The Road Home (37 page)

Around nine o’clock, Vitas and his friends would invariably set out on the quarter-mile walk to the pub, the Mings following in their wake, and Lev was alone.

He walked in the beautiful silence to where the white geese lay down in their field. Lev leaned on the gate, smoking, trying to empty his mind of everything but this: the May darkness, the moon’s borrowed light, the feeling of being alive. But often, like a movie suddenly beginning in his brain, scenes at GK Ashe would come pelting in: G.K. shouting at the waiters, the nurse from Niger banging down heavy skillets on the steel draining top, every sound bouncing and echoing off the hard surfaces. Then the noise lessened and there was Sophie . . . selecting a knife, pinboning a sea bass with deft cuts, making this look as easy as slitting open an envelope, as easy as sliding a scalpel across a vein . . .

He’d leave the gate, leave the geese, alert for foxes and night creatures. He’d start walking again, as if trying to escape, fleeing Sophie’s knife, but there was nowhere to go, except farther into the darkness, to where the poplars sighed like the sea. Sometimes, as he turned round and went slowly back to the caravan, Lev looked over at the lights in Midge’s farmhouse. To push Sophie from his mind, he began to wonder about Midge, “Big Berri,” lonely lord of his fruit and vegetable kingdom, too fat for his clothes, tender toward his dog, spending his life hiring strangers. Had he had a wife once? Had he ever danced a tango? Did anyone alive care about the answers to these questions?

Then Lev would sit at the table, on his bed in its folded state, reading
Hamlet
under the single bulb hanging from a black wire draped across the ceiling of the caravan. External electric sockets on the wall of the chiller fed the three vans, wires bunched up with brown tape and pushed in through tilting windows. When the wind blew, the light above the table swung back and forth, throwing shadows everywhere, like spirit rags.

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d . . . ?

Lev’s eyes were bent low over the page. It was so difficult, he heard himself cursing Lydia for expecting too much of him. But he had nothing else to read here, so he labored on, and for some reason, whenever the ghost appeared, he felt his understanding make a forward surge.

I am thy father’s spirit . . .

He read till his eyes were closing, then put the sheets on his scratchy bed and lay down. He was usually asleep by the time the Mings returned from the pub, but he’d wake to hear them laughing, see their light come on through the curtain that separated their sleeping area from the rest of the van. Sometimes Jimmy (or Sonny) would stumble out again, still convulsed with giggles . . .
hor-hor-hor-hor-hor-hor
. . . and see Lev sitting up, watching him.

“Sorry, Rev. Forgot piss.”

More unstoppable laughter from the one left behind.
Hor-hor-hor-hor-hor-hor!
Then a moment’s silent repentance, a dark head appearing through the curtain. “Sorry, Rev. We waken you?”

“It’s okay.”

“We drinking rotsa beer!”

“You have fun?”

“What you say, Rev?”

“You enjoy the pub?”

“Yah, yah. Good shit. Sonny win bar birriads. Night, Rev.”

He’d drift back to sleep, but wake again, hear them talking, then sighing, moaning, and whimpering in their sleep. It seemed to him that their rest was fitful and short, yet in the mornings they always greeted him brightly: “Morning, Rev. How you today?”

If it was raining, they’d appear with their yellow oilskins zipped up to their chins and their sou’westers already pulled on over their thick black hair. In the Land Rover, they sat tight up against each other. They reminded Lev of two obedient brothers at his school, near in age, who went everywhere together and couldn’t bear to be separated. Rudi had nicknamed them “the KGB.” He told Lev they had a family secret too terrible to let out, had to spy on each other night and day, in case one of them talked. To Vitas and the others, the Mings seldom spoke. Only, sometimes, to laugh about Big Berri. Or when it was their turn to work in the chiller, to rub their gloved hands and say, “Big cold, this chirrer! Cold like China winter.”

It was an old stable block with a sagging roof, refrigerated to 8° Celsius. The pickers took turns to do a two-hour evening shift in there, washing, weighing, and bagging up the asparagus, reboxing it for delivery to local shops and supermarkets. They wore oilskins, and rubber gloves and boots, like the trawler crews. They worked in pairs, under dim rods of industrial lighting, using conversation to try to keep them warm.

Working in the chiller with Vitas, who was trying to grow a fussy little triangle of beard under his lower lip, Lev asked, “You going to stay with Midge all summer?”

