Hinterland: A Novel (26 page)

‘You OK?’ he asks.

The bird drags one flared wing behind it as it tries to hop away. Kabir scoops it up in his hands and blows gently to warm its feathers and places it back inside the cage.

Above them, the purple clouds hurt too much to snow.

At nightfall they trudge back towards the town, Aryan, Kabir, Hamid, plus Khaled and two of his friends who used to share his hut. Over their shoulders they carry the blankets they tried to dry over the bushes, heavy now with wetness and mud.

Through the fence they can see the trucks aligned in the waiting bays of the port, the white buildings, the cold bright lights coming on. Aryan tries to work out how far they’d got before the guards discovered them in the truck, where it was that the police van stopped and the men came to get the Iraqi man.

There aren’t any warm air vents like there were in the pavements in Paris. So they look for a niche under a bridge, or under the back wall of a factory, or the ledge of a motorway roundabout. Each time, they find that other people have already staked out a claim.

Finally they reach the goods entrance of a supermarket. The six of them roll the metal garbage skips across it to make a cave, but the howling wind bores straight at them between the wheels. With cold-stiffened hands they try to block the worst of it with packaging they salvage from inside.

‘Aryan.’

Aryan isn’t sleeping either. He is frightened he won’t wake up if he closes his eyes.

‘Aryan. It’s too cold.’

Kabir is shuddering with it. Aryan can hardly feel his own hands and feet.

‘Come on,’ Aryan says. ‘Let’s keep moving.’

Hamid slides the skips apart. They set off, three slight shadows walking, walking, on the move all night through the silent streets.

Aryan has sworn to himself that they will try anything but the ice trucks. But now, his spirits ebbing on this hostile stretch of coast in the bleak midwinter, his mind keeps slithering back to Idris’s words.

Seven hours.

He is starting to wonder if it isn’t their best chance.

The long weeks of stasis are starting to gnaw at him. With every day that passes, with every night that finds them still in the streets, or slowly rebuilding their huts in the thorn bushes littered with refuse, Aryan feels his control over their lives slipping away. He is tired, tired, tired; the climate is wearing on him; every morning he is surprised he is still alive. Afghanistan was bitter in the winter, but he has never known cold like this – the way the wet air stings his eyes like needles, the way the wind off the sea bores through to his neck, to the small of his back, makes chilblains of his unwashed hands. The way its rimy fingers thumb through five layers of clothes.

Under numb feet, the puddles crack and splinter but do not melt.

Aryan tries to remember the last time he felt happy, and decides it is when they were on the move – in the back of a truck, in the train through Italy, in the carriage with the Americans-from-Iran. Every bump in the road, every flash of scenery made him feel they were getting closer to their goal. Where on the journey was it that they had stopped fleeing and started running towards a future, no matter how indistinct? Yet all that time, they were only getting closer to a wall. The harder he runs up against it, the more he feels his courage fray.

He tries to hide his despair from Kabir. It is not just the sense of being trapped. It is not just how hard it is to hold on to their hopes. It is something giving way inside.

There are moments when he feels like he is fragmenting. His memories are becoming disconnected slivers of time with gaps in the logic that links them. He remembers the coldest night, when the snow set to ice and a vengeful wind swept in from the north and the lights of the trucks were the only things creeping through the port. He remembers the old French people coming out of the blizzard to find them and take them to sleep on mattresses on the floor of a hall. But there are also empty expanses where he can’t remember how they filled their days.

Sometimes he wonders if, in the unspoken things between them, Kabir can sense how he feels. Though sometimes he weighs upon him like the Earth itself, at others Aryan wonders who was sustaining whom, and whether, without his brother, he would have made it this far at all.

‘I’m sorry, Kabir,’ he says. The hand holding his plastic fork is raw and trembling with the cold.

Puzzled, his brother looks up from his tray of spaghetti. The road is black with water; they are sheltering from the sleet on the leeward side of a warehouse with their handout meal. The top of the lighthouse is invisible in the cloud, as if it has given up on ships and is looking out for aircraft instead.

‘I’m sorry for bringing you here,’ Aryan says. ‘I should never have let you come. I should have gone by myself and sent for you from England. Maybe you could have flown all the way in a plane.’

‘I wanted to come with you, Aryan,’ Kabir says. ‘I would have run away if you had made me stay in Iran. You’re the only real family I have left.’

It is so long since they’d lived as a family that the word comes as a shock to Aryan; he can hardly remember the time before everything imploded. For a moment it seems that his brother is referring to somebody else’s life.

He looks at Kabir, at the overgrown hair, at the rain-slicked jacket over layers of clothes that have buried the Spiderman T-shirt he was once so excited to wear. He has changed, Aryan realizes. He is more serious than the Kabir he remembers with the puppies playing with his shoelaces in the onion fields. His puffy cheeks have thinned, and there are shadows around his eyes like he had when he was sick in Greece. If this journey is wearing him down, Aryan thinks, it is also taking its toll on Kabir; yet he never questions it, never says he wants to go back like he did when they arrived on the farm, never complains any more that he is nearly nine and still hasn’t been to school. He never imagines there is any path other than the one they are on.

