Tomorrow Pamplona

by Jan Van Mersbergen

  From the bulls, I mean, Robert continues. Running away from the bulls.

  Danny wonders whether there are bulls running after him. It feels as though the bulls were released this morning and they’ve been chasing him all day.

  He and Robert exchange a look. When they’re both staring ahead at the tarmac again, Robert says: Running away is a natural thing to do. It’s survival instinct. A reflex. Those chickens don’t have that reflex. They’re going to die. Whether they want to or not.

  Tall lampposts line the central reservation, their bases thick with grime. Some have seagulls sitting on top. Robert revs the engine. The fields are strips of green and brown, slowly merging into a flickering patchwork. The sky is blue except for a single vapour trail, which spreads wider and wider and then evaporates.

  Danny closes his eyes.

  *

  It was dark and cold and he was lying on his bed, staring up at the dark beams of the attic. He mumbled her name. She answered.

  Danny.

  Here, he said. He held his cock tight, squeezed it, made it grow. He put his other hand between his legs, tensed his thighs and said her name again. Yes, Danny. He thought of her face, of her eyes, of her dark hair and the way its colour contrasted with the ceiling. He felt her hand around his cock. She stroked it. He slid across the bed towards her, went onto his knees and leant forward. Resting one hand on the top of her head, he whispered something in the darkness. His hand twitched urgently. He swore and growled to himself and when he opened his eyes again all he could see was cold, dark beams and maybe a few puffs of his own breath.

  At night she was with him, during the day he was alone, in the evenings he went to the boxing school. A dozen other guys trained there with Ron, including Aaron and the young Russian. He worked to maintain his fitness levels. Lots of skipping and running. Boxing in the ring, going at sixty per cent. Sparring with the amateurs who were preparing for their own fights. For some of the lads, these were their first matches. Danny could tell they were nervous. He talked to them during the training sessions. He was the last to leave the building and he walked home at night through snowy streets.

  I’ve had Varon on the phone, Richard said to him one evening in the canteen after training. I tried every day this week, but he’s been in Germany. Finally got through to him tonight.

  Well?

  It’s good news. Fights in Germany, that’s what it’s all about.

  He nodded. Richard gave him the card. He wants to talk to you in person.

  Do I have to phone him?

  Sooner the better.

  Danny thought about her and the man who had put his hand on her back as they left the changing room.

  What’s stopping you?

  He went home. He cooked some spaghetti, watched TV and lay on the bed. He thought about her the whole time and about the man called Varon, with his neatly combed grey hair. In the days that followed, he saw Varon’s name everywhere. No photos, just his name. In magazines and newspapers, on a poster for a kickboxing gala stuck to the door of an electricity substation. Even on the radio. The voice that had dominated the changing room after the fight with Hristov now came out of the tiny speakers in his attic. An item about boxing and the criminal world. Was she there too, at the radio station? Did she push him through the studio doors in his wheelchair?

  He kept thinking about her, couldn’t stop whispering her name. If he could have behaved any differently, he would have done. The nights became carbon copies of each other until one evening a terrible screeching started up outside, between the blocks of flats. It sounded like a baby crying. He went downstairs, pushed open the window in the stairwell, looked down and saw a cat with white patches dart away over the fence of his downstairs neighbours, and a black cat on the roof of a nearby shed. He didn’t know if it was the cats or something else, but his mind was clear for the first time in ages. He went back upstairs, turned on the light, searched through the papers on his table. When he found the card, he smoothed out the creases and looked at it for a long time, as though he might discover something in the letters and numbers. A dark coffee stain marked one corner. He put the card down on the table, went to bed and slept well for the first time in weeks. His pillow lay beside him as he fell asleep and when he woke up he was hugging it to his stomach. There was a damp patch on the sheet. He slid out of bed and pulled on his jogging bottoms. The next thing he did was pick up the phone and dial that number. He knew it by heart.

