‘I wanted to ask you some questions,’ she said. ‘Will any of you talk to me?’
‘Who are you?’ said one.
‘No one,’ she said, raising her hands. ‘I’m not the police.’
There was no response. A few glanced at each other. One picked up his bike and threw his leg over, preparing to cycle off, and this seemed to be a signal, as the rest of them turned away from her and headed over to their bikes.
‘Wait,’ said Anna, aiming at the man who had first picked up his bike, the ringleader. ‘Listen. Don’t give me your names. You won’t get in trouble, I promise. And I have money, I can pay you.’
The man – short, with a snub nose – stopped and looked around.
‘How much?’
Anna took out the folded notes she had ready in her pocket – the last of the envelope Simón had given her.
‘Thirty euros if you talk to me, just for a few minutes.’
The man hesitated for a moment, and then swung his leg off his bike and laid it back down on the ground.
‘No names?’ he said.
‘No names,’ said Anna.
He nodded and moved towards her, and then the others did too, grouping in front of her so she felt in the position of the men in the trucks, soliciting.
‘What do you want?’ said one.
‘Are any of you from Senegal?’ she said.
‘I am,’ said one, and two others put up their hands.
‘I’m trying to find out what happened to a man. I think he was from Senegal.’
‘What is his name?’ said one.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But, he’s dead. He died around a week ago. Have you heard anything?’
‘He died at sea?’
‘No,’ she said – and then she thought of Paco’s tearful account of the body being dumped from inland, and his unsettling behaviour in the cafe. ‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe. But he was found on the land, on the beach. He had a gris gris around his stomach.’ She put her hands to her waist.
‘Many people have those,’ the snub-nosed one said, dismissively.
‘Did he die in the boat?’ said another.
Three of the men started talking in their own language, and then one said, ‘Ibrahim, he died. On the boat. He was at the bottom.’
‘I was in the boat,’ added another.
‘You were in the boat when the man died?’ asked Anna.
The man nodded. He had huge eyes: you could see the white all the way round the iris. In his over-large fluorescent jacket, he looked like a schoolboy.
‘Can you tell me what happened?’ said Anna. Her suspicion of Simón’s involvement in the man’s death had now fallen away.
The man started speaking, first slowly then speeding up, keen to get the words out. At first others chipped in, and once or twice Anna interjected, when she couldn’t understand his slow, imperfect Spanish. The huddle of men listened, although, Anna presumed, they must had heard it before, or had similar stories themselves.
After a few minutes, she stopped him.
‘Wait, can I call you something? Anything. Not your real name.’
One of the others said something indistinguishable and they all laughed; a private joke.
‘Call me Mickey,’ the man said, to Anna.
Mickey came from a village in the east of Senegal. He was nineteen, the oldest of five brothers and sisters and had considered becoming a fisherman, like his father and grandfather. Life was OK – they had a house and food and a television – but he wanted more than that: he wanted a nice life. After seeing pictures of Barcelona on the TV, of clean roads and gleaming buildings and shopping centres, he’d decided to join many of the other young men in the village and make the journey. Barcelona was the goal – everyone wanted to get there – but any part of Spain would do.
His mother had been sad to let him go but having a son migrate to Spain was a badge of honour. Those boys who got to Europe wired money back, and bought their families fridges, cars, new houses. With his first pay he was going to tell his mum to buy herself a mobile phone. The cost of a passage to Europe was $1,200; his uncle loaned him the money. His cousin was coming too.
