The Lightless Sky

by Gulwali Passarlay

  They gave me an age-assessment document with their findings, and my new date of birth on it. I couldn’t read what it said, but I could make out the date of birth.

  I tore it apart and threw it on the table. ‘Thank you very much. I don’t want this. You keep it,’ I said, scattering the confetti in front of them. The translator relayed what I’d said in English but my actions made it obvious. They all looked completely stunned.

  I may have looked older than my years, but what had I just gone through? My face had been very damaged by the burns, giving me a much older appearance and, besides, I had had to grow up fast and learn to act tough. How could these people not understand any of this? Had they not seen the record of my medical examination on arrival at Dover? Did they have no concept of what living outdoors in all weathers on a near-starvation diet might do to a person?

  I stormed out in protest. I had no proof to dispute their absurd findings, and common sense wasn’t a language these people spoke. I felt that instead of smugglers and agents, I was now in the hands of new strangers, and these bureaucrats were now in control of my life.

  To be treated like a liar by this committee of officials was truly soul-destroying. After my outburst, I refused to say another word. In the face of such stupidity, what did my cooperation count for, anyway?

  A few days later, some officials arrived at the hotel.

  ‘Gulwali,’ said the manager, two unfamiliar faces standing behind him. ‘These men have come to take you to Appledore.’

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Appledore was like a large hostel, with twenty-nine shared bedrooms and a big communal kitchen and sitting room. There were around twenty or so under-sixteens in the building at the time I was there. The majority were Afghans, but there were Africans, Arabs and Kurds. All of them, like me, had travelled alone, without family.

  We had care workers looking after us. They were very nice people. My key worker was Scott, the assistant manager of the centre. He was very young and had the ability to make me laugh, but he was so busy it was really hard to get any one-on-one time with him.

  It was a very well-equipped place. The rooms were clean and tidy, with modern furniture. There was a table-tennis set and a football pitch outside. They really did try their best for us.

  We were also expected to use the time to learn more about the UK. We had classes about British life: its history, monarchy, culture. One video we watched told us the UK was the father of democracy and a big leader in human rights.

  We also had life-skills classes, such as time and money management, and how to use public transport. We won brownie points for cleaning our rooms and helping the staff in the kitchen. We used to go shopping for the kitchen – the idea was that we needed to allocate the budget accordingly.

  I still preferred the company of older people – maybe my time spent with Baryalai and my other older friends en route had made me this way – so for me, hanging around the staff and offering to stack the dishwashing machine, unpack boxes of supplies or clean the shelves was preferable to talking to the other depressed, sad children like me. I didn’t want to be reminded of my own story, let alone hear someone else’s. I couldn’t cope with it.

  We were given a budget for clothes and had to write out lists about what would be appropriate for a particular location or weather. They needed to see that we could work out prices, and decide what was a good buy. It was all designed to ensure we could cope on our own in the UK when we left there. I think it was really useful.

  The first time I went shopping was fun. I had been given a clothes allowance from my social worker – I think it was about £100. One of the care workers, Lorraine, took me shopping and helped me choose lots of things. She took me to a very big store she knew about which she said sold bargain goods at the very best prices. She said it was where all sensible English people shopped, but that rich people laughed at these kinds of places.

  Inside, I was overwhelmed by all the choice – the shop sold everything, from household cleaning supplies to toys and clothes and bed sheets. We had so much fun as Lorraine helped me cruise the aisles finding discounted items and special offers. We managed to get so much – socks, towels, shirts and jeans. I’d never really had more than one change of clothes, at least since I’d left Afghanistan.

  When Lorraine and I got back to the centre, we were both really proud of how much we’d managed to get for our money. I was so grateful to her. It gave me a real sense of achievement – the first I had had since getting here.

  I had been there for just over two weeks when Qumandan was sent on from the Dover hotel to Appledore too. It was great to be allowed to share a room with him. He had been through a similar age-­assessment process, but he had a different social worker to me, and different people assessing him. They believed him when he said he was fifteen. Eventually, he was sent to a foster family in a town called Hastings, leaving me feeling very alone. Why could I not be fostered too? I was still deeply unhappy about my own age assessment and dispute, but no one was willing to help me challenge it.

  One of the things I liked best during my time at Appledore was that every Friday they dropped us at the train station and let us catch a train to Tunbridge Wells, to a local mosque. Meeting other Muslims was so good – a couple were other Afghans or Arabs. But Tunbridge Wells didn’t seem like a place with very many immigrants: walking around there, where everyone looked very English indeed, made me feel quite self-conscious. But it was a really pretty town, and I enjoyed looking at the architecture.

  Letting us go there on our own was a big deal for the staff – they had to trust us. Perhaps once or twice I considered running away, but I didn’t because I really thought that by staying at Appledore I could sort out the age problem with social services, and begin the process of finding my brother. I also liked that I knew my way to the mosque and past a few of the nice sights, and I enjoyed the feeling of proudly showing off my newfound knowledge to some of the other new arrivals.

