutchman had removed the vest which was holding his arm up and the American sat slumped over to one side.
He surveyed the items before him and thought for a second and looked at the kid and took a deep breath and nodded and took one of the child’s t-shirts and dipped it into the rainwater kneeled behind the American and wiped some of the blood away from the bulletwound. He mopped it until the material was thick with blood and tossed it aside and did it a second time until the next shirt was dripping red too and took the mouthwash and poured the entire bottle into the wound. The American bucked on the spot and threw his head back and both his arms shot outwards, nearly punching the toy truck across the room.
“Stay still man” the Dutchman bellowed to him.
His eyes were focussed and his brow was pouring sweat.
“Hold him”
The kid stood in front of the seated American and held his shoulders and his head into himself.
He poured some of the bleach into the toy truck and stirred it with the blade.
“Hold him” he said again and the kid held him tighter.
The Dutchman grabbed the American’s neck and pushed his head forward and held it that way with his hand while with the other he carefully poked the tip of the blade into the open wound and the American roared so loudly both men jumped.
“Hold him still” he screamed.
He pushed the thin blade slowly into the wound and pushed the blade upwards so that he could see into the hole. Blood streamed out and poured down his back. The Dutchman took another of the child’s shirts and thrust it into the bleached water and wiped it across the wound.
“Leave it in there” the American mumbled.
“Let me see how deep in there it is, if I can get it I will”
He was pouring sweat and as he wiped it from his face he wiped more and more blood over himself until he too was covered.
“I can see it” he said, taking the knife back out, “but I’ll need something to get it with”
The kid looked at him. He had no idea what to do.
He let go of the American’s head and he slumped forward. He looked up at the kid through bloodsoaked eyes with bloodsoaked teeth like a demon looking at him from hell itself.
“Get another knife” the American growled, “and whiskey. And get my smokes”
The kid ran down the wooden steps into the open barn below and jumped into the water and splashed his way around the submerged farm machinery and into the little sidekitchen. He frantically tore open the cupboards and threw items down into the water and ransacked the place until eventually he found another thin blade, old and blunt. He ran back up the stairs and handed the knife to the Dutchman.
The American looked him in the eyes. He looked desperate.
“There’s no whiskey man” the kid said.
“Gin?”
The Dutchman held the second knife in the bleach and rubbed the blade between his finger and thumb.
“Shut up and stay still. Hold him”
“Get me a smoke”
The Dutchman shook the excess liquid from the blade.
“They’re wet, you’ve been swimming with them again. Hold still”
He opened the wound with the blade and the American drew in a sharp breath and let it exhale slowly. He slid the tip of the second blade along the top of the first and used the points to try to grip the edges of the bullet which was buried into his shoulder muscle.
He managed to pull it out a few millimetres and it slipped again from his grip.
Blood poured down over the blades and the Dutchman’s hands and a huge crimson pool had gathered where they sat and the American looked like a butchered animal.
He cleaned the blades in the water again which was itself red, and slid them back inside the American’s shoulder and gripped the bullet gently and pulled it a few millimetres further. The Americans good arm was around the kids legs and he was squeezing so tightly the kid’s leg was numb.
The Dutchman’s eyes were thinned and the veins in his temples were throbbing and a mixture of blood and sweat poured over his face and he was concentrating as hard as he could. He dropped one of the blades onto the floor and held the second with both hands so that he could dip the tip of it behind the ridge on the back end of the bullet and pull it forward and it slid to him and popped out into his hand in a cough of blood. He dropped the bullet and the knife and grabbed the last of the child’s clothing and thrust it in the water and pressed it hard against the wound.
“Hold it”
The American tried to reach around to the wound.
“Not you, you fool”
The kid rounded the bloodied man and pressed the clothing against the American’s shoulder. The Dutchman left into the hallway and came back with more clothing and dipped it into the water and began to clean the American. He wiped around the wound and he wiped his own hands and when the red blood was cleaned off their skin it remained red from the bleach burn.
“Close your eyes” he said to the American.
“Why?” the American replied. He turned his head slightly to look at him, “what are you fixin’ to do?”
“Close your damn eyes man, this has bleach in it”
The American obliged and the Dutchman squeezed some of the liquid onto the Americans head and used one of the cloths to dry his face.
“We should get him outside, the rain will clean him” the kid said, “can you get up?”
