Bandits & Butterflies
March 31, 2010 by admin
Filed under Linger Longer
Linger Longer: Driving the Trans-Siberian
Chapter 16: Bandits & Butterflies
With rubles bursting out of our pockets, Si confidently
drives the Sierra through the city of Tyumen, a business
capital where during World War II Lenin’s body was
secretly hidden from the invading Germans. A sign to
Pokrovskoe springs up from the side of the road and points
towards the village and birthplace of Grigory Rasputin –
aka ‘the priest of sex’. Si isn’t keen on straying too far off
route, and even though I feel we should visit the village of
Pokrovskoe as a mark of respect to a man who had more
charm than Leslie Phillips, we continue on to Omsk and
the city of Novosibirsk.
Like the Trans-Siberian, we head east and drive and drive
and drive – ten hours, eleven hours, twelve hours – we
can’t get enough of the road, we’re addicted. I don’t know
why? Maybe it’s because we’re trying to get the thought of
Vladivostok out of our minds, or because we want to get to
Lake Baikal as quickly as possible before the Sierra decides
it’s had enough and blows a gasket.
The P402 to Omsk is long and empty and the sky is enormous
overhead. Wide-open grass plains stretch out into
the distance as far as the eye can see, and we chase telegraph
poles that link arms in a line for hundreds of miles.
Occasionally, we catch a glimpse of the Trans-Siberian
cutting through the landscape, and we feel reassured that
if all goes tits up at least we can get the train. In the middle
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of nowhere, a microlight glides low overhead and I wonder
who might be inside. Si guesses it’s a rich farmer with a
cool mode of transport, but I wonder if it might be some
crazy Dutchman attempting a solo round-the-world flight.
Passing through Omsk, we park up for the night at a rest
stop 50km outside the city. We sit at a picnic table outside
a cafe and are greeted by an interesting looking woman,
who informs us she is from Tashkent in Uzbekistan. She’s
tiny and has a dark brown face and oriental features that
are framed by a white Muslim headscarf. She serves us
fried chicken and plain rice, and makes us laugh as she
stamps her feet with frustration at the mosquitoes nipping
around her ankles. She stands by our table in-between
serving us beer, and explains in broken English that she
has two children living in Tashkent, and has come to
Siberia to work for her uncle for six months. Listening to
her communicate with us in English, I begin to realise
how incredibly ignorant we are about the rest of the
world, and the level of intelligence of people who are far
less privileged than ourselves. She tells us about the long
journey she made from Uzbekistan with her nephew,
across the perilous mountain roads of Kazakhstan – a
journey she has made out of necessity, not by choice like
we have. She deeply misses her children, but hopes to put
them through school with the money she’ll earn working
here. Her eldest daughter is six years old and can already
speak a few words in English.
We’re up at the crack of dawn and cover 300km before
breakfast. What we’re doing is no ‘Gum Ball Rally’, but
we’re chewing up miles faster than Michael Jackson has
facelifts. The weather begins to change from dark and overcast
to bright sunshine, with the temperature outside
reaching 28°C. Before we started this journey, if someone
had asked me what I thought it would be like in Siberia, I
would’ve imagined an empty barren landscape covered in
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snow. In the winter the temperature drops to minus fifty
below, but at this time of year, particularly where we are
now, it’s as hot as Alicante.
Before long we enter the Khakassia Republic and
Novosibirsk, a large city spawned by the Trans-Siberian at
the rail crossing of the Ob River in 1893. It’s a modern city
with orange and white high-rise buildings on the banks of
the river. We cross a road bridge over the Ob.
‘Hey, Si! Did you know over a million people live in
Novosibirsk?’
‘Really?’
‘Yep, one point three million people live right here in
the middle of Siberia.’
‘That’s insane.’
‘We’re so ignorant in the west, aren’t we? I didn’t expect
there to be anything out here.’
‘Me neither,’ Si replies. ‘What do all these people do?’
