Wild Weekend

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘Ah …’ There was always one. The one with the spiked hair and the white skin.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sorry, you’ve lost me, Minister. The wash?’

  ‘It’s a geographical feature of the east coast of England,’ she filled him in. ‘Approximately the same latitude as the North Wales coast.’

  ‘Er …’

  ‘OK, make it everything south of Birmingham then. Am I clear?

  ‘Oh, yes, Minister. I’ve got it now.’

  ‘I want viability figures, cost per acre per product, that kind of thing. How many square miles it takes to produce one cow, one ton of wheat, a million eggs. As much as you can get. With global comparisons. As disadvantageous as possible to the UK. The land cost of the same product in Canada, Brazil, South Africa, France.

  We’ve got to get home to people what the real price of the food on their plate actually is.’

  ‘Ah …’

  ‘Leave the metaphors to me. Your job is to get me the figures. I need data to work with here.’

  ‘Ah, when …’

  ‘Tonight.’

  Such colour as their faces had drained away.

  ‘If you need technical support, call it in. I need this data.’

  ‘Ah …’

  ‘That’s all. I’ll see you again this evening.’

  Evening! The staff twitched with shock. This was not, traditionally, a long-hours workplace. Except during the crises, of course. In the normal run of things, Agriculture was the one ministry that could get you home in time for EastEnders. After a moment of stunned immobility, they slunk away, hoping feebly that this regime was just a new broom showing off, and that next week the Minister would settle into their old routine.

  Clare Marlow thought of the planned lunch with her daughter again. Very important to keep Miranda on side. A successful politician might be allowed one embarrassing offspring – George Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill, none of them damaged by the antics of their less-than-perfect children. But two … well, two was different. Especially if two meant both. Therefore, all.

  If all your children were failures, well, what did that say about you? Even the Queen had managed to get one of her kids right, more or less. Besides, being seen with a presentable daughter showed that you were in touch with the young.

  She wasted a minute of thought on her son. Simon had been born the way he had intended to go on, skinny and inconsolable. Now he was somewhere in the Midwest of America teaching youth with even less intelligence than himself all about the reptile people of Atlantis and their intergalactic conspiracy to take over the earth.

  The tabloids hadn’t picked up on Simon yet, but it was only a matter of time.

  There was nothing to be done about her son, which made it all the more imperative to secure Miranda as an asset. Clare was thinking a spread in Hello! magazine, a fashion feature in Vogue; maybe something in Vanity Fair even, or a lifestyle interview in the Sunday Times at least. Much cooperation would be required of Miranda. And it was about time the girl got herself a partner, too. She must be pushing the envelope of the median age range for a woman to be single.

  Perhaps it would take a carrot, a bonus, a bribe, a sweetener of some kind. What sort of thing did her daughter like? Clare found she had no data. She had noticed Miranda’s regrettable taste for young, cute and brainless men, but she had simply deleted the information, as she did with anything that conflicted with her vision of how things ought to be.

  In her car on the way to the restaurant, the solution came to her. In business, when a team needed to bond, you sent them off to a country house hotel somewhere to get drunk and go paintballing, in between blasts of new management mantras and brainwashing with the corporate strategy. Why not do the same thing with her daughter?

  What they needed was a weekend at a country house hotel, some place with chintz bedrooms and log fires, perhaps a cut above the usual venues for corporate bonding, a place with a good gym, nice food, fine wine. Perhaps they would be able to stroll through some landscape on Sunday morning. Dress it up as a low-stress detox rebalancing weekend. No paintballing, of course. Nothing messy, good heavens, no. The thought of anything drippy or squidgy or sticky or squelchy made both Clare and Miranda feel positively nauseous.

  Two miles to the east of Suffolk, on the icy waters of the North Sea, a trawler rocked on the swell, its engine idling. The night was cloudy, and the only illumination came from the searchlight mounted on the wheelhouse. The shaft of light picked out the black shape of a rubber boat on the deck, and the form of one of the crew, moving around the craft, releasing the ropes that held it to the deck.

