‘It’s cold,’ Kabir says, his socks sinking into the sand. The breeze is coming at them straight off the sea.
‘Keep moving, Spiderman, then you won’t notice.’
A few metres around the base of the dune Aryan flings himself down on his back and waits for the pounding in his chest to subside.
After a while he turns his head to look sideways at Kabir.
‘You OK?’ he asks.
Small pearls of blood well along a scratch above his eye.
‘Yes, OK,’ he says.
They sit in silence. Kabir makes moon craters in the sand, quarrying through the damp surface to the fine dry particles beneath.
When did Kabir stop being a little boy? Aryan wonders. It is not just that his brother is nearly too heavy for him now, not just that his own voice is starting to break. They are both growing up on the road.
It feels like they have been travelling for ever. Now that England is suddenly so much closer, he realizes how little he really knows, how little he can even imagine of what things will be like when they arrive.
Aryan sits up. The wind parts his hair, already grown thick since the last time it was cut, by Rahim’s wife in Rome.
‘Look, over there,’ he says. ‘That’s England.’
It has been a clear night, and dawn is starting to smear the horizon pink. A tanker slides between the marker buoys and the early ferries approach, merge and separate on an aluminium sea. A string of lights winks on the opposite shore, beyond a diaphanous outline of cliffs.
‘It doesn’t look so far,’ Kabir says.
‘I know,’ Aryan says. ‘It’s only thirty kilometres. But it’s further than it seems.’
He thinks about how far they have travelled, and how strange it is that the hardest part of their journey should come at the end.
‘They say the police in England don’t carry any guns,’ Aryan says.
Kabir is quiet, trying to imagine that. ‘Maybe they don’t have any bad guys,’ he says.
‘Or maybe the police outsmart them.’
Dry strands of seaweed skim the beach, hissing and tangling with driftwood and stray pieces of orange rope. A plastic bottle rolls in demented circles. Kabir covers his eyes to keep out the sand.
‘Why did the police come to the camp?’ he asks.
‘It’s because they don’t want us here.’
‘We don’t want to be here either,’ Kabir says. ‘They should just let us go on the boat.’
‘You can if you’ve got a passport and a visa and a ticket,’ Aryan says.
‘Why don’t we just get them?’
‘Don’t I wish we could.’
A flock of gulls chases the SeaFrance ferry out to sea.
‘How long do you think it’s going to take to get there?’ Kabir says.
‘Who knows,’ Aryan says. ‘We have to find out how things work. Then after that, we’ll just need a bit of luck.’
Aryan lies back in the sand. He can feel the cold grit of it funnelling down the back of his T-shirt and filling his shoes, but suddenly he is too tired to care. It is enough just to get himself and Kabir through each day. He looks up at the stars that are fading in the watery dawn and thinks of the stars where he was born, passive overseers of so much strife, and wonders how long they will have to bear this limbo, suspended between a past they can no longer return to, and a future that’s taking for ever to unfurl.
‘Hamid!’
Kabir’s high-pitched shout makes half the men in the food queue spin around.
With all the power in his short legs he hurtles down the line, nearly tripping over his laces and the flaps of his jeans, and barrels into Hamid’s ribs with the full force of his eight-year-old body.
There is a driving rain and it is already dark. Hungry men in five layers of clothes hunch inside their anoraks like monks hoping for alms. Their faces are sombre inside their hoods.
‘Hamid! You’re here!’
Reeling with disbelief, Hamid prises the limpet-hands off his legs. ‘Kabir!’ he says, staggering backwards through his own laughter. ‘Where’s Aryan? Are you both here?’
But Aryan is already throwing his arms around his friend. It’s been more than eight months since he last saw him in the back of the truck when it abandoned them on the farm in Greece. He feels his whole body open in a smile, doesn’t care that they’ve lost their place in the line.
‘It’s really you!’ Aryan says, draping his arm over Hamid’s shoulder in the old gesture of friendship.
Kabir is so excited he starts to dance in the rain.
