The Invisible Crowd

by Ellen Wiles

  Melat laughed finally, and it was like music. ‘Well, she’s the ray of light. Her schooling is terrible, you know, education here has dive-bombed and most of her classmates can barely read, but at least thanks to Father I know enough to teach her at home. We’re lucky to have his books. She is reading English now, all by herself, she can sit for hours…’

  ‘Amazing! I wish I could see her.’

  ‘She misses you. Oh Yonas, I can’t bear the thought of my baby getting conscripted…’

  ‘Melat, don’t even think about that yet – it’s more than a decade until Lemlem turns seventeen. Things will change.’

  ‘Mmm. I hope so. Now, tell me about Gebre,’ Melat said. ‘How is he?’

  ‘Oh, he made it to the UK with me… he’s doing all right, I think.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘He isn’t with me just now – he will be joining soon.’

  ‘How come? From where?’

  He could hear the accusation in Melat’s voice as well as surprise. He couldn’t remember his childhood before Gebre was in it, and Melat probably couldn’t either. ‘He… found different work outside London. He wanted to stay and do that for a bit longer. Look, I’m about to run out of credit, but can I just say hello to Lemlem?’ There was a pause, but he heard Melat call her name, then a fast, drumming sound.

  ‘Uncle Yonas!’ cried a tiny voice. ‘I can read English now so Mama says I can come and stay with you and go to school in London!’

  After hanging up, Yonas stood still for a moment, imagining them all at home, how they’d be chewing over the conversation later. Would he ever get to see them again? How would he forgive himself if the tax men came and beat Melat, or sent her to prison, all because of him?

  The graffiti around the phone box walls read:

  Emma n Ben 4ever

  Live 4 the moment

  Get Out this is my urinal

  He pulled out Bin Man Joe’s number and typed into the keypad. The ring trilled over and over, like a robotic bird. Just like Auntie, he was never going to answer – perhaps it was a fake number – but then:

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Oh, hello!’ Yonas replied. ‘This is… You took me to the station.’

  ‘Oh, you! Well, I never…’

  ‘I just want to say thank you. I thought you would like to know that I found a place to live and a job.’

  ‘Right! Well, that’s fantastic – good on you.’

  ‘Also I am calling because… I need to ask you for help one more time. Not for me, but for my friend. He might find you in the same place. I want him to know that he can come to join me.’

  Silence.

  ‘I don’t have a phone yet, but there is a shopkeeper near where I’m living, he knows how to find me, so if you can pass the address to my friend – his name is Gebre – he can find me that way. I can give it to you now, if you have a pen…’

  More silence. But Yonas could still hear breathing.

  ‘It is only one more person’, he added, ‘and Gebre – he is a good guy. A really good guy. He is like my brother. I will be so happy if he can join me in London, and I can help him to get on his feet.’

  ‘All right then,’ Bin Man Joe said eventually, sounding unconvinced. ‘I’ll grab a pen. But I can’t guarantee nowt, all right? Haven’t seen any sign of any other chums of yours or nowt like that at all, so…’

  From the scratchy sound over the line, he did seem to be writing down the address, but his goodbye after that was swift and gruff. Yonas couldn’t help wondering if he’d only agreed to write down the address in order to get him off the phone, and had no intention of passing on any message, or giving any more random lifts to stinking, scared, illegal men. But at least he’d tried.

  He walked home, hands in his pockets, staring at the tessellating pavement slabs. Would Gebre ever leave the factory? Would Osman ever be well enough? He should report Aziz to the police, now, today, for their own good… But then, Gebre was right: there was no obvious way to do that anonymously and not get arrested. And even if he managed it, Gebre had chosen to stay there, of his own free will, so what gave Yonas the right to expose him?

