The Devil's Highway

by Gregory Norminton

  Ice broke underfoot and he felt soft and sucking earth. Water was audible before the boy pulled him into it.

  ‘What do you think,’ he said, ‘you’re going to drown me?’

  The water ran so cold to his knees that it was like fire. He could feel the trembling insistence in the boy’s hand as he led them, not to the relief of the opposite bank, but along the bed of the stream.

  Marcus looked down. Starlight shimmered beneath them. He twisted his wrist free of the boy and shook off his fur gloves. Tucking the gloves in his armpit, he reached with both hands into the water. He drank and drank, scooping bitter, foul and never sufficient handfuls to his mouth. Bent over the stream, he gulped the fuel of hope. It was stronger than any magic.

  The boy tugged on his arm. Marcus felt cold flesh against his skin and realised that the boy had nothing to warm his hands.

  ‘Quickly,’ the boy squealed, and Marcus put on his gloves again. He nodded and waded after him a dozen yards or so, until the cold began to numb them both and they scrambled over ice and loose gravel onto the opposite bank.

  The boy was nimble and quick but Marcus could not easily follow. Three times he tripped and once fell headlong into the frosted leaves. His guide beckoned and pulled at him.

  ‘Damn it, yes,’ said Marcus. He felt for a loose branch that he might use as a weapon, but the boy gave him no opportunity: he twitched and danced until they were moving again.

  Where was he being led? Marcus longed for the open: the spread of the heath and the bright star-cloth of the sky. Anything to be free of these branches.

  His guide had other ideas. Marcus distinguished brightness but they were in heather for a hundred yards at most before thorny scrub clawed at them again. He was dragged like this from thicket to thicket, the green flames of gorse scalding his hands and face, until the decurion’s legs failed him, whereupon this wild spirit that was saving his life granted them both a rest.

  They wriggled in on hands and knees, ignoring the scratching of leaves. Where the boughs touched the ground, at the heart of the holly, they would find a green door against the wind.

  Going first, Andagin flushed a blackbird and winced to hear its scolding.

  In the dark womb of the holly, upon its pricking bed, they sat and nursed their sorrows. Andagin did not wish to think about Judoc. Could he be on their trail? Had he captured the other soldier, or come to grief in the attempt? He scowled to own his mind; he walked it along the route he planned. He could feel the soldier watching him, saw his night-shadow crouched and fearful. He supposed it was possible that the man might hurt him. He would resist of course, but could not hope to withstand a determined assault.

  Andagin’s fingers no longer burned with cold. They had grown numb, thick and stupid and scarcely his. He tried not to think of the mittens he had lost. If he did, he might howl like a baby. He clenched and unclenched his fists, breathing on his knuckles.

  He heard the soldier shuffle beside him. Gently, warm fingers took hold of his wrist. Andagin was afraid for a heartbeat, then felt fur against his skin.

  ‘I cannot take these,’ he said, trying to hand the gloves back, and the soldier replied in Andagin’s language:

  ‘Aye. Take them.’

  ‘You understand me?’

  ‘Very small.’

  ‘I cannot take your gloves. You will need them.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘I can warm my hands in my cloak,’ Andagin said, and buried them there to refuse the offer. Secretly he turned the Mother’s stone with his fingers, swapping it from hand to hand until his blood began to move again. He was glad of the pain, like nettle-rash: it meant he was not yet frozen. He remembered his grandfather’s corpse when they brought it back from the heath. He did not want such a purple, bitter end.

  ‘Do you,’ he whispered, ‘follow my words?’ He could sense the warmth of the soldier, smell his rancid, thirsty breath.

  ‘Follow some.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘A man. One of your men. I know at my camp.’

  ‘One of our people?’

  ‘He teach me.’

  Not well, thought Andagin. His accent was thick and the words simple like those of a child.

  ‘Why do you do this?’ the soldier asked.

  Andagin was silent. The man speaking his tongue, even badly, was unlooked-for luck. He needed the words that would carry most, and the effort made him light-headed. It was easier to run in darkness than to find his way in words. ‘I help you,’ Andagin said at last.

  ‘Yes and why?’

  ‘Because I need your help.’

