This one’s really interesting.

It has been the most shocking and peculiar evening.

To begin at the beginning…

Mark came home early from work, because it was Friday, and they had had enough.

We thought we would have a little snooze before we went to work, the other work, taxi work, that is, and we overslept.

I had just leapt frantically out of bed and was dragging my clothes on at seven o’ clock, when the doorbell rang.

Goodness, we said comically, who is it this time, the police or the bailiffs?

It was the police.

They wanted to know about a green and yellow camper van, registered to our address. They explained that they wanted to speak to the man who was in there, but he had locked the door and would not come out.

I explained, as clearly as one does when one has just woken up and is uncomfortably aware of the itchy bits of hastily-donned underwear, that there should not be anybody in the camper van. Not anybody, no, not under any circumstances, not at all. 

The police said that there was definitely somebody in it.

Mark was still getting dressed. I told them that I would get the key and meet them there.

Then I grabbed the key and without even stopping to readjust my underwear, I ran out of the back door.

I ran all the way round to the camper van, and there really was a man there, messing about with the bikes on the back. 

I called to him to stop, and he ran off, so I ran after him.

A brief chase followed. 

I almost grabbed him at one point, but missed, and then the police turned up with the blue lights flashing, and ran after him themselves.

They must be fitter than I am because those jackets weigh a lot. I know that because of tidying up after a policewoman in Northampton.

The police caught him, and handcuffed him.

Mark appeared, and we were heading back to the camper van when a second man hopped out of it and ran off.

He had too much of a head start, and none of us even bothered to chase him. 

The camper van was trashed.

We stood in the doorway and looked and looked. 

Everything was scattered everywhere. There were clothes and quilts piled up so that we could hardly get in through the door. 

The policeman came in and looked with us.

There were a lot of drugs and little plastic bags on the table.

The smell of cannabis was overwhelming, but the table was covered in tablets and milk powder, and sugar. 

It actually was sugar, we discovered later. They had emptied our sugar tin. We do not know what they were doing.

The policeman told us that they had been called to the van by the local children. The people who had been in the van had been in the Library Gardens, offering the children drink and trying to get them to go back to the van with them. When one eleven year old went, the other children flagged down a passing police van.

The police had gone and banged on the van door, and the men had locked it and closed the curtains, so they came round to us. In the meantime the eleven year old had thought better of the whole scheme, and run off.

The men in the van had not had such presence of mind. 

The policeman took lots of evidence and then told us we could tidy up, but by then it was really late, so Mark went to work and I started tidying up.

To say ‘tidy up’ does not cover it.

They had been in the beds. They had emptied every cupboard. They had cooked food in the frying pan and eaten it off the plates. They had made tea in the teapot and eaten the biscuits.

They had even taken all of Mark’s drugs for his heart, and the wrappers were everywhere.

The kitchen was covered in grease and leftover food and dirty plates.

They had been buying food. There was bacon and eggs and herbs and noodles and all sorts of things.

This was when I started to notice what they had done.

They had taken our pictures down and stuck their own in their place. Their pictures were not really pictures, they were pages torn out of magazines. They had got a long plastic Halloween ribbon and pinned it, carefully, over the children’s names on the bunk beds, so you could not see whose the beds were.

They had hung plastic bats on the walls. They had written on the whiteboard, nothing coherent, just a jumble of words and letters.

They had taken all of Mark’s clothes, even his dressing gown. Mine were all there, but Mark’s were all gone. This was dreadful. It was his new tweed jacket.

It was as if they had tried to make the van their own and to become Mark.

I hardly knew where to start cleaning up, but of course I did.

After a while the police came back and I made a statement. 

The police said that nobody had been hurt, and that all the children had been quite all right.

Mark came back to see how I was getting on.

I had found lots of their clothes, and bicycle magazines, and CDs.

I put them all in a bag but did not know what to do with it.

The policeman said that we could do what we liked with it, because it should not have been in our van in the first place at all.

Mark said that he would take it away and put the bag around the back of the van.

He lit the fire for me, and we looked sadly round at the mess and wondered how we would clear it up.

I said that I would just get on with it, and that he needed to go back to work because we have not got any money, so he went.

He came back a moment later and said that the bag of things had gone.

The man had been and taken them.

He must have been watching me from outside the van the whole time.

Fortunately I do not watch horror films, so all that I felt was a bit uncomfortable. Mark said that perhaps I ought not to be by myself, and he would go home and get the dogs.

When he came back with the dogs he said that the man was in the Library Gardens, looking through his stuff.

I left Mark and the dogs at the camper van and went to see.

I found him.

He was a small, grey looking man, probably in his thirties, with a straggly beard and a woolly hat.

I crept up and he did not hear me coming. I was not frightened of him then, because I had found him, he had not found me. 

I handed him a bicycle magazine.

“You left this behind,” I said.

He turned and looked at me, and his expression was so miserably bleak I could hardly look at it.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

It was the man I had chased. The police had let him go and told him to come back to be interviewed in the morning.

He came back to the camper van with me and I gave him some of his things that he had left behind. I did not feel at all cross, just sad and weary.

He told me that he would find his friend and get him to give Mark’s clothes back. He said that his friend had been wearing them so that he could look smart.

I said that the clothes were really important to us, and that I did not really mind about the rest, but we wanted the clothes back.

He promised that he would get them back.

He explained that they had liked being in the van. He said that people had kept stopping to say nice things about it, and so they had been pretending that it was theirs. He said that it was beautiful and had made him happy.

I said that I was so sorry that he could not have it, but that it was my special place and that I had painted the pictures, and that I loved it and looked after it, and felt very sad about the mess. 

He said again that he was sorry, and that they had not broken anything, which was true. He said that he was cross with his friend about the clothes, because he had thought they they should just bring things into it and not take them away.

He added that I was a surprisingly fast runner and that he had not thought he would be able to get away from me.

I was secretly pleased about this.

He went away then. I carried on cleaning.

It took me until after midnight.

I filled the taxi with quilts and towels to take home and wash, and I washed all of the camper van.

I felt very sad, for the awful tragedy of the whole thing, for the broken lives that had been confused enough to pretend the camper van was theirs. They had been so confused that when the police had first turned up, they had not run away. They had felt they were in a safe place and had closed the curtains and hidden. They had tried to take a part of our lives and made it their own, and only managed to trash things and spread filth all around them, because of the ruin of their own lives that they had brought with them.

I was glad when it was done. I left the dogs in there, because the other man had stolen the spare key, and came out to work.

I have not earned very much because I started so late, but it will be all right.

I do not feel cross about it. I do not even feel invaded. The camper van is so much ours that the souls of the two men who have been in it have not even left an echo. I do not feel the need to exorcise the traces of them, because they have not left any traces, apart from dirt, which is easily washed away. 

Of their presence, of their spirits, not even a ghost remains. 

Have a picture of my walk this morning.