2007 - Two Caravans (13 page)

At first she was sad, then she was furious, then she was glad to be away from home, and in a new country where nobody cared what race you were. At the college, she made friends with Song Ying, another Chinese girl, who wasn’t even studying but just needed a work permit. They talked for hours about mothers, fathers, boyfriends, brothers, sisters, Poles, Ukrainians, Malays and Englishes. They laughed and cried together. They went off to pick strawberries together. They went off to Amsterdam together.

T
he Majestic Hotel at Shermouth might have been considered luxurious in the 19505, compared with hotels on the Baltic, but it has seen little by way of refurbishment or even basic maintenance since then. Among its many discomforts are the fact that the lift is broken (Yola and Malta’s room is on the fifth floor), the water in the communal bathrooms is turned off after 9
PM
(en suite? You must be joking) and it is infested with cockroaches. They do, however, have a very nice view of the sea.

But the worst thing about the Majestic Hotel is that inside its massive redbrick-Gothic cockroach-crawling walls are housed some two hundred people, not travellers or holiday makers, but people trying to live their lives here—migrant workers like themselves, asylum-seekers from every strife-torn corner of the world, homeless families from city slums in England—stacked one above the other like souls in hell, jostling in the queues for the filthy toilets, stealing each other’s milk from the mouldy communal fridges, keeping each other awake with their arguments, celebrations and nightmares.

There are no communal meals, and ‘guests’ have to take their meals in cafes or forage for themselves and eat in their own rooms—nice for the cockroaches. And though there is no birdsong, neither is there ever silence; for even in the dead of night there is always someone getting up for an early morning shift or returning from a late one, playing music or having a fight or making a baby, or comforting a crying child, so that the only way to stay sane is to cut yourself off, to block out the crush of humanity pressing in through the walls, the floors and the ceilings. Yola sums it up in three words: “Too many foreigners.”

If this was really Hell, though, there should be devils with pitchforks, thinks Tola. Instead, they have been assigned to share a room with two Slovak women, who are not particularly welcoming to the newcomers, having previously had it to themselves, and who have spread their stuff out and hung their wet knickers to dry all over the place, making the room steamy as well as cluttered. Of course they are not to be blamed that the hotel has no proper laundry facilities, but even worse, in Tola’s opinion, is the type of knickers they choose to wear, which are of thong design. The uncontrolled way these Slovak women’s hefty buttocks bounce around beneath their thongs is deplorable, and Yola cannot for the life of her understand why any woman should choose to inflict such discomfort on herself when generously cut knickers of the white cotton style are universally available, inexpensive, and known to have hygienic advantages, and moreover, contrary to what might be supposed, are considered to be extremely seductive by men of a more refined nature, of whom, she can only suppose, there are precious few in Slovakia.

Marta also views the thong knickers with abhorrence, though for different reasons.

When Yola and Marta were dropped off at the hotel, Tomasz was told to stay in the van, as he was needed at the Sunnydell Chicken Farm and Hatchery in Titchington. He protested vehemently that he only wanted to be with Yola, and he didn’t care about this new job, he would be happy just to sit with his guitar and sing to her. But the van was already on its way, Yola and Marta waving and disappearing through the rear windows.

“No worry. Not far,” said the minibus driver. “You come back when you have good pay in you pocket, then you make good possibility. Heh heh.”

For some reason, all the seats of the minibus had been taken out, so the passengers had to squat on the floor. From this position, he couldn’t see much of the surroundings, but there were fields, woods, and at one point a glimpse of the sea. Then they were negotiating speed bumps on a long tarmac drive, and they had arrived.

The minibus pulled up in front of a pair of small brick-built semidetached houses, standing in a ragged overgrown garden behind a wooden fence. They should have been charming but, even at first sight, Tomasz felt there was something seedy and forbidding about them. The curtains were drawn, although it was late morning, and there were several overflowing black rubbish bags by the front doors which tainted the air with a vile smell.

“Here,” said the driver, indicating the house on the left. “You stay here.” Then, as if to reassure him, he pointed to the house on the right. “And I am stay here.”

Tomasz picked up his bag and slung his guitar across his shoulder. Well, to stay in a house at last would be a good change, he thought, and at night at least he could close his eyes and close the door.

“When you ready, you go to office there.”

