Neither though was I able to motivate Dextrose into anything above a tortuous pace, and when we were 50 yards up the road I saw Hilda reach the road behind us, in tepid pursuit.
Suddenly I was back in my own body, all out of ideas and bravado. We could not continue like this for much longer, and she was battery-powered. A hopeless shot, she might have been, but she would soon begin to gain on us and we would be done for.
Then Dextrose stopped and would not move. He was bent over, gasping like an asthmatic jackass. “What… the… mink… is… going… on?” he went, between wheezes.
“The old woman killed Importos and now she wants to kill us!”
His brow crumpled. “Importos?”
There was no time to explain. “Look!” I said, pointing back down the Nameless Highway.
Hilda had stopped, too, not 20 yards from us. She levelled the shotgun at us. “Ready boys?” she called out.
“GET DOWN!” I yelled, screwing my eyes shut and throwing myself to the ground.
BANG!
BANG!
“Damn you!” Hilda’s voice.
BANG!
“Mink you!” (No guesses.)
BANG!
(Hang on. How many shots in a shotgun?)
BANG!
I dared to open one eye and glance up. Dextrose had his revolver out, cursing under his breath; Hilda was reloading. Everyone was still alive.
BANG! Dextrose fired again, but his hand was shaking and his entire body gyrated unsteadily on its feet.
Back down the road I saw Hilda cock the shotgun. She held it out and looked vaguely down the barrel, more myopic than markswoman. Dextrose began shuffling towards her, pistol raised.
Burying my face in the road, I covered my head with my hands and let the smell of the wet tarmac return me to England.
BANG!
Then:
BOOOOM!
I sensed something flying over me.
After that, debris started raining down, clattering about the road around me. I did not dare open my eyes, waiting for something painful to hit me, knock me senseless or shatter a bone. Nothing did. For those few seconds, someone was looking after me, and he did not wear a tweed overcoat in the sunshine and he did not stink of booze.
When the unnatural shower had ceased and only the rain remained, I opened my eyes, removed my hands from my head and rose to my feet.
Devastation.
Lonely Bush Gas Station had simply vanished, replaced by the sort of crater a modest meteorite might have made. My father lay further up the Nameless Highway, blown there by the explosion. My concerns for him were allayed when he struggled to his feet and began wandering around looking perplexed, which was normal.
For her part, Hilda, the aged murderess, had been deposited some distance onto the sandy scrubland opposite her former residence, and lay bundled and unmoving nearby her upended wheelchair. I remembered Importos’ dying expression; her demise did not trouble me.
We had lost everything bar that which we carried on us. The bike was gone, Importos was gone, my luggage was gone… But we had survived, Dad and I.
It was all too much. The shock, the fear, the dicing with death, they all collided inside my stomach. I bent double and was sick among the slew of rubble that littered the scene.
When I had finished, by chance the cursed rain stopped too.
“Mink me! Eh?” went Dextrose as I approached him. He was sitting in the middle of the road supping from a bottle of beer. Where he had found it, I had no idea.
He held the bottle out to me. It was the first time I had ever seen him share his booze. I took it, tipped my head back and gulped down the warm, frothy brew, savouring the liquid and the numbness it promised.
“Alright! Stop! Mink me! That’s enough!” he gasped, motioning urgently for its return. He snatched the beer back, drained it and lobbed the bottle away.
I sat down next to him.
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
“What for?”
“For saving us.”
He was barely recognisable. A deep graze obscured his left cheek, seeping blood among the sand and grit, and his hair was matted with blood, no doubt the result of his crash-landing. The other side of his face was no worse than before, which was still shocking. His tracksuit bottoms were ripped at both knees, fantastically stained, and his overcoat was losing a sleeve.
“I’d forgotten you had a gun,” I said.
“Us too,” he replied.
“So how…”
“Went into me pocket to find that beer. Found that instead. Decided us might as well take a pot at the old cobweb on wheels. Couldn’t take no chances – another day or two an’ she’d have been in danger of hitting one of us!” He chuckled throatily to himself.
