The Flight Of Captain Kamper
by Richard Mollowen
Part travel-book, part-fictionalised memoir, part-philosophy, this book charts the travels of 'The Captain' in his big old German Camper, Lotti, around Europe. Here's an extract.
Barrea
He can’t say it’s been a hard day. The drive up the valley and round a couple of high scarps wasn’t all that long. The campsite was open. The view from the hillside over the roofs to the long high lake and the surrounding mountains – enfoldingly-beautiful, calm, restful. He’s climbed nearly another winding thousand feet and is above the elevation of far-away Ben Nevis now.
But he can’t blame a sudden slump in energy and morale on such minor altitude. All he can do is
say, he’s feeling weak.
And here is ‘Pasetta’. This is the man who owns and runs the campsite. He bounces out, in mountain-man’s jutty beard and cap. When the Captain totters down to the office, the flint-eyed jollity of this man and his solidity of handshake belie his years. He must be 15 years older than Kamper, by his story – well, indeed, by his book, which he sells and inscribes to his guest with aplomb. Mountain-guide and promoter of Umbria, Pasetta’s the uncrowned popular king of these parts, hero of stories of wolves and bears, of skiing championships and uphill Tour d’Italia stages. He’s enjoyed himself, over the years, by becoming widely known for stunts like popping up unbidden on TV beside the winter-sports or cycling presenter, or the gasping, triumphant finisher, dressed improbably, Davy-Crockett-like, in wolfskins. The book’s photographs prove it, and he’ll sign and sell the lavishly-illustrated volume to every visitor. The self-appointed trademark and
salesman of a poor, patronised, unvisited region in urgent need of economic generators, you may at first see him, as the box-gogglers of the northern cities certainly do, as a clown. But – expert mountain-guide, celebrated long-distance walker and declamatory poetaster – like all shrewd mountain-men, he knows exactly what the game is. With limited education and opportunity, out of a childhood interrupted by war and a young adulthood stunted by the failure of a period of emigration to the USA, this man’s returned to his homeland roots, to fight unselfconsciously for his people and their dignity.
And here he is, found on a quiet day at home. The campsite front-office wall is being renewed. His son is around too, keeping things ticking. All day while you’re near the site, Pasetta’s growling chatter is audible, on the phone or to the builders. He’s so bloody fit. Ten years older than you,
Captain. And he’s as hard as nails, bright and sharp as a mountain-sparrow.
The Captain maunders about taking photographs, feeling weedy, irritated, disorganised, nervous, undecided and – for the first time this trip? – lonely.
Weedy. His legs have gone watery. Is he unwell? Irritable. In all his admiration for the man and the place, he is feeling alienated, for he has reached a land that is determinedly itself, its own and it makes no compromises to the outsider and the soft city-dweller. Disorganised: thanks to the re-routing from Roccaraso, it’s starting to feel too improvised and accidental that he’s here at all. And where should he be? Nervous: this feels too free, too random, too uncontained. He may be a free molecule, but just now it feels as if all his particles are heading for the hills, evaporating in the ether. And finally, lonely in a way which encompasses all the rest: a weedy, irritable, disorganised, nervous loneliness – a feeling that he is missing all that can ever contain him.
Unable to focus on the present, he starts to read Pasetta’s book.
‘I, Tomaso d’Amico, known as “Pasetta”, was born in Barrea..... on February 2nd, 1941, at 4.30pm. Barrea counted 1,500 inhabitants at that time.
I’m the seventh son of eight....
‘I was two-and-a-half years old, when, during World War II, the German troops, in retreat from the Allied forces, occupied Barrea, forcing me and my family to leave home. That was October 28th 1943. We left for Bisegna, 40km from Barrea; that was to be my second
home.
‘By the end of the occupation we were glad to go back home. But mines placed along the road made a tragedy of our march. Lots of people lost their lives.
