The Invisible Crowd

by Ellen Wiles

  When I managed to get up and walk into that supermarket, there was so much food right there in front of me – bright tubs of sparkling pink watermelon, marigold mango pre-cut to the perfect size for your mouth, salads with goat’s cheese, walnuts and aubergines, and next to them plastic forks with napkins in special packets, rows of baked goods like caramel cupcakes with chocolate patterns, clear tubs of blue-white prawns that I might have shelled myself with special lemongrass butter included for cooking, rainbow layers of different vegetables ready to steam in a microwave for just two minutes, and at least a hundred different pre-prepared sandwiches in triangular boxes, filled with egg, prawns, bacon, tuna… It was like one more kind of torture. Like I was a dog and they were dangling a juicy bone in front of my mouth, just beyond the length of my chain. They would not miss one loaf of bread, would they, amid these riches? A plain brown one, not even pre-sliced, and a pint of milk?

  The detainees I told about this laughed at me. ‘Supermarkets here throw so much good stuff away,’ Banda said, ‘you could’ve filled up from the skip – sushi, tortilla chips, chorizo sausage…’ Things I had never even tasted. But as I was walking around the corner, ripping off a hunk of the bread, I was grabbed from behind. It was the security guy from the supermarket doorway, a black man, he looked African like me, and I looked hard into his eyes, I said please, but he dragged me back, called the police, and they came fast. They arrested me like I had just stolen a gold watch and a laptop computer, and when they tried to handcuff me I was so desperate, I just lashed out with my arms and legs, like a trapped animal, but that only made it worse.

  When I got to the place they call an ‘immigration removal centre’, and saw the barbed wire, I knew it was a prison. My freedom was over before it had started. I tried to find the phone number for Yonas, but it must have got lost when the police searched me, and they told me they never saw it. They managed to lose my photo of my parents too – the only thing I managed to bring with me. And when I watched how, every day, another detainee would get sent back or choose to go back, and when I heard the staff call us animals, I knew how it was going to be. I knew that this was the end of the line.

  It was not like prison back in Eritrea. I mean, you did not get tortured, and the food was okay, and you could drink as much water as you wanted – but it was still a prison. And so grey. Living there was like slowly drowning in greyness. Grey walls, grey sky outside, grey faces. At first I talked a bit to the other detainees, but then, after two weeks, one guy I quite liked got deported.

  To the officers, I was nobody. I could just have been a donkey they had to keep an eye on so as to get paid. One nice lady worked in the library, and I used to go there, but reading English is too difficult for me. The letters get mixed up. Even when we were kids it would always take me five times as long as Yonas to read a book, even in Tigrinya – my father used to tell me I was lazy, but it was not true. I tried, but I could not concentrate, and I had no energy for exercise, so I just stayed in my cell. Which I was supposed to call a room.

  Most of the staff could hardly wait to get away after their shift each day, so they could go to the pub or go home to watch TV. They pretended they cared when they told me to stop cutting myself. They even sent a psychiatric doctor to ‘help’ me. But really they just wanted him to stop me hurting myself to protect their jobs. A dead detainee would mean a lot of forms, and they were always filling in forms as it was, and complaining about having to fill in forms.

  After a while I did not feel like eating the food we were given. I thought about not eating at all, just stopping, fading away, but I saw one other guy who did that, and they just took him to the hospital, fed him through his nose, and brought him back.

  One good thing about that place was that I had pens and paper to draw with, as much as I liked. So I sat in my cell and I tried to draw, thinking maybe I would feel better. At first I drew cartoons of the other detainees, then faces of people like Yonas and Osman. But then I would think how I would never see these people again, and I began colouring over the faces, colouring over everything, until the whole sheet of white paper was black. I got through many pens, many sheets of paper, like that.