It was too early for me to find any of it funny. “Why are you laughing?”
“Well, I’m no marksman meself. Must have missed her and hit the petrol pump. What a minking bang! Eh?”
I shook my head.
“Ah come on, lad!” persisted Dad. “Harrison Dextrose has been through worse than this!”
It didn’t seem possible. “But you’ve just wiped off the map…” – quick mental arithmetic – “16 per cent of the landmarks on the Nameless Highway. Lonely Bush no longer exists.”
He shrugged. “You heard the old mink. They’ll plant another one.”
“You’re forgetting that the ‘old mink’ is dead.”
He nodded thoughtfully and we sat there in silence for a while.
I was stunned at how he had come to the rescue, having seemed so screwed up and lost within himself. Granted, his primary concern was doubtless his own safety, and his rescue had been all luck and no judgment… Yet, thinking about it, that’s how he had come across in The Lost Incompetent. Good fortune fell into his lap, whatever the levels of his womanising and debauchery, and his complete disregard for the conventions of preparation and planning. He sort of explored by default.
What drove him? Surely not purely the chance of fame and/or notoriety? Or even the whoring? I simply couldn’t work him out.
Harrison Dextrose was such a mass of contradictions. And I couldn’t help feeling some admiration for him seeping back.
“Why are you helping me?” I asked.
“Is I?”
That’s what I’d thought: my own safety was a mere byproduct of his. Or was that the old braggadocio? The bluster he concocted to obscure his sensitive side? Because he did have one, I felt fairly certain.
“Alright,” I said. Let’s see how deep he went. “What have you been thinking. While we were quiet just then?”
He shot me a queer look. “What’s this? Lady-talk?”
I said nothing.
“Oh alright,” he conceded. “I’ve been thinking I wish I’d saved two minking bottles, not one!” And he laughed.
This time I joined in. Our eyes met, his far from sparkling, but I dared not lean in for the family hug, not with one so determinedly macho.
The gaiety petered out and we fell silent.
I reached out for a nearby shard of metal. It was turquoise on one side, unpainted on the other; I suspected it had come from that old petrol pump. I began passing it between my hands. “So, what are we going to do?”
“Well,” he said, exhaling. “We’re minked!”
“Do we just sit here?”
He shook his head, shrugged.
“That heat’s gone, at least,” I said. I looked at my watch. “Nearly five o’clock. We could always walk a bit?”
“Where to?” There was nothing to be seen in either direction, just that never-ending road, straight as a stiff one. “How far to Mlwlw?”
Ah. That old chestnut. And we’d been getting along so well. Should I come clean? He was in no state to throttle me, after all.
“Actually we weren’t heading to Mlwlw.”
His neck stiffened.
I continued: “We were heading to Pretanike, to find your wife. Mrs Dextrose.”
No
response.
“My mother.”
He placed a palm on the road surface and pushed out a creaking leg. He put the other palm down and heaved himself onto all fours. Gradually, groaning, he pulled his torso upright and stood up. He dusted off his hands.
“Yer coming, then?” he said.
And we started trudging, away from the setting sun, off towards Pretanike.
It had soon become clear that he could not trudge and talk at the same time. The former took too much effort. But I was happy: any progress was progress, and it took us further away from the nightmare of Lonely Bush.
Without control, I replayed Importos’ death over and over again in my head. So brutal and swift. That sweet-seeming old lady and her hard-of-hearing husband. Tea, cake and homicide.
I kept wondering whether there was anything I could have done, and was relieved to conclude each time, no matter how I twisted it, that there was not. He had been opposite me, across the table, and it had all happened so quickly.
Detritos gone, and now his brother, each time with the same star witness: myself. What would their parents think? I trusted I would never find out.
Imagine their heartbreak. Both sons, outlived. No parent should have to experience that.
