Furnace (18 page)

The girl must have been about thirteen or fourteen and I’d wondered what she was doing alone, but she looked neat and clean and well-cared for. It wasn’t my concern. Other than us,
the carriage had been clear and I’d taken a good look at her sleeping when I boarded. Long, straight blond hair; cool, pale doll’s face; doll’s hands. So still, you wouldn’t
think there was breath in her body, let alone a baggage of words.

I don’t think I’d like that, she replied.

No, he said. I guess you might not. You like the country, though?

Mmm, she hummed, like she didn’t want to say.

You don’t like the country?

No, she laughed, embarrassed.

I love the country. I couldn’t live anywhere but the country. You really don’t like the country?

No, she said again, sounding a little discomforted now. I don’t like bugs and stuff, she apologised.

Oh I get it now, he said, his tone brightening. You’re right not to like the bugs, he said. He whistled a single trailing note. Where I live, the bugs sometimes, they can eat you
alive.

I’ll bet, she agreed, happier again. I know what that’s like from camp and stuff. When I was a kid.

You know, you’ll probably think this is kind of gross, he went on, but where I live, in the summer, we don’t use deodorant or anything. I mean we wash and all. But nobody wears
deodorant because it draws the bugs. But I don’t know – you probably think that’s gross, right?

She said something but it was too quiet for me to hear.

The worst ones are called deer-fly, he said.

There was a long silence then. Maybe a minute or more.

Jeez, it’s quiet in here. Isn’t it quiet in here? he said at last. You notice that? You notice how empty the train is?

Uh huh, she said.

After what happened last week, with those planes and all the craziness, all the people in the cities, they’re living in fear. No-one wants to ride a plane or even a train now. That’s
my theory. Where I live, you won’t get that same kind of fear because it’s a city thing.

I guess, she said.

You watched it on TV? You saw it all happening?

Uh huh.

You saw those guys jumping?

She said nothing, but I imagined her nodding.

He whistled a single, trailing note. Amazing thing, he said wonderingly. You and me, he said, we’re kind of like refugees from all that, on this train. Or like old pioneers. Everyone else,
they’re too scared to move. They’re all huddling together, because of fear. That’s my theory. But you and me, we’re on the move. We’re on the way out of all that
craziness. We’re heading for the big old empty spaces, right?

Then there was some sort of rummaging and I remembered the canvas kit-bag he had with him. I wondered what he was looking for. See that? he said, and she let out a giggle. Hey, he said, you know
how I’m a red-head? Well red-heads are supposed to have something called a recessive gene. You know what genes are?

Uh huh. We studied those.

Well you know how with dogs you get, like, leader dogs and pack dogs? Well a recessive gene means you’re a pack dog. But me, I’m kind of a leader dog. So I figure I’m, like, a
mutant or something. It’s like I’m the exception that proves the rule. You ever heard that phrase?

She asked him if he had a dog.

No, he said, but where I live is good country to keep a dog. Hey, he said, you know that joke, the one that goes ‘it’s in your jeans?’

No, she said, and he didn’t take it further.

There was quiet again then and through the window I watched the hot late summer sun bearing down on Vermont. I put pen to paper but instead of writing found myself making the outline of a nude,
reclining, slender limbs wide open. I blocked it off, filled the square with ink, turned back to the low sun and woods. The harder I looked, the more I seemed to see pathways winding through the
trees, though I knew it was a trick of the light.

Just look at all those leaves, all ready to turn, I heard him say, and for a second I was startled as if it was my shoulder he was suddenly leaning at, my ear his lips were nearly brushing.

I stared at my hands; the smudged fingers, wet palms.

I love the fall, she replied, her own voice grown dreamier. When the leaves get really pretty – that’s so neat.

I thought you didn’t like the country, all that outdoors stuff, he teased, but gentler than he’d picked at her before.

Well, y’know. She giggled at herself, then thought for a time. You don’t get bugs in the fall.

No, he said, slow and almost melodic. No – most bugs die.

I imagined him nodding as he spoke, his pointed beard dipping; I pictured her smooth, upturned face.

