The Invisible Crowd

by Ellen Wiles

  Chapter 24: Yonas

  HOW UNCLE AZAD, THE MASTER FORGER, GAVE THOUSANDS OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS A PASSPORT TO BRITAIN

  From the moment Yonas woke up, he had a feeling something was going to happen. The envelope lying on the doormat said: I told you so.

  He picked it up, went to the kitchen, looked at it. He put on his coat and went out, deciding as he turned left that he would walk down to the local park to open it. He sat on a bench there under a tree, and pulled out the envelope. Inside would be his ticket to join Gebre in the detention centre, almost certainly. But it could, just possibly, be a missive of good news – spectacular news. Maybe he should open it in a more significant place where he could feel truly celebratory, or a place that could at least remind him of his time being free in London… He got up, and decided impulsively to head to the South Bank.

  For once, the air was gloriously crisp and the sky was blue, and it felt good to be going somewhere while he was still officially free to do so legally. Unlike Gebre. Why had he been so unlucky as to get caught for stealing something so small, to fill his starving belly? Did the police have no heart? Nobody more important to arrest?

  As he paced past council estates, he imagined the buildings as rocky outcrops in the wilderness, as if he were back on one of those walks with Sarama on a mountain path, along the rim of a vast crevasse, the rocky screes around them dotted with scrawny thorn bushes and hardy bau bau trees sweeping steeply down to sun-baked planes; how liberating those walks were, despite the sick fear at the thought of all the Ethiopian eyes watching them across the impasse.

  He got to Vauxhall Bridge and paused to take in the view. The Thames glinted as it churned, windows gleamed like scattered sequins, and London was a radiant postcard of itself. He continued along the river, weaving among jostling commuters. The chain of people crossing on the far side of the bridge was silhouetted by the sun, and the sight reminded him of a line he’d read: life is but a procession of shadows. He remembered underlining it but couldn’t remember the book now, and wondered whether Nina and Molly would visit and bring him books if he ended up in a detention centre too. Would he be put in the same one as Gebre?

  He paused again opposite Westminster, which hovered at the water’s edge like an ancient wedding cake turned parchment – on the brink of crumbling and dissolving, like the empire during the last gasp of its historical power. He continued, past scampering dogs, joggers, cyclists, a homeless woman with a cardboard sign and a tin bowl, to Hungerford Bridge, with its diamond-lattice metalwork and huge metal fan shapes. This would have been Gebre’s celebratory moonwalking spot, right here. It was too galling that Gebre was finally in the same city now, yet was more distant than ever.

  Yonas’s first visit to the detention centre, when he was finally let in after a failed attempt, had been worse than he’d imagined. Gebre had been cutting himself badly, and was barely able to make eye contact. Questions like how are you doing, how are you feeling, were met with almost imperceptible shrugs.

  ‘Hey. Look at me,’ Yonas had said, ‘please, Gebre. I know this is hard, I can’t believe the bastards arrested you, but the main thing is that you’re here, I’ve found you, and you’ve got to try to stay positive – which means no more cutting, okay? Veata is working on your case, and she’s a really good lawyer. She can set you free – if you keep believing it!’ He sounded like one of those self-help books from the library.

  ‘No,’ Gebre said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t patronize me, Yonas. I am detained here “indefinitely” – that could mean for ever.’

  ‘Okay, in theory, but it won’t for you. We’ll be together again before you know it. You can come and live in my house. And guess what – I have a British friend who is an artist. Did you hear me? An artist! She even has her own studio space. And she says you can use it, she can get you materials, you can make art again, Gebre – paint whatever you like. People will appreciate your talent more here, you will have freedom to paint or draw anything at all. You can even start doing cartoons again… Satirical cartoons are in all the papers here. No politician bats an eyelid.’

  Gebre’s face twitched, but it wasn’t clear whether it was in acknowledgment or a tic.

  ‘Look, I know you’ve had a nightmare time since we got to the UK,’ Yonas continued. ‘Way worse than me. And it does feel so far from home… but it’s not so bad, there are good people around, British people, who are kind, some of them, but there’s also an Eritrean community – I’ve met some already who are super-friendly. And you get used to the cold weather, it’s just about getting the right clothes, and British people love nothing better than talking about it…’ He could hear the insincerity in his voice. And he might as well have been talking to himself anyway, for all the acknowledgement he was getting.

  But then Gebre replied. ‘Yonas, I am not even allowed outside here. I do not care about the weather. One of the guards said we were caged animals.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘And as for British people, that Home Office guy… Please do not ask me about that interview, not ever. All I can say is, after that, there is no way he is letting me stay. I do not have to get a refusal letter to know that. They will just make me do my time here and then they will send me home to die. And if I refuse to go, they will keep me here until I do.’

  ‘They won’t. My interview was terrible as well, so humiliating – but everybody’s is. Everyone I’ve talked to who’s done one. But did you… did you tell them…’

  ‘I said, don’t talk to me about it.’

  ‘I hope you did tell them; it can help your case – and it’s fine to be gay here. Most of the guys who live in my house are gay! One of them is a good friend of mine now, his name is Emil, he’s from Romania and he’s so funny – you’ll like him. When you come out you can meet him!’

