2007 - Two Caravans (17 page)

“Portuguese?”

“Yes,” says the young man.

“Brazilian?”

“Yes.”

Tomasz points at himself.

“Polish. Poland.”

“Ah!” The young man beams. “Gregor Lato.”

“Pele,” says Tomasz. They shake hands.

“You like football?”

“Of course,” says Tomasz, for the sake of friendship, even though it is not strictly true, as he finds all sport tedious, but if anything would prefer to watch Juvenia Krakow play rugby. It is one of those little areas of dissent he has carved out for himself, like drinking wine instead of beer and listening to foreign music.

“Later we play.” The young man’s teeth flash in a smile.

“Later we play bagpipe.” The other man sitting next to him has a mad glint in his eye.

“Scottish?” Tomasz asks.

He winks at Tomasz. “Scottish.”

As they are finishing their cigarettes a huge lorry trundles up, and the four men jump to their feet and go across to talk to the driver, who also seems to be Portuguese. Or Brazilian.

“They are from Portugal or Brazil?” Tomasz asks Neil.

“Yeah. One or the other. Some are Portugeezers pretending to be Brazils. Some are Brazils pretending to be Portugeezers.”

“They pretend to be Brazil?”

“Yeah, mad, innit? Yer see Brazils are illegal, so they get in by saying they’re Portugeezers. But the Portugeezers are legal now, wiv that Europe like marketing ring, and some of ‘em’ve been making trouble, so nobody wants to take ‘em on any more. That’s what me dad says.”

“They making trouble?”

“Yeah, trade unions. Minimum wage. Elf and safety. Brazils don’t cause trouble, see, ‘cause they’re illegal. So if the Portugeezers want a job, they have to pretend to be Brazillers—Portugeezers pretending to be Brazillers pretending to be Portugeezers. Mad, innit? It’s a mad mad mad world. Did you see that film? Went to see it with my Nan at Folkestone. Best film I ever seen.”

“Very.” Tomasz shakes his head.

“You ever been to Folkestone? My Nan used to take me there when I was little. They call it Folkestone pleasure beach. Pleasure my ass. I wrote it on the road sign. If you go to Folkestone you’ll see it. Pleasure Beach my ass. Yeah, I wrote that.”

“Interesting.”

“Yeah, I made my mark.”

“What is minimum wage in UK?”

“I dunno. Not much. Do you have that where you come from? Poland?”

“We have one very famous trade union. Is name Solidarnoszc. You know it?”

“Sounds like something you could get yer teeth into. Solid-er nosh. Heh heh. Geddit? Yeah, I reckon I’m going to Brazil.” He throws in this bit of information so casually that Tomasz, who is still thinking about trade unions, almost misses it. He looks at the lad with renewed interest.

“So you make voyage of discovery?”

He had been like that at Neil’s age, always looking for a way out. Of course, when he was seventeen, that had been in communist times, and the only journeys to be made were the inward ones. He remembers how one of his friends had got hold of a pirated tape of Bob Dylan and they had sat, four of them, in his father’s car locked inside the garage, the windows misted up with their spellbound breath, listening to the music as though it was the chimes of freedom. In every life there is a moment when you can break free of taken-for-granted situations and strike out in a different direction. That evening had been a turning point in his life. He had taught himself English in order to understand the words, and a few months later he bought a second-hand guitar from a Czech gipsy who happened to be passing through Zdroj. And he made himself a promise: one day he would come to the West.

“Voyage of discovery? Heh heh. I like that,” said Neil. “One day, when I save up enough, I’m going to Brazil. It’s my dream. Everybody’s got to have a dream. That’s why I’m learnin’ to smoke.” He looks across at the four Portuguese-Brazilians, who have zipped up their overalls and are making their way back to the barn. “Maybe their dream was coming to England. Come to England and work up to yer ankles in chicken shit. Funny dream, eh?”

The four Portuguese-Brazilians have started to load the crates of chickens onto the back of the lorry. They beckon to Tomasz and Neil, who reluctantly go across to join them. They have made a line and are passing the cages along to the truck, the tightly packed chickens screeching with panic as they fly through the air and land on the back of the truck with a thump. It is amazing how many cages they have filled, and yet the number of chickens in the barn hardly seems to have diminished.

