2007 - Two Caravans (26 page)

I
t had rained in the night. I could tell, because the air smelt different. I woke up early in my blue-and-white attic room, full of excitement and anticipation, because at last I was going to see London, the city of my dreams, and especially because I was going to see it with him.

It was strange, at first, being just the two of us in the Land Rover, him sitting at the wheel and me sitting in the passenger seat with the dog at my feet. What were we going to say to each other? I wanted to talk to him.
London is a very beautiful city. English men wear bowler hats
. No, not that stupid stuff. I wanted to talk about us, him and me.
Tell me who you are, Andriy Palenko. Do you love me? Are you the one?
But you can’t say that. So we just drove in silence, crawling in the heavy traffic.

According to the map Maria had given me, we were on the South Circular Road. He had that fixed look on his face, concentrating on his driving. And I know this sounds strange, but although he was a Donbas miner I noticed for the first time that in profile he had a slight look of Mr Brown about him. Then he said, still with that look on his face, as though he was talking to himself, “I wonder what happened to all the carrots.”

“Which carrots?”

“From the caravan. Didn’t you notice? Two bags gone. Only six small carrots left.”

“Only six? Maybe she stole them.”

“To feed to her husband.”

Then we both started laughing, and that broke the tension between us, so we laughed even more, till our sides ached. Then we drove on in silence for a bit, but now it was a different kind of silence.

Suddenly Andriy slammed the brakes on. “Devil’s bum! Did you see that?” The Land Rover lurched all over the road as the caravan bounced on its bracket. “These Angliski drivers! Cut-throat bandits!”

I couldn’t help myself. I burst out laughing. “Is that what they say in Donbas?”

“What?”

“Devil’s bum!” I laughed.

He gave me a hard look.

“Do you think we’re all hooligans in Donbas? Primitive types?”

“No, it’s not that. It just sounds funny.”

“And so what did you think when you saw all these uncivilised coalminers coming into your Kiev? All with blue-and-white flags to protest against your Orange Revolution? All talking with Donbas accent? Did you think it is the barbarians’ invasion?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, but I can see what you are thinking. Every time I open my mouth you start to grin.”

“Andriy, why are you saying these things?”

“I don’t know.” He frowned again and clenched his jaw. “I should concentrate. Where are we going?”

“Kensington Park Road.” Maria had looked it up for me and shown me on the map. “You have to turn left somewhere up here. About eight kilometres.”

On Putney Bridge we got stuck in a traffic jam and then it was solid cars all the way, so by the time we got to Kensington Park Road the consulate was just closing. I pleaded with the woman behind the desk. I explained my passport had been stolen and I needed to get a new one. But she was one of those pouty-mouth types who looks as though she finds talking to people too exhausting.

“Come back Monday.” She rolled her eyes, and tottered off in her pencil-tight skirt, which in my opinion she did not have the figure to wear.

“Well?” asked Andriy, who was waiting outside, and when I told him, he said, “These new Ukrainians. They forget who pays their wages.”

Then we went quiet, because obviously we had a decision to make.

“Do you want to go back to Richmond?” he said.

“Do you?”

“It’s up to you.”

“No, you decide.” I was being careful—careful not to upset him again.

“I’ll do whatever you want,” he said.

“I don’t mind.”

“Well, let’s toss a coin. Heads we go back, tails we go on.”

He found a coin in his pocket and flicked it in the air with his thumb, and it landed heads up.

“That’s it. We’ll go back, then,” he said.

“All right.” I looked at the coin, and I looked at him. “But we don’t have to if we don’t want to, do we?”

“I’ll do whatever you want.”

“I don’t mind. But I don’t really want to go back to Richmond, unless you do. I mean, they were nice…”

“Nice but crazy,” he said.

We both laughed.

“Where do you want to go, then?” He had that Mr Brown look on his face again.

“I don’t mind. You decide.”

