I don’t remember the beating itself. I remember him unbuckling his belt.
He never hits them, though. If one of them needs hitting, we do it. Only twice have I seen him hit them. Anyone try to hit him back, we’re all there to stop that person. They have to fear him. It’s the only way to get them out and the only way we make money. If you mess around, we tell them, if you make a noise, if you talk to a stranger, if you vomit or scream or trip or cough, you’re taking money out of his pocket and he doesn’t like that. We find you a truck, you better get in it, fast and quiet. And you make it across, you better pay up.
We menace them. It’s the only way.
He tells me I learned fast. He tells me it took him years to get as tough as I got in a couple of months, as mean.
Weakness, telling me that. I hate it.
Mouse says to me, ‘You’re like a son to him.’
‘Please,’ I say. ‘Does a rock have a family? Does a knife?’
‘Sure,’ Mouse says. ‘A rock’s son is a stone, a sharp stone. And you’re Ghostboy.’
He thinks he’s funny, Mouse. Plus, he thinks he’s going somewhere. He thinks he’s like them, getting out of here. Mouse, you stupid fool. No destination for us, man.
You want to talk about gambling and chance? We’ve lost the game already, I want to tell him. If they’ve got your fingerprints, you’ve lost. If you’re on a crime list, you’ve lost. No chance. OK, say it’s a lottery, and you know what? We got the dud ticket. Our country is just plain out of date. Ten, twenty years ago, sure – asylum, refuge, future. But the roulette wheel spun round and round, and some other country’s landed in the lucky spot. Ka-ching.
Meanwhile, they arrive in the camp with their hopes and plans and backpacks and justifications and family phone numbers. They think they’ve reached the finishing line after a long race, a marathon. They’re from the right country, they deserve the next step, OK? Someone promised them safety. Now, they want to know if we can we get them over that last boundary.
I look into their pleading eyes. Did I ever look this way? Did I look at him with hopeful eyes?
I told him nothing. It was my uncle’s friend, the man I came with, who told him stories: ‘Oh, this boy. His father had to send him away. You know how it is with the village warlord – he sees your son’s height, hears his new deep voice, tells you he needs your boy, he’s going to take your boy to fight.’
I could tell that he didn’t listen to stories like those. Even when I was cowering Fearboy, I told him nothing. I stayed near him and I watched. When I messed up, he unbuckled his belt and he was right to beat me. Some of them get wired before we go out but not me. He saw that I didn’t need drugs. I sleep in the tent nearest his tent. I’m the quietest and, when someone needs beating, I beat the hardest. And when he’s sleeping, no one must wake him. To wake him, they’d have to get past me.
One woman comes to our area with her child. She has no money but, to get a chance on a truck, she must pay and she knows what that means. He told her to come this afternoon but he’s still sleeping in his tent, so I give her my chair to sit on. It’s a kind of holiday chair, with stripes, which I find funny and he finds funny too. ‘You think this is your vacation?’ he says when I sit in it, to make the others laugh. He likes to say ‘vacation’ in English, like we’re in an American movie.
There are always desperate women like her, on the road, in the camp, even in the forest or some damn car. If he likes them, once is not enough. He passes some of them on to us. Or he has them cook or wash our clothes. I don’t take them any more. I used to. I know none of them is a sister of mine but one bitch put that idea in my head. She asked me, ‘Do you have a sister?’ And from then on, I have none of these women. I don’t need to, like I said. Girls like me and if I have to I’ll pay.
The woman sits in the vacation chair with her child on her lap. She lays the kid on its back on her thighs and holds its little feet in her hands. She doesn’t look at me or at any of us, only down at the kid. We’re quiet because he’s sleeping in his tent and no one must wake him, but she talks to her baby. Mother sounds, baby talk, smiling down at it. A boy, a girl, I don’t know. Its stomach is round and its shirt rides up. She rubs the brown skin of its round belly, saying, ‘Beautiful, baby-baby.’ The kid gurgles back at her.
