Annie Christie's That Long Hot Summer
Episode Seven
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle...
Swearwords: None.
Description: In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle...
‘… gone to the Jungle.’
Daniel couldn’t believe the text. The last few weeks with Shelley had been something of a rollercoaster with ongoing revelations and constant surprises. Hard as he found this, he had thought he was getting used to expecting the unexpected. He still hated uncertainty. But with Shelley, the only certainty seemed to be uncertainty and… well… he loved her… so he was having to reappraise his world view. But this. The Jungle? What the…?
He was about to reply, though he still didn’t know what he’d say, when a picture message pinged through. It showed Shelley and, right enough, she was in the Jungle. But not the African Jungle. It was the Calais version. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or shocked.
‘What’s up?’ said Mike. ‘Or should I say What’s App?’
Mike thought he was funny. He wasn’t.
Daniel didn’t know what to say, so he showed Mike the picture. Perhaps against his better judgement, but…
‘Is that Shelley?’ Mike asked. ‘What’s she doing?’
‘Don’t know,’ Daniel replied. ‘She just texted me to say she’s gone to the Jungle and sent this picture.’
‘That’s one weird chick,’ Mike laughed.
‘What should I do?’ Daniel asked.
Mike looked at his watch. ‘You could be there tonight if you left now.’
‘It’s just after lunch,’ Daniel replied. ‘How…?’
‘Just go,’ Mike said. ‘I’ll cover for you.’
‘Uh…’
‘Look, get the train from Piccadilly to Euston – that’s a couple of hours – then get to St Pancras – easy 1o minute walk if you’re not carrying bags – then Eurostar to Paris in two hours. How you get to The Jungle from there I’m not sure…’
Mike was already tapping up on his screen for more details.
‘Bet you never knew I was a travel agent on the side,’ he said.
Daniel was still trying to catch up with the idea of bunking off work on a Friday afternoon.
‘I’ve sent you a guide list,’ Mike said.
‘Boy, that was quick,’ Daniel said.
‘Yeah, and you’d better take off if you want to make the train to London before 3 pm. Get some Euros, buddy. And make sure your phone’s charged.’
‘Sure,’ Daniel was floundering.
‘And text Shelley. Let her know…’
‘Good idea.’
‘I’ll shut down the computer and deal with it all this end,’ Mike said. ‘Go, buddy, go!’
Daniel left.
His phone pinged instantly he was out on the street.
‘Daniel has left the building!’ It was a text from Mike. ‘Good luck, mate!’
* * *
On the train down to London Daniel had plenty of time to think about what he was doing while he read the information Mike had compiled for him. It was remarkably comprehensive given the short amount of time he’d had. Almost as if he’d known in advance. But he couldn’t, could he?
Daniel reflected that not having had time to worry about things was a good way to stop the prevarication he might otherwise have succumbed to. It was too late now. He was on the train. He didn’t have a toothbrush, or a change of clothes or anything. But he reasoned there’d be a lot of people a lot worse off in the Jungle. It wasn’t a holiday camp. It was… well, he really didn’t know what it was. Well out of his comfort zone, that was for sure.
He texted Shelley from the train.
‘I’m coming to join you. Love Daniel x’
Now there was really no going back. He didn’t have time to worry about whether Shelley would welcome his appearance before he got a text back:
‘Cool. When will you be here?’
‘Don’t know. Should get Eurostar at six latest.’
The texts pinged back and forth. She told him that he could get off at Calais Fréthun, a stop before Paris. He looked it up on the internet. It looked like the middle of nowhere. Mike’s notes told him that he could walk easily from Euston to St Pancras – though crossing London at rush-hour on a Friday evening was something that made him not a little anxious. Mike had made him a reservation on the 6 pm Eurostar. Shelley had said she’d be there to meet him. What could go wrong? He didn’t like to even start thinking about that, so instead of watching the countryside pass by he spent time surfing the net to find out all he could about The Jungle. He wanted to be as prepared as possible. The one thing that had never occurred to him was to ask Shelley why she had gone off there at a moment’s notice. Five minutes online was enough to explain that.
