8
Nuchi finally throws a cigarette lighter at me. He’s been fidgety for the last 15 minutes, but I have had my eyes closed – not been sleeping, but just watching the sunlit images form this side of my eyelids. First the sharp, but rapidly fading impression of what you actually see: a sharp bright ball for the sun, the compact rectangle of the windscreen; and then the colour and the patterns which emerge: rotating orange and black squares which come together to form a ball which advances and recedes, advances and recedes… and then, because she, Eve, is everywhere and in everything, the ball opens to reveal the faces: fine detailed old and serious faces thick with worry who look at me and shake their heads; and then, later, there are the others: younger and kinder faces who give me a wry smile, and then turn and fade away.

“Did you drop this?”
“Oh thank you.”

I pass him the lighter, and close my eyes again. He finds a soulful disco number on the radio and turns it up as loud as it’ll go. I open my eyes and give him a look.

“What?” he yells.

I reach out and turn the volume down.

“Why did you do that? You have something to say? You want to talk now, do you?”
“You want me to talk?”
“Well I don’t sleep when you are driving. It’s not fair that you are sleeping when I am… when I am at the wheel.”

I look out of the side window. The clouds are low and dense today; they rest stationary over the fields that roll past, mostly fallow. We pass an old mud-smeared, black-coated cyclist slowly moving the low gears on his small-wheeled bike. Soon we’ll be coming to the outskirts of Witches, and the burned-out bar. From there it would be half an hour to the border.

“OK, actually there is something that I was wondering.”
“Oh yes?”
“You remember that guy we picked up in Pure?”

“Well?”

He starts searching for his packet of fags with his free hand, grimacing and patting his jacket pockets in a practised agitated manner.

“Well, well… I was wondering how many Ievas you have in your patch.”
“Ievas? Where are my cigarettes? Did you see them?”
“No”
“I need a cigarette.”

I cross my arms, put my foot on the sill of the passenger seat dash and look outside. One kilometre to Witches, and there it is – when there’s mist in the meadow where it lies it still seems to be smouldering, but the weeds have grown through its blackened floorboards, and there is no heat and no flames – just the scars.

“It’s not good for the health.” I say.
“You are not helping today, are you?” He has found his cigs, and is pulling one out with his teeth, and now with the fag still held there turns to address me with a “don’t you just close your eyes and go back to sleep?”

“Right.”

He turns the music back up – now it’s a country rock n roll number that’s bumping along quite fine. “I don’t want your sweet love,” declares the singer, “I don’t want you coming around. I don’t want your warm love, I’ll only break you down.”

Witches is a town many centuries old, but it’s still got its new quarters: the grey Prole Council blocks of housing on the outskirts with their bars, repair shops, and hairdressers scattered about on their first floors; then, a little further, the remnants of the most recent wave - - just off the main road, a half finished avenue of timber-fronted modern apartments; all of them freshly roofed and insulated but with tarpaulin for windows, 3-metre high temporary builders’ fencing for hedges, and for their gardens -
tough verdant weed life threading and sucking its way sunward through chalk-white rubble.

We pull up at a crossroads, and as Nuchi waits for the red light to change, I notice the anti-cash poster on the side of a bus stop. You know the one; the unclean kaposta being clutched with filthy fingers - and underneath the question in block capitals:

DO YOU KNOW WHERE IT’S BEEN?

“You want me to change the subject?” I offer.
“Oh, please do. The last subject was unhealthy.”
“Hmm. You know what they are saying about the kaposta, don’t you?”
“What have you heard?”
“That it will be scrapped very soon.”

We pull away.

“That’s nothing new. They’ve been saying it for over a year now.”
“Well,” I say, shifting in my seat to look at him, “you know, Jana said that it could cause problems for us.”
“Jana? When?”
“Last time we came back.”
“Why?”
“Well, it’s because they won’t take it for tribute, and if they won’t take it for tribute, no one will want it.”
“So, we use the new one – the Rialto.”
“Nuchi, Nuchi, come on, think. You have seen the pans by the tills, right? Well you can’t stuff anything in there except your mitt, and how do you think we can sell our out-of-date stuff in an on-the-side deal with an on-the-record Rialto transaction?”
“Listen to you!”
“Well someone’s got to do the thinking.”
“Well, my little thinking man. Have you thought of a solution?”
“Not yet.”
“Of course not. There is no solution because there is no problem. Unless now, in your fevered mind you have started solving problems that don’t exist.”

He pulls up by a small row of shops in the centre.

“No problem?”