  I kept replaying my Home Office interview in my head, the one they sent me to before locking me up. That man made me talk about things that I never admitted to anyone before. Even Yonas. When I said I had been tortured, he made me tell him all the details. So I told him, about the beatings, the hard labour, carrying those rocks in the sun, the helicopter position – and I mentioned to him how the guards did worse things to me. I thought he would guess what I meant, or that the other information I gave him would be enough. But he told me he wanted all the details. So I told him how the prison guards mocked me. You like men, don’t you… You have had sex with men… and how I tried to tell them the truth so they would leave me alone, so I admitted how a soldier abused me when I was still a boy, and they said I was lying. They told me I would have to take off my clothes to prove it. And then they did things to me.

  I thought the Home Office interviewer would understand that. But he said, ‘So now you are gay as well?’ And laughed.

  I had heard one of the detainees say that in the UK being gay was a reason to be protected, so I thought, maybe it is the time to be open. ‘Yes,’ I admitted.

  ‘And you’ve been sexually abused? Sounds to me like a convenient, erotic little story you have come up with for this interview! Right?’

  I said I did not invent it.

  ‘Oh, so let me get this straight, haha, straight!’ he said. He laughed again. I did not see why this was funny. ‘So now you are saying you are gay, and you had sex with adult soldiers when you were still a child, and you then had sex with guards when you were in prison. Is that right?’

  ‘I was forced to,’ I said.

  ‘Are you saying you have never had sex with a woman?’ he asked.

  I said that was true.

  ‘And you are now thirty years old.’

  I nodded.

  ‘So what are their names, then, all these men you say forced you to have sex with them?’

  I took a breath. I had never said it since it happened. ‘The first soldier was called Adonay…’

  ‘Oh your first time! Romantic. Okay, so where exactly did you and Adonay have sex? Describe the place.’

  ‘Outside. Behind some rocks,’ I said.

  ‘Outside! So you are an exhibitionist.’

  I did not know what he meant.

  ‘Did you put your penis in Adonay’s backside?’ he asked me. I stared at him, aghast. ‘It’s a simple question. Yes or no?’ he said.

  ‘No.’ I was wishing I had never mentioned any of this.

  ‘But he put his in yours?’

  I did not want to answer. But I could not contradict myself. I had to go through with it. I wanted to curl up like a beetle.

  ‘And when he did that, did you have an erection?’ he asked. I was not sure what the word was, but he demonstrated for me. ‘Tell me the truth.’

  I did not answer.

  ‘And did Adonay ejaculate inside you? Did he come? You know what I’m asking you. Like this.’ He mimed shooting a gun from his crotch.

  I did not answer.

  ‘Did you use a condom?’

  I just stared at him.

  ‘Answer me, come on, this is an interview, remember. Do you want asylum or not? You have to answer my questions if you want to stand a chance.’

  ‘No,’ I said finally.

  ‘So tell me, what is it about men’s backsides that attracts you? Come on. It’s an easy question. Have you gone mute? Surely you know what turns you on?’

  I did not answer.

  ‘Well, this seems like a neat way to add a bonus human rights layer to your asylum claim. Did your lawyer tell you to say this?’

  I said nothing. And he was not finished. ‘Are you religious?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, though I wasn’t really any more. But I was relieved he’d changed the subject
.

  ‘What is your religion?’

  ‘Christian.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘Orthodox. My parents were Orthodox…’

  ‘So how can you justify being homosexual? The Bible says it is a sin, correct? Orthodox Christians are very strict about that kind of thing.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I knew he was laying a trap now.

  ‘So how am I supposed to believe that you defied your entire culture and religion to have all this twisted gay sex you are now claiming you had?’

  He had not even got onto asking why I left Eritrea yet.

  As I sat in my cell in the detention centre – my room – this interview went around and around and around in my head. I wondered if Yonas had been questioned like that. I wished I had left the factory with him. I wished I had got on a train like him. But I was too much of a coward, I just walked, and that is why I ended up shovelling animal shit and sleeping on hay at a farm, and then sneaking into a pesticide delivery truck to get closer to London. I got off at a petrol station near a place called High Wycombe when the driver was paying, and walked along the side of the motorway until I arrived.

