Unknown Sculptor

  Part One    

Friends are like invisible sculptors, shaping you into something which you will only one day in the future be able to realise. And I often wonder who I would be without them. Possibly an empty shell, a plastic container for my parent’s old photographs and rolling stones CD’s. Oh yes and a soul. I always forget the soul. That strange intangible knowing that only once in a while speaks loud enough to make us unzip our winter jackets into the wind and wildly kiss our lovers. Yes, a soul in a plastic container, that’s what I’d be without my friends.

But sometimes you’re not always ready for a friendship. Or at least you’re not always prepared to see a sculpture made of yourself. One moment chatting to a stranger in a café and the next standing for the first time beside your concrete and cold body. And that’s what this story is about. A fleeting but unregretted friendship that taught me things about this life and who I am. A friendship stranger than fiction. 

Darcy, 2025.

 

 

September 2017

The first condition of friendship is to agree with each other. At least on one thing. And when we first met, Ashraf and I both agreed that Calais was a crazy place.

I didn’t notice him sitting by the entrance to the café when he asked me if I was from the Jungle. Anyone who hadn’t known the place would have been offended by the question.

“Yeah” I replied. “I was in Calais last summer. You were in the Jungle?”

“Nine months. Long time”.

Ashraf and I hadn’t spoken before. I guessed he was new to the café meet-ups. He claimed to have recognised me from my short time volunteering in France but I was certain he had mistaken me for another long-haired woman.

But anyhow, it was good to know that people were still crossing at the channel despite Britain’s recent investment on the border. Concrete walls, X-Ray machines, security guards… No wonder those trying to cross had such high expectations of the UK. The gates of heaven are easier to traverse. 

I smiled. “When did you arrive?”.

“One month ago”. Ashraf replied.

“And how do you like London?”.

“Good! I mean, better than Jungle”.

We laughed. The café we were sitting in was busy with people from everywhere. Men, women, and newborn babies who like Ashraf had recently migrated to the city. Laughter, both fake and real, made the room stuffy and inside the steamy windows the usual ‘refugee’ to ‘Englishman’ conversations were spoken. So where are you from? What is the difference between Sunni and Shia? Yeah, British weather is really terrible...  

Sometimes at the café meet-ups I also pursued these meaningless conversations, smiling almost half-crazy at the other person, in the overly polite English way. And other times I sat back, watched it all happen, and wondered whether silence instead was a more efficient way to overcome our cultural differences. That day I was in the mood for the latter, so I avoided the small-talk.

And what was the point of it all? We were all there to overcome feelings of loneliness and isolation. The meet-ups were run by a start-up charity who invited us all to join the month before. I myself wouldn’t have said that I felt socially isolated. Or lonely. Only a little homesick and overwhelmed with city-life. At that point it had been two months since I moved away from home and I missed the sea more than ever. And the shittiness of Bognor high street. Sometimes I wanted to see a Poundland or some redhead women screaming at her husband. But London wasn’t like that. Well at least I had not yet to see that side of it.

But some people in the café had experienced war, life or death situations. You could see it in the way they moved. The younger fidgeted as they sat, probably frustrated that more of their time was being wasted on external social affairs. Whilst the older carefully scuffed around other people’s chairs, as if with the slightest mistake their bones would explode, shatter into a thousand pieces and be left for the cleaners. I noticed older men in Calais taking the same small footsteps. Sudanese men, from Darfur, they were also forced away from home. I was noticing these things whilst standing in silence next to Ashraf. I was staring at the new-born who was crying madly for the warmth of her mother’s breast. I realised that there was no use in pretending that all of us in the café were equally seeking refuge.

But Ashraf and I connected through Calais. A physical place, a shared experience, a moment of belonging to something bigger than ourselves no matter how ugly or dismal. That day we sat together until the end of the meet-up, speaking of the absurdities on the French Northern shores. The size of the rats, how the police beat people in the night, the Pakistani man who spent every night hand rolling cigarettes just to sell in the morning, Jungle Books, tear-gas bombs, Afghani songs, and the cold. Those bitter sea winds that crept inside of tents in the late afternoon and by evening turned any uncovered limb into frozen flesh. In Calais it is as if the universe is also against anyone trying to cross. 