Importos’ distraught visage came back to me and I dry-heaved.
The fact that his passing also alleviated my retribution concerns kept surfacing and I had to repeatedly batter it back down, fearing for my own morality. How could my mind even countenance such dirt? Yet, like a guilty past, it would not go away.
I was feeling exhausted and couldn’t begin to imagine how Dextrose must have felt. That pensioner with his habits. He wheezed and muttered, shuffling along, like the one at the back of a chain gang.
At one point he tripped and fell. I was a little way ahead at the time – my subtle way of compelling him onwards – and I heard the stumble and turned around. He was lying on his gut, limbs splayed out, as if he’d been run over in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. As I approached him, he rolled onto his back and lay there staring at the sky. He grinned at me ruefully.
“Want a hand?” I asked.
He lifted his right arm; I grabbed him. And something strange happened.
Something… almost magical.
His hand was soft, far softer than I might have expected for one so coarse by nature, and it felt so much larger than mine, though in reality it was not. It was the first time I had held him, touched his skin, and I became lost in imaginings.
I saw myself as a young boy; the colours were washed out and the movement flickered, with odd flares of white light, as if I were viewing the scenes on an old cine projector. I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, bare feet on a lawn, very blond-haired, skipping around a paddling pool.
The scene switched. Dressed as a cowboy now: plastic chaps, felt hat, waistcoat, sheriff’s star and a silver pistol, hiding behind a tree and emerging to fire at an unseen assailant.
Another switch: a swimming gala, myself in too-tight trunks, lined up against competitors, ready to dive off the edge of the pool.
Again: birthday party, wearing a paper hat, eleven lit candles on a cake, preparing to blow. I stare into the camera eye, a child smiling, expression frozen in time.
Then I realised there had been adults in each montage, lingering on the periphery. A man and a woman, not Father and Mother.
Mr and Mrs Dextrose?
The visions disappeared and I was back on the Nameless Highway.
I looked down at my father and saw that he was crying.
Tears rolled down my own cheeks.
I lifted him to his feet.
Some while later, Dad announced that he was “minking done” and toppled over into the side of the road. Though we had stopped for several rests, I sensed that this would be our last of the day.
Would he be able to continue tomorrow, I wondered? Would there even be a tomorrow?
We might die of the cold, or thirst, or hunger, or be eaten by one of the monsters that lurked out there, hidden from view. The odds were stacked against us.
I sat down beside him and shuffled closer so that I might share with him some of my body heat. The light was fading. The sky had turned red again.
Red sky at night… But there were no shepherds out there. There was no one at all.
We had previously passed just one other vehicle – that crappy old farm truck – having travelled almost halfway along the Nameless Highway. What were the chances of another appearing, to whisk us to safety? Slim. And if we weren’t rescued, we would surely perish.
In a rising panic, I checked my pockets and was delighted to find, besides my wallet, that second bag of Sheep Shavings I had saved.
“Look!” I exclaimed, holding it aloft. “Food!”
My father glanced at the bag and raised an eyebrow, breaking a crusted scab in doing so. “Well done,” he said, half-heartedly. “Let’s see what I’ve got on us…”
He laid what he retrieved before him, naming each item as he did so.
“Lighter… string… pocket knife… torch…” He checked it worked, playing the beam on my face and chuckling when it did. “Boiled sweets… compass… haemorrhoid cream. Hehe… sticking plasters… wallet.” He did not open that in front of me. “Notebook… pencil…”
I was gobsmacked. He’d reminded me of Tom Baker in Doctor Who, and I was disappointed when he did not produce a paper bag of Jelly Babies.
But he hadn’t finished. “Hang on, I were sure I had…” Patting around his chest area, he held up a finger and delved into an inside pocket. “Knew I’d packed a bottle of mink somewhere! Never had need of it before…”
And he produced a plastic bottle of water. It had stagnated and turned slimy green, but that did not matter. It was liquid and we would live.
For the time being.
