But something blocks. The machine refuses to work.
The policewoman abandons her attempts to fix it. Sliding an inkpad towards him, she points to where he has to leave his mark.
When he hesitates, she grasps his thumb and rolls it, once, from right to left and plants it on the white paper. Then the other fingers, one by one.
He feels exposed somehow, that something private about him is now in the light.
He stares at the black swirls. They look as fragile as seashells on the page.
It is mid-morning when they are finally let out. They collect their phones from an empty tabletop. Their shoes are lying in the drizzle outside.
But there are no shoes for one of the Iranians, and two of the Afghans find their pairs missing too.
The policewoman stares at them blankly when they ask.
They stumble into the street, hungry, cranky with lack of sleep. Aryan wonders which way to go. They are on the top of a hill, in a sort of industrial complex that is closed up and deserted for the weekend.
The drizzle has stopped but the clouds are violet and so heavy that they touch the earth. Their eyes stream in the cold; Aryan senses snow.
Hamid points out the lighthouse in the distance. ‘That way’s the sea,’ he says. ‘That way the port.’ He has a sense of direction by now. He has been here before, seven times.
He sets off up the road, then stops and turns.
‘You coming?’ he says. ‘Since they’ve brought us this far, we may as well take a look for ourselves.’
The tunnel hovers in their imaginations like some mythical, open-mawed beast. Down its throat, a day’s march through the darkness; how simple it would be. One foot after the other, wind-rush locomotives screeching past them under the waves. Aryan pictures them hopping along the sleepers, or pressing themselves against walls slimy with seawater as carriages full of passengers flash by. There’d be English people drinking coffee, and French people reading magazines, or working on their computers, or chatting on their mobile phones; not even the driver would notice as they ducked along the rails. They wouldn’t worry about the tankers and the ferries and the weight of water above them, nor even about the fissures where the sea was leaking in. Their faces would be turned to the distance, their fingers curled around an invisible thread, while always, calling them in and guiding them and shimmering like a lantern, the smallest circle of light that was England.
They cross wheat fields hacked to stubble for the winter, and clumps of grass turned to old-man’s hair by the frost, then find themselves on a back road. A signpost announces Sangatte; another, Coquelles.
‘The old roads always lead you somewhere,’ Hamid is saying. ‘It’s the motorways that go right past the places you want to go.’
Hamid isn’t sure exactly where it is, but he says they will hit the railway line if they can manage to steer parallel to the coast.
Aryan finds it hard to believe the sea is somewhere beyond the next rise. He imagines this shelterless landscape, exposed like naked skin to the lashing sky, stretching on for ever, crossed only by endless freeways and the single-file stride of power lines humming with electricity overhead.
A knot of trees clings to the horizon, their branches meshed and scratching at the sky. Perhaps there was once a forest here, and this is all that is left.
Kabir, who has run ahead, falls back in step with them. The cuffs of his trousers are already wet and one of his laces is undone. Aryan can tell he’s been thinking.
‘Hamid,’ Kabir says.
‘Yes, Kabir.’
‘Why did the police keep those guys’ shoes?’
‘To make it hard for them to walk back,’ Hamid says.
‘But why would they make it hard for them to walk back?’
‘So they will go away.’
Kabir ponders Hamid’s answer for a moment. ‘How can they go away if they don’t have any shoes?’
Hamid’s laugh has a hardness to it that Aryan doesn’t recognize from before. ‘That’s one you’ll have to put to the police,’ he says.
They walk one behind the other along the gravel shoulder in case any cars come past.
‘Hamid?’
‘Yes, Kabir.’
‘What’s going to happen to that Iraqi man?’
Hamid shoots Aryan a sidelong glance.
‘I don’t know,’ Hamid says.
The road flanks a hill that they decide to climb, hoping it will afford them a view. Their shoes glisten with water as they cut through the grass towards a hedge that is the same shape as the wind.
On the other side, graves line up as strict as hospital beds.