He’s standing in the opening of his tent. He’s been watching me watching her with the baby. I clench my fist. I want to hit something.
She looks up at him and he tips his head towards me, like: Give him the baby. So she stands up and nuzzles the baby’s neck before she hands it to me. Then she walks into his tent, not looking back. He’s unbuckling his belt when he pulls the tent flap closed.
The kid’s eyes get watery but it doesn’t cry. I know how to hold it, I used to hold my sisters, but my teeth are clenched and I would like to throw it on the ground. Here’s Mouse now. He takes the baby away from me. He’s on something, Mouse is – his eyes are red – but the baby’s better off with him than with me.
I thought Ghostman didn’t remember my story, the story my uncle’s friend told, but it turns out he did, he remembered it all this time and that’s why he started talking to me when he should have kept quiet. He told me it reminded him of his own story. But in those days, it was the Taliban. He told me about walking with his father to the market for food because it wasn’t safe for his mother on the street. He told me his father went into the stall and he waited outside, boy he was then, thirteen years old. Five of them were patrolling and they came round the corner in their beards and robes and saw him and ran at him and grabbed him. They said he was a scout, keeping watch to warn people when the patrol approached, and they took him away and beat him.
Why did he tell me this?
Weakness.
Worse, he pulled up his shirt to show me scars.
I felt sick. I clenched my fists. I didn’t look at him.
‘They’re still there,’ he said, ‘my mother and father. I send them money. I tell them I have a shop.’ He laughed. ‘A shop!’ He punched my arm.
Mouse buys tea in the café. We’re not talking, we’re just sipping tea, holding the small hot glasses with the tips of our fingers and thumbs. Sipping, nodding to men we know, listening to the evening voices, figuring out who’s new, what’s going on. Everyone has sand in his socks – not dry clean sand like home, but this dirty wet French soil. The tea tastes right, cardamom-scented, but the sand chafes.
We know the same spies that everyone knows, the obvious ones always asking questions, but there are unlikely spies too. We can vanish in the camp, me and Mouse and the rest of us, or we can disappear in the banlieues, or we can live illegal in City X or City Y, but if the police catch us doing what we do, that’s it. Ten years. Twenty years. So, no talking, no plans, nothing for the spies to report on. We walk out of the café, stroll down the street.
On any path in this Jungle, people are talking. Planning, striking a deal. Out here, far from ears, Mouse talks with anyone who wants to ask. People think they can trust Mouse – he has that kind of face. I’m close by, to scare them. Later, I’ll report to Ghostman. He’s back in his tent right now, low-profile, invisible, doing finance on one of his tablets. Six people made it over last night. Candy all round, celebration. Six times £3,000, maybe more. Most for him, plus a chunk for the driver. The rest divided by the three of us who got them to the truck, then into the truck. And some for the guy who stole the car. Have all six paid? Any follow-up needed? He’s working all this out, Ghostman, in his tent.
Word gets round the camp fast. People hear about the six, those lucky six safely across La Manche. People want to talk with Mouse. He looks friendly enough but he doesn’t negotiate. No, no bargains. No time for hard-luck stories. You want to go, you have to pay.
Mouse stands off the path, making a plan with three men. I’m sitting on a rock nearby. I’m making sure no one’s listening in, no one’s approaching. I’m like the scout in Ghostman’s story about the time he was beaten and why he
had to flee. Even though he wasn’t actually a scout. I hate that story. I hate the weakness that made him tell it to me, the weakness that takes him to that woman in City X for comfort.
Here comes a woman a bit like her, one of the volunteers who come to help them, in her reflective bib with her heavy backpack. I’m another unfortunate refugee as far as she’s concerned, so I smile back at her. Now she wants to talk with me. She thinks I need to tell my story. I shrug to show I can’t understand her. She switches language. I shake my head, smiling, smiling up at her from my rock, shaking hands with all four or five of her friendly bunch. She wants to give me some flyer so I take it. Behind me, I can hear the murmur of Mouse’s voice and the men’s voices. Don’t start handing them flyers, please, madame. They’re doing business.