  It is strange how two people’s lives can be in parallel and then fork apart, so one ends up on the right path, and one on the wrong path. When Yonas and I were little boys I was the confident one! Yonas was shy, skinny, always reading books, and I used to protect him. I was faster at running, and my cartoons made people laugh, and made even the teachers respect me. But I had no brothers or sisters, my mother died when I was very young, so all I had was my father, and then he was ‘disappeared’. If he was killed that would have been terrible, but at least I would have known for sure, but after he was ‘disappeared’ I both knew what had happened and didn’t know. I could never make peace with it.

  So then I was alone. My aunts did not want me. I was lucky that my father and Yonas’s father were good friends, so his parents took me along with them to join the liberation struggle. But I was never part of Yonas’s family. Not really. And near the front line, I was so scared. Yonas and some of the other kids were kind of excited, but I hated the war and everything to do with it, right from the start. I felt terrified just to open my eyes every single morning. And then, when Yonas’s parents and brother were killed… I think it affected me almost worse than him. I could not sleep at night. I kept on thinking: I am next.

  It was at that time that I just started following Yonas in everything. Even if what he was doing was risky. The only thing that was mine alone was my drawing; but of course when he asked me to make theatre sets for his plays, I said yes. When he had any new ideas, or when times were hard, I just did everything he suggested. I did not want to lose him, after my father. And I loved him. More than a brother. At one time, when there was a big battle close by and I thought it was our last moment, I nearly told him – but I stopped myself just in time. After our country’s independence, when I started my art studio in Asmara, and people started to buy my work, finally I thought I would be able to stop being scared and I could start enjoying my life. Maybe I could even look for love elsewhere.

  But then I was conscripted for the border war. And every day I was there in the army was a nightmare. Until one day I could not pick up my gun. I mean, physically, I could not. Everything froze, and I felt like I could not breathe, and the world became very small and far away, and I thought I was dying. I came to in the hospital ward. When I went back the next day, the same happened. I could not make my body pick up a gun one more time. It was a kind of panic attack, they said, and they could not stop me having them, even by beating me. So I was sent back to Asmara. And Yonas was sent back too, because he got malaria.

  After that, I had to take a national service post in the transport office, which was as boring as anything I could imagine, and Yonas was made to take a post in the censorship board, which made him furious. So when he suggested we should send out messages to foreigners to tell them about the situation in our country, that he would write articles and I should draw cartoons to communicate to people more directly, I agreed. We were arrested together in an internet café – caught red-handed, as you would say.

  When Yonas said he had a plan to escape from prison, of course I agreed. Anything was better than being in there. It was only after we finally got to the UK, after a journey I thought would never end, when the factory was horrible and cold, and our boss started torturing people just like prison back home, that I thought, I am done now. I cannot do this any more. I have no fight left. Yonas has fire still. I have to stop dragging him down. I have got to let him go. He will be better off without me. I will just stay here and look after Osman, and maybe find a way to kill myself once he is not there to stop me. And Yonas left. But in the end it was Osman, once he was getting stronger but still could not walk properly, who told me I had to leave too, and try to find Yonas. He said that he would see us in London one day.

  So, I got on the rubbish truck, like Yonas did. And I thought the driver had not seen me, but then he stopped the truck on a quiet road just around the corner, and looked around, so I jumped off, ready to run, but he called out: ‘Wait! Your friend has something for you.’ And he gave me a piece of paper with an address of a shop in London. It was an amazing moment. I even started to feel hope again.

  But then, after all my efforts to get to that address, I was arrested before I even found Yonas. As they put me in the police van, I was sure I would never see him again. I thought that if he did not get my phone message he would have no way to know I had left the factory, and even if he did get the message, he would never know where to find me. But he did find me. Actually, his lawyer, Veata, she found me. Yonas had told her to ask around at detention centres for an Eritrean named Gebre Merhawi, and when she found me, she offered to represent me, for free. It was kind of her. But I had already done my Home Office interview by then. She looked disappointed, like she would have been able to prepare me. I knew I had probably done it wrong. But anyway, it was too late.