‘Well, there’s loads of industry. This city was built as an
industrial and transport centre between the coal fields a
little way to the east of here, and the mineral deposits of
the Ural mountains to the west.’
‘Right … so if you think about it. If it weren’t for the
Trans-Siberian, none of this would exist.’
‘Nope.’
Cruising through the centre of the city, we pass a huge
dirty colourless car market selling everything to do with
… uh … cars. There are literally hundreds of makeshift
stalls crammed together side-by-side selling headlights,
side panels, batteries, hubcaps, engines, wheels, car
radios … you name it someone is selling it. We find the
M53 to Kemerovo, and leaving the bustling traffic we find
ourselves once again on a long straight road that disappears
into the distance. Just as we begin to feel like we’re
making progress a signpost suddenly zips over our heads,
and with genuine surprise we realise we still have a whopping
1778km to go before we make it to Lake Baikal. We
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console ourselves with the fact that this means we’re now
more than halfway between the Ural Mountains and Lake
Baikal and, considering we’ve only been driving for
roughly two days, we’ve covered nearly 1,500 miles of tarmac.
We arrive in Kemerovo around 8 o’clock in the evening.
It’s a lovely little town with numerous outside bars
beneath bright yellow canopies. Pretty girls walk arm-inarm
along the pavement, and smart looking guys drive
around in their shiny cars. Everything is going swimmingly,
when all of a sudden we hear a strange vibrating
sound coming from the engine. We ignore it at first, hoping
it will disappear, but just like turning up the volume
on a stereo, it gets louder until it becomes deafening.
People literally stop walking down the street to look at the
car. The growling tractor noise howls across the town, and
crowds of people standing outside bars watch in amusement
as we roar past. Concerned we may have damaged
the engine by putting the wrong petrol grade in the tank,
we pull over into a rundown tyre garage a few miles outside
town.
Si grabs an old piece of hose from the boot. ‘Why the
fuck did we use seventy-six octane? It’s fucked up the
engine!’
‘It’s all they had. I’m sure it shouldn’t make any difference.’
‘How the fuck do you know? We should’ve used the
petrol from our emergency containers until we got to
Novosibirsk.’
Shoving one end of the pipe into the tank, Si gets down
on his hands and knees.
I frown. ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’
Si pauses for a second and looks up from behind his
long fringe.
‘Yes, I have done this before, you know,’ he snaps. ‘It
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doesn’t take a frigging genius to syphon petrol out of a car.’
Looking away, Si takes a deep breath before sealing his
mouth around the end of the hose. He sucks vigorously,
but turns red and immediately retches before spitting out
a mouthful of petrol. I try not to laugh. Clutching his head,
the poor bastard drops to his knees and quickly swills his
mouth out with water.
‘That was disgusting, it’s burning my mouth!’ He hands
me the hose. ‘You have a go.’
I shake my head. ‘No way!’
‘Well, we’ve got to do something … the car’s shagged.’
Crouching down, I examine the end of the hose. ‘Do I
have too?’
‘Yes!’
Just as I’m about to give it a go, I glance over my shoulder
and see a young guy with a shaved head emerging from the
tyre garage. With a bare chest beneath his blue overalls and
flip-flops on his feet, he makes his way casually over to us.
I smile as he peers down at the pipe hanging out of the
petrol tank. Si grabs the phrasebook from the car.
‘Pamageetee pazhalstra,’ the guy mumbles.
I frown. ‘What’s he say?’
‘I don’t know,’ Si shrugs, flicking through the pages.
The mechanic folds his oily arms and continues to stare
at the pipe. Spinning on his heals he strolls into the garage
and returns with a big white plastic container. He places
it on the ground and begins sucking on the end of the
hose. Within seconds, petrol is gushing out the end of the
pipe and he quickly shoves it into the container. The guy
looks up and nods, we both smile back unsure what to say.
