2007 - Two Caravans (35 page)

“What’s the matter with him?” whispers Irina, climbing up into the seat beside him, looking bright-faced and relaxed.

“Tired from driving. You know, this old bus. No power steering.”

He has a pretty good idea about the cigarette, but he doesn’t want to alarm her.

Half an hour or so later Rock wakes up, scratches his head, shakes himself all over like a dog and immediately goes off in search of something to eat. As he steps down out of the bus Andriy notices for the first time how small he is—he looks like a curly-haired elf in his baggy earthy clothes as he skips off towards the service area. He returns a few minutes later with a bottle of water, an orange, a loaf of sliced bread and four bars of chocolate. Andriy reaches in his pocket for some money, but Rock shakes his head.

“No stress. I liberated them.”

He peels the orange methodically, sharing out the segments one at a time between the three of them. Then he breaks up the chocolate bars and does the same. Then he carefully counts out the slices of the loaf. He seems to be in no hurry to go anywhere. Behind the little round glasses, his eyes have gone pink.

“I can drive if you like it,” says Andriy.

“No stress,” says Rock.

Half an hour later, when they have finished eating, he fills up the tank from a drum in the luggage box, hands Andriy the keys to the bus and crawls into the back.

“Move over, Maryjane,” he says, and stretches out between the dogs. Soon, the three of them are snoring in chorus with the drone of the engine. In the front passenger seat Irina seems to have drifted off to sleep too.

Sitting behind the wheel, Andriy is doing his best to concentrate on the road. Well, for one thing, he was right about the steering—this old bus is even worse than the Land Rover. The gear movement is fiendish, too. Fortunately, once they are on the road, there isn’t much steering or gear-changing to do, nothing much to do, in fact, but to sit there and watch the kilometres slip slowly by.

The promised rain has not materialised, and the sky is still heavy and hot. It is early evening now, and the traffic has built up a bit. Not that it makes any difference to him—theirs is by far the slowest vehicle on the road. It is surprising, he thinks, that Sheffield doesn’t seem to be getting any closer. Surely they would have seen a sign for it by now. On their left is a sign for Leeds. Is that not somewhere in the north? Then a sign to York. Well, at least they are in the right county. But isn’t Sheffield supposed to be in South Yorkshire? Where has it disappeared to?

Irina wakes up, and reaches over to touch his hand.

“Are we nearly there now?”

“I think so.”

“Tell me something else about this Sheffield.”

“Well, you know, Sheffield is the first city in England to be declared a socialist republic, and the ruler, this Vloonki, is known throughout the world for his progressive policies.”

“What are these progressive policies?” she asks, a note of suspicion in her voice. “Will I like them?”

“You will like the bougainvillea for sure.”

He leans across and kisses her, steadying the bus with his right knee.

Although Andriy is very handsome and manly, there are times when I wish he was not quite so primitive. How have I let myself fall in love with a man who is riddled with Soviet-era ideas? I hope that here in the West he will be able to shed some of his outdated misconceptions, but I wonder about this Sheffield. Will it turn out to be some kind of communist-style workers’ paradise like Yalta or Sochi, with sanatoria and communal mudbaths everywhere? We will see.

Rock did not wake up for several hours. When he did, he was amazed to see how far we had come.

“You should’ve turned off on the AS/. We’ve come way too far north. We’ll have to turn around and go back again.”

“You did not say anything about this,” said Andriy rather grumpily. That is one of his bad points, I have noticed. He is inclined to grumpiness. I suppose he is desperate to get to this Sheffield.

Rock looked vague and apologetic. “It was that skunk,” he muttered, staring into the back of the van, though I really don’t see how Dog can be held responsible.

Anyway, the bus was turned around and off we went in the opposite direction, with Rock at the wheel once more. The light had faded from the sky. Occasionally a car or lorry thundered down the southbound carriageway, headlights blazing into the dusk. We must have been driving for an hour or so, nosing our way southwards, Rock resting both hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead, without saying anything. The traffic on the road had thinned out. Once or twice a vehicle overtook us, its tail-lights dwindling in the darkness until there were two red pinpricks, then nothing.

Then suddenly he pulled off the road into a lay-by and announced, “I don’t think we’re gonna make it tonight, lads. Let’s pull over for a kip and carry on in t’ morning.”