“Yeh,” said Vitas. “Do the tomato poly-tunnels next. Then the beans and the soft fruit. Go home in August with a suitcase full of cash. Start my engineering course in Jor in September.”

“You want to be an engineer, Vitas?”

Vitas had chosen to work with a woolen scarf wrapped round and round his head, like a bandage. “I want to be
something,
” he said.

Lev was silent. He stared at the writing on the asparagus bags:
Produce of Longmire Farm, Suffolk. “Only the Best!”
Thought, Yes, this was what, in the end, drew you on over the years, in spite of tragedy and loss, the idea that you could make some kind of mark, that through the slowly accumulating weeks and months you would somehow become the kind of person you might stop to admire.
Only the Best
.

“What are
you
going to do?” asked Vitas.

Lev went on with his work. He thought about all the recipes he’d painstakingly learned at GK Ashe and written out on pieces of paper and stashed in his bag when he left Belisha Road. “I don’t know,” he said to Vitas. “I still haven’t figured it out.”

Midge Midgham invited Lev to his house one May evening, said he’d found a bottle of vodka at the back of his drinks cupboard, assumed Lev liked vodka.

They sat in Midge’s living room, drinking out of shot glasses, munching stale Ritz biscuits, with the dog, Whiskey, asleep on a frayed hearth rug and one window open on a warm but windy night.

Big Berri. His room was full of dust. You could smell it in the upholstery, see its gray bloom on the mantelpiece, on the pewter plates tilting there, on the tops of the huge old loudspeakers, positioned like sentries either side of the fireplace.

“You like music, Midge?” asked Lev.

Midge shifted in his armchair, stared at the speakers, appeared at a momentary loss. “My wife, Donna, she liked pop music,” he said. “R.E.M. The Strokes. Keane. Beyoncé Knowles. She used to jive around in here. Swish her hair about, like Tina Turner. Had a body on her, even at the age of forty-seven. Me, I hated that blusted music. I like quiet. Or else Barbra Streisand. But watching Donna used to get me worked up. Crikey. I’d put up with her music just to see her move.”

“Yes?”

“Yep. She’d been married before. Now she’s married again—to her hairdresser. Me, I was just a whatsername, an interlude. But she tried to get the farm off me. And tha’ riled me, I can tell yew. I’ve put my life into this farm and what did she ever put in? Used to pick fruit, that was all. Feed the geese sometimes . . .”

Lev shook his head in sympathy. The vodka was as stale as the biscuits, but still comforting.

“Know what lawyers cost in this country? Tha’ nearly broke me, but I fought Donna all the way on the farm—and I won. But if I hadn’t, I den’t know what I’d’ve done. I’m telling yew I den’t. I might have killed the girl. Because is tha’ right that she could walk into my life for three or four years and try to take half of everything I had, everything I’d built up? I’m asking yew if tha’s right.”

Midge downed his vodka, got up to break out more ice and to refill the two glasses.

An image of Procurator Rivas, smug behind his huge desk, suddenly appeared in Lev’s mind. “No,” he said. “Not right, Midge.”

“Tha’s what I’m saying. Wouldn’t happen in your country, would it?”

“Well,” said Lev, “in Communist era, people owned nothing in my country. Now maybe small flat or house—if they’re lucky—or, like my mother, a few goats and chickens, one small shed, so . . .”

“Yep. Commies were little devils, eh? Got everybody in a blusted straitjacket. Glad we din’t have ’em here. But what happened to yew, bor? I ben asking myself . . . Why’s a man of your age picking vegetables with young kids? Your wife steal your farm?”

“No,” said Lev. “My wife died.”

He saw Midge’s huge hand falter as he broke out the ice from the rubber tray. He looked up at Lev, smoothing back from his shiny forehead some wisps of gray hair. “Tha’s rotten,” he said. “Couldn’t have been that old, could she?”

“Thirty-six.”

“Oh, crikey, tha’s tough. Wish I hadn’t asked now. Here . . .” He handed Lev his refilled glass. Went to his dusty stack of CDs and selected one. “Like to hear some Barbra Streisand?”

“Sure.”

Midge put the CD on, and the swoony orchestral sound floated out across Longmire Farm, joined with the sighing of the trees. Whiskey stirred on the rug and shook himself and, when Midge sat down again, climbed onto his lap. Midge stroked the dog’s head. “He’s my only companion now,” he said. “Can’t even get people to help me on the land anymore—only immigrant labor. The English used to love the land. Specially Suffolk people. Den’t know where that love went. Had three men working for me on this place once. Now, it’s just me and the pickers and the dog.”

