The Road Home (36 page)

Remorse and shame. His body still trembling from the delirium of fucking her, but the shame flooding in . . .

She moved to the door. The blood on her face covered by the scarf.

He reached for her hand. A single caress. A gesture of forgiveness, of recognition that their old passion was still there; that was all he asked.

But she pulled her hand away. “Good-bye, Lev,” she said. “And please don’t come round to the flat, or anything. It’s better if we never see each other again.”

17

Lady Muck of the Vegetable World

“MIDGE” MIDGHAM BROUGHT the old Land Rover round to the three caravans at seven-thirty in the morning. He picked up his foreign workers and drove them out to his thirty-acre asparagus spread, where the tractor and the rig waited.

The tractor had to haul the rig in a straight line down the furrows. No use letting it buck or slide out of alignment. And it had to go nice and slow, letting the asparagus cutters—the human hardware—keep pace. Housed in the wide steel arms of the rig were plastic crates: five, six in a line, depending on how many cutters were following. The system was simple but effective. The cutters bent down and cut with a knife, making sure there was no wastage, that they sliced each stem just
under
the earth—not a prodigal inch above it—massed a bunch of stems in their left hands, as if they were gathering flowers, then laid the bunch carefully in the crates, spears all facing the same way. In the old days, hundreds of man-hours had been wasted decanting the full baskets carried by the pickers into boxes at the field’s edge. With the rig, the asparagus was cut and crated in one smooth operation. Twice a day, the crates were loaded into the Land Rover and driven down to the chiller in Midge’s barn.

The owner of the spread had to be vigilant, that was all. Midge drove the tractor with his big belly squashed up against the wheel and his neck half bent round most of the time, keeping watch on how the cutters were working. If he saw anybody
throwing
the spears into the crates, he’d yell at them.

“Now, yew listen up,” he’d told them on their first day. “Asparagus en’t sugar beet! It en’t blusted Brussels sprouts. It’s got a good pedigree. It’s Lady Muck of the vegetable world: grows overnight, needs harvesting fast, or it go to seed. And it damage easily. So yew treat it with respect. Yew tug your forelocks to it, or you’ll be off this blusted farm.”

Midge told his farmer friends at the Longmire Arms: “These bors from Eastern Europe, they’re used to fieldwork. At home, as kids, I reckon they’d be up at dawn to feed the family chickens, same thing after school, milk the cows, water the cabbages, all that carry-on . . . So they’re decent pickers, see, because they understand the land.”

Of the two young Chinese men, Sonny and Jimmy Ming, Midge said, “Denno ’bout them. Can’t seem to get their tongues around the language. And Sonny Ming, he cuts too high up the stem because he’s dreaming half the blusted time. But they’re good-natured. I give ’em that. Laugh a lot, they do. Den’t know what at, but who cares? And they never seem to mind the rain.”

But this year Midge had only seven cutters when he could have done with nine or ten, because the asparagus was showing up nice, after a spring that had been just wet enough and after his seaweed mulch, spread on in late autumn, had been broken down by hard winter frosts. The crop had just the right amount of body to it—stems not too fat, not too spindly—and this April was warm; you could practically
see
the stuff growing. So when Vitas came to him and asked him to take on his friend, Lev, a man in his forties, he’d said, “Awright by me, Vitas, if he don’t mind sharing a van with the Mings. And if he’ll put his back into it.”

Lev didn’t mind sharing the leaky old caravan. He didn’t mind any of it, chose to regard the discomfort as a punishment for the way he’d wrecked the life he’d had in London. Because it had been a beautiful life—he saw this now. His friendship with Christy Slane, their tea-and-toast conviviality, had been consoling. He’d begun to love his work. He’d been favored by a beautiful, sexy girl; a girl who spent half her Sundays working for no money in a care home for the elderly. And now he’d lost them all.

“I screwed up, comrade,” he told Rudi. “That old anger of mine made me act like an imbecile. It’s like I put lumps of coal into everybody’s hands.”

“Well,” said Rudi, “love makes people mad. Don’t be too harsh with yourself.”

“Why not?” said Lev. “I deserve it. I half-strangled Sophie in that theater, and then . . .”

“And then what?”

“When she came round to see me, I was rough. You know what I’m saying? I told myself she wanted it because she’d always been quite hot for me. But I guess it wasn’t really far from rape.”

Rudi was silent. Lev could imagine him worrying what to say. After a while, he heard a heavy sigh and Rudi mumbled, “Men are having a tough time in this century. We just don’t seem to know where we fucking are.”

“Well, I’ll tell you where I am,” said Lev. “I’m back with the dispossessed.”