Hamid still looks the same – a little drawn perhaps, a few tiredness lines around his eyes. But there is something different about him too, Aryan thinks. Something elusive, a sort of edginess that makes him seem older than his fifteen years.
Then, he thinks, he too must have changed. They have all been through so many things.
In Aryan and Kabir’s shelter, rain beating on plastic like an orchestra of drums, they wrap the stiff blankets around themselves and talk. The canary eavesdrops in the corner, enveloped in a pink rug of its own.
Hamid has been in Calais for four weeks, trying on his own to get on to the trucks.
‘It’s impossible,’ he says. ‘When you are alone there is no one to close the doors behind you, so you have to go with a friend. But no one wants to stay behind. There is no way out unless you go with a smuggler, and even then it’s not sure. A lot of the guys are giving up and trying to go further north.’
‘North?’ Aryan says.
‘They try from Belgium, or they give up on England altogether and head for Sweden, or Norway, or Denmark. Up there with the Vikings, in all that snow.’
‘What about you? Are you still going to England?’ Aryan asks.
‘That’s the plan. It’s the only language in Europe I know,’ he says. ‘Plus that’s where I have a cousin who will help me. But if it takes much longer I’m going to be too old to go to school.’
Kabir wants to know everything that’s happened to Hamid since they heard him pounding on the inside of their truck.
‘It’s a long story,’ Hamid says.
‘Don’t worry,’ Aryan says. ‘It’s not like we don’t have time.’
In the dimness they sit cross-legged, knee to knee, three dark pyramids of blankets.
‘We were thirteen in the lorry after they dropped you two off,’ Hamid begins. ‘We drove for hours, and in the end the driver ditched us a long way outside Patras, sometime in the middle of the night. We walked for miles till we found the camp.’
He tells them of the scenes he remembers: men silhouetted against the glow of the campfires, or fanning their embers in the smoky dawn to bake sheets of bread over old tin petrol drums. He shows them the marks on his body: the indents from truncheon blows; the traces of police boots on his ribs; the teeth he chipped when he fell on to the road from a lorry. He tells of the shock that swept through the camp when an Afghan he knew by sight was crushed under the wheels of a truck.
Twice he made it to Italy, paying his way by working as a door-opener for a smuggler; twice the Italians returned him on the very same ferryboat to Greece. On his second crossing he was stranded at sea, hidden inside a wardrobe in the back of a furniture van, for three days when the ferry broke down; he spent two hours massaging his legs before he could walk.
‘There was a rumour that kept going around the camp – and the harder things got, the more the rumour took hold – that Canada was going to send a big ship to rescue all the Afghans,’ Hamid says. ‘Some of the guys believed it – I did too at first. Imagine that – one big ship like Noah’s ark to take us all to Canada! It took some of them ages to realize that no boat was ever going to come.’
The trucks became everyone’s obsession. ‘You can’t imagine the knowledge we had,’ Hamid says. He learned to distinguish those that were going to Italy from those that were Africa-bound. He knew that the long-distance lorries were always the last through the port.
He wa
s in despair the second time the Italians sent him back. The Greeks took his fingerprints and stole his money and sent him to a jail with a hundred men and kept him there for forty-seven days.
Then, one night, they drove him back to the Evros. ‘We thought they were going to drown us and toss our bodies downstream,’ Hamid says. Instead, two dozen of them were ordered on to a boat and pushed across the river into Turkey.
He survived on moss, and the bark of trees, and last year’s rice that he scrounged from the paddies along the waterway. He made his way back to the smugglers’ house and argued with the father of the handicapped boy until he agreed to get him back into Greece.
This time he avoided Patras altogether. He worked as a fruit picker, then lost time in Athens, then managed to cross Europe clinging to the chassis of lorries. He ate in the kiosks at service stations, and always tried to head west.
