Jonah leads them past this place to a smaller building with a pitched roof and gaps in its wooden walls. Its floor of boggy earth is mulched with orange peel and discarded clothes and the hormonal stench of urine. As if crossing a pond they walk on planks to avoid sinking into the detritus. Aryan can see no door nor any other room; before he has time to wonder, Jonah has reached the wall and is starting to climb.
Entire horizontal planks have been prised away for firewood, leaving some splintering off into the void. The shoes of previous climbers have encrusted the slats in mud. Jonah disappears into a square cut out of the ceiling before his grin reappears in its frame. Aryan sends Kabir up after him, lifting him on to the first rung. Then he clambers up himself, ducking to avoid the beams.
They emerge into another world; Aryan marvels that he has not even imagined its presence from outside. In a triangular space criss-crossed by rafters lies mattress upon mattress, blanket upon blanket, arranged in an ethereal dormitory. There are little hillocks of daypacks, and anoraks hanging off nails in the rough-hewn wood. A mound of blankets stirs and two faces peer out; Aryan is surprised to see they are girls. Like the sights in a bunker, small chinks in the wall show the outside world in stripes; the place smells of woodsmoke and damp.
Kabir’s eyes widen with excitement.
‘Can we sleep here too?’ he asks.
‘You can have this spot,’ says Jonah. ‘Some guys left the other day. I don’t think anyone’s using their sleeping bags now.’
‘Thank you, we are very grateful,’ Aryan says.
‘I am from Somalia,’ Jonah says. ‘Most people here are from Somalia or Eritrea. My friend playing football is from Somalia too. Those girls are from Nigeria; there are others from Congo and Ghana and Guinea. We have all of Africa here, like the United Nations.’
‘Is everybody going to England?’
Jonah laughs. ‘We didn’t come here for the sightseeing,’ he says. ‘England is my dream. England is everybody’s dream. You step off the truck and they are waiting there to give you a job, no problemo.’
Aryan smiles. He has heard those stories too and wonders if they are true. Maybe people will be waiting there to take them to school.
‘How long have you been here?’ he asks.
‘Five weeks.’
Aryan is taken aback.
‘There are too many controls,’ Jonah says. ‘It’s very hard to get through the port.’
Aryan pulls a packet of biscuits from his daypack and offers them to the Somali, but Jonah shakes his head.
‘I ate earlier at the lighthouse,’ he says. ‘They distribute meals there every day. Tomorrow we will take you there.’
Moments later they watch the curly dome of his head disappear through the attic floor.
Aryan and Kabir divide up the biscuits, setting some aside for the morning. They pass the plastic water bottle back and forth. They still have the last of the hard bread and the cheese they have kept from Paris, and Kabir still has an apple. He eats around the bruises, turning it into a green and white asteroid. Then they venture outside to piss.
When they find their way back to the attic Kabir arranges his outermost sweater for a pillow, as Aryan has shown him. They pull the prickly blankets around them against the cold.
A drop on his eyelid shocks him from sleep. Panicked, Aryan sits up suddenly in the darkness; the cold envelops him like the blanket he has just kicked off. Above him, a patch of night sky winks down through a hole in the ceiling. He struggles through disorientation like a diver swimming up for air. Snowmelt. He shifts his bedding closer to the rafter, away from the icy dripping. He pats the wooden slats in the darkness till he finds his anorak, then folds part of it over his head. He pulls the scratchy blanket back around him. From the shadows behind him comes the sound of snoring; somebody whimpers and turns.
They are sleeping the disturbed slumber of escapees, shallow-breathed, all of them haunted by trouble of some kind.
Outside he hears a sound. A footstep crunches on gravel, then stops. In the attic there is a stiffening as wakening ears strain to listen. Again the same sound; Aryan guesses there are two people below them in the yard. All at once, as if in a collective movement, the sleepers nearest the back wall leap to their feet and scramble for the hole in the slats that leads to the adjoining roof. There is shoving, cursing, confusion, and suddenly the whizz of a missile shooting up through the gap in the floor. The canister hits the rafters and lands on a pile of bedding. Someone kicks it away; it fizzes like a crazy bird with a vaporous plume. Those who haven’t woken in time bury themselves under the covers; fighting off the blanket that has become entangled in his feet Aryan reaches for his shoes. Kabir is already doing the same. There is a smaller hole beside the big one and the last thing Aryan sees is Kabir shoving himself through it on to the roof.