Shelley was a girl who cared. Passionately. About people. While Daniel found people in general pretty scary and individually rather unpredictable and therefore best avoided, Shelley was the kind of person who felt deeply and was not ashamed to admit it. If he lacked empathy, she had it in bucket loads. She’d told him that together they might just scrape by and make one hell of a person. He’d laughed. That was theory. Now it seemed it was going to be put to the test. When he read and saw the information about what was going on in the Jungle, he could see straightway why she’d just upped and offed. He was impressed and not a little proud of her. He was also scared beyond belief. While for Mike an adventure was the raison d’être of life, Daniel understood the syntax of an adventure, which included hardship, jeopardy and transformation. He wasn’t that keen on any of these elements.
It wasn’t a sense of adventure that made Daniel carry his passport with him almost religiously. Most people found it a strange behaviour but having it about his person somehow gave him a sense of security, somehow reinforcing his identity. He reasoned that if the worst happened, he didn’t want people to only be able to tell who he was by his dental records. Especially since he had a phobia of dentists… so finding his records might prove something of an issue.
Little was he to know how significant a passport was in the Europe of 2015. Or smart phones. He settled down to his, forgetting what Mike had told him about making sure he kept it charged, and he all but drained the battery checking out what was to come.
Social media was awash with information and images. Most looked pretty grim, but there were also some bizarre documents suggesting that ‘tourism’ to the site was becoming an established path. The instructions were for the festival generation and read more like a pre-guide to Glastonbury. Daniel found it just a little bit distasteful, however helpful it was meant to be. The Jungle was not, after all, a holiday camp. He could tell that simply from the picture Shelley had sent him. The reality was bound to be much worse.
Time passed. He made it to London. The train, for once, was on time and with Mike’s instructions he found St Pancras easily enough. In the fifteen minutes he had before the Eurostar left, Daniel managed to buy a couple of powerbank chargers because despite the blurb telling him that in the Jungle, along with a library, theatre and cafes, there were power charging points, he felt that perhaps those living in the Jungle could be expected to take priority. He didn’t want to be robbing electricity from a refugee. As far as possible it would be good to be self-sufficient, he told himself. While the online ‘Jungle Book’ he found gave loads of good, well-meaning advice, it also perhaps contributed to a sense of disconnect, where instead it intended to prepare. It should have simply stated the truth: There is nothing that will prepare you for the Jungle.
Daniel got off the train at Calais Fréthun without a problem. The whole journey had gone remarkably smoothly. Have passport. Have money. Have smartphone. No problem. Daniel was soon to discover that in modern Europe these were the holy trinity.
The station was in the middle of nowhere and at nine o’clock in the evening it was getting dark. He was about to start panicking when someone put the lights out. Literally. Stepped up behind him and covered his eyes with their hands. A moment, of panic engulfed him before he recognised the hands as those of Shelley. He felt relief. Whatever he was about to go into, they would do it together.
He still didn’t ask her why she’d gone there. Why she hadn’t told him she was going. Instead it was she who spoke.
‘You came!’ she said.
‘Couldn’t leave you out here on your own,’ he replied, trying to sound in control but his stomach was churning big-style. It was taking all he had to fight off a panic attack. But he was here with Shelley. It was what he wanted. He reminded himself that with Shelley he could face anything. He hoped. It looked like it was time to test the theory.
She laughed. She wasn’t taken in by his bravado. She knew him better than that. They both knew that if anyone needed protecting in the big bad world it was him, not her. That was a given. But it didn’t matter. As long as they were together.
‘Let’s go,’ she said.
She pointed to a couple of beaten up bikes and they climbed on board. On the journey they were cycling too fast, without lights, for conversation to be possible but soon enough they got to the outskirts of the camp.
A sensible person, Daniel reflected later, would not arrive at such a place on a Friday night. They would eat before they got there and they’d arrive in the daylight. That way they might be able to cope with the culture shock. It was an assault on all the senses at once but the overwhelming vibe was of despair. And as dark had fallen it was a place just waking up. Because night is the time the inhabitants of the Jungle come out of their tents and make-shift container homes and try their luck on the trains and trucks. It was a journey none of them would make as easily as Daniel had. A journey of fear and death simply because they didn’t have the ‘full house’ of money, smartphone and passport. The first two were essential, but without the third life was supremely tough. You needed more than a poker face to deal with this place. You needed a full deck of cards. The passport was the Top Trump card. And they were in short supply. The alternatives were dangerous, desperate and generally unsuccessful.
