Devastation Road

by Jason Hewitt

  He should approach and see if someone might help him but, other than the strutting chickens in the yard, everything was still. At the side there was an overgrown vegetable patch and he felt the sudden pang of his hunger. The plants looked underdeveloped for this time of year though, the runner beans no more than scrawny infants reaching their arms up the canes. He stayed nervously crouched. It felt too quiet – just the chickens clearing their throats and the occasional surf of dust.

  Eventually he ventured out, stalking low across the grass, the pistol in his hand. He gave the house a wide berth, avoiding the shattered plant pot in the yard and the dead plant limping, saggy-limbed, from it. He crept in closer. He wondered if he should call out something. Hello? Is anyone in?

  The chickens clucked around his ankles as he edged between them. The strange liquid seeped from his nostrils again – not mucus but something else that stung at his lip until he wiped it away.

  On the veranda the front door was ajar. He nudged it just hard enough to open it, waited and listened, and then cautiously stepped in.

  To one side of the hall was a room stuffed with oversized dining furniture: an overbearing redwood table that had been polished so intensely that the sunlight pooled on it, and far too many chairs with narrow backs and finely crafted marquetry of two birds entwined in flight and splintered into different shaded pieces. There were paintings that, like the furniture, were too large for the space, and their gilt frames seemed entirely at odds with the wooden walls and stubby nails that they had been hung from. It was as if two worlds had collided, one consuming the other, the contents of a wealthy townhouse now hiding within the dead shell of a farm.

  Across the hallway the sitting room had been ransacked and the window smashed. There was a carved bookcase and matching dresser with a foreign newspaper on it, and a chaise longue and padded chairs, one with several penny-sized holes in it that coughed out puffs of stuffing like spittle on to the seat. His shoes crunched on bits of mirrored glass and the discarded books on the floor. When he turned over a broken photograph frame, the picture inside was gone. Sunlight pierced through two holes in the wall and fell on the debris, illuminating dried spatters of blood. He held still and listened, but heard only the soft crinkle of china quietly splintering beneath his feet.

  In the kitchen, drawers hung open, gaping, but he could find nothing to eat. He gripped the sideboard with both hands and tried to shake off his faintness. No sink and no running water. He slammed the work surface hard with his hand and cursed. He couldn’t even drink.

  At the top of the stairs he found three small bedrooms, all untouched and tidy, bar a double room at the back where the bed had a large dried bloodstain spread across its sheets, the rest of the red-soaked bedding pulled out like innards across the boarded floor. He pressed himself against the wall and then stepped over it all to the window. The sun was shining in through a pale film of fingerprints and the dusty flecks of grime. He realized that he had no idea what time it was and his gaze went to his wrist but there was nothing there. He wiped the window clean with his sleeve and looked out, his breath catching in his throat.

  Across the meadow was a figure. A boy, shovelling soil. He was tall and lanky, wearing a grey woollen jacket with what looked like patches on either elbow. He stopped and rested on the shovel, and then started again. There was something foreign about him, like the house and its furnishings, so that he was beginning to wonder if he wasn’t in England at all.

  There were two plots, one already completed, and he watched as the boy shovelled more on to the second and then threw the spade down. The boy glanced around before wiping his nose on the back of his arm and holding it there for a moment, and then taking a few deep breaths. When he had regained his composure, he picked up a couple of whittled branches and, pulling a ball of some sort of line from his pocket, he tied them into a cross, threading the line around the join several times and pulling it tight with a couple of hard yanks before he finally knotted it. He chewed it off and threw the cross down, but before he started work on the second, something made the boy turn, and in that moment before the man at the window bolted, they both caught each other’s eye.

  The pain in his head swelled like a storm. He could feel the pressure of it building, and that niggling discomfort beneath his ribs that felt like the ghost of a bullet. He moved his shoulder stiffly in its socket, feeling the grate of cartilage, and touched the tender split in his lip. If he could find something to eat, he told himself, if he could push the hunger and the pain aside, and roll his thoughts back to the beginning and start the day again . . . Nothing about it seemed familiar. He wanted to kick himself, just to feel it and know that he wasn’t asleep. He was not the type of man who lost things. And yet here he was, losing his mind.