 

 

 

November 2017

Table tennis, chess, and so many biscuits. The charity meet-ups in the café were nice but eventually we thirsted stronger drinks. In October we started to meet at a local pub instead. Sitting around our one table was Julia wearing a yellow fishing raincoat, Segal and her baby, blind Barzun with his vodka, and Yasmeen knitting a multicoloured scarf. Oh and Claire, the organiser of the charity who mostly spoke about the best places to walk her dog. We must had looked like an odd bunch to the Irish landlord, at least compared to his male regulars.

By now Ashraf and I were communicating through hand gestures. We had run out of English words we both knew and even after all those weeks, we still hadn’t mentioned each other’s pasts. He didn’t know that I moved to London to escape a life I felt I had already lived. And all I knew about him was that he was born in Kuwait and the government there weren’t really that good. But one afternoon in November, walking through Liverpool Street, we spoke about it, our histories, why we came to London in the first place.

We met at the station around four o’clock. I still have no idea why I suggested we meet there as Liverpool Street Station is surely one of the busiest places in the city. People were rushing past us as we tiptoed through the crowds looking for each other’s faces. Ashraf’s face was unusual. But the more I had looked at it, the more I realised that it was like mine. We both had long cheeks and big teeth which make our lips protruded outwards and our septums dangle. Kind of like horse faces. If it wasn’t for our skin colour, people may have even thought we were related. Cousins or something. Maybe not.

We met because I wanted to show him East London Mosque. I cringe at the idea now.  Did I imagine that he had never seen a mosque before? Did I want to show pride in my so-called tolerant nation? Or maybe I was looking for a God that I never came to like? If any I hope the latter.

But anyway, the experience amused us both. We stood in the prayer room listening to the Imam like the other good guests. I looked over to Ashraf. He had his phone camera on facing us. I leaned over to look into his screen and then I pulled a stupid face wearing my borrowed hijab. He showed me the photo he took and then we both laughed, loud enough that the rest of the listeners turned around to see what was going on. In awkward giggles we decided to leave, still smirking as we made our way to the exit. We said our thanks and picked up a translated copy of the Qur’an on route. Hopefully God also has a sense of humour I thought. 

“What did you think?” I asked Ashraf.

“The mosque? It’s ok but I am Shi’a. I listen to Imam Hussain on YouTube. Darcy, you know Imam Hussain?”. 

I laughed again then asked Ashraf to show me some videos. One was of an American man wearing a military suit who was explaining how his conversion to Shi’ism had changed his life. The way he spoke reminded me of a French man in Calais who had also recently converted and one evening took me aside to tell me that I could never really be friends with Sudanese people unless I too followed Islam. I laughed aloud remembering the conversation I had afterwards about it with Ismail, a Sudanese friend:

“Oh the French man? He’s crazy. I don’t know his real name. I just call him Muslim”.

Ashraf looked at me, in confusion as to why I was laughing. I told him this story of the French man and asked him what he thought.

“Stupid! I am Muslim but one God. Christian, Muslim one!”.

I agreed. The second thing we agreed upon.

Imam Hussain lesson over, we walked towards a fish and chip shop. The smell of it made reminded me of home on the south coast. I told Ashraf how different it was from London and how people there walked slower, even smiled at you in the mornings. He then asked me why I left and I couldn’t answer so instead I said the expected - Job opportunities and the feeling of needing to grow up. I realise now it was because the comfort of home scared me. I wanted to see whether London had the power to change me into a person I didn’t want to become, a cold city-goer.

We sat down on the outside tables with our shared box of chips and watched the rush-hour people make their way towards the pub for their Friday night drinks. I then asked Ashraf about his life. 

“I was born bidoon, without passport.”

“Oh like a nomad? In the dessert?”