‘When finally we came back to our devastated and plundered homes, our major problem was to find a place to sleep. We had no beds, so I and my smallest brother had to sleep in a large dressing-table. The first and third drawers were taken out so that we could breathe. He slept above me. Often he peed....’
The Captain’s immediately refocused.
The Log Book: July-August 1943:
Ops 57 – bombing Cassino[1]- as the crow flies, no more distant, west from Barrea, than the d’Amicos’refuge of Bisegna, in the opposite direction
Ops 59 – bombing Vairano – 20 miles down the A1 from Cassino
Ops 60 – bombing Venafro – between Cassino and Vairano
Ops 61 – bombing Isernia – the nearest large town to Barrea, 20 miles south-east
Ops 64, 65, 66 – bombing Cantalupo nel Sannio; Carpinone; Acquafondata: tiny villages, the first two on the railway, the third a strategic high point east of Cassino.
All these places are in an arc within thirty miles of where he’s parked.
Pasetta’s family would be forced out of their home in Barrea no more than a month after the Captain’s Dad was sent back to England. This late assault, from air and land, on Isernia and this triangle near the Volturno, was what ultimately forced the Germans back up into the mountains, and the d’Amicos out of their home.
The Captain wants to base himself here in Barrea for a few days, now, to regroup, to plan.
And for the next morning’s event, he jolts Lotti out of her slumbers and heads off down into the valley. Isernia?
Isernia. An ancient town. The site, prehistorically and more recently, of another huge Trasimeno-like boneyard. The precise reasons for so many as 23,000 ancient human remains to be lying here just below the earth-surface is, apparently, still a mystery. They were only discovered when the new motorway was built. But the Isernians, like the inhabitants of many of the towns in this
country, are far less precious about big finds like this than we are about unearthing a few flints and potsherds in a field, with a camera-team and a comedy-actor looking on. There has been a township here in the valley of the Volturno since the 3rdCentury B.C. It was one of the first communities to make a deal with the all-conquering Romans that gave them equal status as free citizens. There’s a scattering of very ancient masonry in many of the old buildings, and a huge pride in history here.
But bones? Hah. The cause of their superficial indifference to death-dealing events, however, becomes all-too-obvious. This, like l’Aquila in 2009, like nearby Naples, like Emilia-Romagna in the north (2012), is earthquake country. Isernia has been destroyed several times over since the Romans held sway - quakes in 847, 1349, 1456 and 1805, to name the major ones. A town such as this rebuilds itself repeatedly from rubble. It can’t be said to forget. Its whole fabric is rebuilt from its ancient memory. The fountain in the square channels water brought down from Pasetta’s mountains by Roman-era aqueducting; and its stones are a mixture of ancient, medieval, Renaissance and modern masonry, higgledy-piggledy, but real – rather like a map of the town’s
21st Century genome.
Much of the rest of Isernia has a shabby-modern look nowadays, rather characterless. So many
tourist-spots across Europe have a newly-cobbled square to stroll in, and a network of old-stone streets, an ancient gateway. And many of these towns have the same strong reasons for the existence of their new-build, their open spaces.
The Captain’s dad’s squadron’s raids of July-August 1943 were attempts to sever lines of communication and reinforcement, and the Isernia area featured three railway-bridges.
However, after the light, tactical bombers (who must have caused significant damage and loss of life) failed to get the bridges) Isernia was the target of one further, heavy daylight raid, from US B17s.
Isernia has a striking, more-recent piece of civic statuary. A classical male nude, distraught, stands up to his ankles in twisted metal and shattered masonry, with a weird whizz-bang of metal-shards flying at his back.
It was market day on 10th September 1943. 4,000 Italian civilians were killed there in one day, mostly women and children, of a population probably no greater than 20,000. The raid was ostensibly in order to destroy those railway bridges vital to the German retreat. The bridges still stand today.
To put it into context - everyone in UK remembers Coventry, and we all know there was one huge raid when there was a firestorm and the cathedral went, and there were several other raids later. The population of Coventry then was around 200,000. Death-toll - somewhere in the region of 1,300....
