Chapter Eleven
R ayan couldn’t face the prospect of returning to the Jungle.
He didn’t want to think of the people living there and what awaited them.
For several days, all he’d done was hang around the house, making excuses.
The situation felt increasingly hopeless.
The idea that he could possibly help was nothing more than a misguided delusion.
That morning, he was lying on the sofa in the living room, a book open on his chest, not even pretending to read, when Mathias appeared above him.
“Eat.” Mathias shoved a bowl of oatmeal into his hands. “You’re getting scrawny.”
Rayan took the bowl and sat up. He’d been lost in his own thoughts and hadn’t even heard Mathias in the kitchen. Rayan brought a spoonful to his mouth. It was hot and bland and oddly comforting.
Mathias sat down in a chair across from the sofa and lit a cigarette. He was shaved and dressed in his suit but apparently in no hurry to leave.
“Don’t you need to get to the warehouse?”
“I don’t need to do shit.” Mathias stretched out his legs and took a long drag.
Rayan ate another spoon of what could have easily passed for prison gruel.
Despite Rayan’s pestering, Mathias was sparing when it came to the details of his childhood.
Rayan did know that Mathias had spent much of it fending for himself, a fact that had revealed itself in his approach to cooking.
Mathias prepared food with an austere efficiency, with flavor and variety coming second to practical considerations, like volume and nutrition.
Food, for him, was a simple equation of empty and full—no different from the fuel gauge in a car—though he had a peculiar habit of ignoring the warning light, and then Rayan had to take it upon himself to feed the man before he self-destructed.
Mathias hungry was a force to be reckoned with.
Regardless, he’d been surprisingly receptive to Rayan’s culinary dabbling.
Not that he took obvious pleasure in the meals Rayan prepared, but he certainly ate them without complaint.
“What’s happening in the world?” Rayan asked.
For three days, the newspaper had gone missing from the house.
He knew it wasn’t René’s fault—despite the kid’s less-than-stellar track record.
Mathias had been deliberately shielding Rayan from the reporting on the latest incident.
At this point, it was a common occurrence to find articles with confronting images and headlines detailing the number of people drowned.
There existed a collective resignation at how normal these stories had become. The thought made his stomach turn.
Mathias shrugged. “New day, same stories.”
“War, contested elections, environmental ruin?”
“That about covers it.”
They sat in silence, the events of the past few days hanging over them. Rayan spooned more oatmeal into his mouth. He was ashamed by how much he’d leaned on Mathias. While he’d been humbled by Mathias’s gracious handling of him, he was tired of his issues dominating their shared experience.
“Tell me about where you went to school in Montreal.” Rayan could still conjure the photo of Mathias in his mother’s entranceway, the powder-blue shirt and striped tie coupled with his cold expression.
“What’s to tell?”
“It was a private school, right? You had to wear uniforms?”
Mathias smirked, exhaling twin streams of smoke from his nostrils. “Now, that’s a troubling predilection.”
Rayan snickered. “What were you like back then? When you were—”
“Young and innocent?” Mathias supplied. “I’ll save you the suspense—I was never innocent.”
“Did the teachers like you?”
“I think you can gauge the answer to that.”
Rayan gave a soft laugh and took another spoonful of the porridge.
“They hated me. They would have expelled me if they could,” Mathias said.
“What stopped them?”
“Proof. No one could ever pin anything on me.” The man’s mouth tweaked in what appeared to be quiet pride. “I once paid a kid a hundred bucks to fess up to breaking another boy’s nose.”
“What else did you do?”
“Ran a couple betting pools, sold pills. I dangled the class representative from the second-floor window for refusing to pay his tab. He never settled late after that.”
Rayan shook his head with a grin.
“I told you it was baked in.” Mathias blew smoke through his teeth.
Rayan looked down at the bowl in his hands, suddenly serious. “Why did your import license get revoked?”
“It’s an empty threat. Nothing to take seriously.”
Rayan frowned. “Who’s sending you a warning, Mathias?”
Mathias seemed to consider his answer. “The Albanians. They’ve taken an interest in the business.”
“As in, the Albanian mafia?”
“Like attracts like.”
“Should I be concerned?”
“Do I look concerned?”
“No, but I’ve seen you smile staring down the barrel of a gun.”
Mathias took another pull on his cigarette. “It’s not working, by the way. There are simpler ways to distract me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What you said the other night.”
Rayan felt a hot spike of discomfort. “I haven’t had thoughts like that in a long time.
Not since you.” He swallowed, the bowl warm in his hands.
“I don’t do well without someone to live for,” he said, the truth of it almost painful.
“It was easy to make you that person. Even without you knowing it.”
Mathias stared at him, the cigarette perched between his fingers.
“You know…” he said after a moment. “It was a point of pride, how little people meant to me. Then you had to get under my skin.” He leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, not breaking his gaze.
“Who exactly do you need to redeem yourself to?”
Rayan dropped his head. He thought of his mother’s hopes for him, forever memorialized in her inscription. Noble and kind. Someone to be proud of. A reminder of everything he wasn’t.
“She would have hated what I am.”
“And what’s that? Alive?” Mathias countered. “Believe me, that’s an accomplishment in itself. And you’re going to agonize over how you did it—that in the glut of options you were given, you didn’t pick a cleaner way to survive? She’d take the end over the means—I guarantee it.”
Rayan’s eyes snapped back to Mathias, his mouth lurching. “You don’t…?”
“I don’t what?”
“Regret anything?”
When Mathias replied, his voice was hard.
