Ten Journeys Read online

  Finally Dog-Man finished with his CB radio and came back to us barking orders and spitting even more than he had done earlier. Cockerel nodded compliantly, taking a moment to wipe a little of the excess saliva from his face, and then he took hold of my arm again, tighter this time, extending long fingernailclaws into my flesh. Biting into me; marking me.

  They dragged me over to the other side of the lorry where a long, coiled snake of a hosepipe was waiting. Cockerel pinned me to a wall and then Dog-Man turned on a heavy jet of water. It hit me with some force, winding me; almost knocking me over. But the quiet, Buffalo-eyed man held me up. Not with his fingernail-claws as Cockerel had done, but more gently somehow. As though he felt that no human being should have to be subjected to such humiliation.

  Being hosed down; in the villages it was what we did to the farm animals or to dogs when they’d rolled about in the dirt. It was a way of cleansing them so they were fit to be touched. I understood the meaning of their water torture completely.

  Cockerel was laughing now as it quickly became clear to them that my will was breaking. I tried to free my mind and to simply submit to the humiliation. But suddenly, something struck me as being very strange. Although Dog-Man had been hosing me down for what seemed like hours, I was becoming dryer and dryer by the minute. No longer was my dress sticking to me. No longer was I shivering. When the water was finally turned off, it was as though it had never been there in the first place. Perhaps it was simply my mind playing tricks on me; I was close to the edge as it was. Lanh was always saying it, or used to be. Perhaps finding myself in such a situation, without a single clue as to how I got there, had finally pushed me into insanity.

  Strange things continued to happen. Suddenly, Cockerel was pushing me back onto the concrete floor again. For a moment, I feared that he meant to choke the life out of me; such was the grip he had on the top of my dress. But then he moved away from me and made an obvious gesture that transcended language. He scrunched up his face and held his nose as though being near me offended his nostrils. In spite of myself, I took a quick sniff under my armpit and realised that I did indeed smell quite badly. Why did I smell if they had just hosed me down? I sniffed again, getting a good lungful of the me-smell now. And then I looked up and saw the men laughing at me. I realised at once that it was our first meaningful conversation. Our only meaningful communication.

  And then, all of a sudden, the dead man was by my side once more. I’d almost forgotten him in my terror, in my incomprehension of what was going on. Almost before I even had the time to check whether he was breathing, I felt more hands grabbing at me and lifting me up. I felt those same hands launching me up into the back of the lorry; throwing me as if I were as insignificant as a rag-doll. The body of the dead man came next and his swollen head landed somewhere near my bare foot. I had to choke back a scream as I wriggled away from him.

  “You can’t leave me in here with a dead man!” I cried into the night air.

  But leave me they did. It was as though as soon as I was safely in the shadows, crouching petrified in the furthest, darkest corner of the lorry, I was completely forgotten. The three men seemed far too busy re-loading the lorry with all of the broken crates that had been spilled out on the concrete floor outside. They seemed absolutely engrossed with whispering excitedly amongst themselves as though they were on the verge of making some amazing discovery that I’d turned into an irrelevance.

  When the final crate was slammed into place and everything was locked down tight, I was trapped. Wedged in. But I found that if I tucked my legs up under my chin and wrinkled up my bare toes, I could at least sit upright. Although it was a tight space they’d left me in, it did seem to fit almost magically around my body (or the other way round). Someone had even thought to leave a blanket for me.

  After a last cursory flash of the torch and a couple of halfhearted shouts (and spits) from Dog-Man, I saw Buffalo-eyes and Cockerel climbing up onto the back-lip of the lorry and starting to pull the rolling back door down fully. The last thing I saw of the outside world was the back of Cockerel’s high-visibility vest, the word ‘IMMIGRATION’ written across it.

  As the door finally rolled shut, I could hear his cocky, evil laughter echoing through the cogs and wheels and machinery underneath me.

  What the hell did that mean? What the hell did any of it mean? I racked my brain to remember if they’d told us any of this would happen at the Orientation 101 classes, but they hadn’t. And those classes were the last real thing I could remember. After them, life was just a stinking, cramped black hole.

