Grazing The Long Acre (17 page)

‘The whole place was going mad before you published, kid. The end of the world as we know it started a long time ago.’

‘Yes, Spence dear. Exactly. That’s what my paper says.’

Spence took a slug from the wine bottle, neglecting the glass that was poured for him. That sweet tone of invincible intellectual superiority,
when it was friendly
, always made him go weak at the knees.

‘Would you like to do sex ?’ he hazarded, across the tremulous lamplight.

‘Like plague victims,’ said Anna huskily. ‘Rutting in the streets, death all around.’

‘Okay, but would you?’

Flash of white knickers in the twilight. Nothing’s sure. Every time could be the last.

‘Yes.’

When they were both done, both satisfied, Spence managed to fall asleep. He dreamed he was clinging to the side of a runaway train, that was racing downhill in the dark. Anna was in his arms and Jake held between them. He knew he had to leap from this train before it smashed, holding his family in his arms. But he was too terrified to let go.

They had pitched the yurt at dusk, in a service area campsite. The great road thundered by the scrubby expanse of red grit, where tents and trucks and vans stood cheek by jowl, without a tree or a blade of grass in sight. The clientele was mixed. There were
gens de voyage
, with their pitches staked out in the traditional, aggressive washing lines; colourful new age travellers trying to look like visitors from the stone age, respectable itinerant workers in their tidy camper vans; truckdrivers asleep in their cabs. Among them were quite a few people like Anna and Jake and Spence, turned back from the channel ports by the fishing-dispute blockade; who had wisely moved inland from the beaches.

Spence was removing the cassette player from the car, so he could re-fit the broadband receiver that would give them access to the great big world again. The dusk was no problem, as this campsite was lit by enormous gangling floodlights, that seemed to have been bought second hand from a football stadium. But of course the player had turned obstinate. He was lying on his back, legs in the yard and face squished in the leg space under the dashboard, getting rusty metal dust in his eyes and struggling with some tiny recalcitrant screws. Chuck, ever fascinated and helpful when there was work going on, did his best to assist by sitting on the passenger seat and patting the screws that had come out into the crack at the back of the cushion. Something thumped near his head. He wriggled out. Anna had returned from her mission with a lumpy burlap sack.

‘What’s in there?’

‘Potatoes, courgettes-I-mean-zuccini and string beans. But the beans are pure string.’

‘Still, that’s pretty good. What did you have to do?’

The channel tunnel had been down, so to speak, for most of the summer. This new interruption of the ferry services had compounded everyone’s problems.
Hypermarches
along the coast had turned traitor, closing their doors to all but the local population. The more enterprising of the stranded travelers were resorting to barter.

‘Nothing too difficult. First aid. Dietary advice to an incipient diabetic, she needs an implant but diet will help; and I’m attending to a septic cut.’

‘This is weird. You can’t practice medicine. You’re a molecular biologist.’

Anna rubbed her bare brown shoulder, where the sack had galled her; and shrugged. ‘Let me see.
First do no harm
. Well, I have no antibiotics, no antimalarials, genecarrier viruses or steroids, so that’s all right. I have aspirin, I know how to reduce a fracture, and I wash my hands a lot. What more can you ask?’

‘My God.’ He groped for the smaller screwdriver, which had escaped into camping-trip-morass. ‘Could you give me some assistance for a moment. Since you’re here?’

‘No, because I don’t want you to do that.’

‘But I’m doing it anyway.’

‘Good luck to you,’ she said, without rancour. ‘It’s mostly pure noise, in my opinion.’

At bedtime Anna listened while Jake read to her the story of the Burmese Temple cat called Sinh, who was an oracle. He lived with a priest called Mun-Ha, and they were both very miserable because Burma was being invaded. When Mun-Ha died, the goddess Tsun-Kyankse transfused Mun-Ha’s spirit into Sinh. His eyes turned blue as sapphires, his nose and feet and tail turned dark as the sacred earth and the rest of him turned gold, except for the tips of his paws—which were touching Mun-Ha’s white hair at the moment the priest died. Then Sinh transfused his power into the rest of the priests, and they went and saved Burma.

‘Do you know what an oracle is?’

‘Yeah,’ he answered drowsily. ‘It’s a little boat.’

Spence finished up, and repaired to the bar. He ordered two pression and took them to a table by the doors that he already thought of as his and Anna’s table, because that was where they’d sat when they came in for a drink before setting up. It was a large and comfortable establishment, rather dimly lit; with absolutely no pretensions. Baby-foot in the games room, pizzas and frites and sandwiches readily available. Yes, he thought. We could live here. The room was crowded, but not oppressively stuffed. The raucous clatter of conversation, mostly French, soon blended into a soothing, encompassing roar like the sound of the ocean: laughter or the clink of glassware occasionally spurting up like spray.

