Hand Me Down World (22 page)

My first lie was to the truck driver. I told him my name was Ines. I didn't plan to. It just came out of me. Ines. There it was. The truck driver looked across and when he nodded that is also the moment I began to believe as well. And then I began to like it. Eventually it felt normal, and then more normal than my birth name. And on occasion when I would review it and consider reverting to my old name I would think, no, Ines can live on. She can live on in this new skin. The other name I will leave to crack and dry up in the sun along with the debris on the beach.

When the truck driver the inspector spoke to discovered I wasn't a prostitute he turned on me. He called me a lying whore. I was a whore. Why else would I be on the road at that hour of the night? He hit me with the back of his hand across my mouth. He said he would drop me off outside a police station if I didn't do as I was told. He said I could stay in his truck if I put my hand on his lap. I did so and as he grew hard his mood improved. Then he told me to undo his belt and open his fly. I did that. For an hour we drove like that. I discovered this was something I could do. I was turning into this new person able to do such things. For hours we drove through the night with my hand on his crotch. He reminded me that I was travelling for free. He pointed out at the night. Earlier there had been some scattered lights, but now there was nothing. I might as well fall down a well as be dropped off out here in the night. He would drop me down that well if I didn't do what he asked. He told me to stroke his penis. So I did that. I closed my eyes and thought about the hardness of a table top through a tablecloth. It could have been that—table and cloth. And my hand was a salt-shaker or pepper-pot. It didn't matter. With every kilometre I was that much closer to Berlin. And whatever I had to put up with didn't compare to the woman lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of the steps. The thought of that woman who had shown me kindness was something to flee as much as Berlin was a place to hurry on to.

I tried to concentrate on the road. The driver said I was holding his penis too hard. He said it was a penis not a handrail. He talked about his penis as if it was somebody quite well known to him, an old friend with certain charms. His English was hopeless. But he spoke it anyway. He asked me to think of his penis as a fountain. He laughed when he said it the first time. So that I laughed too. He'd made a joke. He kept smiling at the road. Then he asked me to drink at the fountain and I ignored him. Soon he wasn't asking any more. He was ordering me to drink at the fountain and when I hesitated he lifted his foot and the truck slowed and I saw the night come into detail. Nothing outside looked friendly at all, not the flat fields or the black trees, so I unbuckled my seat belt and moved across and put his penis in my mouth. As soon as I did that a hand came down on my head and held me there.

Ramona says I should have bitten his cock. She would have, and without a second thought. When I told the blind gentleman his response was different. He was not outraged like Ramona. He sat forward, interested. He had questions to do with the man's penis. I am surprised at how little the inspector was able to get out of him.

After a while I forgot about my head in the driver's lap. I forgot about his penis in my mouth. Then I felt my hair tugged and held, and my head was moved up and down under the pressure of his hand. When he came he kept my head down. His penis went soft. I let the goo drip out of my mouth onto his jeans. When he worked out what I'd done, that hand of his pulled my head up and slammed me across the cab. The truck swerved. My head banged against the door. He pulled over. There was no traffic. He told me to get out. He called me a whore. Again he told me to get out. I refused. I had done my part. I had done what he asked. Now he had to keep driving away from and towards. He yelled at me to get the fuck out. I shook my head. He reached over and punched the side of my face. That hurt—for days after it hurt. I wouldn't get out. I wouldn't leave the truck. He had to get out himself. As soon as I heard his feet land on the road I tried to lock the doors but I messed it up. Next thing my door opened and he pulled me out and I landed on the roadside. His boot found my stomach. He went on kicking. When the sun came up I was still lying there, in the roadside grass, and next to me a cigarette packet that someone had thrown out the window.

I don't tell Ramona that story any more. It makes her angry. She starts to pace up and down until I get the feeling she would like to kill her husband all over again.

I've told her I was shown more kindness than abuse.