  I must have passed out in the back of the lorry, whether from exhaustion or from sheer unadulterated terror I don’t know. All I know is that when I came to we were moving.

  Inside the tarpaulin shell, the noise of the lorry’s movement was so loud that I was surprised I’d not woken sooner. Straps slapped, roller-shutter doors chattered incessantly, wheels crunched and squeaked, the engine throbbed. It sounded like I was inside the bowels of a ravenous beast. Smelled like it too; the stench of decay was everywhere. The dead man was the obvious source of the stink, but his ripe smell was underscored by other scents, some of which I could tell were coming from me. Prime amongst those was the bestial smell of desperation. Like a caged animal, I’d had some key part of me taken away.

  The stink was getting worse. My nostrils quivered as I thought I caught the grace notes of human waste in the overall rotten melody. I couldn’t stop myself from retching, but nothing came up. I realised that there was nothing inside me to come up.

  I tried breathing through my mouth to avoid another retching incident but the air tasted rancid on my tongue. Mind over matter, I told myself. Shakily, I tried to climb to my feet but either my limbs wouldn’t do what I told them or the crate I was clutching onto wouldn’t provide the right purchase. So I sat back down again and stared into the blackness, wondering if I’d ever get used to it. Wondering whether I’d ever see anything again. In my blindness, other senses began to take over. My sense of touch being one of them.

  I let my shaking fingers do my seeing for me. I let them stroke the metal wall behind me; the wall that I figured must divide me from the lorry’s driver. It was cold to the touch, unwelcoming. But something made me keep running my hands across it. Something told me that there was something there that was worth finding. Finally, after I don’t know how long, I found what I was looking for. Deep scratches torn into the metal. I traced my fingers along the tears, trying to work out whether there was a message there for me. Like a flash of light illuminating the whole sorry container, it dawned on me what the scratches actually were. They were the painful, jerky rendering of my name. Or rather, my new name.

  Westerners call that walking-over-a-grave feeling déjà vu. Literally: seen before. And as my fingers finally picked out the name on the wall that was exactly how I felt. The name was surely written by my own fair hand. Had to be; there was that same looping cat’s tail on the ‘J’. There was that same attempt at a smiling face over the ‘I’. I had dreamed of scratching my name on the lorry’s wall and the dream felt as real as the actual sensory perception of the thing. It was almost as though I was in two places at once. The past and present, dream-world and real-world.

  The name on the wall was Jenni. A name that took me back to Orientation 101 class and the tight-lipped Madame Dugard. She was the woman who had given us our new names, and mine was Jenni.

  “Repeat the names over and over in your head so you can get used to them, so you can’t be caught off guard even if they are snarling in your face or threatening you with a truncheon,” she said, leaning against the blackboard and showing us once again how to form the alien letters. “Write them too, if you can write. For you’ll find that through writing something down, you can memorise almost anything.”

  The ten of us in the class obediently bent over our notebooks and tried to scrawl out the letters just as she had, but most of us couldn’t get our hand-eye coordination in. Madame Dugard picked
up one of the books at random, sneered at the poor girl’s attempts and then threw the book onto the floor.

  “How much are you paying for us to help you?” she barked.

  The poor girl turned into a quivering wreck, all blushes and uncertain smiles.

  “Two years’ wages,” I interrupted.

  “That’s right,” said Dugard. “It is costing your family two years’ wages to give you this remarkable opportunity to learn. And we are giving you the education, nay orientation skills, which will stand you in much better stead than anyone else who tries to cross borders that aren’t supposed to be crossed. And what do you do? Blush and smile. Honestly, girls… Start again from the top.”

  Madame Dugard returned to her seat at the front of the class and poured herself a large glass of wine. She drank from it fiercely as though as angry at the wine as she was at us. It was our third such lesson and none of the girls (me included) seemed to be getting the message. I felt bad for her. Perhaps the men would, in turn, be angry with her and cut her money.

