I was staring at him, thinking of how I used to lay my head against his shoulder, thinking of the sweet, split-wood smell of him as morning sunlight spilled over the ridge, when suddenly I realised that I was still angry. It was like some huge sea-creature surfacing. It startled me. I’d forgotten it was there.
‘It couldn’t have gone on, you know,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘You and me.’ He had dropped his voice down low. ‘We couldn’t have gone on like that.’
‘You don’t have to whisper,’ I said. ‘Minkels is deaf, remember? He won’t hear a thing.’
‘Edie —’
‘I hope the property works out.’ I laughed my father’s laugh, one hollow sound and then nothing, because I already knew what I was going to do. I didn’t know how yet, but I knew what.
I walked out of the shop. I heard the bell jangle above the door as he came after me. I turned to face him. His hair seemed to have darkened at the roots. He stood there.
‘Don’t you remember what I told you in the field?’ I said.
He shook his head, but not because he didn’t remember. He looked out into the street. It was a still, grey day. There was nothing to look at. He shook his head again. Then, with his face lowered, and a smile on it, he turned and walked away. Just for a moment the street was not dust and a stray dog and two parked cars, but grass, the coarse grass of the field, and a path was visible, but only to us, and the stream was at the end of it, over a stile and through a copse, and I was following him down …
‘Which way would he have gone?’ Karl said.
I glanced out of the window. We were at a fork in the road. The town where the market was held lay directly ahead of us, but so did the lake. If we turned left, we had to double back along a road that circled the shore. If we turned right, the road climbed up on to the hills that bordered the lake on its south-east side. My father was looking one way then the other, trying to gauge which was the more likely.
‘We’d better try them both,’ he said eventually.
Karl had been staring at him, waiting for an answer. Now he faced the windscreen again and muttered something that I didn’t hear.
‘Left’s quicker,’ I said, ‘if he was in a hurry.’
It was a road with no markings, scarcely wide enough for two cars. On the right and way below, the lake. You could only see bits of it between the trees, smooth as something planed, though I’d seen it in a gale once, with slabs of water lifting clear and flying through the air like houses in a tornado. Some days it was blue, others it was black. That afternoon it was green — the deep, dark green of marrow skin. To the left the ground climbed steeply through beeches that had been there for two hundred years. We drove slowly, heads turning from one side to the other, but we didn’t see the truck. We rounded the south-western corner of the lake, and the trees thinned and the ground levelled out. We stopped at a crossroads.
‘So much for that,’ Karl said. ‘Now what?’
My father said we should drive on into the town.
By the time we reached the market square, it was almost deserted. Traders were packing the last of their goods into the backs of vans. Nobody knew anything. We tried the bars. There was one man who remembered a young couple with a baby. It was because of the baby, he said; his first was due in a month’s time. He thought he’d seen them leave in a dark-red truck.
‘When was that?’ Karl said.
‘Eleven. Maybe twelve.’
Karl looked at my father, but he didn’t say anything.
We headed north, out of the town. The road took us through farm country, then it veered east and began to climb up to a ridge. This was the second route. To the left you could see the bare brow of the hill, all outcrops of rock and windswept grass. On the right, there was a long drop to the lake below — a steep scree-slope which plunged into the water at an angle of seventy-five degrees and kept on going.
There was no sign of the truck.
When we arrived at the fork again, Karl stopped the car in the banked-up leaves at the side of the road and left the engine idling. He sat there, staring through the windscreen.
It was after six o’clock and the sun had almost gone; what was left of it was pink and raw, like part of a skinned animal. We’d been looking for almost three hours. It seemed hopeless. But, without meaning to, I spoke: ‘I think we should try the first route again.’ The two men didn’t say anything, but I could hear their reluctance, their exasperation. ‘I’ll walk it if I have to,’ I added.
Karl was motionless for a moment longer, then he shifted into gear and pulled back on to the road.
We’d only been driving along the lake for a few minutes when I saw it. I shouted at Karl to stop the car, then I opened the door and jumped out. We were on a bend. The road swung left, away from the lake, though it was still just visible about thirty metres below. I ran back to the tree, crouched down. There. A piece of bark had been torn away at bumper-height and the blond wood under it was smeared with plum-coloured paint. I’d only missed it the first time because I’d been looking for the wrong thing. I began to make my way down the slope towards the lake. The ground was so steep, it was hard not to lose control and fall headlong.
I followed the trail of damaged trees, some creaking, as if they were still recovering from what had happened, some scratched or gouged, some split wide open. I saw Eileen Poppel first. She must have been hurled through the windscreen, hurled clean through. You wouldn’t have thought a little thing like that would have weighed enough to break the glass. She lay at the foot of a tree, her arms spread over the roots, her face in profile, like someone worshipping the earth. Her cheek and her forehead were ribboned, crazed with blood. At last they seemed appropriate, those eyes of hers, which had always looked as though someone’s thumbs were pressing at them from the inside. I ran on down the slope.
I found the truck with its radiator grille dipped in the lake, like a cow drinking, its headlamps staring gloomily into the silent, dark-green water. I could see my brother in the cab, his chin resting on his chest. I called his name softly, but he didn’t move. It was then that I noticed the smell of sulphur. I dropped to my knees, put my fingers in the water, tasted it.
I stood up. It didn’t feel as if my feet were quite in contact with the ground. I walked to the door of the truck. My brother seemed thinner. I knew what it was. The steering-wheel had pushed his ribs up against his spine, and the organs had been forced sideways. His face was unmarked, though, and there was no blood on him at all. I wondered when his skin would turn yellow, when his eyes would narrow. I knew he wouldn’t want to look like a foreigner in the land that he was going to. I could imagine him on the battlements already, watching me from halfway across the world, watching me as I stood beside him.
I was aware of everything around me, trees and sky and ground, and I was at the centre of it, and I knew then that it was right, what I had done. I took a deep breath and let it out, and then I heard the two men come trampling through the leaves towards me, and I heard something else, too, not a cry exactly, but a voice, a small voice, and I looked down into the cab and saw the child, not more than six months old, my brother’s child. The wooden drawer he always travelled in was on the floor next to the gear lever and he was lying on his back in it, staring upwards through the shattered windscreen at the trees. He was holding his arms away from his body, moving the inside of his wrists against the air.
‘— I told you it needed work.’
‘I only looked at it a few days ago. I didn’t notice anything —’
‘You didn’t notice anything. When was the last time you noticed anything?’