Ibrahim & Reenie (12 page)

Reenie splashed water on her face, made herself a cup of tea, then ate some bread, just enough to take the edge off a rumbling stomach, and began packing away her things. The field was soft and spongy with morning dew, and she had some difficulty steering the trolley back to the road. As she carried on, along the London Road and toward the village of Marshfield, the music from the party grew quieter and quieter until she could no longer hear it at all.

10

When Nigel first took her there, Gemma told him it was the most beautiful sunset she'd ever seen. They'd walked out over the Big Field, to the edge of the copse, and watched the sun set over the channel. Funny how the Severn could look so mucky in the daytime, even on a summer's day, all brown with silt and God knows what else, but get a few sunbeams bouncing off it and it looked quite pretty. He had known this before taking her there. Knew just the right time, when the light would be perfect, just right, when it would be at its most romantic.

Even so, for his money the sunrises were better than the sunsets. There was something magical about the early morning, the day fresh and new. Sometimes the sun would come up blood red and boiling, and there was a stillness and a silence, not like in the evening. In the evening you might hear cars on the nearest road and planes passing overhead, the tractors and haymakers on neighbouring farms, but in the morning it was almost silent. The early morning, when his wife and son were still asleep, was when Nigel did all his thinking.

Or perhaps ‘worrying' was a better word for it. And what better time and place for him to worry than when he could be alone, surveying all that was his. Though, of course, it wasn't his, not truly. The fields and the farmhouse, the place where he grew up, they belonged to the bank. He owned some, but not much of it. The cattle were his, more or less. The sugar beet and the barley were his. But the soil, and the space, these belonged to people far away; faceless, nameless men and women he would never meet.

The letters they sent, each one more aggressive than the last, had signatures printed rather than written onto them, and he doubted that the signatory had so much as glanced at each one before it was sent. He knew how these things worked.

Gemma never saw the letters, and so had no idea just how much they stood to lose. He had told her they couldn't take a holiday that year – just as they couldn't the year before – because he was so busy with things. He couldn't afford to take a whole week off. Who would run things while he was away?

He sometimes felt that he was born at the wrong time, in the wrong age. Hadn't there once been a place for men like him? Men who knew and understood the land, and were passionate about nothing else? If he'd been born a hundred years earlier it would have been easier. A hundred years ago he'd have known where he stood, who owned his farm, who would buy what he had to sell. And he'd have been paid a fair price for it all, too. Wouldn't have to rely on handouts. He hated that most of all. His father had never relied on handouts, at least not when he got started. The food on his table and the money in his bank were his, the product of hard graft, as witnessed by the callouses tough as leather on his big hands and the permanent scythes of dirt beneath his fingernails.

Nigel was getting hands like his father, the palms more leathery with each season. In one of his hands something had worked its way loose; a little ball-like nub of bone or gristle floating about near the knuckle of his third finger. Could be a ganglion cyst, Gemma said, but it had been there three months and showed no sign of subsiding. He told her he would get it checked out by the doctor some time, but he hadn't visited a doctor in years.

Near the cowshed, out of view of the house, he lit a cigarette. He'd cut down to just two a day; one in the morning and one last thing at night. Sometimes Gemma would smell it on him, and she'd tut and shake her head, but so long as he didn't smoke around Josh she didn't mind so much. Without his first cigarette he'd spend the morning like a coiled spring, wound tighter and tighter, the tension bunching up in the back of his neck. Stupid things, daft things annoyed him. He'd kick something or throw something, and sometimes would feel as if he was about to cry for no reason at all. Without the last cigarette, smoked just before he went to bed, he couldn't sleep. Instead he would lie there, staring at the ceiling, imagining everything that could happen to them in painstaking detail. The bailiffs and the auctions and the move to a small house somewhere in town. Tiny little garden out the back, probably decked over or covered in paving slabs. Nowhere for Josh to run around. And in the mornings just the sound of traffic rumbling past as their neighbours set off for day jobs in Gloucester or Chepstow. A night spent thinking this way left him exhausted by the time his alarm went off, feeling hollowed out and angry at everything and nothing.

The night before hadn't been so bad – he'd slept heavily enough – but the few dreams he could remember weren't happy ones.

His cigarette finished and crushed under his heel into the mud, Nigel climbed onto his tractor, started the engine, and drove west, across the Big Field, and away from the rising sun.

11

The lowing of cows made an unsettling alarm clock, but if that sound was somehow integrated into the dying moments of his dream, Ibrahim forgot it the second he was awake. Sitting upright he saw, through the barn door, a yellow sky. It was morning, and above the frantic bass notes of the cattle he heard birdsong, and beyond that the puttering engine of a tractor, making its way across a field and getting closer. He brushed his teeth as quickly as he could, spitting the foam of toothpaste and water down onto a carpet of straw, and he splashed two handfuls of bottled water over his face.

The tractor was getting closer still.

The barn wasn't far from the main road, closer to the road than the farmhouse. If he was lucky, he could leave the barn and be back on the road before the driver of that tractor saw him.

Packing everything he had into his bag, Ibrahim crept around the inside wall of the barn and leaned out through the doorway. To his right the gravel track stretched just twenty metres or so to the road; to his left it carried on as far as the farmhouse.

This was it. No better chance than now. Run for it, make it to the lane, then carry on walking as if nothing had happened. No one could say or do anything once he was on the lane.

Ibrahim ran from the barn, out onto the gravel track, his left leg pounding, the cold morning air drawing tears from his eyes, his bag jumping on his back and its straps digging painfully into his shoulders, and he was halfway to the road when he heard a voice behind him shout:

‘Oy! You! Stop right there!'