‘I don’t know which countries I was in, and I lost count of the days,’ Hamid says. He went through tunnels, and over mountains, and down endless corridors of highway, eyes streaming, pebbles flying, fingers so brittle that he feared he’d fall off and die like a dog on the motorway, run over by the semi-trailers following behind.
Disoriented, and aching with cramp, he made it to a city called Lyon, and locked himself in the toilet of a train till it halted at the terminus in Paris.
‘There, I found the other Afghans, and slept beside the canal and sometimes in the park and sometimes under the bridges and sometimes in the underage camp inside the metro,’ he says.
‘We went there!’ Kabir says. ‘They had drawings on the walls and you could feel the vibrations of the trains in the tunnels at night.’
‘That’s the place,’ Hamid says.
Some of the Afghans he met in Paris urged him to take the bus with them to Sweden, or to continue on to Finland, but his goal was always England. He fell in with four teenagers camped by the canal and together they came to Calais.
‘We’ve been here for four weeks but this place is worse than Patras,’ he says. ‘No place has been tougher than here.’
Aryan is startled. ‘What makes you say that?’ he says.
‘You’ll see,’ says Hamid. ‘It’s nearly impossible to get out. Calais is a prison with invisible walls.’
‘People tunnel out of prisons,’ Aryan says. ‘What about the tunnel that goes under the sea?’
‘Everyone says it’s too difficult. Some guys had a go at the fences with wire cutters and in five minutes they were surrounded by police.’
‘I don’t understand anything here,’ Aryan says. ‘We don’t want to stay in France, so why don’t the French just let us go?’
‘Who knows?’ Hamid says. ‘Maybe they have some agreement with England. Maybe the English are making the French keep us out.’
‘But the English sent soldiers with the Americans – they know what it’s like in Afghanistan,’ Aryan says. ‘They are good people and everyone knows they have human rights over there.’
Hamid shrugs. ‘Try telling that to the French police.’
The silence pools between them, each lost in their separate thoughts.
‘You know, I’d better get back,’ Hamid says after a while. ‘I’m in a shelter with Farzad – he’s a Tajik I met in Paris – but someone he knows from Patras is coming here this week. Maybe I could move in with you two when he does.’
Aryan smiles at him in the darkness. With Hamid around he is sure they will find a way across. For today it is enough just to have been given back his friend.
‘What do you think, Kabir?’ Aryan says. ‘Will we let him in?’
‘Hang on a moment,’ says Kabir. ‘I’ve got to check first with the canary.’
After midnight the runners come.
Tributaries of men fall in behind them. Together they weave fugitive paths through thorn bushes and under clover-leaf bypasses, their shadows bleached orange in the glow of the city at night.
Soft-footed, dark-clothed, they slip between the slumbering hulks of semi-trailers that are positioned like tanks in the car park bordering the camp and the port and the sea. Their faces are sunk deep in the hoods of their anoraks; like white birds roosting, their feet nestle beside giant tyres as they fold themselves into their own shadows.
Up ahead, the runner tries the seals and locks. When they won’t give he moves on to the next and the next.
Finally he scales a tyre and peers into the cabin, scanning the dashboard for route records and telltale debris from the road. Then he darts to the back of the truck. Cargo-laden, it’s headed for England. He saws at the hard plastic seal with a pocket-knife and swings open the doors.
Quickly they clamber in, blood beating loudly in their ears. This time. This time. All of them are scared. Some are jumpy, some are calm, some trip and lose their footing, some are desperate, some are almost paralysed with fear. Some draw courage from the danger. Others curse or jostle or are nauseous at the demons of the night: violence, claustrophobia, police. Some are taunted by the devils at their back, by complicated debts involving land or their sisters or their homes. Others fear suffocation, or that their pounding hearts will seize up or give way or give them away; others still fear beatings by the drivers or the police. In the great lottery of their journeys all of them are survivors, but tonight only a few will pass this test.
For the others, a squalid dawn will reveal the bedraggled bounty of failure: police vans disgorging new candidates for detention; databases whirring through a million fingerprints in search of a match; the red-eyed, damp-footed night-walkers waking to disappointment at finding themselves still here, still prisoners, still hostage to Calais’s leaden skies.
