The Invisible Crowd

by Ellen Wiles

Yonas recognized her now, from Molly’s photos. ‘Oh! You are Nina, right? I just came to see your mother. I am her student.’ As he spoke, he steeled himself; from a phone conversation he’d overheard, he was pretty sure Nina didn’t think her mother should be having him around, student or not. And her husband certainly wouldn’t think so; Molly had told him all about her son-in-law’s political campaign in a less than approving tone.

  Nina took a step back, as if he still might be preparing to lunge at her with a knife, and Yonas found himself leaning back too, in an attempt to demonstrate that he was unthreatening. He smiled. ‘I just arrived,’ he said, trying to sound chatty. ‘I thought Molly would return soon.’ A birdcall shrilled from a tree, even though it was dark. The strange ways that nature got twisted by this sleepless city.

  Nina was still staring at him, wide-eyed, and he could hear her breathing, fast and shallow.

  ‘I do not want to concern you,’ he said. ‘I can leave now, if you like…’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Nina said cautiously. ‘She’s told me about you. I just wasn’t expecting… how come you’re here this late?’

  ‘I am sorry about that. I have never come to your mother’s house before without an invitation, but I just needed her advice. I have a kind of emergency.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘I have been. . . evicted.’

  ‘Oh no. Why?’

  ‘Because – because police found out that some people living in my place were working illegally.’

  ‘Right. Including you?’

  He didn’t answer. Should he be honest? He suspected Molly assumed he was a refugee or a registered asylum seeker, but she had never asked.

  ‘Look,’ Nina said, ‘I’m sorry to hear about your situation, but were you hoping you could stay here or something? I mean, my mum lives on her own so I don’t think… and she’s not even in.’ Her voice cracked a little.

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I was just hoping for some advice from your mother on where I could go – she is very kind to me and she works at the Refugee Council so I thought…’

  ‘Oh, sure, I see. They don’t have an out-of-hours advice line?’

  ‘Not that I know about.’

  ‘Hmm. I would let you in and check for myself but I went and forgot the spare keys.’ Her voice cracked again. She cleared her throat. ‘Let me just check one more time.’ She rooted around in her handbag for a few more seconds. Yonas waited. ‘Oh,’ Nina groaned, giving up and clutching her hair with one hand. ‘I can’t believe she’s not here! I could do with her advice too, as it happens.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine, I’m just… well, no, not really…’ Her voice dissolved into a sob, and she sat down on the doorstep and covered her face with her palms. Her hair tumbled around her hands. He wondered what it felt like to touch such shiny hair, imagined the fiery colour of it translating into heat, burning his skin. Her back was shaking a little. She was so skinny, he could see her ribs protruding. He hesitated, then sat down next to her.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked, after a bit.

  ‘Oh, nothing, I’m just having a bad…’ She wiped her face, then looked up at him briefly, and forced a quick smile. A smear of mascara ran down from her left eye. Her eyes were the colour of the moss that grew around the factory fence. She looked up at the night sky, and sighed jerkily. ‘I just found out that… my husband is having an affair. God, that’s the first time I’ve said it out loud! Makes it feel real. And trite, almost. I mean, how many women must this happen to, all the time? I shouldn’t have assumed it wouldn’t happen to me, that I was special. But I just – we’ve got a child, you know, a little girl, and I can’t… I don’t know how I could bring her up on my own, and I can’t imagine having to take her away from her father, but… Oh, I haven’t even confronted him about it yet, so I’m probably getting ahead of myself. But I just can’t see a way to… get past this.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Yonas said.

  ‘Oh gosh, thanks, I appreciate it – but I don’t know why I just splurged all that on you! You’ve got enough on your plate, it sounds like.’

  ‘You just found this out?’

  ‘Yeah. Texts from her on his phone – so many of them, and so blatant. I can’t believe he didn’t even bother to delete them. It’s almost as if he wanted me to find them. He doesn’t know I know yet. I don’t know how to tell him and not go to pieces.’

  ‘It must be a difficult conversation. Especially with your daughter in the house.’