  Yesterday, he thought.

  Had he caught a trolleybus? A murky memory leaked in of having a bag in his hand and being short of change. Not to worry, sir. ’Sonly thruppence. He couldn’t recall when this was though. It couldn’t have been yesterday. He usually cycled to Hawkers and kept his bike, like most of the others, in the back garden of Mr Levin’s. If he’d been on a trolleybus he couldn’t think where he would have been going. But there it came again: waiting outside the terrace houses, and a figure in the distance; then on the bus, the babble of other passengers and the sense that even then he hadn’t quite been there. He couldn’t have been, not yesterday. Somewhere else entirely. The memory felt too distant. And where was the bag now? Where was the ticket? Not in the jacket. Or in his pockets. He searched but nothing was there.

  Besides, he thought, that day had been so much hotter than this: people fanning themselves with papers and hankies, all the upper windows of the trolleybus wide open, an English town feverish in the summer heat. When now it felt like a different season entirely. The trees were still in bloom.

  It was as if part of him had melted away, an indeterminate amount of time and the memories within it faded to black, or evaporated entirely. He groped in his head but all he could think of was the trolleybus. Was there nothing between that moment and this? A break in time stitched together, so that whatever had been in the middle now simply was not there.

  He found himself on his knees, bending over the water, drops falling from his nose. He stared back at his wavering reflection. He had needed to see his face.

  He leant further. He could hardly believe it. The eyes had pulled back into their sockets, and what hair there was – cut short, almost to the skull – was receding at the temples where it had not receded before. It was a face that once had been full but now looked lean and wasted, all its youthful plumpness worn away. A gash of blood above his left eye was thick and dried and scabbing. There was bruising on the opposite temple, a cut along his jawline, a split lip and a bruised forearm, as if he had slammed it against something. The pain in the back of his head still pierced through him, along with the sharp ache beneath his ribs – the bullet that wasn’t there.

  He brought his fingertips to his cheek and around his jaw, feeling the skin and his fragility, the parts where even beneath the skin’s lining he felt raw and ravaged.

  My God. It was not a face he remembered. There were just the hidden reminders of his old self buried beneath fresh lines, paler skin, a darkening around his eyes . . . He wondered what on earth had happened to him. One didn’t step on to a trolleybus and simply disappear.

  He wrote his name on the bank with a twig just to know that it was true, scratching the ‘O’ into the dirt, and then the ‘W’, the ‘E’ and the ‘N’.

  That at least was automatic, something that he could be sure of, the tip of a first thread by which he might pull everything else back.

  He did not sleep. A cold bit into him that he had not expected after the relative warmth of the day. He had lit a fire quite easily, rubbing a stick between two rocks until the kindling had caught; but keeping it lit was a different matter. A dampness had crept through the countryside so that three times he’d got up to relight the fire until event
ually he had given up and pulled the jacket tighter around him, his hands pressed into his armpits.

  He lay there trying to recall a house, a room, a bed, a warm arm wrapped around him, but in the thickness of the night – in his own private darkness – there was nothing there.

  OWEN

  Owen woke as cold as if a frost had set within him, and his head felt muddy and confused. He had hoped the new day would bring with it some clarity or an awakening from the dream. Now, maybe an hour later, the strange world lingered.

  He was tired too. Most of the long night had been spent trying to thread his thoughts together, quite convinced that in time he would recall something that would explain everything, but the harder he tried, the less he was certain of. He could find no last fixed point.

  The memories that did come were old and childish and looped in his head: a dog called Cedar; another name – Suzie Sue; a picture of himself as a child running through fields with his arms outstretched; flying a kite with his father, its red wings spread like a buzzard’s, feeling the tug of the string in his hands as if, in his dreams, the kite was trying to wake him.

