Two Caravans Part 23

"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 I hope that here in the West he will be able to shed some of his outdated misconceptions, but I wonder about this Sheffield.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 pinp.r.i.c.ks, 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 coc.o.o.n.

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 gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sionate. "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 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 prost.i.tute 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' c.r.a.p 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Minions of faceless global corporations. Not me. I've had enough of all that. Now I've turned warrior." He pushes back the gla.s.ses 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s.

"I like this landscape," says Irina. "It is how I imagined England. Like Wuthering Heights 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 p.r.i.c.ks 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.

But there was just a jumble of old vehicles at the edge of a wood, some of them propped up on bricks, and the only tents were crude tarpaulins stretched low over bent saplings. Then I looked up and my eyes blinked, because up there among the leaves was a whole spider's web of blue rope, stretching from tree to tree like walkways in the sky, and canvas shelters perched up in the branches.

Rock jumped down and ran towards three people-they must be his fellow warriors-who were coming out to greet us. He embraced them, and introduced us. They were all wearing the same baggy earth-coloured clothes. In my opinion, they did not have the appearance you would expect of typical warriors. The smallest of them, whose name was Windhover, had a completely shaved head. The two taller ones had the same twisted rat's-tail hair as Toby McKenzie, though one of them had it pulled back into a ponytail. They were called Heather and Birch. Everyone round here seems to have these stupid names. In my opinion, people should be named after people, not things. Otherwise, how can you tell whether they are male or female?

Heather is the name of a small purple flower which is very popular in Scotland and it is also a woman's name, but this Warrior Heather seemed to be a man, at least if facial hair is anything to judge by. Despite his feminine name, he looked quite chunky and muscular, with a thick brown beard that looked as if it had been chopped with nail scissors-maybe this is a warrior fashion. I was less sure about the other two. Warrior Birch was quite tall but seemed somehow insubstantial, with a soft voice and an apologetic manner. Warrior Windhover was smaller but seemed more ferocious, despite having no hair of any kind apart from eyebrows, which were dark and curved expressively over luminous sea-blue eyes that stood out vividly in the pale bony head. As we followed them back to the camp, I noticed that Windhover and Birch were holding hands, so one of them must be a woman and one a man-but which was which?

To my surprise I spotted a washing line stretched between a caravan and a tree, just like at our strawberry field, and on it were hanging three pairs of warrior underpants, all greyish, shapeless and soggy.

And this amused me, because to be honest they did not seem like the kind of warriors who would bother much with laundry.

In a clearing among the trees a fire was smouldering, with a blackened kettle hanging over it and some logs set around it as seats. They invited us to sit, and Heather poured tea for us, which was greyish, smoky-tasting, and very weak, into cups that were also cracked, greyish and smoky-tasting. Then Birch ladled out some food from another pot, and that was greyish and smoky-tasting, too. It reminded me of the warrior underpants. If you boiled them and mashed them up a bit, they would look and taste like this.

They were talking among themselves. Rock was telling them about his visit to Cambridge, and they were asking various questions about laboratories, but I wasn't really paying attention, because I had spotted something in the trees. Up there among the leaves was a caravan-a little round green-painted caravan, sitting in the crook of a ma.s.sive beech tree, secured with blue rope, and a dangling rope ladder leading up to it.

"Look, Andriy," I said.

Rock said, "Aye, that's the visitors' caravan. You can sleep up there if you want."

Andriy gave me look that set my body glowing from inside, and my heart was jumping around all over the place, because I knew for sure that it would happen tonight.

The bald woman, Windhover, has the most entrancing eyebrows-the way they lift enquiringly, curve suggestively, tighten into a frown, or rise up in arcs of surprise or pleasure. A woman's eyebrows can be a very seductive feature, thinks Andriy. She is talking to Birch, the eyebrows rising and falling in rhythm. Earlier, he saw them holding hands, and as they bent their heads together there was a little stolen kiss. To watch two women kissing is very arousing to a man. Were they doing it on purpose? He has never met a h.o.m.os.e.x woman before, but he has heard that they are incredibly s.e.xy. Never until now has he had an opportunity to find out for himself. He has heard it said that their pa.s.sionate nature, thwarted by the absence of a suitable man, turns in on itself and fixes on another of the same kind. But should a suitably manly man appear on the scene, they say, the intensity of the ardour that will be unleashed is beyond description. There's no stopping these h.o.m.o-s.e.x women once they get going. A man has to keep a cool head or he could drown in the torrent of their pa.s.sion. What's more, they say, the h.o.m.os.e.x woman will be profoundly indebted to the man who liberates her from her sterile inward-looking fixation, and will show her grat.i.tude in an astonishing display of s.e.xual abandon, etc, which he can only begin to imagine.

This poor hairless woman with beautiful eyes and seductive eyebrows, the thought of her mysterious body pale beneath its layers of dun-coloured wrapping, hungry for the love of a good man, fills Andriy with intense...pity. And although of course he is completely committed to Irina and to their future together, still, he wonders whether Irina would object if as an act of kindness, he were to free this sad confined creature from the prison of her thwarted pa.s.sion.

Oh, don't be such an idiot, Andriy Palenko.

After our meal, Rock said, "Come on. Time to meet the Ladies."

