Devastation Road

by Jason Hewitt

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A deeply compelling and poignant story about the tragic lessons of war and the endurance of memory. In the last months of World War II, a man wakes in a field in a country he does not know. Injured and with only flashes of memory coming back to him, he pulls himself to his feet and starts to walk, setting out on an extraordinary journey in search of his home, his past, and himself. His name is Owen. A war he has only a vague recollection of joining is in its dying days, and as he tries to get back to England, he becomes caught up in the flood of rootless people pouring through Europe. Among them is a teenage boy, and together they form an unlikely alliance as they cross battle-worn Germany. When they meet a troubled young woman, tempers flare and scars are revealed as Owen gathers up the shattered pieces of his life. No one is as he remembers, not even himself. How can he truly return home when he hardly recalls what home is?

Release date: July 3, 2017

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 368

Sample

He woke to the insistent pip of a bird, its distant trill coming to him through a dream. He felt heavy, lying on his back, as if every organ within him had sunk to its lowest position and now could not be lifted. One hand on his chest, head turned, not a position he usually slept in, and now he could feel an awkward crick pulling in his neck. He lay for a while, mind groggy, the last remnants of sleep still swilling in his head. He was cold but the sun was warm on him. He listened but there was no sound of traffic or distant voices, just the stir of leaves and the pip of the bird. He shifted and a pain shot through his head as something crinkled against his ear.

His eyes opened.

For a moment he was blind but for a sharp light that wouldn’t shift, even when he tried to blink it away, and then its brightness slowly receded as a watery sun burnt through. The sky was blue and blurred above him with wisps of cloud hanging, duplicated. His fingers flexed and there it was again, the tickle and lick of grass.

He sat up. The pain pulled.

He was not in a bed. He was in a field.

He was in a field and sitting in the grass.

He looked around, unsure. Everything was smudged and ill-defined: the field tilting away from under him, the blurry line of trees on every side, and nothing between him and them but the shifting grass and occasional blink of a daisy. The pain sharpened, and a wave of nausea washed through him so that he was forced to hold his head between his knees as a sour taste filled his throat.

Head still swimming, he stared down at his hands, scratched and stained with tidelines of dirt. A button was missing from the linen shirt he was wearing–not a shirt he recognized, but nevertheless it hung open at his belly like a lopsided mouth.

He looked about again, carefully twisting right around this time, and thought that for some reason he was in one of the fields behind his parents’ house in Hampshire, but he couldn’t understand why and nothing looked familiar anyway; there was just the hazy perimeter of trees and the sudden streak of a chaffinch that blurred into two and then one again. He rubbed his eyes. He was still asleep. But the ground felt real and the bird was real, and so was the breeze and the ache in his head. When he brought his fingers to it he could feel a swelling against the back of his scalp, and a pain biting beneath his ribs.

In a field in Hampshire, he told himself. He couldn’t think where else. He’d see his father in a minute come huffing through the hedge in his tweeds and brandishing one of his walking sticks, Cedar bounding on ahead. There would be some explanation.

I should be at work, he thought. Mr Camm would be having kittens.

He struggled to his feet and squinted at the flaring sun. He wavered for a moment, unsure if he could move, then checked his pockets, looking for something–wallet, keys, papers–but there was nothing but grit and some red cotton threads; and the jacket wasn’t his anyway. It was a blue-grey serge and tatty. Not at all like something he’d wear. No bag, he thought. Nothing lying about. Nothing fallen from his pockets. He tried to focus on a pair of sparrows as they darted over the grass at the bottom of the slope and disappeared into the trees in a furious bluster of wings. Then, unsure what else to do, he decided to follow after them. It seemed as good a direction as any.

As he took his first uncertain steps he could feel the ache in his head expanding, groping into every corner of his skull and fingering its way down the back of his neck. He felt bruised all over, the waistband of the trousers rubbing at a soreness at his hip, and his bottom lip split and swollen and crusted with dirt. Another wave of nausea flooded through him, and when he stopped and hunched over his knees, a sticky liquid seeped from his nostril and was salty in his mouth.

