The Desert Run

by Gregg Dunnett

  THE DESERT RUN

  GREGG DUNNETT

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  Copyright © 2017 by Gregg Dunnett

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For Alba and Rafa

  You are my whole world

  Now go and tidy your room

  PART I

  PROLOGUE

  Three cars in front the men wait for us, dressed in their uniforms and high-visibility jackets. They look serious. Suspicious. I’ve got the engine running—all the cars in the queue have—but the engine doesn’t idle smoothly in Ben’s van, so I have to keep revving it. I can see one of the uniforms keeps glancing at us, like that’s annoying him.

  “Don’t rev it so hard,” Ben says, getting a bit nervous now. “Don’t draw attention to us.”

  I can’t bring myself to look over at him. My best friend in the world, who’s just knifed me in the back.

  The brake lights on the car in front go off, as the queue crawls one place forward. I have no choice but to follow. What else am I going to do, reverse back onto the ferry? Even if I wanted to, there’s a solid line of traffic blocking us off, and concrete barriers tight up against us on either side. We could make a run for it, just open the doors and leg it, but what good would that do? They’d probably catch us before we got out of the port, and even if not, how long can you last on the run? So our van tinkles as I move forward, from the bottles of wine and beer in the back. If only that was the problem.

  This isn’t the way we planned it. We researched this border crossing, and the plan was to drive straight in. Wave our passports and smile. We were counting on this one being a breeze.

  But even so, it’s not the fact that we’re about to be busted with a hundred kilos of drugs that’s worrying me. It’s what Ben’s just told me that’s still ringing in my head. It’s thrown me, it’s like I don’t care any more. It’s like I don’t even want to get home. Just to spite him, I give the engine a big rev.

  “Easy,” Ben says, anxiety spreading into his voice now.

  I almost can’t bring myself to answer him. I trusted him, and this is how he repays me? But I can’t talk about that, so I go with the obvious problem. The one I barely even care about.

  “We’re gonna get caught and go to prison. And you know what Ben?”

  He looks across at me.

  “What?”

  “It’s all your fault.”

  I stare at him, and I see confusion and hurt in his eyes, and it’s what I was hoping for. It makes me feel just a little bit better. But then he blinks it away and I see his confidence come back, but it’s an effort.

  “Jesus, Jake, what’s got into you? Have a little faith. They’re not going to find it. You did a good job.”

  For some reason this snaps me right back into the present. They really are searching every car, which really does mean we’re in big trouble. A sudden hope flares up in my brain like a match striking: Can I blame all this on Ben? Just blurt it all out to the customs guy when he leans down to tell me to get out of the van? It was Ben’s idea, so surely that makes him more guilty than me? But no. That’s never going to wash. He might have come up with it, but I’m sitting right here in the van with him. I’m in this just as much as he is.

  The car in front moves forward another place. Just one more car in front of them. We’re close enough now to watch how this works. The customs officer, the same one who looked pissed off at me for revving the engine, beckons the car at the front of the queue into one of the bays where they do the searches. He goes round to the driver and taps on the window. I guess he tells the driver to get out because the door opens, and a man steps out. They walk together to the boot, and the driver opens it. It’s a big car, a Volvo, and I can see little heads in the back, kids. Then the customs guy starts poking around. The driver leans in like he’s trying to help, and he gets told off. He puts his hands up like they’re gonna shoot him or something. Then they both calm down, and the customs guy points to the wall, and the man goes and stands and watches from there.

  Then they get the dog, a spaniel or something. Another officer has it on a lead, and its little tail is doing circles, it’s so excited. It jumps into the boot of the car and sticks its nose down. Tasting the smells coming out of the bags. Tasting the air in the car. Tasting with its nose, thousands of times more powerful than any human nose. I get a horrible feeling in my gut, like I’ve been punched. We sort of planned for a dog, but we didn’t really. We were more messing about then. Don’t make the mistake of thinking we were any good at this. This was our first time bringing dope in. We were making it up as we went along.

  Tasting the air in the car.

  I suddenly think of something. We might have the dope well hidden now, but a week ago, we just had it loosely piled up in the back of the van. We didn’t think of that, did we?

  And now I know we’re going to get caught. There’s just no way around it. And forget what I said earlier, I do care. I care about what’s going to happen to me, I care about what my Dad is gonna think. I feel my heart rate soar as I watch. I feel dizzy, like I’m about to pass out. My stomach feels like someone keeps punching me there, over and over again. I can’t believe I’ve put myself in this position. What the hell are they doing with a dog?

  “Jake mate, calm down,” Ben’s voice cuts through my panic. “We planned for this. We didn’t expect it, but we planned for it.”

  The words sound faraway, but they pull me back. Back into the van, back to the horrible reality.

  “They’re doing proper checks. We counted on them not doing proper checks.” Suddenly I’m back to trusting Ben will sort it all out. I can hear it in my voice.

