Refugee Boy (4 page)

When Alem stopped speaking the room fell silent. Mariam had witnessed the Ethiopia–Eritrea war herself and both she and Pamela had heard many horror stories of people fleeing war and persecution in the past, but they still found that no two stories were the same and each new story they heard still touched them.

Alem looked at them both and waited for a response, but there was none. ‘Have I said something wrong?’

‘No,’ Pamela said quickly, ‘no, not at all. You must say exactly what happened to you and your family. We need to know as much as possible about your experiences. Do you have any brothers or sisters?’

‘No,’ said Alem, shaking his head.

‘Do you have any friends or family in England?’ Mariam asked.

Alem continued shaking his head. ‘No.’

Mariam looked towards the photo. ‘Is that your mother and father?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your mother looks like a wise woman,’ Mariam said, stretching forward to get a better view without leaving the chair, ‘and she’s beautiful.’

The photo was a posed one. Alem was seated on a chair with his mother and father standing behind him. His mother was dressed in a bright orange, flowered dress that would have looked very out of place in inner-city Britain. Her shoulders were draped with a light-green scarf. Her face was dark and slim with a slightly pointed chin and gently smiling lips. Large earrings hung from her ears and her hair was plaited close to her head in rows going from the front to the back.

‘You look like a great family, there is a lot of love in that photo,’ Mariam observed. ‘Do you have a phone back home?’

‘No,’ Alem said, looking at the photo.

‘That’s fine. Enough for now,’ said Mariam.

‘One last question,’ Pamela said as she stood up. ‘Do you want something to eat?’

‘Yes,’ Alem said hesitantly.

‘What kind of food would you like?’ she continued.

‘Italian, Italian,’ Alem said with a hint of a smile on his face.

Pamela was a little surprised. ‘Italian?’ she said, looking towards Mariam.

‘If the man said he wants Italian, then the man gets Italian,’ Mariam insisted. She looked around the
room. There wasn’t much in the way of personal belongings. ‘How much luggage do you have?’

‘Only one bag,’ Alem replied, ‘one small bag.’

‘Well,’ Mariam said, ‘you have to leave this hotel today, so what we’d like you to do is pack your bag now and come with us. The first thing we’ll do is to go and find some Italian food and then we’ll take you back to our office. At the office we’ll work out a plan and get you somewhere to stay.’

Alem went to the wardrobe, got his bag and put his few items of clothing in it. Then he went around the room and collected the photo and his schoolbooks and put them away too. He went to the bathroom and collected his toiletry bag and put that in his bag before zipping it up. The whole packing process took less than five minutes.

They left the hotel after saying their goodbyes to Mr Hardwick and then rode for forty minutes in Mariam’s slow old Volkswagen to Reading town centre. There they found an Italian restaurant where Alem indulged himself with a very large portion of spaghetti bolognese while Mariam and Pamela slowly grazed on some boiled vegetables and pasta. It was in their plan not to bother Alem with questions over the meal; instead they let him eat, only interrupting him periodically to ask him how the food was or if he wanted more.

After the meal they took a five-minute drive to their offices, which consisted of four rooms above a shoe shop. Every corner had a desk with a computer on it, as well as stacks of paper. Most of the desks were in use. Mariam introduced Alem to every worker, clearly stating their name and whether they were full-time, part-time or voluntary workers. Then he was taken into a small room, which was empty except for a round table with four chairs. As Alem entered the room he wondered why he was introduced to everyone. Was it for a purpose? He worried because less than one minute after the introductions ended he couldn’t remember one single name. The names all sounded strange and unmemorable to him.

As they sat down, one of the workers came in carrying a tray with a pot of tea, cups, milk, sugar and biscuits on it. The worker put it on the table and left the room.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Pamela asked as she began to prepare the cups.

‘No, thank you,’ Alem replied.

‘Would you like some biscuits then?’

‘No, thank you, I have no more room inside me. I’m full up.’

