The Road to You: a novel

The Birth of the Homunculus

MATTHEW: I wasn't sure it was such a good idea for Jude to be driving again so soon after being in hospital. And I wasn't sure I could stay awake to keep an eye on his driving. But I wanted to be alone with him for a while so we could talk. And as kind as Margaret and Laney were, I didn't get the sense they were going to leave us alone if we stayed. Must have been tough for them living together in a little town like that. They must have been dying for company of their own kind.

"Are you sure you're okay?" Matthew asked Jude with gentle solicitude.

"Yeah," Jude said, "I think so."

"You sure?"

"Yeah... I feel pretty good. Surprisingly good. Don't worry."

He stroked Matt's wrist, thanking him for his concern. The ordeal hadn't fully sunk in yet. Jude was still in a disbelieving daze.

"And you don't remember it happening?"

"No, not really. When I woke up in hospital, the first thing I thought was that it had something to do with those kids at the beach. That they'd... attacked us or something."

That this fear could be more real for Jude, more impressive, could cling more tenaciously to memory than the actual experience of nearly drowning, saddened Matthew profoundly – not least because he was no stranger to this fear.

Jude picked up on Matthew's melancholy mood.

"Hey," he shook Matt's arm affectionately, "enough about me. Are you okay?"

"I don't know. It's been quite a day... quite a week."

Both stared ahead at the evening sky and at jaundiced hills of parched grasses and loose rock.

"I don't want to get into a whole thing about it," Jude launched a new topic cautiously, "but why were you so insistent on holding hands at the beach?"—the question roused Matthew out of his pensiveness—"...especially after that episode on the highway last night."

"You really have to ask that?"

Jude was confused, unable to read Matthew's tone.

"Precisely because we shouldn't have to be afraid." Could it be any simpler than that?

"No, no, of course not," Jude agreed. "But who cares what those kids think of us, or what they think we are?"

"That's the point. That's it exactly. Who cares what those kids think of us – those kids who saved your life."

The irony was not lost on Jude, as a yielding pucker of one cheek betrayed. But he also felt, though he dared not say, that they could just as easily have been the opposite kind of kids.

"I didn't even get a chance to thank them."

Jude felt guilty for being such a coward. He was still trying to process what the last couple of days meant for his life outside this brief gap of time, this break from normal reality. But since he and Matt had become what they had become together, it felt like the world they were passing through was more full of everything – exciting and frightening – than what he thought of as the 'real' world, the world back home, the world he felt like he'd been passing through in a haze for ten or more years.

Matthew was so much more lucid about the whole affair. How was it that he got it, that he was able to see the world upside down and backwards, and to see it transparently, in all its ugliness and beauty, while Jude was still just trying to get his bearings? Indirectly, and somewhat inelegantly, Jude put these questions to Matthew, who had been feeling guilty too. He knew that he owed Jude an answer, not because they were sleeping together, but because they were fellow travellers on a difficult road with an uncertain end point. He could no longer justify withholding the truth.