Marina Lewycka - Two Caravans

Darren finished the paperwork and with a flourish thrust the passport back across the desk to Tomasz. Tomasz understood from this that he was now in some oblique way employed by Vitaly. He was getting a bad feeling about this job.

“And accommodation is provided?”

“By another agency. Well, it’s the same really. They’ll deduct that from your wages, so you don’t have to worry about it. Health. Tax. Insurance. Transport. They take care of all that for you.”

“And the house is this one…” He pointed across the road.

“That’s it, pal. On the left. Didn’t Milo take you there?”

“Yes, I saw. It was very full.”

“Don’t worry about that. They’ll all be gone by seven o’clock. They’re the night shift. We bus ‘em off to Shermouth.”

“I’ll put a good word in for you, Irina.” Boris led me up the steps to the office at the Sherbury strawberry farm. Obviously he thought I’d proved myself sufficiently. Next time he tried anything, I’d put a knee in his gut.

The first thing the woman at the desk asked was, “Have you got your papers? I need your passport and a valid Seasonal Agricultural Worker’s certificate.”

I explained that all my papers had been stolen. She raised her eyebrows, if you can call them that, though they were really just two little arches drawn in pencil.

“The agent who brought me here. He tried…He wanted…He took me…”

I didn’t know the English words to explain the horror of it. “He kept my papers.”

The woman nodded. “Some agents do, though they’re not supposed to. We’ll have to sort it out if you want to work at Sherbury. We don’t do illegals here. Some supermarkets get a bit funny. Leave it with me. I’ll have to make some phone calls. Do you remember the agent’s name?”

“Vulk. His name was Vulk.” Just saying it made me shudder.

“I think I’ve heard the name. And the farmer?”

“Leapish. Not far away from here.”

The little bald eyebrows bounced up again. In my opinion, people should leave their eyebrows alone.

“The one who was run down by his strawberry-pickers? Did you have anything to do with that?”

“Oh, no. I had no idea. It must have happened after I left.”

OK, so it was a lie, but only a small one.

“So why did you leave?”

“Not enough ripe strawberries to pick. I wanted to earn more money.”

OK, two small lies. The woman nodded. She seemed happy with my answer.

“You’ll earn good money here. After expenses.” That word again!

“Mind you, I wouldn’t be surprised if they used a bent agent. There was some funny goings-on on that farm.” The woman dropped her voice. “They say that Lawrence Leapish was having it off with one of the pickers, and Wendy Leapish had a Moldavian toy boy.”

What on earth, I wondered, was a Moldavian toy boy?

“They say that after her husband came out of hospital, she sat him in the wheelchair and let him watch their carrying-ons. Can you believe it-here in Sherbury?”

“That also must have happened after I left.”

The arch-eyebrow woman scribbled some notes. I have seen a number of eyebrow disasters in Ukraine, including Aunty Vera’s, but these were among the worst. She gave me a temporary number, until my paperwork was sorted out, and assigned me to an empty bunk in caravan thirty-six, with Oksana. There were two other Ukrainian girls there too, all ex-factory workers from a closed footwear factory at Kharkiv that used to supply boots to the Soviet army, and they all had certificates from the same non-existent agricultural college as me.

“Welcome to the crazyhouse,” said Lena, who was the youngest of us four, with very dark sad eyes and hair cropped like a boy’s. She produced a bottle of vodka from her locker and passed it round. I was going to say ‘No thanks’, but instead I said ‘What the hell’ and took a large gulp.

See, Mother, Pappa? I’m OK. Everything’s OK , As soon as I could get to a phone, I’d ring them. I wondered what had happened to the picture of them that I’d stuck on the wall of the caravan. I wondered what happened to the caravan, and the people-the Chinese girls whose bed I’d shared; Marta who was so kind; the nice-looking Ukrainian miner from Donetsk. Would I ever see them again?

Tomasz is finding it hard to imagine what forty thousand chickens would look like, and even after he has seen them with his own eyes, he still can’t quite believe what he has seen.

When Neil opens the door of the barn for him to look inside, a wave of heat and stench hits him, and in the half-darkness he sees just a thick carpet of white feathers; then as Neil turns up the light, the carpet seems to be moving; no, crawling; no, seething. They are so tightly packed you can’t make out where one chicken ends and the next begins. And the smell! It hits him in the eyes as well as the nose-a rank cloud of raw ammonia that makes his eyes burn, and he coughs and backs away from the door, his hand over his mouth. He has seen paintings of the damned souls in hell, but they are nothing compared with this.

“Plenty of chickens, eh?” says Neil, who has been assigned to look after him. He is Darren’s son, seventeen years old, skinny and tall like his father, and with the same acne problems. “So that’s all you got to do-grab ‘em by the legs, four or five at a time, and stuff ‘em in these cages. That’s all there is to it.” He slams the door of the barn.

“Plenty. Too much plenty.”

“Yeah, too much plenty. Heh heh heh.” The lad chuckles. “That’s good. It’s because they grow too fat. They start off as little yeller chicks, and in six weeks they’re like this-too fat to walk around on their own two feet. Mind you, you see people like that, don’t you? Fat bastards. Did you read about that woman who had to have two seats on a plane, and they charged her double fare?”

“Double fare?” Tomasz wishes the lad wouldn’t talk so fast.

“You can get some overalls at the office.”

“But this is normal?”

Tomasz still cannot take in what he has seen. Just in the area in front of him-in about a square metre-Tomasz counted one, two, three…twenty chickens, all jostling together desperate to get out of the way of the men. Yes, they call them chickens, but their bodies look more like a misshapen duck’s-huge bloated bodies on top of stunted little legs, so that they seem to be staggering grotesquely under their own weight-those of them that can move at all.

“Yeah, they breed ‘em like that to get fat, like, quicker.” Neil pulls a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket, puts one between his lips, and offers one to Tomasz. Tomasz shakes his head. Neil lights the cigarette with a match, puffing lots of smoke out, and at once starts coughing and sputtering. “It’s the supermarkets, see? They go for big breasts. Like fellers, eh?” Cough cough. “Did you see that woman on Big Brother?”

“Who is big brother?”

“Don’t you know Big Brother’? What do they have on telly where you come from? It’s where they lock ‘em all up together in a house, and you can watch ‘em.”

“Chickens?”

“Yeah, yeah, just like chickens. I like that.” The lad chuckles again. Actually, he’s quite a nice lad, thinks Tomasz. Friendly and talkative. About the same age as Emanuel, with the same gawky innocence. “And there’s this voice that’s like telling ‘em like what they’ve got to do. And they’re not supposed to have sex, but one of ‘em did-that one with the big, like, knockers I was telling you about.”

“Big like knocker?”

“Yeah, massive.”

“But how can they walk when the breasts are so large? How can you tend so many?”

The lad gives him an odd look.