  ‘I know. Oh, poor Clara! She doesn’t deserve a broken home. Or bitter, bickering parents.’

  ‘I am sure you did not deserve for your husband to cheat on you.’

  ‘No! Well no, I didn’t. Thank you for saying that. Oh dear. Look at us both, sitting here like lost waifs!’ She laughed, and he followed suit. Her laugh was high-pitched and light, like clinking china, but oddly the same pace as his deeper one, so it sounded as if they were deliberately in sync.

  Yonas stopped laughing abruptly, cleared his throat, and instinctively reached out and plucked a narrow leaf off one of Molly’s potted plants. It smelled soothing, but now that he was holding it, he realized Nina was probably wondering why on earth he’d just damaged her mother’s garden, and how much else he’d boldly steal from her house in plain sight.

  But instead Nina said, ‘Ooh, would you pick a sprig for me too, actually? Lavender is supposed to be calming, isn’t it? I could do with that right now!’

  A sprig… Yonas wasn’t sure what that word meant. He placed his fingers at the bottom of one long stem and looked at Nina enquiringly.

  ‘Oh, just the top part of that,’ she said. ‘Yes – perfect.’ She took it from his fingers, brushing them with her own for a millisecond, and sniffed deeply, slowly. ‘Mmm. So, since we’re here, maybe you could tell me more about yourself? Mum told me you’re from… Eritrea, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘That’s on the east coast, right?’ Then she grabbed his arm and whispered, ‘Oh look, a fox!’ He spotted it, sloping along by the fence, almost certainly the same one he’d seen before she turned up. ‘I love foxes,’ she confided. ‘How they lead these secret lives right in the middle of the city, defying its order. How determinedly wild they are. Cousins of wolves. Quentin hates them though. Thinks they’re vermin. Anyway, sorry, we were talking about Eritrea. How did you come to leave? I mean, if you are comfortable telling me…’

  He thought about how to answer.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘It is okay, I was just going to tell you a story. A very short one.’

  ‘Oh! Okay. Go ahead.’

  ‘Well, God was surveying the world one day,’ he said, ‘and he was looking over all the mountains, valleys and seas, when he stopped and exclaimed: look at Eritrea! Why is it so green? I deliberately made that country dry and yellow. So the Angel Gabriel leaned over and whispered to him: my Lord, those are army uniforms.’

  Nina laughed. ‘Right. So I guess there’s a war there, then? Sorry, I’m so ignorant.’

  ‘Actually, there is no war there now. But there is no peace either. No-war-no-peace. That is what they like to call it.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Good question. It basically means that every person in our country, men and women, from their last year at school until they are old and grey or until they fall down dead, has to do military service, or national service.’

  ‘Wow. So you did too, then, I guess?’

  ‘I was conscripted for the border war.’

  ‘Border war with… Ethiopia?’

  ‘Right. And after that I had to do national service.’

  ‘And that can go on indefinitely? How’s that justified?’

  ‘No-war-no-peace. That justifies everything. It started after the war – the border line was actually never completely settled, so the President said that there was still a threat of invasion. That turned into a reason
to abandon our constitution and our free press and militarize the whole society.’

  ‘Wow. How long has that been going on then?’

  ‘More than a decade.’

  ‘Gosh. I can see why coming to the UK is tempting.’

  ‘In the UK, if you have two cows, you sell one and buy a bull, then your herd of cows gets bigger, the economy grows, and in a few years’ time you sell all your cows and you can retire in comfort on the money you have earned. Assuming that you are lucky enough to be a British citizen…’

  ‘Indeed! Well, that’s the ideal, I guess. It definitely worked like that for the baby boomers.’

  ‘Baby boomers?’

  ‘Post-war babies. Second World War, I mean. Not quite so easy for people in my generation, but we definitely have it easy compared to you.’

  ‘In my country, if you have two cows the government takes both of them and puts you into the army, and if you refuse or speak out, puts you in prison or kills you.’

  ‘Mmm. Not much incentive to be a farmer then. Sounds like one of the worst regimes in Africa, is it?’

