The Invisible Crowd

by Ellen Wiles

  ‘Oh come on!’ he said. ‘You told me I could bring other official documents – you didn’t say I would need more than one.’

  ‘I told you we couldn’t necessarily accept other documents,’ I said.

  And then he burst out at me: ‘You can’t turn me away again! Do you even know my friend, Gebre? Have some compassion! Let me tell you what he has—’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with compassion,’ I said. ‘It is just the rules.’

  ‘Okay. Look, I understand you are just doing your job. But please can you ask your manager, just in case he can accept these documents, this time?’

  I hesitated. I knew Gebre Merhawi hadn’t had any other visitors, I’d checked, and it did seem wrong that people with depression like him should be kept in here indefinitely. I mean, that situation could send anyone a bit crazy. So I relented, and said I’d call the manager, but that it was unlikely he’d make a different decision.

  After I’d put the call through, I sat Yonas down. There was nobody else at reception, so I explained to him, out of goodwill, that Gebre had recently been moved into isolation for a while because he had been harming himself.

  ‘How?’ he asked sharply, leaning forward, almost as if he were accusing me of hurting the guy!

  ‘I heard that he broke a canteen plate by stamping on it, and used the shard of plastic to cut into his wrists,’ I explained. I knew I probably shouldn’t be the one sharing this information, but I felt like Yonas Kelati should know as he might be able to help, and also I kind of owed him for failing to deliver the note, though I wasn’t going to admit that. ‘Does he have a history of doing this, do you know?’ I asked. He didn’t answer straight away but he frowned as if he were remembering something. ‘Any information like that could help us to help him.’

  He sighed. ‘Gebre is traumatized,’ he said. ‘So much has happened to him, torture in prison, for one thing, but so much more: his father was disappeared when he was a kid, war, the journey. . . And from what you are saying about his condition, I know Gebre; he needs to be in a hospital, right now, or out of here, in a house with friends, people to support him. He should never have been put in here.’

  ‘Okay, well thanks for sharing that,’ I said. ‘I’ll pass on your comments. But you can rest reassured that the doctor here is monitoring him. Now, since we’re still waiting for the manager, I’ll take your photo and fingerprints.’ I took his photo first. He was quite striking, actually, with prominent cheekbones – I mean, not my taste, but he could probably do modelling or something; they like darker skin these days, don’t they? Then I showed him to the fingerprint scanner. He lifted his hands, and I noticed they were shaking.

  ‘I don’t think this part is going to work,’ he said. Slowly, he turned his hands over, and I saw the bright, uneven scars on each of his finger pads, as if a child had persuaded him to do some finger painting with a pot of bright pink paint. I wondered if he had any sensation in them, and imagined the scene when they were first burned, probably by some smuggler in the wilderness near a border, with no painkillers. I swallowed.

  ‘No, I’m afraid it won’t,’ I said. ‘And I can’t let you in without scanned fingerprints, so—’

  ‘But please,’ he said. ‘They just burned off in a fire – it was not my fault. That could happen to any British person as well, right? You would not refuse a British person permission to visit family in here because they had been in an accident?’

  But it wouldn’t happen to them, I thought, and they rarely do have family in here. ‘I’ll ask the manager when he comes,’ I said.

  We waited in silence for a while, and I felt increasingly bad about Gebre Merhawi, who was about to lose his only chance to have a visitor, again. I got up and called through to my manager to see what the hold-up was. ‘He’s gone on lunch,’ the secretary said.

  ‘But he was supposed to be coming down to check an issue with a visitor’s paperwork,’ I said.

  ‘Must’ve forgot,’ she said.

  I put the phone down and looked at Yonas Kelati. He looked back at me, pleading. ‘Okay, fine, I will let you in this once,’ I said. ‘Just because your friend is unwell and he could do with a visitor, probably. But I am making a note that nobody was around to authorize your damaged fingerprints. And next time you’ll need to bring additional documents, okay?’ He nodded.

