The Desert Run Read online

  “Yeah,” I agreed again.

  “You know the police, the customs guards, they’re all looking for patterns. That’s how they catch people. But there’s no pattern here. It’s just random. Mate, you’re a genius!”

  And hungover or not, whether I particularly liked the overall idea or not, it’s nice to be told you’re a genius.

  “Yeah,” I said again, a little more forcefully.

  Ben didn’t love everything about the deal I’d made. For example he wasn’t keen on the price that I’d agreed to a little later on that night. So from that point on both Mo and I dropped out of the negotiations and they became exclusively between Ben and Mo’s cousin Ahmed. And then Ben told me he hadn’t been sitting around doing nothing either.

  14

  That summer in Europe, we’d all bought ourselves surfboards. We hardly ever used them back in Brighton because the waves were never up to much, but we still had the boards. I kept mine in the corner of the lounge, partly because my room was small, and partly because I thought it made us look cool. Actually it worked too. When Julia and Anna came to look round, this was before they moved in, Julia mentioned the board and sounded impressed. She wanted to live in a surfer’s flat.

  But Ben actually did use his board occasionally. And that afternoon, he told me how, a few days previously, he’d gone for a surf and left his board leaning against a wall while he was getting changed out of his wetsuit. And then how a gust of wind had blown it over and knocked a big dent in the side. He told me how he took it to a local surf shop where they repair boards and got talking with the repair guy, who showed him another board that he’d just finished fixing. Apparently, it had been snapped clean in half. But here’s the point. According to Ben, you couldn’t tell from looking at it. The guy had just finished the repair, the paint was nearly dry, and it just looked like a normal board. Like nothing had happened to it.

  Can you see where this is going? I could, the minute Ben told me that part.

  And he knew I knew, because instead of telling me anything else, he got me to follow him upstairs to his room. He said he wanted to show me the other reason he wouldn’t let me into his room the night before.

  His room was its normal mess, I tried not to look at the bed with the duvet screwed up, I didn’t want to see any stains or used condoms lying on the floor. Instead I looked at the other end, where he had a bay window that had a view of the sea. His surfboard was propped up there, between the back of a chair and his chest of drawers. It was upside down, the fins pointing at the ceiling, and it looked like a patient undergoing an operation, one that wasn’t going well. Ben had peeled off a large section of the skin from the board and hacked out a hole from the foam inside. But he’d done it in a really messy way. He hadn’t taped off the area he was working on from the rest of the board, and he’d hacked at it. In fact, there wasn’t a neat edge anywhere in sight, and the rest of the board, the carpet, the chest of drawers—it was all covered in bits of foam and fibreglass, pots of chemicals, and the tools he’d used, mostly knives from the kitchen downstairs. And as I went over for a closer look, the smell hit me, cloying fumes like smouldering plastic. He’d opened the window, but it still stank.

  “Jesus, Ben. What have you been doing?”

  He tried to look confident and in control, but I think he wasn’t exactly sure of himself.

  “It’s just a test. You can get it all neat again afterward. I wanted to see how much space you could make in there.”

  I went for a closer look. Now I could see there were actually two holes. The one he was currently working on was on one side of the wooden stringer that ran the length of the board. He’d already tried to repair a smaller hole on the other side. But he’d done a terrible job. When I touched it, the chemicals were still sticky, and through the cloudy gloop, I could see there was something inside the board.

  “What’s that?”

  “Sugar. A half-kilo bag. I thought that’d be about the right weight and size.”

  I gingerly pressed down harder on the repair, and felt how underneath the stickiness, it was set hard.

  “You’re smuggling sugar in your surfboard?”

  Ben’s smile became a notch more confident.

  “I reckon I can get a full kilo in the other side.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve fucked your board up. It looks a total disaster. No one’s going to be fooled by that.”

  Ben’s confidence faded away again.

  “Yeah. Well, it’s a bit harder than it looks to fix it up again afterward. But I’ll get the hang of it. The guy in the surf shop showed me.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was already examining the mess to work out what you’d need to do to sort it out.

