2007 - Two Caravans (15 page)

“OK.”

Andriy wonders if there’s a catch, but if you can’t trust a fellow Ukrainian, who can you trust?

Suddenly he hears a shout from the Africa sector of the pier.

“Reel it in! Turn the reel!” A big man in a woolly hat is instructing Emanuel, who is wrestling with a rod that is bent right over into an arc. He tries to turn the reel, but it seems stuck and he starts to tug and jerk.

“Steady, steady,” says the woolly-hat. “Wind her in gently.”

Emanuel starts to wind again; then something great and silver breaks the surface of the water, thrashing and splashing against the waves. There is a stir of excitement from the other fishermen, and suddenly everyone has gathered round to watch. The creature is massive, wild, and fighting for its life. Carefully, Emanuel reels it in, then with an incredible flip lands it on the pier, where it bucks and slaps against the concrete.

“Get it in the bucket!” someone shouts, but it is too big for the bucket.

“Haven’t you got a net?” someone else shouts.

“Or a knife? Get a knife to it!”

“No!” cries Emanuel.

He puts the still-trembling fish into the Mozambicans’ red bucket, nose down in a few inches of water, its huge tail bent sideways and quivering above the rim. Andriy pushes through the crowd to pat him on the back.

“Good job, my friend. We sell this fish make good money.” Several woolly-hats have arrived on the scene, and everyone is talking excitedly about how much the fish will weigh, with the highest bid corning in at twelve kilos.

Mr Tattoo is waiting at the exit, stopping people with blue buckets as they come out. His sidekick has a spring scale and they are weighing the puny catches and doling out puny amounts of money. His eyes light up when they see the giant fish in Emanuel’s bucket.

“Nice bit of cod you got there, mate. Big as a nigger’s dick,” says Mr Tattoo. “Unusual for this time of year. Want to stick it on the scale?”

“This fish is not for selling. Is for me,” says Emanuel with emphasis. “I catch. I keep.”

Mr Tattoo’s eyes narrow. The mermaid on his bicep seems to frown.

“Fair enough, mate. Catchers keepers. It’s a free country. But you got to give your rod and bucket back now.”

He reaches for the rod. Emanuel grips it tighter.

“No! This is rod and bucket of Mozambique Africa men.”

A small crowd has gathered. Andriy loiters on the edge of the crowd, trying to make himself invisible.

“What about the gear we hired you?” Mr Tattoo can’t take his eyes off the fish. “You got to give it back now, chum. Givee hackee bucketee. Or givee fishee. Comprenday?” He has raised his voice.

“No!” Emanuel is getting flustered. “This bucketee is of my Mozambique friends go toilet.”

Mr Tattoo grimaces. “Yuk! That’s disgusting. Don’t you black-boys get potty-trained? There’s toilets at the end of the pier.”

Pleased with himself, he looks around the crowd for approval. Andriy is keeping his head down. He is waiting for the moment to melt away and get out of the quay unnoticed, but the sidekick spots him and makes to grab him.

“There he is. That’s him what got the gear off of us.”

“That was not me. That must be other Ukrainian.” Andriy sidesteps quickly. “The one that was with dog.” He wants to make a run for it, but he can’t abandon Emanuel.

From the corner of his eye he can see that the other Ukrainians have cleared the quayside and are making their way over the roundabout, his blue bucket cunningly concealed inside their yellow one.

Another woolly-hat fisherman steps forward from the crowd and challenges Mr Tattoo.

“Let him have the fish, Bert. A fisherman’s got to keep his catch.”

“You keep out of it, Derek,” says Mr Bert Tattoo. “The bugger’s trying to nick off with me tackle. And he’s been using the bucket for a toilet.”

He looms over Emanuel menacingly and grabs the handle of the bucket.

“Give me the tackle or give me the fish. Tidge, sort him out.”

Tidge steps forward menacingly.

“Hang on a minute, Bert. That ent your bucket. It’s a red one. It must be one of Charlie’s.”

The Bulgarian lad, who has been waiting for his catch to be weighed, is getting impatient, and now he pushes forward and tries to slip his three measly tiddlers on the scale. But Mr Tattoo is having none of it.

“Dogfish. No use to me. I told you yesterday. Are yer thick, or what? Eat ‘em yerself. Or give ‘em to the dog.”

As if summoned, suddenly Dog appears across the road, wagging his tail.

Andriy sees Dog. He also sees that the two Ukrainians have walked right past the pub, and are heading off up the road. They have broken into a trot. Devil’s bum! The thieving rat-faced scoundrels!

