Hinterland: A Novel (20 page)

When the water in the enamel pot starts bubbling, one of the Africans slides it off the fire and ladles the brown liquid into plastic cups thrust towards him in outstretched hands.

Kabir is sitting next to a teenager in a Bob Marley T-shirt who is rocking backwards on a loose-jointed chair. He slides a piece of wire as thick as a bucket handle into the fire and leaves it there, checking its colour and pushing it in deeper and turning it until the length of it glows as red as a neon sign.

Then, calmly, while his friends sip their tea, he withdraws it from the coals and, in a single gesture, closes his fingers over it and pulls it through.

Mouth agape, Kabir scans his face for pain.

The youth opens his hand to examine the effect. Kabir kneels up to look. A polished line runs across skin turned yellow with scar tissue.

‘Does it hurt?’ Kabir says.

The teenager shakes his head. ‘It’s for the fingerprints,’ he says. ‘So they can’t send me back.’

Under an oppressive sky they traipse along a disused railway line towards the port. Jonah walks ahead of them with some of the Somalis Aryan recognizes from last night’s game. His feet are ice and he feels light-headed with hunger. The tracks lead them along a murky canal and then veer off, running parallel to a road. Ahead, Jonah ducks under the barbed wire, and Aryan and Kabir follow suit.

They emerge on the edge of a car park squeezed between the railroad track and the canal. Aryan falters. Spread out before them, beside a temporary cabin and a row of green rubbish bins, they see scores and scores of men, queuing, leaning on the fences, sitting on the street kerb, picnicking in small groups on the ground between the puddles in the patchy asphalt. They sit hunched against the cold in dark anoraks and knitted hats – the camouflage of the unauthorized, the phantom men on the road.

‘Ravens,’ Kabir says. ‘They look like lots of birds.’

A car is parked beside the cabin, its four doors open wide like a beetle’s wings. Music pours from the speakers. Africans are sitting everywhere: inside, on the bonnet, in the boot, hanging on the doors. The car rocks on its suspension with the beat.

Jonah makes a detour to high-five them as he heads to the queue.

In low gear a police car cruises by, windows sealed, invisible eyes watching behind the reflections. Nobody runs.

Aryan takes a step backwards. There must be more than three hundred men gathered there under the metallic clouds. He had no idea they were so many.

Jonah turns back to look for them, taking a moment to locate them on the edge of the crowd.

‘Come on!’ he calls. ‘There’ll be none left if you wait.’

There are big groups of Africans in one queue – Nigerians, Somalis and Eritreans – alternating with Afghani Pashtuns and knots of Tajiks and a big group of Hazaras. Further on there are Kurds and Iraqis and Iranians and Pakistanis, everyone babbling in different languages. There is a Kurdish youth on crutches with one leg missing below the knee. Aryan and Kabir join the shortest line.

Aryan turns to the man behind them. He has ears like handles and a wide friendly face and a gap between his front teeth.

‘
Salaam alaikum
,’ Aryan says.

The man returns his greeting. ‘Are you new around here?’ he says. ‘I’d have remembered the boy.’

‘We got here last night,’ Aryan says. ‘We are looking for the Afghan camp.’

‘You know someone there?’ The man’s friends bunch around them in the queue to listen.

‘No. My brother and I need somewhere to stay for just a couple of days, before we go to England.’

The man guffaws. ‘Just a couple of days!’

His friends join in the laughter.

Aryan flushes with confusion.

‘You might need more than a few days, my friend,’ the man says. ‘You will see. But you can stay at the Kabul Hilton while you’re waiting.’

‘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.