  ‘I think so. But different countries have different problems. If you have two cows in Somalia either you sell your milk to your neighbour at a fair price, or your neighbour will kill you and take your cows.’

  ‘Right – dictatorship versus anarchy…’

  ‘Exactly. Compared to China, where if you have two cows you are made to take care of them, but the government takes all the milk.’

  Nina laughed. ‘Yes! Communism in a nutshell.’

  ‘As for the Italians, who used to rule my country, if a man in Italy has two cows he drinks an espresso, then looks around’ – Yonas paused for effect, looking in both directions with his hand shielding his eyes – ‘and he realizes he doesn’t know where his cows have gone. So he decides to take a break for lunch.’

  ‘That’s hilarious! And in India, I guess, if you have two cows you worship them.’

  ‘Right. But in Russia, if you have two cows you count them again and find you have five cows. Then you count them again and find you have forty cows. Then you count again and find you have ten cows. You decide to stop counting and have another bottle of vodka.’

  Nina threw her head back and laughed. ‘That’s a more acute global political analysis than I’ve heard in a long time, and I’ve got a politician for a husband. Have you thought about a career in stand-up?’

  ‘Stand-up?’ Yonas got to his feet, then sat down again. ‘You are telling me I can make money here by doing that?’

  She giggled. ‘You know, I feel better already! No wonder Mum is such a fan. Laughing is the best therapy, isn’t it? I wish there was a laughter drug I could get prescribed. I saw a short doc the other day about laughter clubs which sound nuts, in a way – a huge group of people get together in a park just to laugh, which is infectious of course, and then there are laughter competitions, like who can do the best belly laugh – but maybe they’re a stroke of genius. I mean, it’s fair enough to feel upset when you find out your husband’s had an affair. But I can’t help feeling like it’s my fault. I mean, I get so knotted up with anxiety sometimes I can barely leave the house, and being a mum – well, sometimes it makes me feel full to bursting with love, but other times, like today, I get in a total panic that my life is a failure and I’ve ruined my career and I’m a bad mother and I was never cut out for parenthood and I married the wrong man and it’s no wonder my husband is fed up with me and I’m like a spider being slowly wrapped up and suffocated in its own web. But, compared to you, obviously, I still have several possible roofs over my head, and a bank account, and a family and an art studio, whereas you’ve just been evicted and don’t even have a country to call your own. And yet you still manage to crack some jokes to make me feel better! So – thanks, I guess is what I’m trying to say, through all that ramble.’ She smiled.

  Yonas grinned back. ‘There is no need to thank me.’

  ‘So, the place you’ve been evicted from,’ she said, ‘had you been living there long?’

  ‘A few months.’

  ‘You don’t have any family over here?’

  He shook his head. ‘I did have the phone number for an auntie, who was a friend of my mother’s, but it did not work.’

  ‘Oh, that’s rubbish. So is your family back home then? Do you have kids? Or…’

  ‘No, no – I am not married. I was going to get married, actually, but my girlfriend was killed in the border war—’ He broke off abruptly. It was the first time he’d told anyone except Gebre about Sarama, and he wasn’t sure why he was sharing it now, almost offhandedly, and with Nina, of all people. He imagined Sarama looking down on them now, listening in to their conversation, and swallowed. He did feel a little lighter, actually, just for having said her name aloud. Their relationship was just a fact, after all. A historical event from long ago.

  ‘Oh no,’ Nina said softly. ‘How terrible. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It is okay.’ He cleared his throat. ‘My sister lives in Asmara – she looks after her daughter and our grandmother and brother. My brother lost his legs when his twin and our parents were killed. That was in the liberation war.’

  ‘God, how awful!’ Nina said. ‘To lose half your family that way… and I guess your sister couldn’t come with you, here? If she has to care for the others…’

  He smiled bitterly. ‘No, you are right, she is stuck. They are all stuck. I did not even get to say goodbye to them, because I left after I escaped from prison…’

  ‘Wait, you were in prison? Why?’

