The Invisible Crowd

ELLEN WILES was born in 1981 and grew up in Reading. After doing a music degree at Oxford, she did a Master’s in Human Rights Law, and then became a barrister at a London chambers, disappearing off periodically to work, including on The Bushmen Project in Botswana and with Karenni refugees in a camp in Thailand. After scribbling fiction on the side for a while, she did a Master’s in Creative Writing, and eventually quit the law. She is the author of Saffron Shadows and Salvaged Scripts: Literary Life in Myanmar Under Censorship and in Transition (Columbia University Press, 2015), which includes interviews with Burmese writers and new literary translations. She is currently doing a PhD in Literary Anthropology, researching live literature, and directs an experimental live literature project. She lives in London with her husband and two small children.

Someone has flung rainbow pepper on the air.

The hummingbirds are migrating, each alone:

Blossomcrown, Coppery Thorntail and Flame-Rumped Sapphire.

RUTH PADEL, THE MARA CROSSING

All across the country, people said that

it wasn’t that they didn’t like immigrants.

ALI SMITH, AUTUMN

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Prologue

Chapter 1: Jude

Chapter 2: Yonas

Chapter 3: Joe

Chapter 4: Yonas

Chapter 5: Quentin

Chapter 6: Yonas

Chapter 7: Emil

Chapter 8: Yonas

Chapter 9: Jude

Chapter 10: Molly

Chapter 11: Yonas

Chapter 12: Meg

Chapter 13: Yonas

Chapter 14: Veata

Chapter 15: Yonas

Chapter 16: Jude

Chapter 17: Gavin

Chapter 18: Yonas

Chapter 19: Tesfay

Chapter 20: Yonas

Chapter 21: Nina

Chapter 22: Yonas

Chapter 23: Gebre

Chapter 24: Yonas

Chapter 25: Clara

Chapter 26: Yonas

Chapter 27: Martina

Chapter 28: Yonas

Chapter 29: Jude

Chapter 30: Melat

Chapter 31: Yonas

Chapter 32: Jude

Epilogue

Afterword

Acknowledgements

References

Copyright

Prologue

We’re clinging to each other, fistfuls of flesh and bone, and battering rams are smashing over our heads leaving us stingy-eyed, breathless, a woman and her child are clinging to one of my legs each, everyone is clinging to someone or something, and I almost envy the two tiny babies slung tight to their mothers who don’t have a clue what this chaos is about, who don’t understand the enormity of this terror, because there are way too many of us piled in here, we’ve created a death trap for each other, we know this, but we need each other too, we’re all we’ve got left, and this might be the last group of faces I’ll ever see, and I’ve never seen a group of faces so petrified, and I’ve seen a lot of petrified faces, and there’s another one approaching, oh God, it’s coming, it’s coming, and we’re rising, rising up – up and up and up – and this wave is taller than the tallest cliff and my stomach clenches and our boat is vertical now and I’m clinging on with all my strength and we’re going to flip backwards and this is the end… but then we dip forward, just a little… and then we’re nearly horizontal again – we’re floating on nothingness, we’re flying – and then we SLAP down on the water, and my brain explodes through my skull and the water is roaring and children are shrieking and women are wailing and men are sobbing, and I look beyond the boat and there’s still nothing but this vast purple-grey sky bleeding into a desert of wetness you can’t drink, with a furious monster thrashing underneath the surface, waiting to devour us, and why couldn’t it have chosen a group of people who’ve had an easier life? – and now the child who’s got hold of my leg has vomited in my lap but it doesn’t matter, because we’re rising again, oh God, we’re rising, up and up and up and up…

Chapter 1: Jude

WELCOME TO HEAVEN, HOW ABOUT A CUP OF TEA?

The cold facts about immigration – why so many asylum seekers head for Britain.

YK (Eritrea) v Home Office. That’s all you have so far. It’s 8 p.m. already, and you’re supposed to submit the skeleton argument tomorrow. You were all set to leave chambers at 6 p.m., for once, when your clerk phoned. You so nearly didn’t pick up, but the receiver tugged at your hand like a magnet.

‘Brief’s just come in for you, counsel’s sick – skelly’s due in the morning, papers being biked over now, all right?’ he barked.

