2007 - Two Caravans (8 page)

He turns off the engine and goes back to the men’s caravan, which is leaning crookedly on its one wheel. Yola is there, sitting on Tomasz’s sloping bed, shaking and crying uncontrollably, and Tomasz is comforting her.

“I’m going,” says Andriy. He retrieves his passport and money, and starts to stuff his other belongings into his bag. “Before police come.”

Yola looks up, startled.

“Police coming?”

He nods. She jumps up, pushing Tomasz out of the way.

“I go too. I get my bag.” She makes her way towards the door. “Wait. Please wait.”

Tomasz pulls his bag down from his locker and starts to pack too.

“I come with you.”

Emanuel is sleeping on Vitaly’s bunk, but he opens his eyes and raises himself up on one arm, shielding his eyes from the light with the other, and mumbling something in his own language.

“We’re going. Goodbye, my friend.” Andriy closes the door quietly and returns to the Land Rover with his bag.

He drives the Land Rover round the edge of the field, overtaking Tomasz, who is running straight up through the strawberry clumps, his bag and his guitar bouncing on his back. The second gear on the Land Rover keeps slipping and the steering is loose. He’ll have to drive carefully.

He knocks and opens the door of the women’s caravan. Inside is hysteria and chaos. Yola is trying to gather her possessions by the light of an oil lamp and at the same time to calm Marta and the Chinese girls, who are sobbing uncontrollably.

“Where’s Irina?” he asks.

“Man take it,” says one of the Chinese girls, trembling, and the other chimes in, “Woman hairs man take it.”

“Man in gangster car has taken Irina,” Marta explains in Polish.

Blood swims before Andriy’s eyes. How has this happened? How has he let this happen? What kind of man would let his girl (is she his girl?) be snatched away like that? He feels faint and sick.

“Which way?”

The girls point vaguely down the field. His heart shrinks at the uselessness of it. What a fool he’s been. The blonde. The Ferrari. What a stupid useless idiot.

“Let’s go. Let’s go.”

He grabs Yola’s bag, and Marta’s, because she wants to go with her auntie, then the two Chinese girls start shrieking and wailing.

“We no stay. We come. We go. Bad woman hairs man come again.”

“You pack up quick quick,” says Yola.

They are all scrabbling about, shaking hysterically, and Tomasz is getting in the way, clunking them with his guitar each time he moves. Andriy thinks he sees a flash of blue lights between the trees down in the valley. Suddenly he realises what to do. He jumps into the Land Rover, manoeuvres round, backs up, and hitches the caravan to the towing bracket. There is even a socket into which he plugs the connector. It hardly takes two minutes. Then he is off.

As he bounces along the edge of the field, a small figure in a green anorak stumbles out in front of him, seeming still the worse for eight cans of lager. He slams on the brakes. The caravan lurches and almost leaps off the towing bracket. Hm. He’ll have to remember not to brake so sharply.

“Get in,” he yells. Emanuel clambers into the back of the Land Rover and settles into the hay.

At the bottom gate, Wendy is still crouched over the prone body of the farmer. She looks up briefly as they drive off and Andriy thinks he catches the flicker of a smile on her face, but it could be just a trick of the light.

He can’t get up into third, and it keeps slipping out of second, and trying to control the rebellious sway and tug of the caravan hitched to the back with the steering so loose is no joke. And there, wailing up the valley, are the flashing blue lights. Holy bones! He’s only gone a few kilometres, and they’re after him already.

How has this happened, Andriy Palenko? Fifteen minutes ago, you had a Land Rover, money in your pocket, the open road, a childhood sweetheart waiting for you. Now you have six passengers, an unruly caravan and the police on your back. Why didn’t you just say no?

Ahead of him, on the left, is a turning—a grassy track that seems to lead into a wood. He veers off the road. After a few metres the track widens into a parking place with an old picnic table. He pulls to a halt. In the back of the Land Rover Emanuel is asleep on the hay. Andriy sticks his head in the door of the caravan.

“Everything normal in here?”

The four women and Tomasz are crouching in a huddle on the floor. Marta has been sick.

“Where are we?” asks Tomasz.

“I don’t know. I don’t know where we are or where we’re going. We stay here. In the morning we decide.”

He sits down on the floor next to the others, resting his head in his hands. He realises his knees are shaking. He is covered in sweat. If the police come, he will just explain everything. He will tell them it was all a mistake and take the consequences like a man. This is England.

