Two Caravans

by Marina Lewycka

  “Double fare?” Tomasz wishes the lad wouldn’t talk so fast.

  “You can get some overalls at the office.”

  “But this is normal?”

  Tomasz still cannot take in what he has seen. Just in the area in front of him-in about a square metre-Tomasz counted one, two, three…twenty chickens, all jostling together desperate to get out of the way of the men. Yes, they call them chickens, but their bodies look more like a misshapen duck’s-huge bloated bodies on top of stunted little legs, so that they seem to be staggering grotesquely under their own weight-those of them that can move at all.

  “Yeah, they breed ‘em like that to get fat, like, quicker.” Neil pulls a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket, puts one between his lips, and offers one to Tomasz. Tomasz shakes his head. Neil lights the cigarette with a match, puffing lots of smoke out, and at once starts coughing and sputtering. “It’s the supermarkets, see? They go for big breasts. Like fellers, eh?” Cough cough. “Did you see that woman on Big Brother?”

  “Who is big brother?”

  “Don’t you know Big Brother’? What do they have on telly where you come from? It’s where they lock ‘em all up together in a house, and you can watch ‘em.”

  “Chickens?”

  “Yeah, yeah, just like chickens. I like that.” The lad chuckles again. Actually, he’s quite a nice lad, thinks Tomasz. Friendly and talkative. About the same age as Emanuel, with the same gawky innocence. “And there’s this voice that’s like telling ‘em like what they’ve got to do. And they’re not supposed to have sex, but one of ‘em did-that one with the big, like, knockers I was telling you about.”

  “Big like knocker?”

  “Yeah, massive.”

  “But how can they walk when the breasts are so large? How can you tend so many?”

  The lad gives him an odd look.

  “Is that like…what ‘appens…like…in your country?”

  “In Poland everybody…”

  “Poland?” There is a note of awe in the lad’s voice. “Wow. Never been there. So the women’ve all got big knockers?”

  “Yes, many people has. Keep it in shed at side of house.”

  “Oh, you mean chickens.” A flush of enlightenment creeps over his youthful face.

  “Of course. We have to look after it.”

  “Oh, it’s all taken care of, in here.” The lad looks oddly disappointed. “See them pipes? That’s where the water comes in, see? And the food comes in down there. As much as they can eat, cos they want to fatten ‘em up fast. Fast food, eh? Geddit? They keep the lights on low, so they never stop for a kip-just keep on feeding all night. Bit like eating pizza in front of the telly. The low lights calm ‘ em down. That ’s why they usually catch ‘em at night. It’s all scientific, like.”

  “But so many together-this cannot be healthy.”

  “Yeah, it’s all taken care of. They mix the feed with that anti-bio stuff, like, to stop ‘em getting sick. Better than’t National Elf, really, everyfink provided. Best fing is, when you eat the chicken, you get all the anti-bio, so it keeps you helfy, too, if you fink about it. Prevention is better than cure, as my Nan says. Like Guinness.”

  “And cleaning up mess?”

  “Nah, they don’t do that. Can’t get to the floor. Too many birds. Can’t get in. Just leave it. They just have to walk about in it. Chicken shit. Burns their arses, and their legs. Who’d be a chicken?” As he talks, he is zipping himself into a blue nylon overall. “You don’t want to get it on your shoes. Go right over the top. Burn yer socks off. After they’ve gone, that’s when you go in to clean it all out, ready for the next crop.”

  “Crop?”

  “Yeah, it’s what they call ‘em. Funny, innit? You’d fink it was vegetables or somefink. Not somefink alive. But vegetables is alive, ent they? Are they? I dunno.” He scratches his head and takes another drag on his cigarette. “Vegetables.” Cough, cough. “One of life’s great mysteries.”

  Then he stubs out the cigarette, and carefully returns the unsmoked half to the packet. “I’m just taking it up, like, steady, a few puffs at a time,” he explains. “Building up to full strengf. Anyway, you’ll need some overalls, pal. What’s your name?”

  “Tomasz. My friends call me Tomek.”

  “Tom-Mick…whatever. Mind if I just call you Mick? You’ll need some overalls, Mick. Let’s go see if there’s any left.”

  They walk across to the office. At the back is a storeroom, and there is a pair of blue nylon overalls hanging on a peg above a bench on which is scattered a jumble of male clothing.