The plastic container quickly fills up with the urinecoloured
liquid, and he snaps at me in Russian to fetch
another container from the garage. As the last few drops of
petrol dribble out of the pipe, the guy wipes his hands on
his overalls and points to a petrol pump less than thirty
yards away.
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‘Spaceeba,’ Si smiles.
The mechanic climbs to his feet and studies our registration
plate before disappearing back into the garage.
‘Nice bloke,’ Si grins, screwing on the petrol cap. ‘He
could’ve charged us for that.’
‘I guess tourists don’t come through these parts all that
often. This town isn’t a Trans-Siberian stopover.’
Si’s eyes light up. ‘Hey, we’re probably the first foreigners
he’s met.’
‘We could be, but he didn’t exactly seem overjoyed to
see us.’
‘Yeah, but then he doesn’t look the type to get over
excited.’
We push the car over to one of the petrol pumps and fill
up the tank with octane 95, but as we try and drive away
the tractor noise continues to roar from under the bonnet.
‘Bollocks!’ I yell. ‘I knew it wasn’t the petrol!’
Opening the bonnet, we look down at the rusty engine.
Si grabs the tatty old manual that came with the car, and
after a few seconds he tosses it to the ground.
‘Right, then,’ he beams, rubbing his hands together.
‘What we have here is a common problem, which effects
most cars of this age.’
‘You haven’t got a clue, have you?’
‘No, I haven’t got a fucking clue.’
We watch the engine vibrating vigorously from side-toside.
I click my fingers. ‘Wait a minute, I think the noise might
be coming from that pipe … press down the accelerator.’
Si jumps behind the wheel and gently begins to rev the
engine.
‘It is … look!’ I shout. ‘The front part of the exhaust has
come apart.’
‘The front part of the exhaust?’ Si replies, switching off
the engine.
‘Yeah, I think so,’ I laugh. ‘The bolt that holds it together
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has popped out.’
‘Shit, the engine must’ve got really hot.’
‘Uh-huh. Maybe driving over five hundred miles a day
is too much for a sixteen-year old car?’
‘That does sound pretty extreme. I can’t believe we just
threw away a whole tank of petrol.’
I scratch the back of my head. ‘So what the fuck do we
do now? It’s starting to get dark?’
‘Try to fix it, I suppose,’ Si replies.
‘How?’
‘I have absolutely no idea.’
‘We could bandage it together with some kitchen foil
and wire.’
Si frowns. ‘Are you sure that’ll work?’
‘It’s worth a try.’
Pushing the two pieces of pipe together, we quickly
begin to wrap the foil around the join and just as I’m about
to use some wire to hold it all in place, the guy from the
tyre garage appears behind us. He glances down at our
handy work and begins to laugh. He points at his chest
and then at the Sierra. He gestures for us to drive the car
into his garage. Feeling embarrassed, but happy to accept
some assistance from our new friend, we swing the car
around and he directs us into his workshop and onto a
ramp. Closing the doors behind him, the guy points to two
wooden chairs next to a small table and a rusty stove. We
sit down and fight to get comfortable. The mechanic
presses a button and we can hear the sound of hydraulics.
A ramp slowly lifts the car a few feet above the ground. He
jumps down inside the pit and begins tinkering around.
Si turns to me with a puzzled look. ‘What’s he doing?’
I shrug. ‘No idea.’
The mechanic peers over the side of the pit and raises
his thumb in the air. We both smile and nod reassuringly.
Grabbing a wrench from the side, the guy dives back
under the car.
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Ten minutes later, he climbs out of the pit with oil on his
face and indicates to us that the job is complete.
‘Bloody hell, that was quick!’ Si beams.
‘Don’t get too excited,’ I whisper. ‘He’ll probably want
us to show him the money.’
