Devastation Road (2 page)

He turned, fearful now that someone was watching him, and tried scrambling up the bank but it had grown too steep. Instead he drew himself beneath the trees, picking up a dead branch and
gripping it tightly. Had they been attacked?
Had he been attacked?
He half expected to hear a voice, someone coming after him, or perhaps not even that but one last piercing shot that
would return him to sleep.

Edging on, he approached a bend in the river, the surge of water growing into a tumultuous roar. The banks on either side were rising higher and higher, the land veering up to form a steep and
rocky gorge. He had seen no more bodies, only a pair of ladies’ stockings snagged on a branch, the empty legs weaving in the water like eels trying to swim upstream.

As the river arced around, he ducked under some branches and was brought to an abrupt halt. Some distance further upriver stood the remains of a stone bridge, both sides fallen away to leave
nothing but two central arches standing unbuckled and helpless on their piers among the rubble below. The girders of a railway track stuck out like huge twisted hairpins from one end, bending down
towards the water. There beneath it lay the broken wreckage of a locomotive, carriages mangled and up-ended, doors thrown open, piston rods bent and wheels torn away, the carcass of an engine,
around and over and through all of which the river thundered. He stared at it, his eyes still blurred and blinking. He would open his eyes for real in a minute. His heart might still be pounding
but he would find himself in a bed, in a house, in a home he knew, and all of this would be forgotten.

In front of him the crows nosed around the bits of wood and metal, and then took to the air in a flurry of wings and water, their sudden laughter filling his ears, but still he did not wake.

He clawed his way over the carriages, clambering on to the side of one that, overturned in the water, now formed a sloping roof, and from there on to another, occasionally
losing his grip and slipping, fighting against the water that blasted and buffeted through every crack and hole. Here and there bodies lay caught among the bent iron and broken wood: pale-faced men
in drenched suits or women in buttoned coats and flowered dresses; others were soldiers or guards, their uniforms unmistakable within the carnage.

A single door was now a skylight, and peering down through the hole he saw bodies floating among the benches and luggage racks. A teddy bear with one eye missing bobbed against a shut window. He
watched it nudging at the glass and then turned away, the sight of it making his stomach flip and clench into a fist.

He rummaged for a while, climbing over the wreckage as if the piled carriages were rocks on a beach. In the pools and crevices he scavenged for food, one eye nervously on the blurred slopes
around him as his feet slipped about on the wet metalwork. In among the broken sleepers and mangled rods of iron, smashed glass glinted like broken shards of sunlight and wet rags of clothes
haemorrhaged from burst cases before being carried away downstream.

He found the pistol in the holster of a grey-uniformed soldier crushed between two wagons. With his hands shaking, he pulled out the magazine and counted eight bullets, then somehow fumbled it
back together and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

As he carefully made his way down to where the engine was he noticed a backpack caught by a branch. Cautiously he lowered himself and waded in. The water was cold and fierce, pulling at his
legs. It took some time to unhook the pack but he managed it and clambered back up on to an iron-frame ladder and then the footplate and the top of the engine’s cab. On the tilted side of the
tender he perched with the backpack on his knees. There were scratches and rips in the canvas where something had tried to tear it open, and on the top a faded number had been scrawled: 4993. He
unfastened the buckles and took out a small parcel wrapped in sodden paper. He peeled the shreds of it away until, buried within its soggy folds, he found a hunk of rye bread, now a sodden mush
that disintegrated like oatmeal and crumbled into the water. There was nothing else except, in a side pocket, a clutch of tightly bound letters that were soaked through as well, the ink drained
away to a wash of watery lines. He tossed them into the river and then hurled the empty bag in after them, watching as the letters, like waterlilies, drifted away downstream.

After a while the gorge became shallower but the terrain along the river grew too overgrown to navigate, and he was forced up the slope back into the trees. He struggled
through the dense woodland and broke through to open land. He wondered whether he should retrace his steps back to the field, double-check whether he had dropped anything or whether he might see
something familiar coming at it from a different angle, around which everything would fall back into place. He must have been robbed.
Had he been robbed?
There would be a simple
explanation. He was not the sort that panicked. He simply needed to think.

Yesterday, he thought. Surely he had been at work, seated at his draughtsman’s bench with Harry beside him. He remembered his section had been working on the new wing structure of what
would be the Typhoon. He had been drawing out the stringers that went across the wings’ ribs, his logarithmic tables beside him, and his set squares and rulers. Had that only been yesterday?
He tried to remember anything else but there was nothing there.

Ahead and behind him, the fields ebbed away over the horizon. He looked in the direction that he had just come from but even the landscape he had walked through only minutes ago now looked
unfamiliar.

He put his fingers to the back of his swelling scalp and winced; then he took his head in both hands and let out a desperate sob. He couldn’t walk any further. He couldn’t think what
had happened. He slumped in the grass, so tired and hungry. He didn’t even know how long he’d been walking. Perhaps it had been days.

He looked at his clothes. Not his trousers. Not his shoes. He rummaged in the pockets and, feeling something weighty in the jacket, he was surprised – alarmed, even – to pull out a
pistol. Was it his? It couldn’t be his. He turned it over in his hand. He didn’t remember having a pistol, yet something about it was familiar. He emptied out the magazine – eight
bullets – then pushed it back with a click and slipped it back into the pocket. Jesus Christ, he thought. He prayed to God he hadn’t shot anyone.

He studied the shoes, the laces twice broken and twice knotted, and the stitching straining to keep them together. When he took them off he found that there was nothing written inside. He felt
down each trouser leg, and then to his surprise found that something had been sewn into them: something flat and round and hard, and embedded within a tiny pocket that had been cut into the seam.
He prised it out with his finger. It was a rusted metal button. He turned it in his palm, confused by it, then smelt the tin and felt its scratches, the raised ridge around its edge and four tiny
eyelets. It seemed an odd thing to have, hidden away like a secret. Someone else’s button. Someone else’s gun.

He pulled himself to his feet and carried on walking. After an hour he passed a half-buried rock in the undergrowth. It had a painted face on it. He could have sworn that it was grinning.

The house across the meadow was a ramshackle attempt at a wooden-framed building. Curling paint crumbled on the slatted walls and the veranda rails were loose and leaning,
while glass was strewn across the boards from a shattered window at the front. Beneath the broken guttering was a barrel, a bucket, a pair of boots and, pushed against the wall, the mound of an
overturned rowboat with a hole the size of a foot through it, the wood all gone to rot.

He didn’t know how long he had been watching from under the trees. His thoughts kept sliding out from under him; he could barely keep himself conscious. The only constant was the hymn in
his head, that same refrain riding in and jerking him awake.

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.