2007 - Two Caravans

by Marina Lewycka

  “To all caravan dwellers everywhere!” Tomasz said, raising his cracked cup.

  In fact nobody gets very much sleep that night. They lie awake listening to the storm outside, and talking in low whispers, until at last the wind drops, the rain patters away, and the sky grows light.

  Vitaly is waiting for them at the ferry terminal next day. He is talking on his phone again and looking around with an edgy, anxious air. Marta notices for the first time the restlessness in his eyes, and it makes her feel uneasy. After the intimacy of last night, his brash mobile-phone patter seems to strike a false note. But he smiles with delight when he sees them.

  He has a companion with him, a young man with the same shaven head and a complexion as dark as his own, but older, with slightly coarser features and a scar across his left cheek which has caught the tip of his lip, whom he introduces as Mr Smith.

  “Mr Smith will be your escort,” he says to the Chinese girls. “He will accompany you to Amsterdam and introduce you to family of distinguished diplomat. Is this not so, Mr Smith?”

  Mr Smith smiles, and the scar on his upper lip pulls tight against his teeth.

  “Ladies. Please come with me. You have your passports?”

  He leads them through the crowd to a large silver car that is parked outside.

  “Goodbye,” they say, waving their hands through the darkened glass.

  Song Ying, known to the others as Chinese Girl One, comes from Guangdong Province in southern China. Her father works in a new bank in a large industrial town, and is a person of some standing in the local community. Her mother is a teacher. Song Ying is their only child, and they dote on her, sparing no expense, so she is raised with rather an elevated expectation of what her life will be. She is a bright girl, and they have paid for her to have private lessons. At nineteen, she passes the entrance exams to be accepted into the prestigious Beijing University Business School. Her parents have saved up enough money for the fees. Her course starts in the autumn. Or at least that’s when it was due to start.

  Sixteen months ago, her mother became pregnant. The authorities had become lax about the one-child rule, and she thought she might get away with it, but recently, in one of their periodic bouts of orthodoxy, they have been tightening up again. She is summoned to the provincial council and given the choice of aborting the foetus or paying a substantial tax. Song Ying’s mother uses some of her savings to have an ultrasound scan done privately. The scan tells her that she is carrying a boy. Song Ying’s parents discuss the choice facing them late into the night. Her father urges her mother to have the abortion, but her mother weeps so much that in the end he relents. They go ahead and have the child; and they pay the tax.

  The tax takes up all the money they have saved for Song Ying’s education and more, leaving them in debt. The baby is beautiful. He is spoiled by all the members of the family, and grows fat very quickly. Song Ying’s mother is happy and hardly notices Song Ying any more, except to tell her, “Look, you have a beautiful brother. Isn’t that enough?” Song Ying’s father takes a promotion in order to help pay the extra tax, and another night-job in a restaurant. “Don’t worry,” he tells his daughter, “I will find you a good job in the bank even without a university degree.” Song Ying cries into her pillow at night, but nobody hears.

  Then Song Ying learns of a college in England where for a modest fee overseas students can enrol and get a student visa, without having to attend any classes. With a student visa, she can come to Britain to study, and still work part-time. No one will check how many hours she is working. The college will gladly confirm that she is attending classes, so long as she pays the fees. They will even help her to find a job. She can work all the hours she likes, and so favourable is the exchange rate with the yuan that, even after paying for the airfare and the college fees, the money she earns will more than fund her first year of university in Beijing—she does the calculations carefully, for she cannot afford to make a mistake. Then she applies to the college, is accepted, and signs an agreement to pay for her airfare and her fees from the wages she will earn.

