Nala's World

2

The Stowaway

It took another hour and a half to reach the border, but my new passenger remained clamped to my shoulders throughout, snoozing away, totally oblivious to everything. If only I could have felt so relaxed about life right now.

Weaving my way up the mountain road, my mind was working overtime. I was sure that I’d done the right thing. I couldn’t have left a vulnerable little creature in such a dangerous place. But at the same time, I was being nagged by doubts. What was I going to do when I reached the border crossing? And what was my plan beyond that? I hadn’t bargained on having a cat as a co-pilot.

I briefly convinced myself that I should declare the kitten to the authorities. I’d be honest and simply explain what had happened. I’d found it at the roadside and was going to take it to a vet. Surely they’d be sympathetic? It wasn’t as if I was trying to bring through something sinister. It was only a kitten, for heaven’s sake. But when I thought it through, I realized that wasn’t going to work. There was a reason that every country had rules on the movement of animals. They could carry diseases across borders and kittens were notorious for picking up illnesses. It might need to be put into quarantine; they might even have to euthanize it. I really didn’t want that to happen.

For a while, I thought about getting around this by claiming it was my own cat. But I had no paperwork, no medical certificates to vouch for its health. So that was a non-starter too.

I saw that my only option was somehow to slip the cat into Montenegro unseen. I’d work out my next move after that.

I passed a sign: five kilometers to the border. I stopped at a rest stop on the side of the road. A part of me was still hoping to find a loophole, a workaround. So, as a last throw of the dice, I pulled up a map on my phone; there might be a small mountain road or trail that didn’t have border guards. But the map showed there was no other route into Montenegro. And besides, it was a stupid idea. What would happen if I was pulled over by police and had no official record of entering the country?

Get real, Dean, I told myself.

There was no avoiding it, I’d have to go through customs and get past the border guards. But how precisely was I going to smuggle a kitten across an international border?

That was the question.

At the height of my partying days back in Scotland, I’d had some experience slipping weed and alcohol into music festivals. I’d hidden stuff in my shoes, in my headband, in all sorts of places, with mixed success. I’d been busted a couple of times, but got away with a slap on the wrist. This was different.

Officials in this part of the world carried guns.

I sat at the side of the road, staring at my bike, hoping for a brainwave. I couldn’t slip the cat into the panniers at the back. Apart from anything else, there was no room. They were stuffed full of my gear. For a moment I considered putting on the heavy jacket I had packed away. I could tuck the cat inside. But again, that was a daft idea. The chances of a wriggly, nervous kitten sitting there quietly were virtually zero. It would want to say hello to the border guard, guaranteed.

So my only real option was to zip the kitten up in the pouch at the front of the bike and hope the border authorities didn’t notice it. That wasn’t going to be easy. The wee thing hadn’t stayed quiet before, so why would it do so now? But I had no choice. I had to take the risk.

I played with the kitten for a while in the hope I’d exhaust it. There were some long-stemmed daisies growing nearby. I grabbed a few and let the kitten chase the stringy stems around. It went crazy, running around in circles and springing up and down as if it was on an invisible trampoline. For a while I despaired. It wasn’t slowing down at all; the cat was an insatiable ball of pure energy. The Duracell kitty. But then, as if by magic, after about twenty minutes its batteries ran out and it lay on some rocks next to me, as if ready to snooze again. It was time to make my move. “Okay,” I said, steeling myself. “Let’s do this.”

I was encouraged to see a sudden flurry of traffic heading toward Montenegro. If I was lucky, maybe they’d still be there when I passed through. They might distract the guards, make them less interested in me. No such luck. When we reached the border about ten minutes later, there wasn’t a single other vehicle in sight. It was only me. Or me and my stowaway cat, to be precise.

The crossing was a modern construction, a series of barriers and booths stretched out under a metal frame with a brick building and some offices attached. I pulled up alongside one of the booths, being careful to park the front of the bike past the window, so that it was out of the guard’s eye-line. The kitten was still snoozing, but I was paranoid that it would wake up and start meowing. So I kept my sound system playing at a low level. The young customs official was behind a glass partition, which was a help. With luck, he wouldn’t hear the cat, even if it did start making a noise. It would be drowned out by the gentle thud, thud, thud of my music.

The guy appeared totally bored. He flicked through my passport casually, not even bothering to check my photo or ask any questions. He then reached for his stamp and searched for a clean page to mark. I tried to remain calm and kept smiling, looking at him directly in case he tried to make eye contact. We were nearly through. But then out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the pouch. Its surface was rippling and, at the point where I’d left the zip open, the kitten was trying to push out its paw. It was also meowing. Loudly.

My heart nearly jumped out of my chest. Somehow, I managed not to swear, which was a feat for me. I forced myself to hold my nerve and kept looking toward the guard. For a moment all I could hear was meowing. There was no way he wouldn’t pick up on it, I was convinced of it.

I’m no great believer in spirits and guardian angels. But one of them must have been watching over me at that moment, because it was then that a small truck suddenly appeared. It was a battered old vehicle with a noisy exhaust. The truck quickly drowned out the meowing—and almost everything else.

The official stamped the passport and handed it back with barely a glance of acknowledgment. I could only have been at the window for a minute, but it felt like an hour. I pushed off, not even daring to look back behind me. My elation was short-lived. We’d left Bosnia. But now we had to tackle the border into Montenegro. Leaving a country was one thing, entering quite another. This would be more challenging, I knew it.

Sure enough, the second border had more of a military presence. There were a couple of guys with guns walking around a large truck that had been pulled over.

