Hinterland: A Novel (18 page)

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.

Jonah leads them past this place to a smaller building with a pitched roof and gaps in its wooden walls. Its floor of boggy earth is mulched with orange peel and discarded clothes and the hormonal stench of urine. As if crossing a pond they walk on planks to avoid sinking into the detritus. Aryan can see no door nor any other room; before he has time to wonder, Jonah has reached the wall and is starting to climb.

Entire horizontal planks have been prised away for firewood, leaving some splintering off into the void. The shoes of previous climbers have encrusted the slats in mud. Jonah disappears into a square cut out of the ceiling before his grin reappears in its frame. Aryan sends Kabir up after him, lifting him on to the first rung. Then he clambers up himself, ducking to avoid the beams.

They emerge into another world; Aryan marvels that he has not even imagined its presence from outside. In a triangular space criss-crossed by rafters lies mattress upon mattress, blanket upon blanket, arranged in an ethereal dormitory. There are little hillocks of daypacks, and anoraks hanging off nails in the rough-hewn wood. A mound of blankets stirs and two faces peer out; Aryan is surprised to see they are girls. Like the sights in a bunker, small chinks in the wall show the outside world in stripes; the place smells of woodsmoke and damp.