The next morning I concentrated on just one board and prepared it to be sealed. First, I cut two sections of plastic sheeting to cover the bricks and tucked the first in around them as best I could, so that the epoxy wouldn’t stick to the dope itself. Then I laid the second sheet over the entire hole. Then I had an idea and took everything out again. Into the empty shell of the hull, I spooned in a full jar of instant coffee. I didn’t know if it would really help in putting sniffer dogs off the scent, but there seemed no harm in trying. Then I repeated what I’d done before, shouting to Ben to get lots more coffee.
I double-checked everything. I made sure I had all the materials and tools I’d need in the next stage ready. I didn’t want to mess the next part up. I weighed precise amounts from the two bottles of clear, syrupy epoxy with my digital scales and mixed them together for a few minutes. Then I painted the mixture onto the plastic sheeting, and beyond where it overlapped onto the surrounding parts of the board, now sanded back so that my additional layers could be blended in. Then I laid on my first sheet of fibreglass, allowing the resin to soak through and wet out the fibres. And then I added a second sheet of fibreglass, touching it up with additional epoxy where there were dry spots. The air being so warm meant I had less time to work than back in Brighton, which nearly caught me out. The resin was already turning to jelly as I finished, but by the time I left it, I was satisfied. The first board was on the way.
Although it was dry to the touch a couple of hours later, I forced myself to leave it overnight, and then I trimmed off the excess fibreglass to begin the process of blending it in. The bottom of the board was now sealed, and the set fibreglass and epoxy gave it a surface that was hard and strong, but you could see the shadow of the brown bricks beneath, and the surface wasn’t flat. I prepared my squeegee and filler and got to work fixing that. This was easier. I just had to get the consistency of the filler right so that I could draw the flexible blade of the squeegee along the bottom of the board, and it would fill the dents and pattern left by the fibreglass. Two coats, one to sort the larger holes, the second two hours later when it was dry, to sort the smaller ones. Then two hours of careful sanding, and it was looking good. Another two hours, and I couldn’t detect a blemish on the surface, either by sight or touch. The repair was perfectly blended in, and even when you tapped the surface of the board, it was hard to detect what was original and what I’d put in. But it still looked a mess. Instead of a white, smooth surface, the bottom of the board was a mixture of browns and greens, from the filler and parts where the hidden contents still showed through the opaque resins and fibreglass.
While that first board was drying, I got started on the second. I was slightly concerned I was going to run out of materials, and I didn’t want to skimp, so I drew up a shopping list for Ben, as well as giving him the task of disposing of the pile of hacked-out foam and the old surfaces of the board’s undersides. We didn’t want to fill up the bins at the house with all this, just in case someone got suspicious, and Ben said it would be easy enough to dump it in the desert.
I decided to paint at night when it was cooler. I hung up a sheet against the back wall and propped the board so that the paint wouldn’t pool on the surface. There were a few bits of graphics, which wrapped around the board’s edges and onto the bottom; I’d been careful not to damage this area when I’d cut into it, and I masked them off now. Then I shook the paint and put on the first coat. Instantly, it was transformed. It looked damn near perfect, except for a fingerprint where Ben wanted to see if the paint was dry. I told him to get the fuck out of my workspace and fixed that. Then I left it overnight again, getting up early to inspect it and adding a second coat, then a third. By lunchtime, I was confident it was dry, and I had my first chance to inspect the finished board.
It was beautiful. I thought of my dad and how he’d taught me all this stuff, I wondered what he’d think if he saw what I’d done. I decided he’d probably be rather proud. When Ben came in, I showed him my work and waited for the inevitable praise. He came over and stared at it closely. He gave me a quizzical look, like he wasn’t sure if I was kidding with him, wasn’t sure if this was perhaps a board I hadn’t even started with, hadn’t even opened up yet. Then he picked it up.
“Fucking hell, Jake, it weighs a ton.”
My pride and sense of self-satisfaction disappeared in a heartbeat.
“Well, yeah, it’s got twenty-five kilos of hashish in it. This board only weighed ten kilos before.”
“Fucking hell. That’s not great, is it?” He made a face.
“Oh, fuck you, Ben. You want me to work miracles? Look at it—it’s fucking perfect,” I began, the stress of nearly three days work suddenly coming out. “You can’t see the join. You can’t feel the join…” I stopped, realising he was kidding me.
“It’s awesome Jake. It’s a thing of beauty.” Ben said.
“Yeah right,” I replied, not quite convinced he meant it.
“Go and have a swim. I’ll roll you a joint,” Ben said.
I did what he said, doing lengths underwater until I calmed down. And Ben came out with the joint and a beer that he’d managed to find in a shop somewhere.
“It’s perfect, mate,” he said. “We’re going to have no problems at all.”
24
I got back on with it, enjoying myself a little less now. Not because of Ben’s lack of appreciation, but for another reason. I was getting to the end of the job, and that meant one thing. We had to start thinking about driving home.
You’ll probably appreciate it wasn’t the thought of three thousand miles sitting next to Ben that worried me. Nor his insistence on choosing the music on the iPod. My concern stemmed purely from the two international borders we had to cross before we got home.
