Ellen Wiles - The Invisible Crowd

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! M elehaye! ’ 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.

On the very first morning in the factory, when they could have slept for another twenty-four hours, they hauled themselves up, stiff as rusted robots, and Aziz put them straight to work. New crates of shellfish were delivered before dawn, and they all had to be rinsed, the bad ones discarded, the rest graded and sorted, then shelled or polished, cooked up or chilled, potted or packed, and finally re-loaded into the crates and lugged back outside for collection. Buckets and tools had to be emptied and cleaned, stray shells and seaweed fronds swept up, floors mopped. It wasn’t as if Yonas hadn’t anticipated some drudgery when he first got here – they had to pay back the smugglers after all – but he hadn’t expected to be stuck in a place this grim without any pay at all. So much for his university degree. If it weren’t for that stupid war, he might be at work right now in a warm office, with his own desk under a fan, wearing a thin, crisp shirt, writing something, coming up with new ideas… The only thing going for this place was the hope that they’d end up with papers, a ray of light that was diminishing daily. Ninety-three days…

The shrimp shells started to cut into Yonas’s scarred finger pads, and pinkish blood began seeping out. The point of a headache drilled into his skull. It was so damply cold here, he felt like mould was growing into his bones. He jiggled his feet and waggled his fingers in an attempt to get some feeling back.

A rumbling came from above: rain dancing on the roof. Drips began to splat on the floor in syncopated rhythms, and the radio crackled into ‘Billie Jean’. Yonas looked over at Gebre, trying in vain to catch his eye, hoping for a sign that he too was remembering his attempt to moonwalk all the way to school.

That evening it was Yonas’s turn to make dinner, and Aziz, with a vindictive look in his eyes, paired him up with Samuel, who never seemed to utter more than a monosyllable. Yonas surveyed the ingredients glumly. ‘Well, there’s not much oil left,’ he said, ‘so how about we boil the pasta and potatoes, put chunks of that plastic cheese on top, and steam those reject mussels?’

Samuel nodded blankly.

‘We’ll get about two runts each from that lot if we’re lucky,’ Yonas added.

Samuel just stared at the reject mussels, expressionless.

‘I’d give anything for a big, tasty lamb zigni stew with rice right now, and some herbs and spices, and vegetables – wouldn’t you?’ Yonas persisted. ‘If you could eat any other dish in the world, what would it be? Come on. Your favourite! You must have one.’

Samuel thought, long and hard, or so it appeared. Then he just shrugged.

Yonas tipped potatoes from the sack into buckets, got two nailbrushes, told Samuel to scrub one bucketful, and started on the other. Dirt clouded into the water and embedded under his fingernails. He considered his chances of supplementing the mussels with some of the scallops that were intended for customers, and glanced over at Petros who was on enforcement duty, looking bored. After a few minutes his bulbous head began to nod. Yonas trod softly over to the scallops, and reached for a handful.

‘Er, we’re not allowed those ones,’ Samuel said dozily.

Yonas only just managed to snatch his hand back before Petros sat up to see what was going on. ‘I’m going to take a leak,’ he said, and walked outside.

Once he got through the door he punched his fists at the dark and yelled, ‘GET ME OUT OF HERE’ – noiselessly, and to nobody in particular. He took a few deep breaths before going in again.

Once dinner was ready, Yonas banged the ladle on the vat lid. The others mooched over, collected plastic bowls, and held them out. He swallowed his own gloopy portion as fast as possible, as most of them did, and watched Gebre pick listlessly at his. Just before bed, he beckoned Gebre outside.

‘It’s time,’ he said. ‘Let’s cut our losses and go.’

‘What, now? In the dark?’

‘Harder for them to find us.’

‘What about our papers?’

‘We’re never getting papers – we’ve been slaving here for three months now. We must have earned enough to pay off our debts. And I feel so guilty about Melat: the police will be onto her about me and she’ll be hounded for diaspora tax, and Sheshy needs prosthetics and Lemlem needs school fees. . . I’ve got to wire them some money.’