Suddenly Aryan’s eyes are streaming. He trips on a sleeping bag and lands on the floor. It feels like his eyes are bleeding. Needles of pain shoot to the back of his sockets, stinging and burning like acid. He tries to open his eyelids, but light and toxic fire sear his streaming eyeballs. He hears swearing and the clatter of feet on the fibreglass roof. His heart is pounding and he is breathing fast and tears pour from his blinded eyes. Through his panic he can hear the stuttering of a police radio, the click-clack of reloading, and boots making their way across the railyard to the old mechanics’ workshop where the others are still asleep. In the yard outside, the sound of shouts and running feet.
Through the hot liquid of his eyes, chinks of light began to appear, and a blurred kaleidoscope of colour. But there is sand inside his eyelids and keeping them shut is the only way to hold the pain at bay. His head throbs. It reminds him of the time when, long ago, he had been playing with chilli peppers in the kitchen and had rubbed his fists in his eyes. Sight had vanished then, and he had yelled to decapitate the mountains before it returned.
‘Here, take this,’ a low voice says. A plastic bottle is thrust into his hands. ‘Cup your hand and splash this on your eyes.’
The acrid smell still hangs in the air but Aryan does as the voice advises. Someone takes the bottle from him and pours more water on to his hands, and he washes his eyeballs as best he can. The more he rubs, the more it stings. His eyes feel like an ocean weeping endless water; he is maddened with blindness and fright.
‘Keep rinsing,’ comes the voice like a guardian angel’s. ‘The water will wash the tear-gas out.’
He cups his hand and bathes his right eye, then his left, then the right again, until slowly the stinging starts to abate.
‘Kabir!’ he bellows. In his pain he has forgotten he is not by his side.
‘Here, Aryan.’ The voice is a small distance away, beyond the rafters, outside.
Gradually the world returns – lozenges of colour, and shadow, and pencils of piercing light.
Mounds become backpacks, triangles become rafters, verticals become people again. Swirling shapes turn back into mounds of bedding. The splashes of brightness become chinks in the wall where the dawn is squinting through.
‘Can you see anything yet?’ the voice says.
‘Almost,’ Aryan says. He feels nauseous with the stench of gas and the aftertaste of fear.
At last he can make out his brother, bottle in hand, red eyes streaming too.
‘They do this just about every day,’ the angel says. Through tear-blur Aryan makes out the form of a skinny Somali boy with a narrow face and corkscrew hair. ‘Keep a bottle of water where you sleep. There’s a tap next door. Next time you will know what to do.’
Relief mingles with shock that this could happen. Aryan doesn’t understand. This is not a country at war; in Europe they are meant to be safe.
‘Who is attacking us?’ he asks.
‘It’s the police,’ the boy says.
‘Why would the police attack us?’
‘Because they don’t want us here.’
‘We don’t want to stay either.’
‘Nobody doe
s. Everybody is trying to leave.’
‘Then what is the point of attacking us?’
The boy shrugs. ‘They have special police to control us. They bring new ones every month so they’re always fresh. It’s just the way it is.’
Aryan feels like he is losing his footing. He doesn’t understand how they could have become a target. They are not warriors and they don’t have weapons – they are on the run from those very things. It is as if the police in France have been given the wrong information, and have been sent in to attack the wrong side.
The plastic bottle twists in the fire like molten glass. As the water inside it slowly heats, it sways and beckons like a belly dancer, releasing invisible fumes.
