Long Way Home Read Online Free Page B

floral pattern. He found faces in it, gazing at each other and looking away, strange, uneven profiles and eyes sitting askew.
    He thought of the times lying on the beach with Maria, seeing faces in the clouds high above them, talking about the apartment they would buy when they had the money, kids and cars and holidays. She didn’t want him to leave but she understood it was the only way they could make that future happen. They reassured each other that it would be worth it.
    Jakub went out into the kitchenette and filled the kettle, whistled to himself as he waited for it to boil. Within a couple of minutes the other men were awake as well and the caravan juddered on its blocks as they moved around. One of the Chinese was coughing up the night before’s cigarettes in the toilet, while he pissed noisily in fits and starts.
    They had been here for a few days now. Paolo tried to speak to them but they had very little English and he wondered if he was the only person who had learned it before coming here.
    Jakub poked his head in the room. ‘Work now.’
    Paolo dragged himself upright and pulled on the trousers he’d left on the floor. Put on a dirty T-shirt and an even dirtier sweater, dried concrete flaking off it, found his work boots and laced them with fingers numb from the cold.
    In the kitchenette one of the Chinese handed him a cup of black tea and he thanked the man, got a small bow in return. There was a pan of beans bubbling on the two-ring electric stove and the man gestured towards it.
    ‘You?’
    Paolo shook his head.
    Back in Portugal he had read of how the Chinese were smuggled into Europe. They scraped together the money from their families, borrowed the rest from gangsters, all for the promise of better paid work. They were dragged across mountainous borders in the snow, some froze to death, others starved, a few fell into ravines. The ones who survived considered themselves lucky.
    The tea turned to dishwater in his mouth and Paolo forced himself to swallow it, didn’t want to offend the kind Chinese man who didn’t know him, had no reason to be nice to him, but had thought to make it.
    Outside the second alarm sounded and the men left their breakfasts unfinished on the melamine table, grabbed their coats and hurried out of the door. Jakub trudged after them, eating a slice of stale white bread folded in half, and Paolo closed the door, pulling it up sharply to stop it blowing open again.
    It was light now, and so cold he could see ice sparkling on the tarmac. A biting wind swirled around the yard, where the dogs were prowling, five vicious mutts in a pack. Paolo hurried to get inside the van away from them.
    The gates opened automatically and the vans pulled out in convoy, four of them full of men, and this morning two went off to the left and two to the right, heading away to different jobs. That only meant one thing – they would work much harder than usual today.
    Paolo shrank down in his seat and tucked his chin into his chest, hugging his arms to his body for warmth. Next to him Jakub radiated heat and he couldn’t understand how the man was never cold. When it snowed he would work with no jacket and at the first sign of sun stripped down to bare skin, showing a broad back covered in acne scars and strap marks which became livid with exertion. Paolo had asked where he was from and when he couldn’t make himself understood Jakub drew a crude map in the dirt with his finger.
    Eastern Europe, Paolo guessed, one of those cold, grey countries run by gangsters and thugs.
    He let his head fall against the window, watching the countryside swipe past, the fields shrouded by freezing fog. Saw the vapour trails of aeroplanes heading north, people flying away to new lives or maybe back to their old ones, freshly rich and full of plans.
    He closed his eyes and imagined his own homecoming, finding Maria’s smiling face among the crowd at arrivals, hurrying to her waiting arms and seeing the realisation light