The Year of the Runaways

by Sunjeev Sahota

  ‘This is England,’ Deniz said, when at last Tochi was able to wriggle out. They were in some sort of car park. Shops, white people. Nearby, the grey noise of fast traffic. The sky looked the same as in Paris. Deniz fetched them a plain baguette each and they got back in the front and rejoined the motorway.

  ‘I thought you said it would only take an hour?’ Tochi said.

  ‘From Calais. They do less checking in Dieppe. Why, was it uncomfortable?’

  ‘It was fine.’

  Deniz said he’d drop Tochi off in Southall, in London, unless he had anywhere else in mind. ‘My wife’s brother is always saying how he needs waiters. He has a restaurant.’

  Tochi stared out of the window. The roads seemed impossibly straight and flat, the fields perfectly hedged in.

  ‘What do they grow here?’

  Deniz said he didn’t know.

  ‘It looks like spinach.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  He looked closer. ‘It is spinach.’

  ‘Why, does it remind you of home?’

  ‘It reminds me of spinach.’

  Two hours later they arrived, parking the lorry half on the pavement. A car beeped, swerved past.

  ‘There’s your temple,’ Deniz said. He nodded towards a gold dome, princely and Indian against the coming dark. ‘And this is the main road.’

  The bus stops – Tochi guessed they were bus stops – showed filmi posters, while passing women retightened cardigans over their kameez, salwaar-bottoms puffed out in the wind like legs of mutton.

  ‘Are they all illegal here?’

  ‘No, just Indian.’

  He followed Deniz out of the driver’s side, past a travel agent’s called IndiGo and a shop display of sari-draped dummies. Deniz halted outside a fast-food place, cartoon chickens on the window, and told Tochi to wait there a minute. He watched Deniz enter and shake hands with a fat man who kept wiping his nose on his apron. They spoke a while and the fat man lifted his shoulders heavily and gestured around him, in a move that suggested either there was more than enough work, or not enough as it was. As Deniz came back through the door, Tochi stepped away.

  ‘I’ve got to go but wait inside and Marat will take care of you.’

  ‘Is there work?’

  ‘Maybe. He’s not sure. Just wait.’

  They returned to the truck so Tochi could collect his bag, his suitcase, and pay Deniz the balance.

  ‘I hope you make your millions,’ Deniz said, restarting the engine, saying good luck, goodbye.

  Inside the restaurant, the fat man – Marat – brought Tochi a can of cola and showed him to a table. He moved his hands so that Tochi understood he should wait there while Marat used the telephone. Tochi nodded, said thank you in English.

  It was a busy night. White people, Indian, black, everyone seemed to eat food from here. Even Indian girls came blustering in, in tight tops and skirts. Tochi stared. Another fat man worked with Marat at the counter, while further back two younger men in sleeveless T-shirts operated the fryers. He could easily learn that, Tochi thought.

  The chicken clock on the door said ten past eleven and Marat untied the apron from behind his back and lifted it over his head. He said something to the others and indicated that Tochi come with him, flicking the lights off on his way out. They turned down a side street where Marat pointed to a long window bordered with red conch shapes. The glass in the front door had the same pattern.

  ‘Bangladeshi,’ Marat said.

  Tochi followed him round to a small yard where a shallow sports car was parked. A tall man with a shaved head and a gold bracelet leaned on the bonnet, chatting into his mobile. He saw them waiting, yet made no move to end his call. Eventually, he and Marat exchanged some words and the tall man looked over.

  ‘Where you from?’

  ‘Bihar.’

  ‘How’d you get here?’

  ‘Truck.’

  ‘Can you wash dishes?’

  ‘If there’s water I can.’

  The tall man nodded at Marat, who looked relieved as he left.

  ‘How old are you?’ the man asked.

  ‘Twenty-six.’

  ‘Course you are.’

  He said his name was Sukhjit and he took Tochi back through the restaurant and to the kitchen at the rear. The floor was tacky against his feet.

  ‘Start with the dishes and work your way round.’

