In the Kitchen (56 page)

When Olek tapped him on the shoulder and by a simple gesture said it was time for a break, Gabriel was astonished to see that the women had filled four boxes each and Olek was on his fifth, while Gabe had managed only two. All his joints protested as he struggled to his feet. They sat on upturned crates and knocked the soil off their hands. The others had brought knapsacks with bread and cheese and water. Gabe's mouth filled with saliva. His stomach howled. He walked a little way off and lit a cigarette, not wanting to embarrass the others with his need.

The cigarette tasted foul and he put it out. He didn't feel like smoking today.

Olek came up beside him. 'Ukrayinets?'

Gabriel shook his head.

'Polyak?' Olek coughed and took a packet of tobacco from his pocket. The tips of his fingers were thick and slightly flattened. 'Serb? Rosiyanyn?' He found his papers and began to roll.

Gabriel smiled apologetically. 'English.'

Olek started. 'English?'

'Yes.'

Olek shrugged and looked into the distance as if they had come out here to admire the view. 'OK,' he said. After a couple of moments he reached into the inside pocket of his anorak and took out two plain biscuits which he offered without comment.

'Thanks,' said Gabriel. He ate them casually, trying to conceal his hunger.

'Here,' he said, holding out his pack of cigarettes. 'I don't want them. You can have them if you like.'

Olek nodded and took the cigarettes. 'Must working,' he said, as Tymon drove by with the window down and his angry head sticking out.

At first Gabriel thought that he would not be able to bend his back sufficiently to continue. He managed to get to his knees but then seized up.

The pain made him bite on his tongue. He clawed at the earth with his hands.

He poured all that he had left, his entire being, into pulling up the next bunch and when he succeeded he felt a great sense of accomplishment, as if he had delivered not a handful of salad onions but something of great worth. He ignored the pain by focusing on the rough wooden handle of the fork when he picked it up, the way the tines glinted when the earth slid off, the crisp boldness of the green shoots, the coy lustre of the bulbs. He worked and scarcely looked up for there was so much to see where he knelt, a hundred shades of black in the peat. It was as if until now he had seen the world only in a blur, in fat brushstrokes, unable to distinguish the details. He watched a beetle walk officiously over the back of his hand, he crumbled the soil with his fingertips, he watched the waves of muscular contraction that propelled a worm, shortening and lengthening, across the furrow. He felt the cool touch of the wind on his face, he felt the breath enter and leave his body, he felt alive.

He worked on, noticing everything and asking no questions so that there was only the flow of one moment into the next and it came to his mind that he had never done this before. All his life had been spent in planning, asking what came next, or looking back at what had already been, so that the present, that infinitesimal slice of now, between a future that never arrives and a past always out of reach, was only a dim possibility, as if life could never be truly lived. He observed the thought but then, instead of filling his head with voices, with arguments for and against, he rubbed the sap from a green shoot between his fingers and filled his lungs with air.

That night he slept like a king in a four-poster bed, undisturbed by dreams.

When he woke, though he could smell his own body and when he stretched his arms and rubbed his eyes he could see the dirt beneath his nails, he was relaxed and fresh. Instead of queuing for the squalid bathroom he went outside to urinate in the field and listen to the birdsong. Gabe's mind was pleasurably blank. He felt like hugging himself, like a child who has run away out of the back door, immeasurably content to escape from his parents' latest row. He would have to go home at some point, but he would not go quite yet.

Some of the young men kicked a football in the yard and one used a bucket of water for a wash. Olek sat on a wooden bench in his oversized anorak, tossing a coin. Gabe sat down next to him.

Olek spun the coin, caught it, and slapped it on the back of his hand with his other hand covering it. He nodded to Gabe.

'Heads,' said Gabriel.

Olek removed his hand. He smiled, showing his brown teeth. He tossed again.

'Heads,' said Gabriel.

Olek revealed the coin, and then threw it in the air.

'Heads.'

They both laughed this time.

Olek tossed and slapped the coin down on the bench, keeping it concealed.

'What is chance,' he said, 'for to be heads?'

