The Devil’s Highway

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.’

‘It’s your house.’

‘Technically it’s not.’

Aitch fiddles with his shemagh, drapes it across his shoulder. ‘Reckon I’ll go see Bekah,’ he says.

‘Is that wise?’

‘Stu’s at work. Then maybe I’ll go for a run.’

‘Okey-doke,’ says Rachel. She drains her mug, gets up and puts it in the sink. Job done, parishioners to see. ‘Will you be going through the heath?’

‘Eh?’

‘To your sister’s?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s just the ground’s very dry. We’re supposed to take care not to drop cigarettes.’

‘“Don’t burn everything, Aitch!”’

Rachel hiccups a laugh. ‘I don’t mean that.’

‘Cross my heart, Rev, hope to die, I promise I will not burn down the heath.’

Locking the front door, she tastes the air. Nothing but the exhalation of flowers and, fainter, diesel fumes from a ride-on mower. She walks to the junction with College Ride. Putting Bagshot behind her, she follows the holly hedge as far as Pennyhill Park Hotel and its pungent hinterland of skips. At the crest of the hill she turns right, scaling a low bank of gravel shored up by oil drums. She pushes through holly and laurel, looking out for dog mess underfoot or bagged and hung from branches.

In the wood the footpath is obstructed with logging debris. Someone has been grubbing up rhododendron, leaving the wrack snagged in trees as if deposited by a great flood. She walks among roots and torn branches. Machines have carved deep ruts in the mud.

She drags a stick through the skeletons of last year’s bracken, knocking tentacles of new growth. Everywhere the understorey is in leaf – rowans with their stems nibbled by deer, birches spangled with sunlight. A blackbird, threshing leaves in search of springtails, flies scolding at her approach. Birds seem to call from every corner – chaffinch, robin, wren – and she imagines their song as silver threads tying up the wood. Above the trees the sky is raw with the rasp of jet engines.

Bobbie enters the beech plantation. Her father has shown her the damage done to it by deer and squirrels. Inattentive, she treads in a rare puddle and tiny insects rise like vapour about her ankles.

Has she ever known the woods this dry this early? She thinks about the fire on the ranges. They were in the Vauxhall at the time, taking more of Grandpa’s stuff to the dump. ‘That’s smoke,’ her father said. The air flashed blue and they bumped onto the verge to let a fire engine pass.

‘Could be a bonfire,’ said Bobbie, seeing the expression on her father’s face.

‘It’s not a bonfire.’

After that, he swerved as he drove because he was fiddling with the car radio to find a local news station. He swore at Dolly Parton, he swore at travel updates.

When they got back to Grandpa’s house, he left Bobbie in the hallway and ran to fetch his iPad. The heath in Pirbright was in flames. Sparks, they reckoned, from ordnance or a soldier’s cooking fire. Her father was scrolling in a sweat. ‘Says here a thousand acres.’

‘Is that a lot?’

‘That’s the lot. Jesus.’

It was because of drought, he said, and the winter dieback. Spring is the worst time of year for it – nestlings in the heather eaten by flames, lizards cooked on the blackened soil. Bobbie listened but she failed to make the necessary noises. It made her father sullen all evening.

She picks at shreds of bark torn from a beech by a gnawing squirrel. He reckons she doesn’t care about the land, but that’s not true. Didn’t they come here every summer, and every autumn half-term, to endure Grannie’s cooking and Grandpa’s lectures? And weren’t things easiest on those visits when all together they took off on long hikes, picking blackberries in August and mushrooms in October? Sometimes they found Sparassis, or brains as Bobbie calls it, spongy growths from pine stumps that you bake in casseroles or use to flavour omelettes. Deep amid the trees, they found boletus mushrooms with slimy caps. Best of all were the cep, so mild and nutty, filling her grandparents’ house with the smell of autumn woods.

Those were among the few occasions when her grandfather, who considered the kitchen to be his wife’s domain, commandeered the means of production and banished the family to the sitting room, summoning them with a crier’s voice to grzybowa or mushroom soup, with poppy seedcake that he’d ordered from a Polish shop in Hounslow. That soup, Bobbie thinks, is lost to them now. Her father never learned how to make it – he’s tetchy about picking mushrooms for ecological reasons – and Grandpa was not one to write his recipes down.

She sits on a stump among sweet chestnuts. The chestnuts are warped and dying, their flanks blackened by fire. Bobbie drinks from her water bottle and the cold makes her teeth ache. She lowers herself into stillness as her father taught her, trying to expand her peripheral vision – casting a web of attention to see what lands in it. She hears aircraft noise, traffic on Nine Mile Ride and the A30. Nearer, fainter, there is the shaken bell of a robin, the breeze in the pines. She tries to give herself to this moment, to stake a claim in it, but there are human voices at the edge of hearing and her wide-eyed stare contracts. She perceives, so dimly it might be a twinge of gristle in her jaw, the squeak of bicycle brakes. She stows the water in her rucksack and touches as she does so the patterned stone in its inner pocket.

She retrieves the stone. It soothes her to roll the familiar shape in her palm.