  ‘They caught me emailing reports out of the country, trying to tell people the truth about what was happening.’

  ‘Oh wow, so, are you a journalist?’

  ‘Not exactly. I am a writer. I studied literature and I even wrote plays, like my father, for my first job – but then when they brought in national service I had to do the opposite.’

  ‘The opposite? What’s the opposite of writing?’

  ‘Stopping other people writing. They made me become a censor. And I got so angry about being made to do that, and about all the propaganda and the lies being covered up, I had to do something.’

  ‘Brave to risk writing stuff like that. In the circumstances…’

  ‘Brave, or stupid. But I would not do differently if I had my chance again. Maybe I would just have been more careful.’

  ‘So – how long were you in prison?’

  ‘About four months.’

  ‘And how did you escape?’

  ‘I escaped with my friend, Gebre. We could talk to each other over our cell walls. We waited to target this night-time guard, a guy who would always drink too much whisky, and we managed to trick him. When we got out, we had to run through the desert for a long distance, keeping as far away as possible from the army, from all the soldiers they would have sent to hunt us down. And then in the daytime, in the heat of the sun, we had to keep going, with no water, no food, thorns shredding our skin… It is very, very difficult to make that border crossing alive. Even if you are a man who is healthy and young like me. Many people die along the way.’

  ‘I bet. I would have… I wouldn’t even have dared to challenge the status quo in the first place, probably. It’s amazing you made it – the journey after that must have been pretty risky too.’

  Yonas nodded. He wondered if she had any idea. He closed his eyes and remembered that lorry journey, the sensation of being buried alive in a grave on wheels, the fetid stench poisoning all his organs, the heat melting his eyeballs in their sockets.

  ‘So, your friend,’ Nina said, ‘did he make it with you all the way to the UK?’

  ‘Yes, he…’ Yonas took in a long breath of neutral air, picturing Gebre, still sitting in the factory, then huffed it out. ‘He is not in London yet though. He got tied up, doing a job. I hope he will come soon. In the meantime, I need to find a place we can stay.’

  ‘Of course. There must be a solution – I’ll try to help. So, are you of
ficially a refugee or asylum seeker, or…’

  He paused. ‘Not officially,’ he admitted, finally. ‘I hope… I mean, I did not tell Molly that I was registered, but I think she might have assumed—’

  ‘But why not?’ she interrupted.

  ‘I know, I should have told her—’

  ‘No no! I mean, why haven’t you claimed asylum? Or is it that you’ve been refused already?’

  ‘I have not been refused – I have not claimed.’

  ‘But if you were imprisoned for writing the truth, then surely you deserve…’

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe, but I am too late. You are supposed to claim when you arrive, but I worked illegally. For smugglers at first, but even after that… And I know people who have been refused. I do not want to risk being deported. As soon as arrived back home I would be killed, or put in prison again. And I need to stay so I can send money home to my sister.’

  He expected Nina to bristle at his mention of illegal working, perhaps to quote her husband. But she just said, ‘You should definitely speak to a good lawyer at least – find out your chances. I’ll research it, when we finally get inside – as well as the accommodation, which is obviously more urgent. If you like? I mean, I don’t want to intrude. But… would that help?’

  ‘Okay, sure. Thank you!’ he said, surprised at her apparent change of heart – not only to sympathize, but to proactively offer to help. What would her husband think? Nina smiled at him, looking relieved, and the smile transformed her angular, elfin face. Unexpectedly, he wanted to hug her, and to be held in return. He felt the heat of her thin body radiating out, so close to him on the cold stone step. There was an awkward pause, as they looked at each other for a long moment, then both looked down, and away. Yonas was starting to get cramp in his leg, but felt he couldn’t move an inch, or it would ruin a moment of… he didn’t know what. And then another car drew up.

  ‘Mum’s back,’ Nina said, and they both stood up.

  Molly stepped out of her car, noticed them and gasped. Her keys dropped onto the gravel. Yonas dashed forward to pick them up.

  ‘Good evening, Molly,’ he said, holding them out. ‘I am sorry to—’