Devastation Road (10 page)

PILOT
, he had written too, although he couldn’t work out whether that had been him or one of the other names written beside it. There was no line connecting it; it
hung, like a lost thought.

As boys they had always played at fighter planes, running through the fields behind The Ridings with their arms out, or making planes from balsa wood and hurling them from the top of St
Catherine’s Hill, where they had flown kites.

One summer they had made large paper model gliders, launching them from the guest bedroom. And one day Max had even lit the middle of the model with a match and they had watched in glee and then
horror as it had glided down, leaving an impressive trail of smoke, only then for the wind to change and take it straight in through the sitting room window where it had set fire to their
mother’s rug.

He sat up, disturbed by something in the undergrowth, then turned sharply but whoever was there – a stooped figure, a glimpse of white – quickly pulled away.

In the fading afternoon he walked with the infant slumped and sleeping over his shoulder. The longer he held the child, the more it felt like his. Then a name came and went
again, stopping him in his tracks. A woman’s name this time. He tried to pull it back but it had fallen right through him.

When the baby woke, to entertain him Janek took him and held him out to one side as if the infant was flying along the road. And again, Max was there in Owen’s head, running open-armed
through the cornfields, always racing each other. He could see him in the driving goggles Uncle Archie had given them.

Max would never be a pilot – he had always been too rash for that.

He had been with Owen though, in the war – Owen felt quite sure of it.
Two peas in a pod
, Uncle Ernest had said.

He looked back down the lane. He felt a sickening blame for something but he didn’t know what.

‘Janek,’ he called, waving his arms. ‘Janek! We have to go back!’

The barn was old and tumbledown. At the far end, lit by the partial light outside burning through the splits and holes in the wood, six thick pieces of rope were tied from a
rafter. Each one hung loose, cut at the same height. Owen tried to pull them down but the knots were too high to reach and there was nothing to stand on. Beneath each one there were dried patches
of blood and what looked like piano wire.

The panic that he had left his brother in the field where he’d woken, or just a trace of him even, had passed. On that lane Janek had hauled him along by the arm. He wouldn’t let him
go back.
Ne. Ne
, he had kept saying, urging him forward and squeezing his shoulder. They would do whatever they needed to do but there would be no going back.

In the barn Owen paced about. With the weight of the child in his arm, a familiar numbness was creeping into him. There was a pinch he remembered digging into his armpits, not as thin as grenade
wire or as thick as the ropes, but painful nevertheless. He looked at them still tied to the rafter. He had hung just like that, somewhere.

He put his fingertips to the side of his head, expecting to feel blood.

As it got late he walked the child around in the dark. The infant had leaked diarrhoea and vomited all the milk back up and now it screamed with an intensity that was ripping
right through him.

‘Can you try?’ he huffed to Janek but the boy just sat with his back to the wall and his hands over his ears, staring down at the dirt.

‘For God’s sake,’ said Owen. Then he shouted, ‘Will you just shut up!’

All things were jumbled now. The dark of the night opened him up to them. Blood running down the side of his forehead. A numbness in his armpits. The memory came of a
girl’s white ankle socks, small feet in sandals, and placed so neatly together next to a child’s suitcase.

He stared up at the roof and the patterns the moonshine made through the gaps between the tiles. The lines of it traced around the broken timbers above them like filaments of light.

It was not the fear that he had forgotten her that concerned him most, but that this love he felt had forgotten him – that, after all this time, she could no more remember his face or the
sound of his voice than he could hers. And with that they would be lost to each other – both erased from each other’s minds.

When sleep did eventually crawl upon him, he dreamt of pulling a house across a frozen sea – he and all the other people, each with a rope tied around their waist and hauling the house
across the ice. Seagulls curled noisily around the chimneystack, and on the ice they felt the strain of the weight, their feet sliding and cracks appearing, though the ice did not give way. They
pulled and tugged, and the house inched forward. He could feel the cold biting at his hands, while all around them there was nothing but a flat and frozen landscape, and a sky that was giant and
blue.