The American pulled himself up and he stumbled forward and the kid helped him over to the open window. The Dutchman stood behind holding the fabrics against his back.
“You can’t go down there, if you get any of that filthy water in this you’re done”
The kid turned to him.
“I know, come with me”
He led the two men through into the hallway and into the first bedroom and kicked the mess from the soaking bed.
“Lay down” he said and the American lurched forward on to the side of the bed on his knees and lowered himself into the puddle on the mattress where the rain streamed through the window.
The Dutchman nodded.
“Wait here” he said, “there’s something I have to do”
He left and went out onto the landing and down the wooden stairs into the water at the ground floor. He crossed the barn and swam out into the yard to the raft and took the rope in his hand and pulled the raft across the water so that it was under the cover of the barn roof. He swam backwards until eventually regained his footing on the wooden floor and was able to pull the raft inside where it couldn’t be seen from the floodplain.
He tied the raft to the banister of the staircase and slumped down onto the rotten wooden steps where he sat for some time with his head in his burnt hands, watching the rain.
The American slept for the rest of that afte
rnoon and all through the night. The kid and the Dutchman had collected all the rainwater they could and washed the wound and redressed it with any clean item of clothing they could find in the house until the wardrobes were empty and the bleeding had mostly stopped and there existed next to the bed a huge pile of bloodstained fabric. They had made the American drink the water they had gathered and the kid found salt in the kitchen which they added to it and that evening they pulled the soaking bed away from the window into the middle of the room and rolled the American on to his side and pulled the wet and bloody sheet from beneath him and tried as best they could to slide a drier one into its place.
It had rained throughout the night and the water crept further up the stairs and in the morning when the black sky turned grey again the kid went into the bedroom.
He sat on the dresser by the door and watched the American.
He was laying on his front with his head turned away but he heard the kid come in and after a few moments he spoke.
“You just gonna sit there lookin’ at me?”
The kid smiled to himself.
“I dried your cigarettes for you”
The American lifted himself just slightly so that he could turn his head to look around.
He smiled faintly.
The kid walked across to him and put one into his lips and flicked the lighter a few times until it the flame caught and lit it.
The American sucked at the end of it and blew the smoke from his nose and it swirled over the pillow.
“Well then” he said, and then sighed.
He winced in pain and lifted his good arm up underneath him so he could raise himself slightly.
“We’re fixin’ to leave yeah?”
The kid shook his head.
“No we’re not, we’re not going anywhere. We can stay here as long as it takes, you need to rest”
The American looked around the room.
The wooden floor was starting to flood with the rain coming through the window. Outside a car floated past in the distance and crashed into a tree and the tree buckled and the car spun and floated onwards. The sky was somehow brown. There was nothing intact there from horizon to horizon and the land was flat and open, from what they could tell, and it was to them like looking from the cabin window of a boat in the middle of a vast ocean. Somewhere in the distance the kid thought he heard women’s voices calling but they were lost against the rain.
“What is there to eat?
The kid took a moment to answer.
“Nothing”
The American thought about this and smoked.
He pushed himself up so that he was propped up with his good arm. His shoulder was bleeding again.
“Then we’re gonna have to find something, there’s no use staying here starving”
“Come on, you have to stay still, your shoulder has hardly been dressed at all, if you move too much it will all just pull open”
“It hurts like fucking hell”
“I bet it does”
“Where’s the blonde nurse?”
“Sleeping in the other room”
The Dutchman called through from the next room.
“I’m not sleeping much”
The kid smiled.
“And tell that bastard to rest” he called.
The American shouted back.
“I’m up, and we’re leaving, I’m dog hungry”
There was a moment of silence and then the Dutchman appeared at the door.
“Lay the hell back down, you have a gaping hole in your back you fool”
The American sat and watched him. The Dutchman watched him back. The American flicked the end of his cigarette onto the wet floor and it landed with a hiss.
“I’m hungry, we haven’t eaten for two days, there’s a gaping hole in my stomach too”
“We’ll find food and bring it back, you have to stay here”
The American pulled himself to his feet in a slow and measured defiance.
“Enough. I’ll be careful, I will. We need food and we need something to sterilise this shit with and it needs dressing with something other than goddamned kid’s clothes”
The Dutchman shook his head and looked at the kid and the kid shrugged and shook his head too.