After the lorry has gone, it’s back into the barn for more catching and caging. The day drags on, tedious, dirty and gruelling. Tomasz’s arms are aching so much he thinks they will drop off. His legs and forearms are bruised from the pecking and thrashing of the struggling birds. But worse, his soul is bruised. He is already losing his sensibility of the chickens as living sentient creatures and, through the same process, of himself also. At one point he finds himself thrusting five birds at a time into a cage with such force that one of them breaks a wing. What is happening to you, Tomasz? What kind of a man are you becoming?

By the end of the afternoon, the floor is littered with dead and dying birds, some trodden into the sawdust and excrement, some still flapping and struggling to stay alive. Tomasz feels his own soul is like a dying bird, fluttering in the mire of…of…Maybe there is a song in this, but what chords could be plangent enough to express such desolation?

“Did we kill so many?” he whispers to Neil.

“Nah, don’t worry, pal,” says Neil. “Most of them was dead already. See if they break a leg, or if they’re a bit weak, they can’t make it to the feeding line, so they die of hunger. Mad, really, when there’s all that food there for ‘em, but they just can’t get through to it. Anyway, they only live five weeks from hatchin’ to catchin’. Five weeks! Not much time to develop a personality, eh?”

“Personality?”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to develop—a personality.”

Another lorry arrives, and trundles away into the leafy lanes with another load of screeching misery. It is time for another break. Neil carefully smokes another half-cigarette. The Portuguese-Brazilians race to the tap and splash around, laughing and wrestling each other’s heads under the water. Tomasz drinks gulp after gulp from the tap, then washes his hair and face under the cold running water. To have longish hair and a beard in this situation is definitely a disadvantage. If only he had some of Yola’s nice scented soap.

“Uh-oh.” Neil looks over towards the Portuguese-Brazilians, who are becoming increasingly raucous. “Bagpipes. Yer’d better not look at this, Mick.”

But Tomasz is transfixed.

One of them, the one with the manic eyes, has seized a bedraggled broken-legged chicken, and tucking it under his arm, its head poking out backwards behind his elbow, he is sneaking up on his friend, who is bending down to close a cage. As he straightens up, the other man squeezes the chicken hard with his elbow, like a bagpipe, and a torrent of excrement flies out of the chicken’s tail end and hits the man in the face. The chicken squawks and struggles to free itself, excrement still dribbling from its behind. The victim bellows in fury, wiping his face with his hands, which just spreads it around even more. Then he grabs another chicken, sticks it backwards under his arm, and squeezes it hard at his friend with a rough pumping action. The chicken lets out a long screech of pain. Excrement flies. The older man comes rushing across, shouting at the other two to stop, skids in the slime and ends up wallowing on the ground in all the muck. The fourth man just stands and watches, clutching his sides and weeping with laughter. Neil also stands and laughs, whooping hysterically, tears pouring down his face. To his horror, Tomasz finds that he is laughing too.

The foreman pulls himself up and fires off a stream of abuse in Portuguese. Sulkily, they resume their work. There is an edge of barely suppressed excitement as the number of birds diminishes, and catching the remaining ones becomes more challenging. It is incredibly hot, the shit on the floor steaming like a manure heap, but they still can’t leave the doors of the barn open. These last few chickens are the survivors, the tough ones. They are all having to run around more, shouting and swearing, as they skid in the muck trying to corner and grab the birds.

In the end, there is just one chicken left, a large canny bird that dodges and sidesteps with amazing skill as they try to close in on it. Then one of the Portuguese-Brazilians—the football enthusiast with the beautiful teeth—catches the fleeing chicken with the tip of his boot, sending it up into the air. Its wings are too weak to carry its weight, and as it flops down the second Portuguese-Brazilian runs up and gives it a mighty kick, sending it up into the air again. It is spinning and screeching. Feathers are flying everywhere. The older man is shouting to them to stop, but the game is too exciting. The first one boots it right across the feeding trough and raises his arms in the air shouting, “Goal! Goal!” The bird, dazed and dishevelled, picks itself up and starts to run again, limping. It is running towards Tomasz. Suddenly it stops and looks at him, its strange round eyes blinking. He looks back. They stand and face each other, man and bird. Then with a quick swoop, he bends down, grabs the bird, and holding it in both hands, dashes across the barn, opens the door and runs outside. Still holding the chicken against his chest, he sprints through the yard to a low wire fence beyond which is a dip with a hedge at the bottom. He leans and puts the chicken down on the other side of the fence. It stands there, bewildered, blinking in the bright light. He leans over, gives it a shove and whispers in Polish, “Run, chicken, run!” The bird hesitates for a moment, then suddenly it dashes towards the hedge as fast as its stunted little legs will carry it, and disappears into the undergrowth.

