WHEN I’D BEEN SITTING another twenty-five minutes, I got up and asked one of the other officers if I might go to the bathroom. She was a young woman with a lavender hijab and thick black mascara that gave her otherwise sympathetic eyes a spidery look. Skeptically, she fetched a male officer to accompany me. This man was several inches shorter than I and, for some reason, chose to follow a yard or so behind me as we walked, so that I felt as if I were taking a small child to the toilet rather than being chaperoned myself.

Only when we passed an unmanned checkpoint did my minder quicken his pace. Of course, one would have to be very desperate indeed to try to jump passport control without a passport. And even if you were to slip through unapprehended, what then do you do, trapped in England without one? Peddle contraband or pull pints in the hinterland, until you die? Mine had been taken from me in exchange for a half sheet of paper confirming my detainee status. This slip of paper I was now carrying into the men’s room with two hands, as though it bore the instructions I needed to urinate and flush. Rather than wait outside, my minder followed me in and, having offered to hold my slip, stood by the sinks jingling the coins in his pocket while I drained my bladder and then took my time soaping and rinsing and drying my hands. It was something to do. Checking my cell phone messages would have been another thing to do, but I didn’t have a signal. When we’d returned to my seat, my minder nodded without a word and resumed his post by the line for EU nationals. In front of me, time and again, a passport was presented, fanned, examined, stamped, and returned, its integrity verified and its owner already turning his mind toward the logistics of Baggage Reclaim and Onward Travel. Whereas the woman who’d taken my passport remained nowhere to be seen.