Hinterland: A Novel

by Caroline Brothers

  ‘Where?’ Aryan looks puzzled.

  ‘Five stars,’ the man says. ‘Hot water, feather pillows – you’ll never want to leave.’

  The men grin and pick up the baton.

  ‘Room service for breakfast! How do you like your eggs?’ says one.

  ‘Same-day laundry service! Kindly place your socks in the bag!’ says another.

  ‘The shoeshine service is free! Just leave your boots outside the door!’

  Aryan shrinks with embarrassment. Men ahead of them and behind them are chiming in.

  ‘One hundred television channels, and all the movies you want!’

  ‘Fresh towels for the swimming pool!’

  ‘And heated towels for your bath!’

  ‘And if you feel like doing some sightseeing, sign up for our Jungle Tours!’

  Kabir’s black eyes are alight. ‘Can we go there, Aryan?’ he says.

  The men fall about laughing.

  ‘They’re only joking, Kabir,’ Aryan says.

  ‘Kabul Hilton – it’s what we call the Jungle, my friend,’ says the man with the handle ears. ‘It’s where all the Afghans stay.’

  ‘Is there room for two more?’ Aryan asks.

  ‘Sure, my friend. You can come with us.’

  ‘Why do they call it the Jungle?’ Kabir says.

  ‘It’s not really a jungle,’ the man says. ‘It’s just a derelict place full of thorns.’

  They are near the head of the queue. Steam rises from giant cauldrons. A Frenchwoman doles couscous into white polystyrene trays; another, cheeks glistening from the vapour, ladles out vegetable broth. A man hands them chunks of that weightless bread, and a plastic bag with forks, apples, yoghurt, chocolate, and sometimes a cigarette.

  Two Frenchmen patrol the lines, dousing scuffles, weeding out queue-hoppers, protecting the trestle tables from any shoving.

  Suddenly there is a pop-pop sound. A car accelerates; a burly Iraqi clutches his shoulder and yells. From the ground at his feet he picks up the pellet from an air rifle. The car has already disappeared.

  The woman who hands Kabir his tray smiles and says ‘bonjour’ and gives him an extra bar of chocolate. Her face is a collection of right-angles framed by frizzy hair.

  Aryan cannot eat apples. He gives his piece of fruit away.

  Kabir walks carefully, pursing his lips in concentration as he balances his plastic tray, watching his feet. His too-long trousers drag on the ground. The plastic bag swings from his wrist like a pendulum, gathering speed. He stops to break its velocity.

  ‘Over here,’ says the man from the queue, beckoning them to where he sits in a small circle on the edge of the canal.

  Ravenously, they eat. Their first hot food in days, it fills them and glues to their insides.

  ‘I am Khaled,’ the man says, wiping a hand on his trousers and holding it out.

  ‘I am Aryan. This is Kabir, my brother.’

  The man releases his grip.

  ‘Is everyone here going to England?’ Aryan asks, impressed by the crowd.

  ‘Trying to,’ Khaled says. ‘As you’ll find, it’s not that easy.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Nine weeks.’

  Aryan starts. That was even longer than Jonah. Surely it only took a few days?

  ‘Who’ve you been listening to?’ Khaled says. ‘My friend has been here eleven weeks, some people have been here three months. It’s very hard to get across. The port is crawling with police.’

  The men must be doing something wrong, Aryan thinks. England is very close. Thirty kilometres away. He saw it on the map the Afghan with the zippers showed him back in Paris, one afternoon by the canal.

  A man on the edge of the circle is concentrating so hard on something in his hand that he doesn’t immediately notice Kabir’s stare.

  A flash of silver. Kabir nudges Aryan. It takes him a moment to realize the man is carving at his fingertips with a razor blade.

  Music still throbs from the African car. Aryan has lost Jonah in the crowd.

  They line up for tea. It is served from a window in the cabin whose outside walls are covered in graffiti in all languages: Arabic, Pashto, Farsi, Urdu, Kurdish, English, and others that Aryan can’t recognize. There are felt-tip pictures of houses. Names. Cryptic messages scribbled in blue ink. Ways of trying to remember; a noticeboard for those following behind.

