How do you know all this?
Lee drew on his cigarette and shrugged. His mind became arid. The tick of the cooling car engine. It was, you know, family knowledge.
Not that. About them fighting in the car and everything.
Lee coughed drily. How do I know? Because I was in the fucking car when it happened.
In the accident?
Yeah. Of course, in the accident.
And what happened to you?
Fractured my skull. Hit my head on the front seat and bounced back. Broke some ribs. Big cut down my side here. I was in hospital for a month or so.
But your parents died?
Yeah. They both died. And he paused. Right there on the front seat.
Wild wiped a hand across his nose and eyes. Jesus. That’s incredible. I’m sorry.
Lee stood and poked again at the fire. His mother’s voice, her hand clawing for his father’s shoulder, her hand dark and slow in the car’s interior, reaching across that space. Yes. It was terrible. He swallowed. Inexplicably, his mouth tasted of chalk. He wiped his lips with the back of one hand. But that was a long time ago.
What were they fighting about?
Lee put another log on the fire. He licked his lips and looked at Wild. Those greedy blue eyes. Had he been listening like this the whole time?
They were fighting about me, Lee said at last. I’d run away, how you do when you’re a kid. For a while I had this thing about this strange communication tower that I could see from the backyard and I was obsessed with getting to it. The thing was miles from our place. Anyway, I headed off towards it and was found by the parents of some kid at school and they rang my mum and dad and they drove around and collected me. In the rain. Freezing and windy. One of those real winter nights. They were mad as hell. And they were fighting about what to do with me, you know, how to punish me, I suppose. Whose fault it was that I’d done this thing. And Mum was saying how Dad had brought me up all wrong and carrying on, having a go at him and . . . Bang! Lee licked his dusty lips again, drew the last from his cigarette and tossed the butt into the fire. And that was that.
That smear of night, the swerve of tree, his mother’s voice. Tom! The darkness rearranging itself around the crumpled car, accommodating them, the way darkness does. And that solitude, rendered more profound by its recent proximity to voices and noise.
I was in hospital for a few weeks, but when I got out me and my sister lived together. She was sixteen, I guess. Just carried on. Made our school lunches, tried to make me go to bed at a sensible hour. Nobody bothered us. We had an aunt in the same town who was supposed to take care of us. Be the guardian or something, but she didn’t take much interest in things, probably sent my sister some money now and then. I dunno. People have their lives. Mostly people stayed away, like they were afraid of us or something. Like we might infect them. Like we were dangerous. Especially me. People looked at me funny. Whispered about me afterwards. Two kids on their own in a big house. Seems sort of strange, now I think about it, but at the time . . . Although, you know. It was also great sometimes. We ran wild, did what we wanted. Swam all summer in the lake.
As always, the memory of his weeks in hospital conjured a particular colour. The ward’s linoleum floor at night, dimly lit from the lamp at the nurses’ station and the fluorescent light flickering in the hall. A faded, lozenge green that—even now, twelve years later—prompted a dull ache in the side of his head where he had smashed against the front seat of his father’s car.
And the tick, tick, tick of the car engine cooling in the night air, then the sound of rain, which was itself just a variation of silence. And Lee on the back seat, an orphan, newly minted, the warmth of his own blood filling his mouth. Weeping.
26
He stood in a large wooden boat, an old-fashioned lifeboat, like something you’d see in a history book about old whaling methods. Despite the size of the boat, there was nobody else in it. There hadn’t been for a long time. A kerosene lamp hung from a bracket at his side. It hissed and swung with the movement of the boat. He was in the rear, whatever that was called. The prow? The aft?
In his hands was a huge oar, but he was unable to gain purchase in the water. Each time he leaned forward and tried to angle it into the waves, the blade skidded away. Several times he almost lost his footing and tumbled. If he fell into the water it would be the end of him. Buckets and spades and coils of rope banged and rolled about in the bottom of the boat.
He had the sense he’d been here for a long time. His shoulders were dull with ache and his hands were frayed from handling the oar. He’d been on a voyage of some sort. The waves were large and so inky black they might have been made not of water but of something else entirely, something viscous and industrial. They assembled in gangs not far away, rose to their full height, and then charged the boat in groups of two or three. Icy water sprayed up over the sides.
