Jan and I nodded a greeting to them and continued walking through what was essentially their living room, taking care to step over a shallow channel that had been cut across the ground to drain away rainwater. Now it functioned as an open sewer.
The people who were guiding us took us to a spot where several migrants sat huddled around a fire. An old man threw a plastic bottle on to the flames, which belched out clouds of sickly sweet chemicals as the plastic melted. At least it was momentarily warm.
A muscular man appeared.
‘Gulwali, this is Karwan.’
We shook hands. His Farsi was good enough for me to understand him, but his Kurdish accent was still strong. He wore a shiny black ski jacket and faded jeans. Wrap-around sunglasses sat on his head, holding a long sweep of black fringe in place.
‘You are the newcomers. I am told you want to get to England?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow.’
He scratched at the patchy black stubble on his chin. ‘Well,’ he replied, taking his time, as if scratching for my benefit, ‘have you put any money with anyone?’
I knew what he meant. Karwan wanted to know if I had any money lodged with one of the shadowy ‘third party’ individuals – did I have credit to travel? Most migrants reaching the Jungle have not paid in advance, as the national agents in places like Kabul and Pakistan only promise to get you as far as Greece, or maybe Paris, and that’s all they take money for. After that, you need to use one of the specialist Calais agents, people like Karwan, to get you across on the ferry. This work – getting people on to trains and trucks – was all they did. The cashless people in the Jungle tended to pay for this part of the journey by having that third party somewhere in France or the UK act as guarantor. The third party was usually someone known to the agent, but critically was someone with a European bank account where funds could be lodged. If you had family or friends in Europe already, they could make the contacts on your behalf. There had even been people in the park in Paris who had promised they knew third parties who could help with this – if you paid for it in Paris (or at least lodged the funds), then in theory by the time you reached Calais the specialist agent would be expecting you.
Shafique had stayed in Paris trying to do just that. He had wanted to pay up front and sort it out in advance, not turn up here without plans as Jan and I had done.
The other option on offer in Calais was one where an agent would give you details of his own contact, with a bank account. These people would be complete strangers to you but they were still willing to guarantee for you, once they took some background details – the names of your family, and where they lived. The idea was that once you made it to England, you paid them back in full. Of course, you could just disappear and not pay them, but in reality this rarely happened. The strong tribal networks we had back home had tendrils that stretched into Europe, and if you didn’t pay it was a safe bet that somehow the agent and their guarantor would find a way to hunt you or your family down and exact revenge.
It sounds like a crazy system but it works. If it didn’t work, it wouldn’t happen.
Karwan looked at me expectantly. ‘I have contacts in the UK who can arrange your credit. I can give you their number and a phone to call them. You make the agreement and once that is arranged, I will ensure you reach the UK. Guaranteed. Five hundred euros each.’
He scratched his chin.
I stayed quiet and scratched my chin too. Guaranteed.
‘We have cash.’
‘If you want to pay me cash, pay me three hundred euros each.’
‘That is too much. Where are we going to get that sort of money?’
He didn’t answer.
‘We don’t have that much money.’
He continued to scratch his chin, this time with an air of annoyance.
‘I can give you fifty euros,’ I said, taking a thumbed note from my pocket and waving it at him. I had another fifty in there too, but I was determined not to let him see it.
He stared coldly. ‘Don’t waste my time with fifty euros.’
‘Please, Karwan. You’ve got to help us.’
My hands wrapped around his wrist and I looked up at him, willing my eyes to fill with tears. If I concentrated hard on my mother’s memory, I could get a fairly convincing hyperventilation going.
Under normal circumstances, Karwan might have pushed me away, or even hit me. I think he wanted to. I could sense the tension in his arms, but it was a risk I was willing to take.
‘Please, Karwan.’ I looked up into his eyes again. I was getting to him, I could tell.
He muttered something I didn’t catch. He repeated himself: ‘So, what about the fifty euros you still have hidden in your pocket?’
He’d seen. Reluctantly I gave him the money.
He looked over at Jan. ‘And you. What have you got?’
Jan handed over another fifty.
‘Please, Karwan. Take us.’
He shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘All right, I’ll take you,’ he huffed, fixing me with a glare that told me he knew what I had done. ‘But if anybody asks,’ he hissed, drawing close to me, ‘you’ll tell them you paid £500 each. Into a British bank account. Got it? If you tell anyone the truth, I will kill you both.’
We nodded. ‘We won’t tell, we promise. Don’t we, Jan?’
‘People cannot think I’m a pushover,’ he muttered.
Karwan told us we’d begin trying to get on a lorry that very night. He told us to come back to the fire and meet him there in one hour.
We walked around the Jungle, taking it in. We came across a group of Afghan and Pakistani men preparing to worship in a mosque made from wooden goods pallets and yet more tarpaulins. Someone had attempted to decorate the outside of the structure with stolen pot plants. I tried to pray whenever I could, and this seemed a perfect place to do so.
Jan and I splashed water from a split plastic bucket on to our faces, and left our shoes in a neat pile with the others.
