The Low Road (29 page)

L
ee woke to find himself curled on the couch in the lounge room. He was fully dressed, crumpled, even wearing shoes. It was very cold and he was unwilling to move and disturb the cocoon of warmth he'd established during the night. His body was heavy and mute, telling him nothing of himself. For this he was thankful. The fire snoozed in the hearth.

He felt he was finally conscious after a lengthy period of time somewhere far away. He remembered the motel, and he remembered the crash and the night on the train, but it was almost as if they were another person's memories, or stories he'd read long ago. It was all too strange. He tilted an ear to the great silence, then shifted and pain flooded his torso. He winced and mentally examined the dressing over his wound, feeling for leakage or infection. It felt OK, just the usual persistent ache. Perhaps a slight humming itch as his body healed. A dream skulked like a burglar in the corner of his mind. Was this how it felt to be old, everything formless and bulky, memories so incomplete?

After a time, he sat up with a sudden urge to go outside and walk in the fresh air. He felt he had been cooped up for weeks in the stale and dusty air of this house. He pulled on his coat and shambled through the house; the old place smelled of cold lino and dried flowers. It wasn't until he stepped outside that he saw it had snowed during the night. When he saw the white, glittering blanket covering the garden and trees, he laughed with unexpected recognition. No wonder it was so cold last night. No fucking wonder.

Hugging himself, he crunched through the garden, allowing his fingers to linger over frozen railings, and pausing here and there to marvel at the billowing plumes of his own exhalation. He could feel his cheeks going pink, and his hands were thick and numb with cold. Everything dripped and shimmered, appeared both fragile and monumental. Awkwardly, he bent down, scooped a handful of snow and packed it into a ball. The snowball held its shape in his palm and he brought it close to his face. There was something about it that made him want to eat it, to see what it was like. Smiling, he nibbled gingerly at the snowball. It was harder than he expected, less satisfying. The granular burn of ice, the way he imagined a cloud would taste. The snowball left frosty crumbs on his lips and chin. His nose ran with the cold. He laughed at his own childishness and considered the snowball for a minute before lobbing it against the trunk of a nearby tree.

The garden was spectacular. With its sparkling eaves and white roof, even the dilapidated house looked more beautiful, as if designed for such a landscape. Against the dark and foaming sky, the old dump almost glowed. He negotiated overgrown paths. A trickle of icy water slid down his back. His memory of their arrival was vague—an old man on a cart, a village, a broken road—but he must have passed through this garden some days earlier with Wild. Wild. He'd forgotten about Wild. He'll love this, he whispered to himself and, grinning, shambled back up the steps, through the kitchen and down the hall to Wild's room. He listened at the door before entering. This will cheer the old bastard up.

He knew, of course. Somewhere deep in the bones of his knowing.

The air in the room was cold and brittle. Even in here, Lee could see his own breath. Wild was on his side, facing the wall, a mountain beneath the bunched sheets. One socked foot protruded from a blanket. The empty whiskey bottle was beneath the bed and the metal bucket was under the window. One of Wild's black shoes alone by the wardrobe. It appeared so lost. Even in the thin light, he could make out the angle of wear on one side of the sole, the knot of a broken lace.

The fire he'd built the previous night had burned down, was now mere ashes and coals in the grate. Lee crossed the room, jabbed at the coals with the poker and arranged more logs, crouching until they caught fire. Using the poker for balance, he stood companionably and faced the room. The backs of his knees grew warm and flames crackled and popped. He was reluctant to move. He waited, content to prolong the sensation of being the bearer of exciting news. The moment, he knew, was frail. Water dripped from an icicle over the window. It made a highpitched plinking sound, like glass. Wild didn't move.

In hospital after the car accident, Lee was unable to attend his parents' funeral but his sister had told him all about it. He hadn't wanted to know the details, but Claire had been so talkative, at a heightened and manic pitch in this new country of teenage grief—perhaps even secretly enjoying the drama. Imprisoned by his injuries, he'd been unable to escape her ranting. She'd told him who was there and what they wore, that Uncle David was drunk and sat in a pew
crying
, that the church was full of strangers talking about their parents, that they misspelled his name in the funeral notice in the newspaper.
L-E-I-G-H
, she'd said, incredulous.
They're idiots. Leigh. Can you imagine?
She'd discovered things about their parents, as if death had released them from their private histories. With relish, she'd told him that their father had been in the merchant navy when he was a teenager and abandoned ship at Singapore.
I bet you didn't know
that
? Or that Mum was a swimming champion in high school?

