The Devil's Highway

by Gregory Norminton

  Condatis climbed the steps, watching that he spilled nothing from his bowls and flagon.

  Marcus took his breakfast and Condatis began to prise open oyster shells with his knife.

  ‘I have been admiring our road.’ His servant looked up, attempting to gauge what was required of him. ‘It is not like your sandy paths. Your wayfarer routes that twist and turn.’

  ‘My people,’ said Condatis, ‘do not see as yours do. We are not so here to there. We turn,’ he said and, defeated by language, traced a snail’s shell in the air.

  The veins showed blue beneath the man’s pale skin. He was lean and wiry; the grey hairs on his scalp were too sparse to be limewashed into a warrior’s mane. He handed over the shucked oysters.

  ‘My nurse used to warn me about your people. She liked to frighten me with tales of the dreaded Keltoi who once sacked Rome.’

  ‘Long ago,’ said the Briton in his own tongue. The decurion had learned enough of it to understand. It was hard to square the horrors of the uprising with this mild man. Marcus regarded that bowed head. The dwelling-place of the soul. To take a head in battle was to possess the soul of one’s enemy – did they not believe that?

  ‘Rome’s past is your past,’ Marcus said in the language of Rome. ‘Do you not think it a glorious heritage to have come so close to the seat of your enemy?’

  ‘My people are herders. We know nothing of old wars.’

  ‘That is deftly spoken. Rome’s peace will absorb your people. Our gods were the vanguard. Is not your Taranis our Jupiter in a local guise? And your Camulos is, I think, no match for our Mars.’

  Marcus contemplated his manservant. There was strength in that leanness. Would he be of use as a guide in the hunt? Aulus Pomponius had plans to stir the blood by spilling some.

  ‘Do you hunt, Condatis?’

  ‘Hunt?’

  Marcus spoke the local word – or what he took it to be.

  The tribesman blanched. ‘The killing days are over.’

  ‘You misunderstand. I mean for meat. Hunting beasts.’

  Marcus hesitated. A local’s sense of the land might help but not, perhaps, the local reverence for brute nature. It was good to set one’s wits against a quarry – to boast over its flesh as if in victory. Why speak softly to a carcass, why thank its spirit that had none?

  ‘What sort of man was your father?’

  ‘A good man, sir. He died when I was young.’

  ‘Was he a religious man?’ Again, that muted bewilderment. ‘Did he fear the gods?’

  ‘Who does not fear the gods?’

  ‘And the wild places, did he revere them? I have heard of a British man who ran mad when the Legion felled a grove of oaks.’

  ‘I know nothing of this.’

  ‘No, you are very tactful.’

  Condatis had put on a cape of evasion. Marcus regretted his interrogation and wanted to share something of himself, to make a peace offering. ‘My father is still alive. As far as I know. His trade is tableware. He sells to ambitious men who want their wealth to speak for itself.’ The Briton nodded, secure in his deferential burrow. ‘My brother stands to inherit the foundry and the business. I have soldiering. Perhaps it will keep me here, in your country.’

  ‘It is your country now.’

  Ah, thought Marcus, I have lured you out. ‘Well, I will be pensioned off to fatter pastures. In the midlands, no doubt, where I shall dig turnips until another uprising finishes me off.’ He sensed his servant weighing these words, sifting them for a nugget of intention.

  ‘When that time comes,’ the Briton said, ‘perhaps you will consider my services.’

  Marcus felt his lips open and close. ‘Perhaps,’ he managed to reply.

  Condatis bowed and took back the breakfast vessels. Marcus watched him withdraw, negotiating with hands full the narrow wooden steps to the camp.

  A raven cronked from one of the granary towers. Marcus looked for it through the smoke and growing clamour of the settlement. He noticed that the snow had stopped falling. It would be a bright day for once; all the better because unlooked for. A blessing.

  2

  No Man’s Land

  She realises only after she has woken that she did so braced for the smell of smoke on her pillow. The bedroom is hot and whiffy like a sickroom in summer, and the heavy curtains admit a sliver of breeze in which she expects, almost avidly, the scent of wildfire.

  She lies on her back, looking at the spines of Polish thrillers on the bookshelves. Shutting her eyes, she wills sleep to reclaim her, but she is cut adrift and washed ashore on another day.