The others have followed him outside, with puzzled looks on their faces.

“What yer doing, Mick?” asks Neil.

Tomasz turns to face them with a mad grin.

“Rugby. I score.”

By the time they have finished, he is so burnt out with exhaustion that he longs for that filthy mattress with five other sweaty exhausted bodies stretched out alongside. The four Portuguese-Brazilians have gone off somewhere with the lorry driver. Tomasz is too tired to go with them, and decides instead to stretch his legs and walk down to the village to see whether he can buy something to eat. Their pair of houses is on the outskirts of Titchington, which turns out to be no more than a cluster of quaint steep-gabled cottages with gardens full of roses, clustered around a pretty medieval church. He wonders whether the villagers know the horror that is happening on their doorstep. It was said that the villagers who lived near Treblinka had only a hazy idea of what was happening behind the barbed wire fence a few kilometres away. They, like the villagers of Titchington, must have been bothered by the smell when the wind blew in a certain direction.

There is no shop or pub. He realises with dismay that he has nothing to eat, and there is nowhere to buy anything. When he gets back to the house, it is empty. The sleepers have all disappeared—there is nothing but their lingering smells and their shabby holdalls and overflowing carrier bags lined up against the walls to remind him they were there. He hunts around in the cupboards and finds some slices of stale bread and a tin of tomatoes. In a drawer in the kitchen there is a tin opener. He eats the tomatoes just like that, out of the tin, mopping out the juice with stale bread. At the end, he still feels hungry. If only there were some pilchards. Or some chocolate biscuits. And a nice glass of wine. Chianti. Rioja. He wonders where Yola and Marta are, and what they are eating. Rabbit maybe. Or fish. He imagines he can smell the dish, fragrant with herbs, and Yola, smelling of soap, passing a plate to him and smiling.
Come, eat, Tomek
.

Then there is a knock on the door and, without waiting for him to open it, Neil walks in. He has changed out of his overalls into jeans and a black leather jacket, and he has a motorcycle helmet under his arm. In his other hand, he is holding something in a paper bag.

“Here, Mick. I got this for you. Solid-er nosh.”

The bag is warm. Tomasz opens it. Inside, in a foil container, is a small chicken-and-mushroom pie.

“Thank you.” He starts to unwrap it. The smell is penetrating and delicious. It must be the tiredness, or all the pent-up horror of the chicken barn, or maybe just loneliness that makes the tears spring into his eyes. “Thankyou. You have saved me from desolation row.”

“Desolation row.” Neil nods. “That’s good. Is it a film?”

“It is song.”

“I like that.”

“And good luck with your voyage.”

“Yeah.” The lad shuffles his feet backwards towards the door. “Yeah. I’m getting there.”

There is a full moon that night, which shines in through the open curtains of the upstairs bedroom, lighting up the five sleeping figures curled on their mattresses on the floor—five strangers, who arrived at half past midnight and made such a noise when they came in that they woke Tomasz, who had gone to bed three hours earlier. Now, despite his weariness, he can’t get back to sleep. He listens to their deep, rhythmic breathing, and stares at the moon. He is thinking about the chicken—the one that ran away. Is it sleeping in the hedge tonight, under the moonlight? Is it enjoying its freedom? What is freedom?

“Yerll be on chicken-shit clear-up for a few days. Then they’re sending yer to the slaughterhouse,” Darren had said, and Tomasz had shuddered.

“Is there not another job I could do?”

“Nah, pal. Yer’ve got to go where they send yer.”

“Where black is the colour and none is the number.” Darren gave him a funny look.

Is he freer here in the West today than he was in Poland in the years of communism, when all he dreamt of was freedom, without even knowing what it was? Is he really any freer than those chickens in the barn, packed here in this small stinking room with five strangers, submitting meekly to a daily horror that has already become routine? Tormentor and tormented, they are all just damned creatures in hell. There must be a song in this.