Breach

by Olumide Popoola

  When Muhib first arrived in the Jungle, a few months before, he was horrified by the dirt, the tents, the taps to be shared by so many, the stinking toilet cabins. But Isaac had lived in Darfur before Calais, had stayed in a refugee camp there from the time he was eight years old. ‘For me,’ Isaac told Muhib in those early days, ‘the Jungle is much better.’

  ‘It’s like a heaven to you?’ Muhib asked him.

  But Isaac is not a romantic like his friend. He’d raised his eyebrows, looking round at the garbage holes, the mud, the plastic bags and rags entangled in the branches of dune shrubs.

  ‘No, not a heaven,’ Isaac had said. ‘But still better.’

  ‘When must you leave?’ Muhib asks him now.

  ‘Today,’ Isaac says. ‘The bus goes in one hour. I must put my clothes in a bag.’

  ‘I come with you, Isaac. Let me help you, my friend.’

  *

  Julie walks by a tent she noticed the day before emblazoned with a marijuana leaf and a notice to ‘Keep off the grass’ amended to read ‘Keep on the grass’. But the camp feels a lot less like a music festival this morning. Empty. Cold. People sleep in, Julie’s been told, because their shelters are finally warming up, or because they’ve spent the night trying to get on a train or a truck to cross to England, or because – Julie smiles – they were out in the town of Calais with volunteers last night, with one volunteer in particular, with me. Lucky, happy me.

  And now she will see him again, the wonderful Muhib. Today is the beginning of the rest of their lives. Oh, God. Is she going to think in schmaltzy poster captions now? Maybe she’s going to turn into one of those Facebook over-posters: ‘Share if you love someone so bad it hurts.’

  Here’s the bar with the giant squirrel mural on the wall. Muhib said he’d meet her outside. Julie is a little late, but Muhib isn’t there either. Perhaps he’s inside instead? Julie pushes aside the sheet of faded African cloth that curtains the doorway. Inside, in the gloom, she can make out one or two figures seated at tables. No, there are more of them. One laughs, but she can’t see his face. It’s all a bit creepy. A woman stirring a pot on a gas burner turns round and waves her spoon at Julie, a ‘get-out’ motion. From behind Julie, a hand pulls her back out onto the track. It’s the man in the balaclava and army greatcoat. He waves her on, so she keeps going, towards the café where she and Marjorie ate the night before.

  The night before. Before.

  She buys a glass of sweet milky tea tasting of spice and perches on the fruit-printed plastic sheet on the wide ledge that runs round three sides of the structure. There’s only one other customer. He sits cross-legged, peeling an orange, and the spark of citrus pings the sluggish air, which feels moted with dust, fusty with body smells. Net curtains drape the high windows. And that’s the door she had watched all through supper last night. She expects him to walk in at any moment. And kiss her again.

  She’d asked about his first kiss. He’d shrugged. It was with a cousin in the village. So silly. And her first kiss? Oh, some boy at a party, a boy she’d never seen again. But this, Muhib had told Julie, and this, and this – these were their first true kisses. She puts one hand to her cheek, under her ear, round the back of her neck, where he’d kissed her. Her skin feels alive.

  ‘When I come to London,’ he’d said, ‘I will be a new person.’

  She’d shaken her head. ‘Don’t be new,’ she’d said. ‘I like you just exactly like this.’ Sitting on the bench in the café, she pictures Muhib walking beside her down a London street, in Shoreditch say, his hand on the small of her back.

  Now, a figure blocks the light of the café entrance, but it isn’t Muhib. It’s some other man, a hefty older guy. He catches her looking at him. ‘Oh, hello,’ he says in English, in a high fake voice. ‘How are you? Are you well? Are you fine? Can I help you?’

  It stings her, the mockery. She slides off the shiny plastic platform to leave. But the big man stands by the entrance with his tea, so she must walk right by him. ‘You are a volunteer?’ he asks her. ‘I am not,’ he says, pointing to himself. ‘Me, I’m an involunteer. You understand? I’m here, yes, but involuntarily.’

  He’s unhappy, she sees, but still. It’s not her fault, after all. ‘Not our fault, not our responsibility,’ inner Dad pipes up.

