Andriy stepped outside and helped me down from the bus. We were in a lay-by, set back from the road behind a hedge. There was another caravan there, too, all shuttered up, with a sign saying TEAS. SNACKS. The night was still warm and humid, the sky overcast, with no stars. I breathed deeply, filling my lungs, stretching my limbs and feeling them loosen. We had been sitting for hours. I wandered behind a bush to water the grass and I heard Andriy doing the same a little distance away, stumbling in the darkness, then the soft hiss of his pee seeping into the ground.
When he came back in the dark, he took me in his arms and pressed me up against the side of the bus. I could feel him, all hard, and his breath hot and urgent on my neck. I don’t know why I started trembling. Then he held me close, until my body went still against his.
“Irina, we are two halves of one country.” His voice was low and passionate. “We must learn to love each other.”
No one has ever said anything so wonderful to me before.
He kissed my hair, then my lips. I felt spurts of fire running through my body, and that melting feeling when you almost can’t say no any more. But somehow I did say no. Because when it’s the night, it has to be perfect-not on that disgusting mattress where Dog and Maryjane had been lying licking their parts. Not standing up by the roadside like a prostitute in a doorway. You can’t imagine Natasha and Pierre consummating their love up against the side of a bus, can you?
“Not now, Andriy,” I said. “Not here. Not like this.”
Then he said something quite bad-tempered, then he apologised for being bad-tempered, and I apologised for what I’d said, and he said he was going for a walk and I said I’d go with him but he said no, he wanted to go by himself. I stood at the side of the bus, waiting for him to come back, and wondering what I should say to make him not be angry with me. Should I tell him that I loved him?
When at last we did crawl onto the mattress the bedding was grey and greasy, with a sweaty doggy smell. I couldn’t take my clothes off. Andriy thought it was out of modesty-he’s such a gentleman-but it was really because I didn’t want to feel those limp clammy sheets against my skin. He held me in his arms all night, my head tucked in between his chin and his shoulder. He didn’t even notice the sheets.
In the morning, I woke to find my hands and feet were covered in red lumps. Andriy’s were too. Rock was already awake, squatting by the gas stove boiling some water, wearing nothing but his underpants, which were grey and loose like the loincloth of an Old Testament prophet.
“Ready for a cuppa?” he said.
He was smoking a thin hand-rolled cigarette, which hung on his lower lip as he talked and puffed simultaneously. His body was stringy and very pale, with no manly musculature, but a sprinkling of ginger freckles and fleabites. I wished he would put some clothes on.
For breakfast we ate the remains of yesterday’s bread and some wizened apples that were lurking in one of the boxes. Rock poured out the hot, weak tea, which he sweetened with honey from ajar. Andriy leaned over and whispered in my ear, “You are as sweet as honey.”
A brown curl flopped down in the middle of his forehead as he said it, and for some reason I can’t explain, I felt a shining bubble of love swelling up inside me, not just for Andriy, but also for Rock, for Dog and Maryjane, for the smelly old bus, even for the fleabites and the loincloth underpants, and for the whole fresh lovely morning.
It was still very early. Outside, the landscape was softened by a haze that lingered over the flat empty fields, clinging to the outlines of trees and bushes. The birds had already started to rouse themselves, chirping away busily. Dog and Maryjane were chasing around out there, tumbling and playing. Rock whistled, and they came running, their eyes bright, their tongues hanging out. They settled themselves on the bed, and we sat in front. Then Rock revved the engine up, tearing through the misty silence, and we were off.
Some time last night they must have turned westwards off the Great North Road. The road they are on now is smaller, winding through a featureless agricultural landscape of large fields planted with unfamiliar crops and little settlements of redbrick houses. But what amazes Andriy is that there is already so much traffic on the road, cars, vans, lorries, people racing to get to work. A large black four-by-four cruises by. It looks like…No, surely there are dozens of such vehicles on the roads. He glances at Irina. She is sitting in the middle again, her left hand warm beneath his right hand. Her eyes are closed. She didn’t notice.
A minibus overtakes them on a long straight stretch, and he counts some dozen men squashed together on the benches, swarthy dark-haired men with brooding early-morning faces, some of them smoking cigarettes, gliding past them into the mist.
“Who are these men?” he asks Rock.
Rock shrugs. “Immigrant workers. Fragments of globalised labour, Jimmy Binbag called them.”
“Who is…?”
“Whole country’s run by immigrants now. They do all t’ crap jobs.”
“Like us.”
“Aye, like you,” says Rock. “Did you hear about that crash in Kent? Minivan full of strawberry-pickers. Six killed.”
“In Kent?” Irina sits up sharply, her eyes very wide.
“Poor exploited bastards. Minions of faceless global corporations. Not me. I’ve had enough of all that. Now I’ve turned warrior.” He pushes back the glasses that have slipped down his nose. “If only me dad could see me now. He said I were too soft for t’ pit.”
“But you are defending stones and not people,” says Andriy. “Why?”
“Coal, stone, earth-it’s all our heritage, in’t it?”
“What is mean eritij?”
“It’s what you get from your mum and dad. Gifts passed on through t’ generations.”
“Like underpants,” whispers Irina in Ukrainian.
If I were a warrior, thinks Andriy, I would not be defending some stupid old stones, but the flesh and blood of living people. In Donbas, too, the mobilfonmen have taken over, and people have become disposable, their precious lives thrown away through avoidable accidents and preventable disease, their misery blunted by vodka. This is the future his country has prepared for him-to be expendable. No, he will not accept it.
“What are you thinking?” asks Irina softly. “I’m thinking how precious you are, Ukrainian girl.” The words feel strangely solid in his mouth, like lumps of un-dissolved sugar. He isn’t used to saying things like this to a woman.
They are still going westwards. They pass through an ugly traffic-clogged town, out onto a larger highway, then take a narrow road through the fields, which are green and undulating but without the luminous beauty of the Kent countryside.
“All round here used to be pits,” says Rock. “In t’ strike, they blocked all t’ roads to stop Yorkshire pickets coming into Notts. Scabby Notts, they called it. It were a battleground. Me dad were arrested at Hucknall. That’s all history now.” He sighs. “No binbags in t’ dustbin of history, as Jimmy used to say.”
“Who is…?”
“Motorway up ahead,” says Rock. “Once we’re over, we’ll soon be home.”
Beyond the fields, some kilometres ahead, they catch glimpses of a huge road carved through the landscape, bigger even than the Great North Road, the lines of cars and lorries moving slowly, as close as coloured beads on a thread.
After the motorway, the road becomes narrower, and starts to climb. The houses are no longer of brick but of grey stone, and the villages smaller and further apart. As they climb, they come into a different sort of countryside, wild and heathy, with dark crags, copses of silver birch and conifers, and sweeping wind-smoothed hills. The sky is heavy, with storm clouds resting on the horizon. Rock is driving in first most of the time, leaning forward over the wheel, because the road is so narrow that if a vehicle comes the other way, one of them will have to back up to let the other pass.