Her father found it twenty years ago – long before she existed – on a dig at Silchester. She imagines him with a full head of hair, on padded knees in a trench, scraping off the dirt with his thumbnail. The stone is shaped like a withered pear and carved with ribs and pockmarks. It was never knapped to kill or cut – its markings are odd, with hatchings like decoration about what Bobbie thinks of as its waist and neck. It’s impossible to guess its age – it might have been carved by a schoolboy on a field trip, or a soldier resting on manoeuvres. Bobbie likes to claim it’s prehistoric. No roads back then. No England. Only foraging and hunting, small groups of people your only shelter and hope of survival. When he presented her with the stone, her father had been circumspect. ‘I can’t guarantee that it’s of archaeological interest.’ Even so, it matters that the stone is hers, that it came into her keeping. In the first hand that held it, it would have felt the same as it does in hers.

She puts the stone in her left trouser pocket and picks up the footpath towards Surrey Hill.

Here he is, slouching behind the sports hall of the country park hotel. There’s gash everywhere: smashed beer bottles, cans of Red Bull, plastic bags with dogshit inside. It’s a relief to get under the trees. In the beech wood there’s a girl, or maybe a boy, of ten or so, thrashing old bracken with a stick. He doesn’t often see kids here, mostly dog walkers and lads from the estate on their way to the pub.

This path was one of his favourites on the Yamaha, taking turns with Donnie to punish their guts on its roots and stones. On foot, the gradient is starting to cost him. How can he be short of breath already? He’s seriously out of shape. Not that the weather helps. Never known an April like it. Still, chilly after Helmand.

Ten litres a day he got through at first, the water warm and tasting of bottle plastic. Sweating like a pig out in the ulu. His arse-crack like a river. Mid-summer it got so hot his brain went numb. He only wanted to sit and breathe, and even that was like sucking the air inside an oven. But there were duties to perform, orders to keep them knocking about while the heat squeezed the sweat out of him and even the flipflops were sitting it out in their hovels, waiting for nightfall.

He makes it to the top of the hill. Twenty-three and he can still hack a bit of exercise. A few more paces and the trees give way to patchy scrub. He trained on land like this in Germany, but the sand and soil were no preparation for Afghanistan, its thin dust a powder over everything – in his skin, his hair, the parts of his rifle. Some days the dust was a beast, surging up in the downdraught from a chopper as if it wanted to smother it. Like the brownout when the Slick came for Chris and Gobby.

Who washed the dust out of their wounds? Did some of it travel home in their plywood coffins?

Fuck it – he lights a bine.

What is he going to say to Bekah? What arrangement of words can he come up with that would change anything with his sister?

He walks across the Poors Allotment, treading down the heather, dropping ash into it. He sees the burnt-out car, its rusted hull pierced by birch saplings. Strangely comforting that, knowing even the ugliest things will disappear. Or maybe that’s wishful thinking. What could grow out of him to obscure the sights in his head? They come at him in the day but worse at night. Sometimes, too anxious to sleep, he walks up and down Church Road or into the dark of the forest. Last Saturday, after pub closing, he kept going along the A30 as far as the golf shop on Jenkin’s Hill. Stood in its empty car park thinking: top spot for a sniper, you can see a mile down the road.

He is level now with the telecoms tower. It stands behind gates and razor wire, though it wouldn’t be hard to get in if the fancy took him. He drops his fagbutt on the gravel and crushes it under his boot-heel. Has a quick sniff of his armpits. Tests his breath. She won’t chuck him out if he pongs, not without a second reason. Still, a man has his pride.

In the Old Dean estate, people are either at work, asleep, or plonked in front of breakfast TV. Plenty of curtains are drawn and there’s nobody about on the pale grass between houses. Outside Bekah’s block he looks for Stu’s van, but it’s not there.

He rings the buzzer and waits a long time. Probably she’s trying to pick Annie up, or yelling at Barry to turn his music down.

‘Hello?’

‘Bekah, it’s me.’ The intercom breathes static. ‘Can I come up?’

She lets him in and he goes slowly up the stairs. The echoey landing, the dead tomato plants outside 2C, then ARCHER, Stu’s surname where theirs used to be.

Bekah has put the latch on. He steps into the hallway that smells of last night’s supper and the nappy bin. There are noises from the utility space, where he finds Bekah putting a load on while Annie sits playing with an empty bottle of Fairy Liquid. His sister presents him with a hard, perfumed jaw to kiss. His niece pays him no attention – she knows Aitch has nothing for her.

‘You didn’t tell me you were coming over.’

‘It’s not exactly far. Where’s Barry?’

‘How should I know?’

‘Stu’s at work, is he?’

‘Where else would he be?’ Bekah closes the drum of the washing machine and selects the economy cycle. Annie has shaken a drop of soap from the bottle and is spreading it with her foot on the lino.

‘I’m parched – can I get a glass of something?’

‘We’re out of squash.’

‘Tap’s fine.’

Aitch escapes to the kitchen and pours himself a glass. He does a quick recce in the drawers and finds a pack of fags under some fliers. He shakes it at her when she comes in. ‘Silk Cut? That’s like inhaling air.’