It wasn’t really meant to be a question. But you still could have said no. You had the right to say no. You should have said no. But if you want to get decent work at the Bar you have start out as a Yes person, and as your old supervisor kept telling you, he got his breakthrough case by stepping in at the last minute. You trill your fingernails on the desk.

Back home, Alec will be listening to his final story before lights out. You’re a terrible mother! You should be the one reading him Burglar Bill. He’ll move onto books without pictures soon, and before you know it he’ll be off to uni. You should be spending this precious time cultivating his language development, guiding him through important moral lessons like if you burgle tins of beans and bedpans from people’s houses you have to give them back, or just feeling the warmth of his little body snuggled against yours… But unless you have a career you can’t even pay for the nursery fees you need so that you can have a career… oh, wait…

Anyhow, your papers will arrive any minute. You’ll do the speediest prep possible, enough to wing it, then you’ll jump on the Tube, and in half an hour you’ll be back in your kitchen, making a cup of peppermint tea, then sitting on the edge of Alec’s bed, touching your lips softly onto his apricot cheek, watching his silhouette gently rise and fall with his breath, letting yourself indulge in a moment of utter peace. And then you’ll crash. Meanwhile…

You write the initials YK in your blue notebook, italicize them, doodle some flowers around them, and fill out the acronym in your head: Yoghurty Koala. Yielding Kipper. Yesterday’s Kleenex. Your friends are probably all out having fun right now, on a night out at that new Brazilian place you had to pull out of last time because you were working, or seeing whatever the new film of the moment is… you’re so out of the loop. None of them have procreated yet, or become obsessed with a futile desire to change the world. As a result, all of them appear to have managed to achieve a sane work–life balance involving that mystical thing called down time. You wouldn’t change Alec for the world, of course. But why were you so obsessed by getting into human rights law? Why? The fees have got so low for publicly funded work that you won’t make enough from this case to cover the weekly food shop. Come on, YK. Yowling Kitten. Yachting King. Yossarian Killer.

Your clerk finally lumbers in with two large boxes and dumps them on your desk. ‘Enjoy. I’m off home,’ he says, as if you’d be thrilled. This will take hours just to skim-read. You’re tempted to throw them out of the window and jump after them – or at least just disappear from chambers for a while. You’re so drained, and all you’ve got is a Snickers for dinner, and you’re becoming a stranger to your little boy, not to mention his daddy, and right now you feel less like a human rights warrior and more like a masochist… You manage enough grace to say ‘bye’ but your clerk is already out of the door. His feet thump down the stairs, two at a time. You pull out the first file, and just after you extricate it from the box, it bursts. White sheets drift over your desk and across the floor like snow.

Max would love you to quit the Bar! He says it’s not worth the stress. If you did quit you could start your own business, like screen-printing pretty muslin cloths, that idea you had when Alec was a baby – there’s clearly a market among new mums who want to look artsy while mopping up sick – or maybe just trade barrister for barista, and get a no-stress nine to five in a hipster coffee shop. You’d probably make more money, in the short term anyway, and the pay would be regular. Or else, you and Max could shove all your stuff into storage and migrate somewhere exotic like Zanzibar, teach English, and sip coconut water as Alec splashes through turquoise waves and rides on dolphins.

You pull down a new ring binder from the cupboard, gather up the papers, stick them back in again, in order, which eats up at least fifteen minutes, then start to flick through. So, YK is a male… arrived from Eritrea a year ago… university… government job… writer… conscript… prison break… desert… boat… cabbage truck… and you share a birthday! Seriously, 2 March 1975 – what are the chances? Could he have been born at 8.20 a.m. as well? For your last birthday, Alec made his first ever card for you – a portrait of Mummy in crayon that looked like a warped tomato on stilts with spaghetti on top – and while you were blowing out the candles on Max’s home-baked chocolate and raspberry cake, YK was probably… being smuggled through France? Cakeless and cardless, at any rate.