You know all these woods are famous, he told her. In songs I mean. Old songs about Vermont. You know that song, ‘April in Vermont’?

I don’t know, she said. They’re nice though.

You like music?

Uh huh.

What kind?

Oh, I don’t know. Lots of kinds I guess. I kind of like Christina Aguilera.

He let out a death-rattle and she laughed. Man oh man, you like her stuff? Really?

Yeah. Well kind of.

You like the way she is in that new video though? You know the one where she’s dancing and her clothes are all like, sweaty and dirty and torn?

She hesitated. I guess it’s ok, she said.

You wouldn’t wear anything like that though?

I don’t know. I guess not.

You like her though?

Yeah, she said. And The Smashing Pumpkins.

Oh, you like the Pumpkins? Okay. Cool.

She laughed again, shyly.

You like all these woods though?

Uh huh. I like these kinds of trees. They’re not like, big dark winter trees.

You mean like pines and firs and stuff, right?

Yeah. The kind you get on mountains, in snow and all.

Yeah, he mused. Where I live, it’s like this.

It must be nice, in the fall.

Oh yeah. You should see the fall up there. You know, you should just miss your stop and get off with me where I’m going and see it all for yourself for a couple of days. You could do
that.

I don’t think so. She laughed. But she wasn’t uncomfortable anymore.

Well, I was just kidding. Where I live, I kid people all the time.

She didn’t answer and I realised I’d started drawing again.

I’m kind of known for it, he said.

I closed my eyes, shifted away from the window where I’d been leaning. And maybe the sudden movement reminded him I was there in front of them, because he said nothing for a long while
after that, even when she said something about a deer feeding at the tree-line.

After a time I opened my eyes and craned across so I could see clear down the aisle. We were almost at the tail of the long train and the far carriages beyond, where he came from, looked as
deserted as our own. I considered moving on into one of the last cars, but something kept me sitting there with them, feeling the same rocks and bumps, waiting. I finished another nude, the same
girl but standing this time, lewdly, and again boxed it, then scored it all black.

I dozed fretfully for what must have been hours, woke at a small station where no-one got off or on. The sun was much lower now, flooding in through the glass with a mellow, golden glow. Behind
me, they were speaking again, but softly, as if it was already night. I knew then the words I had to write wouldn’t come, not that day, and not ever. I looked at the few lines I’d
written, signed them – though God knows they couldn’t have made much sense – and folded the sheet closed. The nudes were still there, in their ink coffins.

All I wanted was sleep – sleep to the end of the line – and I wasn’t sorry to hear him wander on back with her, still talking softly, too soft for me to understand, into the
empty carriages.

The track was closed to vehicles – she remembered noticing the sign – but something was approaching anyway. Every few seconds Laura saw the distant, unmistakable
flash of a windscreen winking through gaps in the trees. Whatever the vehicle, it was moving slowly and any sound its engine made was swallowed up by the tall loose hedges and waving corn fields,
all the heavy mid-summer growth nodding and whispering for miles around in the blazing Basque sunshine.

Finally it passed her – a battered grey Mercedes with a heavy, middle-aged man hunched at the wheel. Laura stepped off the track into a fringe of tall weeds. The driver nodded curtly when
she raised a hand but he hardly turned his face to her. A chip of gravel sprang out from one of the rumbling tyres, flicking her bare shin, but the car was crawling too slowly to raise much dust.
For a while she waited, watching it lumber away, then carried on. She knew it would have to come back the same way soon. The bottom of the dirt road, a mile or so down the track, was blocked except
for the wooden stile she’d climbed and there had been nothing more than footpaths leading off from it. She quickened her pace.

According to her map she should have arrived already at Arizkun. The track was marked as a byway on the old Santiago pilgrim route and she’d taken it on impulse when she saw the symbol
– a white scallop shell painted on the stile. She regretted it now: the walking had been much easier on the road. Here, down below it, the trees crowded in and the baked mud surface, rutted
and braided with old motorcycle tracks, threatened to turn her ankles at every step. Even the swarms of flies seemed thicker, batting against her sweating face and following the trickles of sweat
inside her vest.