“I don’t regret a fucking thing. This is how life works—you get dealt a hand, and then you make your move.
You don’t spend the rest of the game wondering if you should’ve made a different one.
” He crushed his cigarette in the ashtray on the coffee table, and a single column of smoke rose from his fingertips.
“Stop playing hooky, Rayan. There’s nothing wrong with your humanitarian crusade, but considering it a form of penance is a waste of head space. ”
“I needed a way make sense of things,” Rayan said, unable to articulate the fear that had gripped him after leaving the family and looking out at the yawning expanse of life ahead. Even now, part of him still felt unworthy of his freedom.
“You don’t have to make sense of it. Not every event needs to be assigned some greater meaning. You can either remain inactive or act. Forward momentum—live by that.”
While he’d done so far less kindly when Rayan was a grunt, Mathias had always managed to bring the salient facts of a difficult situation into clear definition.
“So, what are you sitting around here for?” Mathias got to his feet. “Think of all the needy people you could be wasting your time helping.”
He headed for the door but stopped as he rounded the back of the sofa. Mathias reached out and cupped Rayan’s chin. He bent to kiss him, his lips warm and gentle.
Rayan closed his eyes, words deserting him, hoping only to communicate the depth of his gratitude in the sweetness of the kiss he returned.
Rayan arrived at the service office later that afternoon to find a relieved Asmarina sorting through files in the back room.
“There you are, Rayan.” She wrapped him in a tight hug. “We were worried when you stopped returning our calls.”
Rayan hadn’t communicated much about his absence. He’d simply left a message at the center to say he wasn’t coming in.
“Phone trouble,” he offered feebly. It wasn’t a complete lie. He’d had to pick up a new one and transfer his number.
“Right.” Asmarina looked at Rayan as if waiting for him to say more. It wasn’t uncommon in their line of work for people to disappear when the weight of the job got too much.
“I just needed a few days,” he admitted.
She nodded and gave him a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder. “Well, we missed you.”
Rayan smiled. “What do you have for me?”
“Some good news for one,” Asmarina said, her eyes brightening. “We got confirmation of the funding from Groupe d’action.”
“That was quick.”
“Karl did say the meeting was more a formality. They were keen to get involved from the get-go.”
“That is good news.”
“And Laurent managed to pin down a meeting with the mayor for next week.”
“Next week?” Rayan marveled. Contact with the mayor’s office was usually painful and protracted. Maybe Durand had finally realized that ignoring the problem wouldn’t help anyone.
“You’ll come, of course.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Just so I’m not the only foreigner in the room,” she teased.
Rayan laughed.
“I’m sure you’ve heard…” Asmarina lowered her voice, and the smile slipped from her face. “About the latest drownings.”
Rayan could still recall the sting of seawater as it burned his throat. The panic as wave after wave broke over his head. He thought of the mother of the children on the beach—how frightened she must have been as the water filled her lungs.
He nodded wordlessly.
“There were several families hoping to reach relatives in Britain. But after the failed crossing, most of them ended up here at the camp. We’ve been trying to help them work through the process of applying for refugee status in France.”
Rayan had assisted others with similar attempts, and he was well-versed in the requirements the French immigration system imposed on those applying for asylum.
He would gather the information for the bid and then submit it with the assistance of an old school friend of Laurent’s—a local lawyer who volunteered his services for a few hours each week.
As cumbersome as the process was, it held more chance of success than setting out across the channel in search of better opportunities in the UK.
Asmarina led him out of the cabin and into the Jungle.
They followed the dirt road that crossed through the middle of the camp toward a section of tents on the north side.
“There’s a family that needs some extra help with their application on account of their…
situation.” She paused by a blue canvas tent.
“They’re the family of one of the women who drowned. ”
Rayan knew, before she lifted the entrance flap, who he would find inside. Sitting on a frayed mat on the tent floor was the man from the beach, his younger daughter on his lap while the older one hung back.
“This is Farhan Taleb and his daughters, Amina and Zahra.” Asmarina gave Farhan a warm smile and gestured toward Rayan. “Farhan, this is Rayan Ayari. He’s here to help you and your family make a bid for asylum.”
Farhan got to his feet with a look of shock, and the young girl slipped from his lap and hid behind the leg of his pants. He stepped forward to offer his hand, and Rayan shook it numbly.
Asmarina passed Rayan the folder with paperwork. “I’ll leave you to it.” She patted him on the back and stepped out of the tent.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” Farhan moved to grip Rayan’s shoulder. “On the beach. I didn’t get a chance to thank you.”
Rayan nodded and gently extracted himself. He didn’t deserve the man’s thanks. They stood in silence before Farhan indicated for Rayan to join them on the mat. Rayan sat down across from Farhan and his daughters, the folder deadweight in his hand.
“Your wife…” Rayan managed finally.
Farhan shook his head solemnly.
“I’m sorry.”
“She’d have been grateful her daughters are safe.”
The two girls stared at Rayan with large brown eyes. They were pretty, with angular faces and long dark hair tangled at the ends. He couldn’t help but wonder if they took after their mother. Rayan felt his chest tighten.
“Let me help you keep them that way,” he said, suddenly resolute. He opened the folder and pulled out the application, flipping to the first page. “We’ll try and find a home for you here. Asmarina has talked to you about the process involved in filing?”
Farhan nodded. “Do you think it’s a good idea?”
“It’s the best chance you’ve got. That being said, it can take a long time, and the odds vary. I can’t make any promises, but we will try.”
Farhan gave him a tired smile. “Thank you, Rayan. It seems all we can do is try.”