Kabir wanders over to a patch of gravel, then calls them over to see. A small group of headstones, inscribed with Arabic words.
‘It’s not that long ago,’ Hamid says, reading the dates.
‘I wonder who they were,’ says Aryan.
A wreath of plastic flowers trembles in the cold.
Nearby they come across a tap. Aryan bends down to it, then makes Kabir drink as well. ‘You won’t feel so empty that way,’ Aryan says.
He pictures the water curling its tentacles towards his belly.
Hamid beckons from the far side of the hilltop. A thread of silver carriages slips past, then disappears into the weft and warp of the land.
‘It’s got to be over there,’ he says.
They gallop down the hillside and follow an old farm road that runs beneath the motorway; it peters out at a wider road that leads to a bridge.
Under it, rows of railway tracks stretch out like horizontal ladders. The three of them peer through the wire fence, staring at the small grey circle that must have swallowed up the train.
‘There are two of them, two tunnels!’ Kabir says. He gives a small hop of excitement.
As if he has sent the sky a signal, it starts to snow.
The twin entrances sit side by side, each bracketed by a safety exit bored above them into the hillside, ordinary, anticlimactic, as out of reach as the stars.
To Aryan, they look too small to be the gateway to England. He had expected something grander: triumphal arches maybe, and decorations, and lights.
‘You sure that’s it?’ he says.
‘You think they put all these fences up for a rabbit hole under a hill?’ says Hamid.
Through the twirling snow they can see access roads, and floodlights, and security cameras perched like hooded birds on the tops of poles. And multiple layers of fencing, even there on the bridge. And everywhere, razor wire, rolled into invisible blankets atop the walls of no-man’s-land for as far as the eye can see.
‘Are there landmines here too?’ Kabir is saying.
‘Not that I’ve heard,’ says Hamid. ‘But they’ve probably electrified the fence.’
Snowflakes settle on to their heads. Kabir squirms as Aryan dusts them off his hair and pulls the hood of his anorak over his ears.
‘Where’s your hat?’ Aryan says.
Kabir pats his head, then pulls at his pockets. He turns up a striped plastic bag, a sea grape, and the blue plastic soldier he thought he had lost on the beach.
‘Maybe it fell off in the truck,’ he says.
A freight train shoots past them towards the tunnel; the latticed sides of its carriages turn the trucks into grimy mosaics. From a distance the wagons fill the entire entrance; Aryan can’t see any space to walk alongside. And as the train goes in it neither stops nor decelerates enough for anyone to jump on board.
‘It doesn’t look too promising,’ Hamid says.
Aryan turns the other way and peers down the vanishing rails. ‘Do you think these fences go all the way back to Paris?’ he says.
‘Even if we could get around them, the cameras would still spot us along the tracks,’ says Hamid.
‘What about the safety exits?’
Hamid cocks his head, considering them. ‘It’s the same problem, don’t you think?’
‘We could jump off the bridge on to the top of a train,
’ says Kabir.
‘Sure thing, Spiderman,’ says Aryan. ‘What about the rest of us?’
Hamid gives Kabir a friendly punch. ‘There has got to be some other way,’ he says.
Aryan’s stomach growls. Now that they have seen the tunnel he is hollow with disappointment; it laces the cold around them with bitterness. He hadn’t realized how much he had been counting on it; it was a fallback; it was a last-ditch reservoir of hope. But here, confronted by the sight and shape and sense of it, by the coils of wire and the electric fence and the dull-eyed stare of the cameras in the spiralling snow, he can feel its possibilities slipping through his fingers like a rope.
Fat snowflakes cloak the metal railings in fur. They gather in the angles of the razor wire, settle on the tops of the security cameras, and eddy like fainting butterflies on to the sleepers and the listening rails. They decorate the headstones in the graveyard, and rub out the footprints on the beaches, and fill in the exposed creases in the aching, hard-scrabble hills.
They ice up the decks of the ferryboats, and melt into the waves, and drape the south of England in the same billowing canopy of white.