“La. No. Not Bedouin. Bidoon. Without passport.”

I didn’t understand.

“My father, born Kuwait, work for government but government not register him, I was born, me no papers.”

“But you were born in Kuwait, right?”

“Yes but Kuwait do not accept my case.”

I continued eating our chips, staring at him blankly.

“Listen Darcy, in Kuwait people bidoon, like me, have no school, no hospital, no life yanni…”

“But you had a job? I mean, how did you get the money to travel here?”

“My job, sell fruit in… in… truck, but police stop us and before three years we… one second…”

Ashraf unlocked his phone, opened translator, started typing and then held up the screen:

For many years stateless people in Kuwait protested. The government threatened me and my family with prison. I went to prison. Many people in Kuwait have no nationality. Kuwait is my country but it gives me no future. 

“But I thought Kuwait had lots of money from you know, oil and stuff?”

Ashraf shook his head and made a tutting noise, just like he had when we saw the drunken Irish man fall off his chair in the pub. I didn’t say anything and instead watched my hand take the last chip from our box and dunk it into the paper cup of ketchup. It was the hand of a young white girl. 

 

 

April 2018

It was Ashraf’s possible birthday. April First, April fools. He had chosen the date because he didn't know his real birthday. I supposed it was hard to remember without a birth certificate. We went for a drink and I gave him a present. Subterranean Homesick Blues, Bob Dylan, 1965. At the time it felt symbolic of something. A gesture, a nudge, that everyone in this life feels like an outsider in some way or another.  

 

 

 

May 2018

City lights eventually become too bright and people fade amongst them. That is what happened to most of the people at the charity meet-ups. The divorced Egyptian lady found a new lover and the Kurdish man started to visit a Turkish coffee shop. But Ashraf and I still met most weeks and over the winter months we did the normal things friends did our age. Eat pizza, watch films, get drunk, laugh, cry, walk, smoke cigarettes, suffer hangovers, talk about the future. And it was easy most of the time, it felt natural, like friendships should be, not too serious. And during the best moments, when we were sitting on the edges of my bed or slumped upon cushions of my friend’s sofa, we had tears of laughter falling from our eyes, muscles almost falling away from us, drowning amongst the craziness of our lives.

But our differences did emerge. One evening Ashraf invited me around his place for dinner. We were both nervous. It was the first time he had ever cooked for a woman and when I arrived, he asked me to lay a black plastic binbag on the floor of his shared bedroom.

“You don’t eat chicken! You crazy!”.

I had typed ‘vegetarian’ into translator before but Ashraf always had laughed in nervous confusion and assured me that I wasn’t a vegetable. I don’t know why I didn’t realise then that why dietary habits had obviously been miscommunicated.

“Why Darcy? How do you live? Meat is good, healthy!”.

I agreed in politeness and managed to eat around the big bits anyway.

But our biggest differences were shown to us through other people, the passer-by who would glance at us for just a second too long, possibly wondering what we are doing together, speaking in a different language, waving our arms around. Maybe I was just paranoid. But of what I still wonder? But certainly we were treated differently by the people we met and once these differences surfaced, they remained like scars upon our backs, permanently there but unnoticeable to ourselves.

“Look matie, I ain’t gonna haggle with ya”.

One night at the end of May, Pat, the landlord of my local pub accused Ashraf of trying to barter the price of a beer. I heard them talking whilst I was sitting by the window on the front tables. It was clear that Ashraf was only asking for two glasses.

“It ain’t two, it’s three-eighty!”.

 Pat shouted, rosy cheeks aflame. I still don’t know why I didn’t help. Maybe I wanted to see if Ashraf’s English had gotten good enough to barter with a pub owner. But I know Ashraf also got drunk after two beers and it didn’t surprise me when, on the way back to our table, he accidently kicked one of the wooden chairs and dropped the single pint glass onto the floor.

“Right! That’s it I’ve had enough of you, get out!”.

Pat is usually calm, even with the drunkest of customers. But not to Ashraf. It was obvious that he wasn’t from around here and he was treated him that way. A citizen of some other place. Of nowhere.