  As he got settled in the warehouse, and came to know the others living there, he concluded he’d been incredibly lucky that it was Emil he’d bumped into and got as his mentor. The Russian guys were grumpy alcoholics who never washed their sheets, the Ivorian and Nigerian guys boasted and bickered, the Indian guys sneered and kept to themselves. Emil loathed the warehouse as much as any of them, but he was always on the lookout for something to laugh about, like the woman in a legal office who kept a vibrator in her desk drawer tucked under a book about the morality of law, and the overweight guy leaving the gym as they were starting their clean and wolfing two chocolate bars in the space of thirty seconds, then phoning his girlfriend and saying he was just going to grab a salad after his workout and then he’d be home, and the bus driver who kept overtaking other buses as if he were a bitter Formula One reject.

  Yonas was glad, though, that Emil’s joker mask had slipped on that first day, when he divulged his secret. Although he wanted it kept quiet in the warehouse, Emil genuinely seemed to anticipate a future in which he would live here openly as a gay man. And why not, if it was legal? Yonas had responded with assiduous nonchalance, as if people he’d just met came out to him all the time, while silently marvelling and wishing he could introduce Emil to Gebre straight away – but, he hoped, it wouldn’t be long until his friend arrived.

  The novelty of riding on a comfortable bus soon wore off, and the freedom to choose meals became less miraculous when all Yonas could afford or be bothered with was cheap pasta interspersed with greasy McDonald’s, and when his days were defined by endless bottles of bleach and sprays and mops and dirty coffee cups and toilets and loo roll holders. He didn’t mind the tediousness of the work particularly – it beat the factory, and at least it was paid – but he minded how short a distance the money could stretch. The amount he had left over at the end of a week to wire home to Melat was pitiful, and the prospect of saving enough to pay for a place to live, with a bedroom to himself, a kitchen with more than one hotplate and a bathroom between twenty guys, and clothes that suited him better than the two clown-like outfits he’d got from the charity shop, never mind obtaining a visa, all seemed as remote as a trip to the moon. He couldn’t risk part-time work, but he kept looking out for other full-time options, asking people in small cafés or restaurants about jobs. He got mildly excited about the prospect of teaching English in the dodgy language school above a corner shop, where they didn’t seem bothered about visas, but even the few employers like that who offered him something there couldn’t pay enough for him to rent a room, eat and send any money home.

  Months passed, a biting cold set in, and there was no word from Bin Man Joe or Gebre. One day, when Yonas was walking home from work, a thin drizzle intensified into icy rain that needled his face and, looking around for a doorway to shelter in, he spotted a sign saying ‘Public Library’ above an old red-brick building. He walked up the steps and into a warm, brightly lit room.

  Moving slowly among the rows of multicoloured spines, exuding words and ideas in such a calm, quiet space, felt exciting, but also unexpectedly emotional, wondrous, spiritual almost – the way Yonas remembered feeling as a little boy in the Orthodox church at Christmas, when the singing died down and there was a sense of people together, reflecting, being quiet. He spotted the fiction section, went over to A, and pulled out Arrow of God. He’d first read Achebe’s first book, Things Fall Apart when he was about fifteen, under instructions from his father who had handed it to him while giving him a lecture about colonization, and he’d never read this one. Keeping hold of it in his left hand, he ran his right finger along shelves, pulling out books at random, just to flick through, to smell the sweet, musty paper and skim-read each back cover, remembering the library in the university back home, the hours he’d spent there in the fond belief that the political tensions wou
ld work themselves out, that his degree would lead him to an interesting career as a writer, maybe a professor down the line, that he’d be able to go home peacefully after work each night and choose some bedtime stories to read aloud to his children… He thought back to all the books he had got excited about as a student, the reading group he’d set up, the debates about realism and modernism, and how to get past the socialist, realist, moralist diet of the older generation, and how he’d got the group to read Orwell’s 1984 and Kafka’s The Trial way before they became a reality. He felt like reading them again now, in retrospect, and started to move towards O… but then stopped. It would feel too close to home. And he didn’t want to look back, not now, not yet. He wanted to read some new things, books that would somehow point him to the future.

