The Invisible Crowd

by Ellen Wiles

  ‘Bit disturbing though, isn’t it?’ you say, ignoring the passive-aggressive aside. ‘Boys and their warmongering toys.’ Had it been up to you, you wouldn’t have chosen this museum, but you’ll have to work tomorrow with YK’s appeal coming up, and three other hearings this week, and so, in a fit of guilt about how little you’ve been around, you’d told Max he should choose a venue for a family outing.

  ‘Yeahhh,’ Max says tolerantly, ‘but he doesn’t get all that yet – it’s just a collection of fantastic moving machines to him. And when he’s old enough, there are loads of exhibits here describing the fallout of war. Hey, Captain Alec, where are you taking us in your submarine under the sea? Shall we go find a killer whale’s underwater cave?’ He goes over to squat down next to your son, who’s attacking the steering wheel like he’s in Formula One.

  You smile at the backs of your boys’ matching mousy-brown heads of shaggy hair, and wander away from the submarine and around the cavernous museum. Such huge bombers and such compact Spitfires – unthinkable that grown men could fit into those cabins and sit in there for hours – all of them sleek and streamlined, like blown-up versions of Alec’s wooden planes, and yet each one a massive murder weapon.

  Walking around a gigantic tank, like a green alien-mobile that could squash you into a bloody pancake if it were to rev up its engine, you remember that picture you found online of a tank graveyard in Asmara – a vast area on the edge of the city, crammed with the rusted beasts, like a zoo full of decaying elephant carcasses, that was originally intended as both a dumping ground and a memorial to their fight for liberation. Now, apparently, those tanks were being recycled by the government.

  ‘Can I climb on it, Daddy?’ you hear a little girl ask. You picture YK, as a boy, in the army with his brothers and sisters, hiding out in that implausible-sounding revolutionary school, with tanks like this one thundering by and explosions shaking the clouds, and hope you never have to see a tank in action. But you shouldn’t take that for granted. After all, the First World War erupted out of a tiny incident, one crazed assassination. What will start the Third World War? Will it even involve tanks, or will it be a nuclear Armageddon? Will North Korea finally flip? Will America and Russia descend into another Cold War? Or will it start somewhere else, like in the Middle East? And what will the asylum-seeker situation here look like after that? Especially as the seas rise and climate change drives populations away from their homes. Will the popular media ever be sympathetic to people fleeing from violence and disaster? Or will politics just swing further and further to the right?

  You head out to the front steps, and ponder the phallic cannons sticking out of the front of the grandiose building. And why, with all we’ve discovered about science, all we’ve learned through history, all we’ve expressed in art, why do human beings – men, in particular – go this far to be brutal to each other. You sit on the top step and look beyond the cannons at the green lawns. Grass, flowers, unthreatening vegetation – all that will ultimately survive, even if humans bomb each other to extinction. The tiny green blades will push on up towards the sun, through the rusting relics of tanks and planes. Weeds will wind themselves around the rubble of once-lived-in apartment blocks. The world will become wild again. Maybe dinosaurs will return. Alec would love that idea.

  Back inside, after another half-hour or so of wandering around climbable exhibits, your son has a hangry meltdown and you tell him firmly that it must be time for lunch, even though it’s only just 11.30, and suggest a picnic outside on the grass.

  Naturally the sun has just gone in, and you forgot to bring the picnic blanket, but the three of you line up on a bench. ‘Mummy,’ Alec says with a mouthful of sandwich, ‘when I’m big, I’m going to fly a big aeroplane and shoot guns.’

  You glance across at Max. ‘No,’ you say shortly. ‘You won’t want to. It’s not fun at all, you know, the real thing.’

  ‘It is fun. Kill kill kill!’

  Alec had come back from nursery saying that for the first time the other week, making you wish momentarily that you’d had a girl, before wondering whether little girls came home saying that too. ‘Alec, never say that again please,’ you tell him. ‘It’s not funny. I mean it.’

  ‘It is funny.’