We wait patiently for him to present us with a huge bill,
but instead he begins to boil the kettle. Picking up a tin of
coffee off the floor, he shovels a couple of teaspoons into
three stained mugs. He laughs and says something in
Russian, but we haven’t got a clue what he’s talking about,
so we just laugh back. We sit in silence for a while and
then he whips his wallet out of his pocket. He flips it open
and pulls out a picture of a pretty young woman holding
a baby in her arms. We smile and study the picture with
interest. Taking a sip of coffee, I attempt to try out some
Russian words from the phrasebook. He laughs and sparks
up a cigarette. Heating up soup on his cooking stove, he
pours some into two bowls and for some unknown reason,
apart from maybe to break the ice, I suddenly show him a
particularly nasty graze on my left elbow. Si quickly joins
in and rolls up his jeans to display a large scar on his knee
from when he fell off his BMX as a kid, but the guy doesn’t
seem impressed – he just looks at us strangely.
Suddenly he stands up, pulls down his overalls and
reveals a deep scar on the back of his thigh. We both look
at it and gasp. He then mimes firing a machinegun and
uses his hands to imitate an explosion.
‘Chechnya,’ he nods, pointing to his leg.
He grabs a pen and a piece of paper and writes the date
1994. This guy can’t be much older than twenty-six,
which means he must have only been about seventeen
when he went to war in Chechnya. He tries to act out what
happened, and it looks like a piece of shrapnel had
embedded itself in his leg when a landmine exploded.
Many people were killed. He crosses his chest. You can
see in his face that he’s not lying; the scar says it all. I feel
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stupid for showing him my graze, and it makes me think
that it doesn’t matter how far we drive across Siberia or
how many experiences we have, nothing can even come
close to what this young guy has seen. Shaking his head he
quickly lights another cigarette. Grabbing his diary, he
flicks to the back page and starts punching a number into
his mobile phone. He stands up and shows us a dirty single
bed behind a flimsy divider.
‘Dyevachka,’ he nods with a smile.
I frown. ‘Dyevachka?’
Si already has his face in the phrasebook.
‘Dyevachka?’ Si mutters. ‘Ah, dyevachka means … uh …
girl.’
‘Girl?’ I repeat.
The guy grins and points to the bed. ‘Dyevachka.’
He dials another number and points to each of us, then
once again at the bed.
‘He must mean a prostitute,’ Si cries. ‘He’s dialing a frigging
hooker!’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Well, what else is he doing?’
‘He’s getting a hooker to come here? To the garage?’
Si nods. ‘Yeah, I think so.’
‘Why? We’re here. He can’t fuck a hooker while we’re
here!’
‘That seems to be the idea. He probably wants us to pay
for it.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, either that or he wants us to join in the fun,’ Si
smiles.
‘What? I’m sorry, but I’m not doing that!’
‘Well, let’s stop him, then.’
‘OK, I will.’
I turn to the guy and shake my head. ‘Nyet, spaceeba.
Nyet dyevachka.’
The guy’s face drops. ‘Nyet dyevachka?’
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I nod. ‘Da. Nyet dyevachka.’
He looks sad. The poor guy, he’s probably not getting
any action from his wife at the moment.
‘Nyet dyevachka?’ he repeats sitting down.
‘Nyet. We’re tired,’ I reply, resting my head on my hand.
He puts his mobile phone on the table. We sit in silence
for a few minutes. Si tries to liven up the mood by asking
him more questions from the phrasebook, but he doesn’t
seem interested. The guy lights up another cigarette and
stares down at his phone. More silence. We eventually
make our excuses and crash out in the car.
* * *
I’m woken by the whirring sound of a machine. I peer out
of the window and see our new mechanic friend skillfully
removing a tyre from its rim. Chris is already up and is
sitting at the small table sipping coffee from a mug.
Climbing out of the car I throw the tyre guy a friendly
wave, but he just ignores me and carries on with his job at
hand. Thanks to this dude’s kind help, the tractor noise
has gone. Without him we would’ve been up shit creek
without a paddle, and all it took to solve the problem was
a bolt … not kitchen foil or wire. He still looks pissed off
about last night, and I can only imagine it’s because we
prevented him from getting laid. No offense to the guy, but
I think it was for the best. Feeling as though we’ve outstayed
our welcome, we offer him some money for fixing
the car, but he declines. We gather together our belongings
and say our goodbyes.