On one side of the cavernous machine hall, an angular Eritrean sits in the largest armchair – all green velvet and sawn-off legs – drinking tea from the sole china cup. Standing, or seated on crates and wobbly benches beside him, the others pass around plastic beakers to share. The Eritrean’s limbs are too big for the chair – his bent knees stand higher than his waist. A peaked cap shades triangular cheekbones and sharp, light eyes. There is an aura about him – Aryan can’t quite place it – in the coldness of his gaze, in the careful formality with which he is treated by the other youths.
Slowly the circle widens as more Africans emerge from their sleeping places. They hug their hands under their armpits, rub their eyes, rinse out the last of the tear-gas with water from plastic bottles, calm now after the alarm of dawn.
Aryan and Kabir hesitate a little way from the circle until Jonah gestures to them, diamond earring twinkling. The bottom of his red football shirt is hanging below a jacket, a sweatshirt and two sweaters. The other Africans eye them curiously until Jonah says something to them in their language and they relax, and shuffle sideways to open a space. Aryan declines the offer of a packing-crate seat.
The slow-dancing bottle shares the fire with an enamel cooking pot half-filled with water, tea-bags dangling from its edge. Inside, ash particles circle like microscopic fish; a torn cardboard box of sugar-cubes sits nearly empty on the ground. Kabir squats, and plays with a piece of plywood he has edged into the coals. Aryan feels the warmth put colour in his face, and turns his back to the flames when the smoke sidles his way. It reminds him of the cooking fires at home, his mother stoking the wood stove in their kitchen of hardened earth. Quickly he bats the thought away.
One of the Somalis leans forward in his rickety chair, playing a pop song on the speaker of his mobile phone. ‘Bye-bye-bye,’ the crackly voice sings to his girlfriend. ‘Please don’t say it’s bye-bye-bye.’ His neighbours sing along in low voices as they wait for the water to boil.
Beside the pot, very slowly, the plastic bottle flexes and contorts as its transparent ribs cloud in the heat. To Aryan it seems a miracle that it can still stand upright, the cool water inside stopping it from subsiding into a petrochemical pool. He wonders if the fumes are poisonous. A young man with a shark’s tooth around his neck steadies it with a pair of sticks, watching for steam. Then his friend, in a white hooded sweatshirt and hair grown wild from weeks on the road, grips it with his T-shirt and lifts it gently from the coals.
Circumventing the patches where snow was dripping from the roof, they carry it to the centre of the room where mechanics once worked, and stand over a hole in the floor filled with grease and discarded clothes.
It is bitterly cold, and conversation curls from their mouths in indecipherable comic-strip swirls.
‘You go first,’ says the one with the shark’s tooth round his neck.
Opposite the fire, and its ring of packing crates and broken armchairs, the walls are rimmed with bedding, daypacks and shoes. Like a man on a stage, the youth stands there in a T-shirt, rubbing a bar of soap between his hands.
Then he cranes his neck, and his friend pours the warm water over the crown of his head, and the whorls of his hair turn white as a Grecian statue as the lather takes hold. He scrubs, and his friend rinses, and afterwards he shakes his head like a puppy and rubs it dry with his T-shirt. Then he does the same for his friend, bare-chested, shark’s tooth gleaming just below the indentation of his throat. Afterwards, the two of them come back to dry off by the fire.
Moments later, in the freezing space of the cavernous shelter swept night and day by the wind, laughter echoes from the concrete walls and up to the dripping rafters.
‘Hagos, your hair’s on fire!’
The boys look at each other and grin. From their warm, damp heads clouds of steam unfurl as thick as halos in the icy air. They hop about flapping their hands, pretending to pat out invisible flames. In this, their bathroom-bedroom-living-room filled with rubbish and rat bait and grease, they clown around, almost normal, almost relaxed, almost teenagers again, as the steam rises and their hair dries and their skin grows taut from the soap and the cleanness and the warmth.