 

 

 

May 2018

We began finding ways around Ashraf not having any I.D. Once night we snuck in through the back-entrance of a venue like we were the evening entertainment. And we probably were. That night we danced wildly to bad rock music, our eyes glowing under the U.V lights. But after Ashraf was detained, I realised that all of these things were minor issues - not getting into bars, not being able to travel – they were distractions, temporary fixtures to cover the uncomfortable truth that, in the eyes of the law, Ashraf had no right to be in the UK.

Ashraf was detained at the end of May, taken in the back of a security van to a male-only detention centre close to Gatwick airport. His asylum application was rejected and he was told he would soon be put on a flight to Germany, the European country where his fingerprints had been first recorded.

Germany isn’t that bad, sure. But all of a sudden, instead of sitting on the carpets of our bedrooms, we found ourselves sitting across from each other in plastic chairs, holding machine made tea and being watched by two officers in blue uniforms. And as I walked through the security checks at the detention centre, I realised that to others I was the friend of a criminal.

But Ashraf was not a criminal. Or at least if he was then I was too. Nothing had changed and when we saw each other we laughed, just like we had when we walked arm in arm along Liverpool Street. Like partners in crime. No. Like friends. Like anyone.

We were given an hour together in the visiting room and most of the time there wasn’t much to talk about. In fact, there used to be more silence than ever, as if we had already accepted our powerlessness under the chains of fate. And when we said our goodbyes, we hugged. The only instance when we were allowed to touch each other. But our hugs were faster than normal. It felt strange to hug when you were being watched.

 

 

 

May 2018

Sometimes I visited the detention centre three times a week. I would run to Kings Cross, jump on any train heading south, and then on arrival to Gatwick airport, I boarded a free service minibus that would drive me and other visitors to the two detention centres in the area.  

It was usually other women in the mini-bus, young women and not English. I remember one woman, Polish I think, quietly sobbing on the journey there and back. I noticed her but tried not to get involved as I also was emotionally tired. But then on arrival she continued to cry. I brought her a tea from the tea machine and sat down next to her in the reception area.

“…it’s shit here isn’t it?”. I tried to show a glimpse of solidarity.

She nodded her head and continued crying. She then told me that her lover had been detained and she wasn’t allowed to see him because she hadn’t booked an appointment the day before.

“…and I have travelled four hours to get here”.

She wiped the snot from her nose with the sleeve of her pink jumper. I looked over to the reception desk. There was two men talking, one throwing his hand around, pointing between his computer and this Polish woman. She sipped her tea and as I was called though to the security checks, she boarded the minibus back to the airport.

But other times I was the only person on the bus and I would sit in the front with the driver, talking about our favourite ales to drink and whether he really enjoyed his job.

“It pays”. He would shrug, his beer belly bouncing over the humps on the road.

After a few journeys, he even asked me why I was visiting the detention centre. I would tell him Ashraf’s case and he too would agree with me that the asylum system is complicated.

“but what can-ya do?”. He would always conclude with.

And what could I do? I would wonder. What could any of us do?

After waiting in the reception centre, an officer would walk me and the other visitors towards the central building. I was always interested to see the reactions of the young children when they too were forced to go through the three sections of security checks. Removal of items, X-Ray, then pat-down. I used to wonder what they were thinking, whether they were going to visit their Dads, or brothers, and what they would one day make this strange rite of passage to see them.

“…but muuum when will Dada come home?”.

In the second waiting room there were children’s toys in one corner and I remember one young girl skipping around asking her mother unanswerable questions as most children do.

“I don’t know but we will see him soon”. Was all her mother could reply to her.

A second officer would then arrive into the inner waiting room, take us across the inside court and over to the building where Ashraf and others were held. From the other side of the brick wall and barbed wire fence, you could see a basketball flying up into the air and you could hear men shouting at each other. ‘It’s like a family here’ was printed on a large white sign that was placed above the next locked door we had to pass through. I remember sneering at it once, as though it was a living thing.

