Aryan starts down the steps of the bridge.
‘Come on,’ he says, turning back. ‘See that fence? I think we’ve reached the park.’
Three youths are perched on the low stone wall of the canal. Aryan can tell they are Afghans, even from a distance, even before hearing them speak.
‘Do you know if there is anywhere we can sleep?’ he says. ‘We’ve only just arrived.’
The three look up. ‘For underage boys like you, there is a place, but it’s too late for today,’ says one of them. He disentangles a mobile phone from his pocket and looks at the time inscribed over the photo of a Bollywood actress.
‘You have to be there before eight o’clock to get in,’ says his friend. He has a round face and wide-spaced eyes and a jacket with an enormous number of zips. ‘Otherwise you will have to bed down like us, out here in the park.’
Another night under the stars, Aryan thinks. Luckily they slept a bit in the train.
‘Is there any place we can get something to eat?’ he says.
The youths shrug. Looking at them, Aryan thinks they could be eighteen or nineteen, but the lines on their faces make them seem older. One of them is swimming inside an anorak several sizes too big.
‘There is a soup kitchen further up the canal but you have to go there at half past six. There’ll be nobody there now,’ the man with the zippers says.
The temperature is starting to drop. People sitting along the canal wrap themselves in their jackets and scarves; old ladies, miniature dogs squeezed into the crooks of their arms, punch numbers into the walls of nearby buildings; the heavy doors click open, then slam shut.
‘If you can wait till lunchtime they bring meals for homeless people to the gates of the park,’ says the man with the phone, waving the Bollywood actress towards a bandstand and a cluster of trees. ‘Or there’s a supermarket around the corner that throws out lots of food.’
The youth with the zips holds out his hand. ‘Here, you can have my bread,’ he says.
Aryan thanks him and opens the white plastic bag. Inside are three disks of bread so light they feel weightless in his palm.
Aryan and Kabir demolish the bread where they stand. A few crumbs float like snowflakes on to the flagstones beneath their feet.
As night falls, the youths show them where to climb over the park’s high railings, though Aryan is so thin he can fit between the bars. They drop softly on to the mulchy soil. The man in the anorak stumbles, crushing a clump of irises underfoot.
People sitting under heaters at the outdoor restaurants barely notice the shadows slipping over the rails, or bedding down on the strange rubbery surface beneath the playground swings.
The three slide flattened cardboard boxes from behind the creepers that spill over the park’s stone wall. Silently they extract plastic sacks, swollen into enormous pumpkins with bundles of bedding, from their hiding place in a tangle of shrubs.
Aryan and Kabir have nothing to lie on and nothing to pull over themselves. But there are other sheets of cardboard concealed against the wall by other men. Aryan hesitates a moment, then slides one out and hands it to Kabir. He takes a second one for himself, and they drag them away from where their owners might come looking for them. They position them close to the place the youths have chosen, in a curve of shrubbery that shields them from the wind. Aryan buttons Kabir’s anorak to his chin and pulls his hood over his head and the two of them curl up, waiting for sleep.
‘Tomorrow it will be better,’ Aryan says. ‘We will find the underage sleeping place.’
‘What is underage?’ Kabir asks.
‘It means under eighteen.’
‘What happens when you turn eighteen?’ Kabir asks.
‘That’s when they say you are a man.’
‘And then you can sleep in the park?’
Aryan laughs. ‘Everything’s back to front in Paris,’ he says. ‘They keep their animals inside their houses, the bridges break in half when a boat comes by, and the boats have to go under the roads.’
Kabir ponders the contradictions. ‘What about the lights?’ he says after a while.
‘What lights?’ Aryan says.
‘The lights of the city. Ahmed said Paris was a city full of lights.’
Aryan looks around them; all he can see are the dark trees, and the streetlamps winking through the branches. ‘Maybe you have to go downtown,’ he says.
Paris, he remembers it now, is the bride of all the cities – that’s another thing Ahmed had said. He had imagined a girl in a long white dress with a voluminous train studded with diamonds and crystals.