  She slips by the big man and outside into the bright cold sunlight. The path is filling up with people, but none of them is Muhib. Why did she imagine that she’d find him so easily? Had she forgotten these crowds? They’re the same people as yesterday but they seem sadder somehow. Perhaps because of Muhib’s story – wound up with last night’s happiness in the way Muhib wound her hair between his fingers.

  ‘When I came to France,’ Muhib had said, ‘I told myself: I have crossed many countries, eleven or twelve countries – UK is nothing. I can cross to UK by closed eye. It’s only a small river. I can swim across. I really did not understand.

  ‘The first night in Calais,’ he told her, ‘I was wearing good clothes, looking good. There were many police and I ran from them, the police behind me, me in front, running. I had no idea where to go because I was new; it was my first time. I was so afraid to be caught again, beaten, taken to another prison. I climbed up over many fences, I climbed down, cut my hands, cut my jeans, and then there was only one fence left. I was behind the fence and there was a train, the train was being loaded and it was going to England, and I saw my dream, ah yes, going to England, but I was not able to cross that last fence.’

  All around her now, on the path, Julie sees stranded people, people who cannot cross that last fence. Involunteers.

  From her jacket pocket, she pulls a rumpled sheaf of flyers for the Dome. ‘Come tonight,’ she tells a startled man, thrusting a flyer into his hand. ‘Feel free, for a few hours at least.’

  She strides on, beyond anywhere she’s been before, and then, randomly, into a circle: a couple of caravans, a few wooden shelters and some tents set up in a ring. Some guys are nailing boards to the frame of a new shelter, others are sorting through a pile of donated clothes with a group of volunteers in matching blue T-shirts. In the centre of the circle, two men sit on low chairs, facing each other across a lurid pink leopard-print item made of firm sponge and standing on the damp ground as a card table. The two men slap their cards down on it. One greets her in a loud voice. ‘Hello!’ he says, but not meanly, not mockingly like the man in the café. He says his name is Leon.

  Beyond Leon’s pink card table, women and children are sitting on wooden planking under the overhang of a tent, semi-secluded there. Might she get to talk with them, invite them to the Dome? How should she ask?

  But Leon wants her attention back.

  ‘You are from UK, right?’ he says. ‘And what message are you bringing us from Cameron? Because this place is no good. We want to leave.’

  ‘You see?’ says inner Dad. ‘They all want something from you.’

  Leon shouts something that Julie can’t hear and rips open his shirt to show her a white plastic shell over his torso, like a gladiator’s breastplate. Is it something medical or is it bulletproofing or what? She can’t tell and neither can she understand why he is showing it to her. Then the cheerful British volunteers want her to take a photo, all of them together, a sea of blue T-shirts. Julie holds up their phones one by one, snapping away while Leon photo-bombs, pulling crazy faces from the edge of frame.

  Walking back afterwards, no Muhib in sight and no women invited to the Dome either, Julie sees a playing card lying on the newly laid white gravel of the pathway. The Joker. She photographs that on her own phone, thinking of Leon, planning to ask Muhib who Leon is and what his breastplate might mean. Muhib will know.

  Muhib can’t find Julie anywhere. Not by the squirrel mural, not in the café, not on the path, not in or near the Dome or the library or the school. Watching the bus drive his friend Isaac away, Muhib had cried, and now he tastes again the nausea that burns the back of his throat when he lets himself recognise the dizzying
nothing that Isaac faces and the matching emptiness all around himself. How to look away? He could hammer nails to build shelters, he could help clean the Dome, he could play his flute, he could join those boys with a football.

  But no. Today, he wants to find Julie. His ginger angel.

  ‘Always, I wanted to go to London,’ he’d told her the night before, wrapping her up in his arms. ‘One guy in our village went to London when I was a small boy. After a month he sent a letter. You know how it is in a village – everyone gathers round to listen to the letter. He says he is in London and it is very good there. I ask my father, “Daddy, what is London?” Of course, he doesn’t know but he tells me it is a place of angels. And from that time it is my dream. London.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Julie had said, thinking of her own father. ‘Please don’t expect angels.’

