The Low Road (27 page)

J
osef pulled on a singlet and a pair of trousers. He crossed to the window, raised the blind and peered down into the empty street. A small and unremarkable place, just a mess of lines and shapes. His eye searched for movement, but there was none. Not even a lousy traffic light.

His reflection held a lunar shine, the skin dimpled and worn and thinly spread, making apparent the various ridges and planes beneath, the very shape of him. The sharp nose and high cheeks, his dark and drowsing eyes. In front of him, the window rattled in its frame as he brushed a lick of hair from his eyes.

His breath fogged the glass. He sucked at his gold tooth and curled his toes on the carpet. The cold didn't agree with him. There was an arthritic ache in his right knee. The tattoo on his forearm thrummed and he scratched at it, softly at first, but then harder.

He fetched a glass of water from the bathroom and returned to his vigil. The hotel room smelled of old wood polish and dust. The water from the bathroom tap tasted faintly of rust. It was still some time before dawn. There was no sign of life until a grey cat slunk across the bakery roof opposite, almost invisible against the tin. Not far above, the cloudy sky hovered like the pale belly of an even greater darkness.

Hunkered under night, the town appeared different from when he arrived yesterday afternoon. A blue thread of smoke curled from a chimney stack on a far hill. There was a very dim and distant light, perhaps from a house on the other side of town. He wondered if there was another person standing at a window just as he was, staring out over the darkness, listening out for cracks in the silence. Who else could be awake at this time, adrift in the night? Apart from animals in the undergrowth, only the very good or the very bad were awake at this hour. When he was a child his father would wake in the middle of the night and shuffle to the kitchen to drink tea and pray at the table beside the humming fridge. He wondered about the urge to pour oneself into the silence.

After a lifetime in the city, the prehistoric hush of places like this unnerved him. He was a thin man in a strange hotel room, his movements slow and careful, like those of a mantis. He smoked a cigarette and coughed gently, just to impose a sound upon the morning, to remind himself of himself.

He grimaced at the thought of his dream. Like witches or foreign tongues they made sense, but only to themselves. Someone in his family would have been able to decode it for him, were he able to tell them. Most of them loved nothing better than to sit over morning coffee and unpick the hem of a dream, to argue whether it was a vision from the future or the past or some dead soul reaching across the darkness. His aunt Mary was a merchant of dreams; she sold dreams to people in the neighbourhood who wanted a chance to fly, to have children or to revisit the countries of their birth one final time. He was never sure how this was done, but it seemed to involve an exchange of whispers and certain herbs, the pressing of amulets into wrinkled palms. Money as well, of course. Mary also claimed she could take people's dreams away from them, was able to bear the nightmares others found intolerable. When he was a boy, Josef would be woken in the middle of the night by her wailing in the next room, apparently lost in the cathedral of her dreaming, trying to outrun the madnesses that rightfully belonged to others. Those flocks of owls and crumbling teeth, the light that dripped like water. But then, like a fish in the shallows, his dream flickered and was gone.

Josef shivered. It suddenly seemed a long way to come in search of a little bastard like Lee. A lot of bother over such a pathetic sum of money. A snitch in the police department had told him about two men—who sounded a lot like Lee and his doctor friend—rolling a railway guard and jumping a train. It was the only clue Josef had been able to gather since leaving Sylvia's place that day, but it was enough. He was getting close. If Lee thought he was going to sneak off to his sister's, then he was dreaming. Josef would find him and stop him.

Aunt Mary would surely be dead by now, Josef realised. A lot of those people were probably dead. Dead or otherwise scattered like leaves. No way to track them, even if he wanted to—even if they wanted to be found by him. All those aunts and uncles and cousins: Leo, David, Drusilla. Little Carla, who wouldn't be so little anymore. Maybe even married. The family he hadn't seen for so many years.

He recalled his father trying not to cry as his mother pressed money into Josef's hand on the day he left more than twenty years ago. The day he went away to work and perhaps learn a trade, do things in the real world. His homecoming delayed, first by a ten-year sentence for armed robbery and then by shame. The only time his father and mother wrote to him in jail was to tell him he wasn't welcome in their home ever again. How quickly it had become too late, and for how long it had remained that way.

He wondered whether his parents were still in the same weatherboard house, crowded with relatives and their children, with their bramble of languages. There was probably still a glass jar full of wooden clothes pegs left on the lawn beside a saucer of milk for the cat. Josef's father had no sense of smell or taste because of an accident when he was young, but it didn't stop him leaning across to sniff plates of food in the hope that
this
meal, at long last, would be the one to rekindle this lost sense. Holding his tie back against his chest with his right hand to stop it trailing in the food, his other hand grasping the lip of the table for balance, eyes half closed in concentration. Once he found his father in the back garden handling an apple from their tree. His father was wearing a blue shirt that was frayed at the collar, with tiny strands of white thread waving loose around his brown neck.
Tell me, son. Does this have a actual smell?
he'd asked, and Josef, no more than ten years old, had closed his eyes and shyly brought the smooth, round shape right up against his nose. It was cold on his lips and large in his palm. At first there was nothing, but he wanted to please his father so he tried again, breathed in more deeply and discovered a scent of something sharp and tangy. What was it? How to describe such a thing? He'd never even noticed it before, had never thought apples had a smell at all, but it was unmistakably the smell of apple. Again he breathed in. It smelled of apple, that was all.

But
No
, he'd said with a shrug.
No smell. There's nothing you're missing here, Dad
, and his father had nodded and smiled and walked back indoors with his hands deep in his pockets.

