White and Other Tales of Ruin

Jade curses bitterly, trying to untangle her legs from the wreckage of the bicycle. I notice that she is keeping her head down almost without thinking about it, and I wonder how many shoot-outs she’s been witness to. I crawl along the dry ditch, leaving the trike behind, hands reaching out to drag the bike away from her legs. I try to tell her to keep still, but the gunfire has increased to a screaming crescendo and she can only frown at my words.

Eventually, through a combination of her kicking and me pulling, she extracts her legs from the twisted bike. There is a raw gravel burn on her left knee, blood already seeping from a hundred pinpricks in the skin and merging into angry red rivulets. She sucks her palm, spitting out black pellets of stone, sucking again, spitting. I feel queasy watching her, and then the Sickness comes along and sends me into a faint.

The gunshots fade away — either the shooting has finished, or I’m really losing it. I slump in the ditch, Jade staring at me past the splayed fingers of her right hand, palm pressed to her mouth. The last image I see is Jade spitting a mouthful of blood and gravel into the air, and the sun hiding behind clouds like the ghost of an airship.

IV

“About time,” the voice says. I open my eyes and grimace as the sun dazzles me. I feel heat on my front, and realise instantly that my shirt has been removed. The sun is slowly cooking the growths on my chest, turning them an angry red as if embarrassed at their nakedness.

“How long…?” is all I can manage.

“Half an hour,” Jade says, leaning into view. She tips a water bottle over my face and then splashes more across my body. I flinch, but then sigh with pleasure.

Groggily, I sit up. I realise that the hillside is silent, just as I see the crimson mess of Jade’s hand holding the bottle. “Oh Christ, your hand.” I reach out, but she withdraws.

“It’s all right! Bloody, that’s all, looks worse than it is.”

She has washed her leg and is wearing what looks like her knickers as an improvised bandage. She looks away from me, as if ashamed of her wounds, and wraps a strip of cloth from her shirt around her hand. It instantly soaks red. She cringes, flexes her hands and draws in an uncomfortable breath.

“How’re you feeling?” she asks.

Memory suddenly jerks me upright, instils me with a sense of urgency. “Where are the guns? Who was shooting?”

“Don’t worry, while you were doing your Rip Van Winkle they got into a truck and drove off.”

“Did they see us?”

“If they had you wouldn’t have woken up.”

I try to stand, sway, sit down again. “Who were they shooting?”

Jade looks up the gentle hillside, trying to see past the crumbling wall. “Once we get moving again we’ll find out.”

“So many guns…” I say, trailing off, leaving the obvious unsaid. So many guns, how many people?

We haul the tricycle from the ditch, brushing off the accumulated rubbish of decades. Apart from a twisted spoke or two the machine is undamaged, but that’s more than can be said for Jade’s bike. It’s ruined, all pointing spokes and bent frame, the saddle deformed almost ninety degree out of true. The front wheel is buckled beyond repair, the rear tyre flat and shredded. I realise how lucky Jade had been. Torn hand and slashed leg, true, but if the ground had been as unkind to her as it had to her bike, we’d be looking at more than a bit of leaking blood right now.

“You were lucky,” I say.

She nods. “Come on, we’d better get a move on.”

“Jade.”

“What?”

“Why are you so pissed with me?”

She stares at me. I realise how old she looks under the superficial attractiveness, how her eyes never really laugh but bear whatever terrible things she has seen like a brand. I wonder how I would feel if I was cured of the Sickness; I like to think it would give me a new-found energy, a reason to be grateful, a duty to thank life every single day. I know Della would want it like that.

“I’m not pissed at you, Gabe. Oh Christ, it’s something you’ll know soon enough.”

Her words scare me more than I’d like to admit, burrow their way into my thoughts like insubstantial maggots. “What are you leading me to?” I ask, for the first time. Until now, I’d always trusted her implicitly. A stupid reaction for someone I didn’t know, maybe, but there had really been no reason to think otherwise. And she seems to know what she is doing, she’s streetwise and confident, knows things, like how to get the bikes and how to get me to String. But just what the hell had I really gotten myself into?