The refusal of Italians to sentimentalise over the events in which such horrors were visited upon them is natural enough. There is little enough reason to commemorate powerlessness at the best of times, and especially in an earthquake zone. Moreover, it would not be appreciated by the majority of tourists from – Germany, America, Britain. The Captain reflects, however, that good manners and stoical, proportionate rebuilding deserve memorialising beyond their own city-limits.
He returns to the camp-site. He gets out the log-book, alongside the chapter of Pasetta’s childhood he opens the war-record. He calls to the office, says he’s intending to move on now, and invites the old galoot in for a glass of wine. His Italian is much worse than Pasetta’s out-of-practice Yankee English. He explains about his dad bombing the area.
“Ah. Yes. Isernia" Pasetta's face clouds a moment. "But did he get back OK?” the old man asks,
concerned.
[1]
In what was of course the bloodiest corner of the whole campaign, this “Cassino” was the town, and not Monte Cassino, the monastery a thousand feet above it.
He can’t say it’s been a hard day. The drive up the valley and round a couple of high scarps wasn’t all that long. The campsite was open. The view from the hillside over the roofs to the long high lake and the surrounding mountains – enfoldingly-beautiful, calm, restful. He’s climbed nearly another winding thousand feet and is above the elevation of far-away Ben Nevis now.
But he can’t blame a sudden slump in energy and morale on such minor altitude. All he can do is
say, he’s feeling weak.
And here is ‘Pasetta’. This is the man who owns and runs the campsite. He bounces out, in mountain-man’s jutty beard and cap. When the Captain totters down to the office, the flint-eyed jollity of this man and his solidity of handshake belie his years. He must be 15 years older than Kamper, by his story – well, indeed, by his book, which he sells and inscribes to his guest with aplomb. Mountain-guide and promoter of Umbria, Pasetta’s the uncrowned popular king of these parts, hero of stories of wolves and bears, of skiing championships and uphill Tour d’Italia stages. He’s enjoyed himself, over the years, by becoming widely known for stunts like popping up unbidden on TV beside the winter-sports or cycling presenter, or the gasping, triumphant finisher, dressed improbably, Davy-Crockett-like, in wolfskins. The book’s photographs prove it, and he’ll sign and sell the lavishly-illustrated volume to every visitor. The self-appointed trademark and
salesman of a poor, patronised, unvisited region in urgent need of economic generators, you may at first see him, as the box-gogglers of the northern cities certainly do, as a clown. But – expert mountain-guide, celebrated long-distance walker and declamatory poetaster – like all shrewd mountain-men, he knows exactly what the game is. With limited education and opportunity, out of a childhood interrupted by war and a young adulthood stunted by the failure of a period of emigration to the USA, this man’s returned to his homeland roots, to fight unselfconsciously for his people and their dignity.
And here he is, found on a quiet day at home. The campsite front-office wall is being renewed. His son is around too, keeping things ticking. All day while you’re near the site, Pasetta’s growling chatter is audible, on the phone or to the builders. He’s so bloody fit. Ten years older than you,
Captain. And he’s as hard as nails, bright and sharp as a mountain-sparrow.
The Captain maunders about taking photographs, feeling weedy, irritated, disorganised, nervous, undecided and – for the first time this trip? – lonely.
Weedy. His legs have gone watery. Is he unwell? Irritable. In all his admiration for the man and the place, he is feeling alienated, for he has reached a land that is determinedly itself, its own and it makes no compromises to the outsider and the soft city-dweller. Disorganised: thanks to the re-routing from Roccaraso, it’s starting to feel too improvised and accidental that he’s here at all. And where should he be? Nervous: this feels too free, too random, too uncontained. He may be a free molecule, but just now it feels as if all his particles are heading for the hills, evaporating in the ether. And finally, lonely in a way which encompasses all the rest: a weedy, irritable, disorganised, nervous loneliness – a feeling that he is missing all that can ever contain him.
Unable to focus on the present, he starts to read Pasetta’s book.
