The Water

Now the water.
Twenty-one miles of cold grey Channel, France to Kent —
close enough to see across on a clear day,
close enough to swim, if the swimming did not kill you.

Across it, this last year, more small boats than in any year before;
and in twelve months, a hundred and eleven thousand claims of asylum —
a record, the most the country had ever been asked to weigh;
and in the hotels, some thirty-two thousand people,
at five-point-seven million pounds a day;
and a government’s promise that the hotels will end by twenty twenty-nine;
and the government’s own inspector, on the record, saying they will not.

These are the numbers. The play will not pretend they are small,
and will not pretend a country is wicked for having felt them.

But here the chronicle does the unfashionable thing —
it holds two numbers in one hand, and drops neither.
Of those who crossed the water and asked to stay,
some were refused, and some are waiting still in rooms,
and a great many — doubted, questioned, checked, and in the end believed —
were found to have told the plain truth about the thing they fled.
The boat is not the verdict. The crossing is not yet the crime.
A frightened man in a dinghy may also be exactly what he says.

And also — at the very same time, with no contradiction at all —
a town may look at a number it was never once asked about,
and feel a fear that is not hatred, only arithmetic and speed,
and be told that the feeling itself is the sin,
and learn, from being told, to hate the ones who told it.
That is the most efficient engine of radicalisation ever built.
Nobody drew the plans. It assembled itself. It runs without fuel.

A coast. A town. A hotel that used to host weddings. A wall.
On one side of the wall, a woman who has lived here all her life
and does not know who pays her council tax anymore, or what for.
On the other side, a man who walked nine countries to reach this one,
and is sitting in a room he did not choose, eating food he did not pick,
and waiting on a letter from a department whose name he cannot pronounce.

Both of them are here. Both of them are afraid.
Neither of them put the other one here.
And the only thing that will not solve this — the one thing —
is pretending one of them is not in the picture at all.