“What…? Oh I see. There are two kinds of curious, William. One of them is… how things look to you, and the other is how you look at things, I suppose.”
“Am I curious?”
“Definitely.”
“Which kind?”
“Both.”
“Will I die, then?”
“No, it only kills cats.”
“But…”
“That’s it, William. End of conversation.”
William liked sitting in front. Judy had the passenger seat, but there was lots of space for him between the two front seats, because the cab was sort of on top of the engine, and the engine cowling was there. He sat on it, on a pillow. It wasn’t a proper seat, and there was no seatbelt. When he had asked about it, Mr Balderson said, “You can’t have everything. We must take the rough with the smooth.” Aristeas had a big wide windscreen, and William was perched quite high up, so he could see a lot. Mostly it was just cars and lorries and buses, with lines of trees and sometimes petrol stations at the side of the motorway, but sometimes you could see out over the flat countryside, where farmsteads with big roofs and low walls stood all alone in huge fields with only a few wind-bent trees for company. Enormous electricity pylons marched like an army of giants across the land, their tops seeming to touch the low purply-grey sky.
At around lunchtime it started to rain. Big trucks threw up great fountains of spray, the wipers went back and forth – slash tick, slash tick – and you couldn’t see much except for the misty red spots that were the tail lights of the cars in front. It was warm in the cab, particularly for William on top of the engine. Judy had her feet up on the dashboard, and her eyes closed. William was just thinking that she looked all right – not happy, but all right – when he saw her eyebrows get closer to each other, and a wrinkle appear between them.
Judy had been all right, lulled half-asleep by the rhythm of the windscreen wipers and the warmth of the cab, until in an unguarded moment she had let herself start thinking about how many millions of vehicles were on the motorways of Europe at any one time, their average speed, their weight per axle, the mean distance from front to rear bumper, and about what would happen if the temperature suddenly dropped below zero, the road surface iced over, and the driver of some juggernaut stamped on his air-brakes and jack-knifed. Presumably there would be a multi-vehicle pile-up that stretched from Bilbao to Budapest. After all, it was the middle of winter, wasn’t it? She opened her eyes, remembering the story she had told herself about her father jumping on to the deck on Christmas Eve and calling, “Jude, Jude…” She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Nothing was real to her any more. She remembered suddenly a little talk that Mr Greaves had given in assembly about Macbeth. He was always going on about Shakespeare. “Life, says Macbeth, is ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’” But then he had said that Macbeth was very sad and depressed; that he had done some seriously bad stuff because he had believed what the weird sisters told him, and on top of that his wife had died. “So sometimes it feels as if nothing means anything,” Mr Greaves had said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s true. The sun comes out, or someone smiles at you, and suddenly everything, every little thing, has significance. Remember that when you are feeling sad. And don’t trust the weird sisters – they never tell you everything.”
Judy looked across at William and Mr Balderson, who had exchanged his wide-brimmed slouch hat for a tasselled bright red fez, found a radio station he liked, and was thumping on the steering wheel in time to a rousing opera chorus. And here we are, thought Judy. Da-da! The weird sisters. She chuckled. Mr Balderson looked at her.
“Yes, marvellous isn’t it? Fidelio!” Judy burst out in a peal of laughter. Mr Balderson smiled back at her happily.
“Luckily the left eye works. Driving on the right, you know.”
Judy’s laughter died a sudden death. She hadn’t thought about that. He was half-blind! That didn’t improve their chances of not becoming a statistic in the foreseeable future.
By teatime the rain had stopped. Mr Balderson swung off the motorway on to a slip road, and they drove for a long time down small straight roads lined with poplars and linden, through neat villages with red-brick houses whose roofs seemed almost to reach down to the ground, leaving hardly any room for the windows and doors. Mr Balderson seemed to be looking for something. The sun was already almost on the horizon. It managed to sneak a few rays under the clouds, making sudden flashes on windows and puddles. Then it was gone, and a gloomy dusk began to envelope the landscape.