  2

  Danny opens his eyes and focuses. The crash barrier has gone. There’s a strip of grass running along the hard shoulder, with a blackened, scorched-looking edge. In the distance, beyond the ploughed fields lying marshy and heavy in the sunlight, he sees some huge sheds with lorries parked in front. Music is playing very quietly inside the car, French music. He notices a blanket tucked between his left shoulder and the seat. He’s been tucked in like a child. He pulls off the blanket and tosses it onto the back seat. The seatbelt’s wrapped around his wrist. It hangs loosely across his chest.

  Police, says Robert.

  Danny’s eyes flash. He looks out of the window. Nothing but cars with French number plates.

  Where are we?

  Just outside Paris.

  Danny shakes off the seatbelt. He stretches, turns his head a few times. His neck clicks. He rubs his face and his forehead with the flat of his hand. Paris, he thinks. He asks Robert if he has a map.

  I know the route I’m taking.

  It’s just for me, so I can see where we are.

  In there.

  Robert points at the glove compartment. Danny pulls the pile of roadmaps from beneath the Dinky toy and looks at them one by one. He opens up a map of France, folds it out onto his lap. The map covers half of the windscreen. Paris is a multicoloured patch with Lens above it, in roughly the area where they must be. There’s Lille. And right at the bottom, beside the Atlantic, there’s Bordeaux, with the Spanish border beneath it. Pamplona comes after that. It’s not on the map. He stares at the coloured paper for a long time, at the wide red-and-yellow line crossing the whole of France, which they’ll follow all the way to Bayonne, before falling off the map.

  Danny folds the map so that he can look at northern France. He reads the names of the French towns on the road signs and looks for the same names on the map. Slowly Paris comes closer.

  Is the music disturbing you?

  He listens to the radio for a moment, to a woman’s voice. Says no.

  Sleep well?

  Yes.

  Nice dreams?

  What?

  Look at that blanket.

  What about the blanket?

  You were drooling all over it.

  Danny looks at the map, holds his finger to the paper and tries to concentrate on the place names. His finger is fixed on the middle of Paris, where red lines and yellow lines intersect.

  You weren’t dreaming about boxing, says Robert.

  The map rustles in his hands. Robert overtakes a lorry and blocks of flats appear on the right, bedecked with satellite dishes. It’s still a long way to the city centre, but the buildings are already starting to crowd together. They’re driving into the sun. He shades his eyes with his hand and scans the uneven horizon, sees nothing but high-rise blocks stretching into the distance.

  And you weren’t dreaming about your mother either.

  Leave my mother out of it.

  They carry on driving. After a while, Robert says: I always used to dream about Kim Wilde.

  Who?

  Kim Wilde. Whenever Kim popped round to visit, my mum had to change the sheets the next morning. It’d either be her or those three girls from Bananarama.

  Never heard of them either.

  But you were dreaming about someone like that, weren’t you? Hair a bit wild, those eyes. You know what I mean.

  New cars join the traffic while others disappear into the maze of exits. Robert concentrates on the road. There’s a six-storey building beside the motorway. The top two floo
rs on the corner are gutted, the walls are scorched, the window frames charred. On the corner of the building, a melted drainpipe curls away from the wall. Danny folds up the map. He’s thinking about her.

  He says: Yes, she was certainly wild.

  But she isn’t wild now?

  Danny looks at the map, then back outside.

  You said: She was wild.

  That’s right.

  Did you dump her?

  Danny feels a muscle twitch in his back. He shifts position, puts one hand on the small of his back and loudly exhales.

  Or did she dump you?

  None of your business.

  She dumped you, didn’t she?

  Danny doesn’t reply.

  Is that why you’re running away? Or doesn’t it have anything to do with that?

  You fucking heard what I said, didn’t you? Danny says, hitting the dashboard with the map.

  Robert blinks a few times and says: No need to take it out on the map.

  Danny runs his finger around the edge of the map, smoothes out a crease.