  “Actually, I was kind of wondering if this might be something you were better at,” Ben said, as he watched me.

  Now, Ben might be shit with his hands, but I’m not. I told you Mum was a teacher, but I didn’t say what my dad does. He repairs and makes furniture. He has a little workshop in the garden where he goes every day and builds tables and chairs and cabinets, or puts old ones back together again. For years when I was growing up, I was going to be exactly like him. I spent hours with him in that shed, cutting the wood for him, filling holes, sanding, painting. I could do it all. I could knock up a set of chairs, side tables, or even a full cabinet with all the joints properly dovetailed.

  And now I was thinking how you could fix Ben’s surfboard the same way. Ben had bought a surfboard repair kit from the shop: a little bottle of epoxy resin and another of hardener. For small holes, that was all you needed to repair the tough outer skin of a board. For bigger holes, you’d need to bridge the gap, and if you needed strength, you could glass in some fibreglass mat. I ran my fingers over Ben’s catastrophic attempt again. There were parts where the bag of sugar wasn’t lying flat, when you sanded this, all the sugar would fall out. And judging by the mess on the carpet, he’d already realised that.

  “You need to dig the hole deeper, then sand it properly,” I said. “Have you got a sander?”

  Ben pointed to a cheap power tool lying on the floor.

  “Yeah, I bought one. But it’s a bit harder to use than I thought.” He shifted his weight awkwardly, waiting for what I was going to say next.

  But I was already lifting the board up. I could feel at once it was heavier than normal. I checked the deck on the top; it didn’t look any different from that side. I put it back down the right way up and leaned my weight on it, gently at first, to see if what he had done meant it was likely to snap in two. Maybe it flexed a little more than it should. It was hard to say.

  “How much did you say you put in here?”

  “Half a kilo, but the other hole’s bigger. I can get more in there.” Now, Ben came up to the board and showed me how he could fit two half-kilo bags roughly side by side in the second hole he’d cut out. This one was already a little bit neater so I ignored it and started prodding the first again.

  “This is the hole you’ve finished is it?”

  “Alright I know it’s not great. Do you reckon you can have a crack at it?”

  We rolled up a joint, and I got to work while Ben tidied up the mess. I calculated that if I cut enough chambers in the bottom of Ben’s surfboard, I could make a hiding place big enough to put two, maybe even three kilos of sugar—if we packed it tightly enough. Then we could cover it up, using exactly the same techniques that he’d already used—only this time doing the job properly. It would take a bit of work to sand it all flat, since the epoxy they use to fix boards is pretty tough. But that would be useful too, since once it was all smooth and painted again, we should end up with something that was strong. You could probably even surf on it still. And there was a bonus. We also figured that whatever was inside would be totally sealed. Airtight, so in theory, there was no chance of sniffer dogs finding it.

  Ben had used up most of the epoxy that came with the repair kits, and he didn’t have any brushes or anything. If I was going to do th
is, I was going to do it properly, so once we’d finished smoking we went down to B&Q and I picked up all the stuff I thought I’d need. I bought a big pack of epoxy resin and hardener, fibreglass matting, a little power saw with a tiny rotating blade, craft knives, masking tape, some spray paints, and a decent sander with lots of different grades of sanding pads. Ben was paying, so I didn’t skimp like I normally would. I even bought disposable gloves and face masks for the smell, and that gave me a brilliant idea. There was a giant pet superstore next door, and we went in and searched around in the dog section for the smelliest, most disgusting treats you could get. We settled on half-cooked bits of cows and pigs—ears and snouts, chopped into pieces and covered in a sticky, horrible residue. We took it all home, rolled up another joint, and kept going. Or I did. Ben just watched and made excited noises.