“Here we are,” he said, and they turned off on to what was not much more than a metalled track. It was obviously a campsite, but not a holiday camp, the kind with a reception desk and a shop selling food and sweets and gas cylinders and inflatable toys, and a shiny clean shower block. In among the trees, which stood quite far apart, the ground was covered with a thick layer of pine needles and rather a lot of the kind of rubbish that you don’t want to look at too closely. The stuff that people leave because it’s smelly or empty or both, and they don’t want to have it in their cars and they can’t be bothered to look for a bin. And, thought Judy as Mr Balderson manoeuvred the camper into a space that was reasonably clear of plastic bags and worse, they can’t work out what it would look like if you multiplied it by a million.
“This is a nice spot,” she muttered, and then regretted it. She had to stop trying to be smart and sarcastic all the time. She had to just let things be. That’s what Mr Balderson did, William too for that matter. And there was no other way to survive this trip without going barking mad.
“The great thing about winter travel,” said Mr Balderson, opening the driver’s door and clambering out, “is that you usually have the place to yourself.” Cold air streamed into the cab. “Come out and stretch your legs.”
“We’ll have to find something for William,” called Judy. “He’ll freeze to death.” She was pulling out a jumper from her holdall.
“Look in one of the cupboards.”
Judy rooted around for a while. There was plenty to choose from. She found a woollen hat and a lined jacket, and took them to William who was already outside. He seemed cheerful enough, looking around, but his shoulders were hunched up and he was already shivering.
“Instinct for self-preservation: zero points,” said Judy. “Put these on.” The jacket hung down below his knees, but Judy rolled the sleeves up, and put the hat on his head. The long winter evening was morphing into night at last. Already the trunks of the trees were mere silhouettes against the evening sky, and in the fading light you had to walk carefully and keep your eyes on the ground to avoid stepping on something you didn’t want to step on. Mr Balderson had disappeared.
“Come on, William, we have to move around.”
They wandered for a bit, flapping their arms. There wasn’t much to see. The area was bigger than it had looked at first; there was a padlocked concrete hut which might once have housed proper bins, or even a toilet, and beyond it a few bedraggled bushes, and there was more of the site on the far side. But it was getting too dark to walk far, and they were about to turn back when they heard voices. Apparently they were not the only campers. Then they heard a laugh, a rumbly cheerful one that they knew well. They walked on, and on the other side of the bushes they saw a car parked some way off, with some people squatting round a very small smoky fire on the ground beside it. The largest person was Mr Balderson, but they couldn’t make out much else. They walked forward and the mumble of voices stopped, but not before Judy had caught a word that gave her a jolt. Heads were turned towards them, and Mr Balderson stood up.
“Hello there, I was just having a little chat. As you see we are not quite alone here. Fellow-travellers.” They were close enough now to see the motley assortment of clothes that the campers wore, but not much else. They were muffled up to the eyebrows against the chill of the night. A dark eye here, a bit of stubbly chin there, a wisp of hair escaping from a woman’s shawl.
“Come and say hello,” said Mr Balderson. Judy approached, but William stayed where he was.
“Come on, William,” Judy said.
“No. I don’t want to.”
“Ah,” said Mr Balderson. “Time to be getting to bed, I think. William looks like he needs to get his head down.” He said a cheerful goodbye to the silent group, and started back to the camper. Judy didn’t move. Had she heard right? Then a man stood up, pushing back the hood of a parka that had seen better days, and took a step towards her. He looked into her face and said,
“Good night, sleep well. I wish you a joyful end to your journey.”
He spoke in perfect, beautiful Farsi. For a tiny moment it was as if her father was speaking to her, out of the mouth of a sad man in scuffed trainers and torn jeans. Judy was about to reply, but William was tugging at her arm. On the way back, picking their way among the rubbish, William said,
“Who were they?”
“Refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, how should I know?”