  You find anger bubbling up and turn him to face you. ‘In some countries in the world,’ you snap, ‘where there is war going on, right now, mummies and daddies get killed, or taken away from their children for ever, and the children are left all on their own. Sometimes children get killed too. Is that the kind of world you want?’

  ‘Jude,’ Max remonstrates.

  ‘I want ice cream,’ Alec says, his voice small but petulant. ‘Can we have ice cream? Chocolate ice cream?’

  ‘If you finish your sandwiches, and say please, then we can see if they have ice cream,’ you tell him, regretting your temper, and throw an apologetic look Max’s way. Even so, you hope that on some level your son was listening.

  Chapter 17: Gavin

  MIGRATION OFFICER SANG UM BONGO SONG TO AN ASYLUM SEEKER FROM CONGO

  No coffee for me – I’ll take a tea. Make it strong, and three sugars. Cheers.

  Yonas Kelati. Oh yeah – that was the one who came in saying his solicitor had sent a statement and he wanted to ‘check I’d read it’. Cocky bugger. Well, there was no statement on my file, and no time to hunt around either, so I told him we’d just go ahead without. It’s a double-edged sword, a statement. If they’ve learned it off pat they sound like parrots, and it sounds fake but there’s no legit way of saying that in our report; but on the other hand, you can use the statements to point out inconsistencies. Anyway. That day I was already in a fucking bad mood, so when he asked if I was ‘sure’ the statement wasn’t there, and could I look for it, I got even more pissed off. ‘I told you: I don’t have one,’ I said. And then, when we got in the room, he had the gumption to say his solicitor had advised him to check the interview was taped! We don’t tape any interview unless a sol requests, and he didn’t have a letter proving any such request. And anyway our recorder was broken. So I said I’d take a note, and that he’d be well advised not waste any more of my time.

  I was already behind on my targets for that day, so I was hoping he’d tell me a flimsy story and I could move on. All the management fucking care about are targets – basically deporting as many people as possible as fast as possible. When I applied, they made the job sound really good. I mean, the title, ‘Higher Executive Officer, Case Owner and Presenting Officer’, sounds like you’d have some authority and control over your life, right? And they said it’d be all about interpersonal communication and relationship building. Whatever! Our line managers treat us like shit. They’re never interested in what we have to say, they just spend their whole time telling us what targets we’ve missed and what we’re doing wrong. And they’re just a buffer between us and senior management, who we never get to talk to! It’s obvious they don’t give a fuck about the people. We constantly get told by our line managers there’s time pressure, time pressure, time pressure, but we’re already working as fast as we can all hours, so what more are we supposed to do?

  It’s not just the interviews – and they can take ages – we have to write the letters too. And on top of that we’re supposed to correspond with sols and help out with claims in other ways. But where’s the time for all that? We’re massively under strain as it is. Plus we get sent to court for the appeal hearings to nail the deportations, but we don’t get any legal training. All we get is a bit of e-learning. E-learning is bollocks as far as I’m concerned. It doesn’t prepare you for the real thing, and we can get humiliated if there’s a good barrister on the other side. Management don’t give a toss. All we want is to be appreciated and get the chance to do our job properly, right? Not be treated like rubbish the whole time.

  Oh, and the money’s crap too. My pay cheque’s just big enough so I can be a member of a five-a-side team, and if I didn’t have that pitch to vent on three times a w
eek – there’s nothing like kicking a football and sprinting around to get your anger out – I genuinely don’t know how I’d hack it. My marriage has fallen apart over this job and I hardly ever get to see my kids. I’ve applied for other jobs, but no luck. I guess it’s not really like anything else. Anyway, there’s not enough free time around this fucking job to write applications to get yourself out of it.

  Anyway. So, yeah, my mood could have been better when I spoke to your Eritrean guy. I’m pretty sure I remember him right… Black but not that black. Not that old either. Thirties, I think. Tall. Big hair. Seemed pretty calm when you looked at his face, but he was twisting his fingers so I could tell he was nervous. You’re not actually allowed to take body language into account when you decide on people, which is another fucking annoying thing about this job, because a lot of the time you can tell from that straight away if people are lying. Straight away. And it goes against real human communication not to factor that in, you know? There are so many things you can’t put into a formal letter! Like if someone starts wailing and crying at a difficult question, it seems so much more fake than if they’d dropped a single tear. But that’s just what we have to live with.

