Devastation Road (12 page)

Janek had brought kindling in but for some time it was too sodden to do anything other than smoke, and they’d hastily made token attempts at tidying the room: kicking aside the bigger bits
of rubble, the dusty shoe and fork, and then shaking out the damp towel and laying it on the floor.

‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I do not want to make trouble.’

‘Well, that’s good to know,’ he said, trying to make light of it, ‘but a little late, I’d say. I mean, good God, I might have taken your bloody head off.’

She didn’t respond.

With the gun, he meant, and outside; although, granted, it was unlikely. However, it wouldn’t hurt to let her believe that he was made of tougher grit.

She pulled her legs in a little and murmured to the baby, trying to console him as her eyes scanned the room. The desperate and determined creature that Owen remembered from the road was gone.
Instead she sat, small and defeated, all the audaciousness of their last meeting replaced with the nervousness of a wren.

Janek crouched, with his eyes locked on her, while Owen stood with his hands in his pockets then took them out, not wanting her to think that he was anything but proper. He couldn’t think
what to say or even what to do.

After a while the room began to warm, the wood in the fire finally igniting as outside the skies opened with a rumble and the rain began to fall once more.

‘I must feed it,’ she said.

‘Yes. Of course,’ he said with relief. He turned his attention to the wall and the trail of dampness that was bleeding through the mortar. Behind him he was aware of her fumbling
with the buttons on her dress and trying to position the baby, who still squirmed and cried. She said something to Janek in German and he took his jacket off and threw it across.

‘
Danke
,’ she said, but Janek said nothing.

Owen could hear the baby feeding now beneath Janek’s jacket, the tiny legs pedalling under the cover, one hand waving in the air and the fingers opening and closing as if it were this
exertion of pressure that controlled the flow of milk.

‘Better?’

‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘Thank you. Forgive me. I only wanted . . .’

‘What?’

Her eyes lowered. A flash of light.

‘No,’ she said in the end, changing her mind. ‘You would not understand.’

‘I might.’

‘I had to come. I had to see it.’

‘You abandoned him,’ Owen said. ‘You left him on the side of the road. You left him—’

‘I know.’

‘On the side of the road.’

‘I know.’

‘Just lying there—’

‘I know! You don’t have to tell me,’ she said, raising her voice sharply. ‘I didn’t have a choice.’ That he didn’t believe. ‘I can’t look
after it.’

‘You’re his mother, aren’t you?’

Silence.

Janek sniffed.

There came another rumble of thunder, then her voice again, quiet and resolute.

‘I did not have a choice.’

Owen crunched through the rubble to the window and looked out at the rain, breathing deeply. He could feel the headache, long gone, returning once again. Behind him Janek sat, head tilted,
regarding her with that same detached suspicion he had once shown Owen.

‘Have you seen anyone?’ Owen said. ‘Any British troops, I mean?’

She shook her head.

‘American?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t know where they might be, then? You’ve not heard anything?’

She stared at him.

‘I’m trying to get home,’ he told her. ‘I just need—’

‘I don’t know anything,’ she said.

‘Right.’

‘I have not seen anyone.’

There was a flash and through the window the woods were momentarily lit up, a snapshot of the rain frozen mid-fall.

She was strangely androgynous, he thought, with her scarf tied around her head and whatever hair there was tucked out of sight. It was only the fullness of her lips and softness of her skin that
stopped her face from looking like that of a boy.

She kept her head down, reluctant to catch anyone’s eye, but Janek gave her no respite – pinning her with his glare. Owen tried to show some English civility and took his attention
elsewhere. There was something disturbing about the sound of the baby sucking at her with such animalistic hunger.

She must have seen him take the child. Had she been following them all this way?

‘I didn’t want to,’ she said. ‘I tried not to. I kept trying to turn back.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘I had to know it was all right. That’s all,’ she said. ‘I promise.’