We’d tried to get a good look at the customs area on the Spanish port as we came through, and Ben had even fired off some photos, holding his phone in a way that didn’t make it too obvious what we were doing. Unlike the time we’d driven back the summer before, the customs section was empty, but that might just have been because all the incoming traffic from our ferry had already passed through. The photos didn’t help much: slightly blurry images where you could see a row of sheds painted blue, tables inside just visible where, presumably, suitcases could be opened and examined. We couldn’t see much else, but you could guess it. Inner rooms with tiny windows where the guilty would be led away to, the first step in a journey through the Spanish criminal justice system that would destroy our lives. Our plan didn’t rely on evading the customs officers. We were banking that we had the gear well enough hidden that it didn’t really matter if they stopped us. With no reason to suspect we were anything other than tourists, they might check the van, they might even rifle through our bags, but they’d never justify drilling into our boards. But as we got closer to testing this, I became less and less confident about that.
We left the day before our Airbnb dates ran out. The owner had told us to leave the keys where we found them, but we didn’t want to run the risk of him or the cleaners turning up early and seeing what we looked like. All our dealings with him had been done through a fake email account that Ben set up, and we paid him through a fake PayPal account. Even so, we figured that if the owner had any reason to suspect something was odd about us, it wouldn’t be that hard to track us down. That meant we had to spend a long time cleaning up. I made Ben do all the work while I put the finishing touches to all four of the boards. The last thing we did was load them onto the roof rack and strap them down, then thread the cable lock around the whole lot. It would be pretty annoying to get them nicked after all the work we’d put in.
The drive back up to the port at Tangier started off uneventfully, but we got held up in Rabat, and that made us late for the ferry. It was a single-lane road, more or less a straight line that stretched to the horizon with a steady stream of cars and trucks on it. You could sit back and follow behind a truck at forty, but if you wanted to go any faster, it meant overta
king all the time. And even Ben’s van could do sixty. Because the road was so straight, you could always see traffic coming toward you. It was just a case of judging the gap, gunning the engine, and going for it.
It’s addictive once you get started doing that, and I was hammering along, watching the kilometres tick down to the ferry port in Tangier, eating my way up toward each new truck and then sailing past them in a blast of yellow dust, with the flashing lights and horns of oncoming traffic warning me when I got too close. A couple of times, Ben told me to cool it, but I ignored him. Driving dangerously was keeping me from thinking about what was coming up.
There was no customs on the Moroccan side, just a passport check by a guy in Spanish uniform. He didn’t look very interested in a couple of British tourists especially since we were almost the last to arrive. We got sent to the back of the queue for the boat, but then, because we had the roof piled so high, when they started boarding the little ferry we got pulled to the front again. When we clanked over the metal plates into the hull of the boat, we were the first on and got told to park with the nose of the van nearly touching the raised off-ramp, where you drive off. It was open to the sky above, and when we left the van and climbed up to the seating area, we could look down through the boat’s front windows at a hundred kilos of the finest Moroccan dope hidden in our four boards. When we looked up, we could see the Rock of Gibraltar over the narrow stretch of shocking-blue sea, flecked with whitecaps where the wind was hammering through the straits. We drank coffee and sat in silence, as the ferry cast off and carried us away from Africa and back toward Europe.
The port in Algeciras crept into view as we neared the Spanish coast. We left the looming Gibraltar behind and edged closer. Ferries take so long to dock, especially when you’re nervous. There was a queue of people waiting to go down the stairs and get back into their vehicles. We watched the deck hands hurl thin ropes to men standing on the dock, and then those men hauled these ropes until they dragged much thicker ropes up from the filthy water and secured the boat to the land. Then there was a tone and an announcement, first in Spanish, then in bad English: “All passengers should now returning to their vehicles.” Oh God, I thought. Here we go.
It was Ben’s turn to drive, and he climbed into the driver’s seat. A mixed blessing for me. It meant I wouldn’t have to worry about stalling, but I had nothing to distract myself from what was coming up. I checked I had the passports ready about fifty times as the sound of metal rang out in the enclosed hull behind us. I fiddled with my phone. I guessed that was what most people would be doing, getting onto a new network, but my hands were shaking as I held it, and I felt so sick I wanted to throw up. There were a couple of motorbikes beside us. I prayed the customs guys would stop them, not us. Anyone but us.
The off ramp, raised vertical in front of us, began to lower, and the port opened out in front of us, behind it the city of Algeciras. It’s not much to look at, but the stretch of apartment buildings in the distance looked beautiful to me. If we could just get there, we’d be safe. At least, for now, and right now I would take that. Ben started the engine. He didn’t look at me; his eyes were on the guy whose job it was to wave the cars off. Ben was humming. He does that when he’s nervous.
The motorbikes were let off first, then us. Ben revved too hard to take the slight rise up the ramp; I felt my heart rate climb. I wasn’t sure if I could handle this. I forced myself to breathe. Slow, easy breaths. Calming breaths. That passed a few seconds, and we followed the bikers through the maze out of the port.
