Devastation Road by Jason Hewitt Page B

swinging at his side, now full again, and another containing hastily slopped-in soup, and a hand towel looped over his belt.
    They had left the woman sobbing on the floor. It was the second time she’d been robbed in a week. The camps had been blown open and the inmates were loose. The Poles and Russians were
marauding the farmlands, taking everything, she had cried.
    But that was not their problem and for now they walked, the adrenalin still pulsing through them, Owen happy that Janek was happy and smiling again. He had slapped Owen on the back as they made
their way out to the lane and, for a while, he had walked with his arm draped over Owen’s shoulder.
    Owen tried to think of something to sing to the child but all he could find in his head was the hymn, those few lines he couldn’t shift about pilgrims and redeemers.
    They were brothers now, Janek said – brothers looking for brothers. Was that why when Owen took the lead, he sometimes thought the boy was Max, that it was Max’s footfall he could
hear behind him? The stone that suddenly scudded past him had been kicked by Max’s foot. Max’s voice. Max’s laugh.
You can’t get rid of me that easily
. Another
stone skittering past.
    In his arms, the baby strained to suck at the last dregs of milk. His face reddened with the effort, and he let out a few grizzly, hungry gasps. Owen lifted him on to his shoulder and tried to
comfort him, but in the end the baby started to cry once more.
    ‘
M ů ž a?
’ said Janek, offering. He took the infant from Owen and held him out in front of him as if the child was a wet and dripping thing. He manoeuvred him around
and then changed his mind, uncertain how to hold him.
    ‘Not like that. Like this,’ said Owen, showing him.
    ‘Ah, yes, yes,’ said Janek. ‘Shh,’ he said to the child.
    They rested beneath a willow that overhung a rill, Janek leaning against its trunk, with his knees up and the baby cradled within them. The infant clutched a finger with each
hand as Janek softly spoke to him and gently moved his fingers around. The yellow heads of celandine burst up through the thick grass.
    Owen lay on his back, studying his notes and trying to make sense of them. COTTBUS , he’d written, and BABY – NOT MINE . There were other things written and crossed out, connections made with arrows as if they were electrical circuits mapped out at his drawing
board.
We’ll be designing bombers soon
, Harry had said.
    PILOT , he had written too, although he couldn’t work out whether that had been him or one of the other names written beside it. There was no line connecting it; it
hung, like a lost thought.
    As boys they had always played at fighter planes, running through the fields behind The Ridings with their arms out, or making planes from balsa wood and hurling them from the top of St
Catherine’s Hill, where they had flown kites.
    One summer they had made large paper model gliders, launching them from the guest bedroom. And one day Max had even lit the middle of the model with a match and they had watched in glee and then
horror as it had glided down, leaving an impressive trail of smoke, only then for the wind to change and take it straight in through the sitting room window where it had set fire to their
mother’s rug.
    He sat up, disturbed by something in the undergrowth, then turned sharply but whoever was there – a stooped figure, a glimpse of white – quickly pulled away.
    In the fading afternoon he walked with the infant slumped and sleeping over his shoulder. The longer he held the child, the more it felt like his. Then a name came and went
again, stopping him in his tracks. A woman’s name this time. He tried to pull it back but it had fallen right through him.
    When the baby woke, to entertain him Janek took him and held him out to one side as if the infant was flying along the road. And again, Max was there in Owen’s head, running open-armed
through the cornfields, always racing each