It felt so good to pray. Afterwards, I felt calmer and less fearful about what lay ahead.
I was face down in the freezing mud, scrambling beneath a gap in a wire-mesh security fence.
Karwan leaned his weight back to hold the mesh up. ‘Hurry up,’ he urged, the strain showing on his face.
Jan, myself and four other Afghan men wiped ourselves off as well as we could and stared around at the large, brightly lit parking area filled with lorries. Through the sleet I could make out dozens of figures swarming around the backs of the high-sided trailers, or bowing beneath the wheels as if in search of an unknown goal.
‘Come on,’ said Karwan. ‘You don’t want to miss the best spots, do you?’
We jogged behind him. Groups of migrants, mostly in ethnic packs – Asian, African, Arab – roamed the park searching for any opportunity to board.
‘Check underneath,’ Karwan said. ‘They are good spots, especially for a little guy like you, Gulwali.’
I had looked under one trailer before a hand caught my shoulder. It was a Pakistani man. Only his dark eyes showed from his balaclava. ‘Don’t listen to him, boy,’ he said in Pashtu. ‘It’s too cold to ride underneath. If you don’t freeze to death, you’ll lose your grip and get crushed. Better to ride in the back.’
But as we searched, it became clear that there were simply too many people for the few hiding places.
‘Let’s go,’ said Karwan. ‘I have a better plan.’
Two hours later, Jan and I sat shivering back to back beneath a concrete motorway bridge. It was long past midnight. We’d walked along a snow-covered train line for around two hours to get there.
Karwan had gone on to make ‘other arrangements’. He returned soon after, brandishing heavy grey bolt cutters. ‘The keys to England, gentlemen,’ he said, waving them at us.
He cut our way into another p
arking area. This one was a marshalling place for what Karwan told us was British-bound ferry traffic.
Unlike the first, this one was busy with truck drivers. We lay on the ground, trying to get a sense of the activity. Many drivers checked the doors on their trailers and searched the chassis. Others chatted, drank coffee and smoked cigarettes. Cars full of families and businessmen formed a series of orderly queues nearby.
Night was giving way to day now, and I could feel desperation rising inside me. Coming to a decision, Jan and I ran across the open car park, looking out all the while for the police or the sudden appearance of a driver.
We crouched beneath the tail of a lorry.
‘There.’ Karwan suddenly pointed towards a silver estate car parked to one side. The driver’s door was open and we could make out a figure standing against the fence, steam billowing from around his feet as he peed.
We stalked forward, mindful of the heavy slopping noise our footsteps made. Jan opened the back door a tiny way. The passenger seats were full of suitcases and boxes, but the footwells were empty. My heart was racing. I slid into the tight space, crawling into the hole behind the driver’s seat in an effort to make room for Jan. He squeezed in behind me and I heard the door click shut. I barely dared breathe as the driver returned from relieving himself.
My legs were beginning to cramp in such a small space, but the car was warm and I was thankful for that.
Before long, we started to move forwards. Jan patted my ankle as if to congratulate us – we were on our way to England.
The driver crept forward a few feet at a time, occasionally lighting a cigarette or adjusting his car radio. Suddenly I tensed, aware of voices at the driver’s window. Torchlight probed the car’s interior. A shout.
The driver turned, following the beam of torchlight. ‘Hey,’ he bellowed, throwing himself out of the car.
The door beside my head swung open and a strong hand dragged me on to the cold ground. Police stood over me, shouting.
Jan was on the other side of the car. ‘Leave him alone, he’s just a boy.’
The police shouted back. The driver, who had now recovered some of his composure following our discovery, shouted in my face and pushed me against his car before being held back by the police.
The police marched Jan and me down the line of cars, back towards the main entrance, near the ticket barriers.
‘Halas,’ they said, waving us away into the night. ‘Allez.’
We skulked away into the darkness.
‘Why didn’t they arrest us, Jan?’
‘I don’t know. A cell and a hot meal would be welcome right now, wouldn’t it? Maybe that’s why not.’
We found the train line and began the long, cold walk back to the Jungle. It was snowing more heavily now, and the freezing wind stuck my wet jeans to me, sucking the heat from my body. My stomach – knotted with tension for so long now – relaxed a little, so that the pain of its emptiness cut into me.
By the time we got back to the Jungle I was exhausted. We lay down on some sheets of cardboard and tried to sleep for a few hours, before Karwan came for us in the early evening to attempt it all over again.
And that became our routine.
We soon learned that each smuggler had their own area – a section of a car park or rail line that was theirs exclusively. Sometimes in one large park we’d see several groups of migrants all trying to board vehicles, yet no one wandered into another smuggler’s area. It was, despite the chaos, very organized.
Occasionally the smugglers would settle their differences in a brawl. But most of the time we were alone, running from the police or truck drivers. It was easy enough to get on, in or under a truck or vehicle. It was impossible to go undetected by the police and border guards.
They had dogs, and cameras – and they knew all the best places to hide, just as we did. Whenever we got caught the police would just let us loose again – providing we were a long way from the Jungle. Or they would take the time to drive us to a remote location and dump us at the side of the road. They didn’t want to take our liberty, only our time and precious energy.