  He browsed through non-fiction, history, cooking, travel and something called self-help. He pulled out a book called Fat and Fed-Up? How to lose weight and charm people, and imagined showing it to Gebre: This is perfect for you! Haha… Then he saw a law section, spotted Asylum and Refugee Law Handbook, and pulled it out eagerly. He lugged his pile to a table and sat down.

  He opened the asylum book first, keen to read more about whether you could make a claim so late after an illegal arrival. But the writing was nearly impenetrable… and then the flyleaf revealed that it was nine years out of date anyway.

  ‘The library is closing in fifteen minutes,’ an announcement sounded.

  Yonas turned around to see the librarian’s desk. It looked as if people just presented a small card to her, and she scanned their books with a machine before they took them. No payments, apparently. He mustered the confidence to go up and ask if he could get a card, but a wispy-haired woman got to the desk first.

  ‘I’d like to request that the library stocks my book please,’ she said. ‘Yes, the book I authored. I can give you the details, I’ve written them down here. But you’d have to buy it from me, not a bookshop, or a publisher or anything – it’s self-published? It’s kind of a self-help memoir? It’s about the way I came to terms with not being in a relationship by bonding better with my dog – he’s a Schnauzer, you know? – and all the techniques I invented like nurture grooming, and my own dog food treat recipes? So it’s just in paper form now, like, A4 printouts, but I thought maybe you’d have a machine to bind it so it would look like a real book, and I’m sure you’d want to cultivate local writers…’

  Yonas was starting to wonder whether libraries in the UK really were publishers too, and could commission local people to write crazy books on a whim, when the librarian gently started to persuade the woman that this was not possible. He was sure the conversation was concluding, when an elderly lady shuffled up at high speed, panting, and took the next turn, ahead of him.

  ‘Hello, love,’ she said to the librarian, ‘now, here, let me get these out of my bag, I must remember to return them before I go, or I’ll take them home again and be fined, when I brought them in specially… Excuse me? I just borrowed these? These ones? You’re sure? Goodness, really? How do you know? My son stopped me returning them? Well, I think you’re mistaken, I mean, they’re my books, and I’m sure I don’t know…’

  An overweight man with greasy black hair joined her. ‘Mum, you literally just got these out,’ he said. ‘I returned your old books when we first arrived, don’t you remember?’

  ‘What are you talking about, Roger? I don’t recall you doing anything of the sort. I’m sure I’ve read these…’

  Yonas wondered how Grandmother was doing, and whether she would even recognize him, in the unlikely event she got to see him again. Finally, the man manoeuvred his mother off, and it was his turn.

  ‘Oh yes, getting a library card is very straightforward,’ the librarian told him, with a smiling voice like warm caramel. ‘All you need to do is bring in proof of your address, like a utility or council tax bill, and ID. A passport or driving licence is fine. And then you’ll be all set! Meanwhile, feel free to browse – but we are about to close for today.’

  Yonas nodded and smiled back – until he’d turned away. Straightforward. So much for borrowing books. Walking despondently towards his table, he noticed a cluster of computers in the corner of the room, with a FREE INTERNET sign behind them. Free internet! At least he could look up jobs here next time, or classes, or what was happening back home, or in the diaspora… A wave of new possibilities seemed to rise up in front of him, as if he could leap on and coast them with a surfboard. He went over to a computer, and his fingers jumped on the keys. But the screen instructed him to enter his library pass number.

  Back at his pile of books, he sat down again and glanced around. ‘The library is now closing,’ the announcement sounded. ‘Please make your way to the exit.’ People were gathering their things. Nobody was looking his way. He rested his bag on his lap, then slipped four books inside. Checked right and left. The librarian was immersed in typing something. He got up and walked towards the door, reaching it at the same time as two teenage girls. All three were passing through when an alarm screeched. Yonas kept on walking, not varying his pace, heart racing.

