Gregory Norminton - The Devil’s Highway

Marcus felt his lips open and close. ‘Perhaps,’ he managed to reply.

Condatis bowed and took back the breakfast vessels. Marcus watched him withdraw, negotiating with hands full the narrow wooden steps to the camp.

A raven cronked from one of the granary towers. Marcus looked for it through the smoke and growing clamour of the settlement. He noticed that the snow had stopped falling. It would be a bright day for once; all the better because unlooked for. A blessing.

2

She realises only after she has woken that she did so braced for the smell of smoke on her pillow. The bedroom is hot and whiffy like a sickroom in summer, and the heavy curtains admit a sliver of breeze in which she expects, almost avidly, the scent of wildfire.

She lies on her back, looking at the spines of Polish thrillers on the bookshelves. Shutting her eyes, she wills sleep to reclaim her, but she is cut adrift and washed ashore on another day.

She gets up from the hardness of the bed and pulls back the curtains. A bright morning, another one, the sky pale blue and slashed with contrails. She fights with the stiff latch and lurches out –

– blossom and earth and cut grass. The neighbour leaning on the frame of his lawnmower. No smoke, at least not yet. She pads to the bathroom, pees, then goes downstairs. In the kitchen she finds a note folded and propped up against one of her grandfather’s ashtrays.

Gone out on fire watch! Dad xx

She stares at the words as if she expects them to rearrange themselves on the paper. He has left her again to her homework and the heavy tutting of the kitchen clock.

Bobbie slouches, slack-bellied, at the sink and looks out at the garden. The oaks are naked but elsewhere it’s leaf-burst, the beech and chestnuts incandescent with spring. What her father calls the green mist. He wrote about it for the book he was working on before Mum left, before they came to Bagshot these Easter holidays to sort through fifty years of stuff – files, folders, clothes, books, pictures, furniture, garden tools, dusty junk in the garage. She wanders into the sitting room, barefoot on the worn carpet, and contemplates the cardboard boxes left open and gaping. When her father isn’t filling these with his inheritance – though some are marked ‘Mum’, ‘Roberta’, ‘Dump’ – he is out on the heath. Why should she wait for him if he cannot be bothered to greet her when she rises? It’s not as if there are DVDs to watch, or music worth listening to in her grandfather’s record collection.

Bobbie returns to the kitchen. She pulls the dry loaf from the bread bin, hacks at it with the breadknife and fills the ticking toaster. Her friends will be playing in their North Oxford gardens. They will be cycling in University Park or going shopping with their mums. She has no one to hang out with. Only the Lost Boys. She imagines the heat coming off the sand on the Poors Allotment. Waiting for her toast, she pictures the journey – imagines setting herself against the hill, the soil clenching beneath her boots.

A sunburst – a flashbulb going off in his face – and the air pulses. The noise is a giant punching him in both ears. Then (but there is no sequence, it’s all now) the hot splash of shrapnel. He lies on the ground with the high, shocked whine in his ears. He feels but cannot hear the patter of dust falling. Someone is screaming.

He is on his back, waving his legs in the air to restrict blood flow. His heart isn’t so much pounding as taking one. Air escapes his lungs –

– ah!

He’s in bed.

He’s in bed. He eases himself down and the sheets are damp with sweat. He focuses on his breathing – in through the nostrils, out through the mouth. Something catches in his throat and he hacks it loose, trying to do so quietly.

He reaches for his watch on the bedside table. 7:39 . The Rev will be up, all cheery and wholesome and unfuckable in her kitchen.

He swings his legs over the side of the bed and the floor is cold and that feels good. He’s in England. He’s almost home. Almost back.

Ten minutes and a crafty fag later, he is dressed and kitted out at the breakfast table. Rachel is sitting behind her second or third cup of coffee. He can see on her face how he must look – wired and worn out at the same time.

‘What’s it today?’ he asks.

‘Wednesday. Holy Communion. You’re most welcome.’

‘Na, it’s all right.’

She has left out the Rice Krispies and a sweating bottle of milk. The Rev sees but never mentions his shaking hands. She’s careful not to slam doors and to set the volume low on the radio and the television so they don’t come on with a blast. Even so, she makes mistakes. Like that time she invited him into the kitchen when there was raw lamb mince on the chopping board.

‘You wouldn’t care,’ she says, ‘for a grapefruit?’

‘Uh …’

‘This has been languishing in the fruit bowl. It’s on my conscience.’ She holds the grapefruit as he would hold her breast. ‘I bought it in a fit of healthy-mindedness. Can’t face it now.’

‘Bitter.’

‘I could manage it with a liberal sprinkling of sugar but I fear that would be missing the point.’

The Rev gets this way with food. Some people need things to feel guilty about. ‘I don’t fancy it,’ he says. He sloshes milk into his breakfast cereal, hears it pucker and snap. He doesn’t fancy this, either, but he needs to get something inside him.

‘Rough night?’

‘Why, d’I wake you?’

Rachel shakes her head. Sneaking a peek in her room that time, he saw the earplugs lying bent and mottled on her bedside table. ‘Have you given any thought,’ she asks, ‘to my suggestion? I have that number at Veterans Aid.’

‘I’m not a charity case.’

‘Aitch, you literally are right now, and you’re welcome, but staying here is no life, is it?’

‘You want me to leave.’

‘That’s not what I’m saying.’

‘Sounds like it.’

‘You can stay as long as you’ve nowhere else, but we need to come up with a long-term plan. Where do you see yourself, three-four years from now?’

‘Dunno, dead?’

‘You don’t mean that.’

‘All right, stacking shelves, driving a forklift truck, working in a call centre selling shit to people who don’t need it.’

‘In a home of your own. Maybe with a partner, a kid.’

‘I don’t want kids.’

‘Fine.’

‘I’m not having kids.’

‘Aitch, I’m being hypothetical. My point is, organisations exist to help people like you.’

‘I’m dealing with it.’

‘You scream in your sleep. You get up looking like you’ve been on a three-day bender and I know you haven’t, it’s just what sleep has done to you, it’s what your dreams have done to you. There’s nothing wrong with accepting help.’ Her plump hands cup her mug of coffee that has COFFEE written on it. He stares at them because he feels the pressure of her watching and there’s no way in the world he can push his eyes up to meet hers. ‘Tell me you’ll think about it.’

‘Right.’

‘Is that a yes?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I can do all the preliminary work – the talking, the forms …’

Christ. She lifts her mug to drink and he feels the weight of her attention lift, so he looks up and sees red hair and the pink of her face, and in the garden the apple blossom is getting picked apart by the wind and he has to get out, into the woods. He looks directly at her, and if only he could pin her down on the table, his thighs slapping against her bare arse, pounding her till she shouts his name like it’s not a sad puppy.

‘Thank you,’ she says.

‘What for?’

‘For being willing to listen.’