He woke, or dreamt of waking. A shivering body was pressed up against him, warm breath against his neck. In the dark he reached behind and pulled an arm over him. He took the cold hand in his.
He held it to his chest.

The morning was miserable. Janek carried the baby, who had the audacity now to sleep. During the night he had fashioned a papoose-like contraption out of a hessian sack. It
took the two of them to fasten the child in and Owen wasn’t sure how secure it looked, but the child slept happily enough in it, his head resting against Janek’s chest and a growing
patch of drool spreading across his shirt.

Owen felt tired and twitchy, his eyes and ears playing tricks on him: a hand at a branch, a sudden commotion of birds.
Owen
, a voice called to him, but there wasn’t anyone
there.

West and north and homeward-bound, they followed the raised ridge of a railway line that ran parallel to their path, the dull sheen of steel above them through the trees acting as a guide. Where
the foliage gave way along the top of the ridge, bodies lay about the gully and they had to pick their way through, stepping between the limbs. They were all men with a shared wound at the back of
the head. Forty, maybe more, tumbled and sprawled over each other, the rich sunlight around them filled with the frenzy of flies.

In a cherry orchard littered with petals like snow they found a well and filled their canisters, while an elderly man hoed his vegetable patch nearby, a rifle hanging from his
waist, the butt scraping its own furrow neatly through the dirt. They leant against the curve of the well and let the sun shine on their faces. The water was cold and tasted good. The baby wriggled
in Owen’s arms but was soon made drowsy by the warmth, and Owen wondered if he could leave him there, if the man with his hoe would take the child in for his wife.

Not half an hour after drinking the water, though, they were both being sick. Owen leant with one hand against a fence as he vomited, while a short way down the path Janek did the same. When
Owen stood and wiped his mouth, he saw clouds pulling in from the east, a far off smear of rain, and in the distance women and children were bent double, digging with their hands in a field.

At a junction, an argument ensued. Janek kept pointing down the road, jabbing at the air with his finger while the baby in his arms screamed. He kept saying ‘No’
and ‘This way’ and ‘
Na západ
’ – which Owen took to mean ‘west’ – growing more and more angry and insistent. That was where the camps
were. That was where Petr would be.

But Owen thought they were better off turning north.

‘Up towards Berlin,’ he said. He pulled the map from his pocket to show him, the pieces scattering on the ground so that he had to scrabble around, picking them up before the wind
took them. Besides, this road looked wider, he told Janek. They had a better chance of finding help on a major route; they had a child to consider now. He didn’t see the point in scrambling
through more bloody fields.

But the boy was already walking, taking the baby with him.

‘Janek,’ he called, but the boy ignored him.

Fine, he thought. Let him go. This would be where they parted then. He’d had enough of Janek anyway. Let the boy see how he got on looking after the child on his own.

He headed off in his own direction, the first drops of rain falling cold and heavy on his face. He would be fine on his own, with only himself to worry about. He had the map after all, and it
wouldn’t be so hard to find some food.

In the distance shots sounded, their cracks echoing out across the fields.

He stopped and turned, hesitant. The boy was barely visible, almost gone now. With the small bundle held in his arms. Janek didn’t seem intent on stopping.

Owen stood for a moment.

Bloody hell.

‘Janek!’ he called after him.

The rain was getting harder.

The buildings of the hamlet were nothing but charred and collapsed carcasses: wooden rafters, pillars and posts poking out like blackened bones. The rain had only just dowsed
the flames but the fires had been so intense that the heat lifting from them remained hot against their faces. Above, where the wood was still white hot with veins of orange running through it, the
air shimmered. Despite the pouring rain, thick smoke lifted, billowing up in sudden whirls that turned and separated; ashen leaves from scorched trees floated about like moths, crumpling and
burning in the air.

A woman stood, mutely gathering her three small children to her hips, while soldiers with bulky-looking guns, backpacks and canisters poked around. Two covered trucks were parked nearby. The men
took no notice of Janek and Owen as they walked through, strangely lured as if into a dream.