Gabriel considered. 'Luck's got to break. Had three in a row, so I reckon the chance of it being heads now is ... one in ten, one in a hundred, I don't know.'

Olek shook his head. 'No, chance is one in two. Fifty-fifty. Only two possibility. Every time chance is same.'

A van drove into the yard and Olek picked up the coin. He stood up and said, 'Food.'

The driver opened the van's back doors and a group gathered round, buying bread, packet ham, cereal, milk.

'When do we get paid?'

Olek coughed and lit up one of Gabriel's cigarettes. He held up two fingers of his other hand.

'Two days? The end of today?'

Olek shook his head.

'Two weeks?'

'Normal, yes.'

'Christ,' said Gabe. 'And how much? How much do we get?'

Olek pulled a face. 'How many box you fill?'

'Well, how much for a box?'

'Many expense,' said Olek, 'we must paying transport, house, tax – sorry for my English.'

'Transport?' said Gabriel. 'That old minibus?'

'Yes.'

'How much for rent?'

Olek shrugged and the dark rings around his eyes seemed to get darker still.

'Saying thirty, but possible charging more.'

'I've only got a camp bed.'

'Yes. Van will go. We must buying now. Later, tomorrow, buying from shop, more better, more cheap food.'

'I'm OK,' said Gabriel. 'I don't need anything.'

Olek bent down as if to tie his shoelace. He took a five-pound note out of his sock and pushed it into Gabriel's hand. 'When you getting money you pay.'

Gabriel went to the van with Olek and bought a pack of rolls, crackers, cheese and toothpaste. After breakfast they walked out to the onion field together, the two women trailing behind. Gabriel asked a few questions and Olek, in halting English, told him a little about himself. He was from the Ukraine, used to work in the accounts department of the telephone company, but had lost his job. He came to England hoping to save enough money to start his own business when he returned. The first job he had been promised failed to materialize. He found work on a construction site but when he took time off after an injury someone else took his place. Then he worked in a meat-processing plant somewhere in the north, and when his pay packet came after two sixty-five-hour weeks there was only forty-four pounds in it. He had not been told about the Ł150 'arrangement' fee. He made a fuss and was thrown out and for a while he dossed down in a park. Now his only ambition was to scrape together enough money to afford the journey home.

'God, that's really tough.'

'Same everybody,' said Olek. 'Nobody choosing this job.'

'That's true,' said Gabriel. 'Guess I kind of drifted into it myself.'

They started where they had left off the previous afternoon and worked in silence, punctuated only by Olek's coughing fits which were more frequent than yesterday. When he coughed he shrank inside his anorak as if it were eating him bit by bit. But when he stopped he sniffed and cleared his throat and nodded to Gabriel to show that he was fine. For the first few minutes a nagging voice in Gabriel's head told him he should not be here. He didn't listen to it and focused on pulling the onions from the ground as cleanly as he could. The minutes passed into hours and, chained by his fork to this patch of earth, he felt remarkably free, as if he were burying his burdens one by one.

Only a couple of days ago he had been convulsed with worry about who he thought he was. Was he this way or that? What did people think of him? It made him smile to himself. What did it matter? He wasn't Danilo Hetman. He wasn't Gabriel Lightfoot. He wasn't anybody, he was just a man, digging in the soil.

He let it all go and sank into a deep warm pool of calm. All those anxious days chasing his tail, scheming, scheduling, plotting, moving restlessly from one care to the next, justifying, reasoning, arguing with himself, all the tension and contradiction, the endless search to get whatever it was he wanted, although he did not know what that was. He exhaled long and hard and let go of everything. He didn't need it any more.

When he looked up he saw a rabbit, shiny fur and liquid limbs, shimmer up the next row. It peeked over its shoulder at him, shook its cotton tail and ran away. The clouds pleated softly across the sky. Green chased green down the fields and a lone weeping ash tree at the boundary trailed its tresses close to the ground. Gabriel dug on. He pulled up a weed with a small yellow flower and examined the tiny stamen. Mum used to say, when she went into the garden and it was growing wild and out of control, no matter how many weeds you pull up, there'll always be more.