  I decided to start over completely with Ben’s repair. Partly because it was easier, and partly to make a point. I hacked out everything he’d done and widened and deepened both holes with the circular saw. I smoothed around the edges of both until they were nice and neat. I was in my element, doing this. Nicely stoned and kind of enjoying how much dust and crap was going all over Ben’s room. I emptied the disgusting dog treats into freezer bags and packed them carefully into the holes, then covered that with greaseproof paper. I cut sections of fibreglass matting to fit the missing parts of the board’s skin, and then taped off the area where I was working with newspaper so that even if I did spill something, it wouldn’t go everywhere. This was a proper operation now. Only then, when I was totally happy I had everything ready, did I begin to mix up my epoxy. I used Ben’s little drugs scales to weigh out the right amount of resin to hardener, stirred it for five full minutes, and then painted it on. I laid the fibreglass matting over the repair and used the tip of the brush to wet it out. Finally, when I was happy with that, I wrapped the whole thing with cling film and went off to clean up my tools. I told Ben to hoover up and roll another joint.

  It took me three days until I was happy with Ben’s board. I worked in stages, building up the repair, first with the epoxy, then simple filler, and sanding in between. And then when it was all perfectly smooth, painting it. It was a shame I had to paint it though because the skin on surfboards is normally left unpainted, so you can see the foam, but I didn’t have a choice if I wanted to hide what was glassed inside. But I did a good job with the paint, several layers, with a light sanding between each, so that when I was finished the board looked pretty fucking good.

  The next stage was to test it.

  We took Ben’s board for a walk down to the bit of the seafront where they still allow dogs to play. We set the board down on the edge of a green area where the dog owners all hang out with plastic bags stretched over their hands. And we waited.

  The first dog we saw was a doberman puppy, young enough that it wanted to come up to everyone and say hello. We grabbed it by the collar and tried to direct its excited licks and sniffs to Ben’s board but it wasn’t interested, clearly it wasn’t picking up the scent of the dog treats and eventually its owner managed to get it to move away, at least onto the next people it wanted to greet. Next there was a Labrador. That looked like it might take a piss on the board, but had no interest beyond that. We pretended to dog after dog that we wanted to scratch their ears or play ball and to each one we nudged the treat-filled surfboard close enough that they couldn’t have missed the smell if it was there, but there was nothing. Not a flicker of interest. Just the odd yelp when we tried too hard. After about an hour, and probably twenty dogs, we gave up. Either the dogs of Brighton had crap noses, or there simply wasn’t anything to smell through several layers of beautifully applied epoxy resin, filler, and paint. I was all for returning home for a celebratory joint, but Ben wanted to do another test.

  When he said what it was I was nervous at first. I persuaded him at least not to return to the same surf shop where he’d had his board professionally repaired a few weeks earlier. Instead, we went to another surf shop. At first, we left the board in Ben’s van and spent a few minutes browsing the rack of new boards, and when the owner came over and asked if he could help, Ben asked casually if he’d take an old board in part exchange.

  “That depends,” the guy said, looking at us like he wasn’t expecting a sale here, but that this might just swing it. “If it’s in decent nick, I might.”

  “I’ve got it outside,” Ben said. “Shall I go and get it?”

  The guy shrugged and said OK, so Ben went and got it.

  I hung around at the back of the shop, pretending to be interested in the t-shirts while the guy picked up Ben’s board and had a look. He checked around the nose and tail, then gave the fins a flex to see if they were solid. He clocked the paint on the underside and frowned at it, then gave the board a tap with his fingers in different areas. Then he looked at Ben, as if trying to gauge how low a price he could get away with.

  “It’s not the sort of board that’s easy to sell,” he said, rubbing his chin and beard.

  Ben looked disappointed, not nervous like I was, just disappointed. “Why not? Is there anything wrong with it?”

  “It’s had a repair here.” The guy tapped the painted bottom. “It’s well done, but even so. And it feels a bit heavy, might have a bit of water in it.”

  I didn’t like how this was going. I willed Ben to grab it back off him and get the hell out of the shop, but he didn’t.