You go through his witness statement again, more slowly, and find you’re gnawing your knuckles. This isn’t a case you should be skim-reading. The reason you wanted to do this job is because people like YK have had the worst luck thrown their way, and all they get in return for escaping to a supposed safe place is a sea of newspaper headlines branding them liars, scroungers and criminals. At a moment as crucial as a tribunal hearing they need someone who will not only expend time and effort to put their case, but will actually care: that’s you. That’s why you’re still here, when you could be reading Burglar Bill or ordering a caipirinha (probably not simultaneously). But, first things first, where is Eritrea exactly? Might be nice at least to locate it within the continent before you attempt to persuade a judge not to send someone back there.

The internet informs you that it’s a moon-shaped sliver of coastline in East Africa, with mountains inland and coral reefs along the coast. Should be lush. But apparently it’s an ‘open prison’. Ethiopia is its next-door neighbour but also its worst enemy since they split up… after a thirty-year-long war. And then another war over the border… So in 1990, when you were on a camping holiday with your parents in the Lakes, pretending you were a Swallows and Amazons character, YK was stuck behind a front line. And in 1998, when you were doing your law conversion course and trying to get your head around trusts and torts, he was being conscripted. In 2001, when you were starting pupillage in the beautiful surrounds of Temple, his government announced the end of the free press. And in 2003, when you were stressing about leaving your beautiful baby boy in nursery so you could go back to your sought-after job after your maternity leave, he was being tortured in an underground oven.

After a bit more research, you find yourself clicking into a few diaspora blogs, expecting a barrage of outrage against the government, but while you do find a lot of that, you find a lot of defenders as well. It’s like going down a rabbit hole into a world of patriotic passions, fierce emotions and vicious insults. But you’ve got to crawl out: you’re seriously pressed for time now. You need to focus on the law, the expert reports, the evidence. You unwrap your Snickers, take a large bite, and read on.

If what he says is true, YK has lived a more terrifying life than you can contemplate enduring and remaining sane. But as you read his rejection letter from the Home Office, go through his witness statement again and note down questions you want to ask, a cynical voice in your head can’t help asking: how much is he exaggerating? He claims he was imprisoned for writing articles criticizing the regime… but would he really have dared to do something that risky in a country that repressive? There’s less press freedom there than in North Korea. And then to stage a prison break near a militarized border – is that even possible? It’s ironic that the more oppressive the country, the harder it is to make any stories of resistance sound credible in a tribunal, when, if they were true, the case for asylum would be all the stronger. YK has also got zero hard evidence from Eritrea to back up what he says, which of course makes sense if he had to flee, but never helps with credibility. Also, could his journey really have been that hair-raising? And why didn’t he just seek asylum here sooner? Plus, you bet in person his English will be rubbish and he won’t remember what his solicitor put in his statement and he’ll come across as stilted and awkward and the judge will make him squirm.

You plough on, sticking Post-it notes on pages of the file and making lists. YK has got some good character witnesses, like Molly Muldoon, his English teacher, and Nina Lambourne, a friend who claims she trusts him enough to let him babysit her daughter… Doesn’t that name ring a bell? Oh, and she’s Molly’s daughter. So how come she became friends with him? Not relevant, not relevant…

Your eyelids start dragging. You yawn, check your watch. It’s late. Coffee is essential if you’re going to get through this. You get up, stretch, and walk along the deserted corridor to the kitchen.

The ceiling light sputters and flickers as the kettle crackles. You’ve pretty much planned your argument now, and bullet-pointed the facts you need to prove. But it’s funny – although you’re frazzled, it’s at moments like this that you wish your job went further, that you could know more, understand more. Sure, maybe it is a big enough challenge to take a mountain of legal documents and adapt them into a convincing account of someone’s life constructed solely from words and facts that can be evidentially proven and are appropriate to the context, and tessellate all that into a persuasive argument about legal merit. It’s a high-stakes brainteaser. But however well you solve that puzzle, and however well YK performs as a witness, at the end of the hearing he’ll still be a mystery to you. You’ll never know the truth. Truth. Well, you will have a handle on the kind of truth that the law demands – a cluster of facts weighty enough to tip the case over the balance of probabilities – but what you’d love to get a sense of is the truth of what it has felt like to be YK, Yonas Kelati, the living, breathing human being, your birthday twin. At least solicitors get to spend time with their clients, taking statements. Barristers barely get to meet them, usually. You wish you could dive inside the pages of these case files and swim around underneath the text to find out what your life would have been like if you and YK happened to have been switched at birth.