We
could
live here, he fantasized. In this twilight…imagining the blockade stretching into months and years; imagining the actual no-kidding disintegration had begun. Which of course was nonsense. Anna with her home-medicine manual could become a quack doctor. Maybe I could sell information? He dallied with the idea of describing Anna a
wisewoman
, but rejected it. Call a spade a spade. This is not the dawning of the magical, nurturing female future. This is the same road we’ve been travelling for so long: going down into the dark. Chuck had followed him from the car and was sitting on the chair next to Spence, looking around, taking it all in with his usual assured and gentle gaze. The young woman from the bar came by with a tray of glasses. Spence had a moment’s anxiety, in case his companion was going to get thrown out. He was respectably vaccinated and tattooed now. They’d managed to get this done in the same town where they’d dispatched (this was the compromise they’d reached) an anonymous tip-off, and prints of Anna’s photographs, to the police in the regional capital. However, he might not be welcome in the bar.

But she’d only stopped to admire. ‘What do you call him?’ she asked.

‘Chuck Prophet.’

The girl laughed, effortlessly balancing her tray on one thin muscular arm, and bending to rub the Burman’s delectably soft, ruffled throat. ‘That’s an unusual name for a cat.’

‘He’s an unusual cat,’ explained Spence.

She moved on. Chuck had accepted her caress the way he took any kind of attention: sweetly, but a little distracted, a little disappointed at the touch of a hand that was not the hand he waited for. The moment she was gone he resumed his eager study of the crowd, his silver-blue eyes searching hopefully: ears alert for a voice and a step that he would never hear again. Still keeping the faith: confident that soon normal service would be restored.

GRAZING THE LONG ACRE

The first couple of girls I saw, I thought they were hitchhikers. I’m not naive, but that stretch of the E75, between Czestochowa and Piotrkow Tryb, must be the most lost, godforsaken highway on earth. Talk about the middle of nowhere…It was so incongruous. You wondered how the hell
anyone
came to be there, least of all this plump unattractive girl with thick thighs puce in the cold, in a crocheted miniskirt and a strange little satin jacket, skipping about beside the traffic like a lonesome child; or this other girl, skinny as a rake, with her dishwater hair, black hot pants and pathetic thigh-high patent boots. After the third I got the idea. I sat up and watched, it was something to break the monotony. I couldn’t work out why they were here in such numbers. I’d never seen whores plying beside a Polish freeway before. World War Two bomb craters, yes. Kids skateboarding on six-lane high speed curves abandoned half way through the building; potholes, crevasses; ambling horses and carts. But never anything like this line of shivering, primping ugly girls.

 ‘How do they get here?’

My friend shrugged. ‘Their pimps drop them off, I suppose. It’s none of my concern.’

‘But what makes this stretch so popular?’

‘Habit. Police protection, how should I know? Word passes round.’

He spoke excellent English, my friend. I went on staring, bemused, at the cabaret. The sex must be dirt cheap, but how could anyone get turned on in such a setting? I could tell that my friend thought my interest was in poor taste. He glanced at me, and settled his eyes back to the gliding, jolting grey road ahead with a frown.

‘Something preys on them.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What I say. Something kills them. Sometimes they find a body, sometimes nothing but a heap of dirty clothing. Some devil…It’s been going on for a while, maybe years. Many, maybe thirty, fifty girls have died. Or more. Of course the police do nothing.’

‘God, how awful.’

‘It’s a pollution problem,’ he added. I was afraid for a moment that he was approving of the predator. But he was a decent enough guy, my friend. ‘There are monsters who feel they have a right to do away with women of this kind. They are a product of our crazy society, animals like that. A pollution, like the air and the water problems.’

‘But if they’re getting killed, why do they keep on working here?’

‘Why not? What else would they do?’

Sometimes you’d see an actual deal: a girl leaning into the open door of a halted car. Two of them getting down from the cab of a truck; the second slipped, scraped her bare buttocks on the crusted dirt of the bumper and recovered herself exclaiming, adjusting the grubby scarlet thong that divided her backside. ‘Grazing the long acre,’ I said.

‘What’s that?’

It was an expression my Irish grandmother had taught me. It’s what peasants used to do in the old country, when they had a cow but no pasture. They’d send the kids out to lead her along the roadside and eat weeds. If you say someone’s ‘grazing the long acre,’ it means working the margins, making the best of a bad job, with a little cunning thrown in. I explained this to my friend. He liked ‘grazing the long acre’. He said it sounded Polish. It made him laugh.

We drove on south to Czestochowa, where he had business. I went to see the famous icon of the Black Madonna, the most sacred object in Poland—which is saying something in this country full of sainted hallowed holy bones and swords and tombs. In the year 1430 some vandals tried to steal the picture. They couldn’t shift it so they slashed her face instead. Apparently she started bleeding real blood, and that was the debut of her miraculous career. So the story goes, and there’s still a mark on her cheek to prove it. I didn’t see anything, actually. The place was far too crowded, thick with patriotic crocodiles of schoolchildren and rattling with the brusque, hectoring voices of tour guides. But I bought a postcard.

