Devastation Road (3 page)

It was as if part of him had melted away, an indeterminate amount of time and the memories within it faded to black, or evaporated entirely. He groped in his head but all he could think of was
the trolleybus. Was there nothing between that moment and this? A break in time stitched together, so that whatever had been in the middle now simply was not there.

He found himself on his knees, bending over the water, drops falling from his nose. He stared back at his wavering reflection. He had needed to see his face.

He leant further. He could hardly believe it. The eyes had pulled back into their sockets, and what hair there was – cut short, almost to the skull – was receding at the temples
where it had not receded before. It was a face that once had been full but now looked lean and wasted, all its youthful plumpness worn away. A gash of blood above his left eye was thick and dried
and scabbing. There was bruising on the opposite temple, a cut along his jawline, a split lip and a bruised forearm, as if he had slammed it against something. The pain in the back of his head
still pierced through him, along with the sharp ache beneath his ribs – the bullet that wasn’t there.

He brought his fingertips to his cheek and around his jaw, feeling the skin and his fragility, the parts where even beneath the skin’s lining he felt raw and ravaged.

My God. It was not a face he remembered. There were just the hidden reminders of his old self buried beneath fresh lines, paler skin, a darkening around his eyes . . . He wondered what on earth
had happened to him. One didn’t step on to a trolleybus and simply disappear.

He wrote his name on the bank with a twig just to know that it was true, scratching the ‘O’ into the dirt, and then the ‘W’, the ‘E’ and the
‘N’.

That at least was automatic, something that he could be sure of, the tip of a first thread by which he might pull everything else back.

He did not sleep. A cold bit into him that he had not expected after the relative warmth of the day. He had lit a fire quite easily, rubbing a stick between two rocks until the
kindling had caught; but keeping it lit was a different matter. A dampness had crept through the countryside so that three times he’d got up to relight the fire until eventually he had given
up and pulled the jacket tighter around him, his hands pressed into his armpits.

He lay there trying to recall a house, a room, a bed, a warm arm wrapped around him, but in the thickness of the night – in his own private darkness – there was nothing there.

Owen woke as cold as if a frost had set within him, and his head felt muddy and confused. He had hoped the new day would bring with it some clarity or an awakening from the
dream. Now, maybe an hour later, the strange world lingered.

He was tired too. Most of the long night had been spent trying to thread his thoughts together, quite convinced that in time he would recall something that would explain everything, but the
harder he tried, the less he was certain of. He could find no last fixed point.

The memories that did come were old and childish and looped in his head: a dog called Cedar; another name – Suzie Sue; a picture of himself as a child running through fields with his arms
outstretched; flying a kite with his father, its red wings spread like a buzzard’s, feeling the tug of the string in his hands as if, in his dreams, the kite was trying to wake him.

As he walked he felt so hungry that he could feel his stomach gnawing. The state of his shoes concerned him, and with that the state of his feet. His head hurt and occasionally, if he turned it
too sharply, dizziness soaked through him, or a distant tree or gatepost would divide, doubling in his vision. When that happened he would have to stop and steady himself, and wait for the world to
eventually find its form.

As his path took him over the brow of a hill, paralleling a lower road, he became aware of a line of travellers a short distance below him, moving through the sun-drenched mist. There were two
four-wheeled carts, each pulled by a bony horse, their wooden wheels creaking and stumbling over the potholed road. In them he could see piles of furniture: wooden tables, thin-limbed chairs
interlocked together, and the antlers of a deer hooked over one of the sides. Children sat on stacks of mattresses, cradling pans or wicker baskets, or clutching the corner of a blanket to their
nose, or a doll, or a straw donkey, while adults walked alongside, bundles strapped to their backs.

He followed, keeping out of sight, and watching them as they trudged through the smoky sunlight, their horses straining to haul the carts, and the rickety rattle of their furniture bumping
around inside.