  Two younger men came forward to help him, their inexpert fingers slipping around the knots. The older man waved them aside. Tolvo stood back and folded his arms in his heavy jacket. He looked up into the darkness. No stars. No Rigel, no Aldebaran, not even one of the Seven Sisters. Ever since he had been a small boy, craning against the glass of his bedroom window on the eleventh floor of an apartment block on the outskirts of Vilnius, Tolvo had felt that the stars were looking after him. When they were not visible, he felt superstitious.

  He looked out over what he knew was the sea. An occasional pale smudge where a black wave broke out a cap of foam was all his eyes could register. ‘No moon, no stars, not much wind,’ he said, hoping to convince himself as well as his friend Juri, who was standing beside him swigging the last of their vodka. ‘No trouble. Perfect.’

  ‘Perfect,’ Juri repeated. ‘How far is it?’

  ‘Not far,’ Tolvo said.

  ‘Not far,’ repeated the fisherman, trying to give encouragement. ‘Ten minutes, for strong young guys like you. Just get in and paddle. Don’t stop or you’ll freeze. Keep the boat behind you. You’ll see our lights, at least. Keep them at your back, you’ll be OK.’ He raised his arm out into the blackness, indicating the right direction. ‘Ten minutes. No problem. Just keep paddling.’

  He’ll say anything to get rid of us, Tolvo thought.

  From the wheelhouse, the captain shouted, ‘Get them away, what are you hanging about for?’

  ‘Right,’ said the fisherman. ‘Take the other end.’ Tolvo grabbed the thin nylon rope that ran around the edge of the rubber craft. The three of them dragged the dinghy to the side of the trawler and heaved it up on the iron gunwale.

  The fisherman said, ‘You’re lucky there’s no wind. Give her a good shove and there’s a decent chance she’ll stay the right way up. I’ve got the rope, don’t worry. One, two …’

  On ‘three’they pushed the craft over the side and heard it fall on the water. The fisherman made fast his rope and fetched a flashlight. ‘Your lucky night,’ he told them. ‘It’s the right way up. OK, over you go. Big one first.’

  In truth, neither of them could fairly be called big. Both nineteen, never well fed in their lives, they were skinny and small. Juri, two inches taller, red-haired and round-faced, had the honour of being considered big when compared to Tolvo, who was fair-haired, and hollow-cheeked, and even in babyhood had dark circles around his eyes. Juri gave the fisherman his bag, climbed over the side of the boat and down the metal ladder. From the last rung he jumped, landing squarely in the beam of the flashlight, helpfully held in the centre of the dinghy.

  ‘Your friend’s not an idiot,’ the fisherman said, throwing Juri’s bag down after him. ‘What more can a man ask for, eh? He could get a job doing that.’

  ‘Not where we’re from,’ Tolvo said at once. ‘Would we be here if we could get a job doing anything back home? There are no jobs in Vilnius. Not unless your mother’s fucking the foreman.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ growled the seaman. ‘Get moving, your turn.’

  Tolvo threw his bag down and then, clumsy in gloves and boots, struggled over the side to the slippery rungs of the ladder. When he had stood on the deck the ship’s rise and fall on the swell had seemed as peaceful as the breathing of an animal asleep. Now it seemed to toss viciously as if trying to shak
e him loose and hurl him into the water. Death in thirty seconds, that was what they said about falling in the sea in winter. He wanted to be an astrophysicist, not a gymnast. Below him was nothing. The rubber boat was a lump of black on the black waves.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, get those brats off the boat!’ He heard the captain’s roaring voice above the crash of the swell.

  ‘Jump, Tolvo!’ Juri encouraged him. He could make out the pale circle of his friend’s face.

  ‘Don’t make such a fucking racket!’ the captain yelled. ‘Let’em go to hell, I can’t risk this any longer.’

  Tolvo released his hold on the ladder and leaped in the general direction of Juri’s face. He landed in the nose of the boat, shipping an icy splash of water as he fell, and the free rope tumbled on top of him.

  ‘OK, well done, that’s it, don’t panic.’ Juri was gabbling rubbish, dragging him up to a sitting position by the shoulder of his jacket. ‘It’s OK. We’re cast off. We’re free. Here take your paddle. Get this thing moving. Only ten minutes. Keep the lights behind us.’