He stares up at the sky, wondering whether Ahmed is still in Istanbul, or somewhere ahead of them or behind them on the road.
‘Those stars. It’s the charioteer – the one we saw in Iran – do you remember?’ he says.
Kabir follows the line of Aryan’s gaze. Above the trees, the night sky has been erased by the aura of the city. But finally he makes out part of the constellation, beyond the haze of urban light.
‘They’re our stars,’ Kabir says. ‘A charioteer for travellers like us.’
‘Yes just like us – except we don’t have a chariot,’ Aryan says.
Kabir ignores him. ‘Maybe Masood and Zohra are looking at them right now, over there in Iran,’ he says.
Aryan listens with half an ear. He is thinking about the night sky in Afghanistan, how he used to count the shooting stars when, long ago, he slept up on the roof on the hottest nights of the year.
‘Maybe they are even thinking of us,’ Kabir is saying. ‘Maybe if we think hard enough we can send them a message.’
‘What would you say in your message?’
‘I’d tell them about the puppies and that we got new clothes and that soon we’ll be going to school in England.’
There are more than a hundred men lining up for food that comes in a white truck with a big red shield on the doors. It parks between the canal and an overhead railway line, and is filled with shelves of trays that men and women distribute from trestle tables set up behind barricades.
There are not only Afghans in the queue, but Iraqis and Iranians and Kurds, and some French people who don’t have a home. The youths at the back push, and the men from the van shout, and finally they get warm pasta and hot tea.
An Afghan teenager who was behind them in the line takes Aryan and Kabir to the meeting place for the underage camp. There are Hazaras and Pashtuns and Tajiks, and a couple of boys from Africa, and they all give their names to a lady with glasses who puts them down on a list.
It is the first time since school in Iran that Aryan has seen so many boys his own age. He looks at them with a mixture of shyness and fascination. One is slumped miserably inside a phone box; some are clowning and relaxed; some are trying to pretend they’re invisible inside their hoods.
The French lady and a man put Aryan and Kabir with the smallest boys and the ones who are the most tired because they have just arrived. Some of the boys laugh and jostle and try to slip their friends into the queue; the French people when they realize have to start counting all over again.
‘What happens to them?’ Aryan asks, nodding to a dozen others who are turned away once twenty-five of them are marshalled against a wall.
The teenager beside him shrugs. ‘They have to find their own place,’ he says. ‘In the park, or under the bridges, or along the canal.’
They follow the two adults in an elastic line that elongates as they walk – along the canal, across a bridge and down streets so narrow they can’t all fit on the pavement. Some of them stop for cyclists and miss the traffic lights. They bunch up again at a metro station enclosed by a metal grille. When a watchman winches it open, they descend a steep flight of stairs, and heap their sneakers together at the bottom in a pungent pile.
‘Don’t worry, they don’t use it as a station any more,’ the teenager says. A shock of hair flops over eyes so round they look permanently surprised; he says his name is Jawad. ‘It’
s for homeless people in the day, and in the night it’s for us.’
Inside the metro station there are no windows. But the lights are bright, and imaginary forests and islands have been painted on the walls.
Those who haven’t eaten are given pasta and yoghurt on a plastic tray.
‘You have to be quick for the showers,’ says Jawad, showing them the way.
A young man distributes soap and toothbrushes and combs, and razors for those who need them, and an assortment of multicoloured towels.
There is a background hum of washing machines as boys in T-shirts and sweatpants wait for their clothes to come back clean and dry. The odour of disinfectant wafts under the door as the lady with the glasses swabs grazes and cuts and wounds. From a medical chest she extracts two plasters for the blisters on Kabir’s heels.
Kabir’s face is glowing and his hair is damp from the steam.
Jawad takes them to the cupboard for the foam mattresses they unfold on the floor, and the sleeping bags they unroll for the night.
Lying on his side in the darkness, Aryan listens to the trains prowling the tunnels on the other side of the wall. At first their eerie rumbling unnerves him; they remind him of army tanks, of restless underworld beasts. But he reminds himself that here they are safe, that his belly has stopped growling, that they are warm, and dry, and clean.