The drive from Kemerovo to Krasnoyarsk is beautiful. The
Siberian summer meadows are in full bloom and horses
graze peacefully in the fields. Crossing a road bridge over
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the Yenisey River into the city of Krasnoyarsk, I stick my
hand out of the window and ride the air currents.
‘Hey, Chris, you can catch a passenger boat from here all
the way to the Arctic Kara Sea in the north. Imagine how
cool that would be? It’s two thousand miles and takes four
days going up and six days coming back.’
‘Wow,’ Chris smiles, ‘Ray Mears would be in his element
out here … survival central, or what!’
‘Exactly. Mountains, rivers and harsh Arctic conditions
in the winter – what more could he possibly need. It’s perfect!’
Passing through the city, we enter eastern Siberia and
immediately begin to see trucks on the road carrying containers
with Japanese writing down the side. The heat
inside the car is immense and seeing signs for a rest stop
with showers, we decide to clean ourselves up a bit.
Paying to use the shower facilities, we emerge from the
brand new shower block feeling like new men. Dumping
our soiled clothes in the boot of the car, we grab something
to eat in the restaurant and for the first time in days
enjoy a mouth-watering meal of hamburger and chips.
‘You’ll never guess what?’ Chris beams, egg yolk running
down his chin.
‘What?’
‘We’re above flipping Mongolia!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, that’s right next to China.’
‘I know… look!’
Chris slides the map in front of me.
‘See,’ he grins. ‘We’re here and the Mongolian border is
there, three hundred miles across the Altay Mountains.
Now, I reckon we should drive down there and do a bit of
trekking. What do you think?’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘Why not?’
‘Chris, there’s no way the Sierra will be able to climb
those mountains.’
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‘Course it will.’
‘Use your noodle, fat boy. It’s too risky. Let’s see how far
we can get past Chita first before attempting anything as
crazy as that. We’ve still got a shot at Vladivostok, remember.’
‘Do you reckon?’
‘Abso-fucking-lutely!’
Wiping our plates clean, we travel deeper and deeper
into the Siberian forests, where we drive for a hundred
miles along the highway that’s a cloud of white butterflies.
They flutter in their thousands towards the window
screen, some get sucked inside the engine and splat on the
front grill, others fly through the windows and pile up on
the back parcel shelf. We pull over and look in awe at the
white winged creatures that dance in the sky all around
us. They gather on the warm tarmac in monstrous heaps
like confetti, and scooping up a pile in my hands they
tickle my face and get caught in my hair. Thundering
through the white swarm, we pass through tiny villages
similar to the ones we had seen in European Russia, with
the small wooden houses with beautifully carved shutters.
Women in brightly coloured headscarves draw water from
ancient wells and goats chew on wild flowers growing at
the roadside. We wait at a rail crossing and wave at a
young kid, who zooms by in an open carriage of a freight
train. The wind blows freely in his hair, and he returns
our wave as he disappears on his adventure across the top
of Asia.
Heading deeper into the wilderness, I’m surprised to see a
man standing in the middle of the road. He waves his
arms urgently above his head and indicates for us to pull
over. I dip the brakes and slow down as we approach him.
‘What you stopping for?’ Chris snaps.
‘We can’t just ignore him. I think he’s in trouble.’
The guy pops his head through the window and talks
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quickly in Russian. He’s slightly unshaven, but is smartly
dressed in a lime green silky shirt and cream trousers.
‘Nyet Rooskey,’ Chris replies. ‘We don’t speak Russian.’
‘You speak English!’ he grins.
‘Yes, we’re from England,’ I sing, intrigued to meet a fellow
English speaker all the way out here in the middle of
Siberia.
‘You have petrol?’ he asks.
‘Yes, of course,’ I cheerily reply.
Happy to assist a fellow traveller in need, I swing open
my door.