  That Kim Wilde, says Robert, she’s still wild. She doesn’t have a choice really, does she? He laughs. Not with that name.

  If the map had still been open on his lap, Danny could have buried his face in it. All he can do is shove it into the pocket in the passenger door, close his eyes and hope that Ragna will disappear from his thoughts. But then he pictures her black hair and the contours of her face. And the cold tiled floor.

  Slowly, he opens his eyes and focuses on the bustle of Paris. The houses along the motorway have small balconies. He sees a bearded man in a long white robe, leaning on a railing. On another balcony, a moped is standing upside down.

  The car’s boxed in. Robert stays in the right-hand lane.

  That your wife?

  Robert fiddles with his earring and gives it a tug. Then he points at the photo on the dashboard and says: Yeah. That’s Manuela.

  Manuela?

  Yes.

  And does Manuela look a bit like her?

  Like who?

  Kim Wilde.

  Manuela’s my wife, says Robert.

  So she doesn’t look like her?

  At least I got to give my woman a proper goodbye this morning.

  Danny snorts. Then he explodes: Like that’s my fucking fault.

  Robert apologizes.

  It’s okay, says Danny. He looks at the photo.

  Were they already up when you left?

  The little ones?

  Yes.

  I kissed them both and they waved me off. I blew my horn as I was driving away and then gave it another blast when I went round the corner.

  His eyes seemed to have calmed down, but then the tic starts again. Danny thinks about the bulls and says: They’re sure you’ll be coming back?

  They wouldn’t let me go otherwise.

  So Pamplona can’t be that dangerous then.

  It’s not about danger. It’s about the way it makes you feel. Inside. Robert bangs his chest with his fist. It’s a feeling. Do you understand?

  Danny understands. A feeling that rages in his body and his head, a feeling he wants to control.

  The Eiffel Tower suddenly appears, off to one side. Danny leans forward to get a better view. It seems to be swaying in the wind. Then the tower disappears behind tall buildings. Danny peers along the road to see where it’s going to pop up again, but it doesn’t reappear.

  He looks at the photo on the dashboard, at the hand on the girl’s shoulder. He swears to himself. She’s not just his wife. She’s a mother.

  It takes them a long time to get out of Paris, but eventually the buildings become smaller and the kilometres of anonymous industrial estates give way to fields.

  He hears Robert’s voice again. You known her a long time?

  A while, he growls.

  Robert is silent. Even the car seems silent. Danny puts his hands in his pockets. They drive in silence down the toll road to the south.

  *

  The motorway splits at Saint-Arnoult. Robert takes the exit for the first service area and asks Danny if he’d like something to eat. He pulls into a space at the edge of the car park. There are a few lorries at the other end and a man who’s checking the straps on his tarpaulin. Then he disappears behind his lorry. They get out of the car. The air’s warm and dry. Danny feels the heat of the ground rising up through his shoes, caressing his legs.

  Beside the restaurant is a hoarding with a huge advertisement for cigarettes. Danny thinks about cigarettes as they walk to the entrance. Smoking cigarettes. That’s what she does in bed at night. She lies on her stomach with her elbows on the pillows. The ashtray in front of her on the edge of the bed. The smoke drifting up into the top of the attic. She stubs out her cigarette and pushes the ashtray away. He remembers the way her eyes looked as she threw the sheet back for him. That wild look.

  Robert heads inside, into the smell of coffee.

  Danny stops. Just stretch my legs, he says.

  He walks around the building until he sees the motorway again, with the car park on the right. The lorries are lined up in one corner. A row of conifers stands between the last lorry and the motorway. Cars thunder past beyond the trees. The air smells of bulls. He crouches down and stares at the ground, at the fine moss growing in the cracks.

  You look for something?

  Danny turns around. A man is smoking a roll-up beside the cabin of the last lorry.

  He shakes his head.

  You need a ride?

  Already got one.

  Danny stands up and when he sees the number plate he says in Dutch: You’re from the Netherlands.

  Yeah, says the man. And so are you. Where are you heading?