That evening went past in a blur. Shelley and Daniel became part of a decoy group, distracting the French police while a group of refugees tried every which way to get themselves attached to a series of trucks lining up waiting to enter the Eurotunnel. It was chaotic and Daniel had no idea what was going on – apart from that he had to run a lot and once he didn’t run fast enough and came across the wrong end of a French police baton as he rolled himself down a slope in an attempt to get away – Shelley screaming in French at the police as they fell. He didn’t know Shelley spoke French. There was a lot about Shelley he didn’t know. And a lot about the world. How could it be that a place like this existed. Just across the Channel. He’d had no idea. He’d heard of a few ‘migrants’ trying to cross but he had never realised the scale and scope of this whole thing. There were families who had been here for years, children growing up in a make-shift refugee camp which was NOTHING like Glastonbury. It was plain wrong. He couldn’t make sense of it. And he was tired, hungry and most of all angry at what he’d experienced.
He had a passport, money and a smartphone – but in the dark the police knew no differently and he could just as well be a Syrian or an Afghan or an Iraqi fleeing from the horrors of war in their own country only to have this visited on them as they tried to reach what they naively believed would be safety.
‘It should be better organised,’ Daniel reflected when they finally collapsed beside the remains of a fire in the middle of the Jungle camp.
‘Yeah, and who can do that?’ Shelley asked. ‘You’ve seen it. Who can possibly sort this out?’
He looked at her and she seemed close to tears. That was something he’d never seen before.
‘Well, we can try,’ he said.
Making the statement didn’t feel empowering. This wasn’t about empowerment. It was about justice. About determining to do the right thing in a wrong situation. But how they might achieve it – who knew? How could they possibly help?
All Daniel knew was that a night in the Jungle had changed the way he would look at the world for ever. And he cursed himself that it took being there in person to wake up and smell the coffee…
Daniel couldn’t believe the text. The last few weeks with Shelley had been something of a rollercoaster with ongoing revelations and constant surprises. Hard as he found this, he had thought he was getting used to expecting the unexpected. He still hated uncertainty. But with Shelley, the only certainty seemed to be uncertainty and… well… he loved her… so he was having to reappraise his world view. But this. The Jungle? What the…?
He was about to reply, though he still didn’t know what he’d say, when a picture message pinged through. It showed Shelley and, right enough, she was in the Jungle. But not the African Jungle. It was the Calais version. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or shocked.
‘What’s up?’ said Mike. ‘Or should I say What’s App?’
Mike thought he was funny. He wasn’t.
Daniel didn’t know what to say, so he showed Mike the picture. Perhaps against his better judgement, but…
‘Is that Shelley?’ Mike asked. ‘What’s she doing?’
‘Don’t know,’ Daniel replied. ‘She just texted me to say she’s gone to the Jungle and sent this picture.’
‘That’s one weird chick,’ Mike laughed.
‘What should I do?’ Daniel asked.
Mike looked at his watch. ‘You could be there tonight if you left now.’
‘It’s just after lunch,’ Daniel replied. ‘How…?’
‘Just go,’ Mike said. ‘I’ll cover for you.’
‘Uh…’
‘Look, get the train from Piccadilly to Euston – that’s a couple of hours – then get to St Pancras – easy 1o minute walk if you’re not carrying bags – then Eurostar to Paris in two hours. How you get to The Jungle from there I’m not sure…’
Mike was already tapping up on his screen for more details.
‘Bet you never knew I was a travel agent on the side,’ he said.
Daniel was still trying to catch up with the idea of bunking off work on a Friday afternoon.
‘I’ve sent you a guide list,’ Mike said.
‘Boy, that was quick,’ Daniel said.
‘Yeah, and you’d better take off if you want to make the train to London before 3 pm. Get some Euros, buddy. And make sure your phone’s charged.’
‘Sure,’ Daniel was floundering.
‘And text Shelley. Let her know…’
‘Good idea.’
‘I’ll shut down the computer and deal with it all this end,’ Mike said. ‘Go, buddy, go!’
Daniel left.
His phone pinged instantly he was out on the street.