  We even got taken to London, to the National Portrait Gallery. Art was a new thing to me. Images are not Islamic, and photo­graphy was banned by the Taliban, so portraits and pictures weren’t something I had seen before. I found it a bit strange staring at the faces of people I was told had died hundreds of years before; to be honest, I found it a bit boring. I think, even despite it all, there was a little bit of me at that point that was a typical teenager. I did like the British Museum, though.

  Every week we were given £10 pocket money by the care workers, which most people used to call their families. I was so sad that I couldn’t do this. We also did community work, helping to clean a nearby steam train centre, and helping Kent County Council envir­onmental agency with planting trees. This I loved. It reminded me of being a child again and cutting branches for the classroom roof. It was good, physical work. I know for sure today that there are fifteen trees in Kent that I planted, and I’m proud of this.

  A month into my stay there, and I was beginning to wonder if I would ever leave Appledore. Once again, my mental health was not good – I was feeling isolated, alone. Unfeeling.

  One day, I was sitting in the kitchen chatting to a boy called Kiran, a new arrival from Balochistan. He told me he had been arrested and hung from his feet and beaten with small canes. He said he didn’t know why this had happened because no one in his family was involved in politics – unlike mine.

  I wanted to support Kiran and show that I cared, but I felt only numb. I didn’t honestly have the ability or energy to comfort him. I was just wondering how I could walk away without being rude when I heard a voice behind me.

  ‘Gulwali.’

  It was Shafique. I leapt from my chair so fast I nearly knocked it over.

  Shafique hugged me and whooped so loudly that some residents came to see what was going on. Once we’d calmed down and talked, he told me his story. He’d managed to get across the English Channel by hiding in some
kind of metal storage box attached to the side of a lorry. He said he had known it was very dangerous because there would be limited oxygen in the tiny space but, like me, he had reached such a point of desperation by then that he hadn’t cared if he lived or died.

  I was so happy he’d made it and didn’t have to spend the rest of the winter freezing in France. I was still in the grip of despair but having him there helped so much – just knowing someone that I didn’t have to explain myself to.

  Not long after this, I was told I would have a Home Office interview. I was assigned a legal representative who came to see me at Appledore in advance of the interview, to go through my case. She seemed nice, and didn’t argue when I told her how old I was. She seemed to believe me, and so I hoped she’d be able to do something. I also begged her to help me find Hazrat. She said that I needed to talk to the Home Office about this myself, but that she would put a note about it in my file.

  By this stage, however, I was so angry and untrusting that I didn’t tell her as many details about what had happened to me in Afghanistan as I should have done. Everyone kept asking me the same questions all the time, but it felt to me that no one was really listening, so I think I had just given up. I didn’t have the energy to keep going over it.

  I was not an adult, and I kept telling them I wasn’t, but they were treating me like one. My feelings intensified when I realized that the Home Office had given me an adult interview and not a child’s one – one where I would have been treated with more gentleness – because the social services had designated me an adult. I would eventually discover too, that though the Dover Immigration Removal Centre had believed my age in the first place, they had since changed it to be in line with the social services’ assessments.

  The day I went for my interview I felt sick inside – it took every ounce of motivation I had to make myself go. My feeling was that they wouldn’t believe me, so what was the point?

  I travelled to a place called Croydon in London for the interview. One of the care workers came with me. Croydon itself felt grey, impersonal and ugly – matching my mood completely. We arrived at a place called Lunar House. It was even more grey – there were queues snaking out of the door, while the scene inside set the tone: there were more long queues, and the sounds of people sobbing or arguing.

  I was dismayed to discover my legal representative wasn’t there, as she had promised me she would be. One of her colleagues came instead, but he knew hardly anything about me; it was obvious he had only read my notes ten minutes before.

  I was taken to a room and, through a translator, I was grilled as though I was a criminal.

  If I had thought the social services’ assessment was bad, this was a whole different level of awful. It was as if they were deliberately trying to make me feel guilty and humiliated for having dared to come to the UK. I felt victimized and criminalized.

  I tried to tell them that I was only thirteen, but a man at the table said, ‘Sorry, we are not here to discuss your age today. That has already been done and dealt with.’ They then told me that the information I was telling them was new and asked why I hadn’t told them these things in my witness statement – a statement I had made for my solicitors. They also said there were differences in the account I had made when I spoke to the immigration centre in Dover.

  Maybe there were, but it can hardly be surprising, surely? I had been traumatized: I had just got off a refrigerator lorry after a long journey, I hadn’t eaten, and I was in shock. I didn’t know then how the system worked, or that you were supposed to remember every key detail at the first interview lest you pay the price for it later. Couldn’t they see that if I had made mistakes, they were genuine ones?

  I just couldn’t speak any more. I started crying, which made me feel even more humiliated. Then one of the men told me to stop acting.

  At that I lost it. I started hitting the table, banging and banging it with my fist. No one said anything, they all just stared at me, as if this was also a sign of my criminality.

