by George Mann
Panicking, Rob increased his pace. His bouncing, veering suitcase tried to fall over, so he had to slow down. With his remote he zapped this way and that way, hoping that the Lex might flash its lights, but no welcome winking resulted. Hard to say if it was actually raining; more a matter of rather wet air. Some of the veiling in the air was actually midges. Must be hard for them to keep a-wing, or maybe they liked damp air.
HALF AN HOUR later, Rob was seriously worried. Surely he must have made an error, yet what error? Phone and ticket agreed with his memory. Towed away: that must be it. Towed away, maybe, by a farmer? A farmer with a sideline in vehicles stolen to order? Suddenly he hated farmers, despite their knowledge of rooks and magpies and carrots and the weather.
Just search for thirty minutes more, systematically. After that, call it a day and return to the airport for assistance. Assistance with misplaced cars must exist. Such a misfortune must happen at least once a day. Once a week, anyhow. Sodding drizzle.
Rob trudged back to the bus stop at last and ensconced himself within the plastic shelter, which lacked even a bench seat. He pushed the autocall and waited by the tall steel bars of the secured exit gate, eyeing the road. No posters to read. A few cars passed by, headlights on.
Aha.
But the automated shuttle bus passed by without slowing.
Of course! This zone was closed as regards Departures! Only departing travelers would summon a bus, consequently his call wasn’t heeded by the system. Angrily he rattled the bars, although they didn’t rattle much. He eyed the viciously thorned hedge of pyracantha separating the zone from the roadside, abundant with bright red berries. When another car came along, his urgent semaphoring wasn’t noticed. When a second passed, a pig-woman passenger eyed him stupidly. At least, she looked pig-stupid and a bit snouty. Which is most unfair to pigs, his mother’s voice reminded him. Very bright, very clean animals, they are. Not that his mother had ever been a farmer! No, she had worked in a pharmacy. But she always watched nature channels on TV. Nice nature ones, not floods and earthquakes and hurricanes.
Realistically, who would stop their car for him when they wanted either to head home with as much speed as possible, or to park in another zone to catch their flight after hours spent getting here?
If only he had stayed married to mad Jennifer, he could have been delivered to the front of the airport and collected again! Well, to within walking distance of the security barriers. Again, he consulted his phone and found no signal at all. What’s more, the battery was lower than he had thought. What was it doing, leaking, like the sodding sky?
Midges circled but kept to themselves.
“Hey,” called a voice. A young woman enveloped in a long gray raincoat plus hood. Straggly brown hair that looked a bit hacked. Sharp nose, small chin, beady eyes.
She joined him in the shelter. “Your car break down? Mine did. I was in such a hurry I left the sidelights on. I mean, I thought I’d turned the lights fully off. So: battery drained. Engine wouldn’t start.”
“I can’t find my car at all. Maybe it’s been stolen, maybe I noted down the wrong zone.”
“Oh well,” she said.
“You don’t sound too worried. And you only just found out?”
“Oh no, about three months ago. My watch doesn’t have a calendar, so I’m not sure.”
“Three months? What have you been doing since then?”
She gestured vaguely. “Living here. Not much point in going home now. Parking fees and penalties would have vacuumed my overdraft limit within a few weeks. The mortgage would default. Little apartment’ll be repossessed, probably sold off by now. Parking’s probably still sucking up anything it can, although I think the bank and credit cards will have shut me down.”
“Didn’t you try to escape to the airport? Wouldn’t anyone help you?”
“Oh yes, some people helped. I see life different now. I’m free. My name’s Weasel.”
Rob stared at her face, then quickly away again as though the corner of his eye had detected some sudden movement, maybe of rooks on the scavenge. Weasel. How appropriate, especially after living here for the last three months. Surely that couldn’t have been her chosen nickname prior to this. So therefore: bestowed by those people who “helped”? He tried to recall any wisdom of his mother regarding weasels, but none came. Still, Weasel seemed friendly. Maybe dotty, in a different way from Jennifer whose nuttiness was extravert.
“What was your car?” Weasel asked.