It was impossible to see the limits of the ocean, perhaps a dim line of horizon in the distance, a slightly darker thread than the murky space stretching both above and below it. To be so far from land. To be so far from everything.
After some time, he made out a large shape in the distance and tried to steer towards it, willing his boat in that direction. Over the water drifted the sound of glasses clinking and a burble of voices. A firework of laughter in the night. He could make out an even line of circular toffee-coloured lights about halfway up the object’s side. He peered through the gloom. They were portholes. It was a massive liner, as big and complicated as a city, edging through the water.
Suddenly he was beside the liner. It made no sound. He knew he had to get on board. Its bulk only served to remind him of how frail his little rowboat was. Surely something that size would never sink, would be able to carve through these waters? Through one of the portholes he could see cigar smoke and champagne glasses, hairstyles and jewellery. Pearls and bow ties. The waxy skin on a woman’s neck. He had the sense they were people he knew, even though none were immediately recognisable. Surely they were people he knew. They would be excited to see him. They would cheer his entrance. They would care for him.
His rowboat banged against the side of the ship. Waves poured across him. He tried to raise himself but the thick sea grasped his foot. He was in silence now, in some place before sound. Again he reached out with one hand. Perhaps he saw something, a ledge or a toehold, but he was unable to feel it. His hands traced circles on the surface of the ship’s hull, searching for something with which to hoist himself aboard. He was so close. The surface was scored and slick, not like wood at all. Whale skin. It was whale skin. The hull was made entirely of flesh, he realised. There was the smell of seaweed and porridge. The smell was on him. He wiped his hands on his trousers and shirt.
There was a statue of the Virgin, standing on a fridge, her plaster hands clasped at her chest in prayer. The statue fit snugly into his palm and was well handled. It was an old object, something smuggled in suitcases from other countries. He held it in one hand. The cut of her robes was grubby and worn almost smooth. The crucifix dangling over her right elbow was almost gone. Her nose was chipped off to reveal the white plaster beneath that pink skin. All this, but her brown-eyed gaze remained stoic, always looking past him, somewhere over his right shoulder.
He was knee-deep in tarry water, barely able to raise his legs to walk. He attempted to call out, but could not manufacture any sort of sound. Again he tried. A dry cough, little more than a whisper, just the scratch of air catching in his throat. The horizon had been absorbed by the sea, or perhaps it was the other way around. He opened his mouth. Like a dying fish he opened his great mouth. But there was nothing, not even silence.
And he woke and quickly sat up, gasping in the dark forest of night.
27
Josef pulled on a singlet and a pair of trousers. He crossed to the window, raised the blind and peered down into the empty street. A small and unremarkable place, just a mess of lines and shapes. His eye searched for movement
, but there was none. Not even a lousy traffic light.
His reflection held a lunar shine, the skin dimpled and worn and thinly spread, making apparent the various ridges and planes beneath, the very shape of him. The sharp nose and high cheeks, his dark and drowsing eyes. In front of him, the window rattled in its frame as he brushed a lick of hair from his eyes.
His breath fogged the glass. He sucked at his gold tooth and curled his toes on the carpet. The cold didn’t agree with him. There was an arthritic ache in his right knee. The tattoo on his forearm thrummed and he scratched at it, softly at first, but then harder.
He fetched a glass of water from the bathroom and returned to his vigil. The hotel room smelled of old wood polish and dust. The water from the bathroom tap tasted faintly of rust. It was still some time before dawn. There was no sign of life until a grey cat slunk across the bakery roof opposite, almost invisible against the tin. Not far above, the cloudy sky hovered like the pale belly of an even greater darkness.
