The Finisher

9

Spiro and Murat cycled frantically along the towpath. The need to survive dominated everything. Escaping from the work party had been only a first step. The dread of recapture and death wouldn’t go away. If the Finisher didn’t catch them himself, he was sure to call in reinforcements. A pack will hunt down its prey and show no mercy. The stress was as unrelenting as the mind-numbing grind of forced labour had been. And their leg muscles weren’t used to hard pedalling. After little more than an hour, they had left the city behind, but exhaustion forced a stop. They lifted the bikes over a gate, gulped water from a cattle trough and sheltered under a hedge.

After a while they got back on and rode again. Progress through the rest of the day was in stages and the stages got shorter as weariness took its toll. They didn’t speak much. By early evening they were done for. It was obvious that they needed to rest up and recharge.

They slept rough in a field. In the morning they were damp, shivering and hungry. The sensation of liberty was good, but the sensation of hunger was not. Where do you find food and drink when you have no money and you’re illegally in a foreign country, at risk of being slung into jail and sent back where you came from? Putting as much distance as possible between themselves and the Finisher had seemed the obvious thing to do, but where were they heading? They needed food and that meant getting closer to people again. Without a map they had no idea how far off the next town would be.

“You know what?” Spiro said to Murat. “I think we should turn back.”

“You’re mad.”

“I thought you knew that already. I’ve had experience back home of living rough. The easiest place to survive is where other people are, not out here in the country.”

“We can find stuff in the fields,” Murat said.

“Like what — sheep and cows?”

“Rabbits.”

“How do we catch a fucking rabbit? And if we do, how can we cook it when we haven’t got a fire? The town we left was filled with rich people. You saw the posh houses they live in. They throw out good food and clothes. There were shops and hotels and restaurants that have to get rid of food they can’t use.”

“We can find another town if we keep going.”

“As good as Bath? No chance.”

“It’s too dangerous. He’ll find us there.”

“Not if we’re clever. He’ll be thinking like you — that we’re miles away already. You saw how busy the streets were. We’ll be lost among the crowds.”

“You might,” Murat said. “I stand out.”

“There are people of all sizes. That’s the point. Anyone spots us here in the open sees a tall guy and a squib. In the town you’ll be one of hundreds. You want breakfast?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, catch your rabbit. I’m going to cycle back the way we came and see what I can find.”

“I can’t manage on my own.”

“Your choice, my friend.”

Murat chose. Together they started back in the direction they’d come from, but using roads rather than the riverbank. Spiro said it would be a more direct route.

Late that morning in a lay-by they got lucky and found fresh food in a litter bin. A driver had cleaned out his car and binned some apples and a sandwich still in its pack.

Spiro was triumphant. “What did I say about breakfast?”

“This is lunch.”

“We’ll call it brunch. See the sell-by date? This hasn’t been in the bin more than an hour or two.”

They shared. Not much, but enough to stave off the worst pangs.

“Smoked salmon and cucumber,” Spiro said. “You’d better get used to posh food. They eat well in Bath.”

He had been right. This route was more direct, but busy, and when they saw the first road signs for Bath he got nervous of being spotted, so they took a detour up a quieter road.

“Up” was the operative word.

After toiling uphill for about fifteen minutes, they were rewarded with a view of the entire city sited mostly in the loop of the river in a vast bowl enclosed by more green hills. Stone terraces commanded the slopes, gleaming in the morning sunlight. No high-rise buildings here. The tallest were the spires and towers of churches. Clusters of trees poked above blue-grey slate roofs. Surely this was a place big enough to hide in.

“We did the right thing,” Spiro said.

“Prove it,” Murat said. He wasn’t thinking about their safety anymore. Hunger had taken over again.

They rode boldly into town like gunmen in a Western and freewheeled the last part. Spiro was making the decisions. He said they should head for the station and return the bikes to where they’d found them because it would be easier to suss out the centre of the city on foot. No one challenged them and they were rewarded for their honesty. In a bin attached to the wall they found half a banana and most of a sliced loaf, perfectly clean. An elderly woman saw Murat up to his elbows in the bin and took out her purse and handed him a piece of paper with something printed on it.

“What’s this for?” he asked in Albanian.

The woman smiled and spoke in English and made a gesture as if she was forking food into her mouth with both hands.

Spiro held out his hand. “Some kind of voucher,” he told Murat after inspecting the slip of paper. “Put it in your pocket.”

“A banknote would be better.”

“Quit moaning.”

While scavenging for food in a bin behind a supermarket that evening, they found some broken boxes and packing material that would come in useful for bedding. A loaf past its sell-by date was another good find. They took their prizes to a multi-storey car park. After dark there were still lights left on, so they found a shadowy corner. Outside it started raining heavily, but they were dry.

“Let’s eat,” Spiro said, and tore the wrapping from the loaf. He divided it and handed his big companion the larger portion. “I wouldn’t call this stale.” He took a bite. “Not bad at all.”

He noticed Murat mouth some words and cross himself before starting to eat. “Are you Christian?”

Murat nodded.

“This must be bread of heaven, then,” Spiro joked. “The Lord looks after his own. Lucky I was with you.”

Murat smiled and said nothing.

A little later, after most of the loaf had been consumed, Spiro said, “I’m atheist. How long have you been a Bible-basher, then?”

“Almost all my life.”

