By this time we had reached the group, but Henry was still on autowitter. “Sorry not to be here to give you the old welcoming committee—bit of an old blood bag crisis down the black hole of Calcutta.”
The new doctor looked somewhat taken aback. He seemed pleasant, but dull. Pity.
“Hi,” he said mildly. “Robert O’Rourke.” His voice was unusually deep and sounded as though it was coming from a long way away.
“Henry Montague, marvelous,” Henry was bellowing, meanwhile shaking hands energetically. “Great to have you on board. And this is our great white memsahib—Rosie,” said Henry. “I know she looks like a sex object but she’s really very strict.”
“Strict but fair, I hope,” said O’Rourke.
“You mustn’t mind Henry,” said Sian. “It’s his upbringing.”
The ice was broken now. For all his absurdity, Henry understood what good manners really mean.
“Nice to have you here,” I said. “Malcolm, nice to see you.”
Malcolm did his silly teeth-together beam, and waved both hands on either side of his head.
“Have you and Dr. O’Rourke had something to drink?” I asked.
“Well, no, we rather thought Doctor might like to have a good nosey round,” Betty interrupted. “After all, this is going to be home sweet home for our new friend for quite some time.” She lowered her voice. “Actually, Malcolm, when you have a moment I really would like to have a little chinwag.”
The doctor was looking at Betty intently. There was something rather purposeful about him.
He looked at me and gestured towards the camp. “This is a beautiful place.” Bewdaful. I couldn’t place his accent.
“Very beautiful,” I said. Then I looked down and saw his white socks. Ugh.
O’Rourke walked with a slight limp. As Linda took him off to his hut, I tried to look at his leg discreetly without him seeing. Perhaps it was a wooden one. Apart from his medical bag, he seemed to have just one canvas holdall, like an overnight bag. It seemed like traveling light taken to ridiculous extremes considering he was here for two years. I hoped he wasn’t going to start wanting to borrow everyone else’s shampoo.
The rest of the team were looking so clean and smart that I thought I’d better sort myself out. I went to my hut and glanced in the little mirror hanging above my desk, which is something I rarely did. I remember it because that was the moment when I saw, apart from my red nose and mad hair, the first line on my face, just beginning, heading from the edge of my nose down to the corner of my mouth. It must have been the light at that time of day which caught it. It gave me a shock. I always thought that aging should happen the other way round. Life would be so much more optimistic if you began it as a wrinkly old crone and became younger, more vibrant and beautiful as the years rolled by, secure in the knowledge that at the end of your life someone would be happy to play with you, change your nappy and push you round in a pram till you turned back into an egg. Trying to push unpleasant existential thoughts to the back of my mind, I stepped out into the hot light and headed for the cabana.
The lunch was over and there was a scene of intense absorption, furious tearing of envelopes, silent, urgent reading. It was hard to overestimate the importance of the mail in Safila, the arrival of a letter, or its nonappearance, could bring about massive mood swings. I looked around and saw that neither Betty nor Malcolm was there. She was probably lecturing him about the Teeth of the Wind. I had better make sure she didn’t put him off. With some self-control, I ignored the small pile of mail, including a parcel which was for me, and stepped outside.
Betty looked up guiltily as I approached. “I know Rosie will say I’m a silly old moo,” she said, “but, Malcolm, I really do think it is beholden on us to respond.”
Something peculiar happened to Betty’s vowels when she was showing off. Beheowlden, respund.
Malcolm already looked desperate to get away from Betty’s re- spunses. He required delicate handling. He was efficient, so long as everything was logged and predictable: which simply wasn’t the way things worked here. He also had the sort of mind which loved to walk in very slow circles around things, looking at them without getting too close.
“Has Betty explained to you about the rumors?” I asked him.
“Yes, yes. It’s, er, I have heard something of this in Sidra. It’s an interesting development. I think we must wait and see, er, see what develops.” Sidra was the nearest town, where there was a UN office, and telephones that worked on odd occasions.
“Well, the thing is if it does develop, it’ll happen so fast we won’t be able to deal with it. We’re short on stocks anyway. You know the UN have told us we can’t have the delivery? Do you know when this ship’s going to arrive?”
“I, er, well, actually, I was just hoping to get back to Sidra quickly to talk about that sort of area of things and other, er, related matters. So I think, if it’s all right with you here, and there are no other matters to be gone over then I will make a hasty departure, as there is a great deal, as I say, to be gone into in Sidra.”
