The Low Road (19 page)

T
he house was more or less as Wild remembered it, dim and cluttered, a jumble of rooms, each awkwardly placed as if added as an afterthought. It possessed a sort of threadbare elegance. The hallway with red-and-gold wallpaper; a bathroom with a pink bathtub overlooking a damp, overgrown side garden; a library with books in teetering piles on the floor, so that moving among them was like walking through a miniature city with jagged buildings at waist height. A kitchen with two deep sinks, each with the rusty stains of dripping taps. At the rear of the house a sunroom with one entire wall of glass, and a shabby consulting room with a desk and wall-mounted medical certificates. He picked up a framed photograph of himself with Sherman and Jane, taken in the backyard, each of them squinting and giggling into the sun. He recalled the exact day it was taken, how the air sang with cicadas and heat, the bone of the old man's shoulder at his chest.

Everywhere he went, Wild expected to encounter an ancient person living amidst the rubble, to see some hunched and desiccated crone emerge from a shadow, perhaps even Sherman himself. But there was nobody: the only sign of life a pile of grey bird shit on the laundry floor and a pair of dirty dishes on the kitchen sink that had presumably been there since Sherman died. The kitchen cupboards were still stacked with plates and cups, and the pantry was piled with tins of food. Sherman had no family that Wild could remember and obviously no one had bothered to clean the place since the old man's death.

Fearful of the closing darkness, Wild had forced the front door, carried Lee in from the garden and laid him upon a wooden dining table in the main living room. The boy offered no resistance; it was like carrying a sack of bones. The electricity supply was apparently disconnected, but before nightfall he'd been able to scrounge a couple of gas lamps and several candles from a cupboard beneath a kitchen sink. Their light was skittish and infected everything with a kind of nervousness. Shadows jumped and rose, remained inert for a second before writhing away. It made it seem later than it really was.

Still wearing his tatty overcoat, Wild sat in one of several deep armchairs with rounded arms in the lounge room. Now in the house, he was bewildered by the thought of Sherman's death, ashamed he hadn't even known. How was it that age—that most absolute of inevitabilities—could be so unexpected? He thought of the times he'd come here seeking refuge through the years, Sherman's quiet but certain presence, the way he'd try to distract him from his suffering. Was there a greater melancholy than to sit in the abandoned house of a loved one long dead?

He had no real idea of what to do now and sat in silence, just breathing, hands steepled in front of his nose. He felt old, dense with meaning. Older than he had ever felt before. To travel is to age, he thought and raised his hands to his forehead to trace the contours of his skull with his fingertips. There was only the texture of skin stretched tight across his head. Frontal bone. The superciliary arch. Temporal bone. Parietal bone. Fingers traced down across his face. Zygomatic, masseter. An entire landscape of muscle and bone, sinew and gristle. The names were architectural, archaeological, like words lifted from strange texts, which, in a way, they were.

Like a cathedral
, Sherman used to say of the human body.
Nothing complicated. Don't be afraid of it. When you know how it is held together and have its laws explained, it's not so remarkable. It's correct to feel awe at first, but important to inquire after that. And like a cathedral, he would add, you need to enter with delicacy and respect. Take care not to disturb the atmosphere. Like pilgrims. Enter a person's body like a pilgrim.

As medical students, they laughed at ancient remedies and thought of themselves at the sharp end of progress. In days past, some terrible medieval century or other, people believed that in order to rid oneself of whooping cough one should stand on a beach and wait for the ebbing tide to drag their cough out to sea. Wild thought of this every time he visited a beach, imagined a line of tubercular people spluttering along the shore. They also believed diseases could be transferred from the living to the dead. A crowd of women at the scaffold pressing their swollen, bubonic children forward to touch the still-warm corpse of some poor bastard recently hanged.

He looked over at Lee, who lay on the table, his composure disturbed only occasionally by a quickening of his breath. Rub a piece of raw meat on a wart, bury the meat in the garden before dawn and within a week the wart will vanish. The thighbone's connected to the hipbone. His hands, now resting in his lap: more bones than any other part of the body. Twenty-seven or something. Scaphoid, trapezium, distal phalange. Flexor carpi. The hands were everything. Industry and destruction. Incredible things, the single most-useful instrument on earth. At medical school there was always the running joke, uttered in mock hysteria:
Not the hands! These are my future. Do what you like. Break anything, but not the hands.

The lounge room was a junkyard of furniture and clutter. Several fleshy couches, low side tables. Piles of magazines and books, Persian rugs layered across the wooden floor. Black-and-white photographs in small, silver frames. Three cabinets, each crammed with objects: books, unusual rocks, fossils, jade boxes with intricately carved lids, a glass mortar and pestle, bottles, dried flowers, a dried seahorse, the skull of a bird, a bowl of marbles, a curved dagger in the shape of a crescent moon. The place smelled faintly sweet, of preserved things, of spices, like a museum or apothecary.

He went over to the bookcase and trailed a finger along the broken spines. Gardening books, texts on tropical diseases. Herb guides. Cookbooks. Philosophy. A predictable selection of regulars, such as
Huckleberry Finn
and Shakespeare, but also more obscure medical classics:
Journeys in Diverse Places
, written in the sixteenth century;
On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals
;
A Morbid Anatomy of the Human Body
. A collection of Freud. The Bible, dense with sorrow, its Psalms alone enough to kill a man through sheer force of lamentation.