  ‘I’m not going to get out.’

  ‘You will. Veata is on your case. They can’t send you back to die just because you needed a tiny bit of food.’

  Gebre shook his head. ‘I am a mosquito to the people who run this place. A criminal mosquito carrying malaria…’

  ‘No – you’re a talented artist, you’re an excellent friend, you’re a brilliant person.’

  ‘These psychological doctors, officers, all of them, they understand nothing. I am tired. Tired of these people and tired of myself.’

  ‘Gebre, of course you are feeling sad because you are stuck in here. But your time has come for better luck now. You deserve it. And I’m going to help you. So is Veata, and so can my British friends. I can introduce you to Nina, the artist I told you about. She is beautiful with red hair like copper and green eyes… When you meet her you will want to paint her.’

  This at least provoked a cynical eyebrow raise.

  ‘But you can’t meet anyone or do anything if you make yourself too ill to leave this place. Are you hearing me?’

  Gebre’s eyes danced, and an upside-down smile contorted his lips. ‘So now you have had these fragments of good luck, you think it will all be fine, you think you can just marry this red-haired woman and stay here and make children with her and everything will be happy ever after?’

  ‘I didn’t say that! She’s already married. Look, Veata gets people asylum every week. She even represented this Eritrean guy who travelled here with a woman he met on the journey, and they had to hide under the chassis of this big lorry together to cross from Calais – he was hiding inside the spare tyre, and she was sitting inside the shell – and they were travelling really fast, at least seventy miles per hour, and the woman told him she had to let go because her back hurt so badly and she could not take it for one more minute, but he persuaded her to hold on, that she would die if she fell, and he wanted her to live, and so she held on – and they made it, and now they are married!’

  ‘Okay, very nice story. Romantic story. Go ahead and write a play about it. But you saw one lucky guy, on the outside. I see all the rest of them, stuck inside this prison, alone.�
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  ‘TIME,’ yelled the guard, louder than was necessary.

  If this letter would only contain good news, Yonas thought, he could go back to the detention centre and tell Gebre: ‘Look: there’s still hope!’ He picked out a bench, resolving to open the envelope finally, but after turning it around a few times he got up again. He needed to walk some more. He walked, faster now, along to Tower Bridge and all the way down to Greenwich before turning back and retracing his steps. A boatload of tourists passed him on the river, crammed in and craning out with their cameras, excited to visit this iconic place they could descend on, pick the best images to document for their families to prove their travel stories were true, and leave again freely. A hundred years ago, grand vessels used to sail this river, he thought, carrying merchants and seamen from far away, bearing commodities like sugar and coal and oil from his continent, from the empire. It didn’t have the same importance now as the city’s artery, but it still had as much physical power as ever, and he might as well be a speck of soil being carried along in its current – that was how momentary and insignificant his life was in comparison, and how little control he seemed to have to set his own direction.

  Dusk began to smudge the sky. His legs felt stiff, and he could put it off no longer. He picked out a bench outside the huge Tate Modern building, where he had been supposed to go with Nina for that date and now maybe never would, and sat down. He took out the envelope and looked at it again, ran the side of his finger along the line of the seal on the back, started to loosen the glue with his nail, but stopped before it came apart. A lifeboat was zipping eastwards, a clipper was trundling west, and the cluster of grand, static shapes were lined up across the water like a theatre set in which he was supposed to be both the actor and the audience. He felt as present in this place, in this moment, as if he had just stepped on stage. The people down the towpath to his right, their faces still illuminated by the evening light, seemed to radiate positivity, whereas the people to his left, their faces submerged in shadow, seemed to exude grimness. The world was divided into two halves, two possibilities.

  To stay, or not to stay.

  To be in or to be out.

  He tore, fast now, and roughly, along the top of the envelope and wrenched it open, nearly ripping the letter in his belated haste.

  Dear Yonas Kelati,

  This letter is written following your application for leave to remain on asylum and/or human rights grounds…

  You claim to be an Eritrean national of thirty years old. However, you have not produced any identity or travel documents to confirm this. You claim to have arrived in the United Kingdom without such documents, and that you were under the control of traffickers and worked at a factory. However, when questioned you were unable to provide any meaningful information as to the identity of the traffickers or the precise location of the factory.

  He scrunched up the paper in a silent fit of anger, and nearly tossed it into the water. It was obvious where this was going. He should have talked more in the interview about Aziz, about the torture… But perhaps he was being too hasty. The letter was long – maybe it would get better. He smoothed it out again.

  You claim that you were involved in dissident writing… you claim you were imprisoned… you escaped and fled Eritrea. However, you have not provided any evidence of politically dissident writing attributed to your name…

  But I told you, I couldn’t even print articles… I had to go round different internet cafés and use a pen name…

  Since you yourself worked for the country’s censorship office, actively engaged in restricting the writing and speech of other Eritrean citizens, it does not appear credible that you would have in fact espoused values such as freedom of expression as strongly as you now claim to, or have produced dissident writing yourself…

  Yonas’s hands started to tremble. He rested the paper on his lap.