Up ahead, we could see the customs area. “ADUANA” in big letters on a gantry that hung over the road, behind it those blue sheds. Two men stood side by side, waiting for the flow of traffic to reach them. As the first bike neared, one of them held out his hand, pointing into the first bay.
“Fuck,” Ben said. “They’re fucking stopping people.” I felt him accelerating a little.
“Take it easy, just keep going,” I heard myself say. We were nearly level with the two men now. I didn’t want to look at them, but I thought that might look wrong, so I fixed my eyes on them and prayed. They glanced at the van. Then the first man waved his hand in a slowing motion, his expression irritated. My pulse doubled. They were stopping us. This was like a bad dream.
Ben slowed the van further, but the guy’s expression got more irritated. He changed his hand signal now. It wasn’t “slow down” anymore but “speed up, keep moving.” Keep going. Get out of here. Proceed to go. Collect two hundred pounds. You look like nice boys, back from your travels. Back from your silly little surfing holiday. Welcome back to Europe. We’re not interested in you. Get the fuck out of here. I didn’t breathe. Ben aimed for the gap between the blue sheds, the exit for the port in sight, and Ben must have had to fight so hard to keep the speed down now. And then we were out. Passing through the chain-link fence that marked the boundary of the port, and then onto the road, straight onto a roundabout. Spanish cars suddenly all around, smarter, cleaner than the traffic in Morocco. We got sucked into the flow of cars and carried into the town, along the beautiful waterfront. I realised I was out of breath. I really hadn’t been breathing, and then Ben saw a gap by the side of the road and pulled into it, forgetting to indicate. An angry horn sounded behind us.
“What’s wrong?” I managed to ask.
“Nothing. I’ve just got to stop for a bit.”
I understood. Ben got the van more or less parallel to the pavement and killed the engine. Then he put his head in his hands, and leaned forward on the steering wheel. He stayed like that for a long while, and when he finally rocked back upright and dropped his hands, his face was streaked with tears. His whole body was shaking. And he was white. Even with the tan he’d picked up, his face was just white, and he wasn’t smiling this time.
“Fucking hell, mate. That scared the shit out of me.” He burst into tears again.
It was good to know it wasn’t just me feeling that.
25
France is big. I said that before, right?
On the way back, it was the last bit that got me. Northern France. It’s so empty and flat, and Ben’s van felt ponderous, lolling around on its springs as we bumped our way northward, the engine somehow hanging in there. We’d been driving for so long by then, drunk so much coffee and Red Bull, that we weren’t speaking much, just odd words here and there. The rest of the time, we’d just stare out the windscreen in a trance as the tarmac rolled toward us, the faster cars zipping by on the left-hand side, their indicators going all the time in that strange way the French drive. But by then, even that seemed familiar. We felt nearly home. All we had left to do was the customs border between France and England. And for some reason we’d never thought of that as too much of a problem.
Ben had booked the Dieppe-to-Newhaven ferry for the return trip. They’re both smaller ports, a little bit away from the main crossing points of Dover and Calais. They’re a lot less busy, and we figured this meant there would be fewer customs officers stationed there. We actually researched it. Newhaven is just twenty minutes down the road from Brighton, and we’d driven down there to check it out. We went ready to pretend we were meeting someone off the boat if anyone challenged us, but no one did. No one even looked twice. We parked at the back of the terminal car park, where we could see the cars streaming off the boat, and we watched them drive past the customs gates through Ben’s binoculars. We watched four ferries come in, sat in the van having a sneaky spliff. Every time, all the cars just drove straight off. I didn’t see a single customs officer the whole time.
So yeah, we weren’t too worried. We were just tired. A bit sick of each other’s company. Watching the road feed itself toward us. And I was passing the hours by daydreaming. As each mile brought us closer to the flat, I was thinking about Julia, whether she would be in when we got there, and how she’d react when I told her that we’d done it.
We got to the port at Dieppe early enough that we had time to stock up on duty-free beer before
we checked in. There’s no customs on the French side of the Channel. You just show your ticket and drive straight on. Park in the bowels of a ship, and then walk up the softly carpeted stairs into a weird world of plastic café tables and the subtle smell of sick.
The nerves kicked in a bit at that point, but not as bad as the other ferry. Even so, the Newhaven boat takes four hours, and once it casts off, there’s no backing out. Once it docked we’d have to make the short drive through another customs channel and hope like hell nothing went wrong. If it did, if for some reason they stopped us and found it… Well, that would be that. Game over. The beginnings of a long stay in an unpleasant correctional institution, criminal records. Buggered by men who hadn’t seen women in twenty years. So the nerves were jangling a little bit.
It was altogether nicer to just keep going back to the Julia daydream. I wondered how I’d tell her. Maybe she’d come into the room, by accident, while I was working on the boards. She’d see everything, just as I had the skin peeled back and the slabs of resin exposed. She’d smile at our secret. Maybe we’d smoke a little to test it out. After that, well, I still had that packet of condoms in my room. Hell, in my mind, we ended up with the whole load of dope piled on the bed and us fucking like rabbits on top of it. Like I said, I was daydreaming a little bit.
The Desert Run Page 12