You pour out hot water, stir in two spoons of instant coffee with two heaped spoons of chocolate powder, splosh in the last of the communal milk, and sit down on the spare chair by the photocopier. After the first hot, bittersweet sip, you close your eyes. Imagine if, instead of meeting YK at the tribunal hearing, you could meet him for a coffee – not a vile mocha like the one you’ve just made, but a nice cappuccino in your local café with the comfy armchairs – and introduce yourself, not as his barrister, but just as Jude, a random British woman who happens to be exactly the same age. After some small talk you could mention that you’d be interested to know more about him and what led him here, and let him tell his story in his own words, while you probe subtly for details along the way, as any friend might do, allowing the conversation to branch and spiral beyond that square box labelled legal relevance.

Imagine if you could do the same with the other witnesses too. You could invite them each to tell you how they got to know YK, and find out what they really think of him. Yes, that part would be like when you were introduced to Max’s friends and family: you thought you had the measure of your boyfriend, but they gave you a clearer sense of who he was before you came along, and illuminated quirks of his personality. The way Max knocks on his teeth with his fist while trying to make a decision, as if he were asking his inner oracle for permission to enter? His circumspect dad does exactly the same. By the end of a marathon of chats and coffees you’d be bouncing off the walls, but you would also be able to adapt all the sterile witness statements in this ring binder into something resembling stories.

You could go further, and adapt YK’s story into a third-person narrative like the kind you normally get in an asylum judgment, but more red-blooded and visceral. You’d go way beyond that Miller v Jackson judgment you learned about at law school, where Lord Denning started off by waxing lyrical about a summertime cricket match, in order to cement his legal argument about nuisance. You’d go the whole way, turning law into literature. But how would that help YK? You could kidnap the immigration judge listed for YK’s hearing, borrow her robes and pose as her while you read out your own prose to the tribunal, and conclude triumphantly that the appeal has succeeded… Oh, except you’d have to be there to listen to the judgment, as YK’s barrister. And you’d probably end up jailed yourself.

Anyhow, you’ve finished your drink, so it’s time to stop fantasizing and get back to work. But, when you sit at your desk again, your fingers seem to get a will of their own and start typing words into an online search box: Eritrean restaurant London. Your mouse clicks on a link. The food looks pretty good – lots of big pancake-type things and curries. You imagine taking YK and your solicitor there after the hearing to celebrate your win, and inviting him to choose the dishes… It’ll probably never happen. There probably won’t be an appropriate moment to ask, and anyway he might have no interest in getting to know you, might not care at all that you share a birthday, might not want to let you into any more details about his parallel, polar-opposite life. But you can at least make it a belated New Year’s resolution to step away from Pizza Express and drag your family along to eat some authentic Eritrean food one day, if you ever get time off work, to close your eyes while chewing, to immerse yourself in the new flavour sensations on your tongue…

Chapter 2: Yonas

CEREAL OFFENDERS: ASYLUM SEEKER GANG COLLECTED £24 MILLION DRUG MONEY IN SPECIAL K BOXES

It was the ninety-third morning. Yonas picked up a shrimp, tore off its head, pulled off its tail, eased away its leg-fringed shell, then tossed the shell in a bucket to the right, dropped the flesh onto the pile to the left, and grabbed another, then tore off its head, pulled off its tail, and on, and on… until his numb fingertips fumbled, and a shrimp dropped to the floor. He stopped and stared at it for a moment. Lying there. Taunting him. He felt like lying down on the floor and curling up next to it. As he finally bent to grasp it, his spine made a cracking noise and a twinge spiked across his lower back. He straightened up, tentatively, stretched his arms and felt his shoulders crunch. The others were all hunched over cockles, mussels, oysters and crabs, and he imagined the whole lot of them solidifying and being found in here one day by a bunch of archaeologists, frozen in time like statues in a derelict church, with rotting shellfish strewn around their feet.