Hunkered under night, the town appeared different from when he arrived yesterday afternoon. A blue thread of smoke curled from a chimney stack on a far hill. There was a very dim and distant light, perhaps from a house on the other side of town. He wondered if there was another person standing at a window just as he was, staring out over the darkness, listening out for cracks in the silence. Who else could be awake at this time, adrift in the night? Apart from animals in the undergrowth, only the very good or the very bad were awake at this hour. When he was a child his father would wake in the middle of the night and shuffle to the kitchen to drink tea and pray at the table beside the humming fridge. He wondered about the urge to pour oneself into the silence.
After a lifetime in the city, the prehistoric hush of places like this unnerved him. He was a thin man in a strange hotel room, his movements slow and careful, like those of a mantis. He smoked a cigarette and coughed gently, just to impose a sound upon the morning, to remind himself of himself.
He grimaced at the thought of his dream. Like witches or foreign tongues they made sense, but only to themselves. Someone in his family would have been able to decode it for him, were he able to tell them. Most of them loved nothing better than to sit over morning coffee and unpick the hem of a dream, to argue whether it was a vision from the future or the past or some dead soul reaching across the darkness. His aunt Mary was a merchant of dreams; she sold dreams to people in the neighbourhood who wanted a chance to fly, to have children or to revisit the countries of their birth one final time. He was never sure how this was done, but it seemed to involve an exchange of whispers and certain herbs, the pressing of amulets into wrinkled palms. Money as well, of course. Mary also claimed she could take people’s dreams away from them, was able to bear the nightmares others found intolerable. When he was a boy, Josef would be woken in the middle of the night by her wailing in the next room, apparently lost in the cathedral of her dreaming, trying to outrun the madnesses that rightfully belonged to others. Those flocks of owls and crumbling teeth, the light that dripped like water. But then, like a fish in the shallows, his dream flickered and was gone.
Josef shivered. It suddenly seemed a long way to come in search of a little bastard like Lee. A lot of bother over such a pathetic sum of money. A snitch in the police department had told him about two men—who sounded a lot like Lee and his doctor friend—rolling a railway guard and jumping a train. It was the only clue Josef had been able to gather since leaving Sylvia’s place that day, but it was enough. He was getting close. If Lee thought he was going to sneak off to his sister’s, then he was dreaming. Josef would find him and stop him.
Aunt Mary would surely be dead by now, Josef realised. A lot of those people were probably dead. Dead or otherwise scattered like leaves. No way to track them, even if he wanted to—even if they wanted to be found by him. All those aunts and uncles and cousins: Leo, David, Drusilla. Little Carla, who wouldn’t be so little anymore. Maybe even married. The family he hadn’t seen for so many years.
He recalled his father trying not to cry as his mother pressed money into Josef’s hand on the day he left more than twenty years ago. The day he went away to work and perhaps learn a trade, do things in the real world. His homecoming delayed, first by a ten-year sentence for armed robbery and then by shame. The only time his father and mother wrote to him in jail was to tell him he wasn’t welcome in their home ever again. How quickly it had become too late, and for how long it had remained that way.
He wondered whether his parents were still in the same weatherboard house, crowded with relatives and their children, with their bramble of languages. There was probably still a glass jar full of wooden clothes pegs left on the lawn beside a saucer of milk for the cat. Josef’s father had no sense of smell or taste because of an accident when he was young, but it didn’t stop him leaning across to sniff plates of food in the hope that this meal, at long last, would be the one to rekindle this lost sense. Holding his tie back against his chest with his right hand to stop it trailing in the food, his other hand grasping the lip of the table for balance, eyes half closed in concentration. Once he found his father in the back garden handling an apple from their tree. His father was wearing a blue shirt that was frayed at the collar, with tiny strands of white thread waving loose around his brown neck. Tell me, son. Does this have a actual smell? he’d asked, and Josef, no more than ten years old, had closed his eyes and shyly brought the smooth, round shape right up against his nose. It was cold on his lips and large in his palm. At first there was nothing, but he wanted to please his father so he tried again, breathed in more deeply and discovered a scent of something sharp and tangy. What was it? How to describe such a thing? He’d never even noticed it before, had never thought apples had a smell at all, but it was unmistakably the smell of apple. Again he breathed in. It smelled of apple, that was all.