Aryan buries his hands with their blackened fingertips deep inside his pockets. It seems to him that Calais is a city without doors.
It is dark by the time they get back to the lighthouse and the sky has exhausted itself. The snow that has finally stopped falling is freezing into a crust on the mud and the grass.
Men stand shivering and blowing on their hands and dancing like grim-faced boxers on the balls of their feet. The food line has already formed, though it is too early for the charity workers’ van; the Kurdish youth on crutches is leaning against the wall.
The three of them have not eaten since the night before and Aryan is nearly fainting with hunger.
‘Kabir! Where have you been?’
‘Yes, where did you disappear to? We thought you were scooting around London on a big red bus!’
The older Afghans are gathering around his brother, forgetting the cold, laughing and chucking him under the chin. One of them produces a square of salvaged chocolate; another, a rusty toy car he’d found on the beach.
Kabir is grinning his big-toothed grin as the men tease him and shadowbox with him and muss up his overgrown hair.
‘We went to see the tunnel,’ Kabir says.
Aryan watches, and feels a stab that both engulfs him and makes him ashamed. It was the same twisting feeling he had in the workshop in Istanbul, when the other Afghans made a fuss of Kabir and clowned around with him and tried out their magic tricks.
He knows without ever discussing it that they all have people they have lost. He knows they have all left families behind, that they all have siblings or children they’ve not seen in months. He sees how their eyes light up and their faces relax whenever Kabir is around. He knows they would do anything to ensure he was safe from harm.
But sometimes, just sometimes, he wishes he could be the one they were glad to see. He wishes that someone would make a fuss over him, that someone would think he was special, that there were someone to watch over him.
Perhaps he is not fit for such a journey, he thinks. Perhaps he lacks the toughness of mind. Perhaps he lacks the resilience of which Hamid seemed to be made.
But then Kabir disarms him with his giggle, or baffles him with his questions, or produces more of his suggestions, and Aryan remembers they are all each other has, that they are a sort of team, and that together they will see the journey through.
On the way back to their shelter Khaled takes Aryan aside. ‘You weren’t seriously thinking about the tunnel?’ he says.
‘We just went to have a look. Since we were already near.’
‘They say there’s a graveyard somewhere around here where they buried the last guys who thought that was a good idea,’ Khaled says.
Aryan stretches the ache from his limbs. He has slept badly despite his exhaustion, waking many times with the cold and the slats of the crate carving into his ribs.
They are standing round the campfire in the morning, boiling water for tea. Someone throws a plastic bottle into the flames and Aryan’s eyes sting with the smoke.
Kabir has already given the canary water and poked a crust of bread through the wire cage, still trying to bribe or coax it into song. They have been to the beach with Khaled and dragged driftwood for the fire up through the dunes.
Hamid emerges, cursing, through the thorn bushes, four empty plastic bottles in his hands.
‘They’ve cut off the water,’ he says.
There is only one tap, some distance off, on the way to the Tioxide plant. Khaled has heard of another, so they set off to look.
They twist the tap in vain. It complains as it relinquishes a single, rusty tear.
At the cabin the charity workers are ladling out soup.
There are three hundred hungry men and the lowering cloud seems only to aggravate their mood. The air is frigid, and everyone seems irritable, agitated. There is shouting and shoving as the French people struggle to keep order in the lines. The Kurds are muttering at the Iraqis; Pashtuns and Hazaras are glaring their mutual mistrust; a Sudanese man said to be unbalanced is trying to push his way in.
‘What’s going on?’ Aryan says to an Afghan ahead of him in the queue.
‘Didn’t you hear?’ the man says. ‘There’s been a raid on the camp down by the canal. The police destroyed the shelters and arrested six guys and kicked their daypacks into the water. They lost their money, their papers, all their things.’
A group of Eritreans arrive behind them, out of breath. The police gave them the chase as they crossed the park on their way from the African squat.
‘I thought there was meant to be a truce where they hand out the meals,’ Khaled says in English.
