Marina Lewycka - Two Caravans

“I’m sorry, little chicken,” whispers Tomasz in Polish. Should he put it in a cage? He catches Neil’s eye.

“Yeah, don’t worry, Mick. They’re always doing that.” He moves round towards Tomasz, waving four chickens in the air. “Brittle. No strengf, see? They can’t move around to build their legs up. Should get ‘em playing football, eh? Chicken football. Of course some of ‘em do, but the chicken’s the football. Who’d be a chicken, eh?” Tomasz picks up the broken bird and puts it into a cage, where it collapses beneath a pile of other chickens that scramble on top of it. He is beginning to feel sick.

“Time for a break, pal,” says Neil.

Outside in the sunshine, they take deep gulps of air and splash themselves with water from a tap at the side of the barn. Then they slump in a line on the ground along the wall. Neil takes out his half-cigarette and has a few puffs, coughing away with a determined look on his face.

“Getting there, getting there,” he says.

The Portuguese, or the Brazilians, light up cigarettes too. They have unzipped their overalls, and Tomasz can see that they are wearing nothing but underpants underneath. In fact one of them doesn’t even seem to be wearing underpants. That is sensible, he thinks. Then he thinks about the too-tight-in-the-crotch overall that he is wearing. Who wore it before? He turns to the young man who is sitting next to him. He is a bit shorter than Neil, and probably about the same age, with curly hair and beautiful teeth.

“Portuguese?”

“Yes,” says the young man.

“Brazilian?”

“Yes.”

Tomasz points at himself.

“Polish. Poland.”

“Ah!” The young man beams. “Gregor Lato.”

“Pele,” says Tomasz. They shake hands.

“You like football?”

“Of course,” says Tomasz, for the sake of friendship, even though it is not strictly true, as he finds all sport tedious, but if anything would prefer to watch Juvenia Krakow play rugby. It is one of those little areas of dissent he has carved out for himself, like drinking wine instead of beer and listening to foreign music.

“Later we play.” The young man’s teeth flash in a smile.

“Later we play bagpipe.” The other man sitting next to him has a mad glint in his eye.

“Scottish?” Tomasz asks.

He winks at Tomasz. “Scottish.”

As they are finishing their cigarettes a huge lorry trundles up, and the four men jump to their feet and go across to talk to the driver, who also seems to be Portuguese. Or Brazilian.

“They are from Portugal or Brazil?” Tomasz asks Neil.

“Yeah. One or the other. Some are Portugeezers pretending to be Brazils. Some are Brazils pretending to be Portugeezers.”

“They pretend to be Brazil?”

“Yeah, mad, innit? Yer see Brazils are illegal, so they get in by saying they’re Portugeezers. But the Portugeezers are legal now, wiv that Europe like marketing ring, and some of ‘em’ve been making trouble, so nobody wants to take ‘em on any more. That’s what me dad says.”

“They making trouble?”

“Yeah, trade unions. Minimum wage. Elf and safety. Brazils don’t cause trouble, see, ‘cause they’re illegal. So if the Portugeezers want a job, they have to pretend to be Brazillers-Portugeezers pretending to be Brazillers pretending to be Portugeezers. Mad, innit? It’s a mad mad mad world. Did you see that film? Went to see it with my Nan at Folkestone. Best film I ever seen.”

“Very.” Tomasz shakes his head.

“You ever been to Folkestone? My Nan used to take me there when I was little. They call it Folkestone pleasure beach. Pleasure my ass. I wrote it on the road sign. If you go to Folkestone you’ll see it. Pleasure Beach my ass. Yeah, I wrote that.”

“Interesting.”

“Yeah, I made my mark.”

“What is minimum wage in UK?”

“I dunno. Not much. Do you have that where you come from? Poland?”

“We have one very famous trade union. Is name Solidarnoszc. You know it?”

“Sounds like something you could get yer teeth into. Solid-er nosh. Heh heh. Geddit? Yeah, I reckon I’m going to Brazil.” He throws in this bit of information so casually that Tomasz, who is still thinking about trade unions, almost misses it. He looks at the lad with renewed interest.

“So you make voyage of discovery?”

He had been like that at Neil’s age, always looking for a way out. Of course, when he was seventeen, that had been in communist times, and the only journeys to be made were the inward ones. He remembers how one of his friends had got hold of a pirated tape of Bob Dylan and they had sat, four of them, in his father’s car locked inside the garage, the windows misted up with their spellbound breath, listening to the music as though it was the chimes of freedom. In every life there is a moment when you can break free of taken-for-granted situations and strike out in a different direction. That evening had been a turning point in his life. He had taught himself English in order to understand the words, and a few months later he bought a second-hand guitar from a Czech gipsy who happened to be passing through Zdroj. And he made himself a promise: one day he would come to the West.

“Voyage of discovery? Heh heh. I like that,” said Neil. “One day, when I save up enough, I’m going to Brazil. It’s my dream. Everybody’s got to have a dream. That’s why I’m learnin’ to smoke.” He looks across at the four Portuguese-Brazilians, who have zipped up their overalls and are making their way back to the barn. “Maybe their dream was coming to England. Come to England and work up to yer ankles in chicken shit. Funny dream, eh?”

The four Portuguese-Brazilians have started to load the crates of chickens onto the back of the lorry. They beckon to Tomasz and Neil, who reluctantly go across to join them. They have made a line and are passing the cages along to the truck, the tightly packed chickens screeching with panic as they fly through the air and land on the back of the truck with a thump. It is amazing how many cages they have filled, and yet the number of chickens in the barn hardly seems to have diminished.

After the lorry has gone, it’s back into the barn for more catching and caging. The day drags on, tedious, dirty and gruelling. Tomasz’s arms are aching so much he thinks they will drop off. His legs and forearms are bruised from the pecking and thrashing of the struggling birds. But worse, his soul is bruised. He is already losing his sensibility of the chickens as living sentient creatures and, through the same process, of himself also. At one point he finds himself thrusting five birds at a time into a cage with such force that one of them breaks a wing. What is happening to you, Tomasz? What kind of a man are you becoming?

By the end of the afternoon, the floor is littered with dead and dying birds, some trodden into the sawdust and excrement, some still flapping and struggling to stay alive. Tomasz feels his own soul is like a dying bird, fluttering in the mire of…of…Maybe there is a song in this, but what chords could be plangent enough to express such desolation?

“Did we kill so many?” he whispers to Neil.

“Nah, don’t worry, pal,” says Neil. “Most of them was dead already. See if they break a leg, or if they’re a bit weak, they can’t make it to the feeding line, so they die of hunger. Mad, really, when there’s all that food there for ‘em, but they just can’t get through to it. Anyway, they only live five weeks from hatchin’ to catchin’. Five weeks! Not much time to develop a personality, eh?”

“Personality?”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to develop-a personality.”

Another lorry arrives, and trundles away into the leafy lanes with another load of screeching misery. It is time for another break. Neil carefully smokes another half-cigarette. The Portuguese-Brazilians race to the tap and splash around, laughing and wrestling each other’s heads under the water. Tomasz drinks gulp after gulp from the tap, then washes his hair and face under the cold running water. To have longish hair and a beard in this situation is definitely a disadvantage. If only he had some of Yola’s nice scented soap.