  “We’re in luck,” says Neil.

  Tomasz zips himself in. The overalls are too short in the leg and nip around the crotch. Neil looks him up and down critically.

  “Not bad. Yer a bit big for ‘em. Here, you’ll need these.” He passes Tomasz a ragged pair of leather gauntlets, and puts a pair on himself. “And some boots.”

  There is only one boot left, a green one, though fortunately it is the right size.

  “One’s better than none,” says Neil, “Count yer blessings…D’you remember that song? My Nan sings that all the time. When she’s not singing hymns. She’s very, like, Christian, my Nan. Always says a prayer for the chickens. But she likes her Guinness. You’ll have to meet her.”

  “I would very much like to.”

  Neil hunts around and eventually finds a black Wellington boot under the desk in the office, which is a smaller size. This is becoming quite a regular thing with me, thinks Tomasz, stowing his odd-sized trainers under the bench and putting on the odd-sized boots. Maybe it is a sign of something.

  He walks back to the barn stiffly because of the tightness in the left boot and crotch.

  “Ready?” says Neil. “You’ll soon get the hang of it. We’ll have a practice before the team gets here. In we go.”

  He opens the barn door and they wade into the roiling sea of chickens. The chickens squawk and screech and try to flap out of their way, but there is nowhere for them to go. They try to nutter upwards but their wings are too weak for their overgrown bodies and they just scramble desperately on top of each other, kicking up a terrible stinking dust of feathers and faeces. Tomasz feels something live crunch under his foot, and hears a squawk of pain. He must have stepped on one, but really it is impossible not to.

  “Grab ‘em by the legs!” yells Neil, through the inferno of screeching and feathers and flying faecal matter. “Like this!”

  He raises his left hand, in which he is holding five chickens, each by one leg. The terrified birds twist and flap, shitting themselves with fear, then they seem to give up, and hang limply.

  “See, it calms ‘em down, holding ‘em upside down.”

  There is a snap, and one of the five flops and sags, its thigh dislocated, its wings still beating. At one end of the barn is a stack of plastic crates. Neil slides one out, thrusts the birds in, and pushes it shut. Then he wades into the melee for another five.

  Tomasz steels himself and reaches down into the seething mass of chickens, holding his breath and closing his eyes. He grabs and gets hold of something-it must have been a wing-and the bird struggles and squeaks so pitifully in his hands that he lets go. He grabs again, and this time he gets the legs and hoists the poor creature up into the air, and not wanting to risk losing it, stuffs it straight into a cage. Then another. Then he manages to get two at a time, and then three. He can’t hold more than that, because he cannot bring himself to hold them by just one leg. After about half an hour he has filled one cage, and Neil has filled four.

  “You’d better get a move on,” says Neil, “when the catching team gets here.”

  As if on cue, the barn door opens and the rest of the team arrives-they are four short dark-haired men, who are speaking in a language that Tomasz can’t understand. They spread out along the length of the barn, and now the screeching and flapping intensify and the whole vast barn is a storm of feathers and dust and stench and din as they work furiously, grabbing
the chickens five at a time and bundling them into the cages.

  “Portugeezers,” shouts Neil to Tomasz above the racket. “Or Brazil nuts! Respect!”

  And he raises a gauntleted hand. Tomasz does the same. What is the lad talking about? Fired up by the other men’s example, he grabs at the chickens with a renewed energy, and even manages to get four in one hand, holding them each by one leg. And again. And again. And again. It is exhausting work. Inside the hot nylon shell of his overall, he feels his skin running with sweat. His eyes are burning. His hair is stiff and matted with excreta. Even his nose and mouth seem clogged with the disgusting stuff.

  The cages are filling up; the captive chickens, exhausted with terror, tremble and cluck hopelessly, covered in the excrement of the newly captured birds still flapping and struggling above them. After a couple of hours enough of the chickens have been caged that they can begin to see the floor of the barn. It is a reeking wasteland of sawdust, urine and faeces in which injured and ammonia-blind birds are staggering around.

  At his feet he sees a bird with a broken leg dragging itself through the muck, squawking piteously, weighed down by its monstrous breast, and he realises with a stab of remorse that it was probably he who broke the creature’s leg by stepping on it.

  He reaches down for it, gets it by both legs and hoists it into the air, and as he does so it swings round and he feels the other leg break, and the bird hangs there limply from its two broken legs staring at Tomasz in terror.