Up ahead there came a calamitous roar as a roof strained and thundered in, and then the crash of another ceiling giving way beneath it. The dust rose up into a mist and then was dampened again
by the rain.

Owen clutched the baby hard to him. ‘We can’t shelter here.’

Janek seemed to agree, then pointed and nodded at the soldiers among the rubble. They were the same men who had been at the burnt-out farmhouse, in the same two trucks.

Owen remembered and it surprised him. How many days ago had that been? Was his memory finally starting to hold firm?

The dust was settling around the house whose roof had fallen in. Half of the front had collapsed in a pile of wooden debris but Janek still entered through the doorway, which had lost its walls
on either side and now stood like an empty and blackened picture frame.

Owen pulled the wriggling infant closer as he followed, careful where he placed his feet. The rain fell in streaming rivulets down through the timbers.

‘Janek,’ he called. ‘It’s not safe.’

‘
Tu pistoli
,’ Janek said, beckoning with his fingers.

Owen hadn’t meant that but he handed him the gun anyway, and then Janek was pushing through another doorway, Owen stumbling after him.

Here the roof had completely fallen through, and Owen stopped and looked up at the rain firing down like pellets through the broken stanchions. In his arms the baby whimpered.

‘I know,’ he said, trying to calm him. ‘We’re going to get you somewhere dry.’

When the voice came from among the carnage, it was breathless and wheezing.

‘
Bitte . . . Bitte . . . Helfen Sie mir
.’

Instantly Janek had tucked the pistol into his belt and was climbing over the wood, pulling bits of it aside and hauling planks about as quickly as he could.

The voice came again, desperate.

‘Can you see him?’ said Owen.

Janek struggled and heaved a timber away, his feet slipping, and pulled aside the blackened door of a wardrobe, then stopped. He stood staring into the wreckage.

‘
Bitte
,’ came the voice within it, male and deep, but rasping and fighting to catch its breath.

‘What is it?’ said Owen. He took a couple of steps closer, the rain still streaming down through the broken shell of the building.

He heard the voice again.

‘
Janek. Janku, jsi to ty?
’

Then in a slick movement that took Owen by surprise, Janek had drawn the pistol and cocked it at the man half buried under the debris.

It was only when Owen had clambered closer, the baby still held in the papoose, that he saw with a flash of recognition that it was the silver-haired soldier from the burnt-out house across the
border. He was wearing the same uniform, and lay trapped beneath a beam, the hunk of timber so heavy across his chest that his breath was short and restricted.

‘
Kdo je to?
’ he said, his eyes darting across to Owen.

‘
On je Angli
č
an
,’ said Janek.

‘
Angli
č
an?
’ the man said with heavy breath. His face was red and the tendons in his thick neck straining. He was clearly in some pain. ‘English?’ he said to
Owen.

‘Do you two know each other?’

The man smiled weakly.

Janek pointed the pistol more purposefully.

‘Please tell your friend to turn his gun away,’ the man said, his accent thick but his English good. ‘I am not going to hurt him.’

‘He’s right,’ said Owen. ‘Janek, please.’

But Janek did not move.

‘Janek,’ said the man, gasping for air, the weight of timber slowly crushing him. ‘
Prosím, prosím pomoz mi
.’

‘For pity’s sake,’ said Owen. ‘We have to help him.’ He wanted to pull the boy away, but he couldn’t with the baby strapped to his front and teetering on the
broken timbers made slippery in the rain.

The man had got his arms beneath the beam and was trying uselessly to lift it. Owen could hear other rafters above them shifting, straining against the unexpected movement.

‘Janek, come on!’ he shouted. ‘It’s going to collapse. We need to get this man out.’

‘Please,’ the man begged. ‘
Janku, proboha, prosím!
’

He managed to free an arm and reached out a dusty hand.

‘
Ne
,’ Janek said. ‘
To je za Bohumíra
.’

The man then raised his hand to protect his face – a
stop, no, wait
– but the blast echoed through the ruins and the man screamed out, his hand suddenly bloody.