  She gets up from the hardness of the bed and pulls back the curtains. A bright morning, another one, the sky pale blue and slashed with contrails. She fights with the stiff latch and lurches out –

  – blossom and earth and cut grass. The neighbour leaning on the frame of his lawnmower. No smoke, at least not yet. She pads to the bathroom, pees, then goes downstairs. In the kitchen she finds a note folded and propped up against one of her grandfather’s ashtrays.

  Gone out on fire watch! Dad xx

  She stares at the words as if she expects them to rearrange themselves on the paper. He has left her again to her homework and the heavy tutting of the kitchen clock.

  Bobbie slouches, slack-bellied, at the sink and looks out at the garden. The oaks are naked but elsewhere it’s leaf-burst, the beech and chestnuts incandescent with spring. What her father calls the green mist. He wrote about it for the book he was working on before Mum left, before they came to Bagshot these Easter holidays to sort through fifty years of stuff – files, folders, clothes, books, pictures, furniture, garden tools, dusty junk in the garage. She wanders into the sitting room, barefoot on the worn carpet, and contemplates the cardboard boxes left open and gaping. When her father isn’t filling these with his inheritance – though some are marked ‘Mum’, ‘Roberta’, ‘Dump’ – he is out on the heath. Why should she wait for him if he cannot be bothered to greet her when she rises? It’s not as if there are DVDs to watch, or music worth listening to in her grandfather’s record collection.

  Bobbie returns to the kitchen. She pulls the dry loaf from the bread bin, hacks at it with the breadknife and fills the ticking toaster. Her friends will be playing in their North Oxford gardens. They will be cycling in University Park or going shopping with their mums. She has no one to hang out with. Only the Lost Boys. She imagines the heat coming off the sand on the Poors Allotment. Waiting for her toast, she pictures the journey – imagines setting herself against the hill, the soil clenching beneath her boots.

  A sunburst – a flashbulb going off in his face – and the air pulses. The noise is a giant punching him in both ears. Then (but there is no sequence, it’s all now) the hot splash of shrapnel. He lies on the ground with the high, shocked whine in his ears. He feels but cannot hear the patter of dust falling. Someone is screaming.

  He is on his back, waving his legs in the air to restrict blood flow. His heart isn’t so much pounding as taking one. Air escapes his lungs –

  – ah!

  He’s in bed.

  He’s in bed. He eases himself down and the sheets are damp with sweat. He focuses on his breathing – in through the nostrils, out through the mouth. Something catches in his throat and he hacks it loose, trying to do so quietly.

  He reaches for his watch on the bedside table. 7:39. The Rev will be up, all cheery and wholesome and unfuckable in her kitchen.

  He swings his legs over the side of the bed and the floor is cold and that feels good. He’s in England. He’s almost home. Almost back.

  Ten minutes and a crafty fag later, he is dressed and kitted out at the breakfast table. Rachel is sitting behind her second or third cup of coffee. He can see on her face how he must look – wired and worn out at the same time.

  ‘What’s it today?’ he asks.

  ‘Wednesday. Holy Communion. You’re most welcome.’

  ‘Na, it’s all right.’

  She has
left out the Rice Krispies and a sweating bottle of milk. The Rev sees but never mentions his shaking hands. She’s careful not to slam doors and to set the volume low on the radio and the television so they don’t come on with a blast. Even so, she makes mistakes. Like that time she invited him into the kitchen when there was raw lamb mince on the chopping board.

  ‘You wouldn’t care,’ she says, ‘for a grapefruit?’

  ‘Uh …’

  ‘This has been languishing in the fruit bowl. It’s on my conscience.’ She holds the grapefruit as he would hold her breast. ‘I bought it in a fit of healthy-mindedness. Can’t face it now.’

  ‘Bitter.’

  ‘I could manage it with a liberal sprinkling of sugar but I fear that would be missing the point.’

  The Rev gets this way with food. Some people need things to feel guilty about. ‘I don’t fancy it,’ he says. He sloshes milk into his breakfast cereal, hears it pucker and snap. He doesn’t fancy this, either, but he needs to get something inside him.

