The Low Road Read Online Free PDF Page B

constant, a sound that accompanied men calling out to each other and the clatter of tin plates and cups. He had watched men being tattooed, their mouths tight with discomfort, and he could recall many recurring designs: dragons, naked women, flowers, barbed wire, teardrops, tigers. Hundreds of women’s names, thousands of LOVE and HATE . Stars and pit bulls. Men bearing Christ upon their backs.
    Of acquiring his own tattoo he had no memory, not even of the scabbing that occurs afterwards. It was as if—like the skin itself—it had always been there and sometimes as he rubbed at it, he believed it had just floated to the surface, some thin wreckage washed up on the shores of his body. Periodically he would be compelled to rid himself of the damn thing and spend hours rubbing at it with rags soaked in various solutions: bleach, milk, vinegar, mineral turpentine. Once, even sandpaper, gently back and forth, with no result aside from a predictable and embarrassing graze on his inner arm. All of this was, of course, to no avail; the fucking thing would be there forever.
    He drummed his fingers on the laminated tabletop. The kitchen possessed the sepia odour of last week’s dinners, of cuts of meat nobody cooked anymore and beneath that, faintly, of fly spray. A transistor radio in leather casing burbled, its volume too low to discern actual words. He listened only to current affairs or Test cricket; anything else seemed too frivolous. He’d never possessed an ear for music and failed to understand the point of it. A week-old newspaper was on the table, along with the makings for a cup of tea and his packet of tobacco. Steam unfurled from the teapot. He poured himself a cup and added his customary dash of milk, his movements almost ceremonial through long years of repetition.
    A tea-leaf circled on the surface of his drink. It sank and reappeared in the milky currents. He knew a tea-leaf floating on the surface of tea foretold a visitor. He also knew it was unlucky to kill a white swan or a white moth; that it was lucky to touch a hunchback; he knew not to place a hat on a bed and that a shoe on a table would only tempt death by hanging. He made sure to smash the discarded shells of hard-boiled eggs, lest witches use them to sail out to sea and drown unwary sailors.
    His family were given to poring over the moist bodies of newborns, looking and feeling for signs of future career or personalities: a birthmark; a wayward blink; a caul to guard against drowning. When he was born, a grandmother shouldered into the room and held him up to her face as if preparing to devour him, before announcing he would remain a lifelong bachelor, alone and uncharmed. How she arrived at this diagnosis was unclear, but it was accepted nonetheless and woven without argument into the family fabric.
    When he was a boy, the women sang songs of demons and love, of forests and oceans and blood. They were warned away from Jews, particularly at Passover when, as everyone knew, they held Christian children over vats and sliced their throats with butcher’s knives to drink their blood. He believed in some vague and shifting version of hell. Thanks to his dry-fingered aunts, he also knew all about the saints. About Saint Dreux, the patron saint of those with broken bones, the owners of coffee shops and the deranged. About Saint Nicholas, who raised back to life three children who had been murdered and crammed into a vat of brine. Saint Francis, patron of those fated to die alone.
    These offerings, this knowledge, was a love of sorts. Josef was never sure he trusted the signs his relatives insisted were scattered throughout the world, but he found them impossible to ignore. If nothing else, they gave shape to otherwise shapeless anxieties and were a personal bulwark against imminent disaster. After all, only those fears that remained unnamed retained their potency. Although he had not seen them in a long time, he imagined those aunts as they