  The college is not what she expected—it is just some rooms above a betting shop in a shabby street miles from the centre of London. There are only four classrooms. Most of the students, like herself, have not come to study. Her job in a busy restaurant often leaves her feeling too tired to concentrate on the few English classes she does attend. Through the college, she meets Soo Lai Bee, a Malay-sian Chinese girl, who has enrolled for an English language course (the college does run some genuine courses alongside its other activities). For Song Ying, having grown up without brothers or sisters in the intensely protected environment of her parents’ home, to have the company of another girl of her age is delightful. They speak the same language, and they have so much to talk about. Soo Lai Bee is sympathetic to her troubles, and has problems of her own to share. They become inseparable. When the college puts out information about the strawberry-picking job, and offers to provide (for a fee, of course) the requisite papers declaring that they are students of agriculture, they both decide on the spur of the moment to give it a try.

  Although the college found Song Ying the strawberry-picking job, she has not yet earned enough to pay her college fees, let alone save enough for university. However, she is hard-working, intelligent and ambitious. Surely she will find a way to achieve her dream?

  To be Chinese in Malaysia you have to be twice as clever and work twice as hard to get anywhere, that’s what Soo Lai Bee’s father told her. Even then, it’s not always enough. So when Soo Lai Bee, known to the others as Chinese Girl Two, got five straight A’s in her STPM exams and still failed to get a place in medical school, while a number of Bumiputra Malay students with lower grades got quota places, her hopes were dashed. It’s because the Chinese are too successful in Malaysia, her father muttered darkly. If the majority Bumiputra population gets resentful, there will be riots against the Chinese. Look at Indonesia. Even so, it rankled. Her parents, who were ambitious for her, agreed that she should study in England.

  Yes, it would cost a lot of money. But her father had funds, having built up a successful family construction business. If you’re Chinese in Malaysia, the only way to do business is to team up with a Bumiputra company. They get the contract, under regulations which restrict granting of contracts to non-Malays, then you buy the contract from them. They get the business, you do the work, the law is observed, and everybody is happy.

  In fact Soo Lai Bee’s father got on quite well with his Bumiputra business partner, Abdul Ismail, who had made his millions selling on Bumiputra-quota car-import permits to the Chinese, and dabbled in construction contracts as a sideline; they even met socially sometimes. It was at one of these gatherings that Soo Lai Bee met Zia Ismail, his son. It was partly the fact that he was Bumiputra that attracted her to him; it was partly the fact that she was not Malay that attracted him to her. It is the privilege of young people to fall in love with the wrong person, and they did.

  Abdul Ismail was furious. He gave his business partner an ultimatum: break up the relationship, or break up the business partnership. Soo Lai Bee wept and wept, but really, there was no choice. Her mother and two older sisters put pressure on her. Her father warned that without the business partnership, and the lucrative public sector contracts, there would be no fees to fund her English university education. Don’t worry, I’ll wait for you, said Zia Ismail.

  Her English medical school place was conditional on her achieving a Grade 7 in the International English Language Test, and her parents thought it best to get her out of the way at once. She signed up with a college for overseas students in London. Within two weeks of her departure for England, Soo Lai Bee learnt that Zia was engaged to someone else.

  At first she was sad, then she was furious, then she was glad to be away from home, and in a new country where nobody cared what race you were. At the college, she made friends with Song Ying, another Chinese girl, who wasn’t even studying but just neede
d a work permit. They talked for hours about mothers, fathers, boyfriends, brothers, sisters, Poles, Ukrainians, Malays and Englishes. They laughed and cried together. They went off to pick strawberries together. They went off to Amsterdam together.

  Buttercup Meadow

  The Majestic Hotel at Shermouth might have been considered luxurious in the 19505, compared with hotels on the Baltic, but it has seen little by way of refurbishment or even basic maintenance since then. Among its many discomforts are the fact that the lift is broken (Yola and Malta’s room is on the fifth floor), the water in the communal bathrooms is turned off after 9 PM (en suite? You must be joking) and it is infested with cockroaches. They do, however, have a very nice view of the sea.