Yola definitely has nothing to apologise for. Definitely not. When your lover betrays you and insults you with slapping ticker, if you are a woman of action, you have to act. There was that big dolt Andriy, trying to make everybody calm. What use is calm in a situation like that? Naturally the wife would try to put the blame on her. All lies. But try telling that to the policeman. She knows the mind of a policeman—she was married to one once. And the way the policeman thinks is this: guilty person is one who has motive. Does Andriy have motive to run over Dumpling? No. Does she have a motive? Yes.

So best thing is to keep out of police’s way. Back to Poland. Quick quick. But this beetroot-brain says he can’t drive any more, he wants to sleep. And you can see from the way he is looking at the bed that he thinks he should be allowed to sleep here in the women’s caravan. And that knicker-thief Tomasz (he thinks she doesn’t know, but she does) has taken off his shoes. Pah! What a stink! All the girls start to shriek and cover their noses. She folds her arms across her bosom and says firmly, “This is women’s caravan, for women only.”

But will this pig-headed beetroot-brain listen?

“Yola,” he says, “you may have been queen of strawberry field, but here on road, I am boss. And if I am going to drive to Dover, I need good night’s sleep.”

Yola explains patiently that in absence of farmer, for which, by the way, she denies all responsibility, she is senior figure, and she will decide about sleeping accommodations.

“I am mature and respectable woman, and I cannot be expected to share my sleeping quarters with any man.”

Well, his reply is so uncouth that she will not repeat it, except to say that it referred to her age, her underdo things, her country of origin, and her relationship with the farmer, which being a pure business arrangement, and moreover one conducted in a foreign country, has no relevance to any discussion of her character, a nuance which is probably too subtle for a Ukrainian.

“Andriy, please!” Tomasz intervenes, in a very calm and dignified way. “Is no problem. You can sleep in Land Rover, and I will stay here on floor.”

“No! No!” cry all the girls in chorus. “No room on floor!”

“Well, then we will all sleep in Land Rover. Somehow we will manage.”

Well, they did manage. Somehow. So that’s that.

Andriy really let rip at Yola, and now he feels better. Out in the cool pre-dawn the sky is already growing lighter and the stars have disappeared. Tomasz has taken off his trainers once more, placed them on the bonnet and stretched himself out on the front seats of the Land Rover, his feet sticking out of the window, perfuming the breeze with his socks. Andriy wonders where Irina is spending this night. The thought makes his stomach clench unpleasantly. He crawls into the back, fitting himself around and on top of Emanuel, who has slept through everything, curled up knees to chin on the sweet-smelling hay. There is an old blanket on the floor that he pulls up over them. Although the air is chilly, the silence of the wood, the breathing of earth and roots and sap at last put him into such a deep sleep that he doesn’t wake until the morning sun strikes through the silvery tree trunks.

I AM DOG I RUN I RUN ALONE FIELD HEDGE ROAD ALL DARK I SEE BLUE LI6HT FLASH FLASH I SNIFF LISTEN I HEAR BAD WHEELIE NOISE WHOO WHAA WHOO WHAA I RUN FIELD RIVER I DRINK SMALL ANIMALS SCUFFLE SMELL OF GRASS AND EARTH DEAD THINGS ROTTIN6 ANIMAL SMELLS FRESH PISS BADSER FOX WEASEL RABBIT I RUN ROAD FIELD WOOD ROAD WOOD STOP SNIFF SNIFF I SMELL MAN FEET GOOD STRONG FEET SMELL I GO SEEK MAN FEET SMELL I RUN I RUN I AM DOG

I jumped.

I fell. The ground was soft. I rolled, picked myself up, and I ran.
Mamma, Pappa, help me, please. I am little Irinochka
.

I was thinking—the trees—I must get into the trees. I scrambled up the bank into the wood, dodging between low branches. Here I would have a chance. If I was lucky, the trees would stop the bullets. I braced myself for the shots as I ran, flinching, waiting for the bang that would tell me I was dead. There were no shots. All I could hear were footsteps, his and mine, crashing through the undergrowth and dead branches on the ground. Crash. Crash.
No shots. Why no shots? Maybe I was dead already
. It was so dark. Dark like the cupboard under the stairs. Dark like a grave. Before, there’d been a faint glimmer from the headlights, but now I was past that, running into pitch blackness. It was too dark to run. Too many obstacles, shadows that turned into trees, branches that hit you in the face, tree roots that grabbed at your legs, terrors invisible. No moonlight here. On one side, I thought I could see the edge of the wood, the grey gleam of sky through the trees.

I veered right, slithered down the bank back onto the track and sprinted silently along the grass. I could still hear him behind me in the wood. Crash. Crash.

