Over the bridge and up the steep climb of the valley’s slope, up, went he, on his bike, a ride not customary but familiar enough that the route unfolded with the comfort of heedlessness. Nothing there had changed. Left out of the house, up, on through the village and down its descending escarpment, down then towards the quarry, on the quarry road that was, fast enough, the road vertiginous and winding, down to where the narrow bridge was come to at a hard angle, road almost perpendicular, by then, to the piddling river, and having narrowed further than it was already narrow. The bridge concrete with a metal bar only on the one side, the outside side, protection, such as, for the vehicles approaching down either of the precipitous and acutely cornered directions from which they would come.
He though on the climb up now, slow and back up, leaving the woods behind, the quarry (that was) long behind, the farmhouse at the top of the road there, with its barking mutt and cattlegrids to send a judder through him. Up and on then, beyond the old and run down buildings, dilapidated and abandoned, and hedges getting sparser, and out through scrubland, sheepland, tufted and gorse heavy lands, beyond outcrop, fences fewer and further between, further and fewer once the final gate passed, final grid, final judder, and up out into the open country.
Open land and the flat road, low heather scragging at its borders, the odd sheep still, the odd sign, the paint worn from the tarmac and further less of all of that except the heather. And silence grew and the sky with it, or the sky grew and the silence alongside it, alongside him, feeling calm now, breathing slowed now, efforts made, expended, and the whole flat and steady moorland road, that elevated road that would eventually take him back down and around, in doing nothing but proceeding, to the clustered hamlets just beyond, out of sight, and back to home, by ways of another road or two. For now, though, what he could see, on his bike just cycling out, feeling, one can imagine, free, or so, freer, than when he biked through city streets, to work and back and back to work; free in that what he was doing now was a thing he had wanted himself to do to no end but to satisfy himself and he alone; the freedom of being able, having brought his bike up home on the train, and bothered, and woken up early on a Sunday morning, the plan of heading out, and choosing the route, and knowing the way, heedlessly, and having done, for now, the hard part, the dangerous part, of winding, blind-cornered road, having come to the bridge and passed the bridge and come up the valley’s other side.
An hour or so or more, could have been, didn’t check, hadn’t wanted to stop, having reached no point, no peak, no spot from which the view had been especially astounding, a place, say, at which he might have wanted to dismount and take his phone from his pocket and take a photograph. None of that, on he went. The sky held consistent, low and grey, threatening nothing, neither promising a break nor offering much in the way of cast or shade, little light against which the shifting moorland might have played, its heathers, its scuff patches, say, of tan, of flower, of bare and blackened brush, the teeth of the mountains it bared in the distance. No the landscape lay, flat as the road and, as was the road’s way, did not disturb his thinking, the thoughts in which, by which, abreast of and within which the mechanisms of his body heedlessly, freely so, propelled him.
That the land was flat, the road flat, that the light, he did not see from distance, did not, until rounding a gently unending corner, see the van a few hundred metres up and off the road, parked up, seeming, on a track, off to the side, parked up in front of a tree, the only tree about, the doors of it opened up, seeming, and spread wide. For the first time since reaching the moors road he slowed.
The road being flat and the land flat (and the light), the van, where it was, pulled up by the tree, at a passing place, perhaps, just off the byway, was further from him than he had thought first when it came into view. He reached it, of course, none the less, approaching from the direction from which the van itself must have approached, it’s backend, doors wide open on the cargo bay, faced to him, opening up to him, exposing their innards and displaying their sign. He got closer and was soon close enough to see it there, a sign, hanging from the open door, two white painted wooden boards on which, in black, were the painted words, in capitals: SERVEZ-VOUS.
He got closer still. He stopped and dismounted from his bike. He wheeled it up. SERVEZ-VOUS the sign read. He peered into the open van. There were boxes within, boxes, seemingly, full of old books, for they all were marked so. He lay down his bike on the heather; it’s back wheel span.
With the bike no longer encumbering him, before he returned to the contents of the van, he opened out his arms and yawned. He rolled his shoulders and stretched his hamstrings the way he had seen athletes do, one leg bent, the other out straight, heel planted a divot, as he leant over his thigh. He took his phone from his pocket and looked around. He had a single message, from a girlfriend back in the city from which he had been in need of respite; good morning, it read with a kiss and nothing more. He had no other notifications. His parents, he knew, would now be at mass. Likely until they got home and found the his note, they would not be aware he had got up and left.
