I will be so happy if he can join me in London, and I can help him to get on his feet.’
‘All right then,’ Bin Man Joe said eventually, sounding unconvinced. ‘I’ll grab a pen. But I can’t guarantee nowt, all right? Haven’t seen any sign of any other chums of yours or nowt like that at all, so…’
From the scratchy sound over the line, he did seem to be writing down the address, but his goodbye after that was swift and gruff. Yonas couldn’t help wondering if he’d only agreed to write down the address in order to get him off the phone, and had no intention of passing on any message, or giving any more random lifts to stinking, scared, illegal men. But at least he’d tried.
He walked home, hands in his pockets, staring at the tessellating pavement slabs. Would Gebre ever leave the factory? Would Osman ever be well enough? He should report Aziz to the police, now, today, for their own good… But then, Gebre was right: there was no obvious way to do that anonymously and not get arrested. And even if he managed it, Gebre had chosen to stay there, of his own free will, so what gave Yonas the right to expose him?
As he got settled in the warehouse, and came to know the others living there, he concluded he’d been incredibly lucky that it was Emil he’d bumped into and got as his mentor. The Russian guys were grumpy alcoholics who never washed their sheets, the Ivorian and Nigerian guys boasted and bickered, the Indian guys sneered and kept to themselves. Emil loathed the warehouse as much as any of them, but he was always on the lookout for something to laugh about, like the woman in a legal office who kept a vibrator in her desk drawer tucked under a book about the morality of law, and the overweight guy leaving the gym as they were starting their clean and wolfing two chocolate bars in the space of thirty seconds, then phoning his girlfriend and saying he was just going to grab a salad after his workout and then he’d be home, and the bus driver who kept overtaking other buses as if he were a bitter Formula One reject.
Yonas was glad, though, that Emil’s joker mask had slipped on that first day, when he divulged his secret. Although he wanted it kept quiet in the warehouse, Emil genuinely seemed to anticipate a future in which he would live here openly as a gay man. And why not, if it was legal? Yonas had responded with assiduous nonchalance, as if people he’d just met came out to him all the time, while silently marvelling and wishing he could introduce Emil to Gebre straight away – but, he hoped, it wouldn’t be long until his friend arrived.
The novelty of riding on a comfortable bus soon wore off, and the freedom to choose meals became less miraculous when all Yonas could afford or be bothered with was cheap pasta interspersed with greasy McDonald’s, and when his days were defined by endless bottles of bleach and sprays and mops and dirty coffee cups and toilets and loo roll holders. He didn’t mind the tediousness of the work particularly – it beat the factory, and at least it was paid – but he minded how short a distance the money could stretch. The amount he had left over at the end of a week to wire home to Melat was pitiful, and the prospect of saving enough to pay for a place to live, with a bedroom to himself, a kitchen with more than one hotplate and a bathroom between twenty guys, and clothes that suited him better than the two clown-like outfits he’d got from the charity shop, never mind obtaining a visa, all seemed as remote as a trip to the moon. He couldn’t risk part-time work, but he kept looking out for other full-time options, asking people in small cafés or restaurants about jobs. He got mildly excited about the prospect of teaching English in the dodgy language school above a corner shop, where they didn’t seem bothered about visas, but even the few employers like that who offered him something there couldn’t pay enough for him to rent a room, eat and send any money home.
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