Devastation Road Read online

  The offer and the refusal.

  The offer and the refusal.

  They saw it running on a constant cycle until, as the road drew them nearer, Owen realized that the bundle contained an infant parcelled in a shawl. The young girl looked tired and thin, in a grubby white dress, a pink cardigan embroidered with fraying flowers, and a headscarf tied tightly over her head.

  Without taking his eyes off her, Janek gave Owen’s sleeve a tug.

  He leant in. ‘Nemluvte s ní,’ he said. ‘No English. Hm?’

  Owen saw how desperate she was, holding out the child to everyone that passed, and her voice tremulous.

  ‘Bitte, nehmen Sie mein Kind.’

  He tried not to catch her eye, while Janek’s hand at his elbow gently urged him on. Then, to his relief, she suddenly cut in front of them, targeting instead a well-dressed woman walking several yards ahead.

  ‘Bitte, nehmen Sie mein Kind.’

  The woman, who was carrying a leather holdall and had a flowered silk scarf around her neck, tried to ignore her but the girl hurried alongside her.

  ‘Nehmen Sie doch bitte mein Kind!’

  The woman turned her head away and quickened her pace. The girl seized at her arm.

  ‘Ich will es nicht,’ the woman said sharply, pulling her arm free, but the girl grabbed at it again.

  ‘Bitte! Ich kann mich nicht darum kümmern.’

  ‘Ich kann es nicht,’ the woman snapped.

  The girl tried to force the bundle on her anyway, pressing the crying infant against her and talking fast, imploring her as the woman struggled to push her away, red-faced and flustered now.

  Janek shouted, ‘Lasst sie los!’ and before Owen could stop him, he was in the middle, giving the girl such a shove that she staggered back against the verge.

  ‘Sie kann nicht helfen!’ he yelled.

  She stopped, her eyes filling as the baby wailed in her arms.

  Then they turned and marched on – Janek, Owen, the woman with the holdall – leaving the girl behind.

  ‘Danke,’ the woman murmured, but she would no more catch Janek’s eye than she had the girl’s, and after a while they let her pull away, the hard soles of her patent shoes clicking on the road, the leather holdall still in her hand and the silk scarf fluttering out behind her collar.

  When Owen glanced back, the road was quiet again. There was only the girl, holding the child to her chest and trying to soothe it, while she looked helplessly around her. She didn’t seem to know what to do.

  They walked in silence, an uphill slog, but the girl and her baby played uncomfortably on his mind.

  It was another ten minutes before he dared turn again, but the road behind them fell away, as long and straight as a grid-line, and now deserted; just the fields swilling on either side, empty but for the breeze. He stopped, hesitant and suddenly worried.

  ‘Come,’ Janek said. He gave Owen a glare and pulled at his arm.

  But Owen would not. His eyes were fixed on the spot where the girl had been, a feeling of sickness starting to creep through him. He couldn’t see where she could have disappeared to with the child so quickly. Then a terrible thought struck him, and with a growing sense of panic he started to walk back, slowly at first and then faster, his heart bumping up into his throat and thumping in his ears. Like a distant echo he could hear Janek behind him, yelling – ‘Ne!’ and ‘Ne! Jdeme!’ – but Owen would not stop. As the road took him down the hill, he broke into a run.

  The bundle was in the deep grass on the side of the road, just as he had feared, the infant’s small face white within the shawl, its eyes blinking and tiny pink fingers fumbling at the air. He turned and turned and turned again, scanning the corn in every direction for her, and trying to see her in the pockets of trees.

  ‘Hey,’ he shouted. ‘HEY!’

  He waited, and then yelled again, even louder, but the child’s mother was gone.

  Janek stalked on ahead, furious and striding hard. He would barely speak to Owen.

  ‘No!’ he said. ‘No! To dítě ne!’

  Owen had tried to explain that he couldn’t leave it, but Janek kept shouting, a rattling barrage of Czech. She wouldn’t come back, if that was what Janek was thinking. But Janek wasn’t listening. He paced down the road throwing his hands up in disbelief.

  ‘Ne dítě, ježišmarjá!’

  Already the infant was crying.

  In the hours that passed he would tell himself that there had been no choice. The truth, though, was that he couldn’t rationalize why he had gone back and then picked the child up – it had come from a compulsion within him that he couldn’t put his finger on.

  The infant now was inconsolable, its pink face reddening until it was the same colour as the inside of its mouth, and its crying quivered in Owen’s chest. He tried to soothe it as best he could, holding it this way and that. He was filled with a growing sense of dread. Dear God, what the hell had he done?

  On a road lined with poplar trees, the panic finally took him and he tried to give the bawling infant to a family in a wagon. He held it up to the elderly mother at the reins but she shooed him off, snapping something at him and spurring the horses on. The man and two daughters, who were hurrying alongside the piled cart and hauling their cases, pushed their way around him.

  He stopped the nearest daughter to him, pulling her back. She looked about twenty. Just the right age, he thought. Her face was pale and blotchy, and her greasy hair was sliding out of a clip. She looked at the child grizzling in his arms, its clenched fist waving.

  ‘Please,’ he said. If she could just take it . . .