Standing there in near darkness, he allowed a well-thumbed
Gray's Anatomy
to fall open across his palm. Clumps of pages collapsed to one side and he breathed in the tome's exhalation of ink and paper, a whiff of mould. As ever, the drawings were breathtaking. Delicate and strong; almost impossibly human. More than a manual on human anatomy, they might have been the blueprints of God. Figure 1194, the anterolateral view of the head and neck. A man looking upwards and to his right, the pencil-drawn surface of his body marked and signposted. His head was tilted back slightly, revealing the triangular shadow of his jugular notch and the ledge of his left clavicle just beneath the skin. There is always so much happening in any living thing; they are never completely still. Wild inhaled again, deep and long.
The Masseter imparts fulness to the hinder part of the cheek; if firmly contracted, as when the teeth are clenched, its quadrilateral outline is plainly visible; the anterior border forms a prominent vertical ridge, behind which is a considerable fulness especially marked at the lower part of the muscle.

Carrying a candle in one fist, Wild shambled across and inspected the boy. Lee's eyes were closed and his skin was waxen, as if all external functions were shutting down in favour of those required deeper in the caverns of his poor body. His lips were apart, revealing teeth and the dark throat beyond. A tiny thread of saliva. Lee's features were slight and angular, the facial topography as yet undetermined. We end up with the face we deserve, Wild thought, the accumulation of a lifetime's worth of good and bad decisions. This boy was yet to make those choices. Perhaps he really was an innocent, with a face in waiting, as yet undefined?

Lee's breathing was shallow. Patient. A patient. To be under medical care. To wait one's turn. From the Latin
patior
. To suffer. Beneath his jacket, Lee's white shirt was dark with blood and his hands were stained with it. There was even a smear of it on his face.

Wild thought of the suitcase full of money and dope. It didn't make him as happy as it should, considering it could get him a long way from here. He could perhaps even last for some months. But he would eventually exhaust any supplies and have to start all over again. Always the same fears—of running out, of finding himself bereft, of being abandoned to himself alone. Perhaps it was better to have nothing at all? It was a bleak thought. Just leave in the morning and go somewhere else. If not tonight, then Lee would certainly be dead soon. There was not enough food here, no way of reaching help. Not even a telephone that worked. They were miles from anywhere. Nobody would know that Wild had ever been here, let alone left Lee here to die. His escape could be accomplished without too much effort.

Attracted by the candlelight, a moth blurred from the darkness and was gone, leaving in its wake fine scales like snowflakes scattered in Lee's eyelashes and across his cheeks. The creature reappeared a few seconds later and landed ungracefully on Lee's face. Its wings were dark brown, a ruffle at the neck like a tatty stole. With antennae roaming above its blunt head, the moth moved in a drunken circle along Lee's cheek and stopped near his mouth. Perhaps it sensed the stubble there, or a change in temperature. Several times it lifted one furry leg and placed it down again. Its wings trembled in the breeze of Lee's exhalation. Lee displayed no awareness of the moth. Wild leaned in closer, fascinated, as if expecting the moth to say something. If this were a fairytale the creature might indeed speak, dispense advice in cultured tones, perhaps reveal itself to be a warlock or a king.

What people didn't realise was that death is a process rather than a single event. Brain cells begin to die after only a few minutes without oxygen, but muscle cells might last a few hours. Bone and skin cells can even stay alive for several days after the heart has stopped beating. The actual moment of death can be hard to pinpoint, but for legal and medical purposes it is considered to be the point of no return. The first time he saw a cadaver Wild was amazed at how much space it occupied, as if death had left mass in exchange for vitality. Almost impossible to believe the object that so resembled a person would never again stand or speak. In laboratories at medical school twenty-five years earlier, he had stood with a dozen other students and watched in disbelief as the dark-yellow flesh of a man's chest was peeled back like canvas to expose his sternum. It seemed so rude. The thick stench of chemicals settled on their clothes and skin. They shuffled and stared and whispered so as not to offend the man lying before them with his grey mouth agape. The inner world, so nearby. Right
there
. We forget the skeleton we carry with us at all times. Hard to believe, in many ways as distant as a Bombay slum. Under fizzing fluorescent lights they learned to handle the dead, to name the parts and know how they functioned. The grey lungs of a smoker and the swollen liver of a drinker. They were made to feel powerful and intelligent. Any dread of the inanimate was dispelled by the brutal matter-of-fact, before they were let loose on the living.

But Lee was not quite dead yet. Wild looked at him. Uncertainly, he held out a finger in front of the moth and waited until the creature stepped daintily onto the back of his hand, as if mounting a stage. Carrying the insect, he walked through the darkened house. He left the lounge room and moved down the hall to the front door, went outside onto the creaking verandah and raised his hand into the air above his head. The dark air was very cold and the trees and eaves drizzled with rainwater. He could feel the moth moving on his skin until it found the edge. It waited for another minute with antennae still rotating before blundering into the night.

Wild returned to where Lee lay on the dining table. A newly awoken urgency burned through him.
He who wishes to be a surgeon should go to war
, wrote Hippocrates. It is often in times of crisis that medicine is compelled to advance. The German wounded fared better than their French counterparts during the Franco-Prussian War thanks to a willingness to use Lister's ideas on antiseptics. Thus we progress.

As gently as he could, as if handling something newborn, he lifted Lee in his arms. Come on, son.

Wild was aware of Lee's shallow gaze upon him as he removed the young man's bloody jacket and shirt, laid him back down on the table and prepared to operate. The boy might even have tried to say something, but it was probably just an anguished groan; he was almost certainly beyond language.

19

W
ild shook off his overcoat and arranged the things he would need on a low metal table he had retrieved from the consulting room: scalpels, needles, dressing, sutures, antiseptic. Forceps, with their long, serrated beaks. From Lee's torso he peeled away a soggy dressing of toilet paper and dropped the bloody mess to the floor. He waited, breathing heavily, inhaling the stink of blood and antiseptic.