Ibrahim & Reenie (27 page)

‘Is he okay?' asked Reenie.

Ibrahim lowered the cage back into the trolley and shook his head.

‘I'm sorry,' he said.

Reenie let out a long shuddering sigh, more one of resignation than grief, and her eyes became glazed and red.

‘My stuff,' she said, a little angrily, and she began rummaging through the rest of the trolley.

‘What are you looking for?' asked Ibrahim.

‘If it's broken,' she said, glowering up at him and shaking her head.

‘If what's broken?'

She opened one of the bags and produced what looked like a framed certificate, colourfully illustrated and written out in Hebrew script.

‘Thank God,' she said. ‘Thank God.' Then, looking down at Solomon's cage again, she sighed. ‘We need to bury him.'

It took ten minutes for Ibrahim to dig a small hole, perhaps eight inches deep and four wide, using one of Reenie's spoons. Reenie wrapped the bird in sheets of kitchen towel, and after she'd placed him in the tiny pit, Ibrahim filled it in and patted down the fresh earth with his hands.

When they'd first met, only a few days ago, Ibrahim had wondered what, if anything, Reenie could have that was worth so much she couldn't leave it behind. He could think of nothing he owned that would be worth carrying this distance – nothing that didn't serve a practical purpose – but Reenie, he now understood, had her whole life in those boxes and bags; everything she cared about, everything she loved. The pieces of a life, proof that she had been here. What did he have that wasn't disposable? What permanent mementos did he have but scars?

‘You packed it down tight?' said Reenie.

He nodded. ‘Yeah. Really tight.'

‘So nothing'll get to him?'

‘Nothing,' said Ibrahim.

They began moving again, down the sloping hard shoulder of the slip road. At the bottom of this incline the road fed into the motorway's eastbound side, and here the land became flat and the horizons distant; the sky opening out into an immense blue canopy, mostly cloudless but scratched through by a white grid of contrails. The traffic was loud, and they were shaken by the rush of wind from each passing truck and car, but finally it felt as if they were making progress. This was the road that would take them to London.

They were ill-prepared for a whole day of walking. Ibrahim spent much of the time glancing back for approaching vans and trucks, anything that could carry a trolley and two passengers, and when anything large came their way he stuck out his thumb, but no one stopped for them.

If it was foolish of them to come here, they had little choice now but to keep walking. The motorway offered nowhere to stop and rest. Its purpose was relentless. It served only as a sluiceway to an endless flow of traffic, carving the country in two, from one side to the other. The few living creatures that had attempted to cross it now formed dark patches on the tarmac. The entrails of a fox – pink, grey and glistening – stretched out from a smear of red and black, and further along an orange claw clutched at the air from a cake of blood and feathers.

The dead creatures on the road made dangerous pickings for the scavengers that flew above the motorway. A buzzard swooped down, its large expressive eyes given a look of intense concentration by a permanent, dark scowl, but the bird was buffeted back by the turbulence from cars and trucks. It found and rode a spiralling current of warm air, and with every sense it searched for the next, and allowed itself to glide and descend. It headed west, away from the two shambolic figures shuffling along the roadside, and scanned this way and that for signs of movement in the fields and bushes either side of this great river of coloured metal. Further back, one side of the river had stopped flowing altogether, and as it came down from another current the buzzard saw glinting blue lights, and heard human voices crackling and distant. Several blocks of colour were screwed together in a field of broken glass, and clouds of steam rose from the damage. There was blood on the black ground, but not an animal's blood. There was nothing to be scavenged here.

Oblivious to the crash, Ibrahim and Reenie walked on along the motorway, and no one stopped them. Every police car in ten miles was at the scene, so even though they were spotted, in a room full of monitors many, many miles away, there was nobody to move them on or take them back the way they had come.

This was the limit of their luck that afternoon. No van or truck stopped for them, and they walked ten miles along the hard shoulder, on top of the four already walked from the lanes to the motorway. By mid-afternoon the sky had clouded over, and it rained; the rain falling as a fine mist, almost unnoticeable at first but drenching them all the same. It was early evening when they reached the service station, and they were soaked. The sky had darkened to become the kind you only ever see after rain – heavy lilac clouds brushed orange and gold where they faced the sun; the scimitar of a rainbow half-buried in a mess of sunlight and gloom. To the west, splinters of sunlight broke through the clouds, drawing long shadows across the damp, grey car park.

Neither of them had said much in the last two hours, and Reenie breathed in short heavy gasps, and walked with slow, plodding steps, her expression like that of someone grieving. Ibrahim could barely bring himself to look at her, but when he did he felt a wave of guilt and shame at having done this to her. She would have been better off where he left her, however long it would have taken her. At least back in the lanes there were places for her to camp. What did the motorway have but concrete, tarmac and danger?

The service station was hidden from the motorway by a grassy bank, and it was here that Reenie settled, kicking off her boots and letting out a long sigh. Her feet were red raw and blistered in places; the varicose veins on her legs more pronounced. She seemed to have aged ten years in a single afternoon.

‘I'll get us some food,' said Ibrahim. ‘And something to drink.'

‘We've got food,' Reenie snapped, scowling up at him.

‘I mean something warm. A proper meal.'

‘You said we'd be able to hitchhike.'

He looked away, helpless with remorse, and held his breath. Yes, it was a long walk, too long for a seventy-five year old, or however old she was, and yes her bird had died, but she had agreed to it, hadn't she? And what about the state she was in when they'd found her? Hardly a thing to eat, almost nothing left to drink. She would have starved there if they hadn't turned up. She'd still be there now, resting and starving.