He breaks out of the crowd, grabs Emanuel’s fish out of the bucket, and starts to run after them.

“Here, give me that fish!” yells Mr Tattoo, dropping the bucket and lunging forward. He grabs hold of its tail. It slithers out of Andriy’s hand, and then, as if alive, it skips out of Mr Tattoo’s hand too and slides across the ground flapping its tail. A dozen hands reach for it at once.

“Let the fisherman keep his catch! It’s a lawful size!” shouts Derek.

“That red bucket must be one of Charlie’s. Before ‘e kicked it. God rest his soul!” cries another woolly-hat.

Bending and shoving like a rugby scrum, they try to grasp the fish, which is still thrashing about between their feet. Dog watches with interest from the sidelines. It seems as though Mr Tattoo has it at last, but he can’t get a grip on it. Then suddenly, like the cavalry charging in, Dog launches himself from the edge of the action, makes a low tackle between the legs, grabs the fish in his jaws, and he’s off.

I AM DOG I RUN I RUN WITH FISH FOR MY MAN BIG LIVE FISH FLAP FLAP I HOLD IT TISHT IN MOUTH TAKE CARE NO BITINS GOOD DOG MY MAN LIKES FISH I WILL BRIN6 THIS FISH TO MY MAN I RUN MEN RUN AFTER ME BIG PISS-ON-TROUSER MAN RUNS AFTER ME HE SHOUTS I RUN FASTER I RUN ON ROAD I RUN ON SMALL STONES BESIDE BIS-WATER RUNNINS MEN ARE FAR BEHIND HERE IS ONLY BIS-WATER I SLOW I TURN I WALK I WILL BRINS THIS FISH LIVE TO MY MAN I WALK BESIDE BIS-WATER THIS WATER IS BAD IT JUMPS ATME WITH SNAKE NOISE SSSS FEET WET I BARK WOOF OFF I BARK MOUTH OPEN FISH JUMPS OUT OF MOUTH INTO BIS-WATER FLAP FLAP SSSS WOOF FLAP SSSS BIS-WATER SWALLOWS FISH ALL SONE I HAVE NO FISH FOR MY MAN I AM SAD DOG I RUN HOME I RUN I AM DOG

Andriy is sitting on the step of the caravan by the beach waiting for Emanuel and Dog. His forehead is covered in sweat. He is drinking water out of a bottle and brooding darkly on the events of the afternoon. He caught those lads; he ran all the way up the hill after them, and he caught them and asked for his gear back. And they just laughed at him. Rat-faced thieving Ukrainian scum. And when he made a grab for the bucket, the lad with the Klitschko crew cut drew a knife on him. Well, he backed off, of course. He wasn’t going to risk his life for a stolen blue bucket. But the incident left him feeling depressed. What’s happening to his country? What’s happening everywhere? His dad is dead and all his dreams and ideals are dead with him: solidarity, humanity, self-respect. All the things he believed in have turned to dust, and the new world is run by mobilfonmen.

Later, when Emanuel comes back with the Mozambicans’ rod and bucket, he brightens up a bit.

Dear sister,

I am now in Dover. All the mzungus expecting Andree have departed and in place of picking strawberries I am now a fisherman. This stirs me up with memories of our happy childhood days beside the Shire River and I wonder what has become of you my sister and whether we will ever meet again. If my letters receive you please come to Dover where you will find me always on the pier for I have become like one of the Disciples of Our Lord at Galilee but our fishing here is not with netting but with rods.

When we came upon the pier we met a mzungu who had an outstanding tattoo on his arm it was a picture of a woman who was half a fish combing her hair and looking in a mirror shaped like a heart. The fulsome wavings of the woman’s hair obscured her nakedness and down below were modest fish scales which glimmered as the mzungu moved his arm. And a story fizzed into my memory told by some fishermen who adventure on the Mozambican shore of our lake of a beauteous woman whose bottom half is fish who sits on a rock and lures sailors to their deaths. Could this be the same one!!!

And on this pier I fell into the company of some Mozambican fishermen who were friends of our cousin Simeon’s brother-in-law in Cobue. And after some chatter they confided their rod and bucket to me and went away. When they did not return I was confounded for I could not leave their things having in memory the Chichewa saying
a man’s rod is his dearest treasure
and I prayed for their return. After some whilings a great fish came upon my rod which made me tremble for this fish resembled the beauteous woman of the story and it was an outstanding big job to lift her from the sea with all the mzungus crowding round and shouting in their languages. As her flappings became weaker I put her in a bucket of water for she was tormented in breathing and I wondered again about the Mozambicans was she my fish or theirs??? For she was the most resplendent fish I have ever met and reminded me of the woman in the story.

