Hinterland: A Novel (27 page)

‘Can you tell him Aryan called from France?’

But the receiver is already clattering in his ear. With the pip-pip-pip of broken connections something gives way in his chest.

Numb, he slides the phone shut. He shivers on the gritty black asphalt, gripped again by confusion. Tears needle the back of his eyes. He looks for somewhere private to go, but all he can see is the blurred blue light of a police car.

‘What happened?’ Kabir says. ‘I thought you were going to let me talk to Masood.’

When they call again it is hailing. White stones bounce on the roadway, collect in the mud, turn the blankets that make up the sagging roofs of the huts into nests of crystalline eggs. Aryan’s shoulder muscles hurt from always being hunched against the cold; his hands are so stiff he can hardly press the keys.

This time, Mustapha comes to the phone.

‘We need money,’ Aryan tells him. ‘The agent here wants two thousand dollars. It’s the only way to get across.’

Mustapha yells down the line. He has troubles of his own. He doesn’t have that kind of money. While he and Kabir swan around Europe they have just lost their apartment and have moved in on top of another family who occupy a single room. There are more Iraqis moving into Iran, and there is no more room for long-term Afghan refugees.

Aryan doesn’t try to explain. ‘What are we going to do?’ he asks.

Mustapha relents. ‘I will ask around. Your father was well loved. Maybe there is something we can do.’

Two weeks later, Mustapha calls. He has the money; a middleman is holding it in trust. Aryan reads Idris’s number down the phone so Mustapha can pass it on.

Aryan allows himself to think about his father properly for the first time in many months. Wonders about the families so grateful to him for teaching their children, even after he lost his job at the school, that they would agree to assist his orphaned sons. Marvels that he can still help them, though he died so long ago and is buried six thousand kilometres away.

Aryan saves Mustapha’s mobile number in his phone, adding it to the three he has already stored in its memory: for Hamid, Idris, and the tailor’s nephew in London.

Inside it doesn’t seem so cold.

The carcasses swinging in two long lines don’t look as sinister as he had thought. They are just sides of beef, Aryan tells himself, long dead, just chunks of meat destined for the dinner tables of England. They don’t even have any heads.

There are six of them and they have climbed in at a petrol station on the edge of town. Idris has set it up and, after what they have been through in the previous weeks, Aryan is surprised how smoothly it has gone. He is anxious about getting through the port, but Idris has said it will be a breeze, that they never check these vehicles because most people didn’t like the cold. ‘
Bon voyage
,’ he’d said as they’d shaken on the deal.

No, it doesn’t seem so cold inside, not after the weather in Calais. There is a stillness, and Aryan realizes that for once, it’s the lack of wind. In the darkness, under his blanket, he can feel Kabir sitting close beside him, knees to his chest, facing Hamid against the opposite wall. Three other men Aryan doesn’t know are dispersed inside. They are wearing every item of clothing they could find – six sweaters each, two anoraks, and as many socks as they could manage and still fit into their shoes.

Idris’s information is good; the truck gets under way soon after they clamber in.

Aryan has never been anywhere so dark. It’s like the world before creation, before any memory of light.

The hands of Hamid’s watch glow greenly: five forty-five am.

‘How will we know when we’re through the controls?’ A voice is whispering in the blackness.

‘We’ll only be sure once we’re on the ferry. The truck will park and stay still for a while, but we will feel the swell of the sea.’

‘I hope it’s calm. I don’t want to get seasick.’

‘Seasick – now you tell me,’ comes the low reply.

They talk in soft voices, then fall silent. They are taking enough risks as it is. Either they will get through or they’ll be found; they are resigned; there is nothing more to do but hope.

They hear the truck rumble towards the ferry. It stops and starts and reverses. The hooks with their red and pink carcasses swing and squeak over their heads. There is a grinding of what sounds like metal, and then the truck stands still. The men’s ears strain for the sound of voices, the sound of dogs, trying to imagine where they are in the port they have scoured endlessly from the other side of the wire.

The adrenalin that kept him warm is ebbing, and Aryan is starting to feel the cold of the metal seep through his clothes. He wraps the blanket around him, tight as a bandage. He has started to shiver, but can’t bind the shivering down.

At first his mind races. It darts forward and back, rabbiting between anticipation and fear, digging out random moments from the places in which he had imagined a future. He remembers Bashir and Ali, the way he used to trail around with the brothers who are scarcely even memories now. It seems incomprehensible to him that they are not waiting for them to return to Afghanistan, that Bashir and probably Ali too are no longer alive. He reaches further back. He pushes away the horrible time with his cousin on the shores of the lake, before the soldiers came, and thinks instead about the chess games with Baba in the bazaar, about the way he got the old television to work with the car battery and the jump leads with their crocodile jaws. Then the picture surges up of what had happened to his body, gathering him up among the scattered apples, the wrenching sound of his mother’s wails when they buried his remains at dusk.

Aryan forces himself to think about the house, the day his mother served the pomegranate seeds, the feel of the pigeons’ soft white feathers and the scratching of their prehistoric feet on the roof, the stifling summer nights under the stars.

He remembers the house in Iran where he and Kabir and their mother lived with Zohra and Masood, and the bus back to Afghanistan, and the last time he saw Madar, the last sight of her sensible shoes. Her fatal choice to go just that day at just that time, just when the car bomber struck. All the events that that decision unleashed. He thinks back over his and Kabir’s flight, the long journey back to Iran, the last moments at their cousin’s house, the Kurdish smugglers in the mountains who were as frightening as the soldiers on the border. In Istanbul, the mechanical whirr of the sewing machines and the smell of cotton dust and the day he sewed up his hand. He remembers the night river crossing with Hamid, and the old woman’s kitchen on the farm, and the puppies learning to dig, and Kabir’s face in the dashboard light when the lorry driver brought him back to the farm.

