Chapter 30
30
It was almost 11p.m. when they entered the outskirts of Calais and the signs directing traffic to the ferries and the Channel train began to appear at the roadside. There were other sights on the side of the road too. Huddles of people with sleeping bags, rucksacks, and carrier bags with their belongings.
Pete and Fikru had been awake for an hour or so and seemed to realise that the end of the drive was approaching for them. They were tidying up the back seat, draining the last of the water from the bottles, checking and re-checking the belongings in their own bags, as they bravely prepared themselves to get out of the car and into the unknown. All Lucie could think about was the boys, younger than Deva, who had quietly slept almost all the way through France, and the horrible stories on the news about smuggler gangs and refrigerated lorries and dinghies…
‘The car can stop here?’ Pete asked from the back seat, and he pointed to a big supermarket coming up on the side of the road.
She indicated and turned off, then drove into the car park. The enormous supermarket was still brightly lit and open. Outside it was another huddle of young people who looked as skinny and uncertain as the boys in the back of the car.
Pete tried his best to smile and look cheerful. Maybe he had a sense of how nervous she was for them.
‘Very, very thank you very much,’ he told her.
‘Pete, I don’t think this is a safe place. I want to take you to the Red Cross, to a proper camp where people will look after you.’
She wasn’t sure if he’d understood, but he just smiled again and repeated his ‘very, very thank you’.
Then he spoke to Fikru in their language. Fikru nodded and gathered one of the bags into his hand. And maybe Lucie would have let them leave the car and take their chances in the darkness with all the other refugees seen and unseen around them.
But two things happened. Fikru made just the smallest sniff and wipe of his eyes as he prepared to exit the safety of the car. And a loud and angry scuffle broke out among one group of people in the car park.
Lucie immediately imagined the two of them in a dinghy – frail Fikru, just out of hospital. And she thought about someone robbing whatever was left in their precious plastic bags. And she just couldn’t do it.
They were Eritrean… They were escaping war and persecution. They would almost certainly be allowed to claim asylum in the UK. She had googled it during their last café stop. They had an uncle to stay with, but they had no visa to get them into the UK to their uncle.
She thought back to those days of sneaking in and out of nightclubs and getting minor celebrities out of the back of gigs away from fans and photographers. It was always good to have some kind of decoy or distraction, even a towel, a pretence that someone was sick or injured… something to just take people’s mind off thinking too much about things.
If she was going to do what she thought she might, she needed a decoy. She had a big car… she’d been on a short trip to France, and right over there was a massive supermarket that was still open. And now a plan, not too complicated, just needing a little bit of nerve, fell almost fully formed into her mind.
Best to just get on with it , she told herself. Plans like this, you didn’t want to mull them over too much. You needed to just smile, be bold, and crack on.
‘Stay in car. Stay here,’ she told the boys as she drove the car to the brightly lit spaces right beside the supermarket entrance. Then she got out of the Jag, shut the door and locked them both inside, after making sure they understood her. ‘Please wait, in car, for me.’
Inside the supermarket, she grabbed a trolley and hurried to the shelves of wine. She bundled whichever bottles were nearest into the trolley until she had about forty of them. At the till, she managed to convey to the cashier that she needed some boxes. Her simple idea was to put two boxes of wine in the boot of the Jag and one on the back seat. Then the boys would hide in the back seat footwells, covered by a jacket or two.
The wine was there to give her and whoever was on passport control something to have a tiny chat about. Put their minds at rest that she was just your average Englishwoman stocking up the wine cellar in Calais.
Back at the car, she packed the boxes of bottles into the boot and then onto the seat beside the boys. She tried to explain to the now anxious, wide-eyed boys what she had decided to do.
She used the simplest words. For their benefit and also for hers. She wanted it to sound completely straightforward. She wanted it to sound as if it would be an easy enough thing to do.
‘Pete, you and Fikru will hide in the car. And I will take you to London.’
It didn’t seem to register. So, she tried to show them. ‘Hide in car.’ She put her arms over her head. ‘I drive.’ She pointed to the steering wheel. ‘London, UK.’
It dawned gradually.
A slow spreading of joyful smiles, first on Pete’s face as he realised, then on Fikru’s as the words were translated.
She was the one feeling anxious now, but she could understand why they were feeling happy. Hiding in a car when the driver knew you were there and you knew who the driver was, was a world away from having to sneak into a lorry or brave an open-sea crossing.
Plan, act, then breeze on through. That’s what she had to do now. Just a bit of breezy confidence. Don’t overthink it.
She got the boys to move down into the footwells, and she pulled a jacket over each of their heads. Their backpack stayed on the back seat, but she moved the plastic bags to the passenger’s seat footwell, so they couldn’t move against them and cause any rogue crackling.
Then she tossed her bag and a lightweight sweatshirt over the back seat, aiming to make everything look hurried and casual back there.
All set, she told herself. Time to drive out of the car park and towards the train terminal.
Just a brief, jumpy drive later and she was there. And because the queues were short, an official appeared at her window, just about scaring the life out of her, and offered to bump her forward onto the earlier train.
‘Yes, of course… How handy…’ she squeaked, swallowing quickly and trying to get full control over her voice.
