Hinterland: A Novel

by Caroline Brothers

  ‘If we get stuck inside, how long have we got?’

  ‘Yes, how do we know we won’t end up in an English supermarket – up there on a shelf with the frozen dinners?’

  The men laugh. But something darker hovers behind the levity.

  ‘Look, the ferry crossing takes ninety minutes at the most. Add on a couple of hours for customs at each end,’ Idris says. ‘That’s five and a half hours. It’s another hour to get to London – or two if the traffic’s bad.’

  ‘But what if the truck isn’t going to London?’

  ‘Look, this is Europe, you know – you’re not in Pakistan now. Truckers aren’t allowed to drive for more than four and a half hours without a break. So if you think you might feel chilly you throw on a couple more sweaters. If you feel a bit cold after you get through Dover, just bang on the wall – I’m sure the driver will be all too happy to let you out.’

  ‘How many can you take on one of those trucks?’ someone asks.

  ‘Maximum of six,’ Idris says. ‘It’s travelling first class, remember. Any more and your body heat will thaw the chickens out, and the driver will get suspicious if he hears them squawking and laying eggs.’

  The men see through Idris’s jokes, but they laugh anyway, perhaps because they need to laugh, and for a moment the tension ebbs.

  Hamid can’t stand having wet feet. He has moved his blankets into their hut and Aryan is sitting beside him out of the drizzle, watching him roll up wads of newspaper and stuff them into his shoes. In the last of the daylight, Kabir has gone with Khaled to fill the water bottles for the morning.

  ‘Do you ever think about what life will be like in England?’ Hamid says. A loose-leafed ball of newsprint flowers gently in his hand.

  ‘It’s hard to imagine,’ Aryan says, ‘except that I think we will always feel safe. And it’s a good country because people believe in things being fair – at least that’s what the tailor who taught me English used to say.’

  ‘All I know is that it’s very clean,’ Hamid says. ‘My father once said you could walk around London for an entire day and not get any dust on your shoes.’

  Aryan ponders the wonder of it. It is a long time since he has thought about Afghanistan’s dust-choked streets.

  ‘Maybe they will have special buses for driving us to school,’ Aryan says. ‘And they will teach us about computers and the latest things in science.’

  ‘Kabir tells me he is going to be a musician,’ says Hamid. ‘Maybe he’ll turn into a rock star and we’ll get to see him on TV.’

  Aryan laughs. He pictures his brother strutting around a stage beneath a star-shaped electric guitar.

  ‘Do you ever think about your family, about what they are doing now?’ Aryan says.

  Hamid’s eyes drop. Too late, Aryan recognizes he has crossed a line. Like a border without a signpost, the landscape looks the same; he only knows he has passed over it when he realizes the language has changed.

  ‘There’s not much of it left these days,’ Hamid says.

  Aryan swallows. Yet now he has blundered into it, into the private things that no one ever discussed on the road, he senses something in Hamid that wants to go ahead.

  ‘You never told me what happened,’ Aryan says.

  Hamid’s voice when it comes now is soft and low, as if he is opening a hidden cavern in his heart. He weaves pictures for Aryan: a family in a northern village in the mountains, a celebration, a cousin who is about to be wed. But then the colour drains out of his story. Men arrive at the front door after nightfall, black turbans turning the threshold dark.

  ‘They were on the hunt for traitors,’ Hamid says, ‘and that meant anyone with a weapon in their home.’

  Suddenly children, brothers and sisters and cousins were being herded into a single room while the men in the black turbans set to work.

  Hamid’s hands are working at the newspaper again, unconsciously rolling wads of it into tight, illegible balls.

  He heard it all through the door: the crack of whips, voices pleading, the hammerbursts of automatic weapons. He remembers sitting silently, close to the other children, huddled on the floor in the dark. He remembers hugging his smallest sister tight enough to block out the noise.

  ‘Even after it stopped, and we heard them take off in their Toyotas, we didn’t dare leave the room,’ he says. ‘It was hunger that finally drove us outside.’

  It was the same in all the houses. They had killed all the adults in the village, men and women alike, just going from door to door.