He felt far from home, but this was nothing new. Running a palm across his chin, he decided he needed a shave. He sniffed at his brackish armpit. Needed a shower too. He hated travelling. Disliked being prey to the unfamiliar, having to improvise all the time. Why, he wondered, would anyone choose to make themselves a stranger? Those people who travel around because they got nothing better to do must be nuts.

Even up in this hotel room in the middle of the night, Josef felt conspicuous. He knew that a 53-year-old lone man was always considered sinister—a rapist or a terrorist. Pornographer. Even the old man who ran this hotel had seemed miffed by his lack of luggage when he checked in, as if its absence revealed something profound. He'd snuffled like a wombat and showed him upstairs without a backward glance. Like animals, people were suspicious of those abandoned by others. Josef needed to keep a low profile. Find out where Lee and the quack had gone next, and keep moving.

Holding it gingerly between thumb and forefinger, he smoked his cigarette right down. There should be enough time to catch a few more hours' sleep before morning, but he noticed a curious thing as he looked out over the small, remote town before returning to bed. The low clouds had begun to deteriorate and crumble. Small pieces of cloud fluttered, only a few at first but gaining in number until the sky was filled with white shards. They whitened the street and eaves and huddled in creamy drifts on roofs. They sprinkled without sound or apparent weight, utterly of their own magic. Josef wiped the window with his hand to see better and pressed his nose to the cold glass. A smile spidered across his lips. Snow.

He had never seen snow. Even the word was strange in his mouth. Snow, snow, snow. He laughed at the fairytale sight, and then again at his own laughter. Shaking his head in amazement, he walked away from the window and then returned to the glass again. Still the snow fell, like some great silent army. He flung open the window and put his head out into the muffled night. Flakes collected in his hair and on his shoulders. One snagged on an eyelash, hung for a second, then dissolved. Damn. What do you know about that? Snow.
Actual fucking snow.
Take a look at that. Take a look at that. Foolishly he looked around, hoping to see someone else enjoying the sight, but, of course, it was late and everyone else in this town was asleep. It seemed like something that children, at least, should see, but there was not a soul, young or old. Flakes sizzled on his tongue.

Josef's mother had told him of the snowfalls she had seen in her country when she was a girl: about the mineral crunch underfoot, the vast silence, the watery smell of ice. It had always seemed an impossibly distant phenomenon, of a sort that could never occur here. Her stories didn't prepare him for the unearthly sight of it. He dragged a chair to the window and leaned on the sill, exclaiming every so often and shaking his head. Despite the cold, he watched this secret carnival for an hour or more. Snowflakes clung to the glass and massed in shallow drifts along the outside of the wooden frame, their mathematical skeletons visible against the growing morning light. And as he watched, the town softened and almost vanished under a white pelt.

28

W
ild tugged on the chain. The jolt of pain through his wrists was sudden but at least expected. He did it again. Then again. To take charge of one's own pain, at least that was something. A mockery of comfort. Tremors passed through his body like a mob of schoolboys running sticks along a corrugated tin fence. He yanked again at the chain until the skin covering his wrists broke and a bruise revealed itself quickly, as if it had been waiting beneath the skin for such an opportunity. A contusion.
Thou hast brought me to the dust of death.

He shat in the bucket, squatting in one corner of the room with elbows on his thighs and his trousers bunched around his ankles. Picking at his hairy, twitching shanks. Everything was filthy, all surfaces in this room furred with dust. The walls were sea green, the paint cracked and scabbing loose in places. A huge brown cupboard stood against one wall. Inside it a pair of blue trousers on a coathanger and a ghostly smell. Over the fireplace hung a watercolour of a waterfront scene. In some war or other they pegged women spread-eagled to the ground and jammed sticks of dynamite into their cunts. He tried to remember what Jane's tits looked like. God, they were great tits. Breasts were the purest, warmest sort of flesh. Tears ballooned in his eyes and spilled over his eyelids. Pathetic.

He crouched and rocked and wept and his heart swung in his chest, tracing a pendulous arc like that of a chandelier on a listing ship. Again he yanked at the chain and the legs of the bed to which he was attached squealed across the floor. He found himself without trousers, the buttons on his shirt undone, cold, every hair on his body straining to break free, each part of him anxious to escape. How had all this happened? How had all this happened? If only there was someone to blame.

His body was a waxen thing, like something you'd find in a drain and prod with a stick. He flattened himself on the floor, felt the linoleum against his stomach and chest, became aware of every grain of grit crunching against him. Wondered if he could count them by feel alone. Got as far as fifty-two then stopped, just forgot what he was doing. What the hell? Snot leaked onto the floor. And always that wind, that wind scrabbling on all fours across his junkyard bones. The fire smouldered in the grate, the logs having turned to ash.

With the chain trailing behind, he staggered to the window and watched the rain pebble against the glass. In the distance, trees waved blurrily, as if bidding him goodnight or farewell. He looked at his watch, but both its crippled hands just dangled uselessly. He placed another log in the fireplace and waited, crouching, for it to catch. He poured whiskey straight from the bottle down his throat and vomited it straight up moments later into the metal bucket already reeking of shit. He took the final swig and again threw it up. It was hot in his throat. There are so many ways to be hungry. It is a sensation, he thought, that knows no bounds. An ocean, a desert. This great and endless hunger.

His hands shook furiously. Was this how life would be from now on? Was this his punishment? The endless chatter and interior disquiet, this bloody pack of crones rummaging through his body. Wild wondered what it would be like to die. Perhaps it was little more than making a decision. How hard would it really be?

It had almost happened when he overdosed once in his office several years earlier and had been disappointed at the lack of shining lights or warmth, or the benevolent face of God. He'd shrunk and scurried into the deepest parts of his body until there was only the faint sounds of his young nurse Anne calling to him and shaking the shell of his body, all of it as inconsequential as events on a remote planet.