‘The mid-week nights are best,’ the man is saying. There is no sunshine, but his eyes are hidden behind mirrored sunglasses in which Aryan can see nothing but a gnome-like version of himself awash in a petroleum sheen. ‘Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Those are the busiest days in the port, so your odds are going to be better for getting through.’
Nobody knows his full name. The Afghans all call him Idris, but no one ever addresses him directly. He is always wearing the same clothes – the only man in white moleskin trousers and leather boots that set him apart both from the Afghans he is constantly circling and from the runners who guide them to the trucks. Idris has people to do that for him now. Some say he is from Morocco, others, a Kurd; he speaks Pashto, and Farsi, as well as Arabic and the language of the Kurds. At twilight he emerges from no one knows where to cruise the camps in a sort of recruitment drive, ingratiating himself with the new arrivals, staking out his territory, joking while obliging them to sign up. Once they do, they become his property and his clan.
If the Afghans respect him they also keep their distance; it is always Idris who suddenly appears among them, jovial but quietly menacing, clocking their moves with an attentive eye. It is not the year-round suntan so much as the swagger that sets him apart; less the ruby on his finger than the miraculously laundered clothes that suggest his power, and the boots with the Cuban heels that prove he never has to run. In his presence Aryan feels grubby, self-conscious, like merchandise of inferior weft.
‘You can still try your luck on the covered trucks but you know it’s riskier now that they’ve doubled the detectors,’ Idris is saying.
There is murmuring among the knot of men gathered under the peeling lighthouse. Aryan thinks of it alternately with affection and suspicion, a landmark but also an echo chamber that hoards their secrets in its caracole insides.
Some of the men are silent, absorbing his latest bulletin to discuss later in private clusters with the old hands who have been here the longest and know how things work.
‘It’s simple mathematics,’ Idris continues. ‘You can work it out for yourself. Double the number of detectors means double the chances of getting caught, and double the time you’ll be stuck here praying tonight’s your lucky night.’
Nobody asks where he gets his information about the inner workings of the port controls. Th
ey hear the logic, but they have to take him on trust.
‘Of course there’s always another way,’ Idris says, rubbing his ruby ring as if for luck. A small crowd has coalesced around him. ‘There’s always the guaranteed option. It just depends on how long you’re willing to wait.’
Aryan has been in the port long enough to know what that means; he has always dismissed it out of hand.
But men, stressed by repeated failure, by the debts they owe or their families owe or by their families’ need for help, are starting to listen.
Aryan wills his feet to walk, but inertia anchors him to the spot.
‘How cold would it get?’ asks a man with sunken cheeks and hollow eyes.
‘Yes, how long would we have to stay inside?’ says another, his head so thin under its knitted hat that it looks like it’s been squeezed between two doors.
Solemn faces crowd around. All of them are tired, cold to the sinews, exhausted in their minds. Idris sees he has their attention, and spools out his information in languid loops. This time, Aryan can tell, there are men among them who are ready to consider it.
‘If you pick the right one, and that’s why you need me, you can be standing under Big Ben in seven hours,’ Idris says.
Seven hours. The number travels swift as rumour around the circle; the men repeat it under their breath. It seems unreal to them that they could be extricated from this quagmire in so little time, that in so few hours they could pass like ghosts through the walls of glass against which all their hopes have collided until now.
‘Yes but how cold is it inside?’ insists the man with the hollow face.
Idris fixes him with a look. Aryan can just make out the movement of his eyes behind the cold reflective glass.
‘Minus 18, minus 20 at most,’ Idris says. ‘You take a couple of blankets with you and you’ll be fine. Eskimos up in the Arctic live in minus 35 Celsius all winter long.’
Still, there is a murmuring. Seven hours in that sort of cold – you’d want to be sure you could get out when you’d had enough.
Hinterland: A Novel Page 15