‘I, Tomaso d’Amico, known as “Pasetta”, was born in Barrea..... on February 2nd, 1941, at 4.30pm. Barrea counted 1,500 inhabitants at that time.
I’m the seventh son of eight....
‘I was two-and-a-half years old, when, during World War II, the German troops, in retreat from the Allied forces, occupied Barrea, forcing me and my family to leave home. That was October 28th 1943. We left for Bisegna, 40km from Barrea; that was to be my second
home.
‘By the end of the occupation we were glad to go back home. But mines placed along the road made a tragedy of our march. Lots of people lost their lives.
‘When finally we came back to our devastated and plundered homes, our major problem was to find a place to sleep. We had no beds, so I and my smallest brother had to sleep in a large dressing-table. The first and third drawers were taken out so that we could breathe. He slept above me. Often he peed....’
The Captain’s immediately refocused.
The Log Book: July-August 1943:
Ops 57 – bombing Cassino[1]- as the crow flies, no more distant, west from Barrea, than the d’Amicos’refuge of Bisegna, in the opposite direction
Ops 59 – bombing Vairano – 20 miles down the A1 from Cassino
Ops 60 – bombing Venafro – between Cassino and Vairano
Ops 61 – bombing Isernia – the nearest large town to Barrea, 20 miles south-east
Ops 64, 65, 66 – bombing Cantalupo nel Sannio; Carpinone; Acquafondata: tiny villages, the first two on the railway, the third a strategic high point east of Cassino.
All these places are in an arc within thirty miles of where he’s parked.
Pasetta’s family would be forced out of their home in Barrea no more than a month after the Captain’s Dad was sent back to England. This late assault, from air and land, on Isernia and this triangle near the Volturno, was what ultimately forced the Germans back up into the mountains, and the d’Amicos out of their home.
The Captain wants to base himself here in Barrea for a few days, now, to regroup, to plan.
And for the next morning’s event, he jolts Lotti out of her slumbers and heads off down into the valley. Isernia?
Isernia. An ancient town. The site, prehistorically and more recently, of another huge Trasimeno-like boneyard. The precise reasons for so many as 23,000 ancient human remains to be lying here just below the earth-surface is, apparently, still a mystery. They were only discovered when the new motorway was built. But the Isernians, like the inhabitants of many of the towns in this
country, are far less precious about big finds like this than we are about unearthing a few flints and potsherds in a field, with a camera-team and a comedy-actor looking on. There has been a township here in the valley of the Volturno since the 3rdCentury B.C. It was one of the first communities to make a deal with the all-conquering Romans that gave them equal status as free citizens. There’s a scattering of very ancient masonry in many of the old buildings, and a huge pride in history here.
But bones? Hah. The cause of their superficial indifference to death-dealing events, however, becomes all-too-obvious. This, like l’Aquila in 2009, like nearby Naples, like Emilia-Romagna in the north (2012), is earthquake country. Isernia has been destroyed several times over since the Romans held sway - quakes in 847, 1349, 1456 and 1805, to name the major ones. A town such as this rebuilds itself repeatedly from rubble. It can’t be said to forget. Its whole fabric is rebuilt from its ancient memory. The fountain in the square channels water brought down from Pasetta’s mountains by Roman-era aqueducting; and its stones are a mixture of ancient, medieval, Renaissance and modern masonry, higgledy-piggledy, but real – rather like a map of the town’s
21st Century genome.
Much of the rest of Isernia has a shabby-modern look nowadays, rather characterless. So many
tourist-spots across Europe have a newly-cobbled square to stroll in, and a network of old-stone streets, an ancient gateway. And many of these towns have the same strong reasons for the existence of their new-build, their open spaces.
The Captain’s dad’s squadron’s raids of July-August 1943 were attempts to sever lines of communication and reinforcement, and the Isernia area featured three railway-bridges.
However, after the light, tactical bombers (who must have caused significant damage and loss of life) failed to get the bridges) Isernia was the target of one further, heavy daylight raid, from US B17s.