  Muhib had turned aside, out of her embrace, to cough. A deep chest-rumbling cough. She’d stroked his head.

  ‘Is only the smoking,’ he’d told her. ‘Only for now, Julie, only in the Jungle. Too much stress here. I will be a new person when I get to London.’

  ‘What are you going to tell your dad?’

  ‘Jesus, Marjorie, is that all that you care about?’

  Julie slams the passenger door, presses the lock and jams herself against the window, her knees against her chest, her boots on the dashboard. Marjorie is vile. Her father is vile. It’s his fault. He poisons everything.

  ‘I hate you,’ she shouts as Marjorie slides into the driver’s seat.

  Marjorie ignores her, swipes her hair behind her ears, checks that the packet of Gauloises is in the van door and turns the ignition. Half an hour? Forty-five minutes? Then she can light up on the deck of the ferry. Except there’s traffic. Honestly. Who expected Calais to have a rush hour? Will Julie leap out of the car at the traffic lights or anything daft like that?

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ Julie asks her.

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘You made up that shit about danger, didn’t you? You just want to get me away from Muhib.’

  ‘Seems to me he’s the one who got away, darling.’

  Julie kicks the dashboard. Then she bursts into tears. Marjorie is right and she hates her.

  Why am I doing this, actually? Marjorie wonders. Am I protecting Julie or myself?

  The motorway approaches the slip road to the Jungle and Marjorie accelerates. Julie twists round in the passenger seat to look down at the ragged encampment. Where is he, in there? Is he thinking about her? Today was grim, really, not finding him anywhere, wondering if he said those things to other girls.

  Maybe I should turn around, Marjorie thinks. Poor kid, her heart is breaking.

  He can find me if he wants to, Julie thinks. That English guy wrote down my email.

  I probably am selfish, Marjorie tells herself. It’s just so much easier when I come on my own.

  She strives so hard for justice, Marjorie does, but she can’t figure out what’s fair here. Historical forces are so much easier to judge.

  I’ll find him on Facebook as soon as I get home, Julie thinks. It’s a mistake, it’s all a mistake. As soon as he emails me, I’ll get a ticket on Eurostar and come back on my own.

  She glances over at Marjorie. She wants to hurt her.

  ‘I’ll tell Dad he was right,’ she says. ‘They’re all liars and cheats and we must keep them out of our country.’

  Marjorie glares at Julie through narrowed eyes. Soft-spoken Marjorie, but she can shout when she wants to. ‘Like hell you will!’

  Muhib holds one foot, then the other, under a tap at the washstand. Cold air, icy water. He cleans between each toe, one after the other, a ritual as familiar as breathing. As familiar as the tiles round the well in the courtyard at home. As familiar as his mother. And his younger brothers. He can almost hear the creak of the rope winding the bucket up to the surface.

  He splashes his face, twists his finger fast in each ear, shakes his head. Drops of water fly. He’s hungry but he has no money, so he’ll line up at the ashram for a plate of something.

  Some guy is drumming outside the tent and a small crowd watches three men dancing to the drum. Two are volunteers, one is a refugee. Other volunteers are videoing the dance on their phones.

  Here comes his flute teacher, a bowl in each hand – soup for herself and soup for Muhib.

  ‘I want to ask you something,’ Muhib says.

  ‘Of course, man.’

  ‘You will go home soon, to Berlin, right?’

  She shrugs. ‘Sometime I will.’

  ‘Yes, you will go,’ Muhib says. ‘All the volunteers go. And you leave us here in the Jungle, thinking about you, missing you. It’s painful,’ he says, ‘so, please, don’t love us so much.’

  Ghosts

  He lets it be known that he leaves the camp when the trucks don’t run, like at Christmas and New Year, goes to City X and gambles there, drinks and spends and screws. He holes up, they say, with some cousin or brother who lives in City X, in one of those neighbourhoods where the police don’t go.

  So I follow him. Why not? The first thing he taught me was invisibility. To disappear in the woods, to disappear in crowds. He doesn’t even smell me. My hood up, I walk at least ten steps behind him along the streets of City X. Ghostman we call him, but he’s never invisible to me. I let him get way ahead of me, but I can still see the roll of flesh along the back of his neck. I can pick out his feet in a crowd, and the way he steps, a little knock-kneed. Yes, he’s weakening.

