Cross Country Murder Song Read Online Free PDF Page A

ahead, he flicked them to full beam to stave off his creeping fear as he began to imagine figures rushing up at him from the darkness, clambering over his car, blotting out the windows with their bodies.
    When he was younger his family had spent an afternoon at a safari park, driving through fenced enclosures filled with dormant tigers and supine buffalo, the animals grazed leisurely, casting an occasionally curious glance at the families ferrying past at a sedate pace. He’d enjoyed it until they’d coasted to a halt and a family of monkeys had thrown themselves at their car, clinging to the roof, springing happily up and down on the hood. They pulled at the door handles, hung cheerfully upside down from the roof and inspected the startled occupants behind the glass. His father had loved it.
    Will you look at these fucking things; he beamed, until their mother had glared him into silence.
    Ah, sorry kids, his father said, forget I said that, and he turned in his seat and gave them a wink.
    He looked back to the window only to let out a startled yell as a monkey loomed in to lick the glass. He sat back sharply, accidentally jolting his sister who pushed hard back, then they were squabbling, the car pulling away filled with the sound of sibling rage and their mother demanding they calm down. The monkeys slid off the slowly moving hood and roof, leaving the windscreen wipers mangled and useless. One pair linking hands, then walking in a strangely high-stepped fashion back to their climbing frame, scratching themselves absent-mindedly as they went.
    From the sky the whole country looked like a map; a clean grid of roads running east to west, north to south. Parallel lines, straight, unremitting points from A to B. That’s how the driver saw it when he closed his eyes and thought about the journey stretching out before him. One unrelenting path leading from the Jersey Shore to the edge of the New World and into the Pacific Ocean. The reality though was rutted streets, one car wide, undulating, sandy-coloured stretches that followed the line of the hills he was traversing. Endless highways, dashed with dividing lines of yellow and white, their verges in constant motion, long, willowy grass nodding at the cars as they dashed by. Idiots no matter where you were, the squeal of tyres as someone jumped your lane, long, angry horns. Roads that defied belief as they held to the face of the hill, circling ever upward and then flattening out into a plateau with the world below stilled momentarily. Driving down towards a valley floor at night, pitching towards the distant lights, coming in like a small aircraft, unsure wheels feeling for the tarmac. Roadside barriers were blue in some places, red in others, green, black, orange, burnished steel, buckled and bent. Rushing into one unremitting span as he built up speed. Ominous spaces where a vehicle had crashed against the restraint; popped the metal shield off its posts and sailed into the space beyond. Falling out of sight, sunlight streaming through the front and rear windows, briefly catching the startled shapes of the passengers as shadows as they began their descent to the streets below. He saw the moon, giant and spectral in mountain passes, bleaching the night, the sun fierce and blinding as it rose up, lighting up the earth around him, making everything golden and bright.
    The road hit a different pitch when he was travelling over water, everything up a notch as if he was freewheeling or had shifted a gear. He could almost feel the space beneath the car, the timber supports of the bridge, the gentle lapping of the river rolling below him. He enjoyed the dappled light through trees; the sunshine made him think of school holidays and early mornings when his dad had been around more, before he started appearing in the papers and solemn-faced men sat in cars at the end of the drive staring in at the house and the weather felt like it was always about to change. That the