Turning his phone sideways, he opened the camera application and looked back in the direction from which he had come. He snapped two pictures, images of his isolation, unremarkable and without the drama, colour or dimensions to have made his excursion memorable, to be able to share them and say “I am here,” with the sense that it was notable, enviable, something which others might admire or, even better, to which they might aspire. He turned back to the van and took a photo of its open back, the sign: SERVEZ-VOUS. That, at least, was curious.
Before posting the picture, he stepped up again to the open back of the van and looked inside, now leaning into its open bay and pulling one of the boxes towards him. Though he had come out without a bag, he did have a pair of hooked elastic ties wrapped around the rack of his bike, to which, conceivably, books could be lash, should any take his fancy. It had perhaps even crossed his mind that, once home, a trip whose length could be easily expedited with an about-face and heading back the way that he had come, it would be possible to convince his father to drive out to where the van had been left and collect some of its content, its books, in greater bulk.
The first box, however, contained nothing of interest. Mostly it held technical manuals printed on low-quality paper. Large, floppy and unwieldy of dimension, they related to a wide range of home computing software and the various skills one might require to take advantage fully of their functionalities. Not only were the books of no use to him personally, nearly all related to software which was two, three or even more generations out of date, their contents therefore entirely obsolete. A second box held school textbooks, thick tomes on the sciences and mathematics, more still about computers, some on design, sociology, psychology and several on the law, none of which were of the least interest to him. Nonetheless, with the two boxes and some of their content laid out in the floor of the cargo bay, he took a few more photos. It was not until he came to post them, considering the caption which would accompany them, that the true strangeness of the van’s existence, it having been left there, left open, its cargo left to anyone who might want it, occurred. Perhaps, he might have concluded, the communitarian impulse, to share what one no longer had use for, was not so unusual there, at least not so unusual as to be considered suspicious. In the area where his parents lived, as in many, no doubt, it was not unusual to see the owners of smallholdings leave out beside their gates bags of manure for gardeners who might want to take one, produce too might be set out, sometimes with a can into which one could drop a voluntary token of payment; signs, frequently, as well, he could probably recall, would be left when a litter of dogs of kittens were born, when some manner of machinery was being sold: when the opportunity for trade and barter arose. Improvised banners by the sides of country roads was a mode of address to which many there would have been accustomed. The leaving of the van perhaps, open, unmanned, less so.
What was more, he might have thought as he walked back towards his bike, phone in hand, when the books had been left presented another wrinkle. It had rained in the night, had it not? And yet there was nothing to suggest that the contents of the van had been affected. All bone dry and in good, for what they were, condition. There was nothing, also, to suggest the van had been out overnight, certainly nothing which might have suggested longer, but then the questions followed as to whom had driven the van there, out early on a Sunday morning, and why, with no possible expectation that, in doing so, and leaving it there, there on the moors road, out in the middle of the moors, the scene as quiet as the sky was colourless, people would be coming by to peruse or help themselves.
Jacq wiped his nose on his sleeve and tried to post his picture. It was only then he discovered, to no real surprise, that his phone had no signal. He walked a few steps back along the road, phone held out in front of him, but none came through. He walked back towards the van.
Looking over the titles which he had taken from their boxes there was little inspiration to continue digging, despite the number of boxes the little van contained and the attendant probability of finding something of worth. Jacq was a bookish enough young man, bookish enough to know the names of the authors he should have known, to have read enough of them to appear well-read and, more importantly, to have understood the charge of the book as object. Books, he had been brought up to know, and those who celebrated them, were to be conferred a respect they need do nothing else to deserve: the reading of their pages notwithstanding, books, he understood, and their owners, were bastions of culture. That had not been lost on this provincial lad, and so to walk away empty handed, or indeed cycle off unloaded, would be admittance of barbarity. He squinted into the darkness as though in doing so what treasures the van might have yielded would be effortlessly revealed to him. He put his phone back in his pocket. Absent-mindedly, as he turned, he reached out for the sign: SERVEZ-VOUS. His fingers hooked the twine from which it hung. It was dry as bone.
Nothing was moving. Not a roil in the cover of cloud, not a shiver of light, not a bird; not a glint from the passing of a distant car on a distant road, the reflection off its windscreen catching his eye, no listless ewe treading for the meagre cud of the roadside’s lean and scrubby grass. If it was not for this, this freedom, for which he had set out, it was, he went, for nothing, a nothing somehow less than what that freedom was, the silence and the stillness, the living nothing of the landscape. A lichen frilled rock on the moorland freedom was. He frowned, perturbed.