Keep running. Just keep running. If you get to the road he can't do anything. Can't do anything if you're not on his land.

But he thought of outraged farmers and tabloid headlines. Shotgun-brandishing yokels who'd think nothing of shooting the first swarthy stranger they saw. Everything here was so remote. If there was a gunshot, no one but the farmer and his cattle would hear it. And all those acres in which a body could be buried and never found.

He stopped running, his feet skidding and kicking up clouds of dust, and he turned to see the farmer climb down from the tractor, unarmed.

‘What were you doing in my barn?'

‘I was just sleeping. Sorry.'

‘Sleeping?'

The farmer was only a few feet away from him now. A young man – younger than Ibrahim had expected from his gruff West Country burr – broad-shouldered and suntanned.

‘What? You homeless?'

Ibrahim shook his head. ‘I was just travelling this way, and it was getting late. I needed somewhere to stay the night.'

‘You a gypsy?'

‘No. I'm going to London, and it was getting late. I
…
'

‘Were you driving?'

‘No. Walking.'

The farmer gave him a look Ibrahim was already used to; that incredulous expression, as if he'd said he was going to the moon.

‘You're
walking
to
London
?'

‘Yes. And it was getting late. I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to trespass or, or anything. I just… it was getting late and I thought it might rain and…'

‘You're not in trouble with the police or nothing?'

‘No. Not at all. I…'

‘Where you from?'

Where you from, boy? You ain't from round these parts, boy…

‘Cardiff,' said Ibrahim. ‘Well, London. But I live in Cardiff.'

‘You walked all the way from Cardiff?'

He nodded.

‘That's miles away,' said the farmer. ‘You must be mad.'

‘No. I just… I have to walk. It's complicated.'

‘How long you been walking?'

‘Two days. This is day three.'

‘And why are you walking this way?'

Ibrahim asked the farmer what he meant.

‘I mean why didn't you go over the old Severn Bridge?'

‘You're not allowed,' Ibrahim replied.

‘Yeah, you are,' said the farmer. ‘They opened a footpath on it a couple of years back.'

Ibrahim reached into his rucksack and took out one of the maps he'd printed, holding it up for Nigel to see. ‘No, look,' he said. ‘It says you should walk via Gloucester.'

‘Oh, no,' said Nigel. ‘That must be out of date. You could have gone over the bridge and saved yourself no end of time.'

Ibrahim thought for a moment he might either cry or vomit.

‘Anyway, no offence,' said Nigel, ‘but you look like shit. And you've still got a long old way to go before you get to London.'

‘I know.'

The farmer looked out across his fields and took in a sharp breath through the narrow gaps between his teeth. ‘And you're
not
in trouble with the police?'

‘No. I'm not.'

‘Because it's not often I get people sleeping in my barn, and not being funny but you don't look like you're from round here.'

You ain't from round these parts, boy…

‘I'm not. I'm from London.'

‘When was the last time you ate anything?'

‘Yesterday. I had a sandwich.'

The farmer clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. ‘I reckon you ain't much of a walker, eh? Walking to London on a sandwich. You'll be dead of starvation before you get as far as Gloucester. And I don't suppose you've had an hot bath since you left Cardiff, neither?'

Ibrahim shook his head.

‘Right-ho,' said the farmer. ‘Well, you can come back to the house. My wife'll put some breakfast on for you, get you a cup of tea, and you can use our shower. But I'm warning you now, don't you go trying nothing funny. We ain't got any money in the house, and there's nothing much worth stealing, but I
have
got a shotgun. My name's Nigel, by the way.'

‘Ibrahim.'

‘Ibrahim. What's that…? Indian or summit?'

They went to the farmhouse, Nigel driving his tractor with Ibrahim walking beside him, and on pulling up in the farmyard were welcomed by a chorus of angry, hissing geese.

‘Don't mind them. Better than guard dogs, geese. We got dogs and all, but these things, they're vicious. But if you're with me, you're alright.'

Inside the house, before the kitchen, was a small lean-to filled with muddy wellington boots and that same, ripe, dung-and-straw taste as the barn. Nigel stamped his feet, tugged off his boots, and slipped on a pair of canvas plimsolls. In the kitchen his wife, who'd been washing dishes, looked at Ibrahim with a mixture of fascination and caution, as if he were a rattlesnake, something simultaneously exotic and potentially dangerous.

‘This here's Ibrahim,' said Nigel. ‘Found him kipping in the barn. This is my wife, Gemma. Now, Gem… this lad's only had a sandwich since yesterday, so I said we'd do him a spot of grub.'

‘And when you say “we”, you mean me,' said Gemma. ‘Running an hotel now, am I?'

‘Alright, love. Now come on. Poor lad's been in that barn all night. He's lucky he ain't covered in bat shit…'

‘Nige. Language. Josh is only next door, on the X-Box.'

‘Sorry, love. But we can spare the lad a bit of breakfast, though, right?'

Gemma shook her head, flinging the tea towel over her shoulder. ‘Al
right
,' she said, and then, to Ibrahim, ‘What would you like? I can do you a sausage sarnie, or a bacon sarnie…?'

‘Gem,' said Nigel, his voice a conspiratorial stage whisper. ‘He's Muslim, ain't he? They don't eat bacon.'

‘Sausage sarnie, then?'

‘Or saus… I mean pork, love. They don't eat pork.'

‘You don't eat pork?' said Gemma, as if personally insulted.

Ibrahim shook his head as apologetically as he could.