Hinterland: A Novel (24 page)

It interferes with dreams and unpicks sleep and unravels the dark spooling of the night.

The tide is out as they walk along the beach, away from the port, under the bruising dawn. Shreds of sky lie like bandages on the corrugated sand. England has retreated so far behind its angry sea that Aryan wonders if it weren’t just a trick of the imagination, as insubstantial as a slideshow projected on cloud.

‘We can do exercises to build up our rowing muscles,’ Kabir is saying. Aryan has to turn his head sideways to catch his words before they are snatched away by the breeze.

Kabir has thrown himself on to the sand, demonstrating push-ups with his chubby arms. When he stands up again there are circles of soft sugar on his knees.

Kabir has become possessed by the idea of a boat. Whenever they go to the beach he ducks up into the dunes, or between the beach huts beyond the groynes, scouting for a dinghy or some sort of craft they can paddle across the Channel to England. A kayak, he says, would do, or maybe they could balance on a windsurfer.

Once he yanked up a child’s inflatable canoe from under the seaweed, a yellow triangle that turned into a salt-bleached ribbon of plastic with fading Disney characters on the side. It tore out of the sand like a zipper.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ Aryan had said, laughing and frowning at the same time.

Now Kabir is standing between Aryan and the sea and the world is in motion behind him, dark clouds sliding over pitching waves.

‘Have you got any idea how far it is, Muscleman?’ Aryan says. ‘It is more than thirty kilometres.’

‘Yes, but we’d have Hamid.’

‘It would still be thirty kilometres,’ Aryan says into the wind. ‘Ten kilometres each – and that’s if we went in a straight line.’

The black ink still on his fingertips makes their whorls look like the tide-ripples in the sand. He thrusts his fists deep into his pockets; the stain is like the imprint of failure that not even the salt water will wash off.

He watches an eclipse of cargo ships as he tries to think what to do. He is still exhausted after their efforts one night – no, two nights – ago; it is hard to hold on to his thoughts; one slides behind the other and he loses the trail.

‘While we are looking for a boat we can still give the trucks a try,’ Kabir is saying. ‘I don’t take up much room, and on a big one we could both fit on together. Khaled says all we need is a plank of wood.’

Aryan tries to focus on Kabir’s words. He knows his brother was impressed by Hamid’s story, that it’s been playing on his mind, that he thinks they could go to England tucked behind the wheels of a semi-trailer.

‘And where are we going to get a plank of wood?’ Aryan says.

‘I don’t know,’ Kabir says. ‘Sometimes they wash up on the beach. Or maybe someone is building a house.’

‘You know Idris doesn’t like freelances. He’d ban us from the other trucks if he found out.’

‘Idris doesn’t have to know,’ Kabir says. ‘And if we made it, we wouldn’t care.’

‘It’s too risky, Kabir. Even if we did get past the controls.’ He thinks about the cold and the water on the road, stone chips flicking into their faces, hands slipping off the dirt-caked steel.

Still, he would have tried it on his own. And he knows Kabir is game. But he has talked to Hamid and taken the measure of the danger – even supposing they got past the detectors in the port. With a conviction that reaches into a part of him that lies beyond words, he also knows he could never live with himself if anything ever happened to Kabir.

They trail along the invisible line where the hard sand turns soft, scuffing at clumps of seawrack and the slimy ink of jellyfish with their shoes. Two sets of footprints follow them, one meandering, the other looping and zigzagging across the beach.

Kabir fills his pockets with exploding sea grapes to toss into the campfire at night.

Aryan hears voices, distinguishes words, tries to relax into the rhythm of the truck as it crawls through the harbour controls. His hands are cold, and the taste of fear is on his tongue. Through his feet, through his legs and up into his chest, he can feel the powerful mechanics moving, the pistons and gadgets working, carrying them towards customs, towards the ferry, towards England.

Hamid smiled encouragement when he saw the cargo inside. Tomatoes, hundreds and hundreds of tomatoes, tiny ones, yellow ones, and red ones as spherical as marbles, and ovals, the shape of pigeon hearts.

‘We’re in luck,’ he had said, making an O with his mouth and posting a tomato inside.

Plants, he has instructed them – cut flowers, vegetables, fruit – exhale carbon dioxide in the dark. ‘They disguise your breathing from the detectors,’ he told them. ‘It’s like they are still alive.’

Wedged among the crates, Kabir is leaning against Aryan. He has acquired a knitted hat from one of the men, and Aryan can smell the dampness of the wool.

Aryan’s fingers search again for the crinkle of plastic inside his pocket. In the hut’s half-light they had practised, one at a time, learning to conquer panic. They had drawn the bags over their heads and around their throats so the air couldn’t escape until even Kabir could hold his breath for as long as his English counting.

They have chosen the biggest bags they could find, but still Aryan dreads the moment. He loathes the membrane’s whisper as it sucks into his nostrils, its close-up synthetic smell, the feeling of light-headedness as he inhales the diminishing air. And now that the moment is near he is afraid of his own reactions. He imagines ripping the clinging plastic from his face, gasping like a landed fish for breath. He pictures fine red needles spinning like the gauge of catastrophe, electronic numbers whirling, the high-pitched squeal of alarms. Hey hey hey it’s a hit, boys, let’s see who we’ve got inside this van! He imagines the fury of the men and his sense of shame at being the one who let the others down.

