The Low Road by Chris Womersley Page B

from it.
    There is a slamming sound from the walkway outside, followed by the blunt laughter of two or three men. Lee and Simon remain silent for some time. Lee lies back and closes his eyes, tries to imagine himself away from here, to imagine what might otherwise have become of him. What other, better selves might there be out in the world? It is an old game, one he has played with himself for years. He feels a hand pressed to his chest. He tries to jerk upright but is held down. Shit, he thinks. Is this it already? But it’s only Simon leaning over him. The door is closed.
    Listen, Simon says in a low voice. I’m going to tell you something I shouldn’t, because you helped me with that dope thing, so I owe you a favour. What I heard was, Morris bet Rocco two hundred bucks that he’d have you on your knees sucking his cock by Sunday. And every day after that. Simon takes his hand away and clambers into his own bunk. And you know how Morris hates to lose a bet.
    Lee sits up so fast he almost bangs his head against the upper bunk. His heart grinds in his chest. Shit. You sure?
    He swings around and sits on the side of his bed. He lights a cigarette, which burns unsteadily, damp from his sweaty fingers. Someone sings in the tier below. Oh, my daaaaarling Clementine .
    Then Simon speaks from his bunk above, as if he’s read Lee’s thoughts: Today’s Thursday.

Part Two

12

    L ee woke in the semi-darkness of late afternoon and instinctively searched it for intimations of light. His tongue lay in his mouth, heavily, as if just placed there. If not for the absence of noise, he might have assumed he was in prison still. Even the machinery of his own body, with its myriad grumbles and burrs, was silent.
    After some time the world came back to him, apportioned sense by sense: a shaft of pale light; the electrical hum of powerlines directly outside; the smell of a cold afternoon; the dull weight of pain across his body. He remembered he was in a motel somewhere, but this didn’t make him feel any better. After all, he was in a motel somewhere earlier today. Or was that yesterday?
    Gasping with pain, he wrenched himself into a sitting position. The suitcase was beside him on the bed. He opened it and checked the contents. The money, his money, all there. He closed the warped lid, patted it and lurched into the bathroom. The fluorescent light hummed. After pissing, he stared at his reflection in the cracked mirror on the wall, leaning on the basin’s cold rim for support. He splashed water into his eyes. He prodded his cheeks, ran a palm over his features, heard the soft crackle of his boyish whiskers. The man in the mirror did the same, a visual echo. Again he ran a palm over his face. The small sound of skin upon skin is like no other, has no equivalent in nature or art. His reflected selves regarded each other with interest and envy. Men fear other men in a way women never could, because they alone know what they are capable of.
    Lee looked old, as if time had crept up on him while he slept and committed secret acts. He was unshaven and his eyes were red and rimmed with moisture. Water dripped from his chin. A sudden, unwelcome thought: he was looking at the face that, for one man, had been the final human landscape he ever saw. What would it be like to carry an image of that face—his face—across that particular distance?
    He became aware of a dim, human burbling and held his breath to listen. Low, furry voices from the neighbouring room. A man and woman, perhaps. A gasp of laughter, a woman’s throaty laugh. He thought of that expression—what was it?—that his mother used to say: Laughed like a drain. The woman laughed like a drain. He pressed his ear closer to the wall.
    He listened some more and, by his twilight divination, conjured an image of her: the brown and curling hair, always with a rebel strand dangling across one eye; thin lips; the dark cream of her throat; the