He could feel himself getting angry. His mother had told him too many tales of babies left in bins, bundles, boxes and baskets. During the Great War, she had said, in the days when his father
and she had been courting, many young mothers who had lost husbands in the trenches had abandoned infants on the doors of St Mary’s, some with notes, some without, some without even a name.
She had called them all Little Man, or Little Lady until she could think of something better.

‘And what will you do now, then?’ Owen said. ‘Have you changed your mind? You want him back? Well, take him. Go on. We can’t keep him anyway. We can’t look after
him either.’

She stared at him hard.

The rain dripped through the ceiling into a tin at Janek’s feet.

‘Take me with you,’ she said. ‘Please.’

‘You’re not our responsibility,’ he told her. ‘Look at us. We can barely look after ourselves.’

‘No, you have to take me with you.’

‘You don’t know where we’re going.’

‘I don’t care,’ she said.

The boat would never have carried three of them, and when they had left the house the following morning, it had slipped its mooring, anyway, and drifted away.

They followed the river by foot. Owen and the girl with her child walked together while Janek strode on some distance ahead, beheading nettles with vicious swipes. Owen wondered if he and Janek
were thinking the same thoughts. Another mouth to feed. Another person to concern themselves with. Another inconvenience. Two might have been a partnership but four was a mess.

‘Thank you,’ she had murmured to Owen. But she hadn’t left them much choice.

The river emerged from the trees into flat lands, fields unfurling in both directions to where, in the distance, hills bumped along the horizon. Above them a squadron of planes came over, their
growling engines chewing the quietness so that one by one the three of them looked up.

Yakovlev Yak-9. He recognized the clean conventional line of the Russian fighter, even at 30,000 feet. He watched them passing over, their fuselages gleaming in the sun. So free and untethered
in all that vast emptiness, their war so much simpler, he thought – clean and precise and distant. Was that what had attracted him? Had the RAF provided a way of taking part without getting
his hands dirty or seeing what exactly it was he was doing? Their war was purely mechanical. There was no connection with the enemy pilots they shot down, the destruction they wrought below.

Now though, dropped thousands of feet beneath the planes and cast out in a landscape that was alien but real, the last dregs of the war were all around him. It was the stench of smoke, the grit
and sweat, the taste of bile in his mouth; it was the sound of a baby crying or a shot fired through an outstretched hand. And done with such venom, such cold calculation.

The boy strode on ahead, cutting a slim figure in the morning light, and they limped after him.

When Owen glanced back, there were more planes coming, black against the cloud, and further behind them, smaller lines of them like hornets finding their formation.

‘Get into the field,’ he quickly said, ushering Irena on. He shouted up ahead to the boy, signalling him off the path. ‘They’re using the river as a flight path,’
he called.

‘But we are not the enemy,’ she said.

‘Maybe,’ he told her, ‘but they don’t know that. Are you going to take the risk?’

He pulled out the map and spread it on the grass while the girl fed the baby. The field had a familiar gentle slope and instinctively he looked around for signs of Max, but
there was only Irena sitting on her coat with the infant and further downhill, Janek, his arms resting on his knees. He was picking leaves out of the grass and shredding them. Occasionally he threw
the girl a glare but she was absorbed in the baby who was grizzling in her arms.

In the sharp sunlight the dandelions scattered around her burned bright as if their roots were wires connecting them to a power source in the earth that made their yellow heads glow.

At one time he had felt quite confident he knew where they were, but that time was gone and the harder he stared at the map, the less certain he was of not only where they were going but where
it was that they had been. Perhaps it didn’t matter. Perhaps if he could just pinpoint where they were now, not far from a river . . . But there were lots, and he kept seeing them as
threadworms burrowing through the skin of the map.

Now that they had a woman and child, he needed to take responsibility. Perhaps he
had
been in the RAF. It was there on the paper, after all. Next to the word
PILOT
. If she asked him, he would tell her that, until he remembered anything different. He scrutinized his notes for other clues, but it was becoming a jumble. Words written on it in
every direction, many more than he could remember writing: arrows linking them, some circled, others crossed out and then written again.