Coming around the side of it, Jacq approached the front of the van. Only then did he see that, rather than having pulled up, parked at the tree in the layby off the moorland road, the van appeared to have crashed. Its bonnet was crooked in a prang, its bumper bent, its windscreen shattered. He tried the door, and it was locked. A redoubtable gnarl of mountain hawthorn, the tree had been damaged, but its wounds did not seem fresh. Jacq crouched at the fender. He would have smelt engine oil and a feint of smoke. To steady himself he put a hand on the moulding. There were no tracks leading up to tuck under the wheel; the ground beneath the van, had not cut up. He looked back to the road; there were no signs of a skid. The van had driven straight into the tree full tilt. Must have done to have done the damage to itself, despite the tree, upright, letting on that nothing had occurred.
Jacq stood. He came around the tree, the front of the van bent surely around it. He reached the other side of the car; the passenger door was ajar. He opened it, cautiously, and leant in. The smell of engine oil and petrol would have been much stronger there; he would have smelt cigarette smoke and cold ashes too, a musk of bodies. He put his knee on the seat, the seat which was scattered with jewels of glass, the seat that was marked by some manner of stain. On the inside of the windscreen there was a dash of blood, not much, barely indicative of bleeding, but sure enough sign that a someone had been driving when the vehicle crashed, and had hit, presumably, their head when the van collided with the hawthorn. There was nothing else in the cabin that Jacq or any reader might consider a clue. No notes, no tell tale signs. A dry frond of palm in the shape of the Cross had been slipped into the pocket of the visor on the passenger side. Jacq opened the glove compartment. It contained nothing but the car’s manual and scraps of assorted rubbish, of which elsewhere, in the footwell, in the cupholders, and the door pockets, there was little. He leant in further. The keys were still in the ignition.
Stepping back out of the car, Jacq again, automatically, reached into his pocket to take out his phone. No bars of signal, still. No new messages. He took a picture of the front of the van, of its bumper broken on the black and knotty tree, but would have seemed to do so half-heartedly, taking no time to check how the picture was framed and what could really be seen, whether its arrangement approached the aesthetic. A worry now impinged upon what desire to remark he might have had, what to share and how to do so, what to say. There had been blood in the cabin, after all.
He completed a tour of the van, scanning all the while the horizon. There was no sign of anyone, not the least movement in the flat grey world. It was up to Jacq now to decide what to do.
He stepped out into the road and looked first one way then the other as though with such perspective some solution might hove into view, a traveller from the way that he had come, or one, perhaps, from where he was yet to go, someone with the authority of a car, say, or that of not having left the patch of country he had fled, the land he had chosen to leave and to which he now found himself scurrying back. Nothing came. He walked back up the road, back down, his phone in his hand. A little way further, he must have thought, choosing to move in the direction from which he had come, a little further back along, and there you’ll be able to get a signal, send a message, to receive some news. Go on, he must have told himself, a little further, ten more paces, ten more, five, five steps, five more.
Looking back, he had walked a distance from the van of which he had barely been aware. The road flat, the landscape (and the light), he could no longer quite make out his bike, flat as it lay against the heather. The phone in his hand still made no connection. Jacq jogged back along the lane, to the van, to his bike. When he got there, nothing had changed. He dallied.
No plot was forming in his head, none, at least, with clear enough line to propel a course of action. He could always cycle on. Pretend he hadn’t stopped, pretend, as though there would have ever been the need, that he had not even travelled along that road, that he had gone another way, took a turn from the heedless route he had followed, that he knew from memory, which had comforted him. Who would ask? No one. Who had seen him there? None had. If only he had been witnessed, he might have conceived of some better plan.
But no less than Jacq was a bookish lad, he was a polite, well-bred one too. It wasn’t right, he must have known, to flee the scene. Not once he had learned that the van had crashed, that he had seen the blood on the windscreen, that he knew that something was amiss. To cycle away from a scene like that would be admittance of barbarousness. There was human injury to be considered, and someone’s property at that.