  The tea is hot and black and sweet. They hold the flimsy cups by the rim and blow on them, trying not to burn their fingers.

  Aryan is looking for his language on the cabin walls. Then he finds it.

  ‘Never Never Never give up,’ he reads, in red, indelible ink.

  Kabir trots behind Khaled. Aryan follows behind looking for landmarks, trying to memorize the way.

  The town is a labyrinth. Streets peter out in dead ends. Motorways circle, double back, intersect, fly over bridges, ring traffic islands, lie parallel yet inaccessible to each other behind walls of bisecting wire.

  Beside the port, trucks grind past in all directions in a choreography of primary colours.

  ‘I like the yellow ones best,’ Kabir says.

  ‘Why’s that?’ says Aryan.

  ‘Yellow makes me happy,’ he says. ‘It’s the colour of the sun.’

  ‘I thought red was your favourite colour this week, because of Jonah’s shirt.’

  ‘Well I like red too,’ Kabir says. ‘I think I like them both.’

  Aryan laughs. ‘Maybe you should settle for orange,’ he says.

  They stop on the edge of the port and peer through the boundary fence. They see ramps, cranes, and prefabricated offices piled on top of each other like children’s blocks. Trucks wait in long rows in the parking bay. Drivers cluster between the semi-trailers to smoke, waiting for a man in a fluorescent jacket to wave their vehicles through.

  The ferryboats gorge on a slow-moving procession of cargo trucks that fills them with colourful cubes.

  At the edge of the last parking bay, asphalt gives way to sand. On the far side of a double strip of motorway, the steel and concrete stacks of a factory rear out of the industrial flatness. The biggest chimney has red-and-white stripes like an oversized barber’s pole. tioxide is emblazoned in giant letters across the side.

  ‘Chemicals,’ Khaled says. ‘Keep right away from there.’

  He leads them down a narrow track between bushes that stand as high as a man. They bend low to avoid the thorns that snag their clothes as they wind through twisting paths, and emerge into a small clearing. At the centre of it lie the remains of a campfire. Three packing-crate huts are tucked around its edges like sagging igloos roofed with pastel blankets. The place is strewn with rubbish: sodden paper, rotting fruit and plastic bottles decorate the undergrowth. An old T-shirt and a discarded shoe lie abandoned in the dirt; someone has draped a pair of trousers over the bushes hoping to dry them in the damp sea air. The picture of a rat flickers across Aryan’s brain.

  ‘This one is empty,’ says Khaled, indicating one of the huts. ‘It might need a few repairs, but no one is staying there now.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Aryan says.

  ‘Like we were saying, the Kabul Hilton,’ Khaled says.

  But Kabir is already scrambling inside. He lets out a whoop.

  ‘Look, Aryan!’ he says.

  He emerges backwards, on his knees, with something unwieldy in his hands. Outside, he raises it to the sky. A cage, and inside it, a canary. There is a bell made of seeds, and a swinging perch.

  ‘Don’t touch him, Kabir,’ Aryan says. ‘He’ll have germs.’

  But Kabir’s hand is already in the cage, stroking the yellow feathers, the speckled wings.

  ‘I can feel his heart beating!’ Kabir says.

  ‘That’s generally a good sign,’ says Khaled.

  Aryan remembers the homing pigeons his grandfather used to keep on the roof of their house in Afghanistan, how they would circle the baked city, their wings white against the stony backdrop of moun
tains as the heat drained out of the day. The old man would feed one with a piece of bread and hold its feet so that it flapped its wings, and the rest of the flock would hear it no matter how high up they were or where they were over the valley. In a clapping and flapping and beating of whiteness that at first made Aryan afraid, they would all come in to land in a flurry of beaks and feathers and strange orange eyes and claws. He remembers them from before Kabir was born, before they went to Iran, before they didn’t have pigeons any more.

  ‘Don’t worry, he can’t fly,’ Khaled says. ‘His tail feathers were probably stolen by the police.’

  Kabir is kicking through the rubbish hunting for something he can use for water. He whistles at the bird through the bars of the cage.