  But the worst thing about the Majestic Hotel is that inside its massive redbrick-Gothic cockroach-crawling walls are housed some two hundred people, not travellers or holiday makers, but people trying to live their lives here—migrant workers like themselves, asylum-seekers from every strife-torn corner of the world, homeless families from city slums in England—stacked one above the other like souls in hell, jostling in the queues for the filthy toilets, stealing each other’s milk from the mouldy communal fridges, keeping each other awake with their arguments, celebrations and nightmares.

  There are no communal meals, and ‘guests’ have to take their meals in cafes or forage for themselves and eat in their own rooms—nice for the cockroaches. And though there is no birdsong, neither is there ever silence; for even in the dead of night there is always someone getting up for an early morning shift or returning from a late one, playing music or having a fight or making a baby, or comforting a crying child, so that the only way to stay sane is to cut yourself off, to block out the crush of humanity pressing in through the walls, the floors and the ceilings. Yola sums it up in three words: “Too many foreigners.”

  If this was really Hell, though, there should be devils with pitchforks, thinks Tola. Instead, they have been assigned to share a room with two Slovak women, who are not particularly welcoming to the newcomers, having previously had it to themselves, and who have spread their stuff out and hung their wet knickers to dry all over the place, making the room steamy as well as cluttered. Of course they are not to be blamed that the hotel has no proper laundry facilities, but even worse, in Tola’s opinion, is the type of knickers they choose to wear, which are of thong design. The uncontrolled way these Slovak women’s hefty buttocks bounce around beneath their thongs is deplorable, and Yola cannot for the life of her understand why any woman should choose to inflict such discomfort on herself when generously cut knickers of the white cotton style are universally available, inexpensive, and known to have hygienic advantages, and moreover, contrary to what might be supposed, are considered to be extremely seductive by men of a more refined nature, of whom, she can only suppose, there are precious few in Slovakia.

  Marta also views the thong knickers with abhorrence, though for different reasons.

  When Yola and Marta were dropped off at the hotel, Tomasz was told to stay in the van, as he was needed at the Sunnydell Chicken Farm and Hatchery in Titchington. He protested vehemently that he only wanted to be with Yola, and he didn’t care about this new job, he would be happy just to sit with his guitar and sing to her. But the van was already on its way, Yola and Marta waving and disappearing through the rear windows.

  “No worry. Not far,” said the minibus driver. “You come back when you have good pay in you pocket, then you make good possibility. Heh heh.”

  For some reason, all the seats of the minibus had been taken out, so the passengers had to squat on the floor. From this position, he couldn’t see much of the surroundings, but there were fields, woods, and at one point a glimpse of the sea. Then they were negotiating speed bumps on a long tarmac drive, and they had arrived.

  The minibus pulled up in front of a pair of small brick-built semidetached houses, standing in a ragged overgrown garden behind a wooden fence. They should have been charming but, even at first sight, Tomasz felt there was something seedy and forbidding about them. The curtains were drawn, although it was late morning, and there were several overflowing black rubbish bags by the front doors which tainted the air with a vile smell.

  “Here,” said the driver, indicating the house on the left. “You stay here.” Then, as if to reassure him, he pointed to the house on the right. “And I am stay here.”

  Tomasz picked up his bag and slung his guitar across his shoulder. Well, to stay in a house at last would be a good change, he thought, and at night at least he could close his eyes and close the door.

  “When you ready, you go to office there.”

  The driver pointed across to a double gate behind which was a wide yard and a low redbrick building with a few vehicles parked outside. Beyond that, up another drive, were several huge green hangar-like buildings, some twenty metres apart. That, Tomasz realised, was where the smell was coming from.

  I AM DOG I AM SAD DOG MY GOOD STRONS-FEET-SMELL MAN IS SONE MY PUT-OINTMENT-ON-FOOT FEMALE IS SONE MY GOOD-UNDER-SKIRT-SMELL FEMALE IS GONE ALL SONE AWAY GOODBYE DOG THEY SAID GOODBYE GOOD DOG I AM GOOD DOG I AM SAD DOG I AM DOG

  The smell from the farmyard was bad enough, but Tomasz was not at all prepared for the stench that would hit him as he opened the front door of the little house: it was a smell of dead air, sweat, urine, faeces, semen, unwashed hair, stale breath, bad teeth, rotten shoes, dirty clothes, old food, cigarettes and alcohol. It was the smell of humanity. And even though he himself was more immune than most to these smells, still it made him gasp and cover his nose and mouth with his hand.