Amid the snufflings and snorings around him, he falls almost immediately into a dreamless sleep that is punctuated only occasionally by the cries of some other boy.
Shortly before midnight it starts to rain.
The first droplets sprinkle the grey footpath with black confetti. Soon there is no greyness left at all; the drops meet, overlap, then cover the surface entirely, then seek out new depressions to explore. At the top of the stairs a cavity begins to fill; the water collects patiently, inevitably; it is not ready, it is gathering volume, it is mustering strength. The surface of the pool shivers as it grows. Behind it, smaller reservoirs catch, and swell, and overflow into rivulets that burrow under leaves and cigarette butts and the wings of moths that they shoulder like trophies wrested from a battalion of ants. Searching, searching, the rivulets merge and feed into a dam that deepens behind the lip of the top stair. Its convex body trembles, hesitates, holds a moment, then tips into a cascade of storm-water that pours down step after step and across the landing and down again until it pools in lakes under the worn-out shoes of twenty-five sleeping boys.
‘Why are there so many homeless people in Paris?’ Kabir asks.
Aryan, too, is surprised to see so many men sleeping on top of the warm air vents in the street.
‘Maybe they lost their families,’ he says.
During the day the park fills up with people. Children climb and tangle and push and shout and slide on the playground equipment. Parents dart to break their fall. Friends turn their faces to the autumn sun and saddle the green hillocks with rugs.
On the highest knolls little girls stretch out and roll downhill in the luminous grass. At the bottom they lie giggling till the Earth stops spinning and point upwards at the giddy clouds.
There is a scrabbling and a heaving and the sound of sneakers skidding on a gravelly court. Jawad and Aryan and Kabir are watching the older Afghans play five-a-side football against a gang of Paris teenagers who have taught them the rules; their noses and the pads of their fingers poke through the quadrilateral wire.
Aryan follows the attacks and counter-attacks with a kind of ache. His feet itch for the thrill and thrust of it. But the men are bigger than he is, and the game is too rough and fast.
One of the players limps off the court and heads to the drinking fountain. Glassy comets fly in all directions as he shakes his water-soaked hair.
Later, when the sun drops behind the buildings and the families have retreated and the last footballers are flagging and winding up their game, it takes Aryan a moment to locate Kabir.
Then he sees him, a lone figure clad in a red and blue T-shirt, rolling over and over till the contours of the land catch him and the soft earth slows him and brings him to a halt on the swirling, phosphorescent grass.
Two weeks afterwards they get off the train from Paris in the glowering dusk.
There is an icy wind that has sent the police who patrol the station exits off duty early for the day. Already the streetlights are on as they step, directionless and disoriented, into the town and walk briskly against the flow of traffic. Movement, Aryan hopes, will make them invisible as he tries to work out where to go. The shops are closing and their workers are hurrying home; cars hurl muddied water on to the footpaths as they pass.
Aryan tenses as a police car cruises by and involuntarily tightens his grip on Kabir’s wrist; his brother winces and wriggles his hand free. The vehicle glides past without stopping, shattering bright, reflective puddles in the oily streets.
The Afghans they talked to in Paris said Calais was full of migrants, and that any one of them would show them where to go. But in this freezing city at nightfall, no one who looks like a migrant is anywhere in sight.
‘Where’s everybody gone?’ Kabir says.
‘Let’s just keep walking,’ says Aryan.
They come to a park where small clumps of snow, pockmarked by rain, have retreated under the trees. Crossing it, they follow a row of red-brick houses with remnants of snow on their roofs. It leads them back behind the railway line. The road doglegs left; straight ahead, a metal gate closes off a building site. Aryan gives Kabir a leg-up and clambers after him. Ahead looms a row of old warehouses; a sign hangs lopsidedly from a screw under one of the eaves.
As they approach the building they hear shouts and a scuffling of feet. Suddenly a ball comes flying towards them from between two walls, glancing drunkenly off the water-filled potholes. Instinctively Aryan stops it with his left foot just as the thinnest African youth he has ever seen flies out in chase. At the sight of the boys he skids to a stop. He wears a diamond in his ear and a bright red football shirt that says ‘Umbro’.