  ‘He’s lost his voice, too,’ Khaled says. ‘But you can have him if you want. Maybe you can get him to remember some tunes.’

  Khaled has kicked over the old ashes and is building a small pyramid of paper and twigs in order to make a new fire.

  ‘Did they make it to England?’ Aryan asks.

  ‘Who?’ Khaled says.

  ‘The guys who slept here before. The ones who left the canary.’

  ‘Yes, though it took them a few weeks.’

  ‘How many weeks?’ says Aryan.

  ‘I didn’t count. But it must have been five or six.’

  Six weeks. Aryan swallows. He is worried how long their money will last, about how much more they will need.

  ‘Some guys have been trying for a lot longer.’

  ‘How do you know they got across?’

  ‘We know because Idris told us.’

  ‘Who is Idris?’

  Khaled laughs. ‘Everyone knows Idris. You’ll meet him soon enough. He is the guy who organizes the trucks. He knows everything that goes on. People phone him when they get to the other side. Or they phone their friends and they tell him. You can’t go anywhere without him – not even for a piss half the time.’

  They are inside the hut, and Kabir has snuggled close to his brother for warmth. He smells faintly of sweat and the sticky sea air. The blankets are musty with old dirt. Aryan thinks about fleas, about the bites they got in Greece, remembers how sick they were there.

  ‘Can we get some super glue?’ Kabir says after a while.

  Aryan wonders if he has heard correctly. ‘Super glue?’

  ‘To hide our fingerprints. Khaled said we can get it from the store.’

  ‘We don’t need to hide our fingerprints – we haven’t been fingerprinted anywhere.’

  ‘But if the French police catch us, Khaled says they will fingerprint us. Khaled says that means they will send us back here if they find us in England.’

  ‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow. Get some sleep, Kabir.’

  Kabir is silent for a while. Then:

  ‘Aryan?’

  ‘What, Kabir?’

  ‘Did you hear that sound?’

  ‘What sound?’

  ‘That rustling sound. Like someone in the bushes.’

  ‘No. You’re imagining things. Go to sleep.’

  ‘There are ghosts out there, Aryan.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘The Afghans round the campfire. Some of the boys were talking about them.’

  ‘Well you should block your ears. They are only trying to scare you.’

  ‘They said there were killer ghosts that came out at night with knives. They said one man got attacked.’

  ‘More likely he got in a fight,’ Aryan says. ‘Those ghosts are all in their heads.’

  ‘They said there was lots of blood. The ghosts were filthy with matted hair. They said they were the guards of the Jungle and they flashed their knives and said they would take revenge on trespassers, no matter who they were.’

  Aryan shivers. Kabir’s ghosts remind him of the ones that terrified him as a child: malodorous creatures with ragged beards who rained rocks down from the mountainsides, guarding the pass behind the village where Baba was from. His earliest memories of fear. Immediately he smothers the thought.

  ‘Kabir,’ he says. ‘It’s only a story. It’s something invented by the smugglers to protect their terrain.’

  ‘I’m scared, Aryan.’

  ‘Why would you be scared of ghosts? You were brave when we crossed the river into Greece. You were brave when we ran away from the farm. You were brave in the desert and when we crossed over the mountains with the horsemen. You can’t tell me that now you’re spooked by a story some guys have made up.’

  ‘Sometimes I think about that man on the farm. Maybe he is trying to get me.’

  Aryan catches his breath. ‘That man is a long way away, Kabir,’ he says. ‘He can’t find you here. Even if he knew you were here, which he doesn’t. Even if he were out looking for you, which he isn’t.’

  ‘How do you know? Maybe they are angry with us for running away.’

  ‘We are the ones who should be angry with them. They didn’t pay us, remember. And they didn’t help us go to Italy like they said.’

  ‘He could come in his truck.’

  ‘Even if he did, he’d have better things to do than look for you.’

  ‘He might want to take us back.’

  ‘They’ve probably got other boys working there now. You’re only scared because it’s dark. I bet you aren’t frightened during the day.’

  ‘Sometimes I am. Sometimes I think I see him.’

  ‘You see him? Where?’

  ‘In the town. Near the lighthouse where we get food. Sometimes near the Jungle.’