  “Mate, you did a good job hiding it. They’re not going to find it. Relax.”

  I look across at Ben. Right now, I don’t know if I despise him or if he’s my only hope. But the thought of all that dope loosely piled in the back of the van crashes back in. My head starts to shake, it doesn’t feel like it’s me controlling it, it’s this simple, unfortunate fact. My head shakes even more.

  “You’re wrong Ben. We fucked up. There’s no way that dog’s not going to know we moved the drugs in the van.”

  And Ben suddenly gets it too. I see his face drop, his mouth fall open, as if to speak, but no words come out. We had all the dope just piled in here. Rubbing against the seats. No way the dog’s gonna miss it.

  Oops.

  Just then, the customs guy walks two steps toward us, calling us forward again. It’s our turn. I don’t move. I can’t move. He comes closer, looking pissed off that I’m holding him up. There’s nothing else I can do. I slip the clutch, and the van crawls forward.

  1

  I grew up in Crawley, a commuter town south of London. We lived in an ordinary three bedroom house with a view of the railway lines. I went to the ordinary school down the road where I had ordinary friends, and when I wasn’t at school, studying hard like the good little boy I was, I rode my bike or watched TV. Ordinary things.

  But somehow, so
mething happened to divert me from my ordinary path through life. This is that story. How I came to be sitting there that day, about to get busted for the large quantity of illegal drugs we had hidden in our van. And it all started when I went to university. When I met Ben.

  It was just Dad and me who drove down there that day, in his maroon Rover, to drop me off at my new halls of residence. The University of Brighton looked huge and daunting. Around us rose the rolling South Down hills, the same hills that end so abruptly at the white cliffs of Dover. I was eighteen years old, and Mum didn’t come because she was no longer with us.

  My mum was a teacher. She taught French and German in secondary school, although not the one I went to because they thought that might be difficult for me. When I was sixteen she found a lump in her breast which turned out to be a kind of cancer. At the hospital none of the doctors were worried at first, the survival rates for the type of cancer she had were really good. Literally no one died from it. It was like they were pleased she had it so they had someone they could definitely cure. So she’d be given her treatment, and everything would go really well, and they’d do tests to confirm it was beaten, but then the tests would reveal it had popped up somewhere else. And the doctors would tell us how unusual this was, and they’d give her a new treatment, and run new tests. But it would pop up again, like a bubble in a sticker that you can’t smooth out. And gradually the doctor’s smiles became less genuine, more fixed. We tried to stay positive even then, as a family. But that bloody bubble kept popping up, and then more of them until the cancer was all the way through her. And then, once the doctors weren’t smiling at all any more, she died.

  I don’t know whether Dad or I felt the most lonely or scared on the day he dropped me at university. He helped me carry all my bags into my room and unpack the few possessions I’d taken from the house I grew up in, then he looked around for something else to do, but there wasn’t anything. Eventually, he had to go. We hugged. He turned his face away so I wouldn’t see how close he was to losing it. And then he walked out, and I went to my new window and waited to see him returning to his car. Doing his best to pretend his heart wasn’t being crushed for the second time in a year. I thought he wasn’t going to turn and look but he did, just as he reached the car. He raised his hand to wave, as if he would see me later that evening, instead of pushing me out of his life and onto whatever path I would stumble down. Then he unlocked the car and climbed in, and I watched him drive away. Moments later, this guy stood in my doorway and waved a joint, asking if I wanted to smoke it with him.

  I didn’t want to, but I thought about what Dad had told me on the drive down. How I had to stay open-minded and be positive. How I had to make friends and live my life, not spend my time resenting how Mum had been taken away.

  I looked at this guy, this kid really. He was a little shorter than me, with cropped, dark hair. He looked smart, not like the dope heads I’d known at school who would never have made it to university.

  “Yeah, OK,” I said.

  “Cool.” He walked in and sat down.

  “I’m Ben,” he said.

  “Jake.”

  We leaned in closer and shook hands. My first handshake as a real student.

  “I’m in the room next door,” Ben said. “Was that your dad here before?”

  I nodded.

  “Pretty awesome to get away from them isn’t it? Parents I mean.”

  Ben didn’t wait for an answer. He put the joint between his lips and held up a silver Zippo lighter between his thumb and two fingers. He squeezed it and gave a flick with his wrist so that a bright orange flame danced from the top. He took the joint from his mouth and rolled the tip under the flame until it glowed orange. Then he took a drag, and held the joint out to me, the tip pointed at the ceiling.

  “I made mine promise they wouldn’t stay more than five minutes.” He exhaled a cloud of blue smoke. “Mum couldn’t stop crying.”

  I didn’t reply but took the joint and sucked on it gently, just taking the smoke into my mouth, not down into my chest. Then I took a second drag, this time taking it all the way in. I could feel the effects right away. A tingling sensation that spread throughout my body, like the ripples from a splash on the surface of a calm pond.