‘Where are you going?’ Chris shouts, as he tries to grab
hold of my arm.
I jump out of the car and meet the guy at the back of the
Sierra. As I open the boot, I notice a rather dodgy looking
kid leaning against a navy blue car on the other side of the
road.
‘I am from Slovenia,’ the guy grins, shaking my hand.
‘You know my country?’
‘Uh … yeah,’ I reply, handing him the petrol can. ‘It’s
near Croatia, isn’t it?’
He nods. ‘Yes, you know the world very much.’
I smile awkwardly.
The guy suddenly looks a little shifty. He can’t quite
keep still and keeps glancing up and down the long empty
road, almost checking to see if the coast is clear. I suddenly
sense something is not quite right. He signals to the
kid standing by his car, and he skulks across the road and
takes the petrol can. The guy begins to talk urgently at me.
He explains how they have run out of petrol and can’t
afford to buy more. He’s a powerful looking bloke with the
most unusual emerald green eyes, and for a second I find
myself listening to his sob story. My mind races. I suddenly
realise where the conversation is heading, and I
stop him in mid-sentence and tell him we don’t have any
money. He pulls a gold ring out of his pocket with a large
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red rock embedded into it. He tells me it’s a ruby.
‘Please,’ he continues. ‘Maybe you buy ring, very cheap,
very beautiful. We need to buy petrol.’
He thrusts the ring close to my face, and seeing him
glance very quickly up and down the road with those
intimidating green eyes, something inside me clicks.
‘No,’ I snap, slamming the boot shut. ‘I give you petrol!’
‘You buy ring!’
The guy seems to be getting annoyed. He glances up and
down the road again before reaching for his back pocket. I
freeze. For all I know he may have a knife or a gun. My
survival instincts kick in and I sprint around to the driver’s
door and jump inside the car. I quickly strike the
engine as the guy runs around to the passenger window.
‘What about your petrol can?’ he shouts.
‘Keep it!’ I shout back, and revving the engine I accelerate
away at great speed.
‘You fucking idiot!’ Chris yells. ‘Why did you get out of the fucking car?’
‘Fuck, fuck,’ I pant, checking the rearview mirror. ‘Are
they following us?’
‘Slow down!’
I look in the rearview mirror again. ‘He was gonna shoot
me! That guy was gonna fucking shoot me!’
My hands are shaking and the adrenaline is pumping
through my veins.
‘Si, what the fuck happened back there?’
‘He was going to pull out a gun. I’m sure of it!’
‘You’re kidding me?’
‘No, I’m being deadly serious!’
‘You fucking idiot!’
‘He started trying to sell me this ring, but I could see in
his eyes that he was about to do something.’
Chris hits the dashboard. ‘You should never get out of
the car in situations like that, it’s the first fucking rule, you
dumb ass! That’s why people travel in convoy around here.’
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‘Well, how was I supposed to know?’
‘You could’ve got us both killed!’
‘Fuck, Chris, I’m sorry. We’ve been driving for so long,
for a moment there I forgot where we are. What the hell is
a guy from Slovenia doing out here, anyway?’
Chris shakes his head. ‘Jesus Christ! Now we’ve only got
one petrol can.’
‘Oh, fuck off! You’d have done the same thing.’
‘No I fucking wouldn’t have!’
Shaken by the afternoon’s events, we both eventually
calm down and concentrate on making some distance.