But No, he’d said with a shrug. No smell. There’s nothing you’re missing here, Dad, and his father had nodded and smiled and walked back indoors with his hands deep in his pockets.
He felt far from home, but this was nothing new. Running a palm across his chin, he decided he needed a shave. He sniffed at his brackish armpit. Needed a shower too. He hated travelling. Disliked being prey to the unfamiliar, having to improvise all the time. Why, he wondered, would anyone choose to make themselves a stranger? Those people who travel around because they got nothing better to do must be nuts.
Even up in this hotel room in the middle of the night, Josef felt conspicuous. He knew that a 53-year-old lone man was always considered sinister—a rapist or a terrorist. Pornographer. Even the old man who ran this hotel had seemed miffed by his lack of luggage when he checked in, as if its absence revealed something profound. He’d snuffled like a wombat and showed him upstairs without a backward glance. Like animals, people were suspicious of those abandoned by others. Josef needed to keep a low profile. Find out where Lee and the quack had gone next, and keep moving.
Holding it gingerly between thumb and forefinger, he smoked his cigarette right down. There should be enough time to catch a few more hours’ sleep before morning, but he noticed a curious thing as he looked out over the small, remote town before returning to bed. The low clouds had begun to deteriorate and crumble. Small pieces of cloud fluttered, only a few at first but gaining in number until the sky was filled with white shards. They whitened the street and eaves and huddled in creamy drifts on roofs. They sprinkled without sound or apparent weight, utterly of their own magic. Josef wiped the window with his hand to see better and pressed his nose to the cold glass. A smile spidered across his lips. Snow.
He had never seen snow. Even the word was strange in his mouth. Snow, snow, snow. He laughed at the fairytale sight, and then again at his own laughter. Shaking his head in amazement, he walked away from the window and then returned to the glass again. Still the snow fell, like some great silent army. He flung open the window and put his head out into the muffled night. Flakes collected in his hair and on his shoulders. On
e snagged on an eyelash, hung for a second, then dissolved. Damn. What do you know about that? Snow. Actual fucking snow. Take a look at that. Take a look at that. Foolishly he looked around, hoping to see someone else enjoying the sight, but, of course, it was late and everyone else in this town was asleep. It seemed like something that children, at least, should see, but there was not a soul, young or old. Flakes sizzled on his tongue.
Josef’s mother had told him of the snowfalls she had seen in her country when she was a girl: about the mineral crunch underfoot, the vast silence, the watery smell of ice. It had always seemed an impossibly distant phenomenon, of a sort that could never occur here. Her stories didn’t prepare him for the unearthly sight of it. He dragged a chair to the window and leaned on the sill, exclaiming every so often and shaking his head. Despite the cold, he watched this secret carnival for an hour or more. Snowflakes clung to the glass and massed in shallow drifts along the outside of the wooden frame, their mathematical skeletons visible against the growing morning light. And as he watched, the town softened and almost vanished under a white pelt.
28
Wild tugged on the chain. The jolt of pain through his wrists was sudden but at least expected. He did it again. Then again. To take charge of one’s own pain, at least that was something. A mockery of comfort. Tremors passed through his body like a mob of schoolboys running sticks along a corrugated tin fence. He yanked again at the chain until the skin covering his wrists broke and a bruise revealed itself quickly, as if it had been waiting beneath the skin for such an opportunity. A contusion. Thou hast brought me to the dust of death.
He shat in the bucket, squatting in one corner of the room with elbows on his thighs and his trousers bunched around his ankles. Picking at his hairy, twitching shanks. Everything was filthy, all surfaces in this room furred with dust. The walls were sea green, the paint cracked and scabbing loose in places. A huge brown cupboard stood against one wall. Inside it a pair of blue trousers on a coathanger and a ghostly smell. Over the fireplace hung a watercolour of a waterfront scene. In some war or other they pegged women spread-eagled to the ground and jammed sticks of dynamite into their cunts. He tried to remember what Jane’s tits looked like. God, they were great tits. Breasts were the purest, warmest sort of flesh. Tears ballooned in his eyes and spilled over his eyelids. Pathetic.
The Low Road Page 19