  The whole process was so impersonal, so strange. Telling my life story to strangers was utterly at odds with my culture: we respected each other’s privacy – it wasn’t even something I had done during my time on the road. Now, here I was having to tell it to a bunch of strangers sitting around a table.

  And it wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell anyone, but that I needed to feel safe and secure to be able to talk. This process was the opposite of that.

  At the end of the four-hour interview, they told me they would make a decision on my application for asylum and that I would be informed.

  I already knew it was over.

  Back at the centre I was so depressed I couldn’t function. But more bad news was to come: Shafique had had his age assessment, and they had decided he was eighteen, when in fact he was sixteen. Immediately after his interview he was taken by immigration officials to a detention centre. We didn’t even have time to say goodbye to each other.

  He remained there for a week and had been told that he would be deported to Afghanistan within thirty days, but he got lucky in the end. He had a very good legal advisor who fought Kent County Council about his age and the Home Office about his detention. The lawyer arranged for a doctor to examine him to reassess his age. The doctor accepted he was just under sixteen, and he was released back to Appledore. He was granted two years’ leave to remain in the UK and placed with a foster family in Gillingham.

  I was able to visit Shafique there once he got settled, but I don’t think he liked it. The family were kind but he and I both got the sense they were doing it for the money, not out of love. Seeing this made me think that maybe it wasn’t so bad I hadn’t been fostered after all.

  My depression could not have been worse at this point. I recalled the children’s home in Italy and kind Alexandria, and I began to wish I had stayed there. At least they had treated me more kindly. Added to this, I despaired of ever finding my brother. No one would help me, and in a country of so many people, how did I even begin?

  One day I got so angry I walked out of the centre in protest. I made my way to the station in the late afternoon; it was late November, so it was dark when I got there. I got a train to Tunbridge Wells and just walked around. I fully expected to be arrested. I think I had lost my mind. I was like a zombie, suicidal, walking in the middle of the road hoping a car would hit me.

  After a few hours of walking around like this, I realized I had nowhere to go. I had to go back to Appledore. I called the centre to tell them I was at the station. One of the care workers answered the phone. If I had wanted understanding I didn’t get it.

  ‘Gulwali. I am disgusted at you. We have done so much for you – why are you so ungrateful? We were worried about you.’

  When I got back I ran to my room. I couldn’t look anyone in the eye. I felt as though I had done something very wrong and felt so guilty. I thought they would all hate me.

  ‘Gulwali, we have lost all respect for you. You have lost the freedoms and privileges you had. Now you are not allowed to leave the centre.’

  I understood my actions were wrong, but couldn’t they see what a mess my mind was in?

  The nightmares I had had in Italy and Greece returned. I would wake screaming, thinking that my bed was on fire, the burning sensation so real that I would run into the bathroom to douse myself in water. Sometimes I got so panicky I couldn’t breathe or move; I could only lie on my bed willing myself to calm down. I missed my mother and grandmother so much. I longed for one of them to be there to comfort me in my night terrors, to hold me and tell me it was OK, that it was only a bad dream. Instead, I had to tell myself that. I was my only comfort.

  A couple of days later, the others went on a day trip to London to the London Eye. I wasn’t allowed to go as punishment for my escapade. I accepted why I couldn’t go, but it made me feel even worse.

  For the first time, I felt really
suicidal. At Calais, I hadn’t cared whether I lived. Now I wanted to die. Really die.

  I was in my room when they all came back.

  ‘Gulwali, open the door.’ One of the other residents was banging on my bedroom door. I ignored him – the last thing I wanted to hear was about their fun trip. ‘Gulwali. We need to tell you something.’

  ‘Go away, leave me alone.’ I hated the world, hated them all. I didn’t want to see anyone. I just wanted the world to end. Life had no purpose for me any more.

  He knocked again.

  ‘Gulwali. We just met your brother. We found Hazrat.’

  Chapter Thirty

  The next day my dreams came true. I was shaking as the care worker handed me the phone. I couldn’t breathe.

  ‘Gulwali?’

  I started to sob. After that, it became a blur. Hazrat was almost hysterical with joy, babbling and blurting out his story. He told me he’d never given up hope and had shown my passport picture, the one the agent had given him in Peshawar, to everyone he met on the road.

  He had arrived in England six months ago, and was living near Manchester. He was taking English language lessons at college and working in a shop. He was living with a friend, and had been granted two years’ leave to remain as an asylum seeker.

  Neither of us could believe the coincidence of how he’d found me. He had been in London on a college trip, walking along the South Bank. He and his friends had seen some fellow Afghans by the London Eye – my friends from Appledore. They had chatted and, during the conversation, one of the Appledore people had said there was a boy in the centre who looked just like him. Hazrat had asked the name of the boy and when they told him he began screaming, ‘That’s my little brother. That’s my little brother.’

  His social worker arranged for him to visit me a few days later. I was so nervous. Would my brother be the same person? I wondered if the indignities and traumas we had both suffered had changed him.