And this question was subdy resolved by the dog who grabbed the fish in his jaws and put her back in the sea. And every day since then I have come to the pier with the bucket and rod of the Mozambicans but neither they nor the fish have ever returned.

The office was through a door across the courtyard. Tomasz thought at first that there was no one there, then a tall skinny man with a terrible rash of acne on his cheeks popped up behind the desk. He looked delighted to see Tomasz.

“Yes, mate, right. You’ve come at the right time. I’m Darren Kinsman, the foreman. We’ve got another bloody supermarket promotion starts next week—buy one get one free—and we’re short of hands for the catching team. We usually do it at night, but the team’s got another job at Ladywash and they’ve got to get going. It’s easy. All you got to do is catch the birds and load them onto the lorries. Nothing to it. My boy Neil’ll show you the ropes. Start in half an hour.”

“No problem.” Tomasz wondered when would be the right moment to raise the question of his accommodation.

“Then all you have to do is scrub out the barn for the next crop. Nothing to it.”

“How many chicken?”

“Plenty. Forty thousand.”

“Ah.” Tomasz tried to imagine forty thousand chickens, but his imagination failed.

“Where you from, pal? Ukraine? You got papers? SAWs? Con-cordia?”

“Poland.”

“Poland, eh? You won’t need papers then. Don’t get many from there now. Not since they joined Europe. Listen, pal—what’s your name?” He glances down at the passport Tomasz has pushed across the desk. “Tomasz?—you work for the agency, not for us, if anybody asks you, OK? You get six quid an hour, but for every hour you work you do another voluntary, OK?”

“So is six quids for one hour, or two hour?”

“No, six quid an hour. The other hour is voluntary, like I said. You don’t have to do it. There’s always plenty that do. Ukrainians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Albanians, Brazilians, Mexicans, Kenyans, Zimbabweans, you lose track. Jabber jabber jabber round here. Day and night. It’s like United bloody Nations. We used to get a lot of Lithuanians and Latvians, but Europe ruined all that. Made ‘em all legal. Like the Poles. Waste of bloody time. Started asking for minimum wages. Chinesers are the best. No papers. No speekee English. No fuckin’ clue what’s goin’ on. Mind you, some folk do take advantage. Like them poor bleeders down at Morecambe. Jabber jabber jabber into the mobile phone, tide comin’ in, and nobody’s got a clue what they’re on about. What’s the point of having foreigners if you got to pay ‘em same as English, eh? That’s why we went over to the agency. Let them take care of all that.”

Darren finished the paperwork and with a flourish thrust the passport back across the desk to Tomasz. Tomasz understood from this that he was now in some oblique way employed by Vitaly. He was getting a bad feeling about this job.

“And accommodation is provided?”

“By another agency. Well, it’s the same really. They’ll deduct that from your wages, so you don’t have to worry about it. Health. Tax. Insurance. Transport. They take care of all that for you.”

“And the house is this one…” He pointed across the road.

“That’s it, pal. On the left. Didn’t Milo take you there?”

“Yes, I saw. It was very full.”

“Don’t worry about that. They’ll all be gone by seven o’clock. They’re the night shift. We bus ‘em off to Shermouth.”

“I’ll put a good word in for you, Irina.” Boris led me up the steps to the office at the Sherbury strawberry farm. Obviously he thought I’d proved myself sufficiently. Next time he tried anything, I’d put a knee in his gut.

The first thing the woman at the desk asked was, “Have you got your papers? I need your passport and a valid Seasonal Agricultural Worker’s certificate.”

I explained that all my papers had been stolen. She raised her eyebrows, if you can call them that, though they were really just two little arches drawn in pencil.

“The agent who brought me here. He tried…He wanted…He took me…”

I didn’t know the English words to explain the horror of it. “He kept my papers.”

The woman nodded. “Some agents do, though they’re not supposed to. We’ll have to sort it out if you want to work at Sherbury. We don’t do illegals here. Some supermarkets get a bit funny. Leave it with me. I’ll have to make some phone calls. Do you remember the agent’s name?”

“Vulk. His name was Vulk.” Just saying it made me shudder.

“I think I’ve heard the name. And the farmer?”

“Leapish. Not far away from here.”

The little bald eyebrows bounced up again. In my opinion, people should leave their eyebrows alone.

“The one who was run down by his strawberry-pickers? Did you have anything to do with that?”

“Oh, no. I had no idea. It must have happened after I left.”

OK, so it was a lie, but only a small one.