Letting Chris take over the driving, we agree to continue
on until it gets dark. The never-ending forests and the
beautiful meadows of the Siberian countryside slowly
begin to disappear. Grey smog hangs heavy in the air,
blocking out the sun. We pass through a small industrial
town that consists of little more than a grotty housing
estate and a rundown processing plant. Rusty pipes loop
above the road and kids with grubby faces peer at us as we
pass by. On the edge of town, we spy a cafe with a few
trucks parked up outside. It’s the first place we’ve seen in
hours, and feeling tired and hungry we decide to check it
out. Locking up the car, I notice two men and a woman
loitering suspiciously outside the gateway to another
enormous factory. We ignore them and head quickly
through the dark doorway. Walking towards the counter,
I’m immediately surprised by how thick the steel bars are
that stand between the woman slouched behind the
counter and ourselves. They look like they belong to an
18th century jail cell. I hold up the handwritten menu to
the bars and point at a couple of different options. Having
learnt a few words, I also ask for Borshch (beetroot soup
with vegetables and meat), khlyeba (bread) and kartofeeleem
(potatoes). Chris peers over my shoulder and orders two
beers. The gaunt woman, with a starched cloth tied
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around her head and bright red lipstick, scowls in our
direction. Popping the lids, she thrusts the warm bottles
of beer through the bars. We walk across the dimly lit
room and sit at a large metal table in the corner. The hardfaced
male clientele sit hunched over steaming bowls of
soup and glance over at us.
‘What a fucking dive,’ Chris whispers.
I look around. ‘Yeah, they seriously need to slap a bit of
paint on the walls. I’m going to the toilet, back in a
minute.’
I stand up and walk to the back of the café. There’s a
door slightly ajar to my left and poking my head inside, I
see a dirty toilet with the lid down. Entering the small
room, I close the door behind me and grab some tissue
paper out of my pocket. Lifting up the lid, I jump back in
horror as I see a hypodermic needle lying on top of a pile
of black shit. Letting go of the lid, I race out of the toilet
and within two seconds I’m sitting back at the table. The
woman behind the counter looks over at us.
‘There’s a used needle in the toilet,’ I cry, sneaking peaks
around the café.
Chris frowns. ‘A needle?’
‘Yeah. Someone around here is jacking up. It must be
heroin.’
‘I didn’t know they used that crap out here?’
‘Oh yeah, it’s probably making its way here from
Afghanistan.’
A few minutes later, the woman behind the counter
slides a tray beneath the bars with our food on it. I fetch it
and return to the table. The food looks disgusting, and
half-heartedly pushing the inedible mush around our
plates for a while, we quickly head back to the car. It’s
pitch black outside and locking ourselves inside the safety
of the Sierra, we watch as the car park slowly begins to
empty. After a while the lights inside the café go out, and
we’re left alone in the car park feeling incredibly vulnera-
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ble. We try to block out our surroundings by getting some
shut eye, which is impossible as I’ve got images of the guy
who nearly robbed us haunting my mind. A black shape
moving behind the Sierra suddenly attracts my attention.
I sit up and glance in the wing mirror, but I’m unable to
see anything. I nudge Chris awake. With wide eyes, I roll
down my window and peer out into the darkness.
‘What is it?’ Chris mumbles.
‘I just saw something moving outside.’
‘You’re imagining it.’
‘Chris, I definitely saw something moving out there.’
‘You’re paranoid.’
‘I’m not! Fuck knows what it was.’
‘It’s probably the Grim Reaper coming to get ya,’ Chris
laughs, as he snuggles inside his sleeping bag.
‘Fuck off, its not funny. Those highway robbers could
have followed us here.’
‘Go to sleep.’
I check all the doors are locked before pulling my sleeping
bag tightly around my neck. I feel my heart pounding
inside my chest, and just as I’m about to close my eyes I
suddenly see the black shape flash by my window.
‘Right, that’s it!’ I scream. ‘There’s something out there!’
Chris sits bolt upright and peers out of the window.
‘Jesus Chris, where?’
Suddenly, a hand slams against the window. We both
scream at the top of our voices. I jump towards Chris, desperate
to get away from the glass. A face appears at the
window, it’s a painfully thin woman with long greasy hair.
Her eyes are glazed and bloodshot. Chris tears open his
sleeping bag and starts the car as the woman bangs harder
against the glass. Flicking on the headlights, Chris
reverses at speed away from the crazed woman, who grabs
her hair and screams. We wheel spin out onto the road
and disappear in a cloud of exhaust fumes.
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