  As he walked he felt so hungry that he could feel his stomach gnawing. The state of his shoes concerned him, and with that the state of his feet. His head hurt and occasionally, if he turned it too sharply, dizziness soaked through him, or a distant tree or gatepost would divide, doubling in his vision. When that happened he would have to stop and steady himself, and wait for the world to eventually find its form.

  As his path took him over the brow of a hill, paralleling a lower road, he became aware of a line of travellers a short distance below him, moving through the sun-drenched mist. There were two four-wheeled carts, each pulled by a bony horse, their wooden wheels creaking and stumbling over the potholed road. In them he could see piles of furniture: wooden tables, thin-limbed chairs interlocked together, and the antlers of a deer hooked over one of the sides. Children sat on stacks of mattresses, cradling pans or wicker baskets, or clutching the corner of a blanket to their nose, or a doll, or a straw donkey, while adults walked alongside, bundles strapped to their backs.

  He followed, keeping out of sight, and watching them as they trudged through the smoky sunlight, their horses straining to haul the carts, and the rickety rattle of their furniture bumping around inside.

  After a while the road began to edge westerly, taking the procession with it, until it tipped the travellers over a hill and they disappeared into the sunlight.

  He had walked long distances before, he thought, for now a recollection was pooling. Not just the muscle memory of walking for hours, but days, and not in the full blush of spring either, but through deep snow with blizzards buffeting through a pine forest and whipping hard against his face. Then, just as quickly, the memory was gone again. He wondered if there was still a war on – a war that felt so distant in his mind and yet he was quite sure had barely begun.

  He remembered a radio announcement, and the next day at his desk, carefully marking out the lines of a plane – a precision laid out for something that, in his mind at least, had not yet been ruined in its reality – he had barely been able to concentrate. A worry had seeped into him that everything was about to change and with it, him too. Everyone would be altered. Lines would be redrawn, populations recalculated, trajectories of bombs and bullets scrutinized. No one would look for beauty in design any more. The womanly curve of a plane’s belly would be bastardized, bloated to make room for parachutists and weapons of destruction. At least we ain’t getting called up, Harry had said. And yet everything had changed.

  As he sat on the verge feeling for other cuts and bruises on a body that no longer felt like his own, and in clothes that weren’t his either, he found a pocket in the seam of the trousers and was surprised to find a metal button. He turned it over in his palm. It looked familiar yet he couldn’t remember whether he had seen the button before.

  He skirted a wheat field – the crop already waist-high, and the soft stalks rustling in the breeze. He had spent the morning wondering just how long he had been gone. He stopped for a moment and watched the wind casting ripples through the shifting leaves. If he tuned his ears he could hear them whispering to him, the reedy hush of their voices.

  He glanced around and then, seeing that no one was about, he took a step in, slowly venturing further and then feeling the lure of something stronger than he was pulling him in deeper. The tips of wheat licked at his arms as they had done when he’d been a child, that familiar smell of dusty dirt, and the crop swilling and swaying around him. He wanted to run through it. And then, in the memory that swept in on the breeze, sweeping him into it too, his brother was suddenly in front of him, the back of his head bobbing through the crop, the stark whiteness of his shirt against the tan of his arms. Max, he shouted. No, Max, wait! The two of them running through the wheat, their arms knocking against the stalks and the sun burning so bright that sometimes Max would disappear in its flare; or, without warning, would drop like a dead bird into the crop so that Owen would lose him and panic. He would stand in the middle of the field calling out to him: Max, he would shout, where are you? Then Max would burst out through the stalks beside him and with a holler knock him down into the dirt. I was here all the time, stupid, he would say, laughing, as Owen picked himself up. But not this time.

  Not now.

  He stood in the middle of the field, anxiously scanning it for that same movement, that rippling path, an unseen disturbance quickly coming for him through the wheat. He stood, waiting – watching and waiting – until another breath of wind blew through the crop, taking his fear and his brother with it.