The Dutchman and the kid went down the flooded stairs and into the barn where the metal raft was pushed up against the wooden ceiling by the rising water and they had great trouble in dragging it back out into the open. They pulled the rope to the doorway and held on to the wooden slats above the entrance to the barn and swam backwards pulling the raft along as it scraped across the wooden ceiling and eventually it splintered the wood and burst forward into the yard. They pulled it round to the open window under the landing where all traces of blood had long been washed away and the kid held it while the Dutchman clambered up to the window.
The American carefully stepped over the window ledge and perched on the edge of the little roof and dropped down into the raft. It bounced in the water but the American held his balance and the kid maintained his grip on the rope and the Dutchman climbed in and the kid followed and they paddled away again into the open countryside.
At some time that afternoon the rain stopped for the first time.
They were reaching another town and they passed other people in boats and rafts and some riding on doors and some swimming and some stranded on buckling rooftops. Bodies floating by them, bloated and dark and twisted. Man and beast.
They coasted towards a sprawl of buildings where the water was thick with broken woodwork and plastics and all items that the mind could think of, and protruding from the centre of it, towering above all else, a white stone clock tower which had stopped at just before seven.
A man stood atop it in a dusty white robe holding on to the golden carving at its peak.
He called to them in Hindi and they looked but didn’t respond.
“That way” he called to them again.
The kid stood in the raft and looked over to him.
“For what?”
The man pointed back to the north, the way they had come.
“You are going in the wrong direction” he shouted.
The kid turned to the American and the Dutchman and shrugged.
“Why?”
“You need to turn around” he called, shouting from the tower like a mad crier.
“Why do we?”
“Ignore him” the Dutchman said, “he’s just a madman”
The kid watched him.
The man spun around on the top of the clock tower and looked to the south.
“Because that is the ocean”
Ahead of them in the distance they could see boats on the water. There were masts and sails hanging with flags and nets and they realised then that they were indeed sailing boats and fishing boats and, as they focussed into the dull light, they saw that there were indeed many of them.
“You reckon we can make it to one of them boats?” the American asked from where he sat.
The Dutchman held his hand up and squinted into the distance. The raft glided forward, banging through the floating rubbish.
The man called again to them that they were going the wrong way and the kid shouted back that they were not and that the open ocean was exactly where they wanted to go and the man called them crazy.
The kid shrugged and muttered to the Dutchman that the man himself was the one hanging alone from a clock tower in an endless sea of filth and asked him who was indeed the crazy one and the Dutchman replied that they probably all were.
They could not see the land beneath them but they could see that is stretched round to the north and the south sides of a great bay for there were in the distance trees growing from the water.
“You think it’s a river?” the kid asked nobody in particular.
The Dutchman shrugged.
“An estuary?”
“Yes. It leads to the sea, but not for some distance I would say. We can go into it safely for sure” the
Dutchman said.
The kid nodded slowly.
They took the oars up again and pushed the boat forward into the open water and after a short while they cruised up next to the fishing boats and they smelled coal fires burning and there were clothes hanging from the rigging. Men moved about on the decks and some stood to look at them and some waved and called greetings but most said nothing.
Further out from the rest, a single boat bobbed around on the water alone, without lights or smoke or visible occupation. It was old and had been white with a green stripe along its hull but the paint was almost entirely gone from its thirty foot wooden frame. There were two orange life rings strung down the side by old rope and a wheel at the stern for deploying a fishing net. A small rotten wheelhouse at the back sheltered the controls and the steps down into the cabin.
They sat the dinghy next to it for a while and held the rigging and waited and after some time they surmised that there appeared to be nobody aboard.
“What do you think?” the Dutchman asked.
The kid and the American looked around for a long time before the kid spoke.
“We didn’t have a great experience the last time we took a boat”
The Dutchman nodded, thinking.
“Why would it be anchored here like this when the whole world is flooded? You would think whoever owned it would be using it, no?”
“Maybe they’ve gone inland looking for food or something, maybe in a dinghy?”
They sat for a long time holding on to the rigging on the side of the boat and looking around at everything and nothing.
Birds were hovering low and plucking things from the floating debris.
“Why don’t you go up there and see if you think anyone owns it” the Dutchman asked the kid.
“Of course someone owns it”
“Just go and see. See if anyone has been on there recently”
The kid looked at him and looked at the boat and then surveyed the area.
The American looked around too. His vest was brown with crusted blood.
Where Men Once Walked Page 22