  I led him through, and handed him over to the guy who was supervising visits. I went to the staff room to grab my sandwiches after that, and then I walked back via the interview area and looked in. The two of them were sitting at a table in a corner. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it was probably in their language anyway. Gebre hadn’t visibly cheered up at his friend’s arrival. I watched Yonas reach out to touch the bandages on his arms, then hold Gebre’s shoulder and ask him questions. Gebre just gave short answers, then Yonas got worked up, and then Gebre got even more worked up, and I thought Dan, the supervisor, would step in to calm it down, but then they quietened again. Gebre seemed to get upset again, his body shook, and Yonas tried to comfort him. I did feel sorry for them then. Both of them. Of course I did. But the fact was, Gebre was at the end of the road here, and this was the system, and there was nothing we or either of them could do about it.

  The one other visitor Gebre had, at least the only recorded one, was his lawyer. Asian looking, quiet, a polite lady. But on her way out once, I asked if her meeting went okay, and she said, ‘That man should not be detained here in his condition – it’s a breach of his human rights, he’s seriously ill,’ and looked at me hard, the kind of look that said: I am the good angel here and you are evil. It really annoys me that people like her think they are so righteous, that they are ‘saving the vulnerable’, and that we’re all on the dark side. I’m just doing my job! Same with my colleagues. We’re a nice bunch, mostly, just ordinary people, working hard. And all the detention centre is doing is helping to make sure people don’t break the law. Plus, the law is the way it is so the UK doesn’t overflow with illegal immigrants, especially criminal ones. Anyone who commits a crime here has to take the consequences, and if you’re an illegal immigrant like Gebre Merhawi then the consequence should be you don’t get the right to stay, and if you won’t leave, then you have to be detained. Simple. Look, I know, the lawyer was just doing her job too. And maybe she wasn’t thinking that I was evil. Maybe I was reading that into it. But anyway, I don’t trust all the human rights stuff that much. It sounds nice, but as far as I can see from what you read in the papers, it’s mostly used by criminals to get away with stuff – like, I know I’m a terrorist and murdered a bunch of children, but please don’t deport me, I have a human right to see my own child once a week.

  But, whatever. I don’t think I or anyone at the centre could have stopped what happened next. It wasn’t as if we didn’t have a doctor monitoring Gebre Merhawi. All the appropriate procedural steps had been followed.

  The day the alarms went off, it was in the middle of a visiting session and I was supervising. I remember, me and the other guard were chatting about her hen night which was coming up that weekend, and everything was calm. Until suddenly the bells shrilled and there was this big commotion, and one of the other officers ran in and told us that there was a code red, and when we asked what happened, he whispered that Gebre Merhawi had escaped. Escaped! I couldn’t believe it. He seemed such a passive, quiet guy, always depressed and sitting around, I just couldn’t imagine him initiating anything major like that. Plus, the detention centre is super-secure – I mean, there’s barbed wire and high walls and triple gates.

  We had to get cracking, shepherding out visitors and getting detainees to their rooms. And as I was rushing around, doing the lockdown procedures, it struck me: I bet it was that friend, Yonas Kelati. He must be behind it. He was the type of guy who would try his luck: he’d tried it on with me, getting into the centre without the right documents – he’d even told me he thought Gebre shouldn’t be detained. But when we checked the book later, he’d never si
gned in. Anyway, the staff were all mega-stressed, and the lockdown was extra tough because the detainees started getting agitated as the news went around. Everyone’s rooms were searched, but there was no evidence of a break-in.

  But then, Gebre Merhawi came back into the centre of his own accord and – get this – he was in drag! I mean, he had a long wig on, and purple lipstick, on top of his normal clothes. It would’ve been hilarious, if his face hadn’t been so strange and sad. He just walked in the front door, all silent, and waited to be cuffed. Refused to say anything about what happened, how the fuck he escaped with that as a ‘disguise’, how he even got hold of the wig and lipstick, not to mention why he came back! Later, the police found one of the cleaner’s uniforms. It had been thrown over a wall. He insisted he hadn’t taken it, but he must have done. Clever bastard. I wonder how much he used his mental health originally to dupe us into thinking he wasn’t capable of something like that. Of course, we had to punish him so the other detainees learned a lesson, and he was put in solitary. He went without a word of protest.