Isernia has a striking, more-recent piece of civic statuary. A classical male nude, distraught, stands up to his ankles in twisted metal and shattered masonry, with a weird whizz-bang of metal-shards flying at his back.
It was market day on 10th September 1943. 4,000 Italian civilians were killed there in one day, mostly women and children, of a population probably no greater than 20,000. The raid was ostensibly in order to destroy those railway bridges vital to the German retreat. The bridges still stand today.
To put it into context - everyone in UK remembers Coventry, and we all know there was one huge raid when there was a firestorm and the cathedral went, and there were several other raids later. The population of Coventry then was around 200,000. Death-toll - somewhere in the region of 1,300....
The refusal of Italians to sentimentalise over the events in which such horrors were visited upon them is natural enough. There is little enough reason to commemorate powerlessness at the best of times, and especially in an earthquake zone. Moreover, it would not be appreciated by the majority of tourists from – Germany, America, Britain. The Captain reflects, however, that good manners and stoical, proportionate rebuilding deserve memorialising beyond their own city-limits.
He returns to the camp-site. He gets out the log-book, alongside the chapter of Pasetta’s childhood he opens the war-record. He calls to the office, says he’s intending to move on now, and invites the old galoot in for a glass of wine. His Italian is much worse than Pasetta’s out-of-practice Yankee English. He explains about his dad bombing the area.
“Ah. Yes. Isernia" Pasetta's face clouds a moment. "But did he get back OK?” the old man asks,
concerned.
[1]
In what was of course the bloodiest corner of the whole campaign, this “Cassino” was the town, and not Monte Cassino, the monastery a thousand feet above it.
Mortality
He's arrived in a beautiful wooded campsite in the Pay du Tarn. ‘Camping Les Clots’.
It’s green. Trees dapple in the sunlight. The entrance is a farm gateway. To the left is a tumbledown stone hut containing a table, a chair, a logo-ed fridge for ice-cream and a bell hanging from a beam.
He rings the bell. The woman is already on her way up the slope from the house below the road. It transpires she’s Dutch. She offers to show him the site. So he parks in a quiet, luminous glade and rejoins her for the tour. She apologises for the fact that two of the showers are new and still need connecting. She conscientiously reminds him to mind his head against old beams that are, in any case, twelve inches above his head. Her husband is up a ladder fixing some electrics.
The Captain likes these people. They’re the sort of people with whom he would naturally make friends anywhere. She's making bread this morning. Would he like some? Of course he would. He drove late last night and early this morning to get here, parked overnight in an aire. He’s ravenous. He already knows he’s going to stay here for three or four days. Come back here to reception in an hour, she tells him, for a loaf.
Back at the van, he plugs into the electricity supply. He takes a stroll. He gets a shower. The facilities are just fine. An hour after arrival, he's back at the reception-hut, ringing the bell as requested, and Peggy is walking briskly up towards him bearing the brown breadloaf in a cloth. His towel rolled under his left arm, he waves with his right, steps forward to meet a second breakfast or an early lunch, as the slick heel of his new ("Tomorrow!") boot -
slips on a worn, mossed stone. Somebody somewhere flicks a switch.
He has lost his breath and is on his back, on top of two steps and a big stone plantpot. He hasn't dropped his towel. Something's seriously wrong. There is pain more serious and deep-seated than he wants or needs. He nearly passes out. Hell's teeth.
Albi
Her husband drives him 30 kilometres to the hospital in Albi.
Quickly, carefully and with good grace they check that there's no internal bleeding. Then the X-rays reveal without difficulty three broken ribs, right round at the back. Three cracked ribs? No, says the cool, efficient young woman doctor, they are casse, broken, yes. (She
makes a sign like breaking a baguette. Ha ha, very funny, he thinks.)