When the tea making was done, Mariam began the talking as Pamela made notes.

‘Right, Alem, as we said earlier, this organisation is called the Refugee Council. We are independent and
our main concern is to look after the interests of refugees. Unfortunately it’s not up to us whether you can stay in Britain but we will try our best to make sure that the Home Office knows why you should stay.’

Once again Alem looked puzzled. ‘I don’t want to stay,’ he said. ‘I don’t really want to stay here, I want to go home – to Africa.’

Mariam responded quickly. ‘But you know why your father and mother had to get you out, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do, I told you why, but I don’t want to stay here for ever. It’s cold.’

Mariam smiled. ‘Yes, we know it’s cold and we hope that you don’t have to stay here for ever, but do you really want to go home right now? Do you think it’s safe?’

There was a long silence before Alem replied. He took time to think through his answer and as he answered he placed every word carefully. ‘I want to go home but I can’t go now because of the fighting. So I would like to go home when there is peace. Most of all I want to be with my parents.’

‘We understand completely,’ Mariam replied. ‘Let me explain something to you, Alem. It’s important that you understand this. We have to make an application for you to stay; we have to get permission. That permission has to come from the Home Office.
The Home Office is a part of the government. These things can take some time but it has to be done, otherwise you will get into trouble with the police. Today we’ll fill in a form for you. That form will go to the Home Office and then they will decide what to do; they may want you to attend a hearing or they may ask you to see them for an interview. If they do, you’ll see that their interviewers are very different from ours. They will ask you a lot of difficult questions, and they sometimes ask the same questions over and over again to catch you out, and they certainly won’t take you out for a meal; but it won’t be too bad if you are prepared.’

Alem sat up in his seat and said very confidently, ‘OK, I am prepared.’

Pamela handed a form to Mariam, who began filling it in, stopping sometimes to ask Alem questions but mainly working from knowledge that she already had. The main purpose of the form was to confirm the fact that the applicant wanted to apply for asylum so it did not go into detail over the circumstances. What it did do was to ask the applicant’s name, age, country of origin and whether the applicant was under the age of sixteen, and if so, was he or she accompanied by an adult? Alem could see by how fast Mariam ticked some of the boxes that she had done this many times before. She finished by repeating some of the questions and answers to Alem to check
that she had replied correctly, then she asked him to sign the form. Alem could sense how important the form was when Mariam looked it over one more time before signing it herself. Without taking her eyes off the form, she handed it to Pamela and watched as she signed it.

After signing it, Pamela put it with the rest of the documents into her folder and began to leave the room. ‘I’ll get this on its way.’

Mariam also stood up to leave. ‘Wait here, Alem, I’ll be back in a moment. I have to find somewhere for you to stay.’

By now Alem was sure that the two women were on his side, but as he sat waiting in the empty room, he couldn’t help thinking that they must be talking about him. He knew now that he had nothing to fear from them but still he was curious to know what conversations were going on behind the scenes. He could hear talk in the background but couldn’t make out what they were saying. Frustrated, he got up and put his ear to the door to see if he could hear more. He also had to listen for anyone approaching the door, so he still could not hear much but he did hear Mariam say his name in what sounded like a telephone conversation.

He sat down and waited for another ten minutes before Mariam re-entered the room alone. ‘Right,
Alem,’ she said as she sat down. ‘I’ve found a place for you to stay for a while. It’s an OK place, clean, not very far from here, and there are not too many boys there.’

‘What do you mean, not too many boys there?’ Alem replied.

‘I mean that it’s not too overcrowded. Some of these places have hundreds of boys in them, but this one’s not so bad.’

Alem was really confused. ‘Is this a hotel just for boys?’

‘No, not really, Alem, this is not a hotel, this is more like a hostel, actually it’s a children’s home. Because of your age you will have to go into the care of the local authority – the municipality. They will look after you, but we’ll be visiting you all the time. We’ll visit you as much as we can and we’ll get a social worker, someone whose job is to make sure you have no problems.’