After a while the road began to edge westerly, taking the procession with it, until it tipped the travellers over a hill and they disappeared into the sunlight.

He had walked long distances before, he thought, for now a recollection was pooling. Not just the muscle memory of walking for hours, but days, and not in the full blush of spring either, but
through deep snow with blizzards buffeting through a pine forest and whipping hard against his face. Then, just as quickly, the memory was gone again. He wondered if there was still a war on
– a war that felt so distant in his mind and yet he was quite sure had barely begun.

He remembered a radio announcement, and the next day at his desk, carefully marking out the lines of a plane – a precision laid out for something that, in his mind at least, had not yet
been ruined in its reality – he had barely been able to concentrate. A worry had seeped into him that everything was about to change and with it, him too. Everyone would be altered. Lines
would be redrawn, populations recalculated, trajectories of bombs and bullets scrutinized. No one would look for beauty in design any more. The womanly curve of a plane’s belly would be
bastardized, bloated to make room for parachutists and weapons of destruction.
At least we ain’t getting called up
, Harry had said. And yet everything had changed.

As he sat on the verge feeling for other cuts and bruises on a body that no longer felt like his own, and in clothes that weren’t his either, he found a pocket in the seam of the trousers
and was surprised to find a metal button. He turned it over in his palm. It looked familiar yet he couldn’t remember whether he had seen the button before.

He skirted a wheat field – the crop already waist-high, and the soft stalks rustling in the breeze. He had spent the morning wondering just how long he had been gone. He
stopped for a moment and watched the wind casting ripples through the shifting leaves. If he tuned his ears he could hear them whispering to him, the reedy
hush
of their voices.

He glanced around and then, seeing that no one was about, he took a step in, slowly venturing further and then feeling the lure of something stronger than he was pulling him in deeper. The tips
of wheat licked at his arms as they had done when he’d been a child, that familiar smell of dusty dirt, and the crop swilling and swaying around him. He wanted to run through it. And then, in
the memory that swept in on the breeze, sweeping him into it too, his brother was suddenly in front of him, the back of his head bobbing through the crop, the stark whiteness of his shirt against
the tan of his arms.
Max
, he shouted.
No, Max, wait!
The two of them running through the wheat, their arms knocking against the stalks and the sun burning so bright that sometimes
Max would disappear in its flare; or, without warning, would drop like a dead bird into the crop so that Owen would lose him and panic. He would stand in the middle of the field calling out to him:
Max,
he would shout,
where are you?
Then Max would burst out through the stalks beside him and with a holler knock him down into the dirt.
I was here all the time,
stupid
, he would say, laughing, as Owen picked himself up. But not this time.

Not now.

He stood in the middle of the field, anxiously scanning it for that same movement, that rippling path, an unseen disturbance quickly coming for him through the wheat. He stood, waiting –
watching and waiting – until another breath of wind blew through the crop, taking his fear and his brother with it.

The seven soldiers were laid out along the verge like ninepins, each dressed in red green uniforms and missing their shoes and socks. Around them flies patrolled, alighting on
stony faces or disappearing inside an open collar, or up the tunnel of a trouser leg and through a bracken of hairs.

Owen edged closer then nudged one of the soldier’s ankles with his boot. Even knowing that they were dead, he squatted down and nervously touched one. The soldier’s hand was still
warm. He stood up again sharply, pulling the pistol from his pocket and looking around, then pacing back up the path several yards and scanning the trees on one side and the fields that rolled out
on the other. He thought he could sense eyes watching him but he could see nothing there. Whoever had shot them must still be close; these men were not long dead.

He made his way back, still alert, and crouched down beside them again. The flies had already moved back in, pitter-pattering over the skin.

After some awkward digging around he found a torn map in the breast pocket of one and a small notebook with a blank page at the back. He ripped it out and slipped it into his pocket along with
the stub of a pencil; their pistols, bullets and cigarettes, or any chocolate they might have carried, had already been taken.