‘Daniel has left the building!’ It was a text from Mike. ‘Good luck, mate!’
* * *
On the train down to London Daniel had plenty of time to think about what he was doing while he read the information Mike had compiled for him. It was remarkably comprehensive given the short amount of time he’d had. Almost as if he’d known in advance. But he couldn’t, could he?
Daniel reflected that not having had time to worry about things was a good way to stop the prevarication he might otherwise have succumbed to. It was too late now. He was on the train. He didn’t have a toothbrush, or a change of clothes or anything. But he reasoned there’d be a lot of people a lot worse off in the Jungle. It wasn’t a holiday camp. It was… well, he really didn’t know what it was. Well out of his comfort zone, that was for sure.
He texted Shelley from the train.
‘I’m coming to join you. Love Daniel x’
Now there was really no going back. He didn’t have time to worry about whether Shelley would welcome his appearance before he got a text back:
‘Cool. When will you be here?’
‘Don’t know. Should get Eurostar at six latest.’
The texts pinged back and forth. She told him that he could get off at Calais Fréthun, a stop before Paris. He looked it up on the internet. It looked like the middle of nowhere. Mike’s notes told him that he could walk easily from Euston to St Pancras – though crossing London at rush-hour on a Friday evening was something that made him not a little anxious. Mike had made him a reservation on the 6 pm Eurostar. Shelley had said she’d be there to meet him. What could go wrong? He didn’t like to even start thinking about that, so instead of watching the countryside pass by he spent time surfing the net to find out all he could about The Jungle. He wanted to be as prepared as possible. The one thing that had never occurred to him was to ask Shelley why she had gone off there at a moment’s notice. Five minutes online was enough to explain that.
Shelley was a girl who cared. Passionately. About people. While Daniel found people in general pretty scary and individually rather unpredictable and therefore best avoided, Shelley was the kind of person who felt deeply and was not ashamed to admit it. If he lacked empathy, she had it in bucket loads. She’d told him that together they might just scrape by and make one hell of a person. He’d laughed. That was theory. Now it seemed it was going to be put to the test. When he read and saw the information about what was going on in the Jungle, he could see straightway why she’d just upped and offed. He was impressed and not a little proud of her. He was also scared beyond belief. While for Mike an adventure was the raison d’être of life, Daniel understood the syntax of an adventure, which included hardship, jeopardy and transformation. He wasn’t that keen on any of these elements.
It wasn’t a sense of adventure that made Daniel carry his passport with him almost religiously. Most people found it a strange behaviour but having it about his person somehow gave him a sense of security, somehow reinforcing his identity. He reasoned that if the worst happened, he didn’t want people to only be able to tell who he was by his dental records. Especially since he had a phobia of dentists… so finding his records might prove something of an issue.
Little was he to know how significant a passport was in the Europe of 2015. Or smart phones. He settled down to his, forgetting what Mike had told him about making sure he kept it charged, and he all but drained the battery checking out what was to come.
Social media was awash with information and images. Most looked pretty grim, but there were also some bizarre documents suggesting that ‘tourism’ to the site was becoming an established path. The instructions were for the festival generation and read more like a pre-guide to Glastonbury. Daniel found it just a little bit distasteful, however helpful it was meant to be. The Jungle was not, after all, a holiday camp. He could tell that simply from the picture Shelley had sent him. The reality was bound to be much worse.
Time passed. He made it to London. The train, for once, was on time and with Mike’s instructions he found St Pancras easily enough. In the fifteen minutes he had before the Eurostar left, Daniel managed to buy a couple of powerbank chargers because despite the blurb telling him that in the Jungle, along with a library, theatre and cafes, there were power charging points, he felt that perhaps those living in the Jungle could be expected to take priority. He didn’t want to be robbing electricity from a refugee. As far as possible it would be good to be self-sufficient, he told himself. While the online ‘Jungle Book’ he found gave loads of good, well-meaning advice, it also perhaps contributed to a sense of disconnect, where instead it intended to prepare. It should have simply stated the truth: There is nothing that will prepare you for the Jungle.
Daniel got off the train at Calais Fréthun without a problem. The whole journey had gone remarkably smoothly. Have passport. Have money. Have smartphone. No problem. Daniel was soon to discover that in modern Europe these were the holy trinity.