“Were they vermin?”
Judy stopped dead.
“What did you say?”
“Jerry, he’s my mum’s boyfriend, he says they’re vermin. They come into the country and steal things and cheat and use up taxpayers’ money. He says they take bread out of the mouths of proper Englishmen. That’s stealing, isn’t it?”
A calm and peaceful Judy could have taken a few deep breaths and given herself time to see the whole thing: who William was, how his life was. But she wasn’t feeling calm and peaceful. She grabbed the lapels of his ridiculous oversized jacket and backed him up against a tree, with her face inches from his.
“Listen, you pathetic dope. Your teaching assistant and your so-called special needs and your psychologists cost the famous taxpayer around fifty thousand a year, I reckon. Most of the schools in England will do anything to get out of having you. Does that make you vermin? And then there’s me. I’ve only got a British passport because of my mum. My Dad’s not English. So I’m vermin too. As for Mr Balderson, God knows what he is, but I bet he counts as vermin according to your Jerry. And right now, William, while we’re on the subject of vermin, if I had to choose between you and a sewer-rat, I’d go for the rat.”
Even as she spoke Judy knew that she was being viciously cruel, but she couldn’t stop herself. William had his eyes tight shut, and now he started beating the back of his head rhythmically against the trunk of the tree. Judy let him go. He slid down inside the oversized jacket, which had snagged on the rough bark, and curled up in a ball at the bole of the tree. The jacket flopped down over his head, and in the gloom he might as well have been just another bit of rubbish. Judy looked down at him. Tears squeezed out from the corners of his tightly shut eyes. She’d never seen him do that before. It made her want to cry herself. She dropped to her knees.
“William, I’m sorry. I just think Jerry’s wrong, that’s all. Nobody who is at the bottom of the heap should be called vermin. There are all sorts down at the bottom, but there are all sorts at the top too. And there are a thousand ways to cheat and lie that people use all the time, every day: poor, rich, English, foreign. It makes no odds; it’s everybody. Rich people are big cheats, and poor people are small cheats.”
“Like me, you mean. I’m a bad person.” His voice was almost a whisper.
“No, no, no, that isn’t what I meant at all. Honestly. Really. You don’t cheat.”
“But you said it was everybody.”
“Almost everybody.”
She leaned over and spoke, her mouth at his ear.
“William Parkinson, you are one of two people I know who is neither a cheat nor a liar.”
William opened one eye.
“Are you the other one?”
Judy laughed and shook her head.
“No, William, I am not. I’m the biggest liar there is. I’ve been lying like anything for months – to everybody. But I need to stop now. I’ll try to be more like you. Come on.” She helped him up and brushed the pine needles off his jacket. They walked back towards the camper.
“Who’s the other one, then?”
“Guess.”
“Your dad.”
“Clever clogs.”
The next morning they were up early. Mr Balderson, wearing a frilly apron and a flamboyant air on account of a paisley bandana that he had bound at an angle across his blind eye, engaged himself, in solemn and religious silence, in the porridge. Judy started to store away the bedding and put the table back up, helped by William, who was no help at all really but she held her tongue. She was still a bit shaken by her outburst the previous night. She had thought of herself as the kind of person who didn’t take out their own troubles on complete innocents, but she had been wrong. She wasn’t any better than Josh and Tyler – bullies, who just hit out when it suited them. Basically, she was a nasty person. But she would start treating William as a human being, not just a pain in the neck.
When they had eaten breakfast and cleared up, they left the site and drove on across the flat expanses of Northern Germany and into Denmark, gaping at the vast windfarms and the bridges that swept in majestic curves over grey and white-flecked sounds between the islands. Judy took the opportunity to quiz Mr Balderson on the people they’d seen back at the campsite.
“Did you know those people?” she said. As expected, Mr Balderson was cryptic.
“Yes and no.”
“Meaning?”