 Then we went on south to Kracow, where we stayed in a very nice hotel near the Slowacki Theatre. My friend left me alone for long stretches while he did whatever they do, these well-built Polish men in well made suits, with their big-shouldered physical presence that you could cut with a knife. It was the beginning of April, very cold and still not really the tourist season, but I did a lot of sightseeing. One day I went to see what’s left of the Jewish Quarter: which is not much. I sat on a bench next to some dignified memorial or other, in a public garden by the Ariel cafe; which is fashionable with American tourists. I was brought up a Catholic as far as anything, but I’m Jewish enough in ethnic origin that I had a weird sense of belonging, sitting by that cold stone. I thought of the sixty thousand people who had been stripped out of these streets by the Nazis, and wondered how they’d feel about their errant child. Jewish Internationalism, that’s me. I’m one place where the old, nation-stateless, assimilating spirit ended up…other than Auschwitz. I tried to visit the Jewish cemetery, but it was all locked up. I walked along by the ballast of the railway line and picked up a blackened larch cone as a memento, which I keep still; I’m not sure why.

I don’t think my friend liked the fact that I’d been to the ghetto. But we didn’t quarrel. He was never nasty to me, never raised his voice. The day afterward we headed north again. I thought we were going back to Warsaw, but he didn’t say. We went by the same route, on the good old E75. Most foreigners in Poland take the train or fly from one tourist destination to another, but my friend liked to drive. He didn’t say so but I could tell. To have a big car, to travel big distances under his own power, was important to him; it was like the suits. As soon as we were in open country, clear of the commercial ring around Czestochowa, the whores in their tasteless little outfits were there again. But I was cool about it this time and pretended not to notice. About three in the afternoon he pulled off into a bright, new service area. The middle of the afternoon is hungry-time in Poland, where many people haven’t picked up the unhealthy twentieth century habit of dining in the evening; so I knew we were going to eat. He filled up with petrol, parked beside a black and chrome Cherokee jeep and guided me into the shiny “Modern Grill Bar”; sat me down and ordered me a pizza.

 ‘Just stay there for a while,’ he said. ‘I have to talk to someone’.

I had a funny feeling. The place was full. No one took any notice of me, but I was uneasy. Outside the big road went by, slicing through the flat, grey empty fields without a glance, on its way to somewhere real. I picked at my pizza, which was god-awful, and watched the family next to me tucking away sour soup, rice with dill and cream, slabs of fried fish, great heaps of meat and potatoes. Another decade of peasant meals without peasant labour, and the great-looking coltish blondes you see in Kracow and Warsaw will be vast. The driver of the Cherokee jeep, a stylish dark haired woman in a military-grey overcoat, was sitting a few tables away with a cup of coffee. I wondered how old she was. Probably younger than she looked to my foreigner’s eyes, because she had the kind of face you meet more often in Europe than in America, beautiful but toughed-out, as if she’d been living hard and wasn’t ashamed of it. I thought she looked Jewish, which even today is not the most popular ethnicity in this country. She saw me staring, and smiled a little. I glanced away.

At first I couldn’t see where my friend had gone, then I spotted him at a table with two other men the same type as himself. This was normal. It would often happen in restaurants. He’d go off and talk to some buddies, and come back after a while. But I had that bad feeling. None of the men so much as glanced my way, and yet I was sure I was the subject of their conversation. And suddenly I knew what was happening. I went cold all over, because I am such a damned fool.

I was being passed on.

I stood up, casually as I could make it, thinking in my mind so my gestures would match
I am just taking a trip to the john,
to powder my nose. The woman in the grey overcoat had paid for her swift coffee and was leaving. I followed her out, and instead of going to the toilets I put my hand on her arm. I said, in my best Polish, ‘Can you give me a lift?’ She’d seen me come in with a middle-aged local guy. As soon as she heard me speak she knew I was a foreigner. She could probably work out the rest. She didn’t hesitate.

‘Sure, come along.’

I guessed she might not have been so willing to help if she had known what a clown I was, and how richly I deserved the situation I was in. Luckily she didn’t ask for my life story. We went out and climbed into the huge jeep, and drove away. If she’d asked me where I was heading I’d have had no answer. I couldn’t speak more than ten words of Polish anyway. But she didn’t ask. She didn’t say a word until we’d been driving for about ten kilometres. ‘Would you mind,’ she said in English then, slowing down. ‘I have some business.’

At this point the forest, which is always there on the edge of the cold flat fields, had closed right in on either side of the road. In Poland, you never lose the sense that this country really belongs to the trees. Sometimes they look pretty sick, but they never give up. There were trees in a thick crowd around the long wooden shack and its churned up parking lot. They made the place look kind of sinister, but appealing.