There were no curtains at the caravan windows, so most mornings Lev woke at six, when it got light. He made tea on the two-ring burner and usually took the mug outside, to escape the fug of the caravan, to watch the sun come up behind a stand of poplars and feel the fresh air on his face.

It rained often. The field where the vans stood was always muddy, from the trudging back and forth of the gang of workers. This half-acre of mud reached to where a washing line sagged between two posts, usually draped with towels, cheap bed linen, frayed T-shirts, gray underwear, took in a rubbish heap of pallets, boxes, timber offcuts, lengths of gray piping, steel brackets and plastic shelving, and a Portaloo, narrow as a phone box, jacked up on some concrete blocks. Once a week, the toilet was emptied and refilled with olive-green detergent, sharp in your nose as a dry martini.

Drinking tea and smoking, Lev walked out to where the grass shone with dew, toward hawthorn hedges and a field of raspberry canes, still almost bare of leaf. Beyond the canes, a lush meadow on rising ground, where Midge’s geese sometimes wandered, bickered, and lay down, like snow-white meringues. Beyond this, the poplars and the big sky. Standing in this place, Longmire Farm, in the quiet of morning, Lev now and again felt something of what Vitas had described to him—that it was all right, better than a thousand other places, despite the mud, like a corner of England from long ago.

But his back ached. Not just from bending all day in the asparagus fields but from the bed he’d been allocated. Everything in his caravan was old, worn, used, stained. Lev slept on a block of petrified foam rubber, which, in the daytime, was kicked upward into a rigid fold, to form bulky bench seating for a pull-down Formica table. The foam was upholstered in a prickly brown weave. Lev’s thin nylon undersheet slithered around on this weave. All night, his body itched and rolled about. He thought longingly of his bunk at Belisha Road and remembered how, when he’d said good-bye to Christy, he’d felt like weeping.

One morning, after a night of almost no sleep, Lev attempted to ask Midge Midgham for something—a soft blanket or quilt—to put between the sheet and the foam, but he knew that Midge was selectively deaf, so he wasn’t surprised when the man simply turned away from him and strode toward the waiting tractor.

Midge Midgham. The Chinese boys had nicknamed him “Big Berri.” Often, when the pickers assembled for the day and Midge shouted his orders as the rig began its slow forward creep, the Mings’ faces broke into smiles, and these smiles sometimes widened into unstoppable laughter.
“Hor-hor-hor-hor! Hor-hor-hor-hor-hor-hor!”
It amused Lev to watch them: Sonny and Jimmy Ming, bent over the furrows, weeping with mirth at the sight of Big Berri on his tractor with his stomach punched into an agonizing fold by the steering wheel and his thick neck twisting round to let his puffy eyes keep their vigil on the pickers’ pace.

“Wha’s the matter with them?” Midge sometimes innocently asked. The mongrel dog, Whiskey, might be snapping and yapping at their heels, but they didn’t heed him. Their laughter seemed a sweet intoxication from which nothing could part them.

“In China,” Vitas might offer, “people laugh quite more.”

Or his friend Jacek, a rosy-faced boy with blond hair, might add, “Don’ worry, Midge. No laugh at you. Maybe plan something. Plan Whiskey kidnap. In China, everybody eat dog!”

“Well,” said Midge, “tell them I’ll put their blusted eyes out if they lay a finger on my dog.”

And so the morning would roll on, Lev’s world shrinking to the gray-brown furrows, the green stems, snapping cleanly under the knife, wild weeds in the ditches, sun or rain on his back, diesel fumes from the tractor sullying the freshness of the air.

There was a kind of camaraderie in the line. Lev liked to hear his own language pass from voice to voice. It reminded him of beating the woods behind Auror for rabbits and pigeons when he was a boy. Sometimes, breathing in the diesel smoke, he caught a memory-whiff of the Baryn mill, half expected to look up and see his old friends standing at the edge of the wood: ghostly faces under hard hats.

Mainly, Lev himself was silent, listening to what Vitas and the others talked about: the girls they fancied at the co-op checkouts or in the Longmire Arms, the motorbikes they itched to buy and flaunt, the flavors of crisps they preferred, their discovery of Pot Noodle, the money they were saving, the rules of bar billiards . . .

One afternoon, as they ate their lunch in the corner of a field— floury baps filled with corned beef, pickles, processed cheese, washed down with Pepsi—he told them the old story of buying the Tchevi and pouring vodka on the windshield as they drove it home through the ice. And he saw that they were held by this, just as Lydia’s friends in Muswell Hill had been held. Everybody stared at him: Vitas and Jacek and the other young men from his country, Oskar, Pavel, and Karl. Only the Mings looked blank. When he spoke his language, Sonny and Jimmy Ming didn’t understand a single word.