And now, before she’d really, definitively confirmed that she was definitely going to do this, she was being guided into the queue. And it was moving smoothly and, oh holy people-smuggler-could-I-end-up-in-jail for this? Here was French passport control. She wound down her window and tried to smile rather than actually die of stress. Honestly, sweat and fear was squirting from her armpits in a way that must be rousing the suspicion of every sniffer dog within a half mile radius.
She held out her passport for inspection and tried not to blurt out: Bonjour, je suis Lucie. Oui, j’ai du contrebande … or should it be de la contrebande ?
Holy freaking God, I am going to jail .
They waved her through. But there was no time to relax, or even breathe, and she hoped the boys realised this too because here was UK passport control straight ahead of her. So, did that mean, if she could just get through this… and possibly the highly trained Alsatians roaming the train, that would be it? She would drive out with no further checks at the other side? She crossed everything and hoped she could just put on this one, very important performance. Channel Deva , she thought to herself… and her mind couldn’t help producing Chanel Deva … Stress joking, she guessed.
There wasn’t even a moment to tell the boys to be quiet, so she just hoped and prayed that they would understand.
Now it was time to wind down her window and hand over her passport to the UK official. She felt terrible. This was the worst thing she’d ever done, in her whole adult life. Yes, but it was also one of the very best things she was trying to do.
The man in the booth took her passport and seemed to look at her face, look at his screen, then tap on his keyboard forever. What if they have cameras at the supermarket car park? she thought, far too late. What if they saw the boys in the back when I was loading the car… and now they’re checking and wondering… and they’re going to do a full search? What kind of trouble could I have got Pete and Fikru into, not to mention myself?
At this point, as well as breath-holding, there may have been a slight escape of wee due to sheer terror.
‘It’s my dad’s car…’ she heard herself say in the most weirdly normal voice ever. ‘I didn’t think it would make it to the south of France and back but she’s managed.’
There was no response and in the silence, she was sure she could hear the merest squeak from the back seat.
‘And forty-odd bottles of wine is OK, isn’t it? I did check on Google before…’ How could she sound so breezy when even more sweat and fear was pumping out of her armpits and her knees were actually trembling?
Would they all go to jail, she wondered. As long as it was in the UK… How else would she see her dad… Would they give her some leave to see him? Compassionate leave from prison – did that exist? Honestly, a whole scenario of her being in prison and pleading to visit him in the hospice had all played out in her mind in those terrible seconds. If they’re officially in UK customs territory, it would be a UK jail, wouldn’t it?
‘Personal consumption?’ the guy said with a smile.
What! She suddenly couldn’t think of any reply. What was he talking about?
Then she remembered her forty bottles of wine remark, but that felt like a year ago.
‘Oh, yes… I do like wine o’clock.’ Smile. How was she managing to joke, when she felt as if a heart attack was imminent? Any. Moment. Now.
Her passport was coming back to her, and now the magical wave through followed. She wound up her window and drove onto the train.
Now… just this forty-five-minute journey to get through. Alsatians… Alsatians. She sat in absolute silence in her seat and could hear nothing from the boys either. All kinds of panicked thoughts ran through her mind… Would there be dogs, trained to sniff through the cars? Would there be heat-seeking devices? She had thought absolutely nothing through. And she knew she would not be able to relax for one moment until this journey was over.
‘OK, boys,’ she said quietly. ‘We are on the train… You can breathe but keep hiding. Hide. Please. Fikru, I really, really hope you’re OK. Please tell me quietly if you’re not OK.’
‘I OK,’ came the whisper.
It was the longest forty-five minutes of her entire life. She could see other drivers getting out of their cars, stretching their legs, going to the toilet, relaxing, enjoying life. But she just stayed glued to her seat, having to consciously breathe in and out. Willing herself not to die of fright. Because how would that help anyone?
Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die … she repeated in her head over and over again, frozen in position in the driver’s seat, too frightened to do anything, even drink water from a bottle, in case it attracted attention.
Was she helping, doing what she was doing tonight? Was she solving a problem? Adding to a problem? She couldn’t answer the big difficult questions. She just knew in her heart she was doing the right thing for her and for Pete and Fikru.
As she drove off the train and realised there were no further checks at this side and she was going to be able to drive right out of the port and onto the motorway, she suddenly felt a monumental burst of happiness, excitement and fizz.
She found herself laughing with relief.
Once they were out onto the road, she called out to the boys.
‘You can come out! Pete, Fikru… it is OK. We are in England.’
There was a stirring of the coats, and the boys began to emerge carefully, looking around as if worried this could be some kind of trick, maybe finding it hard to believe that after all this time of travelling and trying and hoping that this could really be true.
Lucy wondered if she had broken a law… She couldn’t be a people smuggler, could she? Because she’d not accepted anything for doing this. And the boys weren’t going to be illegal immigrants because they were from Eritrea and were going to apply for refugee status. Plus they were going to stay with their uncle, so they wouldn’t be put on one of those barges or in a hostel.
Her googled information had advised her that they had to go straight to the Asylum Screening Unit to register for refugee status, but she already knew it didn’t open in Croydon, London until 9a.m. It was now approaching 1a.m. and she was exhausted. They must be exhausted too.
‘Where are we going, Miss Lucie?’ Pete asked her with his clear and trusting voice.
‘Everything is OK, Pete. And we are going to my home to sleep,’ she replied.