The least I could do was go on a recce for something to burn – the cold was beginning to bite – and our fortune held when I spotted, some distance up the highway and off to one side, a broken wooden crate. It had fallen off a lorry, I imagined, and I saw that someone had scrawled
along one side; however, the poultry was long gone. Mutated by now into something with a beard and fangs, I didn’t doubt.
The wood was so wet that it wouldn’t light, until I split it into smaller pieces to expose the dry inner layers. Once Dad’s lighter generated a flame among those, we were in business, piling them before us, the fiery glow warming our hearts while steam hissed off them.
Above us, the clouds had vanished and the darkened sky’s galactic denizens watched our preparations with mounting interest. We took a long slug of slimy, foul-tasting water each, even my father for whom the substance was tantamount to treachery. It slipped down my throat like a length of snot. Then I shared out half of the Sheep Shavings, carefully replacing the remainder in my pocket, and we ate those in a reverent hush, broken by the noisy crunches on the unhealthy grossness.
Finally – since our rations were sparse – Dad and I sucked one boiled sweet each. His was purple, my favourite flavour, though I didn’t complain, and mine was a twist of amber, sugar-coated on its edges. Cough candy. It brought back happy memories: a quarter-pound for tuppence from the school tuck-shop, and all mine because no one else liked them.
This wasn’t the life – we could have been far better off – however it was the very best we could manage under the circumstances.
I stared at him, illuminated in shades of orange, saw past the fact that he looked as if he had been cut barely alive from farm machinery, and so many questions flitted around my head.
Why had I been adopted? Why had he gone travelling? How much of the machismo was a façade? What about his own parents? My real grandparents. They hadn’t even crossed my mind. What was Mum really like? I had only seen that one photograph, and she looked so lovely and alive. I didn’t even know her first name. I could hardly keep calling her Mrs Dextrose.
I chanced it. “Dad, what’s…”
But he cut me dead. I
think he’d seen me lost in thought, and there was only so much he was prepared to give away so soon. “I’m minked, boy,” he said. “And that fire won’t last long. Here, move in next to old Dextrose. Mind yer don’t touch me old…” He remembered who I was and caught himself, before the innuendo could slip out.
The bottom of my foot had been kicked and there was a voice, somewhere above me. My closed eyes registered light and I could hear a deep, rattling hum. An engine?
“Wakey wakey! Bet you boys are glad to see me! Thunderbirds to the rescue!” Hold on, what had he said? Rescue?
I was on my feet in an instant.
The sky was mauve. Before me on the Nameless Highway was an old truck, tinny looking and dented, cream-coloured with a tarpaulin covering the rear. Its engine was running and there were spotlights at the bumper and above the windscreen. That cyclical guttural thrum, cutting through the silence of the early morning, felt both eerie and exciting.
In shadow against the vehicle’s glare was the figure of a man: short, with bow-legs and a brimmed hat.
He repeated himself: “Bet you boys are glad to see me!”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes we bloody well are!”
He held out his hand. “Charles Tiberius Snipe, at your service!”
I threw myself at him, sending him almost off-balance, and enveloped him in a bear-hug. “Thankyouthankyouthanyou!”
His hat came up to my nipples. The hug began to feel awkward and he pushed me gently away.
“No worries, mate. Don’t mention it. My friends call me Charlie,” said our saviour. “At least they would if I… anyway! What’s yours?”
“I’m Pilsbury. This is my Dad.”
Despite the racket, Dextrose remained curled up and unconscious. I couldn’t bring myself to wake him.
“Is he alright?” asked Charlie. “He looks terrible.”
“Yes. Yes, he’s fine. How…”
He put his hands on his hips and swaggered a bit without moving his feet. “You’re lucky I spotted you there, down at the side of the road. Chances of another vehicle passing this way in the next 24 hours are slimmer than a… slimmer than a… shit! No, hang on, I’ll think of something!”
Looking for Mrs Dextrose Page 15