  Resolutely – to be anything less than resolute was to let fear wash over them like the freezing water, in which case it would have been simpler to just lie down and die right there – they settled side by side, stuck their paddles into the inky sea and propelled the boat forward. The air froze their faces. Behind them, the trawler engine clanked into action.

  ‘Fucking bastards,’ Juri growled between his teeth. ‘They’re going to turn. We won’t be able to see them. We’ll be rowing round in circles.’

  ‘It’ll get light soon,’ Tolvo assured him. ‘In the east. So if we keep going west, we’re bound to hit land.’

  ‘If we don’t get caught.’

  ‘Well, if we get caught we’ll get a warm bed and a decent meal before they ship us back to Vilnius. How bad can it be, eh?’

  ‘Don’t talk crap,’ said Juri.

  ‘It’s not crap, I heard it from this guy at school. Somebody in his family was sent back by the British police and they’d been kept in a hotel, with food vouchers and everything. This is a really rich country, Juri. You’ve no idea.’

  ‘You’ll believe anything. However rich they are, they didn’t get that way by being stupid, did they? Let’s just shut up and paddle.’ But Juri dug into the water more cheerfully.

  In an hour, the sea around them began to lighten. Their mood lightened with it. The waves were breaking in caps of white foam and the sky behind them showed a couple of sickly stars. Ahead was darkness. A stubborn line of darkness. As the skyline paled, the land showed up, as black as a slice of hell.

  ‘Is that it?’ Juri asked.

  ‘Got to be,’ said Tolvo, ‘Unless we’ve paddled so far around England that it’s France or Holland or some other fucking place. It’s land, whatever it is.’ The dinghy, he realised, was heaving beneath them. The sea was rising. ‘We’re getting a wind to carry us in, too. You see, God’s on our side. I told you.’

  ‘You don’t believe in God.’ Juri stopped moving, paralysed by the final arrival of success in his life.

  ‘Keep paddling, mate,’ Tolvo implored him. ‘Or we really will go round in circles.’

  In another hour, they were staggering through a thin crust of ice over shallow water, dragging up their boots from the muddy bottom at every step. There was enough light for them to see their dinghy, which they had abandoned behind them, floating up the creek on the tide. The wind in the reeds made a ghostly whine and every now and then, where the rising water broke the thicker ice, a crack like a shot echoed over the shore.

  Tolvo found a bank ahead of him, climbed on it, and stamped his feet to get the blood flowing again, then jumped for joy. ‘It’s England,’ he said, still not daring to raise his voice. ‘We’ve made it.’

  ‘Well if this is England,’ Juri gasped as he floundered from the mud to join his friend on solid ground, ‘it’s a fucking puddle of mud and it really stinks.’

  Tolvo sniffed the icy air. Cold as it was, there was a distinct pungency about it. ‘Who cares?’ he said. ‘Whatever it is, that’s the smell of real money. I can get used to it.’

  ‘Have you ever been to a Farmers’Market?’ Miranda asked Dido, on the phone from her office.

  ‘Of course not, angel. Why would I do that?’

  ‘Well exactly,’ said Miranda. ‘But we’ve got this job in from Birmingham for a new shopping centre and they want a space for a farmers’market.’

  ‘Don’t they know they’re a city? I mean, how many farmers’ markets are there in Manhattan?’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘What do people do there?’

  ‘Buy food, I suppose. They must be people who cook, mustn’t they?’

  Buying food. Miranda didn’t like the idea. Food meant fat, and fat meant failure and failure meant hatred and hatred meant death. She lived in terror of food. The fear of eatables ran in her mind all the time, like the stock market prices running along the bottom of the screen on the TV news. Living proudly on the edge of what she assumed to be hunger, everything she might eat had a moral weight to which she was sensitised. Bread: bad. Cookie: horrific. Chocolate: obscene. Apple: unnecessary.

  No junkie was more powerfully conscious of how long it had been since the last hit and how long it would be before the next one. Nor more attuned to where the next hit would come from. Miranda had a mental map of her life on which all the food outlets she had to pass flashed food alert warnings: the coffee shop on the corner – beware the muffins! the kiosk at the station – danger! chocolate!! the kebab shop on the way home – toxic hazard!! chips!!!