  Spain.

  Same here, says the man. He slaps the side of the lorry, takes a last drag of his roll-up and stubs it out with his shoe. He nods at the trailer. Danny realizes that the lorry is a cattle transporter. Now he knows where the smell’s coming from. Red-and-white cows huddle together behind the planks. He can see a wet nostril through one of the gaps, with a tongue licking away at it.

  I’m taking them to be slaughtered.

  The sound of the motorway is drowned out by a cow’s hoof banging against the side of the lorry. A cow bellows. Between the planks, he sees one big, dark eye with another eye right beside it, belonging to another cow. He senses that the cows aren’t standing so close together because the trailer is too small, but because they know what’s going to happen to them. And all they have is one another.

  The man takes out his tobacco pouch and rolls another cigarette. He says: That abattoir down there, you’ve never seen anything like it. It’s an entire village. They ride bikes to the canteen when they have their break. If they walked, they’d have to leave again as soon as they got there.

  He’s silent for a moment. The cow bellows again.

  Don’t I know you from somewhere?

  Danny doesn’t answer.

  From TV or something. We always watch the boxing round at my mate’s place.

  That’s not me.

  No, I’m sure I’ve seen you before.

  Got to go, says Danny. He walks towards the motorway, before changing his mind and heading back to the restaurant.

  The lorry’s engine starts and it begins to move, shuddering and shaking, and lumbers towards the motorway.

  Some children are playing by the restaurant entrance. They’re climbing on the fence between the pavement and the bushes that surround the building. They take it in turns to jump off the fence and play chicken with the sliding doors, running up to the entrance and then shrieking and darting back to the bushes when the doors open. Then they wait for the doors to swish shut again. As Danny approaches, they sit there on the fence, looking the other way.

  Robert’s at a table just inside the door, talking to someone on the payphone. Danny goes to the toilets. There’s a lorry driver in there, washing his hands. He’s younger than Danny and has a pockmarked face. A roll-up h
angs from the corner of his mouth. As he holds his hands under the drier, he looks over at Danny. The machine comes to life and starts blowing and whining. Danny disappears behind the door of the cubicle in the far corner. He locks it and waits for the drier to stop. He leans against the tiled wall, tilts his head back. There are damp patches on the ceiling. He sees the tiles of the changing room. He puts the seat down and sits there, his elbows on his knees and his head heavy in his hands. He presses his hands against his temples. It feels as though his head is in a vice that’s slowly tightening. His head starts to crack, but the thoughts don’t go away.

  He stands up, undoes his trousers, clasps his penis in his left hand. He feels small and, as that feeling sinks in, he feels himself shrink even more.

  He pisses in the toilet, over the seat. It splashes onto the tiled floor. He takes a few sheets of toilet paper from the holder, wipes the seat, throws the paper into the toilet and flushes. He washes his hands and looks in the mirror. The wall above the mirror is a dingy white. He looks down, holds his hands under the stream of lukewarm water and stares at the mirror, at his hard blue eyes. He shuts them and waits for the water to get colder so he can let it run over his wrists. But the water stays lukewarm.

  *

  Richard was standing behind the bar in the canteen at the boxing school, his hands resting on the wood. Aaron and three dark-skinned guys, one of them from Cuba, were sitting on the other side of the bar. Ron was propping up the bar beside the Cuban. Rich said the Cuban had been amateur world champion. Ron stood there for a long time, watching the Cuban, listening to him complain about the cold. Then he said in English: You trained in Havana?

  Yes, said the Cuban.

  With Sanchez? That tall guy?

  The Cuban nodded.

  The one with the long, thin arms?

  Yes. I trained with Sanchez.

  Sanchez with the gold earrings? He grabbed hold of his earlobes. In both ears?

  Yes, man.

  Ron smiled at his brother and said in Dutch: Brother, give me another coffee. And give him something a bit less strong this time. The Sanchez I’m talking about was the porter at our hotel.