  ‘I can’t believe we’ve got this to ourselves! Great idea…’ A girl’s voice, coming from beyond the wall. Yonas craned forward, and saw a small beach down by the water’s edge, where two teenage girls were standing by the water. One picked up a stone and skimmed it deftly, and it flew in three arcing leaps before sinking. He returned to his letter.

  The Secretary of State notes that there are significant differences between your various accounts. This casts doubts on the credibility of your claim. For instance, in your SEF you stated that you were in prison for three or four months but in your asylum interview you stated that you were detained for more than three months.

  That’s what you pick up on and label a lie? It’s not even a contradiction.

  The Secretary of State notes the evidence you presented of marks on your body, which you claimed in your asylum interview were caused by severe beatings while in prison. However, you have not provided any medical evidence to confirm how the marks came to be there. Furthermore, you stated that you managed to escape from prison soon after, run for miles and spend two days without food or water. The Secretary of State is of the opinion that a person as injured as you claimed to be would not be able to achieve such physical feats. He considers that this casts doubt on the credibility of your claim.

  ‘You haven’t got a fag have you, mate?’

  Someone else had come to sit on his bench, and a sour, unwashed scent hit Yonas’s nostrils. He looked up: an old tramp with straggly hair. Yonas opened his mouth to reply, and found he was breathing in short, sharp jabs. Finally, he said, ‘I don’t smoke, sorry.’

  The tramp pulled a can of cider out of his bag, and opened it with a hiss. He took a swig, and looked out at the river. A small trolley next to him was loaded with plastic bags, presumably bulging with all his possessions. Yonas looked back at his sheet of paper. Such a light and fragile thing. And nobody around him knew what he was reading, and what it meant, not the tramp, not anybody.

  ‘Supermarkets,’ the tramp said suddenly. ‘Who called them super? Horrible places. Super. Ha. The name is the only super thing about them. Most godawful places on the planet!’

  ‘I like them,’ Yonas found himself saying, thinking of the long, colourful rows of perfectly formed fruit and vegetables… ‘When I have money to spend.’ He returned to the letter.

  The Secretary of State is of the opinion that if you had been of significant interest to the Eritrean authorities as you claimed, you would not have been able to escape from prison as you claimed because there would have been more stringent security in place.

  But someone escaped from Belmarsh here in London! I read it in your papers…

  You claimed to have been invited to stay with an ‘auntie’, in the UK, but have not provided any evidence of the identity of this ‘auntie’, whom you claimed you could not find after you arrived.

  ‘Want some?’ The tramp was proffering the cider can.

  Yonas nearly said no, but then thought: Why not? He took it, tipped his head back and glugged. Sweet and tinny, the alcohol spun around his veins. ‘Thank you!’ he said, handing it back.

  ‘Welcome. Where you from then?’ the tramp asked.

  ‘Eritrea. Have you heard of it?’

  ‘Oh yeah, love it there, had the time of my life on holidays the other week, helluva place,’ the tramp said. ‘Ha! Kidding! I ain’t never even been to France,’ and he descended into crackly laughter. Yonas smiled. Helluva place.

  The Secretary of State considers your delay in applying for asylum to be unreasonable. He considers this further undermines the credibility of your claim. He must question why, if you believed yourself to be in genuine fear of your life and wanted to seek international protection, you would not have availed yourself or attempted to avail yourself of the protection of the United Kingdom by claiming asylum at the earliest opportunity at the arrival port.

  Not sure how I was expected to break out of my container at the arrival port.

  You mentioned other people whom you said had been trafficked to this country like you had. The Secretary of State has reason to believe that the
credibility of your comments in relation to those people is flawed.

  What was this about? Reason to believe? What reason? Surely not Gebre… Could Gebre have given a contradictory account? What could he have said? Yonas turned, slowly, to the last page.

  It is considered that your submissions do not qualify for asylum or humanitarian protection. It is also considered that they do not qualify for limited leave to remain in accordance with the published Home Office Asylum Policy Instruction on Discretionary Leave.

  You have no basis of stay in the United Kingdom and should make arrangements to leave the United Kingdom without delay.

  In all the circumstances we prefer that those with no basis of stay in the United Kingdom leave voluntarily, but should you fail to do so then your removal may be enforced.

  Yonas sank his head to his knees. Screwed up his eyes. Scrunched up the letter again and encased it in his fists.

  ‘Bloodyell, would you look at that? Coupla lezzies down there on the beach! My eye!’ the tramp said.

  Yonas straightened up and glanced over. The two girls were embracing now, and as their lips briefly parted while they gazed at each other, the long hair of one tumbled around the face of the other in the breeze. ‘I am glad someone is having a good time,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I’m having a ball,’ the tramp retorted, ‘especially now there’s a free show on. Always regretted never having a threesome, but I reckon my time’s passed.’

  Yonas stared past the girls out to the river, as it churned on, and on, and on.

  Veata had said that if he did get a refusal there was still a chance of a fresh claim, but only if the police got new evidence. So far there was no sign of that. The factory might already have closed. And even if it was raided, Aziz would probably deny Yonas had worked there just to spite him.