You plough on, sticking Post-it notes on pages of the file and making lists. YK has got some good character witnesses, like Molly Muldoon, his English teacher, and Nina Lambourne, a friend who claims she trusts him enough to let him babysit her daughter… Doesn’t that name ring a bell? Oh, and she’s Molly’s daughter. So how come she became friends with him? Not relevant, not relevant…
Your eyelids start dragging. You yawn, check your watch. It’s late. Coffee is essential if you’re going to get through this. You get up, stretch, and walk along the deserted corridor to the kitchen.
The ceiling light sputters and flickers as the kettle crackles. You’ve pretty much planned your argument now, and bullet-pointed the facts you need to prove. But it’s funny – although you’re frazzled, it’s at moments like this that you wish your job went further, that you could know more, understand more. Sure, maybe it is a big enough challenge to take a mountain of legal documents and adapt them into a convincing account of someone’s life constructed solely from words and facts that can be evidentially proven and are appropriate to the context, and tessellate all that into a persuasive argument about legal merit. It’s a high-stakes brainteaser. But however well you solve that puzzle, and however well YK performs as a witness, at the end of the hearing he’ll still be a mystery to you. You’ll never know the truth. Truth. Well, you will have a handle on the kind of truth that the law demands – a cluster of facts weighty enough to tip the case over the balance of probabilities – but what you’d love to get a sense of is the truth of what it has felt like to be YK, Yonas Kelati, the living, breathing human being, your birthday twin. At least solicitors get to spend time with their clients, taking statements. Barristers barely get to meet them, usually. You wish you could dive inside the pages of these case files and swim around underneath the text to find out what your life would have been like if you and YK happened to have been switched at birth.
You pour out hot water, stir in two spoons of instant coffee with two heaped spoons of chocolate powder, splosh in the last of the communal milk, and sit down on the spare chair by the photocopier. After the first hot, bittersweet sip, you close your eyes. Imagine if, instead of meeting YK at the tribunal hearing, you could meet him for a coffee – not a vile mocha like the one you’ve just made, but a nice cappuccino in your local café with the comfy armchairs – and introduce yourself, not as his barrister, but just as Jude, a random British woman who happens to be exactly the same age. After some small talk you could mention that you’d be interested to know more about him and what led him here, and let him tell his story in his own words, while you probe subtly for details along the way, as any friend might do, allowing the conversation to branch and spiral beyond that square box labelled legal relevance.
Imagine if you could do the same with the other witnesses too. You could invite them each to tell you how they got to know YK, and find out what they really think of him. Yes, that part would be like when you were introduced to Max’s friends and family: you thought you had the measure of your boyfriend, but they gave you a clearer sense of who he was before you came along, and illuminated quirks of his personality. The way Max knocks on his teeth with his fist while trying to make a decision, as if he were asking his inner oracle for permission to enter? His circumspect dad does exactly the same. By the end of a marathon of chats and coffees you’d be bouncing off the walls, but you would also be able to adapt all the sterile witness statements in this ring binder into something resembling stories.
You could go further, and adapt YK’s story into a third-person narrative like the kind you normally get in an asylum judgment, but more red-blooded and visceral. You’d go way beyond that Miller v Jackson judgment you learned about at law school, where Lord Denning started off by waxing lyrical about a summertime cricket match, in order to cement his legal argument about nuisance. You’d go the whole way, turning law into literature. But how would that help YK? You could kidnap the immigration judge listed for YK’s hearing, borrow her robes and pose as her while you read out your own prose to the tribunal, and conclude triumphantly that the appeal has succeeded… Oh, except you’d have to be there to listen to the judgment, as YK’s barrister. And you’d probably end up jailed yourself.
Anyhow, you’ve finished your drink, so it’s time to stop fantasizing and get back to work. But, when you sit at your desk again, your fingers seem to get a will of their own and start typing words into an online search box: Eritrean restaurant London. Your mouse clicks on a link. The food looks pretty good – lots of big pancake-type things and curries. You imagine taking YK and your solicitor there after the hearing to celebrate your win, and inviting him to choose the dishes… It’ll probably never happen. There probably won’t be an appropriate moment to ask, and anyway he might have no interest in getting to know you, might not care at all that you share a birthday, might not want to let you into any more details about his parallel, polar-opposite life. But you can at least make it a belated New Year’s resolution to step away from Pizza Express and drag your family along to eat some authentic Eritrean food one day, if you ever get time off work, to close your eyes while chewing, to immerse yourself in the new flavour sensations on your tongue…
CEREAL OFFENDERS: ASYLUM SEEKER GANG COLLECTED £24 MILLION DRUG MONEY IN SPECIAL K BOXES
It was the ninety-third morning. Yonas picked up a shrimp, tore off its head, pulled off its tail, eased away its leg-fringed shell, then tossed the shell in a bucket to the right, dropped the flesh onto the pile to the left, and grabbed another, then tore off its head, pulled off its tail, and on, and on… until his numb fingertips fumbled, and a shrimp dropped to the floor. He stopped and stared at it for a moment. Lying there. Taunting him. He felt like lying down on the floor and curling up next to it. As he finally bent to grasp it, his spine made a cracking noise and a twinge spiked across his lower back. He straightened up, tentatively, stretched his arms and felt his shoulders crunch. The others were all hunched over cockles, mussels, oysters and crabs, and he imagined the whole lot of them solidifying and being found in here one day by a bunch of archaeologists, frozen in time like statues in a derelict church, with rotting shellfish strewn around their feet.
His stomach growled, reminding him that, by some miracle, he was still alive. Before he knew it he would be free to go out to a restaurant to eat a tasty meal with a bottle of beer on the side, and even some fresh fruit afterwards if he felt like it. What he would give right now for the zingy fragrance of a mango, fresh from the garden, newly sliced, glistening gold and dripping with juice! Saliva gushed around his tongue.
He blew pointlessly on his fingers, and turned the next shrimp around in his palm, picturing the beast when it was still alive, pottering along the seabed, waving its whiskers, unaware that it was about to be scooped up and boiled. He broke the shell open and extracted the flesh. When it dried, its colour would intensify and it would shrink into a crescent bead. He could string a collection into a necklace for little Lemlem… but she wouldn’t be so little any more. It had been over a year since he’d seen her running around on those chubby legs. How great it would be to hear her voice chirping down a phone. Better still, to have her run through the door squealing Uncle Yonas!, reaching her arms out to be picked up, tossed in the air and spun around…
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! Melehaye!’ 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