I cycled steadily and went through the same process again, placing the pouch as far from the window as possible. But this time I took extra precautions. As well as turning the music up a wee bit, I put my finger into the pouch every now and again to let the kitten play with it. A couple of times it dug sharply into my fingers, but I tried not to flinch. It wasn’t easy. Its little teeth were like needles and they really stung.

This guard was a lot more attentive. He held the photo ID section up and looked at me. He stroked his chin as if to indicate my beard was a lot thicker than it was in my passport photo. I nodded and smiled. He didn’t speak any English, so I wrapped my arms around myself as if to indicate it kept me warm. He just nodded.

The sound of his stamp punching into my passport was the most wonderful thing I’d heard that day. I climbed on the bike and pushed off past the barrier and down the road, feeling like the weight of the world had been lifted off me. I was ready to celebrate and get the kitten out of the pouch. But as I was about to pull over, I turned a bend to discover—to my horror—there was another checkpoint. This was one was smaller and less intimidating. But it still might catch me out. I approached it slowly, praying that I wasn’t going to be third time unlucky.

Don’t do anything stupid, Dean.

I was about to bring the bike to a stop again when a guard emerged from a small booth. He was on his phone and seemed preoccupied. He simply waved me through, barely offering me a second glance while he talked away. I gave the guy a nod and a thumbs-up, then pushed on.

I was tempted to put on a sprint, but thought better of it. I didn’t want him to think I was some kind of felon, rushing away from a crime scene, even though—technically speaking—that’s precisely what I was.

3

Second Chances

A few miles on from the border, I came to a stretch of open countryside where some major roadworks were under way. The construction team had obviously taken the day off; there was no sign of anyone, and the diggers and tractors were parked up. I pulled off the road. My knee was complaining after the long climb. I also needed a breather, to calm my nerves and weigh things up after the morning’s dramas.

I sat down on the tracks of one of the diggers and let the kitten explore. It was soon dashing around, getting excited about a patch of grass here and a pile of concrete curbstones there. It didn’t know what it was looking for, nor did it much care. The poor thing was having fun; it was certainly overdue some.

I took a couple of pictures of the cat then spent a few minutes on my phone, scrolling through a website that had a list of vets in Montenegro. The best one seemed to be in the coastal town of Budva, a few hours down the road. It was touch and go whether I’d get there in time tonight, but I decided it was worth a try.

Before hitting the road again, I decided to have something to eat, spreading some more pesto out for the kitten at the same time. For a few minutes I sat there, soaking up the winter sun, but also mulling over what had happened today so far. It had been an adrenaline rush, that was for sure.

I was distracted by the sound of a car engine. I turned and saw a battered, old silver Volkswagen Golf emerging onto the main road from a small lane that led to some fields. There was a young lad at the wheel. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen years old. He had a mate with him, and loud music was booming out of the window. They were laughing and waving and shouted something at me. As they disappeared down the road, I smiled to myself. It was as if I was watching a scene from my past. My dad used to have that exact same car, and my journey to this place may well have begun at the wheel of it, on a long and eventful night four years earlier.

It was the sort of stupid stunt that had been typical of my life for the past decade or so. Alongside me in the car that night, as was often the case when I was up to no good, was my longtime friend Ricky. We’d been partners in crime—lovable rogues, we liked to call ourselves—for ten years or so, since my early twenties. We regularly hung out, usually smoking weed and getting up to mischief. Ricky and I shared the same taste in music, had a similar outlook on life. We were both party animals—free spirits, I guess you might say. We didn’t do things by the book.

That was certainly the case that night. We borrowed my dad’s car without telling him our plans. We then drove about an hour and a half from Dunbar up to a field in Kinross, more than sixty miles away. But it wasn’t any old field. It was going to host the big T in the Park music festival in a week or so. We went most years. It was one of the highlights of our summer, a long, sunny weekend watching some of the biggest bands around while smoking and drinking to our hearts’ content.

Our crazy plan was that this year we’d bury some weed at a little spot of open land that we’d be able to recognize when we wandered into the festival later. We’d dig up our secret, personal stash and—hey presto—we’d be sorted for the three days of the festival. We thought we were geniuses. Except we weren’t, of course; far from it.

We’d driven in the middle of the night to make extra sure we weren’t spotted. The organizers hadn’t started building the site yet, but we knew from experience where the perimeter fence and stage was likely to be. Having found the right place for our burial in the beam of the flashlight, we headed straight back down the highway. As the only insured driver, I’d driven up and back again but had been working all day, so by the time we were half an hour or so from Dunbar, I was nearly falling asleep.

I remember closing one eye. The next thing I knew, we veered off the road and hit one of those raised platforms where police cars sometimes watch the traffic. The impact shot us into the road, where we hit the central barrier then started flipping over and over. We tumbled down a thirty-foot hill into a farmer’s field. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion, as if we were in a movie. I can still recall how the airbags came up and hit us in the face, and being tossed around as if we were in a tumble dryer. Most of all, I remember us coming to a halt and Ricky and me sitting there upside down, with the roof of the car caved in to within centimeters of our faces. We hugged each other and then sat there, dazed, smeared in blood from a few small cuts. Shaking but, incredibly, otherwise unharmed and so glad to be alive.

Surviving a serious car crash is a life-altering experience. You feel like you’ve cheated death, been given a second chance at life. It was certainly a big turning point for me; it changed my perspective. It gave me a real motivation to do more, to experience more. I kept telling myself not to waste a single day. So when, early in 2018, Ricky first floated the idea of us doing some traveling, my ears pricked up straight away.