  ‘Where do I sleep?’

  ‘On the floor. Tomorrow, I’ll bring a mattress. And then you better move in with Sheera.’

  He put down his bags and got to it. Work on day one. This was good. Maybe it was true what they said about England. That this was where you could make something. He was on to his third stack of dirty plates when he sensed someone watching him. He looked over his shoulder. It was a waiter, his head curled around the doorframe as if sneaking a look.

  ‘I’m Munna. What’s your name?’

  ‘Tarlochan.’

  ‘Tarlochan Singh Sandhu?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m Munna Singh Sandhu. But Munna’s not my real name. It’s my baby name. Are you a friend of Sheera Uncle?’

  Tochi said nothing.

  ‘He’s not very nice.’

  Slow, backward, he looked about seventeen. A two-note car horn sounded, the second note more belligerent than the first, and then the boy disappeared and Tochi heard the front door opening, closing, locking.

  When he woke he had to peel his cheek off the damp steel flank of the cooking range. It was still dark – there were no windows in the kitchen – and he didn’t know what the time was. If he listened, he could hear the noise of passing traffic. He couldn’t hear any movement from the restaurant, though. Perhaps they were asleep, the other workers. Gently, he opened the kitchen door and blinked in the sudden bright. A giant wing of pale, wintry sun rested across the room, over the dark wood tables and the chairs turned upside-down on them. There was a counter to Tochi’s right, with a cash register at the far end, and behind the counter were glasses and bottles and fridges. Through the window, he tried to work out the shops on the other side of the road. Fruit, one of them. Mobile phones another. Then the sari place. And next to that a shop where men stared up at a TV screen, watching horses race. He heard a noise, a wailing like the ambulances in Patna. Cars slowed and set themselves aside as two police vans came flying down. Tochi flattened himself against the wall until the wailing retreated, then returned quickly to the kitchen and closed the door behind him.

  Hours later, he heard the restaurant door unlocking and the muffled creak of feet on carpet. He stood up and waited to be discovered. It took a few minutes – there was first the clinking of glasses, then the complicated beeps of the cash register. When the man came through the kitchen door he paused mid-sip and stared at Tochi over the rim of his glass. His eyes were red and small. He finished necking the drink – whisky – and went round the kitchen switching things on: the tandoor, the oven, something under the sink that made nasty crunching sounds. The crown of his head was so bald it shone, but the hair around the sides was long and landed in greasy curls about his collar. He went back out into the restaurant and next Tochi heard a sustained hungry growl. He opened the door and saw the whisky man pushing around the room some sort of cleaning machine.

  The backward boy – Munna – arrived at the exact moment the oven timer rang out four o’clock. ‘I’m on time again, Sherry,’ he said. ‘That’s three times this week.’

  Behind the bar, the whisky man was pouring himself another peg. He’d changed into his chef’s whites. ‘Call me that again and I’ll rip your tongue out.’

  Tochi went out into the yard. It was already dark. He rested against the wall and slid down to a crouch, T-shirt riding up to his shoulder blades. He put his head in his hands and it took a few moments to recall the name of this place he was now in. He just had to work, he told himself. Keep working, keep earning, and he’d get there, wherever there was. When he came back through to the kitchen, onions we
re being violently chopped, mustard seeds popping. In the restaurant, tables were dressed in burgundy polyester, a steel boat of ketchup marooned in the centre. Munna waited by the door ready to greet the guests. Sukhjit was here too, and with him a kid whose narrow sideburns, amazingly, met in the cleft of his chin. Like Munna, he was buttoned up in white satin shirt and black trousers.

  ‘This is him,’ the boss said.

  The kid approached, all swagger, holding out his fist. Tochi did nothing and the kid grinned and reached for Tochi’s hand and closed it into a fist and touched his own with it. ‘Like that, see?’

  ‘My nephew: Chikna,’ Sukhjit explained.

  ‘Chico,’ the boy said. ‘It’s Chico.’

  ‘Actually, it’s Charandeep Singh.’

