2007 - Two Caravans (16 page)

“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.

“Is that like…what ‘appens…like…in your country?”

“In Poland everybody…”

“Poland?” There is a note of awe in the lad’s voice. “Wow. Never been there. So the women’ve all got big knockers?”

“Yes, many people has. Keep it in shed at side of house.”

“Oh, you mean chickens.” A flush of enlightenment creeps over his youthful face.

“Of course. We have to look after it.”

“Oh, it’s all taken care of, in here.” The lad looks oddly disappointed. “See them pipes? That’s where the water comes in, see? And the food comes in down there. As much as they can eat, cos they want to fatten ‘em up fast. Fast food, eh? Geddit? They keep the lights on low, so they never stop for a kip—just keep on feeding all night. Bit like eating pizza in front of the telly. The low lights calm ‘em down. That’s why they usually catch ‘em at night. It’s all scientific, like.”

“But so many together—this cannot be healthy.”

“Yeah, it’s all taken care of. They mix the feed with that anti-bio stuff, like, to stop ‘em getting sick. Better than’t National Elf, really, everyfink provided. Best fing is, when you eat the chicken, you get all the anti-bio, so it keeps you helfy, too, if you fink about it. Prevention is better than cure, as my Nan says. Like Guinness.”

“And cleaning up mess?”

“Nah, they don’t do that. Can’t get to the floor. Too many birds. Can’t get in. Just leave it. They just have to walk about in it. Chicken shit. Burns their arses, and their legs. Who’d be a chicken?” As he talks, he is zipping himself into a blue nylon overall. “You don’t want to get it on your shoes. Go right over the top. Burn yer socks off. After they’ve gone, that’s when you go in to clean it all out, ready for the next crop.”

“Crop?”

“Yeah, it’s what they call ‘em. Funny, innit? You’d fink it was vegetables or somefink. Not somefink alive. But vegetables is alive, ent they? Are they? I dunno.” He scratches his head and takes another drag on his cigarette. “Vegetables.” Cough, cough. “One of life’s great mysteries.”

Then he stubs out the cigarette, and carefully returns the unsmoked half to the packet. “I’m just taking it up, like, steady, a few puffs at a time,” he explains. “Building up to full strengf. Anyway, you’ll need some overalls, pal. What’s your name?”

“Tomasz. My friends call me Tomek.”

“Tom—Mick…whatever. Mind if I just call you Mick? You’ll need some overalls, Mick. Let’s go see if there’s any left.”

They walk across to the office. At the back is a storeroom, and there is a pair of blue nylon overalls hanging on a peg above a bench on which is scattered a jumble of male clothing.

“We’re in luck,” says Neil.

Tomasz zips himself in. The overalls are too short in the leg and nip around the crotch. Neil looks him up and down critically.

“Not bad. Yer a bit big for ‘em. Here, you’ll need these.” He passes Tomasz a ragged pair of leather gauntlets, and puts a pair on himself. “And some boots.”

There is only one boot left, a green one, though fortunately it is the right size.

“One’s better than none,” says Neil, “Count yer blessings…D’you remember that song? My Nan sings that all the time. When she’s not singing hymns. She’s very, like, Christian, my Nan. Always says a prayer for the chickens. But she likes her Guinness. You’ll have to meet her.”

“I would very much like to.”

Neil hunts around and eventually finds a black Wellington boot under the desk in the office, which is a smaller size. This is becoming quite a regular thing with me, thinks Tomasz, stowing his odd-sized trainers under the bench and putting on the odd-sized boots. Maybe it is a sign of something.

He walks back to the barn stiffly because of the tightness in the left boot and crotch.

“Ready?” says Neil. “You’ll soon get the hang of it. We’ll have a practice before the team gets here. In we go.”

He opens the barn door and they wade into the roiling sea of chickens. The chickens squawk and screech and try to flap out of their way, but there is nowhere for them to go. They try to nutter upwards but their wings are too weak for their overgrown bodies and they just scramble desperately on top of each other, kicking up a terrible stinking dust of feathers and faeces. Tomasz feels something live crunch under his foot, and hears a squawk of pain. He must have stepped on one, but really it is impossible not to.

“Grab ‘em by the legs!” yells Neil, through the inferno of screeching and feathers and flying faecal matter. “Like this!”

He raises his left hand, in which he is holding five chickens, each by one leg. The terrified birds twist and flap, shitting themselves with fear, then they seem to give up, and hang limply.

“See, it calms ‘em down, holding ‘em upside down.”

There is a snap, and one of the five flops and sags, its thigh dislocated, its wings still beating. At one end of the barn is a stack of plastic crates. Neil slides one out, thrusts the birds in, and pushes it shut. Then he wades into the melee for another five.

Tomasz steels himself and reaches down into the seething mass of chickens, holding his breath and closing his eyes. He grabs and gets hold of something—it must have been a wing—and the bird struggles and squeaks so pitifully in his hands that he lets go. He grabs again, and this time he gets the legs and hoists the poor creature up into the air, and not wanting to risk losing it, stuffs it straight into a cage. Then another. Then he manages to get two at a time, and then three. He can’t hold more than that, because he cannot bring himself to hold them by just one leg. After about half an hour he has filled one cage, and Neil has filled four.

“You’d better get a move on,” says Neil, “when the catching team gets here.”

As if on cue, the barn door opens and the rest of the team arrives—they are four short dark-haired men, who are speaking in a language that Tomasz can’t understand. They spread out along the length of the barn, and now the screeching and flapping intensify and the whole vast barn is a storm of feathers and dust and stench and din as they work furiously, grabbing the chickens five at a time and bundling them into the cages.

“Portugeezers,” shouts Neil to Tomasz above the racket. “Or Brazil nuts! Respect!”

And he raises a gauntleted hand. Tomasz does the same. What is the lad talking about? Fired up by the other men’s example, he grabs at the chickens with a renewed energy, and even manages to get four in one hand, holding them each by one leg. And again. And again. And again. It is exhausting work. Inside the hot nylon shell of his overall, he feels his skin running with sweat. His eyes are burning. His hair is stiff and matted with excreta. Even his nose and mouth seem clogged with the disgusting stuff.

The cages are filling up; the captive chickens, exhausted with terror, tremble and cluck hopelessly, covered in the excrement of the newly captured birds still flapping and struggling above them. After a couple of hours enough of the chickens have been caged that they can begin to see the floor of the barn. It is a reeking wasteland of sawdust, urine and faeces in which injured and ammonia-blind birds are staggering around.

At his feet he sees a bird with a broken leg dragging itself through the muck, squawking piteously, weighed down by its monstrous breast, and he realises with a stab of remorse that it was probably he who broke the creature’s leg by stepping on it.

He reaches down for it, gets it by both legs and hoists it into the air, and as he does so it swings round and he feels the other leg break, and the bird hangs there limply from its two broken legs staring at Tomasz in terror.

“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.