22
AFTER MORE THAN A YEAR without contact between Finn and me, our reunion held all the anticipation–principally the fear and doubts–that any lover would have felt in the same position.
How would we feel about each other now, I wondered, away from the familiarity of the surroundings where our intimacy had grown? Was our affair a thing of a particular time and place? Would the spark between us still exist? Would it need rekindling?
Too much expectation risked disappointment, too little risked failing to rise to the occasion and, perhaps, missing the moment, the opportunity, for ever.
I felt awkward and out of place at the airport in Marseilles, coming through the sliding glass doors beyond Immigration. There were groups of my fellow Russians already brimming with enthusiasm for a summer holiday away from Moscow’s more anxious heat. My own arrival brought me face to face with a task that now seemed impossible: to love Finn and satisfy my masters.
I didn’t see Finn at first. And then something drew my gaze towards a figure leaning against a car rental desk by the exit. He was reading a newspaper and it covered most of his face. Between us was a throng of taxi drivers and private chauffeurs holding cards with names on them.
I looked idly across the airport’s concourse and wondered who was from the Forest here, who had travelled with me on the plane, and where they were placed in the hall now.
The reason I didn’t see Finn at first was because he’d almost completely changed. He was very tanned and hadn’t shaved for several days. His hair was long, down to his shoulders, and he’d dyed it a sort of dirty blond. He was wearing a light blue canvas jacket and jeans and, I was startled to see when he flicked the newspaper over briefly, he had no shirt under the jacket. Around his neck I saw a necklace of blue stones, lapis maybe. It was his feet I finally recognised. He wore a pair of old deck shoes with paint on the left shoe. I remembered them from his flat in Moscow.
In a split second our eyes met and then he looked away, still holding the newspaper. He walked with measured swiftness in the opposite direction and exited through automatic glass doors into the azure heat. I didn’t follow him but exited through other automatic doors straight ahead of me. We found ourselves thirty yards apart, on the pavement where the taxis and buses pulled up. We were separated by travellers, their luggage, drivers, porters and airport staff. There was a convenient pandemonium of greeting, and the loading of vehicles.
From the corner of my eye I saw Finn walk quickly across the road, dodging cars, and I followed parallel, keeping the thirty yards between us. Madly, I was briefly irritated in the heat that he wasn’t carrying my heavy case.
I saw him weave into a car park. I watched him look around lazily, behind and in front, and automatically made the same scan myself to see if anyone on foot was tailing either of us. For me in the crush, it was impossible to know, but he seemed to be clear. I saw him flick a switch on a bunch of keys and the lights on a white Renault flashed. I stopped on the far side of the slip road.
He got into the car, reversed out and drove slowly down the slip road towards me. I watched to see if other cars did the same. He stopped the car and threw open the passenger door and one of the rear doors. I manhandled my case on to the back seat and stepped in beside him.
I had forgotten it would be like this. Because it was Finn I was meeting, I was unprepared for it. His first words to me were matter-of-fact.
‘What’s behind?’
‘A dark blue BMW about twenty yards away and a white Mercedes behind that.’
‘Ahead?’
‘Green Peugeot and a taxi.’
‘Let’s go,’ he said, and grinned straight into my heart.
We drew up at the automatic barrier and there were queues at all the barriers on either side. Finn put the parking card into the machine and the barrier rose. Before he accelerated through, he slid a thin metal card into the machine’s slot. We drove under the barrier, I saw him watch it fall in the mirror behind us, and then he grinned. The blue BMW couldn’t get the machine to accept its own parking card and was trying to reverse out, but there were at least four cars behind it. We drove out to the sound of angry horns.
‘There’ll be at least one ahead,’ Finn said. ‘They’re watching you, not me.’
‘There,’ I said.
A green Peugeot was pulled over on to the grass fifty yards away and as we passed, it slipped on to the road behind us.
‘Look out for others,’ Finn said.
We turned westwards out on to the motorway. I watched in the side mirror for what was behind us, the green Peugeot and whatever else might be following. Finn drove fast so that when, some twenty minutes after we’d left the airport behind us, he suddenly pulled up on the hard shoulder, I was jolted forwards.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered, looking in the mirror.
The green Peugeot overshot by forty yards or so and swerved on to the hard shoulder also.
‘There they are,’ Finn said.
I saw the passenger talking into a phone.
Traffic passed us, but no one else stopped. I was watching the green Peugeot ahead of us further down the hard shoulder when Finn slammed his foot on to the accelerator and we surged backwards for thirty yards and then he slammed the gear lever into first and swung the wheel down to the left and on to a motorway works entrance that was so concealed I hadn’t seen it.
We left the motorway in a squeal of tyres and crashed on to a dusty track that led to a quarry-like bowl full of road-making machinery.
Finn drove through this apparent dead end and out of the other side on to another dust track that led back in the direction we’d come from. I looked behind and saw the green Peugeot racing backwards along the hard shoulder.
Finn drove at breakneck speed for about a mile. I looked behind and saw dust kicking up far away as the green Peugeot finally found its way out of the quarry behind us.
The track we were on led back under the motorway and joined a small country road. Finn turned on to it and headed back again in the direction we’d been travelling on the motorway.
There was a distance of half a mile to the car behind and its occupants couldn’t have seen which way we’d turned on to the country road. Finn accelerated and drove so fast I hardly noticed what we were passing. We turned off again twice, on to two more single-track country roads like the first one. When he was finally satisfied he had lost our tail, he slowed and turned off on to another dust road that led out southwards over a great expanse of dead, flat, bleak saltpans that stretched for miles in either direction.
There was no other traffic, not even the occasional slow farm vehicle we’d overtaken on the side roads. Finn drove the car out of sight into a gully and we waited, not speaking.
When we came back up on to the track he drove very slowly and on the grass edges, so that the dust didn’t kick up. We must have driven for another twenty minutes on this winding track across the old, disused saltpans. And then I felt rather than saw the sea. We were so low that the dunes ahead obscured the view.
We seemed to be heading nowhere in a salt-and-sand desert. But when we finally reached the dunes and Finn pulled up behind them, I saw there was a dilapidated wooden shack, obscured from the road. It was a campers’ restaurant, open only in the summer, which contained a few drifting adolescents sitting at rickety tables. Beyond the wooden structure of the restaurant were two more rickety wooden buildings, small shacks erected in a chaotic, haphazard fashion and constructed from what looked like bleached driftwood. Finn cut the engine and looked at me.
‘Fancy a swim?’ he said and grinned again. We got out of the car. ‘And I think it’s about time I carried your case,’ he said.