This was a bad fall, yes. Trois cotes - ribs - very painful. But Monsieur, you should be happy! A fall like this was bad, tree grave, tres fort, to break bones like this. But regardez, perhaps you could bash your head, your skull, yes? With this force? Or break the back, the spine. Those are serious injuries. We maybe see such urgences from such a fall. The ribs are very painful, absoluement. But your brain, your spine and everything inside, is OK. OK? This is what is important for you.
These fractures will be very painful for a while. There is no treatment to make them better, Monsieur; they will heal in time. And here is a prescription for anti-inflammatories and painkillers. They are strong, you should not drive, OK? Have you a card for EU health-care? EHIC you call it? Good. You will take this to the pharmacie for the drugs. Also to the office at the other part of the hospital. This way you claim back for
treatment.
.....Yes, Monsieur. But since I work here with Urgences, I do not like to say, “Au Revoir''!
Adieu, then.
The Captain Collects Himself
Understand, now, Captain, that you are far from home in your house-on-wheels. It may be too late today, but not too late in your life, let’s hope, to realise that you need to be doing nothing more adventurous than: collecting a loaf on a clear day, when.....
A bolt of lightning on an ordinary day – and look – today’s actually the 13th – needs no warning clouds from which to strike. Where you had thought at last to achieve your free-striding, solo-aviating independence, you’ve finally achieved mortality, or at least,
your own first proper sense of it. And many would say you’re fortunate in your delayed appreciation of that reality. Lie down, Captain, back in your van, and sigh deeply with resignation but at least, at last, rest....
Aaaa
But within fifteen seconds you’re in agony. You can’t lie down, on back, front or either side, without pain that gets worse, not better.
And now you can’t get up, either! Ach, ach. Fuck. Shit. After ten minutes' struggling and weeping, you absurdly, and deliberately, roll off your bench-seat bed onto the floor.
Aaaa.
Thank goodness you first worked out the right order to do that, in order to be half-upright against the seat and the pain.
It won’t be for another ten days you'll again try anything so ambitious as horizontality – and then it’ll be only to curse yourself unsparingly again for your stupidity, before repeating the same enforced, ridiculous, cursing, despairing flop.
Aaa.
The Captain is Vulnerable
He does, now, indeed, resolve to stay his full four days in this beautiful Dutch-owned campsite. Peggie and Kuys leave him alone, except, kindly, to let him know he can use their computer to email The Muse. He doesn't know how far he'll be able to drive, or even if. Lotti has power-steering of course. By email, and by phone when he can (after the second day) walk far enough back up the valley to get mobile-signal, he pleads for time. She says he should fly home.
He explains: he's vertical, he’ll be OK. "The weather’s glorious".
Too glorious, too hot, for the couple of hours in the afternoons when he sits and sweats and dozes and jumps with rib-twists, screams when he sneezes at the frisky May-pollen, shifts and sweats some more and tries not to weep.
That internal sense of youth. That sense, vauntingly secret, well into middle-age and beyond, that inside him he is eighteen, or only slightly older, still in his Prime, and therefore invulnerable…. Of course there’s been knocks and bruises on the way, both physical and moral. There’s been slings and arrows, there‘s been love and loss and love and children and divorce and despair and recovery and love and work, work, always some sort of work.
Always resilience. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Pleased that now at last he has only himself, really, to look out for, as for herself the Muse, and they're both tough, independent sorts....
But you know what to do when the old telly isn't receiving properly, when there seems to be a fault with reception? Give it a kick! Or your laptop's frozen? Turn it off, mid-programme, and on again. In just the same way, it takes a shock, or a knock, or a second's black-out, finally to readjust your body-clock, so that you're receiving Reality properly again.
He remembers a story he once read in a book on Buddhism: the irritatingly-persistent little Zen student-monk asked the Master how to attain enlightenment, and the Master, in the end and understandably, gave him a sharp, judicious smack on the head with a stick. That worked OK.
And the Captain’s still lucky. For some people, it comes much earlier, much too early, and much too seriously, and it's all over. As young Madame Doctor knows very well.