The driver pointed across to a double gate behind which was a wide yard and a low redbrick building with a few vehicles parked outside. Beyond that, up another drive, were several huge green hangar-like buildings, some twenty metres apart. That, Tomasz realised, was where the smell was coming from.

I AM DOG I AM SAD DOG MY GOOD STRONS-FEET-SMELL MAN IS SONE MY PUT-OINTMENT-ON-FOOT FEMALE IS SONE MY GOOD-UNDER-SKIRT-SMELL FEMALE IS GONE ALL SONE AWAY GOODBYE DOG THEY SAID GOODBYE GOOD DOG I AM GOOD DOG I AM SAD DOG I AM DOG

The smell from the farmyard was bad enough, but Tomasz was not at all prepared for the stench that would hit him as he opened the front door of the little house: it was a smell of dead air, sweat, urine, faeces, semen, unwashed hair, stale breath, bad teeth, rotten shoes, dirty clothes, old food, cigarettes and alcohol. It was the smell of humanity. And even though he himself was more immune than most to these smells, still it made him gasp and cover his nose and mouth with his hand.

There were two rooms downstairs. One, which had its door open, had six chairs around a table on which the greasy remains of a meal were waiting to be cleared away. The other room was at the front, and Tomasz opened the door to a wave of hot stinking breathed-out air. Inside were six—no, it was seven—sleeping figures curled up on mattresses on the floor, surrounded by their pitiful possessions spilling out of holdalls and carrier bags—a jumble of shoes, clothes, bedding, papers, cigarette packets, bottles and other human debris. There was a gentle chorus of snoring and snuffling. He backed out quickly and closed the door.

Upstairs was the same. In one room, the smaller of the two, there were four mattresses laid out on the floor, so close that you had to walk over them to get to the other side of the room, and on each mattress was a prone sleeping figure. In the other, larger room, there were six mattresses and six sleeping figures. No—one mattress over in the far corner was unoccupied, and Tomasz realised with a terrible sinking feeling that this was the mattress allocated to him.

He went back downstairs into the dining room, pulled up a chair, and with a feeling of despondency so intense that it was almost pleasurable, he got out his guitar. So this was to be his condition, now. What was he but a fragment of broken churned-up humanity washed up on this faraway shore? This was where his journey had brought him.

There must be a song in this.

I was woken up by birdsong, so sweet and close that for a minute I thought I was back at the caravan. I opened my eyes and looked around. Where was I? Sunlight was streaming in low through a dusty window. Then I remembered: at some point in the night, I’d abandoned the three-legged chair and rolled myself in the plastic sheet on the floor. I must have slept like that. My clothes were still damp. No wonder I felt stiff. I stood up and stretched myself, straightening each arm and leg painfully.
Ujjas!
What a night. I remembered that I’d had a dream—one of those terrifying dreams where you’re running and running, but you can’t move. One of those dreams that makes you glad to wake up to a sunny morning.

My stomach was rumbling again—the effect of yesterday’s chips had worn off. I eased the door open and stepped outside. The rain had passed and the sky was clear, but there were still puddles on the ground. In Kiev, when it rains in the night you wake up to see all the golden domes of the churches washed clean and glittering in the sunlight, and the pot-holes in the roads full of water. “Mind the puddles, Irina,” Mother would say as I set off for school, but I always got splashed.

I was in somebody’s garden. The old garage was at the bottom of a long gravelled drive. At the end, behind a screen of trees, I could see the chimneys of a big house. My feet crunched on the gravel and somewhere not far away a dog started to bark. Was it on a chain? Was it fierce? I stood still and listened. The barking stopped. Then faint and far away I heard another sound—the drone of a car engine, getting closer.

A few minutes later, I saw the vehicle. It was a white van. I stepped forward and waved. The driver slowed down and waved back. Stupid man—couldn’t he see I wasn’t just waving for fun? I jumped directly in front, so he had no choice but to screech to a stop. The driver wound his window down and yelled, “You crazy! What you doing?”

That homely accent! That round face! That dire shirt! I could tell at once that he was Ukrainian. For some stupid reason, I felt tears pricking at the back of my eyes.

“Please,” I said in Ukrainian. “Please help me.”

He opened the passenger door.

“Get in, girl. Where you want to go?”