  ‘Rough night?’

  ‘Why, d’I wake you?’

  Rachel shakes her head. Sneaking a peek in her room that time, he saw the earplugs lying bent and mottled on her bedside table. ‘Have you given any thought,’ she asks, ‘to my suggestion? I have that number at Veterans Aid.’

  ‘I’m not a charity case.’

  ‘Aitch, you literally are right now, and you’re welcome, but staying here is no life, is it?’

  ‘You want me to leave.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying.’

  ‘Sounds like it.’

  ‘You can stay as long as you’ve nowhere else, but we need to come up with a long-term plan. Where do you see yourself, three-four years from now?’

  ‘Dunno, dead?’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘All right, stacking shelves, driving a forklift truck, working in a call centre selling shit to people who don’t need it.’

  ‘In a home of your own. Maybe with a partner, a kid.’

  ‘I don’t want kids.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘I’m not having kids.’

  ‘Aitch, I’m being hypothetical. My point is, organisations exist to help people like you.’

  ‘I’m dealing with it.’

  ‘You scream in your sleep. You get up looking like you’ve been on a three-day bender and I know you haven’t, it’s just what sleep has done to you, it’s what your dreams have done to you. There’s nothing wrong with accepting help.’ Her plump hands cup her mug of coffee that has COFFEE written on it. He stares at them because he feels the pressure of her watching and there’s no way in the world he can push his eyes up to meet hers. ‘Tell me you’ll think about it.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Is that a yes?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I can do all the preliminary work – the talking, the forms …’

  Christ. She lifts her mug to drink and he feels the weight of her attention lift, so he looks up and sees red hair and the pink of her face, and in the garden the apple blossom is getting picked apart by the wind and he has to get out, into the woods. He looks directly at her, and if only he could pin her down on the table, his thighs slapping against her bare arse, pounding her till she shouts his name like it’s not a sad puppy.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For being willing to listen.’

  ‘It’s your house.’

  ‘Technically it’s not.’

  Aitch fiddles with his shemagh, drapes it across his shoulder. ‘Reckon I’ll go see Bekah,’ he says.

  ‘Is that wise?’

  ‘Stu’s at work. Then maybe I’ll go for a run.’

  ‘Okey-doke,’ says Rachel. She drains her mug, gets up and puts it in the sink. Job done, parishioners to see. ‘Will you be going through the heath?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘To your sister’s?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It’s just the ground’s very dry. We’re supposed to take care not to drop cigarettes.’

  ‘“Don’t burn everything, Aitch!”’

  Rachel hiccups a laugh. ‘I don’t mean that.’

  ‘Cross my heart, Rev, hope to die, I promise I will not burn down the heath.’

  Locking the front door, she tastes the air. Nothing but the exhalation of flowers and, fainter, diesel fumes from a ride-on mower. She walks to the junction with College Ride. Putting Bagshot behind her, she follows the holly hedge as far as Pennyhill Park Hotel and its pungent hinterland of skips. At the crest of the hill she turns right, scaling a low bank of gravel shored up by oil drums. She pushes through holly and laurel, looking out for dog mess underfoot or bagged and hung from branches.

  In the wood the footpath is obstructed with logging debris. Someone has been grubbing up rhododendron, leaving the wrack snagged in trees as if deposited by a great flood. She walks among roots and torn branches. Machines have carved deep ruts in the mud.

  She drags a stick through the skeletons of last year’s bracken, knocking tentacles of new growth. Everywhere the understorey is in leaf – rowans with their stems nibbled by deer, birches spangled with sunlight. A blackbird, threshing leaves in search of springtails, flies scolding at her approach. Birds seem to call from every corner – chaffinch, robin, wren – and she imagines their song as silver threads tying up the wood. Above the trees the sky is raw with the rasp of jet engines.

  Bobbie enters the beech plantation. Her father has shown her the damage done to it by deer and squirrels. Inattentive, she treads in a rare puddle and tiny insects rise like vapour about her ankles.

  Has she ever known the woods this dry this early? She thinks about the fire on the ranges. They were in the Vauxhall at the time, taking more of Grandpa’s stuff to the dump. ‘That’s smoke,’ her father said. The air flashed blue and they bumped onto the verge to let a fire engine pass.