  Yonas tried to visit me but the first time he was turned away. One of the guards told me he had just left the reception to go home. It felt like I had just been offered a drink of water in the desert and then it was pulled from my lips. Even now, when they had taken my freedom, when they had taken my photo, they had everything, they would not even let me see the one person who wanted to visit me, the one person I could talk to in my own language, the one person who could maybe give me back some hope. I started cutting myself again, just to feel some pain that I could focus on, pain that I could manage, pain that made me feel alive, just to feel something. But as soon as that pain went away, I would feel even worse. So I had to cut again.

  When Yonas was finally allowed to visit, I had been moved to isolation. I had been wanting to see his face again for so long, but by that point I was on so many drugs I was numb, in my body, in my mind. Even when Yonas was finally sitting there in front of me, he could easily just have been a life-size painting of himself on canvas. I heard the words he was saying – he was trying to cheer me up, to tell me things would get better, he was telling me about his life, what was going on – but I could not concentrate, all I wanted was to be left alone. When he left, he gave me a bar of chocolate, some phone credit to call him, and a copy of this book in Tigrinya, The Strange Painter – I still don’t know how he managed to find that.

  Back in my cell, I held the book for a long time, looking at the cover image, the font, feeling the shape of it, the weight of the pages. I finally opened it and tried to read, but I could not concentrate. To think of an artist character painting freely like the one in the book seemed so far away. Like it could never have been part of my life.

  When I was lying on my bed, with no energy, no appetite, trying not to think about cutting, I would try to imagine my mother, to draw a detailed picture of her face in my mind. I could not remember much, because she died when I was very young, when she was giving birth to my sister – that was the end of them both – but I had her photo, for
many years, and I remembered how she had these deep creases in both her cheeks and a laugh that was like bubbles coming up from deep, warm, blue water. Then I would try to draw my father’s face in my mind. He was always more focused on his work than on me, but he was still my father. He was all the family I had. And they took him away before I could say goodbye.

  I would try harder to remember the good things about my life, about my country, not just the bad. I tried to remember the light back home. In the UK, and especially inside the detention centre, I could barely imagine what sunlight was like any more. Proper sunlight, I mean, the kind that puts out heat as well as light, that warms your bones, that transforms the sky into a blanket of blue and palm trees into emerald butterflies, and makes skin glow like honey, makes women’s clothes dance like flocks of parrots and bee-eaters in the urban jungle. I thought about passagero in Asmara after independence, walking with Yonas, the early evening air fragrant with meals being prepared in the restaurants, and feeling excited for the future, like we were finally going to be living in some kind of dreamland all our own, watching the sun fling persimmon ribbons around the sky.

  I tried to remember what it was like when I had my studio in Asmara, how eager I was to rise before the sun just to go there and get to work. Sometimes I would paint dark pictures of the struggle, but other days I would paint joyful images of the city – of the trees and buildings and vases and markets and people walking, and I would add bright splashes of colour, make the shadows teal and violet instead of grey, make the clouds a soft mint green. But the important clients only wanted to buy the pictures of the struggle and to see all my work as a document of patriotic struggle that they could hang in their houses to prove themselves.

  When I was not lying on my bed, I kept on drawing on white paper with black ink, then colouring in my drawings until the black was everywhere and all the white was gone. The greyness of the detention centre was colouring in my brain just like that. Smothering all the light. I just wanted to feel the pain of cutting. One day soon I will get something sharp, and I will be ready to make my last cut, I thought – right into the artery. But then, one day, Yonas paid me a surprise visit, and he told me I had to get on board with just one more of his plans – the most crazy, ridiculous, and maybe the most brilliant plan he had come up with yet.