Devastation Road by Jason Hewitt Page B

gave Owen a grin.
    ‘And this man today, then?’ asked Owen. ‘Who was that?’
    The boy’s smile fell and his face tightened.
    ‘I not understand,’ he said. But Owen was certain that he did. He stared at the bird scrawled in the dust.
    ‘He was the same man though, wasn’t he?’ said Owen. ‘The man we saw at the farmhouse. Do you remember? You know who I mean, don’t you?’
    ‘He is Nemecek,’ said Janek.
    ‘Is that his name?’
    ‘He is traitor,’ he said. He gazed into the fire. ‘Like Kate ř ina.’
    Then he scuffed out the bird with his hand and walked out of the room.
    What if she was gone – this wife, this lover, this girlfriend, this missing part? What if she had not forgotten him but had given up on him? How long had she been waiting?
He wondered if he had written her letters; if she had written to him, and what she might have said; what private things they might have laughed at, what shared secrets, the codes of lovers trailing
back and forth between them in little more than the flow of ink. He wondered at what point she might decide that he was dead; whether, in fact, she had decided already and had put her pen down for
the last time, her last words to him already parcelled in an envelope, sealed with a kiss.
    He watched Janek dozing, flinching occasionally as if his mind were balanced on the brink of sleep while his body kept trying to yank him back. Plenty old enough for girls himself, Owen thought.
He wondered whether the boy had broken hearts like Max had, or perhaps beneath all that Czech bravado he was shy and still unsure of himself – all his mistakes yet to be made.
    He shuffled closer to the fire. He sat in nothing but his undergarments while his clothes dried on a makeshift teepee of branches that he’d gathered from outside.
    The jacket and the trousers and the shirt still bothered him; he couldn’t fathom how he had ended up with them. At least the jacket fit, though both of the shoulders were strangely ripped
at the same point, broken cotton threads hanging where something had hastily been removed. There were similar holes and threads around the cuffs. He wondered if there had been an insignia; if it
was a pilot’s jacket, perhaps.
    He slipped the shoes back on and poked at the fire, then unhooked the shirt from the branch and turned the sleeves inside out to dry the other side. He did the same with the trousers, and the
jacket. Only then did he see something attached to it – a dead leaf clinging to the lining – but when he shook the jacket out, the leaf was still there.
    Not a leaf, he saw as he looked more closely, but a square scrap of grey material the same colour as the lining and lightly tacked to the inside pocket with a fine red thread. He picked at it
with the tip of a finger, puzzled. Some of the threads holding it in place were broken and frayed and grubby. The inside of the jacket didn’t look ripped; yet the cotton square was stitched
there as if it were a patch sewn on and snipped from dead grey skin.
    He sat beneath the window and listened to the rain dripping through the house, holding the baby so that his head touched Owen’s chin and he could feel and smell his
warmth. The infant was fighting hard to stay awake but the weight of sleep kept pulling him under. Perhaps when Owen fell asleep too this nightmare would fall away and he would wake to find himself
somewhere else. In a bed somewhere. A house. A house, he decided, with red geraniums in pots on each of the steps that led down from the door to the small yard and the door in the fence that opened
on to the street. He would sit on one of the steps and roll a cigarette, smoking it before he let himself in. A moment with the geraniums and nothing but his thoughts. He would sit and smoke and
think and plan, and collect up the fallen petals and hold them, an offering for her, red and curled in the palm of his hand.
    It was still dark when he jerked awake with a strange sensation of being