  Anyway, I asked your Eritrean the usual kinds of questions. I’ve looked over my notes so I can remember pretty much how it went…

  So, we tend to start off with the big ones, like why are you claiming asylum? And I remember, when I asked him that, he went: ‘I cannot go back. I was tortured. I have a real fear of persecution.’

  I just laughed out loud. He’d so obviously been coached! I said, ‘Okay then, tell me about your real fear of persecution and we’ll see if there’s any truth in it.’ He leaned forward like he was about to say something bolshy, but then sat back again. ‘Come on,’ I pressed him, ‘or can’t you even tell me where you’re from now?’

  ‘As you know, I come from Eritrea,’ he said, all smug.

  ‘And where were you born?’

  ‘In Addis,’ he said.

  ‘Addis, Ethiopia?!’ Brilliant, I thought – he wasn’t even born in the fucking country he said he was from. I could already see the next paragraph of my letter…

  But then he added, ‘In 1975 they were not separate countries. But both my parents are Eritrean and I lived in Asmara from when I was one year old.’

  So, he was a mouthy bastard too. ‘So tell me why you say you have this real fear of persecution then,’ I said. So, he started telling me he was a political prisoner and he was tortured, all that, and I thought, yeah yeah, you’ve been told which boxes we need to tick, so I jumped in and asked him what he was a ‘political prisoner’ for.

  ‘My writing,’ he said. ‘After they made me work for the censorship board—’

  And I was like: ‘So, hang on, you were a censor then? But now you’re asking for protection so you can stay here because of your writing. Hmm, okay.’ I’ve got to admit, I do get satisfaction from picking up on an inconsistency and watching them squirm.

  ‘I was trying to explain, I was a writer, and then had to accept that posting against my will—’ he said.

  ‘So they forced you to take a government job? As a writer? Isn’t that a kind of desirable job?’ I would take a job as a writer over this shit any day, I was thinking. I mean, I do have to do some writing, but not the kind I want to be doing.

  ‘You have to take the posting you are given,’ he said. ‘But I could not keep going and accept the situation, so I wrote secret articles—’

  ‘Oh, secret articles, is it?’ I said. ‘So where’s the evidence for that, then?’

  ‘Evidence?’ he parroted, like it hadn’t occurred to him.

  ‘Yes, evidence. Copies. Any documents that prove you wrote secret articles and the like. Or all we’ve got is your word that they were secret. Which seems a bit pointless anyway if you ask me. I mean, most people write things to be read, don’t they?’

  ‘I did want them to be read, but I had to write them secretly and send them—’

  ‘Listen,’ I interrupted, ‘to the question I asked you. Have you got copies of the articles you say you wrote or not?’

  ‘I could not print copies, it was too risky, even to keep on a memory stick – so I just typed them in internet cafés…’

  ‘What about links online?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘you can find two of them that were published by human rights organizations, with my pen name—’

  ‘Your pen name? What was that then?’

  ‘Massawa Tekle,’ he said.

  ‘Right. But your name is Yonas Kelati, according to your forms, anyway, which is totally different. So I’m supposed to believe that a couple of pieces on human rights websites, attributed to a writer with a totally different name, are actually by you. That you didn’t just come across these pieces and decide to claim them as your own.’

  ‘I sent the articles out by email,’ he said, ‘and I still have the email address I used, but I had to delete the messages—’

  ‘Convenient. No proof of authorship, and no proof of messages.’

  ‘You can check with the people I sent the articles to.’

  ‘Have you met these people, in person?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘And of course you have no papers either. Or ID.’

  ‘No, but like my statement says, I had to escape prison to get here so I couldn’t get papers, they do not grant passports to travel abroad any more unless you are a diplomat or football player.’