The station was in the middle of nowhere and at nine o’clock in the evening it was getting dark. He was about to start panicking when someone put the lights out. Literally. Stepped up behind him and covered his eyes with their hands. A moment, of panic engulfed him before he recognised the hands as those of Shelley. He felt relief. Whatever he was about to go into, they would do it together.
He still didn’t ask her why she’d gone there. Why she hadn’t told him she was going. Instead it was she who spoke.
‘You came!’ she said.
‘Couldn’t leave you out here on your own,’ he replied, trying to sound in control but his stomach was churning big-style. It was taking all he had to fight off a panic attack. But he was here with Shelley. It was what he wanted. He reminded himself that with Shelley he could face anything. He hoped. It looked like it was time to test the theory.
She laughed. She wasn’t taken in by his bravado. She knew him better than that. They both knew that if anyone needed protecting in the big bad world it was him, not her. That was a given. But it didn’t matter. As long as they were together.
‘Let’s go,’ she said.
She pointed to a couple of beaten up bikes and they climbed on board. On the journey they were cycling too fast, without lights, for conversation to be possible but soon enough they got to the outskirts of the camp.
A sensible person, Daniel reflected later, would not arrive at such a place on a Friday night. They would eat before they got there and they’d arrive in the daylight. That way they might be able to cope with the culture shock. It was an assault on all the senses at once but the overwhelming vibe was of despair. And as dark had fallen it was a place just waking up. Because night is the time the inhabitants of the Jungle come out of their tents and make-shift container homes and try their luck on the trains and trucks. It was a journey none of them would make as easily as Daniel had. A journey of fear and death simply because they didn’t have the ‘full house’ of money, smartphone and passport. The first two were essential, but without the third life was supremely tough. You needed more than a poker face to deal with this place. You needed a full deck of cards. The passport was the Top Trump card. And they were in short supply. The alternatives were dangerous, desperate and generally unsuccessful.
That evening went past in a blur. Shelley and Daniel became part of a decoy group, distracting the French police while a group of refugees tried every which way to get themselves attached to a series of trucks lining up waiting to enter the Eurotunnel. It was chaotic and Daniel had no idea what was going on – apart from that he had to run a lot and once he didn’t run fast enough and came across the wrong end of a French police baton as he rolled himself down a slope in an attempt to get away – Shelley screaming in French at the police as they fell. He didn’t know Shelley spoke French. There was a lot about Shelley he didn’t know. And a lot about the world. How could it be that a place like this existed. Just across the Channel. He’d had no idea. He’d heard of a few ‘migrants’ trying to cross but he had never realised the scale and scope of this whole thing. There were families who had been here for years, children growing up in a make-shift refugee camp which was NOTHING like Glastonbury. It was plain wrong. He couldn’t make sense of it. And he was tired, hungry and most of all angry at what he’d experienced.
He had a passport, money and a smartphone – but in the dark the police knew no differently and he could just as well be a Syrian or an Afghan or an Iraqi fleeing from the horrors of war in their own country only to have this visited on them as they tried to reach what they naively believed would be safety.
‘It should be better organised,’ Daniel reflected when they finally collapsed beside the remains of a fire in the middle of the Jungle camp.
‘Yeah, and who can do that?’ Shelley asked. ‘You’ve seen it. Who can possibly sort this out?’
He looked at her and she seemed close to tears. That was something he’d never seen before.
‘Well, we can try,’ he said.
Making the statement didn’t feel empowering. This wasn’t about empowerment. It was about justice. About determining to do the right thing in a wrong situation. But how they might achieve it – who knew? How could they possibly help?
All Daniel knew was that a night in the Jungle had changed the way he would look at the world for ever. And he cursed himself that it took being there in person to wake up and smell the coffee…
About the Author
Annie Christie is a pretty ordinary person, except that she was born Annie Christie and then married a man called Christie and so is still called Christie despite having taken on her husband’s name. She sometimes wonders if she should have called herself Christie-Christie: but who would believe that?
Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project.
That Long Hot Summer is Annie's third McSerial written for McStorytellers.
Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project.
That Long Hot Summer is Annie's third McSerial written for McStorytellers.