“People,

People who need people

Are the luckiest people in the world . . .”

Barbra sang on. Lev relaxed into his chair.

“I know the vans aren’t up to scratch,” said Midge, after a while. “It’s why I den’t charge rent for them. I’d’ve got them fixed up this year, but my cash flow’s poor. Had to whack down a lump sum in ’04 to get Donna off my back. And, crikey, tha’ left me rocky.”

“The van’s okay,” said Lev. “Only . . .”

“Windows den’t close properly. I know tha’. Get water in when it rains?”

“No,” said Lev. “Only my bed, Midge. I tried to tell you before. Scratches my skin. Maybe you can find something soft to put under my sheet.”

Midge stared at Lev in alarm, as though he’d asked him for a loan or a percentage of his takings on Lady Muck.

“Right,” he said. “But I den’t know what. I’ll look in the airing cupboard. Donna would’ve known, but tha’s all women are good for, if yew ask me—feathering their blusted nests.”

When Lev got back to the van, swaying from the vodka, his head dying for sleep, he found the Mings putting away their mah-jongg pieces at the Formica table. They looked at him worriedly.

“Rev, your phone cawring, cawring . . .”

“Yah, cawring five, six time.”

Lev stared round the van. He knew it was late—later still in Auror. Dread tugged at his heart. He found his phone and stared at the screen. Four missed calls: Rudi’s number each time. “
Call me,
” said the voicemail. Rudi’s voice thin and choked.

Lev took the phone and walked out again into the night. A bright moon came and went among fast-scudding clouds. The washing left on the line billowed in the wind. Lev took big gulps of air to try to clear away the vodka fug. Dialed the number.

Lora answered. “Oh Lev,” she said. “Such sadness for our village. I can’t tell you. I’ll get Rudi . . .”

Rudi came on. “Where you been?” he said frostily. “I’ve been trying your number all fucking night.”

“Nowhere, Rudi. Having a few drinks . . .”

“Okay, well, you’re going to need a drink in your hand now. We got bad news, Lev, unbelievable news.”

“Say it.”

“I can’t hardly bear to.”

“Say it, Rudi.”

A silence. A breath. Then Rudi’s voice, very quiet: “It’s not good, my friend. They’re going ahead with the Baryn dam.”

Just for a moment, relief. Relief that the call wasn’t about Maya or Ina. But then he had to
make sure
they were all right—before he could concentrate on the news about the dam. “Just tell me first, Rudi, are Maya and Ina okay?”

“As of now, they’re fine. But when they know about this . . . when everybody in Auror wakes up tomorrow and learns about this . . . they’re not going to be okay.”

His daughter was safe. His mother was safe. Rudi and Lora were safe. But now something terrible was arriving. Lev cursed Midge for plying him with vodka, kept inhaling the sweet night air to try to get some clarity into his brain . . . “Tell me, then, Rudi. About the dam.”

“Oh shit . . .” Rudi exhaled a long, shuddering sigh, then said, “Well, like you predicted, surveyors came. Pretended to Lora they were testing the drinking water. But we kept our eyes on them. Back and forth, back and forth, upriver, with their stupid theodolites—or whatever you call those fucking things. I said to Lora, ‘When did anyone need colored sticks and expensive lenses to test drinking water?’

“Then, tonight, after dark, I’m coming home from Baryn in the Tchevi, and I see shadows. I see these
ghosts
creeping round the village, sticking up fliers on walls. Jesus! What a way to do it! Stick up notices. No village meeting. No advance warning. Just these bastards, these
cowards,
slapping up pieces of paper!

“They thought everyone’d be in bed, that they wouldn’t be seen, but I wasn’t in bed. My headlights got them in their glare, like fucking rabbits. I stopped the car. Ripped down one of their fliers and read it in the lights.”

“Tell me what it says.”

“Got it in front of me now. You won’t believe the language they’re using, Lev. Bastards! I nearly exploded. Got this one ghost by the scruff of his municipal collar, said, ‘What is this? What is fucking
this?
What the fucking shit is this
FUCKING NOTICE
?’ ”

Lev waited. He could hear Rudi’s breathing, distressed, wheezy, like the breathing of an asthmatic. Imagined him leaning on the hall table, his hair wild, his body wrapped in his old tartan dressing gown.

“Sorry, Lev,” he panted. “But this thing’s got my heart into such a state I can’t hardly get my breath . . .”