  There was no time to say more. They heard the baying of the hound. Human whistles plotted movement through the scrub.

  Andagin went first, scrabbling clear of the holly. The soldier followed. Their tree stood in a copse of rowan: a weft of saplings concealed them even as it slowed them down. They fought their way free and were exposed on the winter heath.

  Enough old snow remained on the ground to show them up under starlight. Yes, it was easy to move, but safer to go slow and hidden. Andagin ran, stooping, towards a familiar clot of trees.

  Through winter’s undergrowth, the scorched fronds and juiceless brambles, they dragged their bodies.

  ‘Where do we go?’ the soldier whispered.

  ‘Calleva Atrebatum.’

  14

  No Man’s Land

  Dust. In his nostrils. Aitch breathes it in with a snort and it rattles in his throat.

  He doesn’t wake, not from a night like that, not in a place like this. He gets mugged by daylight. The sun duffs him up. His bed is sand and gravel and winter grass. He moans like a bear, as if someone might take pity on him. But he is as he always will be, alone. On the chuffing heath, with the old blockhouse for a bedhead. He smells puke and it might be his or it might be the gunk inside that concrete shell.

  Half ironically, he pats himself down, checks that his balls are where he left them. The cash he had in his back pocket isn’t. Spent it, didn’t he. Down the Three Mariners, trying to obliterate yesterday. But it didn’t work. There’s a bus ticket in place of his banknotes and he blinks at it to decipher a telephone number and an address, and immediately he remembers.

  Three lads in the beer garden. Cocksure, more than he was at their age. One of them he knew by sight – it’s his handwriting on the bus ticket. Gary Hazzard. Bekah used to shag his brother, Duke. Gary recognised Aitch, introduced him to his mates as a war hero and that didn’t set him off like it should because he’d already had a skinful.

  Gary must have been the oldest. Nineteen, twenty tops. Aitch can’t be sure the others were even eighteen – they were fresh-faced under their grime. Where’d they been to get like that? They couldn’t wait to tell him, raving about their 50cc two-stroke bikes, the laugh they’d been having on the heath, dodging the rangers and taking the piss out of old farts who tried to stop them.

  Aitch admits to himself, he’d wanted to put them in their place. They spoke about their Suzukis like they were high-tech killing machines, so he gave them both barrels. How he started riding when he was ten and his dad gave him a beaten-up Yamaha TY80 and he got dented and cut up on that bike, but he loved it, the power it lent him, 40 mph while other kids laboured uphill on their BMXs. How he graduated to bigger and nastier bikes, bigger and nastier injuries. It was the usual bullshit. The lads surrounded him on the bench and it turned his head. He fended off their questions about Afghanistan, but only because it made him look harder. Stuffing his face with cheese and onion crisps, fake pork scratchings, laughing when they told him some anecdote about knocking over a birdwatcher. It was all so funny – Aitch had mates and they liked him because he was the adult who went to the bar to buy them beer.

  ‘We’re gonna ride tomorrow,’ Gary said. ‘You can join us if you like.’

  Aitch was swaying and gurning and yeah, he said, cool, why not? And Gary Hazzard’s contact details are in his grubby fingers.

  He looks at the ad
dress. His head’s a plundered hive, each thought a raging bee.

  Water. He needs water and a lie-down and something to eat – Rachel could make it for him, but the vicarage is too far away and he could no more face her after a night on the lash than he could his sister.

  Desperate measures – what choice did he have? He’s a war hero, isn’t he? They’ll let him in. After all he was invited, and it’s not as if he has anywhere else to go.

  Dragging his heels, he sets off across the heath towards the Old Dean.

  Her father is in her room and talking before she is fully awake. Light erupts through the curtains and she buries her face in the pillow.

  ‘Up, up,’ he says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because today is a red-letter day.’

  Bobbie wishes her hair were long so she could hide under it. ‘I don’t even know what that means.’

  ‘A stonking day.’

  ‘No one says stonking. Hey!’ He has grabbed hold of the sheets and pulled them off her. She tugs down her nightie.

  ‘Come along, Grumplestiltskin. I have to be gone in half an hour.’

  She looks at him reproachfully, picking sleep grit from the corners of her eyes. He is dressed as yesterday for the heath. There is beard shadow on his chin. How much has he slept?