After the second week of him being in the detention centre, Ashraf began complaining about the food and social life. He told me that the tomato curry was too sweet for his taste and that the Jamaican men in the garden were taking up too much space. I was almost expecting him to star rate the place. He also told me that religious men were offering meetings with him and trying to help his situation. I tried to highlight their good intentions but he would always remind me of the reality that only a decent lawyer could truly support him with his case, not God.

“Christian, Muslim, all one I know Darcy I know but I need a good lawyer!”.

Ashraf did have a lawyer but only a cheap phone that the detention centre had given to him on his arrival. It cost him to call anyone and the signal was sparing. After one visit, he asked me if I could ring his lawyer for him once I arrived home. I agreed but I didn’t do it until a few days after. For some reason I felt nervous. I hadn’t ever spoken to a lawyer before and I had a feeling that he wouldn’t care unless I was Ashraf’s wife or something.

And what was I supposed to say? Ashraf told me every time that we met that he wasn’t ever going to board a plane to Germany, even if he was forced to.

“All my cousins are in the UK and I spent my family money, my life!”.

And what could a lawyer say to that? Oh you risked your life trying to get to the UK? Why didn’t you tell me before! I will call the home office now, issue you with a passport immediately… Ashraf was another forgein name on a list.

He used to ask me “Darcy why? Why everyone, my brother, Mohammad, my cousin has UK paper and not me?”

And what was I supposed to say? You were rejected because the asylum system is a matter of pot-luck? An endless game of noughts and crosses in which it is never your turn? Instead I would just nod, sip the plastic tea and try to tell him how Germany probably isn’t as bad as he thought.

“You go to Germany then”.

But sometimes nodding wasn’t enough. He would stare at me as though I was a as evil as the forgein officer who closed his case and, in those moments, I realised that all I could be was on his side. Besides, how could I ever convince anyone of submitting to something that even I didn’t want to happen?

“I’ll call the lawyer. That’s all I can do”.

I wanted him to stay too, of course I did. And as the weeks passed, goodbye hugs became longer. I felt his already small frame shrinking.

 

 

 

May 2018

I did call the lawyer and I even claimed to be Ashraf’s girlfriend. But the lawyer told me it was all too late, that Ashraf’s case had already been finalised and if I cared that much, I should have thought about moving to Germany with him. I couldn’t. What would my parents have thought? Running off with someone who I’d known for no longer than a year?

I decided to call them.

“Ah Darcy, still saving flies from the swimming pool are we?”

“Oh fuck off Dad”.

I hadn’t sworn at my Dad until that day. The only other time I’d said anything rude to him was when I had come home school one day and asked him innocently what a tit-wank was. But in that moment, it felt right to swear. As a child I used to save insects from downing in water, even the bluebottles, and my Dad compared Ashraf to a dying insect. He was a man like him I thought! Fuck off. And even my Mum didn’t understand. She said that it’s just what happens to people like Ashraf and that I needed to grow up. Maybe I did but anyway who did they think they were? Who were they not to believe that in another life they could have been Ashraf? Or another? Or anyone! I hung up and for the first time, I realised my separation from them, that I was alone in this and in every other experience I had ever had. I cried. I cried because only Ashraf knew the memories we had shared and I realised that it was pointless trying to explain them to anyone else.

I picked up my phone again but this time called the detention centre. I asked them to add me on to the list for tomorrow’s visiting hours.

 

 

 

May 2018

The last time I saw Ashraf at the detention centre, he was half an hour late to the visiting room. I heard his voice being called on the speakers behind the walls. No police officer would tell me why he was late or where he was. But he eventually arrived and told me that he had been found with a razor. He looked at me and made a cutting action on his throat with his right finger. I laughed. Was he joking? I thought he was, until he showed me his new detention card.

Special case: Individual cell: Night watch. 