“No problem” says Nuchi unbuckling his seatbelt, “because we change the Rialto for Realia, and then we transact in Realia over the river. Then we change back into Rialto, and everything is OK. Now, if that’s clear, let’s at least try and think like petty businessmen, and pop in to this chemists (he gestures to ‘The Cauldron’ apotheka just ahead of us) to see if they are in the market for anything. They must be. Look around you!” he says, nodding towards an old lady pulling a bag of potatoes on a self-made trolley, who pulls over to let a stumbling drunk follow his bloody nose home.

“But how are we going to sell over here what we buy over there on the side?”

Nuchi pauses with the van door half open.

“Go on.” He says, looking down at the patch of pavement on to which he’s about to descend.

“Well, that’s it basically. Anything hand-in-pan can’t be cash in hand, can it?”

He turns to look at me, his eyes widened a little, and he suddenly looks a little unsure of himself, which is both satisfying and disconcerting.

“You know we won’t be able to sell our stuff in Rialto here because to do that we will have to a valid product with a traceable paid-up barcode, which we won’t be able to give them.”

“Pff” is all he can manage, and he opens the door and steps out. I jump out and walk quickly round the front of the transit to join him.

“What is ’pff’ supposed to mean?”

“It means,” says, Nuchi, his hand resting on the door to the Cauldron, “it means, you may have diagnosed a small problem, but where there is intelligence, there is a way. And we will find a way – we always do.”

“Who’s ‘we’?"

“I am speaking generally.”

I take a look around and see the old dame, still shuffling with her spuds, and then the drunk now resting head-in-armpit in some shrubbery. It has started to drizzle. A young women is pushing a new beige pram past the amputated stump of a side-street Ladle tree towards us.

The Cauldron is empty save for a bespectacled white-haired dame behind the counter. Once Nuchi confirms she is the manager, he starts his spiel with a “the thing is, my dear…”. I stand by the door and watch him at work; it’s always the same with the ladies: on another planet in another time he’d have begun his sales patter by offering them his arm for a little light promenading.

He explains the delicacy of the situation while alluding modestly to the virtuousness of our activity, namely helping the poor and sick by running the gauntlet of a pernicious customs regime to return with perfectly good prescription drugs that the only are ‘expired‘ according to the frankly insane health and safety requirements of our rather charmingly odd North-Western neighbours.

She breaks a minute of silence during which her expression has been almost entirely impassive to look at me with raised eyebrows and a small upward nod of her head. I turn around and see the woman with the pram at the door.

I smile apologetically and open the door for her. She pushes the pram in, checking there’s space for the wheels as she does so. The quiet noise and faint damp of the street squeezes itself in to our little conspiracy between the whine of the door hinges.

“Thank you.”

“Quite alright.”

I take a look her and place her straight away into a category I think I know well but have never experienced intimately: a calm, gentle, reasonably innocent, pragmatic young mother from a country town. I imagine coming home to her, you know, … looking after her. I imagine knowing her, which is, of course, how it starts, how it goes, and how it ends.

“Umm” she says and looks around because we are all standing there not saying a word.

Nuchi reacts first and steps aside to let her get to the counter.

“How old?” he says, peering into the baby’s lair.

“6 months.”

She smiles cautiously, and pulls out her purse from her coat pocket.

“He or she?”

“He.”

“Beautiful.” saysNuchi and starts to poke his finger.

“Oh, he’s sleeping – better not.”

Nuchi signals his understanding and the mother hands her prescription note to the chemist, who nods stiffly, turns around and starts opening her various alphabetised drawers. Soon, the drugs are placed on the counter and the amount is rung up: 24 Kaposta in full.

“Oh” says the young mother placing 10 kaposta down, and then makes a show of rummaging through the purse she already knows is empty.

The chemist is expressionless. Nuchi draws his bottom lip up over his top lip and turns away. I look down at my feet, and start checking out the tampons in the display case.

“Could I, I mean on Friday, I should have the rest, or maybe you have something cheaper?”

“We have nothing cheaper in right now, but, well, I can sell you 6 of the 24 pills now.”

“OK, thanks,” says the mother gratefully.

I look around to see the chemist take out a sheath of tablets from the box and hand it over. She then re-closes the box, looks at Nuchi, who then turns around and looks at me.

I see the mother out with a ‘take care now’, which for me nowadays is shameless flirtation, but her mood is darkened, and she bumps the pram against the frame of the door and says nothing as she leaves. Once the door is shut, the chemist looks straight ahead and says, “anything prescription, bring it in, and we’ll see.“

“Of course.” We both mutter more or less in tandem, and turn to leave.

“But,” she addresses our retreating forms, “you better get a good deal over there, because I have next to sod all to offer you – there’ll be no fat profits for the likes of you.”

Out of the Cauldron, into the transit, and we’re almost out of Witches in a few minutes. On the hill at the town boundaries a traffic policemen peers at us through the now thick drizzle, weighing up whether or not to pull us over, but he thinks better of it.