His stomach growled, reminding him that, by some miracle, he was still alive. Before he knew it he would be free to go out to a restaurant to eat a tasty meal with a bottle of beer on the side, and even some fresh fruit afterwards if he felt like it. What he would give right now for the zingy fragrance of a mango, fresh from the garden, newly sliced, glistening gold and dripping with juice! Saliva gushed around his tongue.

He blew pointlessly on his fingers, and turned the next shrimp around in his palm, picturing the beast when it was still alive, pottering along the seabed, waving its whiskers, unaware that it was about to be scooped up and boiled. He broke the shell open and extracted the flesh. When it dried, its colour would intensify and it would shrink into a crescent bead. He could string a collection into a necklace for little Lemlem… but she wouldn’t be so little any more. It had been over a year since he’d seen her running around on those chubby legs. How great it would be to hear her voice chirping down a phone. Better still, to have her run through the door squealing Uncle Yonas!, reaching her arms out to be picked up, tossed in the air and spun around…

A sharp slap on the back of his head jarred his neck, and grey sparkles danced before his eyes. ‘Get on with it,’ Aziz barked.

Yonas felt like jumping up, kicking his stool away, chucking his entire bucket of shrimp shells over Aziz’s ugly, balding head, then roaring: You get on with it! We’re out of here!

But Gebre was hissing at him: ‘Eh! Melehaye!’ his face peeking around a mountain of scallops. ‘While you were daydreaming over there I started my fourth bucket. I’m being tipped for promotion.’ He flicked a shell into the air so it spun down and landed with a clink.

Yonas laughed, as much in surprise as at the joke. He couldn’t remember when Gebre was last in a good enough mood to banter, but then one of them had always tried to pep up the other if they were down. ‘No chance, my friend,’ he retorted. ‘You’re the donkey to my racehorse.’

‘There’s only one donkey in here,’ Gebre said, ‘and I’m talking to him.’

‘If you weren’t the donkey you’d have noticed that my shrimps are a quarter the size of your scallops so my buckets take way longer to fill. Which means I can take time out and still go faster than you.’

Gebre cackled. ‘Listen, one of your shrimps is about the size of your—’

But Aziz was approaching Gebre from behind now, and before Yonas had time to gesture a warning, his friend had been yanked around. ‘What did I tell you,’ Aziz snarled, snout to nose, then let go suddenly, so that Gebre nearly toppled. Then he looked over to Yonas. ‘Stop slacking, both of you, and get on with your fucking work,’ he said, and skulked off to his den again, mumbling something that sounded like ‘fed up with managing reprobates’. A piece of paper taped to his door stated OFFICE NO ENTER in unequivocal red marker.

Gebre’s face crumpled into its default frown, his liveliness fading as quickly as it had appeared. He absently gnawed at a well-chewed fingernail, then got back to his shelling. We have to get out of here, Yonas thought. It was crazy to have been in the UK all this time and still to have no sense of what this country was actually like.

Their arrival felt like yesterday and for ever ago. Yonas remembered so clearly when they first walked in, both of them so weak they could barely stand, but still vaguely elated at having survived, together, through everything. When he registered how dank and eerie the factory was, Yonas’s first reaction was to think he must be hallucinating, that in his fatigue he’d dreamed up some kind of ghost story set in Victorian Britain. He’d uttered a staccato laugh – but the sound had reverberated back at him, and a couple of the other workers had glanced up, confused. The place was dimly lit, with only narrow shafts of daylight struggling through boarded-up windows, and the workers wore glazed, otherworldly expressions. The ceiling was high, and charred remains of timbers were dotted along the wall where the first floor must once have been. The kitchen on the back wall consisted of a big vat perched on a tiny gas burner, like an oversized owl on a twig. The bathroom comprised two industrial sinks with a hosepipe shower, and the toilet was in a shed outside with no lock. Sharing it between nineteen other men meant it was never free when you needed it. But at least there was a toilet. Yonas thought back to those interminable days in the lorry through the Sahara, how he’d had to close off the top of his throat and breathe through his mouth so that he couldn’t smell the foul cocktail of piss and shit and vomit, and later the sickly sweet infusion of decomposing human flesh. Yes, this place might be an improvement, but that didn’t make it endurable. This was the UK, after all.