He packed a small rucksack with some clothes and 200 euros and first they travelled to Dakar and then boarded a small boat. There were twenty of them. The first bit of the journey, to the Canary Islands, took a week, and wasn’t so bad: the captain let them sit upright, and they laughed and joked around, spirits still high. When the boat landed at the Canary Islands, the group was split in half and transferred onto two boats. His cousin was on the other one. The nice captain disappeared; now it was another man, who wasn’t kind, who didn’t allow them to come out above the tarpaulin even at night. They lay next to each other, packed together like fish, and tried to keep their good humour, talking about what they were going to do when they arrived in Spain, the money, the women. Then as the hours went on, they stopped talking, and just lay there, silent, willing the time away. If they were sick, they had to lie in it. In their piss, too. They ate only biscuits they had brought with them – they had been told to eat a special kind because they stopped up your bowels. They tested each other on their Spanish numbers, using a pack of cards. Eight and six equals what? They stored their phones in balloons wrapped in tape, so they wouldn’t get wet.
He thought this was the last boat, the boat that would take them onto Spanish sand, but he was wrong because after forty-eight hours at sea, in the middle of the night, they were told to get up and, in complete darkness, pushed into an even smaller boat.
‘They packed us tight in rows, like we were already dead,’ Mickey said. He was now sitting down on the dusty ground; Anna had crouched beside him. ‘There were two layers and I was on the top layer: I knew I was lucky. Then there were many more hours.’
During the day they all used their phones for GPS, to see where they were going, and to text and play games, but at night, the captain wouldn’t allow it, in case the police saw the light from the screens.
‘But one man kept looking at his phone when it was dark, and the captain got so angry he threw him overboard and left him to drown,’ said Mickey, quite matter-of-fact.
Squatting on her haunches, Anna felt her legs quiver, and sat down next to him.
Mickey kept thinking about the mobile he would buy his mum when he started work in Spain: the expression on her face when she saw a Spanish number, his number, come up on it. He tried to relive his favourite films, scene by scene. The man next to him was sick in his ear, in his hair. The biscuits didn’t work for everyone, and there was a terrible stench of shit. One man kept on saying, ‘We are dead, we are dead,’ but everyone ignored him.
And then, finally, there was an awful jolt as the boat hit land. Mickey banged his head. The tarpaulin was ripped off and a man told them in Spanish to scarper immediately, to get out of his sight. Mickey tried to stand up but his feet were on the other men below him and his legs were wobbly so he fell over, and then some hands dragged him off the boat, painfully. There was wet sand in his mouth and he could immediately taste it was European sand, and, despite the terrible journey, he felt a sense of joy. Even in the half-light he could see the sea was blue, unlike the grey water around Africa.
‘Then the Spanish man told us again to go, to get out of here, and started hitting us on the back, and so we all ran up the beach and then into the bushes,’ Mickey said. He gesticulated as he spoke, waggling his fingers to mimic moving legs.
‘What did he look like, this Spanish man?’
Mickey rubbed his head. ‘No hair. Old.’
‘What was his name?’
Mickey shrugged. ‘We just called him El Tio.’
So, Paco had been their ferryman. Although she’d been expecting it, the news was a punch. She remembered the feel of Paco’s stiff chest hair under her fingers, as he pressed her hand against his heart, and flinched.
The other men had joined Mickey and Anna sitting on the ground now; Anna noticed the snub-nosed one
tracing patterns in the dust. Another man, with a wan expression, brought an inhaler out of his pocket and took a deep lug.
Mickey continued his story. A contact already there in Spain had told them where to go, so when it was daylight they followed his directions and found his shack. They shared a room with him for now, but after he’d earned enough, Mickey would rent a space in a different shack with eight other men, for €100 a month.
Everyone wanted to reach Barcelona. But to get a proper job you needed papers, and to get papers you needed a permanent contract. Down here, in the greenhouses, they didn’t care whether you had papers. And so the men found work there, bent over in forty-degree heat for nine or ten hours a day, for pay of around thirty euros. Some bosses were OK, decent enough. Others were mean, spraying pesticides over the crops when the men were working; many of them got ill. If they complained or refused to work, their names were put on a blacklist.
‘Have any of you worked for Mr Ruiz?’ asked Anna. ‘Simón Ruiz?’
The men conferred between themselves; a couple then nodded.
‘He is OK,’ said the man with the inhaler. ‘Not a bad one. He didn’t spray pesticide.’