  I knew all about how much these people had kindly invested in us, just to give us a good start once we were in Europe. That’s why so many of us were choosing to go the FFF route these days. FFF, like all the other ‘people traffickers’took a great deal of money from us in order to arrange our transport, but at least they included these Orientation 101 classes in the price.

  After all ‘if you sound like a country bumpkin Vietnamese, why, you’ll be treated like a country bumpkin Vietnamese,’ as Madame Dugard was always telling us. She wanted to teach us how to be proper European ladies. Women with names like Jenni and Laura who couldn’t possibly be stuffed into one of those awful camps once they’d reached the tail of the snake. She wanted us to be the kind of women that Westerners would recognise, “remind them of their sisters and their grannies and they’ll never turn the hoses on you,” she said.

  But it was difficult. She didn’t understand that it was hard for us suddenly to become other people. Madame’s writing the name over and over again technique still hadn’t worked for any of us. No matter how many times I drew those cat’s tail ‘J’s or smiley-face dotted ‘I’s, I still thought of myself by my real, Vietnamese name. If someone were to ask me to write down what I was doing at any particular point, I would have written ‘Dung is going to the toilet’ or ‘Dung is trying to half-run along the alley at the back of Romi’s Bar without alerting the mad dog to her presence.’ Instead, what worked for me was making it all into a game like the ones that Lanh and I used to play. I made like I was a secret agent. I pretended that my secret new identity was all that was keeping me from great danger…

  My fingers traced through the carved name once again and I tried to remember whether I’d actually been here before and not just in a dream. Jenni. I liked the sound of the name; sort of tinkly, musical. Not like some of the English names that friends in Orientation 101 were given. Not so long and tongue twisting.

  Jenni sounded nice but I didn’t know what it meant. Perhaps that was why I had such trouble remembering it. There could be no associations with the name. If ever I forgot Lanh’s name (as if) I could think: what do you call someone who always has a plan, be it to make Mr C fall in his own shit pit (a long story) or to go off and join the Band of Brothers from Romi’s Bar? What do you call someone who is street-smart enough to never be caught by the ravenous jaws of the village’s mad dog? Ah! Lanh. That’s it.

  My own real name was Dung, which in our language meant beautiful (which I hoped that I was, despite the fact that in the long-mirror in mother’s bedroom I looked gawky and too young, despite being way-past teenage.) When Madame Dugard first read my name from the register in Orientation 101, she couldn’t stop laughing. At first, I took it to mean that she couldn’t possibly think me beautiful. Tall for a Vietnamese country bumpkin sure, long-legged like Westerners at a push, but beautiful? Who was I kidding?

  “Mother says I’m an ugly duckling…” I muttered.

  But Dugard carried on laughing. Over the course of our week of sessions, we all got used to the almost drunken way she let herself go when she laughed but on that first day, I suppose it scared us. When finally she composed herself she told the whole class that Dung didn’t mean beautiful at all in English. Indeed, she began to snort with laughter once more when she tried to explain what Dung did mean in that distant language. In Lanh’s hand such knowledge would have been an incendiary device, but he was long gone. Street-smart enough to get away. In the hands of the ‘Orchids’ and ‘Placid Ones’ in Orientation 101, it was forgotten about almost as soon as Madame had said it.

  For a while, I thought nothing. I let myself drift, occasionally feeling a sharp twinge in my legs as the cramps set in, but nothing else. And then I suppose I started to listen to the sounds of the lorry once again. Even over the rattle and hum sound of the engine, I could, if I concentrated hard enough, hear the tinny crackle of what sounded like a radio coming from the driver’s cab on the other side of the metal wall. It was playing (or at least I thought it was playing) ‘The Scientist’ by that droning English band they made us listen to in Orientation 101 class. I couldn’t remember the name of that band for a dozen of Lanh’s kisses, but I could remember the MTV video; everything happening back-to-front. A little like my life had become, I imagined.