  “Yeah, it feels a bit heavy surfing it. That’s why I want to trade it in,” Ben said, as easy as you like. “But I need to get rid of it before I can get a new board.” He ran his finger down the rail of the new surfboard he’d been looking at, and the shop guy looked thoughtful. I don’t suppose they sold many boards a day; he couldn’t really turn it down. He glanced at Ben again, and made a decision.

  “I can give you fifty. And I’m going to struggle to sell it for that.”

  Now, Ben started stroking his chin. “The new board’s three fifty, right?” He stopped and turned to me as if thinking aloud. “There’s that other surf shop, isn’t there. We could go and check that out.” He stopped again, then turned back to the shop guy. “Look, if you can make it a hundred, I’ll shake on the deal right now. I can’t really be bothered to check out the other shop.” The two of them stared at each other, the board lying on the carpet between them.

  “Seventy-five is as high as I can go.”

  “I can’t go below a hundred. It’s a shame as I really like the look of that new board.” Ben reached down to pick up his old board, and I breathed a sigh of relief. It didn’t seem a good idea to me to sell a board filled with dog treats. But the guy stopped him.

  “Eighty.”

  “Eighty-five.”

  “Alright. Eighty-five.”

  Ben beamed, and they started to talk about the extras you need with a surfboard. I got a moment while the shop owner was out the back finding a deckpad to talk to Ben without the shop guy hearing.

  “Mate, you can’t actually sell it. It’s got two kilos of dog treats inside it.”

  “So it’s no good to me, is it? I still need a board for surfing.” He turned away, but I grabbed his arm.

  “But what if it snaps? What if someone finds them?” I hissed, then shut up as the sales guy came walking back. He was carrying the new board Ben had selected and placed it carefully down in front of the counter.

  “Yeah, well, they can feed their dogs, can’t they?” Ben replied at normal volume raising a quizzical look from the salesman. I had to get out the shop I was giggling so much by then, and moments later Ben walked out with the new surfboard under his arm.

  I still wonder what happened to his old board, and if anyone ever found it was filled with dog food.

  15

  As pleased as we both were with how the surfboard experiment had gone, it still took a bit of work until we had the problem dialled. Although we’d successfully hidden two kilos of dog treats in Ben’s surfboard, and I’d turned his bedroom into a fibreglass f
actory in the process, we still had a problem with volume. You see, surfboards are quite small. I hadn’t used all the potential available space in Ben’s board, and the dog treats I’d used were probably a bit bulkier than the cannabis resin we were planning to smuggle for real. But even so, even if we each took a board, and I filled both to capacity, it was hard to see how we were going to get much beyond six kilos through in total. We’d need to take hundreds of boards if it was going to be worthwhile. We needed bigger surfboards.

  But fortunately, you can get bigger surfboards. Ben’s was what they call a shortboard, about six foot long, but you can also get longboards, up to about ten foot in length, and with quite a lot more space inside to work with. But even better than that, there was a new type of board that had come out in the last few years that was perfect for our needs. You’ll have seen celebrities using them, wobbling around in the Caribbean. They’re called Stand-up paddleboards and they’re huge, not just longer, but also substantially wider and thicker. They were perfectly suited, it turned out, for smuggling banned substances across national borders. And if that’s not good enough, there was more. Whenever you see people who are into stand-up paddleboarding (and since Brighton is full of idiots who’ll do anything if a celebrity tells them it’s cool, there were plenty), they often have at least two boards on their car and sometimes even more than that. We realised that we wouldn’t look out of place with two stand-up paddleboards each. Plenty of room, in theory, for the full hundred kilos. And absolutely best of all, almost all stand-up boards came painted white on the bottom. Easy to colour match, easy to disguise any repairs. They’re not even that expensive, we bought our first one secondhand on eBay for three hundred quid.

  Over the next couple of weeks, I chopped it up just like I had the surfboard. And actually, it was even better than we’d hoped. Surfboards come with the wooden stringer that divides the two halves front to back. Stand-up boards don’t—they’re just filled with standard polystyrene—so you can hollow out a single, much bigger space. We’d run out of dog treats by then, so just to piss Ben off, I glassed both the pillows from his bed into his new board.