“I know them, but I don’t know their names. Well, I do now, we introduced ourselves, but I didn’t when we arrived. You know them too.”
“No I don’t.”
“You, of all people, know them. You said as much to William last night.”
Judy flushed. He had heard, then.
“They are ‘them’ to everybody with a job and a home and a car in the drive. They aren’t Joe or Charlie or Mrs Green down the road, they are just ‘them’ – the stateless, the homeless, the unbound – and now we are them too, we belong now to the non-belonging. We have upped anchor and sailed away. This is freedom, and I’ve heard it said that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
Judy sat up in surprise. Those were her father’s words.
“What did you say?”
“I said freedom is not all it’s cracked up to be,” Mr Balderson repeated. “Not everybody’s cup of tea. An acquired taste. Personally, I find it suits very nicely.”
Judy came to the point.
“I heard a word. You were talking, and I heard the name of a place; it was where my father comes from.”
“Was it indeed?”
“Yes, and that man spoke to me in Farsi. What were you talking about?”
“Oh, this and that. There is always something interesting about lives such as theirs.”
“But—”
“The thing about eavesdropping, in my humble opinion, is that it can be fun at the time, but you must be prepared to take the consequences.”
With that, Mr Balderson leant forward to twiddle the tuner of his ancient radio and find some music, leaving Judy not really sure how to respond.
8
On either side of the road, the forest marched past endlessly. The trunks of the pines were dark columns, the branches of the firs, burdened with snow, glittered in the headlights. Midnight had come and gone.
It hadn’t been hard to find out where they needed to go. They had stopped at the tourist office in Helsingborg, and a smiling lady had pointed on a map to the town whose postcode Judy remembered. But getting there was another matter. Judy had looked at the map plenty of times before, but it was still a bit of a shock to realize how very long Sweden was, and that they would have to drive almost up to the Arctic Circle to get there. They had been on the road for two full days. Hour by hour the air became colder, the snow deeper, the sun lower in the sky. When, on the third day, they were at last getting closer to their destination, they decided to shorten their journey a bit by cutting across country on a side road.
As it turned out, t
his wasn’t the best idea. The road was narrow and, although it was ploughed, the surface was compacted snow with no trace of grit to be seen.
A crystalline shower of tiny flakes had been falling for some time, whipped around by a mean, cutting wind that swirled and eddied among the trees. Now and then the wind dislodged great lumps of snow from the firs and they fell with a powdery thump into the drifts. Sometimes there was a break in the sea of trees as they passed a little piece of pasture or a patch of clear-felled land, and there the wind took hold and whipped a stream of snow-smoke off the drifts and across the road in front of them. It was like driving into a sudden milky fog – they could only see a few metres ahead.
It was very late, but as Mr Balderson pointed out, there was nowhere they could get off the road, even if they had wanted to, and they had to try to reach civilization.
“It can’t be far to the next village. There might even be a guesthouse, a wayside inn, a hostel, who knows?” he remarked cheerfully, peering through the windscreen at the snow-swept road ahead.
In the cab of the camper the heater was going full blast, but even so it was only bearably warm; Judy had her feet on the seat and her arms round her knees. Mr Balderson was wearing a strange collection of woollens, including a red-and-white striped woolly hat with ear flaps. William was sitting on the engine cowling, so he was warmest, but he had no proper backrest, and his head kept lolling forward as he drifted into sleep. Judy reached behind her and got hold of a cushion, putting it on her knees and pulling William over so that his head was in her lap.
Mr Balderson drove slowly. The road surface sparkled. The new fall had laid down a few centimetres of light powder that covered any tire tracks that may have been there before.
“We’d have been better off with winter tires, of course,” said Mr Balderson conversationally, “But we’ll just exercise our skills instead. Not too slow, that’s the thing.”
“Don’t you mean not too fast?”
“No, Judy, I mean not too slow. If we get into a wheelspin on a hill we’ll never get up it.”
The Unexpected Find Page 7