In the final analysis, Jacq decided, greater exploration was required. He crouched by his bike, removed from its frame the attached water bottle and took a heavy slug. The water revived him and cleared his thinking. It calmed him too, as only water can, when it is not rising around your ears and your feet can no longer touch the bottom. Striding back towards the van he took a recce, taking photographs from every angle, documentation. He took a close up of the sign: SERVEZ-VOUS. Hand painted, hand put together, it seemed, for just such occasions as this, for just this occasion perhaps, the paint distinct and bright, if not to say fresh; the twine from which it hung had yet to fray. He opened up the passenger door and leant right in, knee on the seat, taking photos of the cabin, the drivers seat, the keys in the ignition, and then, fragments carefully brushed from his knees, the passengers seat too with its sprinkling of glass.
When he had finished, for the first time since he had arrived, he consciously checked the time. The morning had passed. Elsewhere he parents would be sitting down to eat; the note he had left had informed them not to wait. Perhaps he felt a gripe of hunger, an awareness of the passing of time more so the emptiness of his stomach revealing a want which until then, in the heedless cycle, in the surprise of coming across the van, in the slow accumulation of disturbing detail that a closer look around the site had brought about, he had been numb. This shedding numbness too put vigour in his acts.
He walked with greater purpose around the van to its open back, and, having newly assumed the authority of fastidiousness, went about checking behind the open cargo doors. The one on the right swung easily shut. The sound of slamming cracked like the shooting of a grouse hunter’s gun. Jacq wavered a moment in its echo, losing the forthrightness only so recently appointed. He looked around in a manner one might call frit. The crack though carried to consequence, no plum of smoke, now winged fowl, no buckshot flesh. Nothing on which to feed came forth from the otherwise silent, otherwise flat, unresponsive landscape. He opened the door again, holding it back in its place until sure it would rest open. The other door, on which the sign was hung, when he went, more sheepish now, to close it, did not shift. A quick glance revealed that it was tethered in place, held by the very same type of hooked elastic rope thanks to which he had imagined cycling book-laden off, to the rim of the moulding as it arched over the wheel. Jacq twanged the fixing but did not release it. All told, its presence was comforting, as, he might have realised, the existence of the sign should have been, regardless of the apparent crash. Whomever had driven the van, injured or not, had at least been able to fasten the door open and hang out the sign before taking their leave. Must have, he likely concluded, slipping his phone back into his pocket.
Walking back towards his bike, Jacq took his phone back out of his pocket and idlily thumbed through the series of photographs he had taken. Much ado about nothing, he might have thought to himself, that being exactly the kind of reference a bookish enough lad like Jacq would make. In doing so, he might have expressed disappointment. He put his phone away, picked up the bike and wheeled it onto the road. Another decision now presented itself: to continue on the journey he had initially begun or to turn back. Time, far more than what he might have expected, had passed since he had rounded that unending corner and the van had come into view, time enough that turning back would not have been considered unreasonable, the entire shape of his day having bent around the discovery no less than the bumper had around the tree. And yet, to judge by his frown, by his expression, to do so was unsatisfying. Jacq bunched his mouth, chewing the question.
Rather than mount and ride, he turned away from the road and, pushing his bike, made his way back to the van and then beyond it. He wheeled his bike around the tree, leaning it there against both it and the bumper, and then spent several minutes framing a photograph in which he sought to include some shred of the landscape and the road, the van, its ruin and the steadfast tree. He crouched, stood, stepped back, crouched again, stood again and, hand on hip, considered, perhaps bringing out a box of books or the sign itself, SERVEZ-VOUS, to augment the scene. He stepped back further and moved left, allowing him, with a change to the phone’s camera aspect ratio, to take in a greater swathe of country and its vein of road. Stepping out further, moving further around, he was considering, perhaps, an angle from which he could take in the whole of the van in profile, rather than only its crumpled front. Had only the sky been more accommodating, more striking, less withholding of its light. Jacq checked the images he had taken, dismissing each one for how undramatic the still life was, how unlike what he saw with his own eyes, the charged oddness of the details which his camera, though depicting, did not draw out, the loss of its own valence in the stillness on the screen, the noiselessness there of what here was silent. He wandered a little back towards the van.
In a final bid to render anything from the scene into which he had been so heedlessly drawn and from which, as we have come to understand, he did not want to depart with only the nothing that he once believed he had sought (and there is no reason not to assume sincerely), he turned his back to the van, dropped into a squat, and held up his phone to take a picture in which he would also appear. Before he had even had time, however, to form the mask through which his reading of the scene would be expressed, something in the heather caught Jacq’s eye. There was a body there.
*****