  Hamid’s eyes are shiny and his throat is tight. The entire newspaper is shredded now into an arsenal of tiny spheres.

  After that he went with his oldest cousin to Pakistan, though on the road they kept meeting other Afghans that Pakistan was pushing back the other way. Eventually they made it to a refugee camp near Peshawar.

  ‘Because I was small I couldn’t do much, but I carried things, and I worked in a tea-house pouring tea,’ Hamid says. For a time he had a job as a carpet weaver, until even that work disappeared.

  ‘I still had to send money for my sisters,’ he says. ‘That’s why I had to keep going.’ He went to Iran where first he found work in a light-bulb factory, then carrying boxes in a brewery, then pouring concrete for builders. But when he was cheated of his pay, and beaten and robbed, he abandoned Iran for Turkey. In Istanbul he laboured in different jobs until he found a place in the workshop with Mohamed.

  Outside the hut, the wet clouds roll in from the sea and obscure the damaged moon. Aryan shivers under his cape of smoky blankets.

  ‘What will you do in England?’ Aryan says after a while.

  Hamid’s answer comes swift as rocket-fire. ‘I want to study astronomy,’ he says.

  Hamid never ceased to surprise Aryan. In his home village, the teacher had shown up for an hour each day before going to another job to earn a living. Yet now he was talking about galaxies and telescopes and planets.

  ‘You should have seen all the shooting stars I saw in Greece,’ Hamid is saying. ‘When you look at a star you are really looking back into the past because the starlight had to leave millions of years ago to reach us. It left a long time before the Russians and the Taliban and the warlords and the Americans and all the killing at home. It left before the Persians and the Mongols and the Egyptians – maybe that light set off when there were still dinosaurs left on Earth.’

  ‘So if you study the stars, it will be like travelling backwards in time,’ Aryan says.

  ‘I just think that if we knew more about the universe, if we could imagine ourselves in space, we would be high off the ground, away from all our troubles, and we could see all of life beneath us. It would make all the fighting seem small and unimportant and pointless, and maybe it would make people like peace more.’

  Hamid is a bit crazy, Aryan thinks, but sometimes he has good thoughts.

  ‘I wish there were a way to turn back time and bring back all the people who died,’ Aryan says. ‘Well not all of them, not the bad ones. Just some.’

  Hamid pauses a moment before replying.

  ‘You lost people in your family too, didn’t you?’ he says.

  Aryan nods.

  They sit in silence, listening to the wind and the low growl of the trucks on the road to the port, each cloaked in their separate memories like a blanket of sorrow they shared.

  Some time later Kabir’s face appears in the triangular doorway.

  ‘What are these for?’ he says.

  ‘They’re for keeping people’s little brothers out of our palace,’ says Hamid. He lobs a paper missile at Kabir’s nose.

  Outside, the sea wind is starting to pick up. They listen to it worrying the plastic walls of the hut and nagging at its perimeter of thorns. They hear it churning up the waves and sifting through the dunes and whipping the dead campfires into eddies of ash and grit. It swoops past the lighthouse, glances off the roof of the cabin, hurdles the town hall and barrels towards the railway line, swinging the elec
tric cables like skipping ropes and spinning the sign above the sawmill like a fairground attraction on its nail. It prances along the rafters where the Nigerian girls huddle in their third-hand sleeping bags. It rocks the trucks where the hauliers lie snoring in their bunks. It rattles the police barracks’ windows, pries at the roof-tiles on the ferry captains’ houses, and bowls cacophonous beer cans past the doorsteps of the soup-kitchen volunteers.

  It interferes with dreams and unpicks sleep and unravels the dark spooling of the night.

  The tide is out as they walk along the beach, away from the port, under the bruising dawn. Shreds of sky lie like bandages on the corrugated sand. England has retreated so far behind its angry sea that Aryan wonders if it weren’t just a trick of the imagination, as insubstantial as a slideshow projected on cloud.

  ‘We can do exercises to build up our rowing muscles,’ Kabir is saying. Aryan has to turn his head sideways to catch his words before they are snatched away by the breeze.