‘Oh,’ said Anna. So Almamy hadn’t been lying before, when he said that Simón was a good boss. She tried to adjust her perception of him; he was awful only to her, not his workers.
‘The bad ones – can’t you go to the police?’ she said.
‘No,’ said the inhaler man. ‘The police turned a blind eye, because the area needed people working in the greenhouses and Spaniards didn’t want to do it. Sometimes, for show, they rounded people up: but everyone knew that if you were caught, the police couldn’t deport you if you had no passport and didn’t tell them your nationality. So, they either kept you locked up until you decided that your old life was better than being in prison and told them where you were from, or, more often, they let you go.’
He paused in his story to catch his breath. One of the others gave him a bottle of water.
‘And you said you saw the dead man?’ Anna asked Mickey.
‘Yes,’ he said. Mickey’s friend had been at the bottom of the boat and told Mickey that the man next to him, Ibrahim, had died during the journey. The friend had been whispering to Ibrahim, and heard Ibrahim’s breath in his ear, and then Ibrahim made a weird noise and the breath stopped. He had been suffocated by the men on top of him. As Mickey was on the top layer, he may have been one of the men who crushed Ibrahim. He didn’t want to think about it.
Mickey’s cousin was probably dead, too. Mickey saw him briefly in the Canary Islands but then he went on the other boat and it never arrived in Spain. For a week he went down to the beach early every morning, searching for his cousin, but then he gave up. No body was found, as far as he knew. There were few bodies recovered, because most of the migrants couldn’t swim, or were scared, and so clung onto the boat as it sank. When rigor mortis set in, they stayed clinging to it as it rested on the seabed.
‘Does his family know?’ asked Anna.
Mickey nodded.
‘What about the other man, Ibrahim?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe. Back home in my village, the families gave it a long time, but if a year goes by, and there are no messages, no money being sent to them, then they accept their son had died doing his duty.’
Anna thought of Paco, dipping into the till at the Internet cafe; the money transfer posters; the phones lined up charging beside the desk. How resourceful he was! First making money off the migrants by smuggling them over, and then profiting from them again when they sent money back home and Skyped their mothers to lie about their great new lives in Europe.
Anna noticed some of the other men had begun shifting whilst Mickey had been talking. They had been listening for twenty minutes: the sun was now hot.
‘But I am not dead!’ Mickey said, smiling, as if he was keen to end on a positive note.
They all stood up, and Anna handed him the money.
‘Thank you for talking to me,’ she said.
He nodded, folding the notes carefully away in his pocket. ‘We will share it.’ He shook her hand, and Anna stood watching as he and the others got back onto their bikes and cycled off into the dazzling sun, in their now unnecessary hi-vis jackets.
10
From the top of the beach steps, Anna looked out towards the rocks. There was Paco sitting beside his boat, legs apart, hands between his knees, and, even from this distance, it was obvious that he was looking at his mobile. She thought back to the discovery of the body on the rocks, how he’d sent her running up the beach to call the police. Señora, I have no phone! And she tried to imagine the terror of the man he threw overboard, in the middle of the ink-black ocean, when the man didn’t stop using his. Two deaths on one journey: all in a night’s work.
Behind her, the church struck 9am. Anna had come straight from the roadside, and although the dawn excursion had already taken on an unreal dimension, the hours it occupied had not: she felt she had lived a day already. The sky was the colour of stonewash denim and the sea gently agitated, the palm trees quivering on their concrete anchors. On the beach, nearer to her, a pair of detectorists were out, testing the sand. One of them was limping. Graeme.
Anna hadn’t anticipated anyone being around when she confronted Paco – nor imagined she would ever be grateful to see Graeme – but she felt relieved she was not alone. She remembered Paco’s expression when approached by the African in the Internet cafe, swatting away the man’s outstretched hand.
