His most treasured possession is a small bottle of sand. It comes from the beach in Puglia where he was found by cara-binieri in what the British Consul in Naples drily terms ‘a state of distress’, having been dumped from a dinghy into the sea some distance from shore by a crew of Albanian people-smugglers. The story he told the police was barely credible, and when it was confirmed caused ripples throughout the European Union, not least in the offices of the nascent Pan European Border Authority, which was later held directly accountable.
He was, he thinks, partly to blame. Blind drunk and heinously misaligned, he allowed himself to be taken to an unknown suburb of a strange city by a woman of easy virtue. He describes himself now, with a certain prim disgust, as a ‘drinker and substance abuser’, though these traits were, he accepts, evidence of the distorted geomagnetism of his living and working environment. He has no distinct memory of what happened to him between leaving the lapdancing club with the woman he knew as Irina and waking up some time later, lying on a bed in a small room with green bamboo-patterned wallpaper. Black plastic had been taped over the window. Apart from the bed and a chipped melamine dresser, the room was empty.
His head ached and he was naked apart from his tie, which was tied round his head like a Japanese headband. He was still wearing his watch, which told him it was 5.10 a.m., news that threw him into a panic because of the pitch meeting later that day He found his clothes under the bed and stumbled out of the door to find himself looking down the stairwell of some kind of apartment building. The door on the other side of the landing was open and through it he could see a bedroom full of Chinese men, sitting two or three to a bunk, smoking and playing cards beneath lines of drying washing. He wondered if he was in some kind of hostel.
A bell rang. Someone must have opened the front door, because the next thing he heard was the sound of shouting, and heavy boots coming up the stairs. Half awake and hung over, he reacted slowly All around him chaos was erupting. Chinese men were running by, clutching trousers and cigarette cartons and pairs of trainers. A pair of young East African women, one carrying a baby in a sling, ran on to the landing, then turned round and fled back inside. Guy decided to return to his room. Whatever was happening had nothing to do with him. A moment later he was gripped in a head-lock by a man dressed in a dark blue Belgian police uniform.
‘All right,’ he remembers calling out in English. ‘Christ. Take it easy.’
The policeman forced him to the ground and kneeled on his neck. ‘English,’ Guy gurgled. ‘I’m fucking English.’ By that time he had worked out what was happening. He was in the middle of an immigration raid.
He did not make the connection with Operation Atomium until he was already in the police van. He had been squeezed in with the East African women, several Chinese still in their underwear and a shaven-headed gendarme who looked blankly at him when he tried to talk to him in English. Going through his pockets, he realized his wallet and phone were missing. He supposed Irina had stolen them. At least she had left his watch. It was a good watch. It was water resistant to 200 metres.
As the van made its way through the streets of Brussels, the Chinese men started to smoke and talk in low unconcerned voices, as if this were just another confined space, just the latest in a series. The police van filled up with a blue tobacco haze, and Guy tried to work out the quickest way of extricating himself. With no ID it would, he supposed, take an hour or two to establish his identity. He would be short of sleep, but he should still make the meeting. He might get time to have an hour’s nap. There was even a potential upside to what was happening. In a certain light, being picked up in PEBA’s first coordinated sweep could be viewed as a work-related activity. He was seeing the system in operation. His misadventure was actually research. Mentally he started to script a new section of his presentation. At Tomorrow* we believe in getting our hands dirty. We believe in firsthand knowledge of the brand in action… He settled down on the metal bench and smiled at the people opposite him. All he needed was Nurofen and access to a phone. Everything was going to be fine.
A temporary processing centre had been set up by Belgian immigration in a hangar at Zaventem Airport. The van parked at a side entrance and, still smiling, Guy was given a number and led into a holding area. Sitting on plastic seats were tall Somalis and tiny Latinos, Nigerians and Byelorussians, Filipinos and Kazakhs. Groups of young men conferred in huddles. Parents comforted crying babies. There were more illegals than Guy had expected. It looked as if they had turned the city upside down and shaken it. An impressive operation.
After a few minutes of relatively interesting observational research, his good mood began to fray. His chair was uncomfortable, and the elderly Arab next to him kept falling asleep on his shoulder. Though he tried to attract the attention of the guards, none seemed interested in talking to him. He spoke loudly and clearly. I am EU cit-i-zen. I need ta-xi to my ho-tel. As the minutes lengthened, his serenity waned to irritation.
He tried to snatch some sleep, but was kept awake by the noise and the brightness of the hangar’s halogen lights. One by one the detainees were being interrogated in a row of roofless cubicles at the far end of the hangar. Afterwards, most were returned to the holding area. At 7.45 a.m. his number was finally called. He went in shouting, giving full vent to several hours’ worth of indignation. Leaning across her ugly little desk, he berated the immigration officer, demanding instant access to the British Consul and throwing around phrases like ‘wrongful arrest’ and ‘unlawful detention’ with all the righteous anger of a man whose free passing has been subject to both let and hindrance, and who reckons that local standards of assistance and protection have fallen well below what Her Britannic Majesty would expect.
Though factually he was probably justified in most of the points he made, his approach was unhelpful. The officer appeared unruffled, addressing him first in French and then (when he screamed at her that she was a stupid deaf bitch who would lose her job in two minutes if she didn’t fucking call him a cab) switching to English to ask in a flat monotone, ‘What is your name?’
He told her his name. She asked his real name. He told her his name again, and then told her to fuck off.
‘You speak very good English,’ she said. ‘What is your first language?’
‘English, you idiotic tart.’
Banging the table was a bad idea. She must have pressed some kind of panic button, because two policemen ran into the room, threw him to the floor and sat on his back, cracking his head against the concrete a couple of times to make sure he got the point. Only when they judged that he was calm did they let him sit back down on the chair. Each time he spoke he was told to be silent. The third time he opened his mouth one of the policemen casually slapped him round the face. He was too stunned to be angry.
The immigration officer had no further questions for him. He made conciliatory faces at her, increasingly desperate faces intended to convey strong European fellow feeling. She supervised as the policemen took his fingerprints and would not meet his eye as he was frogmarched out of the room towards a part of the hangar he supposed was the secure area, a screened-off wire-mesh enclosure patrolled by policemen carrying semiautomatic weapons.