Under Karwan’s careful guidance, our little flock developed an economic hierarchy. Jan and I were always last to board when it came to enacting Karwan’s nightly schemes. We had paid the least, and so we were his lowest priority. Eventually we blackmailed him.
‘Stop putting us last, Karwan,’ I complained. ‘We can see what you’re doing. Stop it, or I’ll tell the others how much we paid.’
Karwan seethed at me, but Jan stood his ground.
‘Do as Gulwali says, Karwan.’
He did.
‘Karwan’s Guys’, as we now thought of ourselves, formed our own small camp, and we started to settle in as best we could. Jan and I befriended a quiet and thoughtful Afghan. I nicknamed him Qumandan – ‘leader’, or ‘man in charge’. He was only a teenager, but he had a strength of character that we instantly warmed to. We made a little house using a tarpaulin and the branches of a willow tree; Jan and Qumandan found some pallets on a construction site after a long walk home one morning. The tarpaulin had been claimed in a similar manner. So too had a gas bottle, liberated from an unlocked shed in a beachside neighbourhood. The theft didn’t sit well with me: theft is immoral. But we were acting out of desperation. No one was really trying to help us, so it was a simple choice of steal or die.
Life became a soul-destroying cycle of escape, capture, theft and construction. Only the physical necessities of eating at charity food points, the occasional wash and broken sleep disrupted the cycle.
As seemed the norm, the Jungle was ethnically divided into ad hoc nationality areas. The Africans seemed to be the poorest and slept nearest the fence to the car park. They didn’t seem to have agents and appeared to be trying to get on trucks themselves. There were also Chinese – I didn’t see where they slept, but they turned up at night with cans of beer and used to sit and talk to us. They may have been migrant workers – there were lots of factories nearby.
We tried to make the best of it. Someone found a tattered football in a playground. Having a kickabout with mates was a moment of normality – and was all too rare.
The police loved to raid during the day, when they knew we were likely to be resting. It was common to have my charity-donated blanket pulled from me, a screaming police officer shouting in French in my face. It was still a language I didn’t understand, although their meaning was very clear. They would move us on, beating any guys who resisted. We would then be forced to stand shivering in the cold while they questioned us about things they didn’t want answers to.
Sometimes activists came to the Jungle to form human shields between the police and ourselves. They tended to be young English and French men and women, although there were a few older people involved as well. They would stand outside our shelters shouting at the police, demanding they stop harassing us. They had loudspeakers which they used to try to embarrass the police into leaving us alone.
We were grateful for their empathy and support. Some of the women used to like to hug me. If felt nice to have a moment of human comfort. Sometimes they brought fruit or other food with them – that was even better. But we knew they weren’t going to be here all the time. As did the police. Sooner or later, the police would get their way.
A couple of times, officers detained me for twenty-four hours. I didn’t mind – it was warm, and usually it offered the chance to see a doctor. There was a volunteer clinic where there was a young French-Afghan doctor who was nice to me. My face and body were covered in pimples – a consequence of poor hygiene – but there was little they could do. The medical clinic had showers, although you were only allowed to use them if you had a medical reason, but the doctor always let me sneak in and wash.
I lived in the same clothes for weeks at a time. I wore them until they were filthy rags – or until they b
ecame so infested with fleas and lice I couldn’t stand it any more. Fortunately the charities that ran the food places were often giving away second-hand clothes. That became my definition of a good day – a hot meal, some new clothes, a visit to the doctor, and an illicit shower from which I emerged clean and dressed. I hated the filth – back home I was so clean. It gave me some small pleasure to throw my old rags on the fire, and watch as the bugs popped in the flames.
The humiliation was hard to bear. Many of the faces I saw spoke of the same thing. In their own countries, these people had power, even the respect of their communities. Here in the Jungle we were barely human. We were the beasts that gave this place its name.
I imagined myself running up to some high-ranking French official and shaking them to demand answers. It wasn’t my fault I wasn’t born in Europe. My home was a war zone – did that somehow make me less human?
I spent a lot of time just wandering the Jungle or the food area near the train station. It helped pass the day. The police would see me and often assume I was out stealing – pickpocketing or shoplifting. Sometimes I was. They would drive past slowly, making a point of staring at me. Every so often an officer might take pity on me – I suppose some of them had children or relatives my own age. They would give me a few euros or perhaps some food. I always accepted it with a smile.
One night Karwan selected a high-sided truck. The driver had left the cab to use the toilet.
‘I’ve already cut a hole in the top,’ he told us proudly, as we lay in the grass on our stomachs, shivering on the cold ground.
When we finally got to our feet, I was pleased to be moving. But when we approached the lorry I wasn’t so sure. ‘What are those?’ I asked, pointing at red signs with skulls on them on the lorry’s side.
‘Nothing to worry about, Gulwali,’ said Karwan. ‘Just don’t eat anything you find inside. It’s haram.’ He boosted me up. ‘You first, little man.’
The Lightless Sky Page 28