At the funeral, you could walk past the caskets and look inside and see them in their nice clothes. Dad in a suit and Mum in her red dress, you know the one with the clasp thing at the neck? Or at least see most of them, their faces and stuff. And you could see that they were calm, calmer even than when they were, you know . . . She was terrified, she'd said, but they made her file past. Said it would be good for her, God only knows why. Something about love and saying a final goodbye. She was crying and she wasn't going to look but she couldn't help it, and they didn't actually look too bad. Staring at the ceiling from his hospital bed, Lee had wondered what Claire could have meant, because he knew how ugly and crushed they had been.

Lee inspected the mantel above the fireplace. He idly ran a finger over the surface and rolled the accumulated dust into a ball between his thumb and forefinger. He picked up a bottle of ink, removed the cork and inhaled the smell of bottled schoolrooms. There was a clump of dried lavender stuck in a glass and a group of toy soldiers. The four thumbsized figures clutched instruments, so crudely carved from wood that they had no hands as such. They each wore curling, painted moustaches and red uniforms with sashes of yellow. Their expressions were bland but stoic as they prepared to play their gold-painted instruments. Strangely, the figures all had a red dot on their pink foreheads. Indian soldiers, perhaps. He picked one up and examined it. A soldier preparing to clash two cymbals. The paint was cracked off one side of its face. Lee tested the glazed paint on its back with a thumbnail and balanced the tiny man in his palm. It weighed almost nothing. An old, dry thing, belonging to some child who was by now elderly or dead.

He wanted to go back outside into the garden and lie in snowy drifts. To bathe in the silence. He kneeled on the floor beside the bed and rested an elbow on the edge of the mattress. The bed sheets were as cold and hard as marble. He felt incomplete, as if being slowly dismantled. Some prehistoric sorrow bubbled in his throat. He gulped and swallowed. He groaned and shuddered. His face became wet and doughy. His tears were salty on his lips as they passed down to his chin and dripped onto the bed. There were hundreds of them, thousands, springing so readily from his eyes they might have been lurking just beneath the surface, swelling, waiting for this moment. Thus abandoned, he wept, kneeling on the floor, head in his hands, inconsolable.

He dug a grave for Wild at the higher side of the house, in a space surrounded by low bushes. The ground was frozen and it took most of the morning just to break the icy crust. He had to pause every few minutes to catch his breath, and took the opportunity to look down over the white countryside. Nothing moved, not even the clouds. There were no birds in view. A line of trees stood still, like a distant crowd of mourners.

Sweat dripped from his forehead and nose when he again bent to the spade. He put a foot on the top of the blade, pressed his entire weight into it and wedged out a clump of soil to add to the sodden pile. Then he did it again. And again. His whole left side, where he'd been shot, made itself known with each exertion. Later, when he removed the dressing, he knew it would be soaked in his own blood. He felt pale and old.

When Lee had finally stopped weeping and rolled Wild over, he'd discovered a dozen empty morphine vials gathered to the curl of his body like a clutch of glassy, misshapen eggs. There was also a handful of used plastic syringes, their metal tips jewelled with blood. The inside of Wild's arm was darkly bruised and smeared with blood, and the sheets were also stained with it. His lips were purple, his skin damp and cold.

Wild's face had been long vacated and contained no expression, the blue eyes like stones jammed into the cavities. There was a tiny mark high on Wild's left cheek, perhaps a chicken-pox scar. The straggling beard. In an otherwise unnoticed breeze from the window, a fold of Wild's grey hair had waved gently from the side of his head, giving the body a suggestion of mere dormancy rather than death. Lee had reached forward with one hand and smoothed the fold back into place. He half expected Wild to sniff and sit up and wonder what the hell was happening, but of course nothing of the sort occurred; nothing remained.

For some time he had deliberated what to do before unchaining Wild from the bed frame and dragging him still on the mattress into the garden. It took nearly an hour. The mattress snagged and tore on rusty nails that crooked from the floor. The guy had weighed a ton, surely heavier dead than alive.

