Hinterland: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

moves. It prickles with their body heat.
    After a while Kabir’s breathing deepens. Aryan listens to it for a long time.
     
    Hours later Aryan loses the debate with himself and gets up to go outside. Kabir doesn’t stir as he pushes the curtain aside.
    He pees against the side of the outhouse, folds his arms around himself, and lingers in the cold night air. Stillness enfolds the land and the sky is alive with stars. One hanging low on the horizon is so bright it hurts his eyes. Somewhere a farm dog barks, and another answers. A shooting star streaks swift as rocket fire across the heavens.
    He gazes up the road where their truck disappeared. Even if they could run away, there are no trees in this bald land, no forest, no place to hide. He doesn’t know from what direction they have come, let alone which direction to take.
    He thinks about Hamid and wonders where he is now. He misses his daring and his jokes, tries to imagine what he would do if he were here.
     
    In the morning when the old woman comes they show her the bites and ask for new blankets. She looks fiercely at them and barks something in Greek they don’t understand.
    She sets down a tray with cheese and some pieces of cucumber and sweetened black tea in mugs. She returns to the house and flicks the curtain shut behind her.
    Aryan follows her to the door and waits. He blows on his hands to warm his fingers, then hugs them under his armpits. She doesn’t come out again.
     
    In their outhouse, Kabir has left him half the food. Aryan notices his face still shows the creases where he has slept on the edge of the blanket. He cradles the mug of tea in his hands, trying to coax its warmth into his fingers.
    Suddenly they hear the sound of an engine. The farmer’s old pick-up truck is idling in the yard.
    ‘Get in,’ the farmer says. He is leaning out the half-opened door. ‘Today we go to another place.’
    Aryan hesitates. ‘What other place?’ he says.
    ‘For working,’ the farmer says. ‘Many trees.’
     
    The dashboard is cracked from the sun and covered in dust but the clock still works, even if the time shown by its glow-in-the-dark hands can’t be right. There is no heating in the truck; Kabir leans into Aryan for warmth.
    They drive for over an hour, watching the landscape change. The earth becomes stonier and redder. They pass groves of stunted olive trees, the trunks spaced evenly as chessmen. Aryan half-closes his eyes; the winter trees flicker light-dark, light-dark through his eyelids as they pass. Bamboo thickets shiver along the roadsides. Plastic-sheeted hothouses dot the desolate landscape; idle watering systems poise angular as stick insects in the fields. In the distance, the mountains are hard and white, not like the ochre ridges that dissolved in the rains where he was born. The road signs are all in two languages, English characters beneath strange Greek symbols, but Aryan doesn’t recognize any words.
    They turn into a bumpy dirt road that leads to an orchard. The trees are dark and laden with golden orbs.
    The farmer tears at the handbrake.
    Outside the truck, the air is cold and still. Though the sun has finally risen, a lacework of frost still decorates the dead leaves on the ground. Aryan jogs on the spot to warm his feet, like they did before Omar’s games. Kabir is blowing on his hands.
    A couple of ladders lean on their sides against a low stone wall. There is a shed with wooden crates; more tumble in a pile outside it. A blue tarpaulin flattens the grass where it lies, rolled up under the trees.
    The farmer pulls one of the ladders upright; it squeals as he kicks its feet apart and plants them in the soft soil. He pulls the tarpaulin round its base, then climbs up to show them how.
    He twists the oranges off the branches and drops them into a bag slung across his chest. Loosened fruit fall like outsized hailstones on to the sheet below.
    He passes the bag to Aryan; Kabir’s job is to collect the falling oranges, fill