Ellen Wiles - The Invisible Crowd

Bang b-bang bang. Bang bang.

Yonas jerked awake. More knocks, louder. He rubbed his eyes.

Bang bang bang bang .

This person was persistent. Yonas flushed. He needed to pee now, after sitting on the toilet for hours without lifting the lid. He decided he would try. This was the purpose of a toilet, after all.

Bang bang bang bang bang.

‘Just a minute.’ His bladder was bursting but nothing would come out – he was too panicked. He zipped up, cleared his throat and unlocked the door.

‘Ticket, please, sir.’ An official-looking man was standing in the corridor with a small machine in his hands, and a blonde woman with a child were behind him, staring.

Yonas swallowed. ‘But, I already…’

‘You’ve been in here for a while now, sir.’

Yonas’s kneecaps turned to goo. ‘I just came in,’ he said.

‘No you didn’t!’ the woman shrilled. ‘We’ve been waiting ages! My little girl here needs a wee. Come on, Evie.’ She shoved her child ahead of her, past Yonas, followed her into the toilet and locked the door to his sanctuary.

Yonas gulped. ‘I have a stomach problem,’ he improvised, then grimaced and clutched his belly, leaning over as if in agony, thinking of his ballooning bladder. He did feel pretty ill right now – though that was probably the terror.

‘I still need your ticket, sir,’ the conductor said flatly.

Yonas straightened up, trying to think fast. Behind the conductor, he noticed a smart man in a suit, with blond hair and glasses, who seemed to be watching disapprovingly. He felt inside his empty pockets, as if he were about to find a crisp orange train ticket in there, and squeezed his little wooden rooster so hard the beak almost pierced his skin. Then he looked up at the conductor again, into those pale hazel eyes, trying to connect, to convey wordlessly how badly he needed his help. ‘Sir, I do not know where the ticket has gone,’ he said quietly. ‘I must have dropped it. I am sorry – I am not myself today. I have just heard that… my brother and my parents have been killed.’

The conductor’s face warped into an expression that was both sceptical and slightly aghast. Yonas imagined his own face in it, like a mirror, the moment when he first heard that news. It was so vivid still, that day, back in the revolutionary school – he was preparing to put on his first play, setting up the tarpaulin stage under an acacia tree, with Gebre’s set painted onto old sheets, hardly able to contain his excitement about the moment when the actors stepped in front of the audience… when they were interrupted. Yonas and Melat. Come with me. The commander. What had they done wrong? I have bad news for you. There was a surprise attack today, by enemy MiGs. Your parents and brothers were hit… The assault of those words, their cold, factual finality. . .

A hand was patting his back. ‘I’m really sorry to hear that, mate,’ the conductor said, his voice softer than before. ‘But I do still need to check your ticket. You sure you’ve lost it?’

Yonas jabbed his fingers in his pockets once more. But the conductor squeezed his arm.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Look, just make sure you hold onto it next time, okay?’

Yonas looked up at him, astounded, but just nodded mutely.

And then he heard a series of clicks, camera-like. Behind the conductor, that blond man was holding something in the air. Yonas tensed. Who was he? Why would he be taking pictures? Was he plainclothes police? Immigration? There was nowhere to run…

Sure enough, the man approached the conductor and asked if this passenger was travelling with a valid ticket. Yonas bit the insides of his cheeks. But then, bizarrely, the conductor told the man to back off and mind his own business. This seemed to anger the blond man who then claimed he was a politician. As the two men locked horns, Yonas saw his chance to slip away.

Down in the furthest carriage, the toilet was occupied, so he slouched down into a seat, so the top of his head couldn’t be seen from behind. He realized he was rubbing his scarred fingertips together: a tic he’d developed since they were burned, as if he could magic the sensitivity back. Across the aisle an elderly lady was looking at him sideways, but when she saw him turn to her, she immediately pretended to return to reading her newspaper. She was wearing pristine pointed leather shoes and her hair was set in immaculate ringlets, like a wig, so white it was almost purple. Maybe it was actually a very pale purple. The headline on her newspaper read:

SMUGGLING GANGS WANT TO SNEAK CALAIS MIGRANTS INTO BRITAIN TO COMMIT CRIMES HERE

Yonas turned to look out of the window. Unseeing, he clasped his hands, felt the sharpness of his nails digging into his knuckles. He wondered how many smuggled migrants like him there were in the UK right now. And where were they all? How many of them had claimed asylum? He supposed he’d meet some more when he got to London. He wished he didn’t have to find his way all on his own. He already missed Gebre like a limb.

At King’s Cross Station, announcements boomed from the tannoy like a robotic priest’s pronouncements across the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people on the concourse. Yonas weaved slowly through them, thinking how strange it was to be surrounded by so much energetic life. White faces might even be a minority here, he was pleased to note. There were lots of other black and African faces around, and also Chinese faces, Indian faces, Hispanic faces and faces with features he couldn’t place, so he didn’t feel like he stood out too much. But he did seem to be the only person in the entire station who wasn’t attempting to rush for a train, or staring with an anxious frown up at the departure board.

He leaned against a pillar in front of a coffee shop, closed his eyes to inhale the scent, and was right back in the Asmara house, walking down the stairs and towards the intoxicating aroma of roasting coffee beans emanating from the kitchen, mingled with incense and song. His mother, by the stove, her voice filling the room, wearing her favourite outfit, the burnt-orange wrap skirt and blouse resplendent with palm leaf patterns.

He looked inside, and watched the baristas standing at sleek chrome machines, bashing coffee grounds out of a filter gadget, refilling, locking the gadget into the machine and putting blue paper cups underneath to catch ebony streams of espresso. A perfect-looking concoction in seconds. He thought of how long it took his mother and Melat to make coffee, the traditional way: how they would measure out the bright green beans, pour them into a menkeshkesh , roast them until they were dark brown, grind them with a pestle and mortar, pour them into a jebena , heat and fan it on the stove, boil the liquid several times, filter it through date fibres… Melat loathed the ritual, but their mother insisted on it whenever guests were invited over. The rest of the time they all used a metal Italian espresso maker that his grandfather had acquired when it was left behind by the colonizers. Yonas and Melat both liked the coffee that came out of that just as well: sacrilege, according to their mother and grandmother. It was so long now since he’d had any kind of coffee. He watched the customers process out of the shop, blue paper cups of deliciousness carried unthinkingly in their hands.

A couple of sleek-haired ladies in high heels clip-clopped past, and the blonde one glanced at Yonas and wrinkled her nose. A targeted wrinkle. A clear message. He looked down at his overalls and tilted his head down to sniff his armpit discreetly. Bad. Of course it was bad. It was just hard to tell quite how repellent you were to others when you had got used to your own smell. Not just body odour – he probably reeked of fish guts as well. The thought prompted him to scan around for Aziz or Blackjack… but why would they be here? They were just small-time con artists. They’d never actually come after him, just as he’d told Gebre.