He worked, and while he was absorbed he was surprised to find a new self growing in the space that he had cleared, and it had no voice or thought, and he sensed it rather than knew it, and it didn't ring in his ears, and it did not divide him but made him, for the first time, whole. And for the first time in his life he felt that he was connected to the earth, to the trees and sky, and that there was a prayer in him, not words to be offered up, but a life to be led. He thought, this cannot be true, I am only imagining things. He thought, I will wake up tomorrow and everything will be as it was. But it was only his mind turning things over, as minds, of course, will do. Thoughts, like buses, would come and go, and he would watch them, standing well back from the kerb.

Olek had received instructions from Tymon that they were to return to the barracks for lunch because in the afternoon they were needed in a field at the far side, to finish clearing another crop. As they walked, a series of random reflections entered Gabriel's head. He remembered a suit he had left at the dry cleaners in January and wondered if it would still be there. He thought that he must join a gym and take regular exercise. It seemed that he had stopped scratching his head and he pondered whether, now that he had noticed this, he would start doing it again. A baby rabbit – did he have this right? –

was called a kit. An image of Oona floated into his mind; she was laughing her cosmic laugh and showing her gold tooth, but it didn't irritate him. He thought about Charl
ie.
He had messed things up with her and now it was hopeless, beyond repair, and he received this thought without agitation, he accepted it, so that instead of remaining, as it had done so many times before, as a kind of oscillation in his brain, it quickly flowed away.

'How long will it take you to save up?' he asked Olek, as they jumped across the little stream.

Olek began to reply but was overcome by another bout of coughing. When he had recovered he seemed to have forgotten the question. He lit a cigarette.

'Should you be smoking?' said Gabriel. 'I mean, with a cough like that.'

'No,' said Olek, taking another drag.

He told Gabriel about a woman he had met in London when he worked on the building site. When he had been laid up with a leg injury he had lost touch, but before he went home again he intended to stop off in London to see if he could find her.

'Big place, London,' said Gabriel. 'If you don't have her address or anything, running into her would be ... a big coincidence.'

'Not good chances,' said Olek. 'But must asking question. Sorry for my English.'

'No ... listen, thanks for that money.'

'Twenty-two persons coming here on bus with you,' said Olek, observing Gabriel with his bloodhound eyes to see if he was following.

'What is chance for two this persons sharing same birthday?'

'So out of the twenty-three of us who arrived, two of us having the same birthday? I don't know how to work it out but it doesn't seem very likely.

Three hundred and sixty-five days in a year so the odds are stacked against.

The probability is going to be ... five, six, seven per cent.'

'Over fifty per cent,' said Olek. 'With fifty-seven persons or more, probability of ninety-nine per cent – almost it is certain.'

'Really?' said Gabe. 'Are you sure?'

'Yes,' said Olek, 'I am knowing. Maths degree, Donetsk University.'

'Amazing.'

'Chance,' said Olek, gravely, 'many often not how you think should be.'

They sat on the bench outside the barracks, eating salty crackers and hunks of plastic-tasting cheese. Tymon was in the yard, sorting workers into the backs of two trucks.

Gabe thought about Ted, making shepherd's pie for Nana. He thought about the last time he went to Rileys and Ted standing in the weaving shed spreading his hands firmly over a stopped loom. Remember, lad, the important thing ...

A young man ran up to Tymon, shouting and waving an envelope.

Tymon yelled back at him.

The man pulled a piece of paper from the envelope and waved it in Tymon's face. Tymon swatted it to the ground.

'What's going on?' said Gabriel.

Olek shrugged. 'He saying something wrong with payslip, only a hundred pounds for two weeks.'

He was more boy than man, Gabriel saw when he looked carefully, young enough to think that being right meant that you would win.

The shouting continued. Tymon flapped his arms as if to wave the boy away like a stray dog.

'What are they saying?' said Gabriel. 'What's happening?'

'Tymon telling him go if you not liking here, and boy say but they taking his passport.'

'What are—'

'Shush,' said Olek, 'for listening.'

Gabriel sat quiet and still, trying to find a calm space within.