I tried to speak, but I found myself sniffling, which was pathetic, because after all I was alive and nothing terrible had happened.

“OK, girl. You don’t cry,” said the van driver. “You can come with us.”

As the van moved forward I heard voices in the back. I turned in my seat and saw there were about a dozen people, men and women, crouching or squatting on the floor. They were all young. Some were chatting quietly. Some seemed half asleep. They looked like students—they looked quite like me, in fact.

“Hello,” I said in Ukrainian. There was a chorus of hellos, some in Ukrainian, some in Polish and a couple of other Slavic languages I couldn’t place.

“Strawberry-pickers,” explained the driver.

“Ah, that’s lucky! Me too.”

I started to explain about the caravans and the strawberry field, and then suddenly there it was, just flashing past on the right, the little copse, and the gate, and the lovely familiar south-sloping field. But what had happened to our caravan?

“Stop, please!” I cried. The driver pulled to a halt, shaking his head.

“Stop. Go. Stop. Go. Typical woman.”

“Wait. Please. Just one moment!”

I ran back down the lane and opened the gate. The women’s caravan had gone—vanished completely. Only the shower screen was still standing, the black plastic flapping forlornly. The men’s caravan was there, leaning at an angle. I tiptoed up and peeped through the window. It was empty. No one was around. The field was full of ripe strawberries. At the top of the field I could hear the thrush still sitting there in the copse singing its early-morning song.

I climbed back into the van. “Stop? Go?” said the van driver. “Let’s go.”

After the Chinese girls have gone with Mr Smith, and Vitaly has taken the Poles to their rendezvous with the van driver (whom he refers to as the ‘transport manager’), Andriy, Emanuel and Dog go off for a consolatory ice cream to get away from the heat. They arrange to meet Vitaly at a pub in town.

Andriy hopes that Vitaly, with his new mobilfon wealth, will stand them a round of drinks, but when he comes back it turns out that unfortunately he has no cash on him, so from what is left of his two weeks’ wages Andriy has to pay for two small beers for himself and Emanuel and a double Scotch with Coke for Vitaly.

They take their drinks through a door marked Beer Garden into a dank courtyard full of empty beer barrels where the sun barely peeps above high brick walls that are covered with dismal sooty ivy. They are the only people there. Dog finds the remains of a sandwich wrapped in a paper napkin under one of the tables, and gobbles it up, spreading crumbs and shreds of paper everywhere. Emanuel and Andriy sip their beers slowly to make them last.

At once Vitaly wants to know what has become of Irina, and there is an annoying presumptuousness about the way he talks, moving seamlessly between Russian and English.

“I thought you and she would be making possibility by now. I could find her very nice job in London. Dancing. Can she dance? Good pay. Luxury accommodation.”

When Andriy tells him about the night-time abduction, he whistles between his teeth.

“That Mr Vulk is a no-no-good. He brings bad reputation to profession of recruitment consultant.”

“He is recruitment consultant?”

“Yes, of course. But not same like me. Not employment solution consultant with capacity for advance meeting flexi. He is more interested to make overseas contact. My contact is to find work for people when they arrive on ferry. Dynamic cutting solution to all organisation staffing.”

“And he is living here in Dover?”

“In some hotel, not far away I think.”

“Can you take me to him?”

“Aha! I see you are still thinking of making possibility with this Ukrainian girl.”

Andriy gives a studied shrug. “Well, of course I would be interested to know where she is. But she already has boyfriend I think. Boxing champion.”

Vitaly gives him a runny look. “Boxing? This is unusual for high-class girl. Angliski?”

“Maybe. I think so.” He too has his doubts about this boyfriend.

He feels unaccountably furious with Vitaly. Where did he get these clothes, these sunglasses, this phone? And how all the women were dancing around him at the ferry terminal! It couldn’t have been just the mark-up on the beer at the caravan, could it? And why did he keep it all to himself? The strawberry-pickers shared everything, but Vitaly had been secretly keeping something aside for himself all the time. And how quickly this transformation from equal to superior had taken place. Devil’s bum! It had happened overnight. Of course he had lived through a time like this in Ukraine—one day they were all comrades, next day some were millionaires and the rest had…coupons. How had it happened? No one knew. It left a bad taste in the mouth.