Andriy didn’t say anything, but I knew what he was thinking. I could see the thundery look on his face.

“You two can have t’ bed—I’ll sleep on t’ bench. Maryjane! Here!” Maryjane bounded into the front, and Dog followed. Rock pulled two of the seats together end to end. He took off his T-shirt and jeans, threw them into a box with the crockery, and eased his pale little body into a khaki-coloured sleeping bag like a larva crawling into its cocoon.

Andriy stepped outside and helped me down from the bus. We were in a lay-by, set back from the road behind a hedge. There was another caravan there, too, all shuttered up, with a sign saying TEAS. SNACKS. The night was still warm and humid, the sky overcast, with no stars. I breathed deeply, filling my lungs, stretching my limbs and feeling them loosen. We had been sitting for hours. I wandered behind a bush to water the grass and I heard Andriy doing the same a little distance away, stumbling in the darkness, then the soft hiss of his pee seeping into the ground.

When he came back in the dark, he took me in his arms and pressed me up against the side of the bus. I could feel him, all hard, and his breath hot and urgent on my neck. I don’t know why I started trembling. Then he held me close, until my body went still against his.

“Irina, we are two halves of one country.” His voice was low and passionate. “We must learn to love each other.”

No one has ever said anything so wonderful to me before.

He kissed my hair, then my lips. I felt spurts of fire running through my body, and that melting feeling when you almost can’t say no any more. But somehow I did say no. Because when it’s
the night
, it has to be perfect—not on that disgusting mattress where Dog and Maryjane had been lying licking their parts. Not standing up by the roadside like a prostitute in a doorway. You can’t imagine Natasha and Pierre consummating their love up against the side of a bus, can you?

“Not now, Andriy,” I said. “Not here. Not like this.”

Then he said something quite bad-tempered, then he apologised for being bad-tempered, and I apologised for what I’d said, and he said he was going for a walk and I said I’d go with him but he said no, he wanted to go by himself. I stood at the side of the bus, waiting for him to come back, and wondering what I should say to make him not be angry with me. Should I tell him that I loved him?

When at last we did crawl onto the mattress the bedding was grey and greasy, with a sweaty doggy smell. I couldn’t take my clothes off. Andriy thought it was out of modesty—he’s such a gentleman—but it was really because I didn’t want to feel those limp clammy sheets against my skin. He held me in his arms all night, my head tucked in between his chin and his shoulder. He didn’t even notice the sheets.

In the morning, I woke to find my hands and feet were covered in red lumps. Andriy’s were too. Rock was already awake, squatting by the gas stove boiling some water, wearing nothing but his underpants, which were grey and loose like the loincloth of an Old Testament prophet.

“Ready for a cuppa?” he said.

He was smoking a thin hand-rolled cigarette, which hung on his lower lip as he talked and puffed simultaneously. His body was stringy and very pale, with no manly musculature, but a sprinkling of ginger freckles and fleabites. I wished he would put some clothes on.

For breakfast we ate the remains of yesterday’s bread and some wizened apples that were lurking in one of the boxes. Rock poured out the hot, weak tea, which he sweetened with honey from ajar. Andriy leaned over and whispered in my ear, “You are as sweet as honey.”

A brown curl flopped down in the middle of his forehead as he said it, and for some reason I can’t explain, I felt a shining bubble of love swelling up inside me, not just for Andriy, but also for Rock, for Dog and Maryjane, for the smelly old bus, even for the fleabites and the loincloth underpants, and for the whole fresh lovely morning.

It was still very early. Outside, the landscape was softened by a haze that lingered over the flat empty fields, clinging to the outlines of trees and bushes. The birds had already started to rouse themselves, chirping away busily. Dog and Maryjane were chasing around out there, tumbling and playing. Rock whistled, and they came running, their eyes bright, their tongues hanging out. They settled themselves on the bed, and we sat in front. Then Rock revved the engine up, tearing through the misty silence, and we were off.