‘That doesn’t stop them going for you on the way,’ one of the Eritreans says. ‘This morning they broke up one of the shelters in town. They’ve boarded it up with nails.’
Hamid looks at Aryan.
‘Did you leave anything in the camp?’
‘Only bedding,’ Aryan says.
When they get back, the huts are all smashed up. Their blankets are trampled in the dirt. There are tracks in the mud where their firewood has been dragged away. The birdcage is lying on its side in the filth.
Kabir stands it upright. The door is open. A moment later he finds the canary cowering beside a rusting tin.
‘You OK?’ he asks.
The bird drags one flared wing behind it as it tries to hop away. Kabir scoops it up in his hands and blows gently to warm its feathers and places it back inside the cage.
Above them, the purple clouds hurt too much to snow.
At nightfall they trudge back towards the town, Aryan, Kabir, Hamid, plus Khaled and two of his friends who used to share his hut. Over their shoulders they carry the blankets they tried to dry over the bushes, heavy now with wetness and mud.
Through the fence they can see the trucks aligned in the waiting bays of the port, the white buildings, the cold bright lights coming on. Aryan tries to work out how far they’d got before the guards discovered them in the truck, where it was that the police van stopped and the men came to get the Iraqi man.
There aren’t any warm air vents like there were in the pavements in Paris. So they look for a niche under a bridge, or under the back wall of a factory, or the ledge of a motorway roundabout. Each time, they find that other people have already staked out a claim.
Finally they reach the goods entrance of a supermarket. The six of them roll the metal garbage skips across it to make a cave, but the howling wind bores straight at them between the wheels. With cold-stiffened hands they try to block the worst of it with packaging they salvage from inside.
‘Aryan.’
Aryan isn’t sleeping either. He is frightened he won’t wake up if he closes his eyes.
‘Aryan. It’s too cold.’
Kabir is shuddering with it. Aryan can hardly feel his own hands a
nd feet.
‘Come on,’ Aryan says. ‘Let’s keep moving.’
Hamid slides the skips apart. They set off, three slight shadows walking, walking, on the move all night through the silent streets.
Aryan has sworn to himself that they will try anything but the ice trucks. But now, his spirits ebbing on this hostile stretch of coast in the bleak midwinter, his mind keeps slithering back to Idris’s words.
Seven hours.
He is starting to wonder if it isn’t their best chance.
The long weeks of stasis are starting to gnaw at him. With every day that passes, with every night that finds them still in the streets, or slowly rebuilding their huts in the thorn bushes littered with refuse, Aryan feels his control over their lives slipping away. He is tired, tired, tired; the climate is wearing on him; every morning he is surprised he is still alive. Afghanistan was bitter in the winter, but he has never known cold like this – the way the wet air stings his eyes like needles, the way the wind off the sea bores through to his neck, to the small of his back, makes chilblains of his unwashed hands. The way its rimy fingers thumb through five layers of clothes.
Under numb feet, the puddles crack and splinter but do not melt.
Aryan tries to remember the last time he felt happy, and decides it is when they were on the move – in the back of a truck, in the train through Italy, in the carriage with the Americans-from-Iran. Every bump in the road, every flash of scenery made him feel they were getting closer to their goal. Where on the journey was it that they had stopped fleeing and started running towards a future, no matter how indistinct? Yet all that time, they were only getting closer to a wall. The harder he runs up against it, the more he feels his courage fray.
He tries to hide his despair from Kabir. It is not just the sense of being trapped. It is not just how hard it is to hold on to their hopes. It is something giving way inside.
There are moments when he feels like he is fragmenting. His memories are becoming disconnected slivers of time with gaps in the logic that links them. He remembers the coldest night, when the snow set to ice and a vengeful wind swept in from the north and the lights of the trucks were the only things creeping through the port. He remembers the old French people coming out of the blizzard to find them and take them to sleep on mattresses on the floor of a hall. But there are also empty expanses where he can’t remember how they filled their days.
Hinterland: A Novel Page 17