Please let her move on now. She doesn’t. She’s tugging at the straps of her backpack, trying to take it off and zip it open. ‘He’s so young,’ she’s saying. Meaning me. ‘You can see how much he’s been through,’ she says. ‘And he doesn’t understand French either.’
One of the others says, ‘Well, OK then.’
She reaches into her backpack and out comes a small box. It’s a radio. You wind it up, she shows me how. ‘You can listen to your own people,’ she tells me in a loud voice, slowly. ‘News from home.’
We never take donations. Ghostman’s rule. But this radio is kind of cool. I mime big gratitude, tuck it in my pocket, wave at her as they move on. Finally.
But Mouse must have seen something and then reported. Back at our place, Ghostman tells me to give it to him.
‘Give what?’ I say. I lift my arms and Mouse frisks me. The radio’s hidden by now. He finds nothing.
Ghostman slaps my face.
‘We take nothing from those people,’ he says. ‘Ever.’
That’s one of his rules for them too – anyone who wants to get across must set out from the camp in his or her own clothes, no donated shoes or coats or shirts or trousers or skirts.
He turns back towards his tent.
‘Why not?’ I ask. ‘Why can’t we take things from them?’
We never question his rules. The others wait for him to hit me again. I’m ready for it.
But he doesn’t hit me. Weakness. He talks instead.
‘You look,’ he tells me. ‘You look carefully at those trainers they bring, those boots, those jackets. You’ll find something small and hard,’ he tells all of us. ‘Tracking devices.’
The others are nodding. ‘You can’t trust them,’ Mouse says.
‘Why do they bring old clothes?’ another one says. ‘It’s suspicious, right? Why not real help?’
They’re all nodding. Here comes a long night of stories and politics. Who started the bombing? American planes and British soldiers. And whose father died, whose brother? Swearing and smoking and then weeping for their mothers. I can’t listen to it. I follow Ghostman into his tent. He hands me a parcel to give them, something for their night off: pills, weed, I don’t know what. He knows I don’t touch it, I don’t need it. I don’t listen to talk about mothers and I don’t need drugs.
‘Is it true,’ I ask him, ‘what you said about tracking devices?’
Again he doesn’t hit me. He tips his head to one side. ‘Might be,’ he says. ‘Doesn’t hurt me to say so.’ He laughs. ‘Doesn’t hurt me at all.’
It’s a more powerful weapon than violence, I can see that. Better than hitting them – make sure they trust no one else.
I trust no one else. I used to trust him but he’s weakening. Now I trust only myself.
It happens when I’m with a French girl. She’s older than me but not old and I like her laugh. It’s been a bad night. Police checkpoints on the road. Dogs in the forest. He’s gone back to the camp to sleep, Mouse and the others too, but I wasn’t tired so I came to this club in the town, and I’m standing outside smoking a cigarette, acting like I’m waiting to go back in, listening to the music from inside thudding through the walls, blaring out when the door opens. I light a cigarette for this girl who’s stepped out. She keeps laughing when the wind blows out the lighter flame.
I ask for nothing, I suggest nothing, but when she asks me, I say OK. She’s a little drunk but not too much and I put my arm around her hip when she slips. She isn’t like anyone I know or anyone I knew before. I set myself a challenge: make her laugh.
It’s dawn when I walk back towards the camp. The grey time. She wants to meet me again. I’m thinking, why not?
Then I see the police vans parked under the motorway at the entrance to the Jungle. They park here some days but not often this early. And seldom so many of them.
I slip by them. I know how. After all, I’ve been Ghostboy for two years now.
Men are standing by their tents, and outside shelters and cafés. I keep to the shadows, I listen to the talk, but these guys don’t know anything. Police marching, they say, not searching tents, not fanning out across the camp, they tell each other, just marching directly that way.
They wait. I wait.
We hear the tramp of boots. This is sleeping time in the camp but not this morning. Everyone is awake. Here come the police. I swallow because I think I know what I’m going to see and my stomach is twisting.