  I wondered who was in there. Would it be one of the three from the concrete place? What did he possibly think he was carrying in his truck? I wondered how he could listen to his radio without a care in the world if he knew that there was a dead Vietnamese in the back. But then I remembered the way Cockerel had looked at me. I remembered the barely contained hatred in his eyes and that jerky, scary way he walked around me, head bobbing, readying himself to strike.

  The monotony of pain and the mind-numbing battery I’d taken from an almost constant state of confusion were wearing me down. But, as Lanh always said, it was amazing what the human body could get used to, and soon I started to feel a little better again.

  I noticed that my eyes were starting to grow somewhat accustomed to the dark. And I clutched onto this small victory as though it was the most important thing in the world. I forced myself to make a mental list of everything I saw when I looked at my immediate surroundings. It was like a life-or-madness game of I-Spy.

  “I spy with my little eye something beginning with ‘C’,” I whispered.

  Ah! Too easy. Crate. Try harder, ladeez, chirped the voice in my head. For some reason, it sounded exactly like Madame Dugard. I wondered what she would have made of the fact that she’d suddenly become one of the voices in my half-howlingmad head? She’d probably have simply poured another load of wine into that globe-sized glass, and just leaned back and got on with it.

  “I spy with my little eye something beginning with ‘P’.”

  Another easy one. Come on ladeez, what do you think I am? A country bumpkin like you? It’s ‘P’for plastic bag. As in the two plastic bags that you can see just out of reach behind that third crate there… That’s right, near the outstretched hand of your travelling companion. Not much good at this game, eh?

  There were indeed two bulging plastic bags close to the dead man. I steeled myself to crawl closer to him in order to check them out, only, as soon as I got any closer, I realised what was in them. I jerked backwards, clipping the side of one of the crates.

  You know what’s in those bags, don’t you Dung? Don’t you; dung? That’s a good one.

  My head was filled with the cackling of Madame Dugard. She was right; dung filled the bags. Dung from Dung, although I couldn’t remember doing it.

  “Shut up! Shut up!” I screeched, my voice almost as highpitched as the squeaking of the lorry’s brakes. “Get out of my head!”

  Not that easy, I’m afraid, Mzzz Country Bumpkin. I’m here for the duration. You didn’t think the FFF would just leave you on your own did you?

  Lanh used to say that the first sign of madness was talking to yourself, but maybe that was because I did it a lot, and
especially when he started hanging out with the men at Romi’s Bar. Back then I didn’t see the harm in it, but now? Now it felt as though I had altitude sickness. Like I was lost at the top of the peak of my own mind and couldn’t find a way out. But at the same time, so pressed in by darkness, by dung and by dead man’s hands, I felt cornered. Like I was being crushed in so eventually I’d become so small I could simply be folded away and put in someone’s pocket for later.

  Now when I tried to speak, it felt as though cockroaches were crawling out of my mouth. When I tried to breathe, leeches latched on to my nostrils. When I tried to listen to the dim radiosounds from the driver’s cabin, all I got was an earful of cotton wool. I was drowning in myself. Dung’s body becoming her own tomb before finally becoming what it was pre-destined to be from the moment of slapped-arse naming – dung. Shit. Nothing. So this was what it felt like to be buried alive. This was what my worst nightmare felt like…

  Back when we were snot-nosed, raggedy-pants children, Lanh and I used to love scaring each other. While Lanh was squatting over the toilet, I would crawl under the door like a snake and bite him on the ankles. While I was drifting off to sleep at night, he would make his fingers into a spider and crawl them across my face. Together, we were braver, daring each other to confront the huge dog out the back of Romi’s Bar in the village. We poked him with sticks until he was spinning-round crazy, throwing up great gobs of saliva all over the place before we ran away giggling into the night. We’d steal up on the drunks out front of the bar while they were comatose, sleeping with their eyes open. We’d stick our mucky paws into their pockets and take a couple of coins from them and then, as our final coup de grace, we’d extricate the glass from their hand and we’d pour the last of the remaining bad-poison onto their crotch so when they woke up, they’d believe they’d wet themselves.