nothing but an old prismatic compass to show me east.
Silky bent forward, inspecting her boot, as if she had X-ray vision.
I reached out a hand and touched her shoulder. ‘Change of plan.’
10
I checked the kangaroo round my neck. It was just after midday and we still had about six hours of daylight.
I’d have to carry her on my back, and I knew I’d soon be too fucked to talk. ‘Why come here, of all places, to get out of my way? Aren’t there enough nice rivers in Italy for you to play about in?’ I tried to make light of it, but I knew I wasn’t kidding anybody.
Her hair was red with mud, and lay flat against her head.
She tried, but couldn’t look me in the eye. She picked up a leaf and started playing with it. ‘Whatever Stefan told you, it would have been true. I run, Nick. I run from everything. Always have done. That’s why we met, remember?’
At last I got a little eye-contact and a smile I returned. Melbourne – a backpackers’ hostel, opposite Flinders Street station. I’d gone down to the lobby, where she was looking at the message board on which I’d offered a lift to Sydney for a share of the gas.
’You don’t want to go with him.’ I prodded a rival’s note. ‘Rubbish conversation and, besides, he’s an axe murderer. You’d be much better off with this bloke.’ I prodded mine. ‘Much better-looking, and no axes.’
She turned her head. ‘So what’s his weapon of choice?’
‘Ice-cream. Free cone at every gas stop.’ I’d stretched out my hand. ‘I’m Nick.’
She shook. ‘Silke.’ I liked her German accent. ‘Under what circumstances would your offer include crushed nuts and syrup?’ And the fact her grammar was better than mine.
And that was pretty much that. She’d slung her surfboard on to the roof of my combi van, and five days later, after a thousand miles of great conversation, four vanillas and a couple of tuttifruttis, we were sharing more than expenses.
Now her smile faded.
‘My mother would stroke my hair. I can still smell her perfume when I think about her, even now.’ She tugged at the leaf. ‘When she died, I ran away. And I kept running, from anything too complicated, or just to avoid it completely. I’d pretend the problem wasn’t there – and if I didn’t think about it, well, it wasn’t.’
I wanted to ask why I couldn’t be the one to listen, but I already knew the answer. I’d never been the listening kind.
She leaned down and touched her swollen ankle. ‘I’m sorry, Nick. I needed to figure stuff out.’
I knelt beside her and stroked her cheek. ‘Well, next time you need to do that,’ I said, ‘make sure you go to Butlins.’
She didn’t get it. Maybe they didn’t have holiday camps in Germany.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. An English joke.’ I hesitated. ‘I guess Tim isn’t a Butlins kind of a guy, eh?’
She held my gaze now, and I could see tears in her eyes. ‘I needed to see him. Not in the way you think. But now I’m here, you know . . . Look at what he is trying to do . . . Can we really just head back to Lugano, or Sydney, or any other damn place and drink cappuccino and feel comfortable about the world?’
I got up slowly, not wanting to carry on this conversation. ‘Wait here. I’m going to check things out.’
I scrambled up towards the higher ground, looking, listening and giving myself a hard time. What I really wanted to do was scream into her face: ‘So you came all the fucking way here to talk to him about us when you could have done that with me over a brew – not in a fucking war zone where I’ve just had to kill another kid!’
I stopped. I couldn’t hear much above the yelling in my head, but I could see movement down by the river, where we’d just been.
I checked the sky and let my prismatic point settle. The sun was directly overhead, but still only a ball of light trying to penetrate the cloud.
I looked north. If we kept on the high ground, we’d eventually get back to the valley – as long as we didn’t trip over any hostiles on the way. Whatever, I wasn’t going to wait until last light.
11
There was nothing scientific about what I’d been doing for the last ninety minutes. Carrying Silky on my back was like humping eight stone of bergen up and down the Brecons. All I had to do was lean forward to take the weight, then get one foot in front of the other as fast as I could.
I’d kept off the top of the high ground, the natural route, moving instead just below it to hide my shape and silhouette. I’d moved in bounds, no more than five metres at a time, using the cover as best I could, stopping after each to look and listen, then plan the next – scanning the ground in front of me for more cover, for a route without too many rocks, bushes or anything else that might send me flying. Silky never left my back. Once I’d got her on, it was easier to keep her there.
I stopped against a tree. I rested both hands on the trunk and leaned forward to balance her and control my breathing. This was taking for ever. I listened and looked between the tree-trunks and bush for any irregularities of shape, shine, shadow, spacing, silhouette or movement.
Sweat dropped from my forehead and chin on to the leaf litter, like water from a melting icicle.
Birds twittered in the trees and the cicadas went for it hammer and tongs. I’d never seen one of the fuckers in all the times I’d spent in jungles, but they always let you know they were out there, ready and in sufficient numbers to take over the world.
She slid off, hobbling on to her good left leg, either to give me or herself a rest. She levered herself down slowly with her back against the tree-trunk, her right leg out in support as the left did all the work. Finally she sank into the mud.
Too tired to do anything else, I kept my position, looking and listening as I pulled out my prismatic and checked our direction. Everything hurt; everything was heavy. Anything with wings, the size of a pinhead or bigger, landed on me to bite. I glanced down at Silky and saw they weren’t saving it all for me: she had lumps on her face and neck the size of witch’s boils.
My head swam and my throat was so dry it felt like I’d been swallowing the gravel Crucial should have been getting down his neck to sort out that squeaky voice. I knew I was dehydrating, and that I had to take on fluid urgently. These symptoms were Nature’s final warning. The next step was collapse.
I tapped her shoulder and offered a hand to pull her up. A small flock of birds rattled out of the canopy somewhere in the distance, but not close enough to worry about. I was trying to work out my time and distance. We’d been on the move for about an hour before we’d got the contacts, and we’d been going slowly an hour and a half since. We must be at least halfway to the mine, maybe even a bit more.
I thought about the contact. Well, more about the boy whose face I had destroyed. I knew now that if we got back to the mine, there was a pretty strong chance I might have to do it again.
Silky looked at me. ‘You OK?’
‘Yeah.’ I got ready to take her weight. ‘Come on.’
She climbed on as best she could, but she was fucked, and she wasn’t the only one. I adjusted her on my back as best I could, as if she was a bergen and I was twenty-nine Ks into a thirty-K fast tab. I got my hands round her thighs and jumped up that last little bit to get the balance right. Her legs rubbed against the sores on my back and I almost shouted with pain. But there was fuck-all to be done about it; I had to crack on. I leaned forward, took the weight in my hands again, and shook my head of sweat. I checked my next bound and made distance.
I didn’t know what I was supposed to think or feel about her running away from me. When I heard the next burst of gunfire ahead of us, I realized it didn’t much matter.