When I stood up out of the roadside grass a small car pulled over. The driver was an old man. He opened his door and got out to call to me over the rooftop. The passenger door fell open and a small girl's face peered back. It took me a moment to realise that one side of my face was covered with dried blood. I got in the back of the car. The little girl stayed in the front with her grandfather. I didn't speak Italian. They didn't speak English. As we came to the edge of a village I tapped on the window to get the driver's attention. I tried to make him understand I wanted to get out. He shook his head. He said something, and pointed to the side of his face. We drove on, crawled along a lane beside a field until we stopped outside a small cottage. An old woman in a black dress was pegging out washing. He turned off the engine and wound down the window and yelled something. The woman pegging up the washing shifted her attention to the back window. The man turned around and looked at me. The little girl in the front poked her face between the seats and said, ‘Come.'

I don't know their names. But they were gentle and kind. My cheek hurt when the old woman touched it with the warm cloth. My ribs hurt. She wiped something from my chin. She had to rub hard to get rid of it. When it came off she looked a little harder at me. They fed me. Then the old man put me back in the car. The woman and the barefoot granddaughter waved from the door. We drove to the village, where a bus sat idling in the square. The driver disappeared inside an office. He came back with a ticket for me. He kissed me on both cheeks. I climbed onto that bus without knowing where I was headed except that it was north.

Two hours later the bus arrived at its destination. Another village, this one surrounded by hills. I watched the passengers get off into waiting cars or be met by friends and relatives. Arm in arm they wandered off.

Outside the bus the driver pointed north out to me. I climbed over a stone wall and crossed a field of dead crops and climbed up to the hills where I could see another village against the sky. That night I slept beneath the trees. The following day the snail woman found me and took me home. Her testimony is the one that makes me feel the saddest. Until I read it I thought all pity had been rinsed out of me. I rediscovered it when I read her statement to the inspector. I wish I had left her a note. I am sorry I stole the road map. I have asked the inspector for her address so that I can write to her. I will thank her for her kindness and for delivering back to me what I had thought I had lost, and in due course I will send her some money and perhaps one of Ramona's drawings of me to pay for the road map.

A baker saw me gazing in at his display window and came out with a bread roll. He wanted nothing in return. I ate a piece of apple nudged along in the dirt by a sparrow. I ate it without a second thought. Thank you, sparrow. I drank from the taps at the backs of cottages. At night I washed in fountains. I stole what I could. A bowlegged man, with some missing front teeth, carrying a digging tool over his shoulder, gave me some cheese and a cigarette. I'd never smoked a cigarette before. A man in an expensive-looking white open-top car stopped to pick me up. He was a gentleman. Well dressed, a white man, tanned, with white teeth and a gold chain that dangled from his wrist. When I asked if he had worked in a hotel he laughed and slapped the steering wheel. We stopped at a village. He bought me lunch. It was fun to feel like a tourist. I ate all the olives and all the bread. He wanted nothing in return. His English was good. I surprised him when I told him I was travelling to Berlin. At first he seemed to think I was joking. Then he asked why. I answered truthfully, my son. But the rest of what I said was lies. The truth tends to frighten people—some are alarmed and want to run away from the natural disaster spilling towards them. Others stare with wonder. The snail woman was like that. Almost frightened to breathe.

We slowed down in the traffic around the station. The conversation dried up. The man hid behind his sunglasses. We were getting ready to say goodbye. My gratitude was waiting there on the tip of my tongue. He dropped me by the steps and at last I thanked him. He took off his sunglasses to smile. I walked up four or five steps. I wanted to look like I was going somewhere. Then when I judged the moment was right I stopped and looked back at the traffic. I waited for the lights to change, then after his white car moved into the traffic I left the station steps and for the next hour I approached different people—a woman with a child, a small boy who took one look at me and ran off, a man with a newspaper, and the baker who gave me some bread—to ask directions to the edge of the town and the road north.