For others maybe it will come as illness gradually limiting their behaviour, requiring indefinite medication and care. The Captain reflects he’s had a couple of minor "conditions", but never believed that they might be anything other than temporary, or at least ignorable in the medium term.
And then finally, most people – for God's sake, Captain – most people always, at every stage of their lives, know exactly how old they are, and what that means.
But this has come to him as a personal Attack. It’s an ambush. It’s like being shot in the back. Worse still, he’s learnt now, that he is shootable. Vulnerable not just to whims of the gods of Fortune, toward whom he may if he chooses (he's done it before) snap his fingers or flick them in a V-sign; nor to some creeping illness of which he will not otherwise think. No, he can also now, literally, be dashed against rocks. He is breakable.
He knows that this particular crisis, however painful, will not remotely be the one that carries him off. But this body, which has taken in its time plenty of football, cricket, rugby, work and gardening injuries along with a couple of minor medical “procedures” – and then taken apparently mere minutes to reset itself – this body does not feel today, this 13th of the month, nor will it feel for far too long, ready to bridge the gaps in the cells of his bones.
It will take time for this second imaginary bullet to penetrate. His nervous system, drugs or no drugs, will not be prepared to shrug off pain at any time in the first six weeks of the curative process. And he won't find that his brain can switch any more, as it always has, into assuming something simply hasn't happened – or that if it has, it can be joked or jollied
away.
He’s yet to learn that for more than three weeks, no matter where he is, the only way he will be able to sleep at all will be sitting up in Lotti’s front passenger-seat, in part-recline, feet across on his driving-seat, on a good dose of the painkillers he can’t use at all when driving.
And for almost a week after the 13th – maybe it's the drugs, maybe it's the shock, or both – his digestive system seems absolutely to go on strike.
It may well be that the living shit has been entirely scared out of, or frozen inside, him.
Then, on his third day at Les Clots (on waking from a dream of being beaten up on a piece of waste-ground by the goalkeeper of Wolverhampton Wanderers FC) his eye is caught by a sort of movement that is not quivering grass, nor shimmering leaves. On the edge of the side-window frame, beside the left-hand-driving-seat. Along the edge, a black, fluid movement
like blood. But not subject to gravity, it moves along, and it moves upwards.
Up the edge of the window...
Ants.
They must have climbed up on a wheel, along struts, up inside the wheel-arch.... No, along below the engine and thus somehow (the pedal-space, the fuse-box!?) into the cab.... Or no, up the outside, then, and through some micro-space in the edge of the window?
No, after an inspection tour, there’s no sign of them outside on the van. But they are inside. Little modest black ones with, unlike him, no individualistic delusions. Single-mindedly about their communal business.
They are inside, and they’re walking in file. Or rather two files, one file back, the other, forth, into and out of Lotti, his house, his cave, his nest.... More of them walking in, than out. Continuous. Tens of them. Hundreds. Organized, on some chemical track. And obviously, ants don't justcome in hundreds. Start multiplying for the ones you can't see.
Is this the painkiller-induced equivalent of delirium tremens? No, they’re horribly
real, and they aren’t pink.
Even in the reduced condition in which he has found himself, the Captain’s sure he’s kept his van clean. He even knows, because a little light dusting and his monumental case of anal retention are his only permitted obsessions at present, that there are maybe fewer breadcrumbs, jam-blibs, cheese-smears around than usual. But anyway, even with the collective-intuitive power of an entire ant-colony, how could they have decided, through all that hot rubber-and-diesel stink, from outside, that there was something in here worth having, in his cupboards or fridge?
Even Marmite doesn't smell that strong.
Have they just – popped in on spec? But –they’re walking across his ceiling! They’re exploring the shelves in the toilet! Maybe they're considering moving house, or at least setting up a home-share.
He's been here only three days….
He may be drugged and poorly, but there are three things he must do.
Today, now, he must drive up to the hardware store in the village and get some ant- killing stuff.
On return he must park on a different pitch.
Tomorrow, he must leave.