  ‘Could be a bonfire,’ said Bobbie, seeing the expression on her father’s face.

  ‘It’s not a bonfire.’

  After that, he swerved as he drove because he was fiddling with the car radio to find a local news station. He swore at Dolly Parton, he swore at travel updates.

  When they got back to Grandpa’s house, he left Bobbie in the hallway and ran to fetch his iPad. The heath in Pirbright was in flames. Sparks, they reckoned, from ordnance or a soldier’s cooking fire. Her father was scrolling in a sweat. ‘Says here a thousand acres.’

  ‘Is that a lot?’

  ‘That’s the lot. Jesus.’

  It was because of drought, he said, and the winter dieback. Spring is the worst time of year for it – nestlings in the heather eaten by flames, lizards cooked on the blackened soil. Bobbie listened but she failed to make the necessary noises. It made her father sullen all evening.

  She picks at shreds of bark torn from a beech by a gnawing squirrel. He reckons she doesn’t care about the land, but that’s not true. Didn’t they come here every summer, and every autumn half-term, to endure Grannie’s cooking and Grandpa’s lectures? And weren’t things easiest on those visits when all together they took off on long hikes, picking blackberries in August and mushrooms in October? Sometimes they found Sparassis, or brains as Bobbie calls it, spongy growths from pine stumps that you bake in casseroles or use to flavour omelettes. Deep amid the trees, they found boletus mushrooms with slimy caps. Best of all were the cep, so mild and nutty, filling her grandparents’ house with the smell of autumn woods.

  Those were among the few occasions when her grandfather, who considered the kitchen to be his wife’s domain, commandeered the means of production and banished the family to the sitting room, summoning them with a crier’s voice to grzybowa or mushroom soup, with poppy seedcake that he’d ordered from a Polish shop in Hounslow. That soup, Bobbie thinks, is lost to them now. Her father never learned how to make it – he’s tetchy about picking mushrooms for ecological reasons – and Grandpa was not one to write his recipes down.

&n
bsp; She sits on a stump among sweet chestnuts. The chestnuts are warped and dying, their flanks blackened by fire. Bobbie drinks from her water bottle and the cold makes her teeth ache. She lowers herself into stillness as her father taught her, trying to expand her peripheral vision – casting a web of attention to see what lands in it. She hears aircraft noise, traffic on Nine Mile Ride and the A30. Nearer, fainter, there is the shaken bell of a robin, the breeze in the pines. She tries to give herself to this moment, to stake a claim in it, but there are human voices at the edge of hearing and her wide-eyed stare contracts. She perceives, so dimly it might be a twinge of gristle in her jaw, the squeak of bicycle brakes. She stows the water in her rucksack and touches as she does so the patterned stone in its inner pocket.

  She retrieves the stone. It soothes her to roll the familiar shape in her palm.

  Her father found it twenty years ago – long before she existed – on a dig at Silchester. She imagines him with a full head of hair, on padded knees in a trench, scraping off the dirt with his thumbnail. The stone is shaped like a withered pear and carved with ribs and pockmarks. It was never knapped to kill or cut – its markings are odd, with hatchings like decoration about what Bobbie thinks of as its waist and neck. It’s impossible to guess its age – it might have been carved by a schoolboy on a field trip, or a soldier resting on manoeuvres. Bobbie likes to claim it’s prehistoric. No roads back then. No England. Only foraging and hunting, small groups of people your only shelter and hope of survival. When he presented her with the stone, her father had been circumspect. ‘I can’t guarantee that it’s of archaeological interest.’ Even so, it matters that the stone is hers, that it came into her keeping. In the first hand that held it, it would have felt the same as it does in hers.

  She puts the stone in her left trouser pocket and picks up the footpath towards Surrey Hill.

  Here he is, slouching behind the sports hall of the country park hotel. There’s gash everywhere: smashed beer bottles, cans of Red Bull, plastic bags with dogshit inside. It’s a relief to get under the trees. In the beech wood there’s a girl, or maybe a boy, of ten or so, thrashing old bracken with a stick. He doesn’t often see kids here, mostly dog walkers and lads from the estate on their way to the pub.