Aryan is anxious about time sliding by, that every day he is getting older and they might not let him into school, about how he should make a life. But Kabir accepts their situation with a sort of stoicism. His brother might have grown quieter, but for the first time Aryan notices how much he has come to rely on having him at his side.

Something moves inside Aryan, and he smiles. ‘Remind me where we’re going, Soldierboy,’ he says.

‘We’re going to school!’ comes Kabir’s reply.

‘And when are we going to get there?’

‘At half past nine!’

‘When?’

‘On time!’

‘And
how
are we going to get there?’

‘KabulTehranIstanbulAthensRomeParisLondon!’ says Kabir.

‘Nearly there,’ Aryan says. ‘But I bet you I’ll get there first.’

With his ruby-ringed hand Idris pulls a mobile phone and a wad of notes out of a bomber jacket that did not spend the night in the dunes.

‘Look, if you’re worried, I can get you to talk to someone who’s made it across that way,’ he tells Aryan. Idris is impatient, feigning fatigue. ‘It’s easy. We can ring them in England. Plenty of guys have done it. They go back and forwards whenever they like.’

‘Let me think about it,’ Aryan says. He does not trust Idris, but right now all he can see is a circle of diminishing options.

He wants to talk first with Hamid.

Khaled sells them a card for Aryan’s phone. He got it for them at a supermarket on the edge of the town. Aryan doesn’t ask how much he paid; he knows that the price already includes Khaled’s commission.

They look for Jonah in the meal line, and find him sharing a cigarette on the African side of the cabin, beside the musical car.

‘Still here, my friend!’ Jonah says when he sees them, his tired face made young again by his grin. He slaps his palm against Aryan’s. His hair has grown springier since the night they spent in the rafters beside the sawmill; raindrops nestle in it like diamonds that match the one in his ear.

‘You too,’ Aryan says with a smile over the booming music. Faces lean out to see who Jonah is talking to, then pull back inside the car like a tortoise with multiple heads. The vehicle rocks to a reggae beat.

‘I need your help again,’ Aryan says. ‘It’s for the phone.’

‘You need to charge it up?’

Aryan nods. He has long since lost his charger but he remembers that the Africans were pirating current for their batteries from a building site next to the sawmill. ‘Would someone have a charger that fits?’

The phone gleams iridescent as a beetle on Aryan’s proffered hand.

‘No problemo, my friend,’ Jonah says. ‘We can do it this afternoon.’

‘Do you want to talk to Masood if there’s any time left at the end?’ Aryan asks.

‘Sure,’ says Kabir. ‘I’ll tell him about the sea, and that we saw England from the beach.’

Aryan dials the number of the house in Tehran. There is an echo-filled pause like air rushing down a wind tunnel. There are strange click-clack sounds as the small current of hope races back across all the miles they have traced on foot, by boat, in the back of trucks and semi-trailers, on suspension-shot buses and trains. He imagines the signal beaming up to satellites and bouncing down to the cables that criss-crossed the city, snaking its way to the right street, the right pole, the right house, to the black Bakelite telephone, click-clack, click-clack in the silence as the call patches through.

He tries to guess who will pick up the receiver; his heart is bound tight with anticipation, joy chasing loneliness chasing anxiety chasing sadness at how long it has been. He pictures ruddy-faced Masood, and his sister Zohra who was teaching Masood to read, and their father Mustapha who scares Aryan a bit. He holds his breath; the line rings and rings into the void.

He counts nineteen rings before it cuts off.

‘Wrong number,’ he tells Kabir. His brother is waiting at his elbow, scuffing the ground with his heel.

He tries again.

He can see the phone in the hallway, just outside the living room they also used for eating and sleeping. He can remember the sound it makes which is different from the one carrying now down the crackly line.

He lets it ring until the line goes dead.

Something isn’t right. Phone calls are so rare that there is always someone who will leap to pick up the receiver, or at least take a message for the family if no one is in.

He turns off the phone to save the battery and zips it back into his anorak, its hard shell close to his agitated heart.

In the evening they try again.

Aryan counts fourteen rings. Suddenly, a man’s voice.

‘Mustapha?’ Aryan says.

‘Who is this?’ Aryan doesn’t recognize the speaker.

‘Aryan, the nephew of Mustapha,’ he says. ‘When will he be back?’

‘Mustapha’s gone, the whole family’s gone,’ the voice says.

‘Gone where?’ Aryan tries to make sense of the words.

‘No idea where. Just gone. All the Afghans have gone.’

Aryan tries to grasp the news, to think fast as he absorbs the facts. Why would they have gone? Where would they have gone to?

‘Who is speaking, please?’ he says.

‘I am Izad, the cousin of the owner of this house. My cousin has moved back to the city and needs his apartment again.’

‘When did they leave?’ Aryan’s voice constricts. He tries to keep the man talking while he gropes for the right questions to ask, as the last thread connecting him and Kabir with the remnants of their family stretches as thin as the voice undulating feebly down the line.

‘Last week,’ says the man. ‘I’m only here because Mustapha is coming back tonight to pay us the last month’s rent.’

So they are still in Tehran. Aryan tries to think through the buzzing in his ears.

‘I need to speak to him,’ says Aryan. ‘What time will he be there? I can call again.’

‘He said he was coming tonight. Call back in an hour,’ the voice says.