As he set off again, the grey flannel trousers flapped at his ankles and pinched around his crotch. These couldn’t be his trousers. Even the shirt was too tight, the sleeves not even reaching his wrists; and the jacket, though it fitted, was ripped and scuffed at the shoulders.

He cautiously glanced back, hoping something might jog his memory, but there was only a trail of trodden-down grass. It wasn’t far to the edge of the field where a rock with a painted face sat half buried among the undergrowth: white rings for eyes and a snout and teeth. It watched him, hunched like a stone golem. Beyond the trees he could hear the rippling of water, so he pushed his way through the branches, the ground steady for the first few feet but then quickly tumbling away, until before he knew it he was crashing through a mesh of twigs and spasms of light, falling out on to a narrow and stony riverbank.

The river was fast-flowing, with rocks protruding here and there. He stood for a moment taking it in: the weeds coasting through it like long lingering thoughts and the bank on the other side rising up over him. He crouched at the edge and cupped water over his face, washing the blood and dirt from his hands and pressing his fingers over his eyes. He took a few deep breaths, feeling the pain pull beneath his rib as he breathed. But when he looked again he was still there, the sun splashing down on him, the river’s slop and swill and leap of droplets spattering over the stones. As he watched, strange bits of debris drifted past: branches with sprigs of leaves still attached; clothing–a grey cap, a shawl, a handkerchief; the sodden pages of a newspaper; a single book; another branch; another shawl; a flimsy shoe. He would wake in a minute. Perhaps he was awake. If he saw someone he might call out and ask them where he was.

He lifted the side of his shirt and looked at where the pain was, but he could see no mark. He cupped his hands in the river again and drank, and for a time at least the water quelled the empty ache of his stomach. The river drifted away.

He made his way upstream, picking his way over the narrow streamlets that threaded out from the trees and lost themselves in the flow. He tried to think of the names of tributaries, as if in the finding of a name he might then find himself, but the only thing that came to him was the line of a hymn that looped in his head, something about redeemers and pilgrims.

He stopped and listened. He scanned the trees. Nothing seemed real.

He rubbed at his eyes, trying again to clear his vision, but everything looked watery and barely there at all. The swill of the river slopped in his head; it was hard to keep his balance. You’re being bloody ridiculous. You know where you are, he thought. You just need to think.

As he walked on an empty crate floated into view, bobbing and turning in the water, a magpie strutting around its rim and peering in; and then the smeared shape of a handbag, a half-eaten apple, and a pamphlet, and there, glinting in the shallows, a tin with its label washed off. He stepped gingerly in to retrieve it, and for several minutes he tried to smash it open on a rock, denting and bashing it out of all shape, and then looked for something to pierce it with before, with frustration, he flung it back into the river. If he could have found a voice somewhere within him he would have shouted out.

He barely noticed it at first, thinking it to be nothing more than an oddly shaped rock wedged up against others on the opposite bank. It was only as he drew parallel and his vision cleared a little that he saw that what he had also assumed was a trapped branch pulling in the water was in fact an arm. A turned face, grey and bloated, was staring at him. His chest tightened. He glanced around. He couldn’t see anyone to call out to. He stared closer, not sure what to do. He had never seen a dead body before, but there it was, still floating, the shirt ballooned with air.

He carried on, walking faster, his heart banging. But barely minutes later he came across two more. They were tangled together on his side of the river this time, caught among the overhanging foliage. One might have drowned, he thought, but surely not three.

He searched the trees, seeing nothing in his hazy vision but the blurring of leaves. Cautiously he edged nearer and saw that they were two men, both smartly dressed: one in shirt, trousers and braces, another in a sodden jacket, his arm sprawled across the other as if they had been lovers. As he dared to lean closer, he saw that beneath the water the face of the first was smashed and raw, while the other floated on his back, a line of ribs bursting through his shredded, bird-pecked shirt.

He turned, fearful now that someone was watching him, and tried scrambling up the bank but it had grown too steep. Instead he drew himself beneath the trees, picking up a dead branch and gripping it tightly. Had they been attacked? Had he been attacked? He half expected to hear a voice, someone coming after him, or perhaps not even that but one last piercing shot that would return him to sleep.