‘I know,' he said. ‘And okay, it's not exactly going to plan. But we can stay here for the night. How does that sound? We'll get some sleep, and then in the morning we'll try again. There'll be dozens of lorries and vans coming through here. It might be easier than trying on the motorway.'

‘And what other choice have we got?' said Reenie. ‘I mean, yes, we can stay here and sleep, or
what
? Keep walking? I'm knackered, love. My feet are in bits. And Solomon…' Her lip trembled and she shook her head. ‘What other choices have we
got
?'

Ibrahim sighed. ‘I'm sorry, okay? Really, I'm sorry. I thought this would work, and it hasn't, and I really hoped it would, and it hasn't. I wanted to make things right…'

‘What do you mean, “make things right”?'

He paused, avoiding her gaze.

‘When I left you, in Newport,' he said, without conviction.

‘
I
left
you
in Newport. What do you mean, make things right? What does that mean?'

‘It means…'

This was his chance. If he wanted to tell her everything, this was his opportunity.

‘Nothing,' he said. ‘It means nothing. I wanted to help you, and it didn't work. But I didn't know what else we could do.'

‘We could have kept going the way we was going.'

‘And we would still have had to walk. We'd still have been a hundred miles from London, maybe more. I mean, you
are
actually going to London, aren't you? You weren't just saying that to wind me up?'

‘Did you think I was doing this for
fun
?'

‘Well, I don't know, do I? I mean, I don't even know
why
you're walking to London.'

‘And I don't know why
you're
walking to London.'

He said nothing. They'd discussed everything, almost everything, but this. If anything, perhaps their progress so far had been fuelled by not knowing each other's reasons. That made it simpler, somehow. To ask the question would have meant taking a scalpel to something small and delicate, something that wouldn't survive dissection.

‘You never asked,' said Ibrahim.

‘And you never asked me.'

They looked at one another with narrowing eyes, locked in a stand-off that could end only with the question being asked or by one of them walking away, and after a long and wordless moment of unease, Ibrahim turned around and made his way silently toward the service station.

22

It was possible – no,
certain
– that Vincent had passed his millionth mile years ago, if you included every journey made in the twenty-three years before he began driving for a living. Even if you discounted every journey in which he was the passenger and not the driver, he must have crossed that line much earlier, but the point was unknowable, because only when he became a professional driver did Vincent start counting the miles.

It began with him monitoring distances. Understanding distance, knowing how far he travelled each day, was integral to his job, but in time this was surpassed by his determination to reach that next point when a messy figure was flattened out, regimented by zeros. First ten thousand, then a hundred thousand. Soon enough he began thinking of those distances as trips around the world, and by the age of twenty-six had, by his reasoning, circumnavigated the globe four times. Always counting in miles, rather than kilometres, because miles offered a rounder, neater figure. The earth is 24,000 miles in circumference; a thousand miles for every hour of the day. The moon is 250,000 miles from the earth, give or take. And when his laps of the earth became meaningless he looked to the skies. At twenty-eight he'd been to the moon. At thirty-two he had been to the moon and back. Now, aged thirty-seven, he had almost completed his second return trip.

Only three men had ever done this for real – the astronauts Jim Lovell, Eugene Cernan, and John Young – and of them only Young and Cernan set foot on the moon itself. On his second trip, Lovell captained Apollo 13 and, while passing over the dark side of the moon, reached, along with his crew, a point more distant from the earth than any other men before them. It being his second mission, this made Lovell the farthest travelled person in the history of mankind, meaning he had travelled the farthest
from
earth, rather than
on
it, but Vincent liked to think the point in that night's journey somewhere between Bristol and London would place him in an exclusive group of men, standing shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Lovell, Cernan and Young.

So much of his driving happened at night, and he spent so many hours in his cabin, that he felt a certain affinity with Lovell in particular. Sometimes, when he was between cities, he believed he understood how remote, how disconnected from the world, an astronaut might feel at that halfway point between worlds. People had made good work of naming most places, labelling almost everything down to the square mile, but there were still voids in between, and at night those voids were featureless but for the rhythmic sweep of the lights above, and the smooth Morse code of lines and patterns on the roads.

The emptiness and monotony of the night were hazardous. It was easy for the mind to wander, and a wandering mind was perhaps the most dangerous thing for a long distance driver. How to keep the mind sharp and focused when the world around him was hell bent on hypnosis. In fourteen years he'd tried everything – caffeine, amphetamines, every genre of music the radio could supply. He'd experimented with his diet, with his sleeping habits, even with the décor of his cabin. It took much of those fourteen years for him to find exactly the right combination, the right configuration of lifestyle and environment to keep him alert and in the moment, to stop his mind from wandering.

Drugs no longer played any part in it. Amphetamines had been recommended by a frazzled older driver he met at an all-night café near Frejus. There, this Satanic-looking character – black goatee beard and multiple piercings in his left ear – pushed a small paper wrap of crystal meth across the table they shared, and told Vincent he should try it.

‘Pour le voyage.'

He should have known from the dark rings around the man's eyes how the drug might leech the life out of him. Day and night, light and dark, happy and sad, all became meaningless. Amphetamines crashed through the barriers between days and between moods with equal recklessness. Once the initial euphoria passed he was left only with an inability to rest, even when the journey was done and it was time for him to sleep. However much his limbs might ache, however heavy his eyelids might feel, his mind still fizzed with unspent energy, each thought barging past the next, vying for his exhausted attention.