  A man’s greatest strength is the very same thing as his greatest weakness. So they say.

  Not me, though. I say, No weakness. Period.

  Gambling. Is this his weakness? He told us that he throws away thousands in a single casino night. And the others say that that’s his weakness and his strength too, because what we do is a lot like gambling. Taking chances, they like to say, slapping the face of danger. Everything to lose, fortunes at stake. They talk like it’s some adventure, like they don’t spend hours lying on wet leaves in the dark. Like they don’t shit themselves when we hear police dogs.

  These boys, they talk too much. I don’t talk.

  And he doesn’t talk.

  Well. He didn’t talk before, but now he’s beginning to talk. That’s weakness number one. Not the gambling, but talking.

  Second weakness, I’m suspecting, is a woman. Not one of the women who have no money to pay him, and not one of the hookers in City X. These women are not weaknesses – he charges them, he forces them or he pays them. No, I’m thinking there’s a woman who lives in City X who makes him weak.

  He doesn’t see me in the casino. No one sees me in the casino, not really. Girls maybe. Girls laying their soft gaze on me. I can get girls who don’t owe me. I can get girls without beating them or threatening them. While he’s settled in, drinking and gambling, I go with one of those girls, not for long, just outside in the alley. She isn’t happy about that, about stepping into the alley, but I don’t force her. She gives me soft eyes and holds my hand and follows me out.

  When I walk back inside, his face is red, he’s unsteady on his stool, throwing notes onto the table. I don’t count any of that as weakness. Talking to me back in the camp in Calais, that’s weakness.

  The carpet in this place, it sucks up sound. I can hear no footstep. The ring of the slot machines by the door, of course, and voices, but not words. The speakers pour music like syrup. It’s sticky in here. And warm. The opposite of the camp, I guess. But people are the same wherever. Greedy or lost or both.

  The whisky I order arrives in a square-sided glass and gleams like pale gold when I hold it up to the light. Mouse would love that, anything like gold, like money, he loves. Mouse, the guy I call Mouse (no one else calls him that but me and I don’t say it aloud), he counts money all the time, counting in his head when he can’t be counting in his hand or on his phone, checking his bank balances. That’s all he spends his money on, data bundles for his phone so he can check the
piles mounting up in this account and that account. What does he think he’s saving for? There’s no later, Mouse, there’s no villa by the sea for you or me, no boy and girl with satchels waving from the gate on their way to school, no big chair for Grandmother and no maid to help her to her feet when she wants to check the pots in the kitchen or go to prayer. Who do you think we are, Mouse? For you and me, there’s only now.

  I don’t even like alcohol but I swallow the whisky in one gulp, my head back like a thirsty man.

  When I follow him out of the casino it’s not quite dawn so the streets are grey with black shadows, like smudged photographs in a textbook. His breath sends puffs of mist above his head. The heels of his leather shoes hit the pavement and echo. And still he doesn’t feel me, his shadow. Not paying attention. He’s Ghostman, unassailable – that’s what he thinks. That’s what I used to think about him too. Right now, though, he’s focused ahead. She’s reeling him in like a fish on a line.

  We walk a long way before he stops, rings a doorbell again and again. She opens, standing in her bathrobe inside the door. She’s no babe, man, she looks old to me. And fat. Not sexy fat – Mama-fat. Old, soft, kind, comfortable like a sofa. I know him. I can feel him lean to her, yearn for her.

  Weakness.

  From the step below, he reaches his hands to her, both hands holding on to her waist where the cord of her robe ties the big sack of her. She looks at him. Not smiling. She says something. She cups the back of his head in one hand and draws him inside her house.

  Two minutes. Three, tops. I read it all.

  While I’m watching the closed door, sunlight arrives. The wall was grey, like pencil shading, then suddenly it’s brick orange, just the one wall facing the light.

  What he taught me from day one: be feared. Long before he started telling me things, he showed me that. Strike fear. I won’t lie – I did fear him, Ghostman, like everyone else feared him. Like most of them still do. And not only him: I feared many people, I feared the world. I was Fearboy, back then.