The Low Road (10 page)

Josef faced her. He sighed and set about rolling a cigarette to buy some time. He was suddenly very tired. This day was not going well. He needed something and Sylvia was his only lead so far. Come on, Sylvia. We've known each other a long time, alright. We go back a long way, you and me. We've been around forever, too long to fall for this old routine. I don't want to have to put the frighteners on you—

Hah! You don't scare me, Josef. Not now.

Josef lit his cigarette, concentrated on it, wondered if the estate agents were still outside on the street.

Sylvia drew breath to speak. She fiddled with a diamond ring, ran a comb of fingers through her crackling hair. Hair you could use as insulation when she died, Marcel had once said. Or stuff it in a cushion. She smiled suddenly, revealing rows of chainsaw teeth. You remember Sammy? That night with Sammy . . . and that bozo, whatever his name was. Larry? Lionel? Something?

Leon.

Yeah. Leon. Thought we were gone then. Who would have thought.

Josef sighed. Who would have thought.

Scared the hell out of me, that one. Body in the boot for God knows how long.

Two weeks.

Two weeks, was it? Jeez.

According to the papers.

Yeah, well. Stunk like I-don't-know-what.

Stunk like a man been dead two weeks.

In a boot.

In a car boot. Yes.

Sylvia shook her head. In summer. Jesus, but that was close. Really thought that was the end of this old place. Not that it would have been a tragedy but, you know . . . What happened to him, anyway?

Leon?

Yeah. They execute him?

We don't execute people in this country, Sylvia.

Oh, yeah. Course not. Too civilised.

But I heard he died. Sammy too, I think.

Sylvia inspected the back of one hand, webbed with thick blue veins. Dead or in jail, I guess.

Yes. Dead or in jail.

They stood in silence for a minute. Josef scratched at his tattoo and wondered what his next move could be. Sylvia was rubbing at her chest, around the place her heart should be, her hand like an implement, pressing at herself. She looked like she was working up to something. Finally she withdrew her hand and ran it slowly across the laminated counter in front of her. Why don't you just let him go? Give him a chance?

Josef adjusted the cuff of his jacket. It was cold. A butt in the ashtray had begun to burn and now the whole pile gave off a junkyard smell. He sighed. We already gave him a chance. Gave him a chance and the little bastard has run off with something that don't belong to him. And if I don't get it back I'm in as much trouble as he is. I can't afford screw-ups at my age, Sylvia. I'm sure you know what it's like. Josef considered the sly old thing for a moment. He leaned in over the counter until their faces were only inches apart. He didn't offer you anything? He didn't give you any money, did he? Because that isn't his money to give.

No. Sylvia sniffed. Course not. It's nothing like that. He's young, that's all.

Josef smoothed a wing of his hair. You appealing to—what?—my sense of
integrity
or something?

Sylvia sighed. They checked out last night. Late. Don't know where they were going, you know what it's like around here. Lee was just dumped here the night before. Found him with his suitcase out front—

A suitcase?

Yeah.

Of what?

I don't know. Clothes, I expect. Anyway. He was in rough shape. Had to throw the linen out, there was that much blood. Something I don't appreciate, by the way. Been shot in the guts. Had a guy stabbed in the stomach in here once before who bled like that. You know what it's like, right? Anyway. That was that, see you later,
but
. . . Thing might interest you, couple came in here real late last night looking for a room. Woman all over the place, crying and carrying on . . .

Sylvia paused. Josef watched her as she plucked a menthol cigarette from the packet, slotted it between her greasy lips, lit up, inhaled, waited for the hit, shook out the match and tossed it into the ashtray.

Seems they had stopped out on the highway at a car crash, she went on at last, obviously enjoying herself now, back to her old self after the sympathetic detour. An accident or something. Two blokes there on the road and one of them sticks a pistol into the girl's head and tells her he's going to kill her unless they get in the car and come back the way they came. Back this way. And not to breathe a word. Dead guy on the road already, some crazy thing, Lee and Wild by the sound.

Wild? That the quack's name?

Oh. Yeah.
That's
it. Wild.

They here now?

The couple? No. Course not. What do you think this is, a motel or something? And she wheezed right through to a gurgling cough.

And where exactly was this?

Christ. Reflux. About thirty miles up the road I think. Heading west.

The plains?

Maybe.

But that's it?

Yeah. That's it. All I know. Everything. She patted her chest again. What's the deal? What's he got?

Money.

You sure?

Josef paused. Yeah.

Well. If he had money, I don't know what he was doing staying here. Might have been better off somewhere cleaner and safer if you ask me. And, like a machine, she exhaled a long, thin stream of cigarette smoke.

Josef turned to survey the empty motel car park and the road beyond the glass. There seemed a pause in the traffic and it was very quiet. The two men had disappeared. He couldn't think what day it was, or even if it mattered. There was that discouraging smell of a midweek afternoon. The time when people should be returning to their families, to their cosy houses and roast chickens and the perfume of freshly bathed infants.

Sylvia shrugged and licked her lips. Well, she said with a toss of her head, I'd better get back. It was nice seeing you, Josef. I guess. Take care, old man. And she shuffled down the gloomy hallway towards the sound of the television and its chemical flicker.

Josef watched the road and the car park a little longer, aware of something surfacing within him. Sylvia had to be lying about something. It was her custom. He waited another minute before following her.

The back room smelled as he imagined it would: of cigarettes, fried foods and ancient make-up. The place was filthy, slatternly. Sylvia had her back to him, crouching at the television fiddling with the dials. When she resumed her place on the soggy sofa, she barely glanced at him. There's no point hanging around here. I don't know anything else. I'm tired, Josef. I got nothing else to say.