  There were two rooms downstairs. One, which had its door open, had six chairs around a table on which the greasy remains of a meal were waiting to be cleared away. The other room was at the front, and Tomasz opened the door to a wave of hot stinking breathed-out air. Inside were six—no, it was seven—sleeping figures curled up on mattresses on the floor, surrounded by their pitiful possessions spilling out of holdalls and carrier bags—a jumble of shoes, clothes, bedding, papers, cigarette packets, bottles and other human debris. There was a gentle chorus of snoring and snuffling. He backed out quickly and closed the door.

  Upstairs was the same. In one room, the smaller of the two, there were four mattresses laid out on the floor, so close that you had to walk over them to get to the other side of the room, and on each mattress was a prone sleeping figure. In the other, larger room, there were six mattresses and six sleeping figures. No—one mattress over in the far corner was unoccupied, and Tomasz realised with a terrible sinking feeling that this was the mattress allocated to him.

  He went back downstairs into the dining room, pulled up a chair, and with a feeling of despondency so intense that it was almost pleasurable, he got out his guitar. So this was to be his condition, now. What was he but a fragment of broken churned-up humanity washed up on this faraway shore? This was where his journey had brought him.

  There must be a song in this.

  I was woken up by birdsong, so sweet and close that for a minute I thought I was back at the caravan. I opened my eyes and looked around. Where was I? Sunlight was streaming in low through a dusty window. Then I remembered: at some point in the night, I’d abandoned the three-legged chair and rolled myself in the plastic sheet on the floor. I must have slept like that. My clothes were still damp. No wonder I felt stiff. I stood up and stretched myself, straightening each arm and leg painfully. Ujjas! What a night. I remembered that I’d had a dream—one of those terrifying dreams where you’re running and running, but you can’t move. One of those dreams that makes you glad to wake up to a sunny morning.

  My stomach was rumbling again—the effect of yesterday’s chips had worn off. I eased the door open and stepped outside. The rain had passed and the sky was clear, but there were still puddles on the ground. In Kiev, when it rains in the night you wake up to see all the golden domes of the churches washed clean and glittering in the sunlight, and the pot-holes in the roads full of wate
r. “Mind the puddles, Irina,” Mother would say as I set off for school, but I always got splashed.

  I was in somebody’s garden. The old garage was at the bottom of a long gravelled drive. At the end, behind a screen of trees, I could see the chimneys of a big house. My feet crunched on the gravel and somewhere not far away a dog started to bark. Was it on a chain? Was it fierce? I stood still and listened. The barking stopped. Then faint and far away I heard another sound—the drone of a car engine, getting closer.

  A few minutes later, I saw the vehicle. It was a white van. I stepped forward and waved. The driver slowed down and waved back. Stupid man—couldn’t he see I wasn’t just waving for fun? I jumped directly in front, so he had no choice but to screech to a stop. The driver wound his window down and yelled, “You crazy! What you doing?”

  That homely accent! That round face! That dire shirt! I could tell at once that he was Ukrainian. For some stupid reason, I felt tears pricking at the back of my eyes.

  “Please,” I said in Ukrainian. “Please help me.”

  He opened the passenger door.

  “Get in, girl. Where you want to go?”

  I tried to speak, but I found myself sniffling, which was pathetic, because after all I was alive and nothing terrible had happened.

  “OK, girl. You don’t cry,” said the van driver. “You can come with us.”

  As the van moved forward I heard voices in the back. I turned in my seat and saw there were about a dozen people, men and women, crouching or squatting on the floor. They were all young. Some were chatting quietly. Some seemed half asleep. They looked like students—they looked quite like me, in fact.