Aryan joins in the laughter too. It feels like an eternity since he has surrendered to the compulsive joy of it. He laughs till the tears come to his eyes, surprised he has any tears left, with relief and a sort of involuntary release. He has held so much in check for so long. Kabir is giggling his Kabir giggle, black eyes shining above luminous cheeks. Jonah nearly falls backwards off his packing crate. For a moment Aryan forgets his hunger and his tiredness and everything they have been through just to get to this place, sheltering like derelicts in the rafters at the back of a railway yard in the icy European winter. He forgets the stomach-cramps that pierce his sleep and the fizzing of tear-gas canisters. He forgets how far they are from home, and how alone they are, and how unfit he feels for this journey, and how there is no going back.
He lets the spasms wash over him until they are spent.
When the water in the enamel pot starts bubbling, one of the Africans slides it off the fire and ladles the brown liquid into plastic cups thrust towards him in outstretched hands.
Kabir is sitting next to a teenager in a Bob Marley T-shirt who is rocking backwards on a loose-jointed chair. He slides a piece of wire as thick as a bucket handle into the fire and leaves it there, checking its colour and pushing it in deeper and turning it until the length of it glows as red as a neon sign.
Then, calmly, while his friends sip their tea, he withdraws it from the coals and, in a single gesture, closes his fingers over it and pulls it through.
Mouth agape, Kabir scans his face for pain.
The youth opens his hand to examine the effect. Kabir kneels up to look. A polished line runs across skin turned yellow with scar tissue.
‘Does it hurt?’ Kabir says.
The teenager shakes his head. ‘It’s for the fingerprints,’ he says. ‘So they can’t send me back.’
Under an oppressive sky they traipse along a disused railway line towards the port. Jonah walks ahead of them with some of the Somalis Aryan recognizes from last night’s game. His feet are ice and he feels light-headed with hunger. The tracks lead them along a murky canal and then veer off, running parallel to a road. Ahead, Jonah ducks under the barbed wire, and Aryan and Kabir follow suit.
They emerge on the edge of a car park squeezed between the railroad track and the canal. Aryan falters. Spread out before them, beside a temporary cabin and a row of green rubbish bins, they see scores and scores of men, queuing, leaning on the fences, sitting on the street kerb, picnicking in small groups on the ground between the puddles in the patchy asphalt. They sit hunched against the cold in dark anoraks and knitted hats – the camouflage of the unauthorized, the phantom men on the road.
‘Ravens,’ Kabir says. ‘They look like lots of birds.’
A car is parked beside the cabin, its four doors open wide like a beetle’s wings. Music pours from the speakers. Africans are sitting everywhere: inside, on the bonnet, in the boot, hanging on the doors. The car rocks on its suspension with the beat.
Jonah makes a detour to high-five them as he heads to the queue.
In low gear a police car cruises by, windows sealed, invisible eyes w
atching behind the reflections. Nobody runs.
Aryan takes a step backwards. There must be more than three hundred men gathered there under the metallic clouds. He had no idea they were so many.
Jonah turns back to look for them, taking a moment to locate them on the edge of the crowd.
‘Come on!’ he calls. ‘There’ll be none left if you wait.’
There are big groups of Africans in one queue – Nigerians, Somalis and Eritreans – alternating with Afghani Pashtuns and knots of Tajiks and a big group of Hazaras. Further on there are Kurds and Iraqis and Iranians and Pakistanis, everyone babbling in different languages. There is a Kurdish youth on crutches with one leg missing below the knee. Aryan and Kabir join the shortest line.
Aryan turns to the man behind them. He has ears like handles and a wide friendly face and a gap between his front teeth.
‘Salaam alaikum,’ Aryan says.
The man returns his greeting. ‘Are you new around here?’ he says. ‘I’d have remembered the boy.’
‘We got here last night,’ Aryan says. ‘We are looking for the Afghan camp.’
‘You know someone there?’ The man’s friends bunch around them in the queue to listen.
‘No. My brother and I need somewhere to stay for just a couple of days, before we go to England.’
The man guffaws. ‘Just a couple of days!’
His friends join in the laughter.
Aryan flushes with confusion.
‘You might need more than a few days, my friend,’ the man says. ‘You will see. But you can stay at the Kabul Hilton while you’re waiting.’
Hinterland: A Novel Page 13