  He appeared to be the first person anyone at the warehouse had ever met who’d entered a public library in the UK or read a book in English, and these facts alone earned him the nickname Professor, which he knew Gebre would find hilarious when he arrived. He began returning to the library every week, more often if he had the time, and soon mastered the art of passing a book around the barrier to avoid the alarm. It wasn’t as if it were stealing: he’d bring them back just like everyone who happened to be eligible for a card. The library came to seem to him like a beacon, like a symbol of all the different ways people could feel, live and think about the world, how everybody could be welcomed for free into a space, whoever they were, whatever they were interested in, however educated they were – just how the UK was supposed to be. And besides, it was good just to have a warm place to sit that wasn’t the warehouse, where he could eat his own food.

  The library was closed over Christmas and into the New Year. Several of the guys saved up and spent New Year’s Eve out in the local pub or with friends, but most of them stayed in to watch the fireworks on TV. After Yonas had tried to cook an English Christmas dinner and almost blown the place up in the process he’d expected to be an outcast, but somehow a new camaraderie had emerged instead, and it was nice to sit down together to watch the old year roll out as the new one rolled in. There was a big concert on the bank of the Thames opposite the Houses of Parliament, with thousands of excited people jammed on the riverbank to watch, and the display was spectacular, the fireworks shooting out of the London Eye, which was itself changing colour from blue to pink to gold. Yonas couldn’t believe the opulence, the scale, how many formations and colours lit up the black sky: flamingo cascades, white carnations, fizzing sparklers, rising green rockets like giant reeds, fans of gold raining down and transforming the sky into an extravaganza of dancing light… But the sound of the explosions, the bangs, crackles, spits, whistles, even through the tinny speakers, gave him the shivers. He could almost smell the gunpowder, feel the blasts shaking the ground beneath him, ricocheting around him, and he found himself rubbing his scarred fingers together hard and chewing on his knuckles and had to focus determinedly on the screen so he remembered where he was, that it was just for fun, that this was the UK… And then the finale, the most intense bombardment of all, like a fleet of bombers overhead spewing out their entire arsenal, seeming to set the whole river ablaze… followed by a final flash of ice-blue light, and dark copper sputterings.

  When they turned off the TV to go to bed, the warehouse felt suddenly more eerie, more silent, and less homely than it had done an hour earlier, when it hadn’t been so obvious how many Londoners had so much more to shout about, or that for most of them the sounds of explosions and the smell of gunpowder signified only celebration.

  On New Year’s morning, Yonas went for a walk by himself. He meant to think about what he should do for the y
ear ahead, what his goals should be, and how he could get himself out of this rut. But he felt drained of energy and inspiration. He was disconsolately focusing on his feet and the pavement when something cold brushed his face. He stopped and looked up. The air was swimming with white flecks. He stretched out his hand, and a crystalline shape landed on his palm and dissolved. It was the most strange, otherworldly thing, like a host of tiny spirits silently drifting in the air. He waited for the ground to turn white like it did in the pictures, but the flakes just seemed to vanish as they landed. Was Gebre experiencing the same thing back at the factory, standing out in the yard perhaps, watching the slow, magical swirl, and making his own resolution to leave as soon as possible?

  Back at the warehouse, Yonas changed out of his damp clothes, put the kettle on and pulled out yesterday’s paper.

  Stowaway shambles: asylum seeker who keeps

  trying to return to Morocco sues Britain for STOPPING him

  He tore it out. This was the first one he’d come across where an asylum seeker was attempting to leave and being stopped. That seemed crazy. He took his cup of tea to his mattress, pulled out the bag containing his collection, and laid all his articles out on the sheet. He’d amassed quite a lot now. On a rough tally, about 80 per cent were complaints about asylum seekers who were criminals or liars or money-grabbers living in fancy houses courtesy of the taxpayer, but most of the time it seemed the asylum seekers being complained about were still allowed to stay. He wondered how much truth there was in all this, and how unusual these scenarios were. Was he wrong to assume it was too late for him to claim asylum? If he risked it, could he get himself a house, even a flat with more than one room, could he bring Melat and Lemlem and Sheshy over to live with him, and even Grandmother if she could handle the journey, and put up Gebre and Osman when they made it to London? Almost inconceivable. But if he didn’t try, he could well still be stuck here in the warehouse in a year’s time, without any of them.