Edging on, he approached a bend in the river, the surge of water growing into a tumultuous roar. The banks on either side were rising higher and higher, the land veering up to form a steep and rocky gorge. He had seen no more bodies, only a pair of ladies’ stockings snagged on a branch, the empty legs weaving in the water like eels trying to swim upstream.

As the river arced around, he ducked under some branches and was brought to an abrupt halt. Some distance further upriver stood the remains of a stone bridge, both sides fallen away to leave nothing but two central arches standing unbuckled and helpless on their piers among the rubble below. The girders of a railway track stuck out like huge twisted hairpins from one end, bending down towards the water. There beneath it lay the broken wreckage of a locomotive, carriages mangled and up-ended, doors thrown open, piston rods bent and wheels torn away, the carcass of an engine, around and over and through all of which the river thundered. He stared at it, his eyes still blurred and blinking. He would open his eyes for real in a minute. His heart might still be pounding but he would find himself in a bed, in a house, in a home he knew, and all of this would be forgotten.

In front of him the crows nosed around the bits of wood and metal, and then took to the air in a flurry of wings and water, their sudden laughter filling his ears, but still he did not wake.

He clawed his way over the carriages, clambering on to the side of one that, overturned in the water, now formed a sloping roof, and from there on to another, occasionally losing his grip and slipping, fighting against the water that blasted and buffeted through every crack and hole. Here and there bodies lay caught among the bent iron and broken wood: pale-faced men in drenched suits or women in buttoned coats and flowered dresses; others were soldiers or guards, their uniforms unmistakable within the carnage.

A single door was now a skylight, and peering down through the hole he saw bodies floating among the benches and luggage racks. A teddy bear with one eye missing bobbed against a shut window. He watched it nudging at the glass and then turned away, the sight of it making his stomach flip and clench into a fist.

He rummaged for a while, climbing over the wreckage as if the piled carriages were rocks on a beach. In the pools and crevices he scavenged for food, one eye nervously on the blurred slopes around him as his feet slipped about on the wet metalwork. In among the broken sleepers and mangled rods of iron, smashed glass glinted like broken shards of sunlight and wet rags of clothes haemorrhaged from burst cases before being carried away downstream.

He found the pistol in the holster of a grey-uniformed soldier crushed between two wagons. With his hands shaking, he pulled out the magazine and counted eight bullets, then somehow fumbled it back together and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

As he carefully made his way down to where the engine was he noticed a backpack caught by a branch. Cautiously he lowered himself and waded in. The water was cold and fierce, pulling at his legs. It took some time to unhook the pack but he managed it and clambered back up on to an iron-frame ladder and then the footplate and the top of the engine’s cab. On the tilted side of the tender he perched with the backpack on his knees. There were scratches and rips in the canvas where something had tried to tear it open, and on the top a faded number had been scrawled: 4993. He unfastened the buckles and took out a small parcel wrapped in sodden paper. He peeled the shreds of it away until, buried within its soggy folds, he found a hunk of rye bread, now a sodden mush that disintegrated like oatmeal and crumbled into the water. There was nothing else except, in a side pocket, a clutch of tightly bound letters that were soaked through as well, the ink drained away to a wash of watery lines. He tossed them into the river and then hurled the empty bag in after them, watching as the letters, like waterlilies, drifted away downstream.

After a while the gorge became shallower but the terrain along the river grew too overgrown to navigate, and he was forced up the slope back into the trees. He struggled through the dense woodland and broke through to open land. He wondered whether he should retrace his steps back to the field, double-check whether he had dropped anything or whether he might see something familiar coming at it from a different angle, around which everything would fall back into place. He must have been robbed. Had he been robbed? There would be a simple explanation. He was not the sort that panicked. He simply needed to think.

Yesterday, he thought. Surely he had been at work, seated at his draughtsman’s bench with Harry beside him. He remembered his section had been working on the new wing structure of what would be the Typhoon. He had been drawing out the stringers that went across the wings’ ribs, his logarithmic tables beside him, and his set squares and rulers. Had that only been yesterday? He tried to remember anything else but there was nothing there.