  “I’m sorry, little chicken,” whispers Tomasz in Polish. Should he put it in a cage? He catches Neil’s eye.

  “Yeah, don’t worry, Mick. They’re always doing that.” He moves round towards Tomasz, waving four chickens in the air. “Brittle. No strengf, see? They can’t move around to build their legs up. Should get ‘em playing football, eh? Chicken football. Of course some of ‘em do, but the chicken’s the football. Who’d be a chicken, eh?” Tomasz picks up the broken bird and puts it into a cage, where it collapses beneath a pile of other chickens that scramble on top of it. He is beginning to feel sick.

  “Time for a break, pal,” says Neil.

  Outside in the sunshine, they take deep gulps of air and splash themselves with water from a tap at the side of the barn. Then they slump in a line on the ground along the wall. Neil takes out his half-cigarette and has a few puffs, coughing away with a determined look on his face.

  “Getting there, getting there,” he says.

  The Portuguese, or the Brazilians, light up cigarettes too. They have unzipped their overalls, and Tomasz can see that they are wearing nothing but underpants underneath. In fact one of them doesn’t even seem to be wearing underpants. That is sensible, he thinks. Then he thinks about the too-tight-in-the-crotch overall that he is wearing. Who wore it before? He turns to the young man who is sitting next to him. He is a bit shorter than Neil, and probably about the same age, with curly hair and beautiful teeth.

  “Portuguese?”

  “Yes,” says the young man.

  “Brazilian?”

  “Yes.”

  Tomasz points at himself.

  “Polish. Poland.”

  “Ah!” The young man beams. “Gregor Lato.”

  “Pele,” says Tomasz. They shake hands.

  “You like football?”

  “Of course,” says Tomasz, for the sake of friendship, even though it is not strictly true, as he finds all sport tedious, but if anything would prefer to watch Juvenia Krakow play rugby. It is one of those little areas of dissent he has carved out for himself, like drinking wine instead of beer and listening to foreign music.

  “Later we play.” The young man’s teeth flash in a smile.

  “Later we play bagpipe.” The other man sitting next to him has a mad glint in his eye.

  “Scottish?” Tomasz asks.

  He winks at Tomasz. “Scottish.”

  As they are finishing their cigarettes a huge lorry trundles up, and the four men jump to their feet and go across to talk to the driver, who also seems to be Portuguese. Or Brazilian.

  “They are from Portugal or Brazil?” Tomasz asks Neil.

  “Yeah. One or the other. Some are Portugeezers pretending to be Brazils. Some are Brazils pretending to be Portugeezers.”

  “They pretend to be Brazil?”

  “Yeah, mad, innit? Yer see Brazils are illegal, so they get in by saying they’re Portugeezers. But the Portugeezers are legal now, wiv that Europe like marketing ring, and some of ‘em’ve been making trouble, so nobody wants to take ‘em on any more. That’s what me dad says.”

  “They making trouble?”

  “Yeah, trade unions. Minimum wage. Elf and safety. Brazils don’t cause trouble, see, ‘cause they’re illegal. So if the Portugeezers want a job, they have to pretend to be Brazillers-Portugeezers pretending to be Brazillers pretending to be Portugeezers. Mad, innit? It’s a mad mad mad world. Did you see that film? Went to see it with my Nan at Folkestone. Best film I ever seen.”

  “Very.” Tomasz shakes his head.

  “You ever been to Folkestone? My Nan used to take me there when I was little. They call it Folkestone pleasure beach. Pleasure my ass. I wrote it on the road sign. If you go to Folkestone you’ll see it. Pleasure Beach my ass. Yeah, I wrote that.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Yeah, I made my mark.”

  “What is minimum wage in UK?”

  “I dunno. Not much. Do you have that where you come from? Poland?”

  “We have one very famous trade union. Is name Solidarnoszc. You know it?”

  “Sounds like something you could get yer teeth into. Solid-er nosh. Heh heh. Geddit? Yeah, I reckon I’m going to Brazil.” He throws in this bit of information so casually that Tomasz, who is still thinking about trade unions, almost misses it. He looks at the lad with renewed interest.

  “So you make voyage of discovery?”