Inside, the shack was an old-fashioned Polish roadside diner: no plastic, everything wood; mud-coffee and a handwritten menu. For the coffee they don’t use a pot or a filter or anything, they just dump boiling water on a heap of grounds and the rest is up to you. Getting anything other than a mouthful of grit is quite an art. She ordered for both of us without asking what I wanted (I was used to that) and we took our glasses of mud to a table. She offered me a cigarette and lit one herself. Close up she was both more good looking and more ravaged than she’d seemed back in the Modern Grill. There were crinkly smoker’s creases around her big dark eyes, and a faded scar on her cheek that was only partly concealed by make-up. From the few words she’d spoken I could tell her English was good. I wanted to break the ice, and head off some of the questions she was bound to ask: but then I looked around and I got distracted.

 Our diner was the whores’ restroom. Here they all were, off duty, their peepshow nakedness looking less ridiculous: as if we, fully dressed, were the ones who had stumbled into a chorus-girls’ dressing room. There were a few men, too, eating their meals and joking with the girls in a comradely way, as if this scene was perfectly normal. I couldn’t stop staring. I am
not
naive, but it was so interesting. There was a constant coming and going. A girl would rush in, pulling a bundle of notes out of her bra. She’d go up to the counter and have an intense discussion with the woman behind it; a narrow-eyed, respectable-looking dame in a rusty brown overall. Some notes would change hands. Sometimes the girl would enlist a friend to help resolve the transaction, and there’s be some sharp exchanges. Or two of them would dive into one of toilet cubicles at the back of the room, and there’d be much laughter and banging before they emerged, eyes bright and make-up slipping. They came in from the road looking exhausted: they left again refreshed, tugging at their underwear; rearranging nearly naked tits in rats’ nests of dirty polyester lace.

It jolted me a little when I realised that my new friend was equally fascinated. She smoked one cigarette and lit another, in silence: absorbed.

‘Excuse me,’ she said at last. ‘I have to talk to someone.’ Off she went, taking her coffee, to chat with a little blonde in a crumpled black vest dress, who’d just walked in.

Well, here I am again, I thought.

The great thing about these old East Bloc countries, with the two-tier economies, is that when you find yourself on the street again, suddenly your last scraps of spare change turn into a month’s wages. I looked in my purse. I could eat, I could buy a night’s lodging if it came to that; wash my smalls out in the basin. I had my toothbrush and my lipstick, what more does a girl need? I went up to the counter and ordered a plate of
bigos
, the universal meat and sauerkraut stew. It came with fresh rye bread. I wolfed it down and lit another cigarette. I felt like Lauren Bacall in
To Have And Have Not
, the ideal of all teenage runaways. I wished the diner was a hotel so I could stay, and become part of the louche scene. I wished it was Martinique out there instead of a slab of dour Polsku highway, but you can’t have everything.

There was a flurry going on among the girls, around the blonde: who was slumped with her head on her folded arms, looking in sore need of a pep-up trip to the john. My friend was in the midst of it. I watched without seeming to care, I didn’t want to be pushy. I wondered what I’d say when she asked me how did I get into this scrape?

I was at school in Paris. I wasn’t failing, I had friends, I wasn’t taking drugs. Some of my smart and pretty bourgeoise classmates were selling ass around the
Marechales
—that’s a ring of Paris road junctions, all called after old generals, for some reason—for jet set pocket money: I wasn’t in that league. Maybe I just wanted my parents to take notice. Maybe I resented the way they’d brought me up international, following Daddy’s job over the world, when I’d have preferred to stay home with my grandmother. I don’t know why I did it. I wanted to have an adventure, I wanted to be in a Howard Hawks movie. So I took a flight to Budapest, to see what I could see.

I lost my credit cards to a mugger but otherwise I had a good time. When my cash was running low and I was thinking about phoning home, I met a guy, another American, in a picture gallery. I told him my troubles, he paid the rent I owed at my pension. He took me out to dinner, we went back to his hotel room. It was no different from having an older boyfriend, a grown-up who would naturally pay for everything: until one morning a couple of weeks later I woke up, my friend had checked out and there was money on the table. Then I understood, but it didn’t matter. He was gone and I didn’t have to face him.

Since then I’d been living on my wits. I could have stopped the adventure any time. I didn’t want to. It had been fun riding up and down that big road with my Polish friend. It makes you feel part of something exciting, to be cruising with some guy whose mysterious business is like an intriguing foreign film without subtitles. It makes you feel different. I’d been scared by what had happened, or nearly happened, in the Modern Grill Bar. That had given me a shudder, like the time in Kracow’s Jewish quarter when I’d suddenly realised I was easily Jewish enough to have been shipped out with the others, down the railway line to the death camp.