Ahead and behind him, the fields ebbed away over the horizon. He looked in the direction that he had just come from but even the landscape he had walked through only minutes ago now looked unfamiliar.

He put his fingers to the back of his swelling scalp and winced; then he took his head in both hands and let out a desperate sob. He couldn’t walk any further. He couldn’t think what had happened. He slumped in the grass, so tired and hungry. He didn’t even know how long he’d been walking. Perhaps it had been days.

He looked at his clothes. Not his trousers. Not his shoes. He rummaged in the pockets and, feeling something weighty in the jacket, he was surprised–alarmed, even–to pull out a pistol. Was it his? It couldn’t be his. He turned it over in his hand. He didn’t remember having a pistol, yet something about it was familiar. He emptied out the magazine–eight bullets–then pushed it back with a click and slipped it back into the pocket. Jesus Christ, he thought. He prayed to God he hadn’t shot anyone.

He studied the shoes, the laces twice broken and twice knotted, and the stitching straining to keep them together. When he took them off he found that there was nothing written inside. He felt down each trouser leg, and then to his surprise found that something had been sewn into them: something flat and round and hard, and embedded within a tiny pocket that had been cut into the seam. He prised it out with his finger. It was a rusted metal button. He turned it in his palm, confused by it, then smelt the tin and felt its scratches, the raised ridge around its edge and four tiny eyelets. It seemed an odd thing to have, hidden away like a secret. Someone else’s button. Someone else’s gun.

He pulled himself to his feet and carried on walking. After an hour he passed a half-buried rock in the undergrowth. It had a painted face on it. He could have sworn that it was grinning.

The house across the meadow was a ramshackle attempt at a wooden-framed building. Curling paint crumbled on the slatted walls and the veranda rails were loose and leaning, while glass was strewn across the boards from a shattered window at the front. Beneath the broken guttering was a barrel, a bucket, a pair of boots and, pushed against the wall, the mound of an overturned rowboat with a hole the size of a foot through it, the wood all gone to rot.

He didn’t know how long he had been watching from under the trees. His thoughts kept sliding out from under him; he could barely keep himself conscious. The only constant was the hymn in his head, that same refrain riding in and jerking him awake.

He should approach and see if someone might help him but, other than the strutting chickens in the yard, everything was still. At the side there was an overgrown vegetable patch and he felt the sudden pang of his hunger. The plants looked underdeveloped for this time of year though, the runner beans no more than scrawny infants reaching their arms up the canes. He stayed nervously crouched. It felt too quiet–just the chickens clearing their throats and the occasional surf of dust.

Eventually he ventured out, stalking low across the grass, the pistol in his hand. He gave the house a wide berth, avoiding the shattered plant pot in the yard and the dead plant limping, saggy-limbed, from it. He crept in closer. He wondered if he should call out something. Hello? Is anyone in?

The chickens clucked around his ankles as he edged between them. The strange liquid seeped from his nostrils again–not mucus but something else that stung at his lip until he wiped it away.

On the veranda the front door was ajar. He nudged it just hard enough to open it, waited and listened, and then cautiously stepped in.

To one side of the hall was a room stuffed with oversized dining furniture: an overbearing redwood table that had been polished so intensely that the sunlight pooled on it, and far too many chairs with narrow backs and finely crafted marquetry of two birds entwined in flight and splintered into different shaded pieces. There were paintings that, like the furniture, were too large for the space, and their gilt frames seemed entirely at odds with the wooden walls and stubby nails that they had been hung from. It was as if two worlds had collided, one consuming the other, the contents of a wealthy townhouse now hiding within the dead shell of a farm.

Across the hallway the sitting room had been ransacked and the window smashed. There was a carved bookcase and matching dresser with a foreign newspaper on it, and a chaise longue and padded chairs, one with several penny-sized holes in it that coughed out puffs of stuffing like spittle on to the seat. His shoes crunched on bits of mirrored glass and the discarded books on the floor. When he turned over a broken photograph frame, the picture inside was gone. Sunlight pierced through two holes in the wall and fell on the debris, illuminating dried spatters of blood. He held still and listened, but heard only the soft crinkle of china quietly splintering beneath his feet.

