The Invisible Crowd. Ellen Wiles
Aziz for so long before. He took in the saggy eyelids, the tousled eyebrows, the beige, blotchy skin, the browning teeth. This was a man who was disillusioned with life, who seemed to have no family and no friends, who lived in shoddy enough dwellings here himself, and whose sole aim seemed to be to wield the little power he’d been given. Yes, he was capable of shooting. But he probably didn’t want to. None of the other workers were saying a word in Yonas’s defence, but he could feel them all, silently rooting for him. Yonas turned away from Aziz, and started to walk back towards his sleeping mat, expecting any second the sound of a gunshot, searing pain. None came. But instead he heard another strangled sob from Osman. Fury bubbled up, and he turned back to Aziz again. ‘So string me up there instead,’ he challenged in an unnaturally loud voice. He felt everyone else go still, and wondered what the hell he was doing.
Aziz looked confused for a second, then laughed snidely, took a handkerchief from his pocket and began, ostentatiously, to polish the muzzle of the pistol. ‘Since you asked so nicely, I will string you up, as well, next to Osman. . . if you say one more word. I’m giving you a chance, here. A last chance. If you’ve got any sense you’ll shut your mouth, and get to bed.’ He didn’t sound entirely convincing though – a bit like a cross parent who has just refused to tell another story but is now conceding. Yonas told himself to stand his ground a few moments longer. Aziz put the handkerchief away, and then, remarkably, his shoulders seemed to sag as he tucked the gun back into its pouch and looked away. ‘Right, Petros,’ Aziz said, ‘give the kid five more minutes, then if he apologizes – like he means it – he can come down.’ With that, he went into his den and slammed the door.
A couple of the others came over and patted Yonas on the back, but he was still seething at their collective gutlessness. ‘Come on, Petros,’ he said, ‘make it a quick five minutes’, and was met by an unsurprising glare. But about two minutes later, Petros summoned a few of them outside to support Osman’s body while he cut the rope, then slouched off.
They carried Osman inside, laid him down gently on his mat and gathered around. He seemed to be unconscious. Was he dead? His eyes were bright red, devilish, his face greyish-purple and blotchy, his skin cold to the touch. Salim grabbed his wrist, held an ear to his chest. ‘Yes – he’s got a pulse!’ he said. ‘Osman?’
But Osman didn’t utter a sound. They all began tenderly stripping him, and putting on dry clothes. His feet were swollen and bloodied, and a couple of his toes pointed in odd directions. Yonas reached out to try to straighten them, which must have been agony, but Osman barely reacted. After a few minutes he coughed, as if he were coming to, but he still didn’t seem to be hearing anything they were saying, just closed his freakish eyes and groaned a little.
‘You will be okay,’ Yonas told him. ‘A friend of mine came through the same thing.’ Tenderly, they wrapped him in blankets.
‘We can keep an eye on him during the night,’ Yonas offered, and he and Gebre put their mats down either side of him, and lay down, both facing him, like anxious new parents caring for a baby. Yonas began humming a lullaby his mother used to sing. It didn’t seem to have any effect on Osman, but made Yonas feel a bit calmer. Gradually, the skin of Osman’s palms warmed, and eventually he took a long breath, like a sigh, that turned into a husky, open-mouthed semi-snore.
A while later, when it sounded like most of the others were asleep, Yonas leaned across and whispered, ‘Gebre, that was the last straw. We’re out of here, tomorrow morning. I’ve got an idea. Involving rubbish. It might be genius. You just need to follow me outside when I say, okay?’
Gebre was silent. He wasn’t asleep though – Yonas could see his eyes glinting in the moonlight.
BARE-FACED CHEEK: FURY AS GERMAN NUDISTS ARE ORDERED TO COVER UP AFTER A MIGRANT SHELTER ARRIVES NEAR THEIR LAKE
Long black, please, extra shot, extra hot, no sugar.
So, this Mr Kelati of yours. Well. I wouldn’t say I know him exactly, but what I do know is that he managed to sneak into this country and turn my life into a train wreck. Talking of trains, that’s where I first came across him, joyriding – though he didn’t exactly look joyous. Look, I’m sure he’s had a tough time of it. I don’t doubt that. But so do thousands of others. My point is that asylum seekers should go through the proper processes if they want to live here, not sneak in illegally and then use public transport without paying and work tax-free and do God knows what else. Otherwise we can’t know who genuinely deserves protection under the Refugee Convention. Which is very unfair to all the genuine refugees. As well as to British people. That’s my opinion. I know, I know: you don’t want my opinion, you want the story.
So, I was with my campaign manager, Alice, en route back to London from Grimsby, where I was Conservative candidate. It was a while before D-day, but you need to start canvassing early: a fact Nina, my wife, struggled to understand. I know it’s not easy looking after a child by yourself, but I would usually only go off for a few days at a time, which lots of mothers manage fine, and Nina is as capable as anyone – except her anxiety was taking her totally off piste. She’d started claiming she couldn’t cope and I didn’t care enough and I was never around and our abysmal parenting was going to ruin Clara’s life. Which was baloney, but she wouldn’t listen. I told her we could pay for some extra childcare if we had to, and she should try going back to her CBT therapist, but she bit my head off. I said she should at least spend more time on her painting, which she says is her best therapy; the problem is she gets herself into a catch-22 situation whereby she needs to go to the studio but is too stressed out to leave the house, and blames it on housework and childcare, even on the days Clara is in nursery.
I’ve always tried to be patient, but it’s hard if you’re constantly being deluged with someone else’s worries or pestered for reassurance or blamed, especially when you’ve got a lot going on yourself. Not to mention the fact that, after I accepted the candidacy, Nina decided she actively disliked all party politics and refused to speak about my work at home. Point-blank! So I was expected to gag myself against any mention of the work I was doing at the most important point in my entire career, but constantly tell Nina not to worry about ridiculous things in a patient voice that implied she wasn’t in fact being ridiculous? It didn’t exactly motivate me to rush back home when I had a constituency to convince, put it that way.
But I digress. That day, Alice and I were on our way back to London, as I say, and I had a vile hangover, but Alice had scheduled a review discussion en route. So I bought myself a long black at the station, and once we were on the train I pulled out my notebook. We talked about how the trip had gone, how the campaign had progressed, what had worked well or less well, and how we might adapt our approach, and, inevitably, we got onto immigration.
It had never been a policy priority for me personally before, not really, but this phase of the campaign had made me realize I just had to take it seriously and focus on it if I wanted to engage the constituents. It was a huge deal for them. Their biggest worry. People were already concerned about all the Eastern Europeans in the mix offering labour for peanuts, and what with illegal immigration stepping up too and asylum seekers swarming in, they felt like they were being invaded. And I needed to up the ante – my UKIP counterpart was wielding all kinds of extreme language, and he was becoming far more popular than anyone had predicted.
Alice and I had always seen eye to eye on pretty much everything. But that morning she said that, in her view, a lot of the headlines I was regularly quoting were more media hype than fact and I should ‘maybe chill out a bit’. I told her she risked being naïve, and while I appreciated her playing devil’s advocate, I ultimately needed her to endorse the approach I was taking, and in fact strengthen it, and that what I was saying was actually more considered and moderate than it necessarily needed to be to make the point. Basically, genuine refugees are fine, but illegal immigration and bogus asylum seekers are major problems that have got to be tackled. She apologized then, and stroked my knee, which I quickly moved away, beginning to