Still, she told herself, pausing to hitch her backpack higher, the path was beginning to climb again now, and anyway it was good to be finally walking the valley, whichever route she took. She
had meant to do it at least a week earlier – as soon as possible after arriving at Nerea’s apartment in Elizondo. But the days since then had slipped by somehow, leaving Laura with the
sense that she was close to outstaying her welcome and would have to set out on the journey soon, or never.

She blamed circumstance more than her own inertia for the delay. When she’d arrived, nothing was the way she’d been led to expect, and the effort of adjusting seemed to somehow steal
from her all the emotional reserves she’d stored up for the walk. For one thing, Nerea was sharing the small second floor flat with a strange giant of a man. The boyfriend, who Nerea had
never once mentioned to Laura in their months together as student flat-mates in Granada, was a glaring, blackly bearded truck driver called Mikel. Mostly silent, if he spoke to Laura at all it was
in quick, incomprehensible Basque and as far as Laura could tell he never left the flat. They had sex very loudly at night too, the pounding and creaking always accompanied by Nerea’s
mercilessly detailed, full-volume commentaries, all of which first mortified Laura, then left her empty and restless for hours in the dark. And every day they spent most of the time wordlessly
stoned. The dim living room, where they slumped in front of endless re-runs of natural history programmes, was a foggy, flickering den from mid-morning till four when, dazed and staggering, Nerea
would finally raise the bamboo blinds with a clatter, throw open all the windows and try to drive the stink out before the first of her pupils arrived at six for English lessons. The first day of
her visit Laura had tried to keep pace with them but by the afternoon they had to lay her flat on her back on the outside balcony until the nausea and anxiety passed. After that she simply kept
them company while they smoked and that in itself was enough to make the days pass by in a dreamlike, timeless haze. She had told nobody she was there, not even her mother who always insisted on
knowing every detail of her travels, tracing them on an old touring map of Europe, and no-one in Elizondo or the whole of the Baztan valley knew who she was or why she had come, and no-one cared.
It was a quietly heady feeling and seemed to go naturally with the cloudy, weatherless atmosphere of the apartment.

Laura had told nobody, either, exactly why she wanted to walk the Baztan valley. She’d decided that she couldn’t fully explain the impulse even to herself. All she knew was that
since hearing of Calum’s death just over a month ago – a car crash somewhere on the road between the riverside villages of Arizkun and Eratzu – her first numb shock had turned
almost at once to fury (he was killed alongside a young local girl, just sixteen, and was drunk) and then, gradually, to an overpowering need to visit the place where it had happened. Maybe then
she could make some kind of peace with him, not just over his betrayal but also her own: after learning about the girl she had ignored the funeral in Edinburgh, though her mother had offered to pay
for the flights and she could have stayed at home with her just an hour’s drive from the city. Weeks later, she discovered from a mutual friend that Calum had never told his family about her
anyway, a fact that still tormented her if she allowed herself to think about it, but despite everything he’d been her first lover, the first boy who’d ever wanted her, as far as she
knew, and for the first few months in Spain when they were both new to the country and adjusting to their student exchange years she was almost sure she’d meant as much to him as he had meant
to her. After they’d made love for the first time he’d stayed awake with her for hours in his single bed, talking quietly, stroking her arms and breasts in the cool white light of the
campus street-lamp outside the window. It was only when he transferred his studies from Granada to Pamplona that the doubts crept in. And then – almost immediately it seemed to her now rather
than after the long, insecure months that actually passed – there was news of the accident and all her gnawing fears were simultaneously confirmed and ended, forever.

At last, and quite suddenly, the trees cleared and the scarred mud of the track gave way to a ragged crust of tarmac. She was at the outskirts of the village, the sun beating
down overhead. A single old-fashioned diesel pump, caked with rust, stood off to her right and a tilting corrugated shed, its doors wide open, to her left. Someone was running a bench saw inside
– she could hear lengths of timber being shrieked through, turned with a clatter and passed through again. As she drew level a leathery headed old man in blue overalls and dusty plastic
goggles stopped his sawing to watch her, the circle blade still whining at full speed.