  It is only now Aryan realizes that Kabir is trembling.

  ‘It’s your imagination, Kabir. That man is not here, believe me. He is a thousand miles away. Next time you think you see him, tell me, and I’ll prove you wrong, I swear it. And next time you hear those ghost stories, put your hands over your ears, like this.’

  Kabir doesn’t say anything.

  ‘Do you think you will be able to sleep now?’ Aryan says.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you remember the English words I taught you?’

  ‘Some of them,’ Kabir says.

  ‘And the counting?’

  ‘Yes, I remember that.’

  ‘So count to twenty in English and then start again. Baba always used to say you can’t count and be scared at the same time.’

  Something startles him awake.

  Rigid, Aryan scans the blackness with eyes that refuse to see. He can’t identify the sound that has wrenched him back to consciousness. He lifts his head in the darkness, every sense alert. He hears Kabir’s steady breathing somewhere beside him under the blankets that were heavy without being warm. The stale stench of socks and bedding fills his nostrils; a wan light thins the sides of the hut where it penetrates the plastic sheeting like a membrane. Overhead all is dark; the blankets that make up the roof have blocked out the sky. In the distance he can hear the sea. He shifts his body softly, easing the pressure where the slats of the packing crates were digging in to his bones, his brain still searching.

  Suddenly, it’s there again: the crackle of a short-wave radio. Like a stab of lightning the noise throws him back to the house in Afghanistan where the sound of electronic voices was the prelude to danger. There is a sour taste in his mouth and one blind thought in his head: escape.

  Aryan grabs Kabir, thrusts a hand over his mouth and leans into his ear. ‘Get your shoes,’ he says.

  Kabir jack-knifes awake. He crawls out of his blankets with neither cry nor complaint. Aryan feels in the darkness of the hut for his own trainers, shoves in his feet, turns to Kabir who is fumbling in the tangle of bedclothes.

  ‘I can’t find them.’ There is panic in Kabir’s voice.

  Aryan flails about under the piles of bedding tossed into the hut by others who had nested there before them; Kabir’s shoes are nowhere to be found. ‘Get on my back,’ he says.

  He can hear the radio-crackle getting nearer – then a shout as the police reach another hut in the thor
n bushes and the men caught sleeping inside it start to protest. Kabir lassoes Aryan’s neck with his arms, threads his legs through his elbows.

  ‘Keep your head down,’ Aryan says, as he crawls through the blanket flap and out into the clear night air.

  ‘Hey, you!’ a voice cries in English. ‘Police! Stop now!’

  Aryan bolts.

  There is a sound of thrashing behind him, as if someone is slashing the vegetation. Aryan can’t tell if the shouts are directed at them or at somebody else.

  Then another voice, that seems to come from the hut next to theirs. ‘I got one! Here, quick!’

  There is only one way out through the bushes and Aryan takes it. Branches tear at his face and shirt as he hurls himself, half strangled by the child on his back, along the sandy path that winds like a rabbit track through the warren of thorns.

  ‘Shut your eyes,’ he says. He is bent double as the barbs rip at cloth and skin.

  There is just enough light in the pre-dawn sky to make out the track, and where it forks he takes the branch that leads away from the truck park, away from the port, down through the spinifex dunes to the sea. His feet kick dry footprints in the sand’s damp crust. His heart is thumping; Kabir’s breath is hot on the nape of his neck; round arms are putting pressure on his windpipe. Aryan clutches at them as his legs work underneath him, under Kabir’s dragging weight. His chest heaves with the effort, with the subsidence under his feet as the sand deepens on the trail.

  Behind them he can hear shouts, and the barking of dogs, as men exhausted by the night’s fruitless efforts to conceal themselves on freight trucks are wrenched from shallow slumber by the raid.

  When they reach the edge of the dunes, the wind that picks up just before sunrise hits them full in the face. Aryan turns his head sideways to listen. No police dogs, no army boots pound behind them; no one, it seems, has given chase. He sets Kabir down on the sand and grips him by the wrist.

  ‘Come on,’ he says between painful breaths. ‘We’ll be safer just a bit further along.’