The Low Road (26 page)

Now that the fire had been rebuilt, the room was warm. Ignoring Wild, Lee shifted back from the fireplace. OK then. Might leave you to it.

Wild looked up. His face was damp and streaked. He sniffled and ran the back of his hand under his nose. What do you mean?

Nothing. Just might go and sleep and—

No, don't. What are you talking about? Don't leave me. Please. A bit longer. What's the rush? Talk to me. Give me something.

Give you
what
? Why the hell do you want to know all this? What's it to you, anyway?

What are you so afraid of?

Lee attempted a shrug. I'm not afraid. It's late.

You look afraid. I was only trying to be friendly. To be a friend. Forget it then.

Lee listened to the drilling rain. If it kept up like this they would be flooded. He imagined the house being torn from its sodden stumps and borne across the fields, its ramshackle creak and sigh, snagging on fences and signs. The fire hissed and popped. He sat unwillingly back on the chair. I'm tired.

Wild scratched at his face and neck and ran his hands over his head, as if tormented by bugs. He grimaced and groaned and chewed at the air. He muttered things to himself. After a minute or so, he settled and again hugged his knees to his chest. So? he said.

What?

Favourite meal. Best thing your mum cooked.

Lee stared into the fire. One of the larger logs was shaped like a dog's head, complete with two knots for ears and a small, sharp mouth. There was obviously no avoiding this fucking conversation. That smear of night. I don't really remember. My parents died when I was little.

How long ago?

Twelve years or so.

Or so?

OK. Twelve years. July 15.

Ides of July.

What?

Wild shook his head. Nothing.

They were both killed. In an accident, a car accident. Long time ago now.

And as soon as he said it, Lee wondered why he was telling Wild any of this, a sensation coupled to the fear of knowing that once he began, there seemed no way to stop. He was haunted, as always, by the insignificance of mere words. They could never be the thing; this was the great failure of language.
Killed
.
Years
. Such small and hollow sounds.
Accident
. That this word could mean both someone spilling their tea and what occurred to his parents on that night. The swerve of trees suddenly ahead. There must be better sounds than these. He lit a cigarette and considered its burning tip.

The car my dad was driving slid off the road into a tree. Just lost control, I think. No big thing. It was wet and raining and my parents were bickering. My mother occasionally picked on my dad. Sort of harassed him. I mean, she loved him, I'm sure she loved him, but, you know, people are strange. You never know what goes on between other people. She used to call him Lucky.
Here comes Lucky
, she'd say.
How'd you go today, Lucky?
Often with a little curl on the
L
, sort of drawing it out and raising an eyebrow. When she smoked a cigarette—which wasn't very often—the first time she put it into her mouth she would hold the very end of it, the end you light, and just hold it there on her bottom lip for the tiniest half a second before taking her hand away and lighting it. Like she was thinking about having the cigarette,
really
thinking about it, all in that little speck of time. Always seemed so exotic to me, so worldly or something. The lipstick on it.

Why Lucky?

Oh, because he used to love to bet at the track. That's what he wanted, really, to hang out with the guys in the yards and shoot the breeze and talk about horses. About who sired who and all that stuff. State of the track, which jockey was riding, you know . . . Not that he lost all our money or anything. We weren't poor. He worked in a printing place. Not sure what he did. We were OK, I think. But, you know, it's easy to have a go at someone like that. I think my mother had ambitions for us. High hopes. Like my sister. Wanted something bigger and better. Her mother never wanted her to marry Dad and, you know . . .

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

H
e 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