“I’d like to drive an American car,” said Vitas.

“I’d like to meet Rudi,” said Jacek.

The others nodded, concurred. They’d like to meet Rudi
and
drive the car. And Lev thought, yes, Rudi was everything this story had made him out to be—and more. He was a force of nature. He was a lightning bolt. He was a fire that never went out.

Lev called him often. It felt to him as though Rudi was once again his only friend in the world. He knew that his money—money that he should have sent to Ina, money that should have repaid his debt to Lydia—was leaking away on mobile-phone debt, but his loneliness was so acute that he had to keep Rudi near him somehow, or go insane.

One evening, Rudi said to him, “Well, I’ve got troubles, too, Lev. The Tchevi’s playing me up again, fuck it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Get this. I’m going along Route 719, way out toward Piratyn, in the middle of nowhere, with this lard-faced granny, carrying two live hens in a coop, in the back. Thinking to myself, I hope she’s got money and isn’t going to try to pay me in fucking
eggs
. And then I see steam coming out of the hood.
Steam!
It’s billowing out in massive clouds. I feel like I’m in some old Communist horror movie, starring a tank engine.”

Lev couldn’t suppress a smile. “What did you do?” he said.

“Well, what could I do? I pulled over. Switched off. Granny leans back on the upholstery, like this is completely normal. Just closes her eyes. Hens fast asleep, too—or dead. So I get out, get the hood up. Everything’s
boiling
in there. I’m not kidding, Lev. I can hear bubbling going on, like Lora was cooking face flannels.

“Everything way too hot to touch. So I know we’re stuck. No option but to stay there and wait till it cools, then refresh the system. But we’re middle of Route 719, nothing in sight but rocks and scrub and one seared old oak tree. Freak temperature: 85 degrees Fahrenheit. And suddenly I’m thinking, It’s still eight or nine miles to Piratyn and I’ve got no water to top up the fucking cooling system!”

“Right. Well, you’re alive to tell the tale.”

“Yeah. But it got surreal. I’m waiting there, apologizing. I feel like such a loser. I feel worse than you’re feeling, comrade. Granny hauls her arse out of the car, twitches her patched-up old skirts, tells me she has to answer a call of nature. So, Bingo, I think to myself: Liquid! And I’m about to ask her, ‘Would you mind saving your body fluid for my poor sick car?’ but then I remember, no, fuck it, I’ve got no receptacle. Nothing to collect it in.”

Lev heard Rudi’s voice begin to break up into laughter as he went on: “So figure what I do, Lev. While Granny’s off into the scrub, I wrap a snot rag round my hand, get the cap off the cooler tank, and I lean over, nearly scalding my balls off, and I piss into the fucking tank. Jesus Christ!”

Lev joined the laughter. Felt it bubble up in him from wherever it had hidden itself. Rudi began coughing, then collected himself and said, “Well, we got there. Chicken shit all over my upholstery, and God knows what uric acid does to an engine, but we survived. Never been so glad to see that dump, Piratyn, in my whole life. Got some coolant into the system, courtesy of a bribe. I swear every last citizen of Piratyn’s a born-and-bred
gray
. Fucking garage people looked at the Tchevi like she was primed with a terrorist bomb. Cost me almost my whole fare. So bang goes another afternoon’s work and the engine still smells of piss and the cooling system’s leaking like hell and still not fixed and not going to
get
fixed unless I can cannibalize another motor for a new pump. I tell you, Lev, sometimes this country —”

He broke off. Lev heard the maimed cuckoo come shrieking out of its home in the wooden clock. “Oh well, I needn’t tell you,” sighed Rudi, “you know only too well. That’s why you’re picking asparagus in the mudflats of England.”

The afternoons felt long. On fine days they worked nine, ten hours. Worked till the light began to go, till the rooks began to shuffle in the high trees, till Lady Muck became almost invisible in her green sheath. Then they fell into the Land Rover, mute, aching, hungry, and were driven back to the caravans. Took turns at the hot shower, a big empty walk-in space, fixed up by Midge next to the chiller. Heated up the cheapest tinned stuff they could buy—ravioli, baked beans, mulligatawny soup—and spooned it in like starving children, bulked out with thick-cut bread. Slaked their sugar thirst with canned peaches, mandarin oranges, Mars bars. Wandered outside to smoke, if the night was fine, and stared at the stars, clear and bright, over the quiet land.