He led Andriy and me and a small pack of dogs back along the track, over the lane and up a steep path through the wood on the other side. As we climbed up I stopped to look back at their camp, but it was hardly visible, the green-painted caravan and faded green tarpaulins hidden among the foliage. You could just see a wisp of smoke fingering up through the leaves. Warrior Heather, who had accompanied us, pointed out an outcrop of rosy-coloured stone.

"That's the sandstone they want to quarry," he said. "Pretty colour, isn't it? It was licensed in 1952. Now they want to open it up again. But we stopped them."

"You stopped it? With your camp?" said Andriy.

"Yes. We made them take it to court. The court threw it out. We should be celebrating, but actually it's rather sad, because it means the end of this camp. Some of us have lived here for five years. Isn't that so, Rocky?" His voice and manner of speaking were very cultivated, unlike Rock's low-cla.s.s regional accent.

"Aye," said Rock, who had gone on ahead, and now stopped and waited for us to catch up. "b.l.o.o.d.y sad. I've been here three year. Now I'll have to become a wage slave again. Earn. Spend. Buy c.r.a.p. Surrender missen to t' vile clutches of materialism." He re-lit the cigarette that was dangling on his lip. "Some of them've gone up to Sheffield and Leeds already. Thunder, Torrent, Sparrowhawk, Midge. Working in t' call centres. Sweatshops oft' information age, Jimmy called them."

"Don't worry," said Heather. "n.o.body'11 let you near a call centre."

At the top, we emerged on a wide stony plateau covered with heather.

Heather said, "Calluna vulgaris. Ericaceous. My favourite plant. Just smell it."

I stooped to pick a sprig, but he stopped me.

"It's protected. You've got to smell it in situ."

I bent down and breathed deeply. It smelt of summer and honey. I could see why he'd chosen this flower for his warrior name. The purple flowers were so small that in the distance they just looked like a mauve haze drifting over the hilltops.

Following a sandy track, we came through a small copse of trees, ash, beech and silver birch, and found ourselves in a flat gra.s.sy clearing some fifteen metres wide. Set in the gra.s.s was a circle of nine stones.

In my opinion they were somewhat disappointing. I was expecting something bigger and more structured, like Stonehenge. These stones were crooked and uneven in size, like bad teeth. They did not look anything like ladies. No one who has seen the basilica of Santa Sofia or the Lavra monastery at sunset, or even certain English monuments, would find these stones of interest. But then Heather said, "Iron age. Three and a half thousand years old. Forerunners of our great cathedrals."

I suppose that is quite interesting.

"You can listen to the spirits up here," said Rock. He flung himself down on his back in the middle of the circle, his arms and legs outstretched. "Sometimes, when I lie still, I think I can hear Jimmy Binbag talking. Come and lie down and listen."

So we lay, the four of us, in a cross shape, our heads to the centre, our outstretched hands and feet just touching. I expected one of them to start chanting some weird stuff at any minute, but n.o.body did, so I just lay staring at the sky and listening to the breeze ruffling the gra.s.s. The clouds were heavy, their undersides purple with rain, with unexpected shafts of sunlight breaking through in bursts of gold and silver like messenger angels. I could feel the closeness of the others, him on my left and Heather on my right, and the silence of the stones. Then, in the silence, I started to feel the closeness of all the other people who had stood and lain in this place over thousands of years, staring at these same rocks and this sky. I imagined I could hear their footsteps and their voices in my head, not hurrying or shouting, but just the gentle chatter-patter of human life, as it has been lived on this earth since time was first counted.

It reminded me of my childhood, when my bed had been in the living room of our little two-roomed flat, and each night I fell asleep to the sound of my parents' voices and their quiet movements tiptoeing around so as not to wake me-chatter-patter.

The silence inside the stone circle is eerie. It hangs in the air like the huge hush in the cathedral, after prayers are finished. If you lie still, you can hear the wind sighing in the gra.s.s like voices murmuring in your ear. Andriy listens. Really, the sound is uncannily like the whisper of human voices. What language are they speaking? The hiss of sibilants makes him think at first that it is Polish-yes, it is Yola and Tomasz and Marta, talking quietly together. They are back in Zdroj. Marta is preparing a feast. It is somebody's birthday-a child's. They are drinking wine, Tomasz filling up the gla.s.ses and proposing a toast to-Andriy strains to hear-the toast is to him and Irina, and their future happiness. Tears come to his eyes. And in the background someone is giggling and whispering-not in Polish now, but in...is it Chinese? Abruptly, the giggling stops, and turns to sobbing. Then the sobbing grows deeper, and now he sees the miners from the pit accident, struggling out of the ma.s.s of fallen rock, reaching out for him with their hands, pulling at him, pleading. His father is there among them, shrouded in that terrible black dust, already formless as a ghost. He knows he has to run, to get away, but he is pinioned to the ground. He can't move. His limbs have turned to lead, but his heart is beating, faster, faster. And just as it seems the panic will overwhelm him the sobbing turns into music, a voice-a man's voice-deep and sweet, singing of peace and comfort, easing the pain and rage in his soul with its promise of eternity. Emanuel is singing to him.

He awakes with a start, wondering-did Blessing remember to make that phone call?