KINGSTON
and
HARRY
and
HAWKER AIRCRAFT
.

SAGAN
had been circled, and
CAMP
written. When?

He turned it around and found a number: 4993. And then next to it a name –
SUZIE SUE
. But that hadn’t been her.

He pulled off the jacket. There was the square of grey cotton sewn to the inside pocket. It had niggled him all morning, burning away at his chest. He ran his fingers over the material, longing
to pull on the broken threads that tacked it in place. Not that the square of material mattered – the jacket was not his – but it bothered him, as the button bothered him and the pistol
that he couldn’t remember picking up, and that tender pain at his side where there wasn’t even a wound.

He watched Janek haul himself to his feet and come up the slope past Irena, but still she did not look. He slumped heavily next to Owen, resting his elbows on his knees again and his chin on his
knuckles, frowning.

‘She is bad mother.’

‘She is like my mother,’ Owen said. Something about the pale oval shape of her face and the milkiness of her skin.

The boy found a twig and poked it into the soil. Before long, Owen thought, there would be a ‘V’ and then another ‘v’ and then, more than likely, a box.

At least the baby seemed happier. The rash on his cheeks had gone and he was more inclined to sleep. Irena said nothing to the infant as she fed him, but gently rocked either him or herself
– it was hard to tell. She fiddled with the buttons at the front of her dress.

‘Where
are
we going?’ she said, nodding at the map in his hand.

‘I’m not sure. West,’ he said. ‘Where do you need to go?’

She didn’t answer but pulled her blouse closed.

‘What have you called him, anyway, the baby?’ he asked.

‘It does not have a name.’

‘You haven’t named him?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘It is not my decision.’

‘What do you mean?’

She looked over her shoulder at him and said it again. ‘It is not my decision.’

They cut through a field of rapeseed in a long disconsolate line, the crop waist-high and such a brilliant, dazzling yellow that it was almost too bright to look at. Janek held
the child aloft and the yellow pollen peppered their shirts, their jackets and trousers, and left its dust upon the hem of Irena’s cardigan.

Owen tried to recall how long he had been walking. Every new field they passed, every wood, brook, stream or road seemed to become more familiar as if he had passed through each one before, and
in time he would turn a corner and find himself back in that first field, the river pushing past at the bottom of it, pieces of clothing floating by.

They walked through a copse where there were pheasants rummaging, too quick for Janek to catch, and then a ploughed field that was strewn with a line of bomb blasts blown deep into the soil.

He saw Max’s letter in his mind, the sharp spikes of his brother’s handwriting scratched across the page. He had been working at the Royal West of England Academy where the Bristol
Aeroplane Company had temporarily relocated their head office. He’d met a girl, and now they had got engaged and he wanted to know when Owen was going up to meet her (Owen had been promising
for weeks). Then there was another letter, not long after, and a week after Paris had fallen: four lines, hastily written. This Owen remembered as he glanced up at another plane. He saw the lines
so clearly and yet fading as if they might as well have been written in the trail of vapour.

Don’t bother. We’re coming down
.

Can’t have the Krauts beating us
.

I’m signing up
.

You in?

Janek had deserted them or, rather, had gone off muttering something about food, and he had taken Owen’s pistol with him – something Owen now regretted in case the
boy actually used it or, worse, didn’t come back.

They waited for him under the trees, watching a distant road across the wheat fields where a line of T-34s trundled like armour-plated woodlice, a single proboscis sniffing at the air. He hoped
to God Janek hadn’t headed that way. He half expected to see a lone figure trying to hold them up and demanding bread with nothing but a pistol and a bent rusty knife; but the tanks moved on,
unhindered, and a motorbike buzzed along the road past them like an angry fly.

Irena stood at the fence with an air of agitation, her coat slung over it and the baby sitting at her hip.

‘German?’ he said.

‘Russian. They are everywhere.’

‘But aren’t they on our side?’