I instantly worried even though I knew that he was a man whose life I have no control over. But I think that was what worried me the most. That I couldn’t change any of it, only watch it unfold as if it was how it was always supposed to end. The final cut. And anyway, who was I to stop him? Despite a thousand borders, Ashraf had already travelled across the world to get to the UK, and no one, not even his closest friends, could convince him that leaving it was a part of his destiny. Maybe he was right I thought. Maybe Germany really was a bad place for him, a country where he knew no one, no family, not a word of the language?

“Ashraf, don’t do it. Don’t let this country kill you!”.

“But Darcy if I suicide, they not send me to Germany”.

I began reminding him of our memories together, that time when my Italian friend laid her head on his lap, started wailing with tears, and we looked at each other in equal confusion. And that other time when we joined a group of drummers in Hackney Marshes, spoke poetry and felt the warmth of the fire upon the front of our bodies and the meet-ups! Those endless conversations which sometimes would flicker and spark and reveal what this was life was really about, people connecting, people! Strangers who come into our lives and then leave but still care, still exist, and would feel even a tiny amount sorrow when our souls eventually leave this world. I wanted to reminded him that maybe, despite all of this, there was still something waiting in the future, somewhere else, glimmering like a tiny shard of glass on a concrete pavement, free and more tangible than anything. But as the security officer began walking over to us, about to tell us that our chairs had moved too close together, I began feeling unenthused about what I had said. And Ashraf also realised, he too felt that flame extinguish. Maybe it was really both of us that needed to find a reason to live.

Our hour together was almost over but just before we said what I thought would be our last goodbye, a little girl with a large afro ran up behind Ashraf’s chair. I noticed the child earlier whilst going through the security checks and I assumed that the women she was with was her mother. I looked over the women and saw her talking fiercely with a man who seemed like her partner. The little girl had obviously got bored of their conversation and decided to explore others. With a beaming smile she ran to Ashraf and shook an open green crisp packet in his face. She was offering him a share. He laughed wildly, as though he had forgotten how to laugh, yet was remembering in that moment just how good it felt. Ashraf took a crisp and then thanked her by patting her afro hair. All three of us smiled, an agreement without words, a conclusion that everything was going to be alright. Everything.

 

 

 

June 2018

Everything did turn out alright, Ashraf stayed alive. I forever thank the little afro-girl. But three days after that visit, he was deported to Germany and the same day I woke up to see a photo of him standing at a small German bus shelter without any shoes.

“Where’s your shoes?”.

He told me that the border guards left them under his bed after they handcuffed him in his sleep. Disrespect. A small act to strip dignity.

“but was the view from the plane nice this morning?”.

I tried to lighten the absurdity by asking him stupid questions, as if he was on a vacation. But he was blindfolded the entire journey. Like a sheep in stockcar. A human humiliated.  

“At least Germany accepts many asylum cases!”.  

He hated Germany already, I could hear it in his voice. The German border guards had driven him from the airport to a tiny country town in the West. There he was shown his new place to stay, a row of camp beds spaced equally across an empty floor of an abandoned sports hall. Square one. Another camp, new arrivals, more talk of suicide. Hardly the free and funky art scene which I promised him existed in Berlin.

“Darcy Germany don’t understand my story. If I was Syrian ok, they accept, but I am bidoon and nowhere exists for us. Only UK”.

How could he still have hope for Britain when it had treated him like shit?

The language. Edgeware Road. His cousins. Of course.

“and I miss you Darcy”.

“I miss you too”.

I put the phone down and walked for miles heading nowhere. It wouldn’t stop raining. It rained so much that I couldn’t tell whether my own tears were falling. I did really miss him and London felt catastrophic without his presence, without the smell of him and the way he tried to guess the nationality of every passenger on the tube, without his laughter and his inexhaustible questioning of everything British, and the way he would feed the pigeons. We both liked the pigeons. 

I reached home and it was still raining. I was drenched, left heavy under the grey clouds. I made tea and then sat on my bed. I couldn’t stop thinking about him and it was then that I began wondering whether our friendship was coloured by something else, something that falls from above and could soak through you as much as rain.