  “Could your mum not face it? Coming down and seeing you off?” Ben asked.

  I’d never had to explain it to anyone before. When I went back to school after she’d died, the teachers had already told everyone. All the kids knew not to talk about it.

  “My mum died,” I said. “A few months ago.” My voice sounded strange to me. I watched Ben to see how he’d react.

  I found out soon enough how most people would mumble some sort of apology and change the subject, and never meet your gaze. But not Ben. He wasn’t like that.

  “Oh shit. I’m sorry dude,” he said, keeping his dark eyes fixed on mine the whole time.

  “So what happened?” he asked and he sat down on my bed.

  I passed him back the joint and told him, as the tingling spread and deepened up and down my body.

  It’s funny how often the subject of parents comes up when you go to university. I guess it’s because it’s one of the big experiences that everyone is sharing; everyone’s living away from their parents for the first time. Or maybe kids on the verge of being adults just still define themselves by their parents. Anyway, it came up a lot. And every time it did, it was awkward, but every time, Ben looked out for me. Just to check I was alright. He’d take over the conversation if he sensed I needed it. He’d give me a look that asked if I wanted to get out of there. He’d make up a reason if I did.

  And in return, I took part in his crazy plans and schemes. Whatever they were, I always said yes. Mostly they involved going out and getting drunk. Chasing girls in the town’s pubs and clubs, and at parties in student houses. But sometimes they were stranger schemes too. Once he noticed a building site where a digger had been left unlocked with the keys stashed under a seat, and we broke in after the pubs had closed and tried to dig a hole. We wanted to make a sandcastle but it was harder than it looked to operate all the levers. We ended up reversing it into a ditch and then we had to run away because we were laughing so much.

  Another time we climbed a crane. There was a ladder all the way up, and it was surrounded by a steel mesh so you couldn’t really fall, but even so it was pretty scary up at the top. There was a craze for doing it and I think Ben wanted to see if it did anything for him. We never did it again so I guess it didn’t.

  We smoked some of the time, but not that much. Sometimes we took other drugs too, but it wasn’t ever about drugs, not for me, and certainly not for Ben. For him they were just a means to an end. And that end was adventure. That’s what Ben was searching for. It was like he could never get enough, it was an itch he couldn’t scratch.

  But mostly we weren’t particularly creative. Mostly we just drank. Testing the limits for how unhealthily the young human male can live before the body refuses to cooperate. And in doing that we weren’t special or different from anyone else. Everyone was drinking really, it’s just Ben happened to live next door to me, so I’d be the first person he called on to go down to the off-licence. I’d be the person he stumbled home with when it was finally time to go to bed. It was always Ben and me, and then the others who sometimes tagged along, and sometimes didn’t.

  After the misery of hanging out in hospital watching Mum slip away, it was a relief to be having fun, to be allowed to be young at last. And Ben was pretty good at drinking, at finding adventures. So we slotted together and we turned that first year into one long party, so that before it even seemed to really get going, the first year was over.

  Ben didn’t want the party to finish. He had a bit of money saved up from somewhere and he spent it on a camper van. Nothing too fancy but it went. A few of us drove it down the west coast of Europe that summer. We built fires on the beaches; we got drunk on red wine. We tried and failed to sleep with French girls, who wouldn’t
even talk to us. Some of us succeeded in sleeping with German girls, who are so much easier. We bought surfboards and learnt to surf in the fresh blue water of the Atlantic Ocean. It was fantastic. But Ben—being Ben—wanted to push things a bit further. He talked us all into taking the van further down and catching the ferry to Morocco. It was his van so the rest of us thought, why not? And that was where this whole idea was born.

  It wasn’t exactly hard to get dope in those little towns on the beaches of southwest France. You just had to hang around in the right bar, and sooner or later some French dude would ask if you wanted to score. Then you’d follow him outside, you’d hand over a twenty euro note, and in return, he’d quietly press into your hand a little block of sticky brown resin. You’d get enough for four people to get comfortably stoned for a couple of days. And it was useful to have it around the campfires, especially if there were any German girls around. But in Morocco... oh boy. In Morocco, it was even easier. In Morocco you just had to walk down the street and people would ask as they walked past, you’d hear them saying it under their breath: “Hello, my friend, you want hashish?” It was like everyone was selling it.

  And if you showed any interest, that same twenty euro note would buy three or four times as much in Morocco as it would in France. And all you had to do was hesitate and the price would drop. It was good stuff too. The dope in Morocco was smoother, stronger, just nicer all round. And that was from a total stranger on the street. We talked a lot then about what deal you might get if you were prepared to buy in bulk. Not seriously, not at that point, but there’s no doubt that the way we laughed about bringing some back planted the seed.