“Best not to expect anything,” was all I thought of to say. He clearly didn’t live in such a forlorn shelter for the pleasure of eking out his existence in a foreign country, and that was a fact. I waited for him to go on.
“It was like this, you see, my wife and two children were killed on this stretch of road seven years ago. Sometimes it seems an eternity, and at others it’s like only yesterday. And it wasn’t my fault. I wish it had been, then at least I could feel guilty.” He put half his drunk tea on a stone, and grabbed me by the collar and tie. “You believe that, don’t you?”
I pushed him away. “I was never so sure in my life.”
“That’s all right, then.” He picked up his tea. “I can’t bring myself to leave the place. They’re buried in the village cemetery. Usually I’m tending their graves at this time, but I’m glad I wasn’t today, otherwise I would have missed you.”
He was evidently in need of conversation, being only human. “Do you go there every day?”
The question brought more tears. “For an hour or two. It calms me down to be with them. There were two cars, you see, coming at a hundred miles an hour. They were side by side, so what could I do. If only we’d all gone together. But I was thrown clear, with hardly a scratch.”
“What about the other cars?”
“Flew away,” he laughed. “Flew away, as happy as sandboys. Just flew away.”
“How do you manage here then, all by yourself?”
“The local people are kind. They share as much as they can, because I don’t have any money to speak of. They give me my bread when they bake, and an egg now and again. When they kill a goat I get a bit of meat. They like me, because I speak their language now.”
He took an offered cigarette, and lit up with pleasure from my lighter. I had to ask for it back, then told him to keep it, seeing the fuel half gone. “So you don’t really want to leave?”
“Well, I sold up in London, didn’t I? Lived it up for a while, then the money I brought back kept me for the first few years. Between you and me,” he leaned closer, as if somebody could hear us through the terrible noise of lorries, “I’ve got an emergency amount to get to Godalming by third class train, if ever the mood takes me, but where would I go when I got there? There’s nothing for me in England anymore. And I’d miss being with my loved ones, wouldn’t I?”
I could have cried at his plight, but didn’t. His clothes were worn, yet he’d kept himself clean. At my staring too closely he said: “I have a decent suit to go to the village church in once a month.”
I gave him a jar of coffee, a carton of cigarettes, another packet of tea, the dinars the man had given me for the Crown Piece, and all my newspapers. “You’re a gentleman,” he said. “But are you sure you’re not from the embassy?”
“I’d know, if I was, wouldn’t I?”
I hoped he believed me, and left him, a forlorn figure clutching his packets. I wondered if he was who he said he was. He could have been a criminal who had found a fairly good hideout from justice, which would explain his anxiety about a messenger from the embassy bringing his extradition papers. His story was so outlandish that, charging on towards Belgrade, I mulled on his fate and wondered whether he wouldn’t languish there till death. I could call at the embassy in Belgrade and show them where he was on the map, demand that someone get him back to England’s social security system, and if he really didn’t want to go he could at least enjoy telling them to piss off. Maybe they did know about him already, and his abusive letters sent on by passing motorists every few weeks berating the heartlessness at not assisting a stranded man were the bane of the ambassador’s life. I didn’t know what to think, but there was nothing I could do about it, so he’s probably still there.
I massaged the rims of both eyes on seeing a little black hatchback in my mirror, certainly the same car that had trailed me from Milan as far as the Trieste turn off. He must have rejoined the motorway without my noticing, and followed me into Jugoslavia. Was he Moggerhanger’s unobtrusive (and unsolicited) escort to make sure I kept to the itinerary, to check that I didn’t hand the briefcase to the wrong person, or abscond to Scandinavia with the material taken on board? I doubted it. Though Moggerhanger’s arms had a longer reach than Kenny Dukes’, he knew I would never be so idiotic as to screw things up in that way.
There seemed no doubt that I was being followed, so who was it? I mustn’t let the motorist know that I twigged he was following me, that’s all I knew. If he’d had me under observation while handing those packets to the unfortunate bloke in the lay-by he’d have gone hot-footed to burgle the shack and check the colour of the Nescafe. Had that been the case the poor castaway would have thought the embassy was getting at him again, and his loud histrionic piss off would have been audible all the way back to Zagreb.
In motoring I talk more often in my mind to the chap behind than to the one in front. I don’t know why, but I suppose it’s normal. It put me at an advantage with regard to the hatchback, because there might then be less chance that he would speculate, at least with much prescience, about me, and have to wait on my shifts and variants. I once played the game on the arterial lanes of England against Kenny Dukes, who was the quickest motorlad in South London. But it was harder on the Balkan Highway to move in concentric switches, and keep my intentions hidden from the hatchback. A deliberate failure on my part to overtake a car in front got me so close to the hatchback’s fender he was in danger of being pushed rearwards to Zagreb. Not much wrong with that, except he would have no headlamps.
He thought it best to pull away for some distance, as I’d imagined he would, so with a risky overtaking into a lot less traffic I tonned up the car and he lost me. He would expect me to nightstop in Belgrade, but I turned off the main road fifty miles before, when he was no longer in my rear mirror, to a place where — Alice having done more of her homework — there was a hotel. Staying there would save me searching Belgrade for lodgings in the rush hour and half darkness.
I found a hotel, in a town whose name I couldn’t pronounce, and was given a room on the sixth floor. My window showed a river below, and a church whose onion dome, close enough to touch, reminded me again that I was abroad.
With five hundred kilometres on the clock since morning I felt as scruffy and tired as after a day in a factory — though I’d never worked in one — so went along the corridor for a shower. The hotel was newish but rundown, as if Vandal Tour buses stopped there now and again, because lights didn’t work on the top floor, locks in the men’s lavatories were smashed, the sinkshelf in my room hung from the wall, and plaster on the ceiling patched with rust looked ready to fall. Who was I to complain? It was a better bolt hole than Peppercorn Cottage.
I waited half an hour in the eating hall for wiener schnitzel and chips, bread and salad, a litre of wine and a bottle of mineral water. The usual Slav band pounded tunes into our ears, but from behind a partition. A young unshaven man on crutches swayed to my table and held out a hand, pain and intimidation in his eyes. When I gave him some change he indicated thirst, so I let him knock back a glass of wine from my carafe, then hobble away in at least one part mended.
Needing fresh air and a walk afterwards I found a street market selling tomatoes, peaches and cucumbers, and bought a bag of each for picnics. Soldiers strolled forlornly in a park behind the church as if a Woodbine or two would cheer them up. They could have earned them, I thought, by digging pits at the lay-bys to pitch all the garbage into.
I put my shopping in the Roller and, blessing Alice for sheer genius, sorted out a plug for the upstairs sink, which headed a list of things she’d told me to bring.