  ‘Dad –’

  ‘Get up!’

  ‘Where are you going?’ He stands half hidden behind the door, as if there is someone behind it tugging on his arm. ‘How’s your head?’ she asks him.

  He steps back into the room. ‘My head is absolutely fine. Don’t you worry about my head.’

  ‘You’ve got some scheme, haven’t you?’

  ‘If that’s what you want to call a perfectly coordinated law enforcement operation.’

  ‘Dad!’

  He sits on the edge of the bed, and she sees the fervour in his eyes, the fever.

  ‘What happened yesterday was the last straw. I’ve been on the phone to the MoD, the rangers – they’ve had enough. And Surrey Police are going to throw everything they have at it. Patrol cars and air support.’

  ‘You’re not going out there again.’

  ‘They need spotters on the ground. There hasn’t been time to assemble volunteers.’

  ‘Don’t you think you should stay at home?’

  ‘I’m not concussed.’

  ‘I’d like you to stay.’ But he does not hear. ‘Please.’

  ‘They behave as if the land belongs to them. They tear it up and burn it. And for years now, the worst they get is a police caution. These yobs are habituated lawbreakers – they’re laughing at us. It’s time to prosecute someone, haul one of them in front of a magistrate and see how he likes it.’

  There is a rush of heat inside her. It must show in her face, a dew of panic on her upper lip. ‘I really don’t think you should get involved.’

  At once, he is furious. ‘You’re being ridiculous. You’re being completely unreasonable.’

  ‘Dad, you got assaulted.’

  ‘And that was the catalyst! You never let an opportunity like that go to waste.’

  ‘Then,’ says Bobbie, ‘let me come with you.’ She does not want to go; she does not want to go, but at least she has quenched his anger. It falls to her, to Bobbie, to protect him. Mum wouldn’t want him going anywhere after what happened yesterday, after what’s been happening to him, and inside him, for weeks. Because of his father’s death. Because of the divorce. Everything he’s ever loved slipping away, so that he clings to what remains. ‘You need spotters on the ground,’ she says. ‘And there hasn’t been time to round people up.’ She watches him lean back, cooling even as the heat roils inside her. ‘Let me come with you.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he says.

  ‘We’re not going to be at the sharp end, are we? I don’t want to spend another day here on my own.’

  She watches the battle within him between his madness and what remains of his better judgement. ‘Let’s have breakfast,’ he says. ‘We’ll decide after we’ve eaten …’

  Only when he gets to the path in front of the semi (ragged lawn, smashed pallets, a dying shrub) does it occur to him that he has no idea of the time. Possibly the lads will be asleep. They won’t welcome him if he crashes in on their hangovers.

  He looks at his watch. Nearly nine. Late for working people, early for the likes of them.

  Only he’s dying of thirst.

  The knocker has broken off so he applies his knuckles. It’s Gary Hazzard who opens, and though Aitch expects him to gawp while he ransacks his memory, he greets him with a grunt and leaves the door ajar. Inside, it’s pretty much what Aitch imagined – three or four young men free at last to live like rats. He glimpses a living room and a pair of naked feet surfacing from the depths of a sofa. It all stinks of weed.

  Gary Hazzard leans against the kitchen units as Aitch makes his way to the sink. The lad’s in biking leathers.

  The sink is a shantytown of takeaway boxes. Aitch soaks the lot as he runs the cold tap and leans under it to gulp and gasp. Water dribbles down his chin but he’s not proud, it’s life he’s taking in, it’s freshness and greenness and it fills him with joy. He surfaces to contemplate a can of wife-beater.

  ‘Hair of the dog,’ says Gary.

  Aitch can’t be sure if he’s being made fun of. Does Gary know he’s a charity case? Does he think Aitch is a pisshead like his old man?

  ‘Na mate, cheers,’ Aitch says, and without expression Gary returns the can to the fridge. ‘You’re all here, are you?’

  ‘Jim is. Sandy’s gone for a job interview.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Mechanic.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘Reckons he is.’

  Now that he’s here, Aitch hasn’t the foggiest idea what to say, what these lads are to him or he to them. Gary doesn’t seem fussed – he shuffles off to the living room and Aitch contemplates leaving, only that would look rum, the sort of thing a homeless drifter would do, so he goes after him and there’s Jim in his boxers, belly creased as he crouches in the middle of the sofa skinning up.

  Gary plonks himself on the floor next to the telly and applies himself to a hangnail. ‘You up for that ride?’ he asks, and Aitch isn’t sure who he’s talking to. Jim says nothing, so it must be him.

  ‘Uh, sure.’

  ‘You can borrow Sandy’s wheels.’

  ‘Yeah, why not?’ The tap water has brought Aitch back from the brink. He feels fucking shit, which is an improvement. Get some scoff inside him and he might make it through another day. ‘Sandy’d be all right with that, would he?’

  ‘He won’t give a toss,’ pipes Jim, ‘so long as he gets it back in one piece.’

  ‘I’m good,’ Aitch says, bristling. ‘Been racing since before your voice broke.’

  Jim pauses, the rollie half gummed in his fingers. ‘I didn’t mean nothing by it,’ he says, and it occurs to Aitch that he’s afraid of him, probably he doesn’t even want that spliff, it’s all for show. They’re just kids acting tough.

  ‘How’s Duke these days?’ he asks Gary, to take the heat out of the moment.

  ‘Yeah, he’s all right.’

  ‘He’s still racing, is he?’

  ‘Na – got kids, wife won’t let him.’

  ‘There’s a warning to us all,’ Aitch says. He remembers Duke, Bekah’s boyfriend when Aitch was twelve or thirteen. He and the older lads got themselves a great beast of a motocross and revved it on the road till their heads buzzed. Aitch would watch whoever tried to tame it gunning so hard into the heath he wondered if they’d make it back alive. Christ knows where the rest of those lads are now. Haulage drivers, probably. Security guards. Tabard-sporting hosts at B&Q.

  Gary gets up with a squeak of biking leather and goes to the kitchen. He returns with plates and a loaf of Mighty White, a tub of margarine and some strawberry jam. Aitch doesn’t wait for permission, cramming it into his gob while Jim lights up and drags smoke into his lungs. Aitch t
akes a toke when he hands it over – just enough to take the edge off.

  Gary goes to wash his teeth and have a piss – he leaves the door open so they can hear everything – and comes back to rescue Aitch and Jim from their silence. He carries a biker’s helmet, white, for main roads, which he tosses at Aitch.

  ‘What, am I commuting?’

  ‘Can’t find Sandy’s, it’s all there is.’

  Aitch lifts and lowers the black-tinted visor. It’s a bit prissy for dirt-biking. ‘I’ll take it. I know the value of helmets. Seen ’em save lives in Afghan.’

  He’s pleased with the effect this has. They know he most likely killed people. He’s harder than they can ever be. And knowing that’s a buzz, isn’t it? Quite the little ego trip.

  She rolls the stone about in her pocket. Her talisman. Its ridges fit into the rounded flesh beneath her thumb. Its parallel furrows are like the concentric whorls of a fingerprint.

  She lifts the stone out of the pocket and swings her arms with it nestling in her fist.

  The heath is blazing hot already as Bobbie and her father reach the summit of the hill. She sees him repeatedly check his phone for a signal, but it proves unnecessary. The forest ranger – a grossly obese man, not the tanned athlete Bobbie was expecting – meets them at the western barrier of the Poors and hands over a walkie-talkie.

  ‘Mike,’ says her father. ‘This is my daughter.’

  ‘Hello,’ says the ranger, and he gives her a wink as if she were a little child. She dislikes the man instantly. ‘The MoD Land Rover is stationed north of Barossa. Chopper’s on the way from Guildford. Better hope we catch someone after all this.’

  Her father acts strangely with the ranger. It’s embarrassing to see him roll his shoulders and swagger like a cowboy. Bobbie wanders off while Mike talks him through the comms protocol. She peers down the gravel firebreak that runs to the telecoms tower. Her stomach is a cold hollow. She can think only of her mother, where she might be at this instant, what she might be doing. She ambles back to her father and Mike, who is saying, ‘No heroics, please. These are feral kids we’re dealing with.’