  He was vexing me by that point – all the answering back. I get enough shit from my line managers. All of a sudden I got one of those sharp stabs of hate for this job that I get sometimes, and I felt so fucking claustrophobic, locked in that windowless box of a room we have to sit in, even though I work in there every fucking day. I had to take a moment and chill a bit.

  ‘So, what books have you published then, if you’re a real writer?’ I asked. I’ve got a book in me as it happens, a fantasy novel, this whole world with vampire bats and werewolves – it’s all there in my head already – just never have the time in this job to write the bloody thing.

  ‘No books,’ he said, ‘not yet, but in my language I have published the texts of five plays and many articles…’

  ‘No books yet, says the famous writer!’ I couldn’t help chuckling.

  ‘I did not claim to be famous,’ he said. ‘But I did write plays and many other communications when I was working in the Department of Cultural Affairs.’

  ‘You wrote plays for a job in government?’ That was a properly ridiculous thing to claim. There’s embellishing a story, and then there’s farce.

  ‘The department organizes national events…’, he said, still pursuing it.

  ‘So, let me get this straight. The government paid you to write plays, then gave you the chance to censor other people’s plays, then you repaid them by writing secret articles against them. Even if that’s possible – and it sounds like a bloody play itself to me – why would you risk losing that kind of job? Sounds cushy, compared to what some people have to do in the army.’ Compared to what I have to do now, I was thinking.

  ‘I wrote the articles after they took away my job and posted me to the censorship board.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So have you written any plays or articles since you got here?’

  ‘I have been too busy surviving,’ he said.

  ‘Or too busy making up fairy stories for interviews,’ I said. ‘I can see you’re all about making things up.’

  He shook his head, and muttered something that sounded like that’s what they said, but I wasn’t sure.

  ‘You’ve been here a while now, haven’t you?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Over a year,’ I said.

  ‘Almost a year.’

  ‘And it just didn’t occur to you to claim asylum before now.’

  ‘I was scared,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Scared? Okay, so what changed? Was it just that you heard how good the ben
efits would be if you got asylum support when you wouldn’t even have to lift a finger?’

  He stood up then, suddenly, and I saw his fists clench, clocked how tall he was, taller than I’d thought, and reached for the panic button. But he just turned his back and walked towards the door.

  It felt good, for a moment, like a victory. But then I felt a little burn of doubt I sometimes get in my belly. Lots of them claim they’re traumatized when the questions get tough. Oh, that’s why I suddenly couldn’t speak or went off on one. Of course, I get that if most of them actually had been through the experiences they claim to have gone through, then they would be traumatized. And I’m obviously not unsympathetic to people who’ve been genuinely traumatized. Occasionally I do get those people. But most of them haven’t, or they exaggerate to improve their chances. I mean, sometimes it is hard to tell what’s true and what’s lies. Fucking hard, actually and the management don’t fucking care. Anyway, fuck it, I thought: fuck off with your plays and your fucking human rights – at least this’ll help me catch up on my targets. Refusal: tick… well, I was about to tick the box, when he turned around and came to sit back down in his chair again.

  ‘I just needed a moment. I want to continue with the interview,’ he said, firmly.

  I rolled my eyes. ‘This is your last chance,’ I told him.

  Chapter 18: Yonas

  ASYLUM ‘CHAOS’ ALLOWED RICIN PLOTTER TO KILL

  A glossy crow hopped along the construction yard fence, then stopped and cocked its head at Yonas, as if to say: You’ve claimed now. You even got asylum support. You’re really going to risk doing this? Then it cawed, loudly and repeatedly, the sarcastic laugh of a bitter old woman, before hopping on. Yonas thought of that red-faced, snub-nosed Home Office interviewer, talking down to him as if he were a recalcitrant child.

  He had felt quite confident beforehand, after talking through everything with Veata. He just hadn’t expected the interviewer to be so aggressive, to have been trying to trip him up – just like Histoire and Michel had warned. Yonas had got so agitated that he’d started burbling. He knew he wasn’t explaining himself clearly enough, and it didn’t help that the interviewer kept interrupting and accusing him of lying, and exploiting his background as a writer to keep insisting he must be making everything up.