Josef remained in the doorway. His hands dangled at his sides. Sylvia sat on her green sofa with both stockinged legs tucked beneath her. On a side table was a well-thumbed television guide, an ashtray and a red lamp. The base of the lamp looked as if it were made of something heavy and solid, like brass. It offered a dull, fish-eyed reflection of the room.

A game show on the television. People jumped around and hooted. A bank of coloured lights flashed on and off and on again. Sylvia stabbed at the remote control. Grainy images of a bomb blast, a burning church, men in military fatigues hurrying civilians across a road. A burning tank, a crying infant. Some war or other. Bang. Another game show with a woman in evening wear astride a car bonnet.

Sylvia picked at a red fingernail and looked up at him. Her moist eyelashes closed and then opened ponderously, like sea anemone. Despite the raucous noise of the television Josef could hear her breathing. He stepped into the room.

When he thought about it later, Josef was unsure why he killed Sylvia. It was inevitable. Even she seemed to expect it. And when he was finished with her, he stood in the darkened room, gasping for air. Thin sweat covered his forehead. The room trembled and jerked with the grey television light. The lamp was in his hand. Its cord whipped uselessly across the floor. He was right; it was made of brass.

His mouth flooded with bile as he staggered back into the hallway with a hand clasped across his lips. He rested against the wall and retched dryly onto the linoleum floor. A soft but determined army of exhaustion trooped through him as he crouched on the floor for several minutes with his hands splayed across his thighs.

He thought suddenly of something his mother used to say—what was it?
Tremblement de terre.
What did that mean? Many years ago, when he was a boy.
Tremblement de terre.
Memory was such a strange beast, surfacing at random, from unexpected depths.

Beneath the dappled shade of an apple tree. The smell of grass and river water.

Josef held his coat back with one hand, wiped his mouth and stood up. He coughed and spat and waited a few seconds before patting his hair into place and straightening his clothes. Eventually he composed himself and strolled back through the reception, into the cold street and lowered himself into his car. He smoked a cigarette to rid his mouth of the tart flavour of vomit before edging out into the traffic.

Earthquake.
That was it.
Earthquake
. With his family in the backyard one day, there had been an earthquake, a tremor, the only time he had ever experienced such a thing. The sleepy rumble of the planet. He must have been only ten years old. Twelve at the most. Before all this. What an amazing thing! To look at the ground with brand new eyes, his mother almost drowning in laughter while his father collected apples loosened from the tree and held them to his nose. And the leaves, shaken free from their branches, falling around them, onto their shoulders and heads, onto their laughing, upturned faces.

11

L
ee stands in the yard smoking a cigarette. He is afraid, but that is nothing new; he has been afraid since his sentence began a month ago. Beneath the blue all-weather overalls, sweat moistens his armpits. At 10.00 a.m. it is already hot. The sky is pale, any colour burned out by the high summer sun.

The yard is a large, dusty rectangle dotted with struggling clumps of grass, like an impoverished primary school's. The ground slopes down to one side. Apart from a small group throwing a basketball into a rattling hoop, there are about thirty men standing around smoking and talking in low voices. Many are shirtless. Everyone is inert, stopped in their tracks. Almost without exception their skin is the colour of clotted cream, bruised here and there with tattoos.

Lee spends quite a bit of time wondering how it all happened. There was the routine questioning, the court date and then suddenly he was here. The first few times he was nicked, they assigned him a social worker who talked about opportunity and socioeconomics and neglect and stuff. The social worker tried to blame Claire for what she had or hadn't done, and asked him if he was getting enough to eat. The social worker asked about their guardian, about the accident and the death of his parents and about life with his sister. He said it was OK to feel whatever he was feeling. They wanted something from him, an expression or reaction perhaps, but he was unsure what it was.

Adjacent to the main yard is another smaller yard which is fenced off for the kiddy fiddlers and granny bashers. A beefy man called Fowler is the only prisoner in there at the moment. Simmo and Greene, each with a face as sharp as a razor blade, lean casually against the wire in the main yard and spit and swear in Fowler's direction. Only occasionally, borne by a favourable breeze and a suitable heft, does it reach the hapless Fowler, and when it does, Simmo and Greene cheer joylessly as he wipes the dull coin of spit away with a bunched sleeve. Even at night, whispered threats stalk the tier:
Hey Fowler, I wouldn't eat your porridge tomorrow. We're getting bleach put in. Hey Fowler, your soup taste like piss today?
Even if Simmo and Greene grow tired of it, which they never seem to, there would be others to take up the slack. There's plenty of people and plenty of time.

Lee tries not to look but finds it hard not to. It's like watching a disaster in slow motion. Fowler stands in the corner furthest from the main yard with the fingers of one hand hooked through the wire. He looks resolute but presumably he knows what's in store for him. He just doesn't know if it will be a sharpened toothbrush in his neck, a slashed throat or a good, old-fashioned bashing.

The guards in the two surrounding towers are armed with rifles, even though this is supposed to be pretty minimum security, only thieves and fraudsters and junkies. The high-security boys hardly even get out of their cells these days; it's only sleep, TV and porn for them. From the highest point of the grassy yard, Lee can just see over the wire fences and high brick wall. There are orange-tiled roofs of houses about a mile away, and the curve of a nearby service road. He's not even sure what suburb or town it is. Now and then there is a flash of sun on a windscreen as a car drives past. It seems an incredible thing, a signal from another planet, but it's just people going about their business, driving the kids to school or doing the shopping or something. Driving to get a fucking video. It's cruel to build a prison so close to regular people.