“I hope it still is. A Lexus Q-9000. Red. A LexQ.”
She whistled, perhaps derisively. “So you’ll take longer to lose your house, unless you’re already up to your eyeballs paying for Lexy. Unless it’s a company car. You a director? If so, you can afford to stick around here for a while.”
“I’ve no intention of sticking around here.”
Another transit bus passed by without stopping, while Rob gesticulated in vain at a few passengers. Maybe he looked as though he was hurling non-verbal abuse at them.
“What’s the alternative?” Weasel asked. “You a director? I’ve never met a director. Million quid bonuses every year. Phew.”
“Not for me. I run an agency for textile designers. Well, I am the agency. The LexQ impresses clients a bit, and it’s comfortable, seeing as I need to drive all over for meetings. I can’t just use a van.”
“Designers of what?”
“Cushions, curtains, et cetera.”
“Can’t you do all your meetings through the web?”
“If only. Trade fairs. Personal touch. Maybe if we had good enough virtual reality, but we don’t. There are times when I get fed up with driving.”
“Well.” She gestured at their surroundings. “Problem solved. Relax.”
“I told my designers I’d be back by tomorrow.”
“Do they all work at your place in some big barn conversion?”
“Of course not. They all work at home, wherever. They email me their designs. Final printouts by courier to ensure fidelity.”
“Whose fidelity?”
“Printer fidelity. Absolutely exact colors.”
“Aren’t there any other agencies?”
Rob allowed that there were several.
“No one’s indispensable,” said Weasel.
“I am not,” Rob said, “pursuing this line of logic. How do you survive here?”
“Mainly vegetarian. Plenty of that. Traps for rabbits and pheasants.”
That might appeal to Mum. Or not.
Mum would miss him. What, in Spain, in a world, or at least a Costa of her own?
“Weasel, haven’t you asked a farmer for a ride out of here? You could even walk out when a farm gate opens.” Using his mother’s sayings, surely he could talk to a farmer. Of course! That was the way out.
“If a farmer assists an escape, he gets fined heavily as well. That’s immigration law. So they’re quite hostile. Also, we’re pests, munching on their veg. Like rabbits. They carry licensed shotguns.”
The farmers, obviously, not the rabbits.
“How about pushing a car into the perimeter fence then climbing on the roof and piling veg on top of the razor wire?”
“Not so simple or safe as it sounds. You don’t get it, er...?”
“Rob.”
“You don’t get it, Rob. I’m free here. So are you.”
Far from feeling liberated, he felt severely deprived, his worldly goods reduced to the contents of a suitcase.
“But,” he said.
“But nothing. Let me show you the ropes hereabouts. You’ll soon adjust.”
“Is it you and your helpful friends who trashed cars in this zone?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes we need little extras. But actually,” and she brightened, “Brian is one of us because we trashed his car too badly for him to drive it, and he isn’t complaining. Not now he isn’t, anyway.”
“Why not trash all the fucking cars and expand into a fucking huge community?” cried Rob.
Weasel eyed Rob as though he was stupid. “Sus-tainability, of course.”
‘SURE, I WAS pissed off for most of the first week,” admitted Brian, a tubby red-faced fellow of middling height and age from Dublin, who was wearing a once smart striped suit, somewhat scuffed and stained by now. And a burgeoning russet beard.
They were now in Zone T15. There existed ways between zones, either due to persistence or to the spontaneous death of prickly pyracantha.
“But after a while I thought to myself here’s an opportunity to knock off the booze. Then there were the credit card debts and the mortgage, and I was fed up with Annie nagging, and she could look after delinquent Dermot, and did I adore being a glorified salesman for exorbitant shit? Weasel and her chums merely trashed a company car, not my own impeccable soul in painted steel.”
By now it was night, and they were inside a long and oldish Volvo estate, Brian and Mog in the front, Rob with Weasel and Donny Dino side by side in the quite spacious rear. This was a bit like being in a very small private cinema, except that the screen was only showing steamed-up dripping darkness. And they weren’t awaiting any performance, except that Rob fantasized now and then that a brightly lit helicopter might suddenly descend like some UFO to rescue him from what wasn’t exactly an abduction.