  Kabir has thrown himself on to the sand, demonstrating push-ups with his chubby arms. When he stands up again there are circles of soft sugar on his knees.

  Kabir has become possessed by the idea of a boat. Whenever they go to the beach he ducks up into the dunes, or between the beach huts beyond the groynes, scouting for a dinghy or some sort of craft they can paddle across the Channel to England. A kayak, he says, would do, or maybe they could balance on a windsurfer.

  Once he yanked up a child’s inflatable canoe from under the seaweed, a yellow triangle that turned into a salt-bleached ribbon of plastic with fading Disney characters on the side. It tore out of the sand like a zipper.

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ Aryan had said, laughing and frowning at the same time.

  Now Kabir is standing between Aryan and the sea and the world is in motion behind him, dark clouds sliding over pitching waves.

  ‘Have you got any idea how far it is, Muscleman?’ Aryan says. ‘It is more than thirty kilometres.’

  ‘Yes, but we’d have Hamid.’

  ‘It would still be thirty kilometres,’ Aryan says into the wind. ‘Ten kilometres each – and that’s if we went in a straight line.’

  The black ink still on his fingertips makes their whorls look like the tide-ripples in the sand. He thrusts his fists deep into his pockets; the stain is like the imprint of failure that not even the salt water will wash off.

  He watches an eclipse of cargo ships as he tries to think what to do. He is still exhausted after their efforts one night – no, two nights – ago; it is hard to hold on to his thoughts; one slides behind the other and he loses the trail.

  ‘While we are looking for a boat we can still give the trucks a try,’ Kabir is saying. ‘I don’t take up much room, and on a big one we could both fit on together. Khaled says all we need is a plank of wood.’

  Aryan tries to focus on Kabir’s words. He knows his brother was impressed by Hamid’s story, that it’s been playing on his mind, that he thinks they could go to England tucked behind the wheels of a semi-trailer.

  ‘And where are we going to get a plank of wood?’ Aryan says.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kabir says. ‘Sometimes they wash up on the beach. Or maybe someone is building a house.’

  ‘You know Idris doesn’t like freelances. He’d ban us from the other trucks if he found out.’

  ‘Idris doesn’t have to know,’ Kabir says. ‘And if we made it, we wouldn’t care.’

  ‘It’s too risky, Kabir. Even if we did get past the controls.’ He thinks about the cold and the water on the road, stone chips flicking into their faces, hands slipping off the dirt-caked steel.

  Still, he would have tried it on his own. And he knows Kabir is game. But he has talked to Hamid and taken the measure of the danger – even supposing they got past the detectors in the port. With a conviction that reaches into a part of him that lies beyond words, he also knows he could never live with himself if anything ever happened to Kabir.

  They trail along the invisible line where the hard sand turns soft, scuffing at clumps of seawrack and the slimy ink of jellyfish with their shoes. Two sets of footprints follow them, one meandering, the other looping and zigzagging across the beach.

  Kabir fills his pockets with exploding sea grapes to toss into the campfire at night.

  Aryan hears voices, distinguishes words, tries to relax into the rhythm of the truck as it crawls through the harbour controls. His hands are cold, and the taste of fear is on his tongue. Through his feet, through his legs and up into his chest, he can feel the powerful mechanics moving, the pistons and gadgets working, carrying them towards customs, towards the ferry, towards England.

  Hamid smiled encouragement when he saw the cargo inside. Tomatoes, hundreds and hundreds of tomatoes, tiny ones, yellow ones, and red ones as spherical as marbles, and ovals, the shape of pigeon hearts.

  ‘We’re in luck,’ he had said, making an O with his mouth and posting a tomato inside.

  Plants, he has instructed them – cut flowers, vegetables, fruit – exhale carbon dioxide in the dark. ‘They disguise your breathing from the detectors,’ he told them. ‘It’s like they are still alive.’

  Wedged among the crates, Kabir is leaning against Aryan. He has acquired a knitted hat from one of the men, and Aryan can smell the dampness of the wool.