In the kitchen, drawers hung open, gaping, but he could find nothing to eat. He gripped the sideboard with both hands and tried to shake off his faintness. No sink and no running water. He slammed the work surface hard with his hand and cursed. He couldn’t even drink.

At the top of the stairs he found three small bedrooms, all untouched and tidy, bar a double room at the back where the bed had a large dried bloodstain spread across its sheets, the rest of the red-soaked bedding pulled out like innards across the boarded floor. He pressed himself against the wall and then stepped over it all to the window. The sun was shining in through a pale film of fingerprints and the dusty flecks of grime. He realized that he had no idea what time it was and his gaze went to his wrist but there was nothing there. He wiped the window clean with his sleeve and looked out, his breath catching in his throat.

Across the meadow was a figure. A boy, shovelling soil. He was tall and lanky, wearing a grey woollen jacket with what looked like patches on either elbow. He stopped and rested on the shovel, and then started again. There was something foreign about him, like the house and its furnishings, so that he was beginning to wonder if he wasn’t in England at all.

There were two plots, one already completed, and he watched as the boy shovelled more on to the second and then threw the spade down. The boy glanced around before wiping his nose on the back of his arm and holding it there for a moment, and then taking a few deep breaths. When he had regained his composure, he picked up a couple of whittled branches and, pulling a ball of some sort of line from his pocket, he tied them into a cross, threading the line around the join several times and pulling it tight with a couple of hard yanks before he finally knotted it. He chewed it off and threw the cross down, but before he started work on the second, something made the boy turn, and in that moment before the man at the window bolted, they both caught each other’s eye.

The pain in his head swelled like a storm. He could feel the pressure of it building, and that niggling discomfort beneath his ribs that felt like the ghost of a bullet. He moved his shoulder stiffly in its socket, feeling the grate of cartilage, and touched the tender split in his lip. If he could find something to eat, he told himself, if he could push the hunger and the pain aside, and roll his thoughts back to the beginning and start the day again… Nothing about it seemed familiar. He wanted to kick himself, just to feel it and know that he wasn’t asleep. He was not the type of man who lost things. And yet here he was, losing his mind.

Yesterday, he thought.

Had he caught a trolleybus? A murky memory leaked in of having a bag in his hand and being short of change. Not to worry, sir. ’Sonly thruppence. He couldn’t recall when this was though. It couldn’t have been yesterday. He usually cycled to Hawkers and kept his bike, like most of the others, in the back garden of Mr Levin’s. If he’d been on a trolleybus he couldn’t think where he would have been going. But there it came again: waiting outside the terrace houses, and a figure in the distance; then on the bus, the babble of other passengers and the sense that even then he hadn’t quite been there. He couldn’t have been, not yesterday. Somewhere else entirely. The memory felt too distant. And where was the bag now? Where was the ticket? Not in the jacket. Or in his pockets. He searched but nothing was there.

Besides, he thought, that day had been so much hotter than this: people fanning themselves with papers and hankies, all the upper windows of the trolleybus wide open, an English town feverish in the summer heat. When now it felt like a different season entirely. The trees were still in bloom.

It was as if part of him had melted away, an indeterminate amount of time and the memories within it faded to black, or evaporated entirely. He groped in his head but all he could think of was the trolleybus. Was there nothing between that moment and this? A break in time stitched together, so that whatever had been in the middle now simply was not there.

He found himself on his knees, bending over the water, drops falling from his nose. He stared back at his wavering reflection. He had needed to see his face.

He leant further. He could hardly believe it. The eyes had pulled back into their sockets, and what hair there was–cut short, almost to the skull–was receding at the temples where it had not receded before. It was a face that once had been full but now looked lean and wasted, all its youthful plumpness worn away. A gash of blood above his left eye was thick and dried and scabbing. There was bruising on the opposite temple, a cut along his jawline, a split lip and a bruised forearm, as if he had slammed it against som. . .