Spiro frowned. Murat was at least forty. He would have grown up when Enver Hoxha was head of the communist state and ruthlessly suppressed every form of religion, declaring Albania the world’s first and only atheist country. Every church, mosque and place of worship in the country was demolished early in his forty-year regime. Anyone suspected of practising religion was liable to imprisonment and torture. Only after Hoxha’s death in 1985 had the persecution stopped.

Murat explained. “My parents were believers. I was secretly baptised into the Orthodox faith in a farm building by a brave man, an ordained priest from Greece, who was later arrested and murdered. I was given a Turkish name so nobody would suspect I was Christian.”

Spiro understood. Many people had been ordered by the state to change to non-religious names in those days.

“I grew up in a family that secretly observed the church festivals and took communion with a few others. I was too young to know much about it. I have a faint memory of an Easter celebration in a cellar with liturgical music played on a wind-up gramophone. When I was four, my mother and father were denounced by neighbours and taken away. I remember that vividly. My sister Elira and I were sent to orphanages, different ones, and taught that all religion is dangerous superstition. I accepted this as truth and came to believe my parents had been bad people. Later, after everything changed, I met Elira again. She hadn’t allowed herself to be brainwashed. She put my head right and told me the truth about our family.”

“Did your parents find you?”

“They died in prison. I try not to think about them.”

“Sorry.”

“I pray for them. I still believe, but I haven’t been to church for a long time.”

He had related the facts of his personal history without a trace of self-pity. The suffering this quiet man had endured must have been beyond words.

They wrapped themselves in cardboard and slept fitfully.

By stages in the days that followed, they learned more about living on the street in this city. They were wary of joining other rough sleepers or using drop-in centres. Spiro warned Murat that it wasn’t wise to become part of the homeless community. “That’s too bloody obvious. If the Finisher comes looking, he’s sure to check that lot first.”

Instead, they watched the street dwellers from a distance and learned how they coped. There was a lot of sitting or lying on the pavement and some begging, but Spiro noticed they all had water and saw where it came from. Certain shop windows had blue stickers in the shape of drops of fluid, with writing on them. If you took an empty bottle in, you could get it refilled with tap water. The idea was to cut down on the number of plastic bottles, an eco-friendly scheme the two newcomers were happy to support.

Better still, they discovered how to use the food vouchers the old lady had handed them. Free soup, sandwiches and cake were on offer to the homeless each evening in the Cattle Market and there was another charity handing out food in the car park at the back of Waitrose. Spiro and Murat felt safe using these open-air facilities. Existing like this wasn’t comfortable or easy and couldn’t last indefinitely, but it was better than sorting rubbish ten hours a day, seven days a week. When they’d learned some English and found casual work paid at a fair rate, they would begin to think about what happened next.

Once the basics of survival were overcome, the biggest problem would be communication. Albanian has obscure origins and bears no obvious resemblance to any other language, even those of neighbouring countries, never mind to English.

Murat was better than Spiro at picking up a smattering of English. He had an ear for sounds. He listened and repeated the words and was good at remembering them. “What are they talking about?” Spiro asked him one evening at the food van when everyone seemed more animated than usual.

“Something about goody bags.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m not sure.”

Spiro set his logical mind to work. “I know what good is and I know what a bag is. Maybe they’re saying where good bags can be found.”

“Instead of plastic?”

He shrugged. “It’s only a suggestion. Listen up, Murat, and they might say more.”

“They seem to be talking about stuff inside the bag. I’m hearing water, biscuits, granola, bananas and chocolate. They could be the goodies.”

“Is all this being given away? Where?”

“Wait.” Murat tried speaking some English to a homeless man who seemed to be the main bringer of the good news. After much nodding, pointing and repetition he came back to Spiro. “It’s not till Sunday morning and thousands of these bags will be given out.”

“That’s an exaggeration. I can’t believe thousands. There aren’t thousands living on the streets here.”

“Hold on. I may have misunderstood.” Murat went back to his informant and a longer consultation took place, punctuated with much gesturing, nodding and pointing. “It’s true,” he told Spiro. “Five thousand and they’re given to runners.”

“What do you mean, runners? People on the run like you and me? I keep telling you there can’t be that many.”

“No, Spiro. Ordinary runners doing it to get fit, like we see every day on the streets. There’s a big road race here on Sunday and they get given goody bags after they finish. Some of them aren’t interested in the food in the bag, so it’s a great place to be for handouts.”

“Okay, it’s making sense. Where does this happen?”

“The runners’ village.”

“Get away,” Spiro said. “They don’t have their own village.”

“On Sunday they will and that’s where they collect their bags when they finish the race. They get a T-shirt and a medal. They always keep the medal and most keep the shirt, but not all of them want the bag.”

“So where exactly is this runners’ village?”

“A sports field over that way.” He pointed. “It’s just big tents.”

Spiro’s interest in all this evaporated. “I know where you mean and I’m not going there for biscuits and bananas. I wouldn’t go there for a five-course dinner. They can keep their fucking goody bags.”

Murat understood why. He’d pointed in the direction of the no-go area east of the city where they’d been detained all those months. Neither of them wanted to see that house again, ever. But the goody bags had a strong pull. “It could be all right, Spiro.”

“No.”

“It’s going to be busy with all those runners milling around.”

Spiro ignored him.

Murat wasn’t giving up. “We won’t be noticed. I’m up for it if you are.”

“Fuck off.”

“Safety in numbers.”

“You were the guy who didn’t want to come back to Bath at any price. Now you’re saying we show our heads where we were last seen.”

“I get hungry, Spiro.”

“Go there if you want, but if you tell anyone I’m hiding up here, you’re a dead man.”