Now there was a bend and the track climbed steeply uphill, with a jagged hedge on one side. Above the hedge I could see the sky, stars, breathless, skipping up and down as I ran. I stopped, panting for breath. My chest was exploding. Blood was pounding in my ears—boom boom boom boom—
Keep going. Don’t stop now. You are younger and fitter. You can outrun him
. I tripped on a tree root, fell, picked myself up, and ran on—boom boom boom. When I couldn’t run any longer, I stood still in the lee of a tree trunk and listened. My breath was coming in great gulps. I could still hear the crunch of footsteps in the wood, I couldn’t tell how far behind me. So he hadn’t given up yet. I ran again, wildly, stumbling and tripping.
Slow down. Take care. If you fall, you are finished
.

This is how a hunted animal feels, I thought, gasping for breath, terror rushing in through all your senses, drowning in your own fear. I found a gap in the hedge and squeezed through, the thorns grabbing at my clothes. On the other side was starlight, a long ploughed field. I was breathing wildly, panting, choking. I tried to run, but the furrows were impossible, so I walked for a bit, breathing slow mouthfuls of air, stumbling in the ruts. Then I stopped, crouched, and listened. Silence. No footsteps. No gun. Nothing.

A bit further up I cut back onto the track and ran again, more slowly now. My heart was banging about like a wild bird in a cage.
Is it finished? Has he gone? How will you know? Last time, he waited until you thought he’d gone, then he came back
.

As I climbed the hill, the sky grew lighter. When I couldn’t run any more I carried on walking. I didn’t stop for a long time. At last I found a hollow where a big tree had been uprooted. I made a bed of dry leaves and pulled some branches over for shelter, so I would be invisible from the track. I lay there, keeping quite still, waiting for my heart to slow down—boom boom—watching the dawn breaking, pink and peachy, with little clouds like angels’ wings.

Andriy is the first to wake, conscious of something warm and heavy on his legs. He thinks at first it is Emanuel who has rolled over onto him in the night. He gives him a gentle shove, and comes up against warm fur covering solid muscle. Holy whiskers!

The creature is huge and hairy, and it snuffles in its sleep. He sits up and rubs his eyes. The dog sits up, too, and gazes at him with what he can only describe as adoration in its soft brown eyes. It is a big, handsome dog, short-haired and mainly black, with some white hairs around its muzzle and belly which give it a mature, distinguished air.

“Woof!” it says, beating its sturdy tail against the side of the Land Rover.

“Hey, Dog!” says Andriy, rubbing its ears. “What are you doing here?”

“Woof!” says Dog.

Emanuel wakes next, to the sound of the tail thumping rhythmically against the side of the Land Rover, and he seems less pleased to see the dog.

“Is OK, Emanuel. Is good dog. No bite.”

“In Chichewa we have a saying.
Where the dog pisses, the grass dies
.”

“Woof,” says Dog. Andriy can see that despite himself Emanuel is quite taken with the enthusiastic tail-wagging and the tongue hanging out, wet and pink, between the sharp white teeth.

But the most passionate meeting is between Tomasz and Dog—such a foot-nuzzling, face-licking, tail-beating, jumping-up, rolling-on-the-ground frenzy. Finally in a snuffling ecstasy Dog finds Tomasz’s trainers on the bonnet of the Land Rover, and though Tomasz tries to stop him he runs off with one in his jaws and chews it completely to pieces. Well, this is quite a splendid dog, thinks Andriy, for the sooner those trainers disappear the better. And a dog with such a good sense of smell may help you to find a missing person.

I AM DOG I AM HAPPY DOG I RUN I PISS I SNIFF I HAVE MY MEN THEY GO TO> PISS IN THE WOOD MAN PISS HAS GOOD SMELL THIS MAN’S PISS SMELLS OF MOSS AND MEAT AND HERBS THIS IS GOOD I SNIFF THIS MAN’S PISS SMELLS OF SARLIC AND LOVE HORMONES THIS IS ALSO GOOD BUT LOVE HORMONES ARE TOO STRONG I SNIFF THIS MAN’S PISS SMELLS TOO SOUR BUT HIS FEET SMELL GOOD I SNIFF IN THIS WOOD ARE OTHER MAN SMELLS VOMIT MAN-SMOKE WHEELIE OIL I SNIFF NO DOG SMELLS I WILL MAKE MY DOG SMELL HERE I RUN I PISS I AM HAPPY DOG I AM DOG

Yola feels the dog is showing far too much enthusiasm, sticking its nose up her skirt on any excuse, in a way that reminds her of…No. She is a mature and respectable woman, and there are some secrets she is not going to share with any nosy-poky book-readers.