This girl—he’s getting nowhere with her. One minute she’s smiling, then she won’t talk at all, and then sometimes she laughs at him as though he’s some kind of idiot. It’s like the Land Rover gearbox: fourth gear and reverse are too close together. You’re just going along nicely in third, and ready to change up to fourth, and suddenly you find you’ve slammed it into reverse and you stop dead or jump backwards. Now she’s smiling again, saying she wants to look around London and see Globe Theatre, Tabard Inn, Chancery, Old Curiosity Shop. What is this stuff? What does she think he is—an exclusive VIP tour guide? First he’d better find somewhere to park, because driving in this traffic with a caravan is no joke. He can’t even get up into third most of the time, and that second gear keeps slipping out, so he’s been driving in first, and they’re burning up petrol fast, and he’s going to need at least another tankful to get up to Sheffield. If he had the tools, he’d take a look at that gearbox. He has heard that the Land Rover gearbox is quite something. How would it compare with their old Zaporozhets, he wonders? Yes, that had had a similar gearbox fault.

When he was thirteen, his father had bought a second-hand sky-blue Zaporozhets 965—the Zaz they called it affectionately, humpbacked like a kind old granddad. It was the first mass-produced workers’ car in Ukraine. Real metal body—not fibreboard rubbish like the Trabant. He was the first person in their apartment block to own one. Every Sunday he cleaned and polished it out in the street, and sometimes he and Andriy would spend a couple of hours together, head to head under the bonnet, just tinkering. (Listen, boy, his father had said. Listen to the music of internal combustion.) His dad would tune the engine fine-fine, to make it run sweetly. Tut-ut-ut-ut-ut-ut. Those were good times. As the car got older, the tinkering sessions grew longer. Together, they ground down the valves and replaced the solenoid and the clutch. He learnt something about car engines, but the main thing he learnt was that all problems can be solved if you approach them in a patient and methodical way. In the end, the car outlived his father. Poor Dad.

This girl—he has tried to approach her in a patient and methodical way, but she is more unpredictable than a slipping gearbox. Will he ever get to the fine-tuning stage? Hm. He turns off into a side street, and then another, following a narrow alleyway between two tall buildings. Here’s a piece of waste ground where something has been demolished, with a sign saying No Parking and some vehicles parked. This’ll do.

“Let’s walk?”

“Let’s walk.” Now, for some unfathomable reason, she’s smiling.

The weather is too warm. Despite the recent rain, the air is already dusty again. It smells of car fumes and blocked drains and the miscellaneous smells of the five million other people who are breathing it at the same time. He feels an unexpected excitement rising in him. This London—once you’ve got your feet on the ground, and you don’t have to worry about those Angliski bandit-drivers—this London is quite something.

He is amazed, at first, just by the vastness of it—the way it goes on and on until you forget there is anything beyond it. OK, he has seen Canterbury and Dover, but nothing can prepare you for the sheer excess of this city. Cars that glide as smooth and silent as silver swans, deluxe model, not the battered old smoke-belchers you get back home. Office blocks that almost blot out the sky. And everything in good order—roads, pavements, etc—all well maintained. But why are all the buildings and statues covered in pigeon-droppings? Those swaggering birds are everywhere. Dog is delighted. He chases them around, barking and leaping with joy.

They come to a row of shops, and the windows are stuffed with desirable items. Minute mobilfons, packed with advanced features, everything compact and cleverly made; movie cameras small enough to fit in your hand; cunning miniature music systems, a thousand different tunes, more, at your command; wall-sized televisions with pictures of amazing vividness, imagine sitting back with a glass of beer to watch the football, better than being at the match, better view; programmable CD players; multi-function DVD players; high-spec computers with unimaginable numbers of rams, gigs, hertz, etc. Too much choice. Yes, so many things that you didn’t desire before because you didn’t even know they existed to be desired.

He lingers, he reads the lists of special features, studies them almost furtively, as if standing on the threshold of uncharted sin. Such a surfeit of everything. Where did all this stuff come from? Irina is trailing behind, staring into the window of a clothes shop, a look of unbelief on her face.

Food shops, restaurants—everything is here, yes, every corner of the globe has been rifled to furnish this abundance. And the people, too, have been rifled from all over—Europe, Africa, India, the Orient, the Americas, so many different types all mixed together, such a crowd from everywhere under the sun, rubbing shoulders on the pavements without even looking at each other. Some are talking on mobilfons—even the women. And all well dressed—clothes like new. And the shoes—new shoes made of leather. No carpet slippers, like people wear in the street back home.