Some time last night they must have turned westwards off the Great North Road. The road they are on now is smaller, winding through a featureless agricultural landscape of large fields planted with unfamiliar crops and little settlements of redbrick houses. But what amazes Andriy is that there is already so much traffic on the road, cars, vans, lorries, people racing to get to work. A large black four-by-four cruises by. It looks like…No, surely there are dozens of such vehicles on the roads. He glances at Irina. She is sitting in the middle again, her left hand warm beneath his right hand. Her eyes are closed. She didn’t notice.

A minibus overtakes them on a long straight stretch, and he counts some dozen men squashed together on the benches, swarthy dark-haired men with brooding early-morning faces, some of them smoking cigarettes, gliding past them into the mist.

“Who are these men?” he asks Rock.

Rock shrugs. “Immigrant workers. Fragments of globalised labour, Jimmy Binbag called them.”

“Who is…?”

“Whole country’s run by immigrants now. They do all t’ crap jobs.”

“Like us.”

“Aye, like you,” says Rock. “Did you hear about that crash in Kent? Minivan full of strawberry-pickers. Six killed.”

“In Kent?” Irina sits up sharply, her eyes very wide.

“Poor exploited bastards. Minions of faceless global corporations. Not me. I’ve had enough of all that. Now I’ve turned warrior.” He pushes back the glasses that have slipped down his nose. “If only me dad could see me now. He said I were too soft for t’ pit.”

“But you are defending stones and not people,” says Andriy. “Why?”

“Coal, stone, earth—it’s all our heritage, in’t it?”

“What is mean eritij?”

“It’s what you get from your mum and dad. Gifts passed on through t’ generations.”

“Like underpants,” whispers Irina in Ukrainian.

If I were a warrior, thinks Andriy, I would not be defending some stupid old stones, but the flesh and blood of living people. In Donbas, too, the mobilfonmen have taken over, and people have become disposable, their precious lives thrown away through avoidable accidents and preventable disease, their misery blunted by vodka. This is the future his country has prepared for him—to be expendable. No, he will not accept it.

“What are you thinking?” asks Irina softly. “I’m thinking how precious you are, Ukrainian girl.” The words feel strangely solid in his mouth, like lumps of un-dissolved sugar. He isn’t used to saying things like this to a woman.

They are still going westwards. They pass through an ugly traffic-clogged town, out onto a larger highway, then take a narrow road through the fields, which are green and undulating but without the luminous beauty of the Kent countryside.

“All round here used to be pits,” says Rock. “In t’ strike, they blocked all t’ roads to stop Yorkshire pickets coming into Notts. Scabby Notts, they called it. It were a battleground. Me dad were arrested at Hucknall. That’s all history now.” He sighs. “No binbags in t’ dustbin of history, as Jimmy used to say.”

“Who is…?”

“Motorway up ahead,” says Rock. “Once we’re over, we’ll soon be home.”

Beyond the fields, some kilometres ahead, they catch glimpses of a huge road carved through the landscape, bigger even than the Great North Road, the lines of cars and lorries moving slowly, as close as coloured beads on a thread.

After the motorway, the road becomes narrower, and starts to climb. The houses are no longer of brick but of grey stone, and the villages smaller and further apart. As they climb, they come into a different sort of countryside, wild and heathy, with dark crags, copses of silver birch and conifers, and sweeping wind-smoothed hills. The sky is heavy, with storm clouds resting on the horizon. Rock is driving in first most of the time, leaning forward over the wheel, because the road is so narrow that if a vehicle comes the other way, one of them will have to back up to let the other pass.

“I like this landscape,” says Irina. “It is how I imagined England. Like
Wuthering Heights
.”

“Peak District,” says Rock. “We’re nearly there.”

On a steep narrow road between two woods, Rock takes a left turn onto a rutted dirt track that leads into a grove of silver birches. At the bottom, among the trees, another bus is parked. As they drive closer, two dogs run out of the wood and race towards them, barking. Maryjane pricks up her ears and starts barking too, and Dog joins in. Then three people emerge, following the dogs. Andriy studies them curiously—are they men or women?

Andriy was rather annoyed when he realised this was our destination. I think he had believed we would soon arrive in Sheffield. Rock had promised vaguely that he would drop us off in Sheffield the next day. Or the day after. To be honest, I was in no great hurry to reach Sheffield and I was curious about this camp. Maybe there would be a tent or little romantic caravan perched up on a hillside where we could spend the night.