  The boy frowned. ‘Thanks, chacha.’ Then, to Tochi: ‘So you a fauji or a scooter?’

  The door opened and a couple in matching leopard scarves blew in. Munna beamed and took their coats and said that, yes, winter was definitely on the way, and Tochi went back into the kitchen, where several steel vats were already humped into the sink.

  He got into routine. First he scraped off the leftover chicken or curry or mint sauce or rice into the bin he’d wheeled in from the yard. Then he rinsed the dishes in a tub placed to the left of the sink, before plunging them into the sudsy water and scouring until he heard squeaks. Lastly, he passed them through a second tub on his right, in water made faintly green by a thimbleful of disinfectant Munna had shown him how to use. His fingers shrivelled and the plate of skin between his shoulder blades ached. It was two o’clock when he heard the last of the diners waved off, and the waiters took a bowl of chicken curry from the chef and started back for the restaurant, calling for Tochi to come and join them.

  They ate with their fingers, moulding the rice and chicken into little balls. The chef came through with his own thali and sat alone by the long window.

  Charandeep spoke. ‘Chacha says you’re from Bihar, yeah? Blitzed it over truck-style?’ He had to repeat himself, in Panjabi.

  Tochi nodded, not looking up from his bowl.

  ‘Proper outlaw,’ Charandeep said, approvingly.

  ‘Are you here for a holiday?’ Munna asked.

  Charandeep smiled. ‘Kids, eh?’ He went on: ‘Same as Chef. Trucked it over time ago. Sixties, maybe.’ He leaned in. ‘Sent him a bit doolally, though. What’s your tonic, alcoholic? Know what I mean?’

  A car with a fierce exhaust parked up. ‘Uncle’s back,’ Munna said.

  Sukhjit swung through from the kitchen, rubbing his hands warm. ‘Too cold for love out there. How’s things? Sherry?’

  ‘I have to call him Ardashir or he’ll rip my tongue out,’ Munna said.

  ‘As long as it’s out of hours,’ Sukhjit said, singing open the cash register.

  One by one they dumped their bowls in the sink. A car horned and Munna left; then Ardashir pulled on his long black coat, and Sukhjit and Charandeep said they were going too and turned off the lights and locked the door. Tochi returned to the kitchen. He changed the water in the sink and started again. It was nearly four when he wheeled the bin out and spread his blanket beside the still-warm range. Sukhjit must have forgotten about his mattress.

  *

  Most days he stayed in the restaurant, going no further than the window, though once a week he’d proceed onto the road, with its big red buses and busy faces. He’d journey to the end of the street and around the corner, from where he could see the green tops of the old gasworks. He always paused outside a shop that sold homes, calculating how long it might be before he could afford one.

  He was paid on Sunday nights. He’d be called into the yard, where Sukhjit held out his notes through the window of his red Alfa, the engine thrumming. It was about a tenth of what he’d expected, yet he said nothing. He used his first wage to buy some proper soap. The rest he folded into his rucksack, which along with his suitcase he stowed in the gap between the fridge and the wall.

  On his third payday his suitcase was stolen. He’d been taking down the chairs in the restaurant when Munna rushed in from the kitchen shouting about some goreh robbers. Tochi sprinted into the yard so fast a doornail ripped off his jeans pocket, but there was only the rear end of a white hatchback skidding round the corner. The microwave lay cracked on the kitchen floor, dropped in the getaway, and the drawers were all tipped open, Tochi’s suitcase missing.

  He picked up his rucksack and checked his money was still there. He had one other shirt and pair of trousers but the rest of his clothes had been in the suitcase, along with his blanket and towel. He got his fist around his remaining jeans pocket and ripped that off too.

  ‘Fuckin’ chiefs,’ Sukhjit said, that evening. He passed Tochi his notes. ‘These things happen, eh?’

  Tochi said nothing.

  ‘Why aren’t you living with Sheera? It’s raid season, man – Sherry, staying with you from now on, yeah?’

  Ardashir was putting on his coat. ‘Never stopped him.’