  He had been like that at Neil’s age, always looking for a way out. Of course, when he was seventeen, that had been in communist times, and the only journeys to be made were the inward ones. He remembers how one of his friends had got hold of a pirated tape of Bob Dylan and they had sat, four of them, in his father’s car locked inside the garage, the windows misted up with their spellbound breath, listening to the music as though it was the chimes of freedom. In every life there is a moment when you can break free of taken-for-granted situations and strike out in a different direction. That evening had been a turning point in his life. He had taught himself English in order to understand the words, and a few months later he bought a second-hand guitar from a Czech gipsy who happened to be passing through Zdroj. And he made himself a promise: one day he would come to the West.

  “Voyage of discovery? Heh heh. I like that,” said Neil. “One day, when I save up enough, I’m going to Brazil. It’s my dream. Everybody’s got to have a dream. That’s why I’m learnin’ to smoke.” He looks across at the four Portuguese-Brazilians, who have zipped up their overalls and are making their way back to the barn. “Maybe their dream was coming to England. Come to England and work up to yer ankles in chicken shit. Funny dream, eh?”

  The four Portuguese-Brazilians have started to load the crates of chickens onto the back of the lorry. They beckon to Tomasz and Neil, who reluctantly go across to join them. They have made a line and are passing the cages along to the truck, the tightly packed chickens screeching with panic as they fly through the air and land on the back of the truck with a thump. It is amazing how many cages they have filled, and yet the number of chickens in the barn hardly seems to have diminished.

  After the lorry has gone, it’s back into the barn for more catching and caging. The day drags on, tedious, dirty and gruelling. Tomasz’s arms are aching so much he thinks they will drop off. His legs and forearms are bruised from the pecking and thrashing of the struggling birds. But worse, his soul is bruised. He is already losing his sensibility of the chickens as living sentient creatures and, through the same process, of himself also. At
one point he finds himself thrusting five birds at a time into a cage with such force that one of them breaks a wing. What is happening to you, Tomasz? What kind of a man are you becoming?

  By the end of the afternoon, the floor is littered with dead and dying birds, some trodden into the sawdust and excrement, some still flapping and struggling to stay alive. Tomasz feels his own soul is like a dying bird, fluttering in the mire of…of…Maybe there is a song in this, but what chords could be plangent enough to express such desolation?

  “Did we kill so many?” he whispers to Neil.

  “Nah, don’t worry, pal,” says Neil. “Most of them was dead already. See if they break a leg, or if they’re a bit weak, they can’t make it to the feeding line, so they die of hunger. Mad, really, when there’s all that food there for ‘em, but they just can’t get through to it. Anyway, they only live five weeks from hatchin’ to catchin’. Five weeks! Not much time to develop a personality, eh?”

  “Personality?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to develop-a personality.”

  Another lorry arrives, and trundles away into the leafy lanes with another load of screeching misery. It is time for another break. Neil carefully smokes another half-cigarette. The Portuguese-Brazilians race to the tap and splash around, laughing and wrestling each other’s heads under the water. Tomasz drinks gulp after gulp from the tap, then washes his hair and face under the cold running water. To have longish hair and a beard in this situation is definitely a disadvantage. If only he had some of Yola’s nice scented soap.

  “Uh-oh.” Neil looks over towards the Portuguese-Brazilians, who are becoming increasingly raucous. “Bagpipes. Yer’d better not look at this, Mick.”

  But Tomasz is transfixed.

  One of them, the one with the manic eyes, has seized a bedraggled broken-legged chicken, and tucking it under his arm, its head poking out backwards behind his elbow, he is sneaking up on his friend, who is bending down to close a cage. As he straightens up, the other man squeezes the chicken hard with his elbow, like a bagpipe, and a torrent of excrement flies out of the chicken’s tail end and hits the man in the face. The chicken squawks and struggles to free itself, excrement still dribbling from its behind. The victim bellows in fury, wiping his face with his hands, which just spreads it around even more. Then he grabs another chicken, sticks it backwards under his arm, and squeezes it hard at his friend with a rough pumping action. The chicken lets out a long screech of pain. Excrement flies. The older man comes rushing across, shouting at the other two to stop, skids in the slime and ends up wallowing on the ground in all the muck. The fourth man just stands and watches, clutching his sides and weeping with laughter. Neil also stands and laughs, whooping hysterically, tears pouring down his face. To his horror, Tomasz finds that he is laughing too.