And so Lee kept digging, spadeful by scratching spadeful, trying to determine a rhythm in the work. He sank into the grave up to his knees. His hands and feet became numb. Mumbling an apology, he covered Wild with a blanket and tried not to look at his shape as he worked. The black goat stood nearby eating some paper, apparently not bothered by the cold. It chewed and watched and chewed again. Every so often it bleated its expressionless, faintly comical bleat and the sound was carried away by the wind, over the rise at the back of the property.

The day wore on. The air grew harder and colder. Occasionally he clambered from the hole and went back into the house to smoke a cigarette and warm himself. He stoked the ancient kitchen stove. He trembled inside and out and was shaken every so often by sobs that bubbled to his surface. He tried not to think of anything. When at last almost done, he paused and looked up, panting heavily as he rested on the spade handle. Steam ballooned in front of his face. His lips were dry and cracked. In the hours he had been outside digging, the cold had stolen through his clothes and skin and then through his muscles until his bones were like ice. He squinted and stared. There, in the space between the bottom fence of the property and the distant crease of the horizon, something moved. A tiny shape by a jagged fence that was stitched across the landscape. He wiped the back of one filthy hand across his nose and watched. The dot was moving ever so slightly, almost not at all, like a dark satellite trembling across a milky sky.

The shape drew larger and closer. What on earth would be out travelling on such a day? Too big for a dingo or kangaroo, too slow for a car.

Eventually, Lee could make out the shape of—what? A bulky person? Perhaps a horse. A man. Hat. A man wearing a wide-brimmed hat. It was the old man who'd driven them here. And his cart. The old cougher with the horse and cart. Lee had to get the hell away from here as soon as he buried Wild. Had to hit the road and get to Claire's place. Needed to escape. Whatever he wanted, the old man and his cart might be perfect timing. The old guy was still a mile away and moving pretty slowly. Lee was nearly finished. His palms were blistered and sore, but he should be able to bury Wild before the old bloke arrived. Just a few more spadefuls.

Lee looked across at the figure of Wild under his blue blanket. There was no mistaking the shape—the higher peaks of the face and toes and the awkward, spreading sag through the middle. Yellow foam stuffing crumbled onto the snowy ground through a tear in a corner of the mattress. If Lee left him there, the snow would soon cover him and nobody would ever know. The crows would peck and the possums would paw. By the time spring crept across the landscape, the wind would be able to sluice through the very wreck of him. Maybe someone would find him in a year, when Lee was long gone. After all, it was unlikely anyone would come to this part of the garden anytime soon and discover the body.

He pondered this for a while, then bent and leaned his weight into the spade until another small portion of the ground gave way. The level of the earth was at his stomach. A little more and he could tip Wild into the hole and cover him. The earth at least would be warm. He could be done with this and get out of here. He kept digging, became contentedly enslaved to the circular rhythm: dig, press foot upon the spade, lever some earth and hoist it over the edge of the grave; dig, press foot upon the spade, lever some earth and hoist it over the edge of the grave. Dig.

Isn't it a bit cold for gardening?

Pausing with the heavy spade in midair, Lee looked up. He didn't need to because he recognised the voice. He licked his lips and swallowed. Josef.

Yes.

What are you doing here?

Dumb question.

Josef was standing near the back corner of the house, beside a glassenclosed room probably designed as a sunroom for warmer months. Within, Lee could make out the silent, motionless tribe of long-dead ferns. Josef tapped the barrel of a pistol impatiently against his thigh, like he'd been waiting there for ages. Maybe he had been. Maybe he'd been standing there forever, waiting for the right moment to finally kill him.

A wintry current ran through Lee. He nodded and opened his mouth to say something, but had no idea what it could be. He thought of Simon, tried to remember if he had said anything.
What the fuck are you doing?
It was the moment, presumably, when he should make a—what? A
plea
for his life? Such a strange, half-formed noise. Plea, plea, plea. Plea. Plea. A meagre grunt. Words lose meaning when repeated, are reduced to lines and scratches. Plead for his life. When he should say
something
. Instead he sighed, held his breath and closed his eyes.