  It was a few minutes’ walk, a run-down part of the neighbourhood Tochi had never been to. Most of the windows were grilled over and behind one of the grilles twinkled a dwarfish tree. Ardashir went down a flight of thin stone steps, Tochi following, and once through the front door he tugged on some string dangling from the ceiling, which brought on the light. Sink, cooker, fridge, boiler. Three chairs – one straight, two orange plastic – stood against the wall with several empty bottles of whisky huddled around their legs. Beneath the long net of the window was a single bed on tiny gold wheels. Tochi dropped his bag to the floor and took a piss in the bathroom, on the other side of the kitchen. When he came back Ardashir was pulling sofa cushions from under the bed and arranging them in the middle of the room.

  In the morning, lying awake on the sofa cushions, he watched Ardashir at the sink, pouring whiskies and chucking them back one after the other, growling as each peg hit the spot. He was in trousers only and the heavy slack of his stomach pressed against the worktop.

  ‘If you get caught, you don’t live here.’

  Tochi nodded.

  ‘You don’t know me, you understand?’

  ‘It’s your house.’

  Ardashir gave a little snort. ‘Yeah.’

  They didn’t bother one another. Soon as Tochi woke he washed and left to look for a second, daytime job. Sometimes he asked the Turk, Marat, and often he trudged to the gurdwara in case fruit-picking had started up. He was back at the restaurant for midday, time enough to vacuum and dress the tables. Ardashir would arrive an hour later and change into his whites, and they’d work together in the kitchen, quietly, peaceably, making the midnight walk back to the basement flat in silence, and in this way the seasons shifted and the months passed.

  The restaurant closed on Christmas Day – the one day in the year when it did – and Tochi spent the morning lying on the floor, on the blue sofa cushions, gazing up at the damp ceiling. There was no point in looking for any work today – he’d learned that much from last year. Ardashir sat on his straight chair at the window. After a silence of almost two weeks, the older man spoke.

  ‘How long are you staying here?’

  ‘I can leave now.’

  ‘In England, I said.’

  ‘Until I’ve earned enough.’

  ‘Then you’re a fool.’

  The afternoon was quieter still and as they sat down with the lamb curry brought back from the restaurant the previous night, all that could be heard was the dull scrape of metal on foil and the slurp and slop of eating. Sometimes a car went by.

  ‘You’re a bigger fool than me. I didn’t have anyone to tell me different.’

  Tochi said nothing.

  ‘Take my advice and go back now. Before there’s nothing to go back for and you’re stuck here.’ It was the most he’d ever said to Tochi. Perhaps it was this Christmas spirit everyone went on about. ‘Thirty-three years. Didn’t do my papa’s rites, my biji’s. Wife and children started new lives. For what? So
I can sit here in this hell. No future but death. Just a body needing to be clothed and fed. Go back, you understand?’

  ‘I’ve done my papa’s rites. And my biji’s. And my brother’s and my sister’s.’

  Tochi’s wrist began to tremble and he lowered the spoon and stared at the ground between his knees. He heard Ardashir stride past and pour the rest of his food into a black bin liner hanging off the side of the sink.

  The restaurant reopened fully on New Year’s Eve. Tochi worked fast, determinedly, but by the time the countdown and midnight cheer came and went he still had hours ahead of him. Sukhjit stumbled in. He was laughing and had his arm collapsed across another man’s shoulder.

  ‘Arré, Sheera, give my cousin one of your lassis, man. We’re gunna be Panjabis tonight!’

  ‘Does that mean we get to beat our wives?’ the other man said.

  Sukhjit put a finger to his own lips. ‘They’ll hear you. Ears like an elephant.’

  Soon, Sukhjit rounded everyone out the door, saying it was over to his place for whisky and poker, and in less than a minute all the noise of the night evaporated and the restaurant door locked shut. Ardashir joined Tochi at the sink, grabbing a wire-wool scourer of his own.

  It was past five when they made it to the flat.

  ‘Thank you,’ Tochi said.