His wrists are manacled. His head is bare. More police stride in front and behind and to the side of the two holding his arms, and they all have rifles at the ready, as if someone might try to rescue him. Everyone falls silent as they pass. He’s the only one they take.
There’s a clamour afterwards, like their boots stirred up a wave of voices. Around me, people are talking shit. Oh, this one knew him, that one remembers him, they all hate him but – oh, God – what will they do now? Others will surely charge more now that he’s been caught. How did the police know exactly where to find him? Did one of his people sell him out?
I haven’t slept for many hours, maybe two days and nights, and suddenly I’m dizzy. I lean against the wooden shack wall. I don’t want to think about them bursting into his tent. I don’t want to imagine him, right now, being shoved into a police van. I try to remember the girl, the French girl, her laugh and her hair falling forward over her eyes.
‘So this is where you are,’ says a voice behind me.
It’s Mouse. I look down at his feet. He always sleeps with his trainers on, in case he has to run.
‘Mouse,’ I say. I forget for a moment that I never call him that out loud, but he doesn’t say ‘What?’ or ask me why.
‘There’s people,’ he says, ‘who want to speak with Ghostman.’
I nod.
‘So,’ he says, ‘I’ll bring them to your tent.’
Lineage
Enitan is hammering. It’s supposed to become what he calls the hospital. Somewhere dry and sheltered. Wooden pallets fixed together, more solid than the canvas of the tents and the tarpaulins. The tent where Enitan sleeps is there, right next to the wood and his tools. On the other side of the clearing, by the spacious shack, a queue has formed. It is drizzling.
This queue breathes: men are chatting and pushing forward in a friendly way, checking out what’s happening inside the tent. A woman with blonde curls that fall into her face when she tilts it, which she does often, is attentive and fast-working. The other barber is a man with tight-cropped curls. He frowns a lot, taking a step back, rocking on his heels, hand still on his customer’s head, brushing away stray clippings, tousling the hair into the right shape.
Ramzi is standing in line with the others. Farrukh recognises his slumped posture from when he saw him with his mates at the water taps yesterday. That’s when he found out his name.
‘You from the UK?’
Ramzi nodded. There wasn’t a reason not to answer – Farrukh didn’t want anything from him: We’re just killing time. We’re all here, innit, not like one of us got a golden ticket. Ramzi didn’t look at him, though.
Eventually one of his mates said, ‘Today not good. You from UK?’ He pointed at Farrukh.
‘Ye
ah, man.’
‘He too, from Newcastle.’ He pointed at Ramzi. ‘Why you here?’
‘I need to get back, man.’
‘He too.’
Ramzi was detached, not engaging at all. Like the guy said, it wasn’t his day.
‘He is Ramzi. From Afghanistan but also from UK.’
Farrukh nodded and left. He could always wash a bit later. No need for bad energy because some guy was having an extra bad day.
Ramzi still looks depressed. He does need a haircut; really needs it. His black strands are tied at the back but some fall out over his face. He can’t pull this one off, not this bloke; the long strands pull him down, making his face even sadder.
Farrukh tries again. Would be rude not to.
‘Hi.’
‘You all right?’
‘Getting your hair done?’
‘Yeah. You?’
‘Yeah.’
‘About time.’
‘Yeah.’
Ramzi’s shoulders are up by his ears, maybe because of the drizzle, maybe because he’s cold, maybe because of fuck off.
‘You from Newcastle?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why you here, then?’
Farrukh isn’t in the mood to beat around the bush, doesn’t have that sort of patience today.
‘Long story.’
‘Yeah, same.’
The hammering is getting louder. Enitan’s friend has joined, a skinny dark man with a metallic blue jacket. They are fixing slats to the frame. It’s starting to look good. The corner poles are in place and now the sides are going up one pallet slat at a time.
Farrukh turns to them. ‘Nice place you got there.’
But Enitan is distracted.
‘Nice place,’ Farrukh repeats.
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