  The seven soldiers were laid out along the verge like ninepins, each dressed in red green uniforms and missing their shoes and socks. Around them flies patrolled, alighting on stony faces or disappearing inside an open collar, or up the tunnel of a trouser leg and through a bracken of hairs.

  Owen edged closer then nudged one of the soldier’s ankles with his boot. Even knowing that they were dead, he squatted down and nervously touched one. The soldier’s hand was still warm. He stood up again sharply, pulling the pistol from his pocket and looking around, then pacing back up the path several yards and scanning the trees on one side and the fields that rolled out on the other. He thought he could sense eyes watching him but he could see nothing there. Whoever had shot them must still be close; these men were not long dead.

  He made his way back, still alert, and crouched down beside them again. The flies had already moved back in, pitter-pattering over the skin.

  After some awkward digging around he found a torn map in the breast pocket of one and a small notebook with a blank page at the back. He ripped it out and slipped it into his pocket along with the stub of a pencil; their pistols, bullets and cigarettes, or any chocolate they might have carried, had already been taken.

  For some time he sat on the grass trying to piece the sheets of map together but the place names all looked foreign. He didn’t know whether they were German or Dutch or something else entirely. He folded the pieces and pocketed them. When he stood back up, he could have sworn that one of the soldiers had turned his head.

  If there really was a war on and he had no idea where he was, then it was much safer not to be seen. The pain in his head still felt like eyes drilling into him and several times Owen had abruptly stopped, distinctly sure that someone was following him. He kept hold of the pistol and checked his pockets: paper, maps, button, pencil. He had to keep checking that everything was in place.

  The morning slowly dissolved, and at times the train wreck and the soldiers laid out like ninepins were gone from his mind entirely, so that it was only when he saw the scrap of paper in his hand that the recollection sprang back and he remembered it was true.

  MAX, he had written.

  How despairing of him his brother would be.

  Lost? Oh, for God’s sake.

  Snatches of thought like that constantly peeled away, though he tried hard t
o cling to them: drawing the stringers of a wing at his desk; the red trolleybus following the overhead wires down the hill. He stepped on the back. Not to worry, sir. ’Sonly thruppence. The conductor had punched out a ticket anyway. Names, too, blew in and away again. Barnes and Budgie and Peri . . .

  You need to make a note of everything. Nothing in his head felt safe.

  And then his father was grabbing the strings just in time and swooping the kite back into the blue. I say, he said, that was close.

  It was only as these thoughts dispersed that he realized that he had somehow wandered on to a narrow road and was standing in the middle of it. The sky had opened up into a rich wide blue. Dandelion seeds drifted like parachutists across his path. He stared behind him at the road he must have walked along, at the gentle haze in the distance shimmering above the dirt. Then, for a moment, there in the watery blur, he thought he saw the silhouette of a boy standing maybe half a mile back – a boy, tall and thin and watching him. The silhouette quivered and disappeared.

  The terrain hardened, the hills forming into jagged edges and the trees into prickly furze. For a while he sat on the verge and could not stop himself crying.

  He wondered if there was someone waiting for him. He had no wedding ring or photograph. If he were married would he not feel it? The memory of it might be gone like so much else but there would surely be something deeper within him that could not so easily be cut away. In time, the sense of someone might come, he told himself; it might bring a face, a name. He would not die. He would not give up. He would somehow get himself home.

  He took out the map again with fresh determination and searched within its sheets. Somewhere he was lost within it: the most indistinguishable pinprick trapped beneath its contours. He scanned the symbols, the railway lines, the rivers and the strange-looking place names. Harry had once said that the cartographer was to the land what the draughtsman was to aircraft: bringing a plan and order to something that would otherwise feel unnavigable. The map, though, was faded and stained, and staring at it he realized what nonsense this was, even if he tried to think of the contours as no more than arcs and the rivers as no more than cables wiring the land together.