With a quick movement Aryan passes him the ball that is made of faded lime-green plastic and could have done with a little air.
‘Who are you?’ the African asks, eyes wary, clamping the ball with his foot.
‘We just got here,’ Aryan says. ‘We’re looking for a place to spend the night.’
‘Where are you from then?’
‘Afghanistan.’
A shout comes from behind the wall. A player runs out and the youth shoots the dented ball towards him.
‘Well you’re in the wrong place. This isn’t the Jungle, you know.’
Aryan is at a loss. He can see there aren’t any trees.
‘The Afghan camp is in the Jungle,’ the boy says. ‘It’s on the other side of the port.’
‘The Jungle?’
‘That’s what it’s called. It’s where the Afghans sleep. It’s in the dunes. There are only thorn bushes, though, there aren’t really any trees.’
‘Ah, the Djangal!’ Aryan suddenly understands. The Farsi word for forest, for mayhem and disorder. He pauses, trying to think what to do.
‘To get there, is it far?’ he asks.
‘You have to cross the whole town.’
Kabir tugs at his jacket. He is cold, and Aryan knows he can’t push him to walk much further.
It is nearly dark and now that they’ve stopped moving Aryan is starting to shiver; their new clothes and the second-hand ones they got from a church in Paris are not going to be enough.
‘Is there a place we could stay here, just for tonight?’ Aryan asks. ‘Tomorrow we will go away, to the Afghan camp.’
The youth hesitates, looking from him to Kabir. Aryan guesses the boy, though his build is slight, must be two or three years his elder.
‘Is that a real diamond?’ Kabir’s eyes are wide with wonder.
The African bursts into laughter, and Aryan is astonished by the way it lights up his whole face. ‘If that’s a diamond then you’d be talking to the richest
man in Calais!’ the young man says.
At the same time, he seemed to have reached a conclusion.
‘Welcome to Little Africa,’ he says. ‘Most of us sleep here.’
As they cross the yard the players’ shoes make scuffing sounds in the sand, punctuated by the dull thwack of the ball smacking the wall. The game is moving fast, all elbows and dancing feet, and suddenly they are surrounded by it, weaving players passing and stopping and threading the ball between Aryan’s shoes and bouncing it over Kabir’s head, leaping around and around till all Aryan can see is a blur of colour and all he can hear is the heave of their breathing. And then, as quickly, they scatter and spread and dive and shout and groan as the ball hits home between a barrel and a blue plastic crate.
‘You play?’ the Somali asks.
The matches with Omar seem so long ago now that they could have been played by a different person. But in that brief contact with the ball Aryan felt the reflex rush of excitement, and longed for it again.
‘I used to be a forward,’ he says.
‘We play to get warm before the night. We could do with another man. After that I will show you where you can bed down.’
‘Thank you,’ Aryan says, touching his hand to his heart before extending it. ‘I am Aryan. This is my brother Kabir.’
‘Jonah,’ the young man says, awkwardly accepting Aryan’s hand.
He turns to the players who have halted their game to stare. ‘OK, Arsenal, stand by. We have just purchased Afghanistan’s Ronaldinho.’
The fading smell of sump oil hits them first. Aryan remembers it from a long time ago, from the mechanics’ workshop near the house they lived in when Baba was still alive, in the town in Afghanistan.
The site looks like it was once home to a swathe of old industries: a sawmill, a mechanics’ workshop, a carpenters’ yard. Most of the old machinery has gone, but the concrete pits remain in the cavernous warehouse whose floor is patterned with an archipelago of grease. A rusting engine base stands useless as a tree-stump. What pieces of furniture there are have come from somewhere else, incongruous amid the industrial abandon: armchairs rescued from the footpath in brown or green velour, kitchen chairs with perilous legs, like theatre props awaiting a play. Some of them have cigarette scars. In the midst of them, someone is trying to coax a campfire back to life. Along the open side of the building blankets hang across the beams in an attempt to keep out the wind.
Hinterland: A Novel Page 12