Donny Dino was Donald Something—already Rob forgot—from a band he had never heard of, Velociraptors. Clad all in black leather, except for his head of lengthening hair. Raggy-haired Mog, in front, wore robes over her bulk, and she had lipsticked thick cat’s whiskers on her upper lip. Mog was given to chortling, a word which she explained had been invented by Lewis Carroll especially for Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There by combining “chuckle” with “snort”. Mog was still experimenting with what the precise noise should be, since “chuckle” suggests amusement yet “snort” suggests an element of derision. And yet, quoth the text, “he chortled in his joy.”
“Like, you snort snow,” Donny Dino, who had got fed up with doing lines of cocaine to make it as a Velociraptor, had remarked earlier.
“Young man,” Mog had retorted, “snort refers to breathing out in a noisy and violent way. Only an idiot would snort cocaine. The powder would all blow away. Unless that’s an instance of a word turning around to mean its complete opposite. Just as,” she rhapsodized, “those of us here have turned ourselves around to become the opposites of what we were before!”
Obviously Mog had much to occupy her mind in the car park, including attempting to express the perfect chortle, which, she claimed, was a practice like Zen—when you hit the target blindfold, then you’d be enlightened. Except, not hit with an arrow, but with one’s voice, as it were. Some discussion had followed between her and Brian as to whether laughter was an aspect of voice.
“Well, can any speechless animal laugh?” she’d demanded of the Dubliner.
“Sure, a jackass can.”
“To our ears, but what does it hear?”
Mog had provided carrot and cabbage stew cooked over a camping stove filled with petrol, and Rob knew from his mother that carrots help you to see in the dark. Elsewhere, in T19, four others of the tribe inhabited a Mazda, named after the Persian god of fire by the Japanese lightbulb company turned carmakers; but Rob hadn’t met the Mazda contingent yet.
Presently the five passengers in the Volvo set about falling asleep. Despite closest proximity to the steering wheel you couldn’t call Donald the driver; he was a passenger too. Rob was reminded of sleeping on a long-haul jet flight, except that in this instance you could open a door and step outside to avoid deep-vein thrombosis and have a pee much more easily than in a superjumbo. Unless you were piggy in the middle, which in this case was Weasel, who mightn’t have experienced this position prior to Rob’s advent; if so, she wasn’t complaining. Maybe, being skinny, she appreciated the enhanced body heat. Midges had got inside the Volvo but were no bother.
Morning dawned with a squabbling of starlings over some torn-up baby rabbit dropped nearby by a crow, not by a rook.
“It’s bath day today,” announced Mog with a vast yawn. “Certainly smells like it,” and she chortled to indicate no offense. “There’s a Porsche Carrera Cabriolet in T18 that collects rainwater nicely after we cut off the hood and superglued the doors,” she explained to Rob. “A posh bathtub with its seats pushed right back.”
“But surely it never rains enough in a week to fill a car, even with downpours? Or is bath day once every season?”
“Some medieval chaps washed once a year, and that frequently was deemed eccentric. I’m all for hygiene once a fortnight.”
“Which is how long it takes to fill up a posh?” Rob asked.
“Ah, how meanings have shifted in this brave new life of ours! No, there’s a fire hydrant hatch where some village got bulldozed for more parking. We have a hose that fits.”
“But isn’t it rather cold in the bath?”
She chortled. “We have a big carton of US military Quikhot, combat in cold countries for the use of. This funny little supply drone crashed, like a winged box. Maybe they were testing it. Oh,” she added, “we drilled a plughole in the bottom of the posh, in case you’re wondering.”
“But didn’t police come, or soldiers?”
“Police, though by then we’d liberated the goodies and made off. They weren’t going to search a million cars; just took the wreckage away. You really must stop saying ‘but’ so much, Rob. But me no buts.”
So after a breakfast of fried fungi the five set off for T18, Rob feeling at once excited and disconcerted by the prospect of communal nudity, Japanese fashion, which he certainly wouldn’t have experienced home alone. On the way, each went behind a different car to do the toilet thing using paper distributed by Mog.