He wonders how Solomon used the fares he robbed from them in Genova, and how the lady with the pram got by after Kabir stole her handbag in Rome. He remembers the touch of the woman’s hands as she cut his hair. He thinks of the girl on the train, and her peacock eyelids in the reflection of the window at night. The Americans-from-Iran will be back in California by now, he thinks. He was happy the day they took them to buy new clothes.

It’s getting cold, he says to Kabir, but his brother is lost in his own world.

Gradually Aryan’s thoughts become heavy. It takes all his energy now to concentrate on not succumbing to the temperature, on gripping his jaws to stop the incessant chattering of his teeth. He covers his nose with his sweater to breathe his body heat back into his chest.

He is tired, so tired. It is so much effort to keep warm.

In his mind’s eye Aryan sees the pigeons again. They are circling the city, white feathers flashing against the dark mountains, against the smoke of the chimneys, against the pastel washing on the lines. They are descending in slow revolutions, lower and lower, until he can feel the wind from their feathers brushing his face, and then the feathers themselves. He can’t see his grandfather or hear his grandfather’s voice but he knows he is somewhere near as the feathers caress his cheeks, and the birds’ small hearts pulse warmly next to his skin. He is not afraid any more of their claws or the beating wings. Still they descend, so many of them they block out the sky and the houses and the wind. There is no place left to roost so they settle on his limbs and his body and his face, gently now, not scratching at all. He can smell their feather scent, like dust and insects and seeds and the mountain wind, as they warm him like a coverlet, pressing down on him, closing in over his eyes and mouth and nose, smothering him with their softness and using up all the air.

Hamid and I were the only ones to walk out alive.

I don’t know how long we waited in the end. Even Hamid was unconscious when they opened the truck. What saved us, I think, was that he and I were sitting near the doors; a thin trickle of air must have managed to filter in, and find its way to our noses and into our lungs, and kept up our low, slow breathing despite ourselves.

The first thing I remember of England was the market stench – rotting cabbage leaves and hosed-down meat – like a forest floor, like a field of compost – invading the metallic vacuum of cold.

A man in overalls was standing in the open doorway. His overalls were blue, the same colour as the sofa where the Queen was sitting in the photo with the dogs that were allowed inside. We were in some sort of loading zone.

‘OhChrist,’ the man was saying. His voice kept getting louder. ‘OhChrist, what’s this in here? OhJesusChrist, they’re blue. Call someone, call an ambulance, JesusChrist, just do as I say, it’s 999, don’t argue with me. Go!’

Hamid was stirring a little but Aryan was lying slumped over me and he was cold like ice. It wasn’t the temperature, they said later, it was the lack of oxygen. I pushed him off and got on my knees beside him and nearly fell down under those hanging carcasses and then I started slapping him about the face.

AryanAryanAryan.

Hamid was coming round with the fresh air. He got up too, kind of dazed, kind of crazy, not coming out at first with coherent words.

Kabir he kept saying Kabir Kabir we’ve got to go just run.

I was trying to wake up Aryan. His lips were blue and his eyes were shut and I couldn’t get them to open up again.

AryanAryanAryan.

Hamid was yelling now Kabir you’ve got to run, and he stood up trembling and swaying and jumped down from the truck on buckling legs and tried to pull me with him. But I had Aryan on my knees I wanted him to wake up I had to wake him up because otherwise he wouldn’t know where he was. And Hamid pulled my arm and then he ran and I saw him running and then he came back he came running back Kabir Kabir he said you’ve got to go you’ve got to run and he turned in a big wide circle away from me then back to me with tears all over his face and then finally he just ran.

Aryan didn’t wake up. When the ambulance came all screaming wailing sirens like there’d been a big explosion they put a plastic mask across his face and pumped air into him from big grey tanks and thumped him on the chest and pushed everyone away but I wouldn’t leave I kept calling him AryanAryanAryan to wake him up Aryan we’re here AryanAryanKabulTehranIstanbul AthensRomeParisLondonAryan we made it but he didn’t stir he didn’t move he just lay there thin and blue under the equipment and the swirling flashing lights. Then they went to put him inside the ambulance but I wouldn’t let go I screamed and screamed and gripped him hard with both my hands till they let me stay beside him and we went with the siren blaring to all oblivion through the English streets.

A lady from the hospital brought his mobile phone and his wallet and his notebook to the place where I am staying with other boys from all countries including England itself. In the notebook there were the drawings that Rahim had done of the park in Paris and Aryan’s sums for the cost of the trip and the sketches he did of me with the puppies in Greece, and the lines where he counted the days, and the strange faces in the golden mosque in Istanbul, and the Kurdish peasants we stayed with in the mountains. There were also some bits of poems, and a drawing he hadn’t shown me of a girl on a train. I called Zohra in Tehran and she went silent on the phone and wept until the last money ran out. I had to wait till they gave us more pocket money and then I could call the tailor’s nephew. He said he couldn’t come to get me because he wasn’t legal. But at least he knew where I was.

So I stayed in the home for boys and went to school with them. At first I only knew the English words that Aryan taught me – ea-gle, shep-herd, snow – though they weren’t very useful in London. But I remembered all the numbers up to twenty, and I liked geography because I had seen so many places on our travels, and I liked learning what the symbols meant on maps.