“Watch out!”

He is so intent on the shoes that he almost stumbles into a young woman walking fast-fast on high heels, who backs away snarling, “Get off me!”

“What are you dreaming about, Andriy?”

Irina grabs him and pulls him out of the way. The feel of her hand on his arm is like quickfire. The woman walks on even faster. The look in her eyes—it was worse than contempt. She looked straight through him. He didn’t register in her eyes at all. His clothes—his best shirt shabby and washed out, brown trousers that were new when he left home, Ukrainian trousers made of cheap fabric that is already shapeless, held up by a cheap imitation-leather belt, and imitation-leather shoes beginning to split on the toes—his clothes make him invisible.

“Everybody looks so smart. It makes me feel like a country peasant,” says Irina, as if she can read his thoughts. This girl. Yes, her jeans are worn and strawberry stained, but they fit delightfully over her curves, and her hair gleams like a bird’s wing and she’s smiling teeth and dimples at all the world.

“Don’t say that. You look…” He wants to put his arms round her. “…You look normal.”

Should he put his arms round her? Better not—she might shriek ‘Leave me alone!’ So they walk on, just wandering aimlessly through the streets, opening their eyes to all there is to be seen. Dog runs ahead making a nuisance of himself, diving in between people’s legs. Yes, this London—it’s quite something.

But why—this is what he can’t understand—why is there such abundance here, and such want back home? For Ukrainians are as hard working as anybody—harder, because in the evenings after a day’s work they grow their vegetables, mend their cars, chop their wood. You can spend your whole life toiling, in Ukraine, and still have nothing. You can spend your whole life toiling, and end up dead in a hole in the ground, covered with fallen coal. Poor Dad.

“Look!”

Irina is pointing to a small dark-skinned woman wearing a coloured scarf like the women of the former eastern republics. She has a baby bundled up in her arms, and she is approaching passers-by, begging for money. The baby is horribly deformed, with a harelip and one eye only partially opened.

“Have you got any money, Andriy?”

He fumbles in his pockets, feeling vaguely annoyed with the woman, because he hasn’t much money left, and he would rather spend it on…well, not on her, anyway. But he sees the way Irina is looking at the baby.

“Take it please,” he says in Ukrainian, handing her two pound coins. The woman looks at the coins, and at them, and shakes her head.

“Keep your money,” she says in broken Russian. “I have more than you.”

She takes the baby off and sidles up to a Japanese couple who are photographing a statue covered with pigeon-droppings.

They have already turned and started to retrace their steps when Irina spots, in the window of a stylish restaurant where the tables are set for the evening meal, a small card discreetly stuck in one corner:
Staff-wanted. Good pay. Accommodation provided
.

“Oh, Andriy! Look! This may be just the right place for us. Here in the heart of London. Let’s enquire.”

What does she mean, ‘the right place for us’? How have she and he suddenly become ‘us’? Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, because really she is a nice-looking girl, and she has a good heart, she isn’t one of these empty-headed girls who are only thinking about what to buy next, like Lida Zakanovka. But he doesn’t know where he is with her. She keeps changing her mind. And he likes things to be definite. One way or another.

“You can enquire if you like.”

“Don’t you want to?”

“I think I will not stay very long in London. Maybe just one or two days.”

“Then where will you go?”

“My plan is to go to Sheffield.”

“Sheffield—where is this?”

“It’s in the north. Three hundred kilometres.”

Her smile disappears. Her brow wrinkles up.

“I would like very much to stay in London.”

“You can stay here. No problem.”

“Why d’you want to go to Sheffield?”

He stares in through the window of the restaurant, avoiding her eyes. He decides not to tell her about Vagvaga Riskegipd.

“You know, this Sheffield is very beautiful. One of the most beautiful cities in England.”

“Really? In my book it says it is a large industrial town famous for steel-making and cutlery.” She looks at him for a moment. “Maybe I will come too.”

Why has she removed the orange ribbon from Dog, and taken to wearing it herself? It looked much better on Dog.