Alem leaned over the table and said, ‘Kanchi gar menor ichilallehu wey?’

‘No, I’m sorry, Alem. I would love you to stay with me but it’s not possible. For the time being you must go into care or we could all get into trouble. We’re going to try our best to make sure that you don’t stay there too long and we’re going to make sure you’re looked after, but you have to go.’

‘What kind of boys are there?’

‘All different kinds of boys – big, small, black and white.’

‘Where do they come from?’

‘Well, I haven’t been there for a long time but you usually find that they come from everywhere, different parts of Britain but also from other countries.’

‘What is the food like?’

Mariam paused for a moment. ‘I don’t really know. It’s probably the meat-and-two-veg type but don’t worry, we’ll try and get some of the food that you like sometimes. I’m sure we can organise some spaghetti,’ she said smiling.

Alem exhaled hard as if he had been holding his breath. He spoke as if defeated. ‘OK, I will go there for now, but please, will you help me if somebody hurts me or if something goes wrong?’

‘Of course,’ Mariam replied, ‘but listen, these people want to look after you. It may not be the best place in the world. If they had better buildings and more money, things would be better, but you are in care and they want to care for you. We will of course help you if you need help.’

Alem thought for a while. ‘I know; maybe I could design a better building for them so that when they get the money the new plans are finished.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Mariam said as she stood up, ‘and when you’ve finished designing their new building, do you think you could design new offices for us?’

The children’s home was situated on the outskirts of Reading. It was an old building that had been through many uses. It had originally been built and owned by a wealthy merchant, who had sold it when he could no longer afford to run four mansions. Since then it had been used as a tuberculosis isolation hospital, a home for the elderly, a yoga retreat and a borstal. The moment Alem arrived, he hated it, although it was the kind of building that he could have really liked. It had a long drive leading to it, and with the knowledge Alem had gained from reading books on architecture he guessed it was Victorian. Two large stone lions guarded the main doors and much of the grey stonework was covered with creeping ivy. The green surroundings were idyllic but Alem just had a bad feeling about the place. It was as if he knew that the place had a pretty bleak history. Something made him feel that he wasn’t going to be having a great time there.

Mariam stayed for only fifteen minutes before saying goodbye and promising to visit Alem soon. It
was left to Sarah Cohen, a middle-aged blonde woman, to introduce him to his new home.

‘We have eighty-six boys staying here and I know the name of every one of them,’ she said proudly. ‘My name is Sarah and there are another seven members of staff here. All the boys call us by our first names. The staff are never all here at the same time, of course, some prefer night duty, some the day shift, but you should find that all the staff are friendly and willing to help you.’

Alem showed no emotion as he looked around the drab office. He had only one thing on his mind and he said it: ‘When am I leaving here?’

‘I must be completely honest with you now: I don’t know – no one knows. What I do know is that Mariam and her colleagues will try their best to make sure that you don’t stay here a moment longer than you need to – but while you are here I promise that we will try to make you as comfortable as possible.’

Alem heard the sounds that came from her mouth but he was not listening to her and she knew it.

‘Come on,’ she said, ‘bring your bag, I’ll show you around.’

They left the office and began to walk the timber-panelled corridors. In places the highly polished wooden floor creaked and as they progressed Alem began to hear activity in the distance.

‘The staff offices are out of bounds to the boys –
unless they are invited, of course – but most of the staff spend very little time in the offices anyway.’

They turned a corner and she opened a side door. The noise hit Alem; it was like an explosive attack upon his ears. The large room was full of boys. In one corner four boys played table football with a small group cheering them on. In another corner a group of boys took turns using hand-held consoles to play each other at Streetfighter on a television screen. Two boys were chasing each other around the room for no apparent reason, while others watched a football match on another television. On the other side of the room, board games were being played and other boys just stood around shouting at each other. From all this tumult two male adults emerged and headed towards Alem and Sarah. Sarah had fully entered the room but Alem still stood near the door.