  What she thought was hunger was something else, a corrosive mixture of guilt and anxiety which ached in her stomach. Miranda had never been honestly hungry in her life. Instead, she had learned from birth that food was her enemy. Her childhood had been fenced about with food prohibitions: no milk, it gave you allergies; no squash, it rotted your teeth; no butter, it stopped your heart; no sweets, they sent you mad; no tuna, it would poison you.

  She was winning the war against food, but the battles were another matter. Get up, eat nothing. Go to work, eat nothing. Get through another morning with the Urban Phoenix Group, eat nothing. Get a report written, eat nothing. Go to a meeting, eat nothing. Come back from the meeting – surrender to the coffee shop, eat a cream cheese Danish with a mocha grande. And pass the rest of the day in sugar shock, and drink a bottle of wine, and get a chocolate bar from a vending machine and be eating naked toast at 2am. Go to bed. Get up, eat nothing.

  Sometimes she was thin. Sometimes she was very thin. Sometimes she was not really thin. All the time, Miranda had food in her thoughts. It was different for Dido. She could smoke. Miranda could not smoke because smoking also killed you and her mother would disapprove.

  Cooking was worse than food. Cooking was as scary as free-fall parachuting. Being alone with all that food! Being intimate, vulnerable, out of control in the presence of the enemy! Cooking was something Miranda was afraid to try.

  They both knew people who cooked, of course. Miranda’s Will had been proud of his green curry, and Dido’s mother had been able to roast a chicken when the occasion demanded it. They saw that cooking appealed to some people, but they were sure it would never be part of their lives.

  Her general intention was to eat only in restaurants, where food was controlled by somebody else, and could easily be rejected and conquered. You had to order something, but there were always ways of not eating. Miranda tended to play safe and ask for chilli sauce to pour over anything that might tempt her.

  When they had to be at home with food, the answer was to buy something ready-cooked, tamed and enslaved, less threatening to them. And pretty. Pretty food, somehow, was not so frightening. Dido sometimes bought luxury readymeals from a late-night supermarket. Miranda sometimes bought sushi boxes from Pret A Manger. The colours were so delicious, especially those little green chips of cucumber. Cucumber: harmless.

  ‘The thing is,’ Miranda sai
d carefully, aware that her friend was hard to motivate and could be volatile, ‘that people who go to these farmers’things must be sort of the target market. But I don’t know about them. I’m not sure how to approach them.’

  ‘You mean you want to go to a farmers’market and find out what kind of people use them?’

  ‘Yes. I think I should, don’t you?’

  ‘Angel, don’t ask me, what do I know about your job? They’re probably just people with nothing to do on Sunday. I mean, I’ve got nothing to do on Sunday either. So if you want to do it, let’s go. When are these things anyway? They do have them in London, I suppose.’

  In the end, they fixed on what was billed as a Spring Food Fair in Covent Garden, which offered the compensations of going shopping for shoes at the same time then, perhaps, if they had the energy, being able to check out the Tate Modern in the afternoon. Sunday in London could be a real problem.

  ‘The shopping is important,’ Miranda insisted, making a note on her Palm. ‘Good retail outlets. Part of the destination concept.’

  On reaching the Fair, they strolled curiously between stalls stacked with cheeses and jams that had been set up, incredibly, in front of the boutique windows, obscuring the displays of tiny sweaters and skinny frocks. The air was full of the smell of freshly baked bread, which they tried not to inhale in case it made them hungry. Miranda believed that if she felt hungry all the time, she would eventually get used to it and not feel hungry at all. The plan wasn’t working very well. Her mother was having a career change, there would be fall-out. Three times in the past week she had found herself diving into the corner café for a culpable muffin. On that Sunday morning, she lasted seventeen minutes before suggesting they hit the coffee stall.

  ‘They look s-o-o-o-o-o ordinary,’ said Dido and she wriggled on her chair, flicking her curls from one shoulder to another as she inspected the passing crowd. ‘Is there supposed to be something special about market customers? I mean, they’re just all sorts of people, aren’t they?’