  Eventually the others calmed down, and it was all over so fast that the centre managed to avoid a media storm – over the escape, anyway, and the kerfuffle after it among the other detainees. The staff just had to give our version of events for an internal investigation, and those of us on duty got formal warnings. Not that it was our fault, in any shape or form.

  But what happened next… We have protocols to stop it happening and we followed them all, so there was nothing more we could have done. Gebre was watched all the time, so there was no way he could cut himself; all reasonable steps had been taken. But when one of my colleagues went for a pee, for like one minute, he took his shirt off and hanged himself from the light fitting.

  Well, that sent the other detainees crazy: they started rioting and shouting and throwing stuff, and we had to handcuff some and isolate them, and police were called, so then they had to be told about the escape incident too. Just when it seemed like the whole thing would stay out of the media, we got a headline about a detainee suicide, accusations that the centre wasn’t fit for purpose, and, sure enough, a whole new raft of forms and protocols followed.

  On the day it happened, there was too much firefighting to do for me to really process it – but when I got home that night, I cried. Only time that ever happened to me after a day at work, except the day when Esme was deported. I kept thinking, What if I’d remembered to pass on that note, before he got into a really bad way? My boyfriend said it wasn’t my fault, it was the fault of the system I work for. Still, every day I go into work now, I remember it. So I’m even more careful not to get attached to any of the individual detainees, because it’d just get me down too, you know?

  Chapter 28: Yonas

  BOGUS ASYLUM SEEKER ACCUSED OF MURDERING TEENAGER ATTEMPTS SUICIDE IN PRISON

  Gebre is dead. Gebre is dead. Gebre is dead. Buildings, fields, trees, buildings, fields, trees, buildings, fields, trees, oblivious sun on smeary windows, oblivious cars on crowded roads, a village, a farm, a canary-yellow field, a river sparkling through emerald green, a picture book scene… It wasn’t long ago that he and Gebre were back in a war zone, when a verdant, peaceful landscape like this was an impossible dream. But now that it was here, outside the train window, with only him to see it, it seemed like a skein of hyper-realistic painted wallpaper that he could reach out to, peel back, and reveal a grotesque cartoon of Gebre’s body hanging in a darkened room.

  He sat back, away from the train window. Contemplated the small sink. The tap dripped. Dead. Dead. Dead. Someone had left a handful of toilet paper in there which had swollen to a wet, white clump.

  So, here he was again. Back in a train toilet. But heading in the other direction. Away from the city he and Gebre had aimed for. Away from the hopes they’d had. Away from Gebre’s dead body. Dead. Gebre.

  It was still impossible to believe they’d been so close to escaping, but that it hadn’t happened. That the worst had happened instead.

  After the bus drove away from the detention centre, Yonas had stayed on until the end of the route, in a daze, and only got off because the driver told him to. He’d walked for some time, aimlessly, trying to contain his fury and despair, trying to be practical. He couldn’t go back to the squat now, could he? What if the police investigated the escape and found it was all down to him? What if Gebre had confessed and told them everything? Surely he wouldn’t do that. But if he did they’d both be punished. They could find him easily. The detention centre had his address – he’d given it to them freely when he was finally allowed to visit – and he was undoubtedly Gebre’s only visitor except Veata. Not only that, he’d even gone and told that officer woman that Gebre shouldn’t be in there, and that he was Gebre’s only friend, so of course they would suspect him right away! But would they pursue him, after Gebre went back in and gave himself up? They might. Just to teach people a lesson. Oh, why did Gebre change his mind again? Why?

  Yonas had found a small park, and sat on a bench, hugging his knees, rocking, until it got dark. He lay down. Slept, on and off. He rose with the sun, and walked around the park a few times, listening to the birds, appreciating the thick, green leaves, the delicate scent of grass. If only he could have shared this moment with Gebre, he thought. He decided to go back to the squat. If the worst came to the worst and they identified him as an accomplice to the escape attempt, he’d end up in detention too, and maybe he and Gebre would be together again. And if he got away with it, he would just carry on and proceed with his appeal, and hope that the law here could save them both in the end. Trust in Veata. Though she would surely know what he’d done by now and be furious with him.