As it happened, it was not the carbon-dioxide sensors that caught them but some other detector that eavesdropped on their rapidly beating hearts.

‘OUT-OUT-OUT-OUT!’ The port police extract them from the freight truck one by one, shouting at them in French, whacking the truck’s metal struts with their truncheons. The driver stands in the pooling light beside the cabin, handing over papers to the guards. On the far side of the parking bay, three hyperactive sniffer dogs inspect a line of vehicles waiting their turn to board.

The air is chill and heavy with exhaust. They stand passively in the artificial light as the guards kick their feet apart and push their faces into the truck’s grimy wall. One after another they are searched, bodies swept, mobile phones collected like a bucket of eggs.

It is routine for everyone: routine for the customs officers; routine for the guards; routine for the border police.

‘Hello, you again!’ one of them says to an Iraqi who has been halted there so often that he knows him by sight. ‘Try again tomorrow, mate. Better luck next time.’

The Iraqi blinks back his humiliation in silence.

Glass doors slide shut on gliding runners. An officer working at a computer scarcely glances at them as they pass. He has straw-coloured hair and pinkish skin and a white crown embroidered on his shoulder.

The first English person Aryan has ever seen.

The back of the police van is cold and smells of metal. The floor is ribbed with dirt. Someone has painted the windows black so they can’t see anything outside.

Shoeless, handcuffed, they sit hunched on two facing benches: a group of Afghans, one thin Iraqi, two young men from Iran.

Hamid is gazing at the floor. Kabir’s pupils widen in the darkness.

The van rolls towards the exit, then abruptly stops. There is no way of telling whether they are inside or outside the port.

The double doors suddenly swing outwards. Three men built like bison crowd into the shrinking space. Bald heads. Army boots. No uniforms. Behind them, Aryan has the impression of darkness and a side of a fence.

When the Iraqi looks up they decide on him.

They can hear what is happening outside, even if they cannot see. There are no words. Just hard scuffling on gravel. The sound of blows. The van swaying as it is hit by something soft, then something hard. Strange, inchoate noises, like the moans of a dog.

Kabir’s eyes are round with terror. Aryan wishes his hands were free to cover his ears.

When they bring him back the Iraqi lies, still handcuffed, on the floor of the van. He is curled up like a foetus. One eye is swollen shut and there is blood in his hair.

Kabir is crying. Aryan is shaking all over. He feels nauseous and stares at his knees.

Later, in the entrance to the detention centre, they sit for hours on a long, narrow seat. There is a window with nothing to look at but a car park and an outside wall.

The Iraqi is taken to a separate room. One foot drags on the floor as they hustle him by. ‘Troublemaker,’ one of the policemen says to the officer on duty as they pass.

Aryan’s feet are wet and cold from walking across the gravel from the van. There is newsprint on the soles of Hamid’s socks.

They wait their turn to stand before a policewoman. At daybreak she takes their details. Name. Nationality. Age.

She indicates an electronic device with a small glass square on the top. She wears a machine-made sweater over her uniform. There is nothing personal about her, or the office, or the building. No decoration bar a portrait of a man in a sash on the wall. No photographs. Not even a plant.

‘First your thumb,’ she tells Aryan. ‘Like this.’ Her voice is neutral; she is just doing a job.

But something blocks. The machine refuses to work.

The policewoman abandons her attempts to fix it. Sliding an inkpad towards him, she points to where he has to leave his mark.

When he hesitates, she grasps his thumb and rolls it, once, from right to left and plants it on the white paper. Then the other fingers, one by one.

He feels exposed somehow, that something private about him is now in the light.

He stares at the black swirls. They look as fragile as seashells on the page.

It is mid-morning when they are finally let out. They collect their phones from an empty tabletop. Their shoes are lying in the drizzle outside.

But there are no shoes for one of the Iranians, and two of the Afghans find their pairs missing too.

The policewoman stares at them blankly when they ask.

They stumble into the street, hungry, cranky with lack of sleep. Aryan wonders which way to go. They are on the top of a hill, in a sort of industrial complex that is closed up and deserted for the weekend.

The drizzle has stopped but the clouds are violet and so heavy that they touch the earth. Their eyes stream in the cold; Aryan senses snow.

Hamid points out the lighthouse in the distance. ‘That way’s the sea,’ he says. ‘That way the port.’ He has a sense of direction by now. He has been here before, seven times.

He sets off up the road, then stops and turns.

‘You coming?’ he says. ‘Since they’ve brought us this far, we may as well take a look for ourselves.’

The tunnel hovers in their imaginations like some mythical, open-mawed beast. Down its throat, a day’s march through the darkness; how simple it would be. One foot after the other, wind-rush locomotives screeching past them under the waves. Aryan pictures them hopping along the sleepers, or pressing themselves against walls slimy with seawater as carriages full of passengers flash by. There’d be English people drinking coffee, and French people reading magazines, or working on their computers, or chatting on their mobile phones; not even the driver would notice as they ducked along the rails. They wouldn’t worry about the tankers and the ferries and the weight of water above them, nor even about the fissures where the sea was leaking in. Their faces would be turned to the distance, their fingers curled around an invisible thread, while always, calling them in and guiding them and shimmering like a lantern, the smallest circle of light that was England.

They cross wheat fields hacked to stubble for the winter, and clumps of grass turned to old-man’s hair by the frost, then find themselves on a back road. A signpost announces Sangatte; another, Coquelles.