Waving at Graeme to make him aware of her presence, but staying out of chatting distance, Anna headed down the steps and towards the back of the beach. Shielded by the ranks of thatched umbrellas and slumbering banana boats, she walked stealthily towards Paco, as quickly as the sand allowed. Because of the angle of her approach, she was only ten feet away when Paco lifted his head. Discreetly pocketing his phone, he got to his feet and held out his hands.
‘Señora!’ he said, warmly.
Anna didn’t reply, and watched as he took in her expression, his dark eyes narrowing into slashes.
‘Cómo está?’ he said, evenly.
‘I know what you’re doing,’ Anna said in Spanish, coming to a halt a few feet away. ‘What really happened to that man.’
Paco gazed at her steadily, silent. The skin on his head looked polished; the trenches on his face so deep they looked drawn on with marker pen. She forced herself to not look away. Then, finally, he shrugged and shook his head, as if bemused – crazy English! – before turning away from her. The gesture also served to remind her of his strength: his bare neck and shoulders were a triangle of solid brown muscle.
‘You have nothing to say?’ she continued.
‘But, señora, I do not understand what you are saying,’ Paco said, slowly, turning back to her.
‘How’s business?’
‘Señora, no comprende.’
There was something mocking about his repeated, overly formal señoras. Anna looked away from him, over to his boat. There was a tidemark of sand on its blue painted hull. Did that mean the surface was wet, that the boat had been out that morning? She stepped forward and crouched to wipe at the sand.
‘You’re cleaning my boat for me? Very kind.’
The sand felt powdery on her fingers. Maybe the morning sun had dried it out? Without making eye contact, in case she lost her nerve, she stood up and leaned over to peer inside the boat. At the bottom was a tarpaulin, neatly folded. Nothing else. The interior space was not much bigger than a single bed: it seemed impossible that there could have ever been ten men in here, however tightly packed. For the first time, she felt a pulse of doubt.
Maybe the inside of the boat was wet? Mickey had talked about waves crashing over them, making them feel they were going to capsize. She leaned inside to touch the base, knowing she was being ridiculous – even if it was damp, it wouldn’t prove anything – and braced herself for Paco’s hand clamping down on her shoulder, hauling her backwa
rds onto the sand.
But there was no hand. For whatever reason, he had decided not to intervene. Her fingers stretched down into the dark hull and grazed against the wood. It was damp and she felt something on her fingertips – something gritty. Sand? No, it was the same colour, but softer. She pinched some and brought it up to her face. It smelled sweet and yeasty.
Biscuit crumbs.
‘Why are there biscuits in your boat?’ she said, turning back to Paco. He’d taken the phone out of his pocket and was scrolling through it, like a bored commuter.
‘It’s my lunch,’ said Paco, not looking up. Now his tone was unquestionably mocking. ‘I am just a poor man. No sardines today.’
‘You’re not going to get away with it.’
Paco’s mask had been slipping. Now, he let it drop.
‘Perra estúpida,’ he said, slowly. Stupid bitch. The look he was giving her was the one she saw in the Internet cafe. His voice had changed: it was stronger, less gravelly. ‘You know nothing. And if I were you, I would fuck off right now.’
Then, unexpectedly, he smiled, and took a single, deliberate step towards her. Anna felt a punch of real fear and whipped around to shout for Graeme, but the beach was deserted.
She started to retreat backwards across the sand, facing Paco, who watched her, arms out by his sides like a body builder, phone in his fist. Even from several metres away, she could see the veins on his forearms. When there was enough distance between them, she turned and started running back up the beach, as fast as she could. Her shins felt as brittle as sticks; the powdery sand clung to each foot as if colluding with Paco, making her stumble and lurch. When she finally reached the steps and took purchase on firm ground, she gasped with relief. Not looking back, she scrambled up the steps and burst onto the promenade, startling a flock of little birds and Rose, her elderly neighbour, who was sitting on a bench. As she ran to the safety of the square, she heard someone calling her name, but she didn’t look back.
Under the Sun Page 18