  He’d left the park and headed south, as the streets gradually populated with commuters. At a bus stop coming up, he spotted a newspaper abandoned on the narrow seat. Worth a look, he thought – he might find a new headline for his collection. As he got closer, he was pretty sure he could see the words ‘asylum seeker’ on the front cover, but when he picked it up it was a story about ‘ambulance chaser’ law firms. He turned a few pages… and then… Oh no. Oh no no no. In a small article, at the bottom right-hand corner of page five, he read:

  IMMIGRANT RIOT AFTER DETAINEE COMMITS SUICIDE

  The words below blurred. No. He was imagining this. Hallucinating from stress. This article must be about a different person, a different centre…

  But he’d read it again and again, then made himself read on, and it was the same place, it must be the same person, it said the man was Eritrean, a thirty-year-old… There was no doubting it. NO! He wanted to bellow into the sky, to grab the nearest person by the shoulders and shake them, to demand they explain how something like this could happen, or to tell him he was crazy, he was making up fairy stories again, it was all fine…

  He’d walked, blindly, back to the park, to be alone, sat back on the bench and opened the paper again, and read the same words again. Black and irrevocable and endlessly re-readable. While he was sitting here yesterday, Gebre had been… It was unbearable! He wanted to yell at the birds in the trees. How dare they chorus on so cheerfully as if the world were the same? He put his hands over his ears and finally, after so long, he was sobbing like a child. Gebre, Gebre, Gebre.

  After a while he’d looked up and wiped his face. He watched a jogger run past him wearing headphones, a flamingo-pink T-shirt and lime-green trainers, bouncing lightly along, immersed in her own world of colour and sound and movement, not a care in the world. He wondered what she was listening to. ‘Billie Jean’? He pictured Gebre, as a kid, moonwalking to school…

  He’d got up and started to walk, his feet hitting the concrete in a robotic rhythm, while his mind turned into a moving collage of Gebre and him, all the things they’d done together that nobody else had or could remember or share or understand: the first kick of their elastic band football, cartoons passed under school desks, singing while dragging heavy rocks in chains, dancing to Helen Meles, injera feasts, bowls of
fish mud, the day when Gebre’s Thriller T-shirt ripped, playing hide and seek among the thorn bushes, candles burning flesh, discovering that shepherd’s water container in the desert, that miraculous oasis, the unbelievable feeling of letting the water run over their swollen tongues, gently applying that absurd mauve lipstick… Was it really all over?

  He saw a sign for King’s Cross, and then he was clinging onto it, as if it were a lifeline. Suddenly he was ravenously hungry. A tiny voice of pragmatism in his head told him that if the police found him collapsed here he would be arrested, that they’d find out about his status, they’d link him to Gebre’s escape and suicide, they’d link him to Quentin and Molly too, and he would be done for. He should turn off his phone to avoid being tracked, use the quid in his pocket for a chocolate bar, and get straight on a train. A train where? North. Where north? Somewhere. Elsewhere.

  Gebre is dead, Gebre is dead, Gebre is dead, buildings, fields, trees, buildings, fields, trees, buildings, fields, trees, Peterborough, Newark North Gate, Doncaster, York, Northallerton, Darlington, Durham, Newcastle… New. Castle. Newcastle. What was it about Newcastle that made Yonas fixate on the name?

  And then he remembered: Tesfay. He should still have a text message on his phone, with Tesfay’s address on it. This would mean turning the phone on again. Would the police be hunting for him yet? He doubted it, and in a way he didn’t care, not now. He turned it on, ignored some new messages, scrolled down… yes, there it was. He had a pen in his pocket. Did he have paper? Yes – he had that paper, that newspaper article. Folded up in his pocket, next to his rooster. He unfolded it now. Was that headline still real? Too real. Much too real. Possibly the last asylum seeker headline he would ever collect, he thought. On the other side, in the margin, he wrote down Tesfay’s address and phone number, but he had no credit left to call. He turned his phone off again.