  Aryan’s fingers search again for the crinkle of plastic inside his pocket. In the hut’s half-light they had practised, one at a time, learning to conquer panic. They had drawn the bags over their heads and around their throats so the air couldn’t escape until even Kabir could hold his breath for as long as his English counting.

  They have chosen the biggest bags they could find, but still Aryan dreads the moment. He loathes the membrane’s whisper as it sucks into his nostrils, its close-up synthetic smell, the feeling of light-headedness as he inhales the diminishing air. And now that the moment is near he is afraid of his own reactions. He imagines ripping the clinging plastic from his face, gasping like a landed fish for breath. He pictures fine red needles spinning like the gauge of catastrophe, electronic numbers whirling, the high-pitched squeal of alarms. Hey hey hey it’s a hit, boys, let’s see who we’ve got inside this van! He imagines the fury of the men and his sense of shame at being the one who let the others down.

  As it happened, it was not the carbon-dioxide sensors that caught them but some other detector that eavesdropped on their rapidly beating hearts.

  ‘OUT-OUT-OUT-OUT!’ The port police extract them from the freight truck one by one, shouting at them in French, whacking the truck’s metal struts with their truncheons. The driver stands in the pooling light beside the cabin, handing over papers to the guards. On the far side of the parking bay, three hyperactive sniffer dogs inspect a line of vehicles waiting their turn to board.

  The air is chill and heavy with exhaust. They stand passively in the artificial light as the guards kick their feet apart and push their faces into the truck’s grimy wall. One after another they are searched, bodies swept, mobile phones collected like a bucket of eggs.

  It is routine for everyone: routine for the customs officers; routine for the guards; routine for the border police.

  ‘Hello, you again!’ one of them says to an Iraqi who has been halted there so often that he knows him by sight. ‘Try again tomorrow, mate. Better luck next time.’

  The Iraqi blinks back his humiliation in silence.

  Glass doors slide shut on gliding runners. An officer working at a computer scarcely glances at them as they pass. He has straw-coloured hair and pinkish skin and a white crown embroidered on his shoulder.

  The first English person Aryan has ever seen.

  The back of the police van is cold and smells of metal. The floor is ribbed with dirt. Someone has painted the windows black so they can’t see anything outside.

  Shoeless, handcuffed, they sit hunched on two facing benches: a group of Afghans, one thin Iraqi, two young men from Iran.

  Hamid is gazing at the flo
or. Kabir’s pupils widen in the darkness.

  The van rolls towards the exit, then abruptly stops. There is no way of telling whether they are inside or outside the port.

  The double doors suddenly swing outwards. Three men built like bison crowd into the shrinking space. Bald heads. Army boots. No uniforms. Behind them, Aryan has the impression of darkness and a side of a fence.

  When the Iraqi looks up they decide on him.

  They can hear what is happening outside, even if they cannot see. There are no words. Just hard scuffling on gravel. The sound of blows. The van swaying as it is hit by something soft, then something hard. Strange, inchoate noises, like the moans of a dog.

  Kabir’s eyes are round with terror. Aryan wishes his hands were free to cover his ears.

  When they bring him back the Iraqi lies, still handcuffed, on the floor of the van. He is curled up like a foetus. One eye is swollen shut and there is blood in his hair.

  Kabir is crying. Aryan is shaking all over. He feels nauseous and stares at his knees.

  Later, in the entrance to the detention centre, they sit for hours on a long, narrow seat. There is a window with nothing to look at but a car park and an outside wall.

  The Iraqi is taken to a separate room. One foot drags on the floor as they hustle him by. ‘Troublemaker,’ one of the policemen says to the officer on duty as they pass.

  Aryan’s feet are wet and cold from walking across the gravel from the van. There is newsprint on the soles of Hamid’s socks.

  They wait their turn to stand before a policewoman. At daybreak she takes their details. Name. Nationality. Age.

  She indicates an electronic device with a small glass square on the top. She wears a machine-made sweater over her uniform. There is nothing personal about her, or the office, or the building. No decoration bar a portrait of a man in a sash on the wall. No photographs. Not even a plant.

  ‘First your thumb,’ she tells Aryan. ‘Like this.’ Her voice is neutral; she is just doing a job.