THIS DAY PROMISED to be brighter than the day before. Before too long Rob was being introduced to Andy, Govinder, and the Welsh sisters Melanie and Anastasia who looked nothing like each other, since Melanie was dark chocolate colored and tall whereas Anastasia was blonde and short, both going on for thirty.
“Our Mum never knew Melanie means black,” Anastasia hastened to say in a melodious voice. “She just liked the sound of the name.”
“And blonde to her meant Russian,” added Melanie, “although to me Anastasia sounds like a plant, like a Nasturtium, like. So if she does something nasty, I call her Nasturtium, like.”
They seemed to like one another well enough to go on holiday together, for instance, although maybe undercurrents of rivalry existed. Rob forbore to ask whether the sisters had different fathers, or an interesting blend of heritage within one dad.
Tall, burly Andy sported a ponytail which was trying to become a horse’s tail. Surinder was a mature and handsome Sikh, so he wore a turban, a somewhat sloppy one, which probably concealed a lot of hair, and a hairnet to control his beard.
“Excuse me for asking,” said Rob while shaking Surinder’s hand, “but aren’t you supposed to wear ceremonial knives in your turban and other places? How does that go down with airport security?”
Surinder flashed a great grin. “Oh yes, we go armed to the teeth! But it’s a good idea to put the knives in the baggage. I painted our Sikh flag on my bag so security will realize.” He seemed unabashed to be asked an intimate question about his religion, and even volunteered, “What I need most is some starch for my turban. Don’t happen to have any, do you, Rob?”
“Alas,” said Rob, “that isn’t something I carry.”
“What, British men don’t use starch for the stiff upper lip?” And Surinder laughed uproariously, while Mog chortled a variation new to Rob’s ear, more like a horse whinnying.
Andy proceeded to fill the Porsche, which took a while, and Melanie added moisturizing bubble creme. This done, Anastasia chucked in three cubes of Quikhot and the bath really seethed.
“Me and our new friend first,” cried Weasel.
Andy produced a big tartan car-rug for Weasel to strip behind; thus decencies were being observed. Onc
e Weasel was reclining up to her neck in the Porsche, Rob followed suit while Weasel averted her gaze. Briefly Rob wondered what would happen if his new acquaintances ran away mischievously with all his clothes, but that seemed unlikely. As he sank down upon comfortable leather upholstery next to Weasel, she whispered, “No peeing in the water, mind.”
“Certainly not.”
Weasel bounced up and down, although not high enough to show him more than the top of her tits. “Beats a hard ceramic tub any day, eh?”
Well, it did. You’d pay good money at a spa for this sort of luxury! True, you wouldn’t have midges circling above the water at a hotel spa, but what could you expect amidst nature?
And so bath time proceeded, turn by turn. When Mog climbed in, water slopped over the side, and she—but of course she did.
Afterwards Rob confessed to Brian, “I think I’m going mad.”
“Sure, that’s the old normality draining away like dirty bath water out of the bottom of a posh, and the new normality clocking in, now wouldn’t you say that’s so? Mad, but cheerful with it, would you be feeling?”
“I was thinking that this beats a spa hotel! My brain actually thought that.”
“Marvel of adaptability, the human brain.”
SURINDER’S LONG HAIR, recoiled in his turban, kept his newly rewashed and wrung-out headgear very damp. Could one get rheumatism of the head?
“None of you have been through a winter yet, have you?” Rob demanded. “This all seems unviable to me. What if that drone thing hadn’t crashed to give you the Quikhot?”
“Then,” said Mog, “we’d be more medieval about having baths. Humans don’t actually need to bathe. After a while your skin stabilizes.”
“We are more viable,” chipped in Weasel, “than the majority of people.”
“What if you get ill? Appendicitis, say?”
“The corpse,” she said, “will burn in a car like a Viking funeral.”
No use reasoning. Rob shrugged his shoulders.
“Okay, so now we’re all spick-and-span, what do we do for the rest of the day?”