Two days later a chicken farmer dropped me off at the side of the road. He got out of the car and came around to my side to point the way over a pass. He gave me some bread and then because he had trays of eggs in the back he insisted on giving me eggs. He must have known they would be useless. But I took them. Those eggs made me feel more normal, they made me believe that the day might end with me under a roof cooking those eggs. They were the only thing he had to give. Then he remembered he had something else. He opened his car and dug around under his seat. He came up with a screwdriver. I understood what he was trying to say. I showed him my sticking knife and he made admiring noises and took back the screwdriver. The clouds moved and we both glanced up at the sun; that's when he remembered the water bottle in the back of the car. I was so grateful for the water bottle that I forgot the eggs.

As I climbed the path to the ridge pointed out by the egg man it got hotter and hotter. The blue sky turned black with the heat. Birds rose on thermals and then disappeared into the melting sky. I walked and walked. I stayed on the correct path. But the ridge kept growing higher. By now I had a finger of water left. I knew I must not drink it. To hold onto even a little is to still have it. I had to crawl under the brush for shade. I spent the day waiting for the sun to drop. I thought about my boy. Hours later that same thought got me up off the ground. It was cooler now and I set off again, walking through the last of the evening light, towards the ridge and a sky black and shining with stars.

For a time I felt as if I was moving towards something better. I held onto that idea like I held onto the water. At some point it was clear I had left the correct path. The ridge was still where it had been two hours ago. Now I wonder if I was walking around it instead of up. I decided to stop and wait for daybreak. I knelt down and cleared away some small stones and lay down. I shook the plastic bottle and left the water alone. I closed my eyes and thought about my boy. It was the next morning that the dogs found me.

twenty-three

Whenever Ramona rakes back through my story she says she is sorry that I have never known love. In her own mind she has driven Jermayne into the same pen holding the faceless men I had hotel sex with. I don't like to correct her because she has decided who the villains are in my story. Every male is a lighter or darker shade of her womanising husband. So the strangely complex feeling I have for Jermayne must stay unsaid. But there are others.
Were
others? I am not sure of the tense. In the partridge hunter's account Paolo is last seen leading me up to the ridge. I am surprised the inspector didn't try to talk with him. And my Frenchman. I can hardly follow his story; the sentences make no sense. I don't recognise him at all. I never heard him once use the name Millennium Three. I know him as Bernard. Ralf used the name Defoe. I did too, but only after getting the Christopher and Andrew parts of his name mixed up.

I didn't realise how high we had climbed until I stopped for breath and looked and saw the sparkling metal rooftop of the car parked further down the mountainside. That is also the moment my knees began to wobble. I couldn't take another step for fear that I would fall off the side of the mountain, and that is when Paolo, the footballer, took hold of my hand. He told me not to look back, otherwise I would lose my balance. He told me to close my eyes. I could place my trust in him. There was air on all sides of me. Paolo tried to get me to look at how high we were.
Look at where we have climbed to!
The glee in his voice gave him away. I shook my head and told him to carry on, I didn't want to stop, I wanted to keep going. I didn't open my eyes until I felt the path lead down. The terrifying light air at the top of the pass turned heavier and warmer. Air that had only known other air turned to air that knew rock and brush. I changed out of a bird back into a human being. And when at last I opened my eyes I found myself looking out on a different world. Behind me the mountain reared up and blocked everything else.

The path grew wider until we were walking side by side. The stones grew smaller. They were shiny with age and slippery. Whenever I slipped, Paolo's hand shot out from his side to catch me. I let myself be caught. I knew everything that was happening between us. Paolo's hand was the same hand as the one that had supported me in the water and showed me how to float. His hand would grasp my wrist, then rest on my shoulder until he had placed me and I felt placed. Up until that moment I was a saltshaker falling from a table. Now I stood still as time itself, grateful, patiently waiting for the next event. We came to a stream. Paolo bounded down with our water bottles and filled them. On his return he held the water bottle to my lips and his other hand rested on my shoulder. As he poured the water down my throat I felt the hope of that hand of his. But as I was thirsty I went on gulping down the water and the hand stayed put. I remembered the truck driver pressing down on my head. I took the water bottle away from my mouth. I looked back at the mountain. Cloud was piled up to the ridge, a neat line of cloud. It had run into some kind of superior will and could come no further.