‘Oi, thief.’

‘When d’you start on these?’

‘I haven’t,’ says Bekah, ‘they’re just in case.’

‘In case you give up?’

‘Go on, you can have one.’

‘Hardly worth it.’ Yet he scrabbles for a cigarette and steps out on the balcony to smoke it. A hand appears behind him and shuts the French window.

When he’s down to the filter, he flicks the butt to the pavement and knocks for readmission. Bekah has made a brew and he sits beside her in the living room, Annie squatting on her heels making marks on the Etch A Sketch.

‘You just come to say hello?’ asks Bekah.

‘As opposed to?’

‘As opposed to having news. Job interviews, getting on benefits.’

‘I’m not a scrounger.’

‘Neither am I, but I take what’s owed to me and the kids.’ Bekah pushes a plate of chocolate Hobnobs his way. ‘So there’s nothing?’

‘Can’t I just come for company?’

‘Course you can.’

‘When Stu’s at work.’

‘He’s not gonna stop you calling.’

‘He stopped me living here.’

‘Don’t start.’

‘I wasn’t taking up much space, was I?’

‘Harry, it was like having a fucking black hole in the living room. You sat around all day looking depressed.’

‘I needed something to do.’

‘Yeah and you got it.’

The stacking job at the Co-op. Long days under neon. Christ, it was bone. But it got him out of the flat, out of Bekah’s hair. Till he decked a punter who startled him with a question about broccoli.

‘I’ll get myself sorted.’

‘How?’ Bekah stares at him. ‘What’s different, what’s changed since you were stoned on that sofa playing Xbox and watching …?’

She can’t say it: filth. ‘You don’t think I can hack it.’

‘Course I do.’

‘No you don’t. You think I’m fucked for life, some wreck with a Rupert in his head telling him he’s shit.’

‘What are you talking about?’ His little niece begins to whine. Bekah picks her up and Annie pats her mother’s face, almost slapping it. Bekah carries her into the bedroom and he can hear the quack and jingle of some kids’ cartoon. She comes back at him. ‘What are you talking about, a voice in your head?’

‘Forget it.’

‘That’s not good, Harry.’

‘Don’t call me Harry.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t like it.’

She stares at him. He looks for somewhere safe to bury his eyes. ‘Don’t you think you should see someone?’

‘Christ, if I’d known it was gonna be like this I’d have stayed in bed.’

‘Why’d you come and see me then?’

He looks at her feet that are swelling over the edge of her grey pumps. Her ankles look grey, elderly. ‘I thought I could stay for lunch. Take Annie to the playpark. I don’t mean on my own – obviously you’d be there.’

In the bedroom his niece laughs and shouts ‘dog, dog’.

‘I’m only doing spaghetti hoops,’ says Bekah.

‘That’s OK.’

‘Then I have to put her down for her nap.’

‘I won’t stop you.’

‘I’ll just go and check on her.’

Even now he can’t talk to his sister. Like on tour, when he got his twenty-minute phone call. Standing there hearing the kids in the background and Bekah asking how he was, what it was like, and him thinking, I saw three men get vaporised in a drone strike, we held a memorial service in the cookhouse for a teenager from Crawley, I’m scared I’ll bottle it next time there’s a contact. None of this would have made sense back home, so he told her it was hot and Gobby sent his love and how were the kiddies, how was work?

The front door opens and he’s off the sofa before Stu has put his toolkit down. It’s as if he can smell Aitch, coming straight into the living room with his long snarky face. ‘Wasn’t expecting to find you here,’ Stu says.

‘All right, mate.’

‘Where’s Bekah?’

‘With Annie.’

Stu is lean, a greyhound of a man, but he fills the room. ‘How’s things with the trendy vicar?’

‘All right.’

He looks at Aitch down his long nose. ‘She’s relaxed with your mess, is she?’

‘She’s not up my arse like some RSM, if that’s what you mean.’

‘She let you up her arse yet?’

‘Fuck off, Stu.’

‘Single woman, strapping young bloke under her roof. Sounds like something you’d watch on telly. Mind you, a lady vicar – she’s probably a lezzer.’

‘If all blokes were like you, who could blame her?’

Stu wets his lips, grins. ‘Good to see you, mate. Staying long?’

‘Just came to see Bekah.’

‘Yeah, well you seen her now, ain’t ya.’

His sister returns with Annie on her hip. ‘Dada,’ Annie cries and casts off from her mother into Stu’s arms. He makes a big show of kissing her cheeks and the tip of her nose.

‘I wasn’t expecting you back,’ Bekah tells Stu, and the lack of warmth in her voice cheers Aitch up.

‘You know me, efficient worker. I see we got the pleasure of a guest for lunch.’

‘Na,’ Aitch says, ‘it’s fine.’

‘You’re welcome, mate.’

‘I got things to do.’

Bekah protests, or feels the need to pretend to. Even so he can tell she wants him gone.

‘You give my best to Barry, yeah? See you, Annie. Stu. Bex …’

3

The Heave

First come our boy Malk.

He hold the guidin stick, it bein his turn.

He hold Abans knife. The knife they take off Feo in the bad time.