  Her eyes were hard.

  ‘Englisch?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  She considered this for a moment. Then, pulling up a force from within her, she spat into his face.

  They sat in the entrance of a field, Owen in the long grass, the baby growing heavy in the crook of his arm. He tried jigging it, turning it, resting it over his shoulder and then holding it again in his arm, but its crying had become incessant and he had no idea how to stop it.

  Janek perched on the top bar of the gate, hunched over his knees, and his head tilted with his fingers in his ears.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Owen, ‘but we couldn’t have left it. You understand that.’

  The boy turned his head away and gazed instead out across the fields.

  Owen had never had someone spit at him before, let alone a girl. He still felt the prickle of her saliva on his skin. It felt like shame.

  The baby was a boy. No more than a few weeks old, the thinnest wisps of blond hair lifting from the top of his head. The skin of his face looked loose, as if the flesh still needed padding, and there were wrinkles gathering around his neck. His eyes were full of gunk and a thin film of snot was drying into a crust under a nose no bigger than a thumb tip. As they sat, the child’s cries tired into a resentful whimper.

  ‘We’ll have to do something with him,’ Owen said. ‘There must be places. Orphanages or something, I don’t know. Somebody will have it. Don’t you think?’

  The boy kicked his heel at the gate bar and arched his shoulders into a shrug.

  ‘He’ll need feeding too,’ Owen added. ‘Can’t give him bloody tins of processed meat. We’ll need to find him something. And nappies. God! Milk, clothes . . . Jesus Christ.’ The list went on.

  The boy remained silent. It was so hard to tell whether he was even listening sometimes. He stared out across the field. Something in the trees where the field dipped had caught his eye – a sudden flash of movement – and he craned to see. For a long time his eyes fixed on a spinney, then he turned to look at Owen.

  ‘No more road,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  He swivelled around, jumped off the gate into the field and set off through the furrows.

  ‘Hey! Where are you going?’

  But the boy just whistled a call and beckoned him on with a wave.

  In the small cluttered kitchen of
a farmhouse they forced a widow at gunpoint to give them food, while the baby screamed in Owen’s arms, and Janek yelled at it and the woman, waving the pistol about, and Owen shouted and the flustered woman cried, ‘Nein! Bitte! Nicht schießen!’

  ‘Milch,’ Janek shouted. ‘Milch.’

  He swung the gun on the baby and Owen, and then on the woman again, who by now was red-faced and sobbing as she bumped around the table, knocking things over, flour dusting the floor and her hands all of a flap.

  ‘And towels,’ Owen added.

  ‘Und Brot!’

  ‘And soap.’

  Janek swung the gun, still yelling.

  ‘Jesus Christ. Will you put that bloody thing down?’ He’d fire it if he weren’t careful.

  The baby screamed and screamed.

  After, as they walked, he held the bottle to the child’s mouth and it sucked hungrily on the teat, the bottle old and cracked but good enough until they found something better. His arms were already aching.

  Janek strode on ahead, the milk canister he had stolen yesterday swinging at his side, now full again, and another containing hastily slopped-in soup, and a hand towel looped over his belt.

  They had left the woman sobbing on the floor. It was the second time she’d been robbed in a week. The camps had been blown open and the inmates were loose. The Poles and Russians were marauding the farmlands, taking everything, she had cried.

  But that was not their problem and for now they walked, the adrenalin still pulsing through them, Owen happy that Janek was happy and smiling again. He had slapped Owen on the back as they made their way out to the lane and, for a while, he had walked with his arm draped over Owen’s shoulder.

  Owen tried to think of something to sing to the child but all he could find in his head was the hymn, those few lines he couldn’t shift about pilgrims and redeemers.

  They were brothers now, Janek said – brothers looking for brothers. Was that why when Owen took the lead, he sometimes thought the boy was Max, that it was Max’s footfall he could hear behind him? The stone that suddenly scudded past him had been kicked by Max’s foot. Max’s voice. Max’s laugh. You can’t get rid of me that easily. Another stone skittering past.

  In his arms, the baby strained to suck at the last dregs of milk. His face reddened with the effort, and he let out a few grizzly, hungry gasps. Owen lifted him on to his shoulder and tried to comfort him, but in the end the baby started to cry once more.

  ‘Můža?’ said Janek, offering. He took the infant from Owen and held him out in front of him as if the child was a wet and dripping thing. He manoeuvred him around and then changed his mind, uncertain how to hold him.

  ‘Not like that. Like this,’ said Owen, showing him.

  ‘Ah, yes, yes,’ said Janek. ‘Shh,’ he said to the child.

  They rested beneath a willow that overhung a rill, Janek leaning against its trunk, with his knees up and the baby cradled within them. The infant clutched a finger with each hand as Janek softly spoke to him and gently moved his fingers around. The yellow heads of celandine burst up through the thick grass.

  Owen lay on his back, studying his notes and trying to make sense of them. COTTBUS, he’d written, and BABY – NOT MINE. There were other things written and crossed out, connections made with arrows as if they were electrical circuits mapped out at his drawing board. We’ll be designing bombers soon, Harry had said.

  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.