For some time he sat on the grass trying to piece the sheets of map together but the place names all looked foreign. He didn’t know whether they were German or Dutch or something else
entirely. He folded the pieces and pocketed them. When he stood back up, he could have sworn that one of the soldiers had turned his head.

If there really was a war on and he had no idea where he was, then it was much safer not to be seen. The pain in his head still felt like eyes drilling into him and several
times Owen had abruptly stopped, distinctly sure that someone was following him. He kept hold of the pistol and checked his pockets: paper, maps, button, pencil. He had to keep checking that
everything was in place.

The morning slowly dissolved, and at times the train wreck and the soldiers laid out like ninepins were gone from his mind entirely, so that it was only when he saw the scrap of paper in his
hand that the recollection sprang back and he remembered it was true.

MAX
, he had written.

How despairing of him his brother would be.

Lost? Oh, for God’s sake
.

Snatches of thought like that constantly peeled away, though he tried hard to cling to them: drawing the stringers of a wing at his desk; the red trolleybus following the overhead wires down the
hill. He stepped on the back.
Not to worry, sir. ’Sonly thruppence
. The conductor had punched out a ticket anyway. Names, too, blew in and away again. Barnes and Budgie and Peri . .
.

You need to make a note of everything
. Nothing in his head felt safe.

And then his father was grabbing the strings just in time and swooping the kite back into the blue.
I say,
he said,
that was close
.

It was only as these thoughts dispersed that he realized that he had somehow wandered on to a narrow road and was standing in the middle of it. The sky had opened up into a rich wide blue.
Dandelion seeds drifted like parachutists across his path. He stared behind him at the road he must have walked along, at the gentle haze in the distance shimmering above the dirt. Then, for a
moment, there in the watery blur, he thought he saw the silhouette of a boy standing maybe half a mile back – a boy, tall and thin and watching him. The silhouette quivered and
disappeared.

The terrain hardened, the hills forming into jagged edges and the trees into prickly furze. For a while he sat on the verge and could not stop himself crying.

He wondered if there was someone waiting for him. He had no wedding ring or photograph. If he were married would he not feel it? The memory of it might be gone like so much else but there would
surely be something deeper within him that could not so easily be cut away. In time, the sense of someone might come, he told himself; it might bring a face, a name. He would not die. He would not
give up. He would somehow get himself home.

He took out the map again with fresh determination and searched within its sheets. Somewhere he was lost within it: the most indistinguishable pinprick trapped beneath its contours. He scanned
the symbols, the railway lines, the rivers and the strange-looking place names. Harry had once said that the cartographer was to the land what the draughtsman was to aircraft: bringing a plan and
order to something that would otherwise feel unnavigable. The map, though, was faded and stained, and staring at it he realized what nonsense this was, even if he tried to think of the contours as
no more than arcs and the rivers as no more than cables wiring the land together.

As he moved the sheet away, his eyes were drawn to a name.
Sagan
. It sat at the edge of the sheet. He faltered, stared and then turned his gaze back to the other parts of the map. But
his eyes kept being pulled to it as if within him two wires had touched, sparking the slightest flicker of something in his head. He scanned around the name with his finger but nothing looked
familiar. Only perhaps the shading of a forest. A symbol printed below looked like the Roman numeral:
III
.

Sagan
. He wondered if he had read about the place recently, or heard it on a broadcast. A place so far at the edge of the map as to be almost hanging off it.

In the end he pulled out the scrap of paper and stub of pencil and wrote it down anyway, then found it again on the map and twice circled it. His finger followed the faint railway lines that
threaded away from it in either direction but nothing else caught his eye.

As the evening drew in, the fields and woods gave way to forests that rose up over the steepening hillsides, capturing the swelling darkness within the clutch of their boughs.
He found a clearing and rummaged around for kindling, but beneath the trees everything was damp. As he poked about he sensed movement nearby – a figure, he thought, changing shapes between
the trees and shifting with the shadows.