I decided I had better tell him what I knew, but it did all sound a bit thin. As far as I was concerned the strongest piece of evidence was that Muhammad believed there was a problem. But when I tried to convey this to Malcolm, it sounded suspect, almost as if I was in love with Muhammad Mahmoud and expecting twins by him.
I made Malcolm promise to radio back to me about the food, and alert head office in London. He said he would discuss the matter with the UN High Commission for Refugees, who gave out the food. He didn’t sound particularly enamored of the idea. I was not convinced that he’d put the whole force of his personality, such as it was, behind it.
“Ah,” said Malcolm, interrupting me, looking over my shoulder. “Don’t suppose I could have my socks back before I go, could I?”
I turned round to see O’Rourke, who looked surprised and then said, “Sure,” and bent down to take off his shoes and socks. Both his feet were real. He straightened up and looked at me, rolling the socks and handing them to Malcolm. “I knew I’d forgotten to bring something,” he said. “Guess I’ll have to, er, weave some.” He had an unexpected smile which came and went very quickly.
I followed Malcolm to the gate to wave him off, feeling that I’d got it wrong. Malcolm had refugee settlements on every border in the country to oversee. I hadn’t convinced him to do much about us. I walked a little way along the track and stood where I could see his vehicle making its way across the plain, raising a plume of dust behind it. The sun was high now. I watched for a long time, till the engine noise died away, till it became a tiny speck and disappeared and the only sound was the cicadas. I felt a big burst of loneliness. Sometimes there were moments like this when the insulation of our little society crumbled away, and I remembered we were just camping in the wilderness. We were like one of those small outcrops of huts you spotted from the airplane on the way from England, surrounded by a thousand miles of desert on every side. Doing or getting anything was blocked by a swathe of distance and time. It took three hours even to get to Sidra.
Back in the cabana I was distracted by my mail. There was a new pair of trainers from my mum in the parcel: black ones, like little boots. I had been waiting for two months for them to come. Also there were new cotton knickers, five pairs in black. There were five letters, three of them from Mum, two from friends in London with handwriting I recognized.
I turned to the first one to cheer me up. I adored my mum’s letters. This one began, as usual, “I was just having a cup of tea and a coffee ring and I thought, I wonder how Rosie’s doing? . . .” and then there was a commotion outside, coming from the direction of the main gate.
I was at the far end of the cabana, so by the time I’d arrived at the gate the others had formed such a tight-knit circle it was impossible to see what they were looking at. Then the group broke up and I saw O’Rourke gesturing everyone away with great politeness, as if trying to move a party of guests through fr
om drinks to dinner. Slumped against the wall of Betty’s hut were a Keftian family, emaciated, filthy and exhausted. A woman lay on the ground with the stick limbs, tufted hair and unseeing expression of the badly malnourished. Beside her, the father of the family was holding a child in his arms. It was only when I got closer that I realized that the child was dead.
I froze completely. Back in the old days, when we lived with this all the time, we had found a way of dealing with it, a robust, workaday distancing which enabled us to do what had to be done. But this had caught me with my defenses down. I tried to remind myself how to be: don’t think about the implications, how they feel, what’s going to happen, just decide what needs to be done, then do it, one thing at a time. I went into the cabana, found rehydration salts, high-energy biscuits. The mother needed a drip, and O’Rourke and Betty organized that while Henry and I brought the vehicles round. We drove down to the hospital in convoy with Henry and me following in the third vehicle with the father and the dead child. The father was crying. There was something particularly harrowing about that simple response—your family is starving, your child is dead and so you cry.
It didn’t take long to find people who knew the family because the camp had been laid out like a map of Kefti so that all the people from the same villages could stay together. I desperately wanted to talk to the father to find out why they had come. Was it the locusts? How many more were following? I knew I had to leave it be, till the burial was over. I decided to go back to the compound to see if I could get Malcolm on the radio in Sidra.
I couldn’t get a connection. I was shouting, “Safila to SUSTAIN Sidra, Safila to SUSTAIN Sidra, Safila to SUSTAIN Sidra,” but all there was was crackle. Nothing. No contact. I started saying Safila to Sidra again, then put my head on my arms and tried not to cry. I heard the sound of a vehicle drawing up and tried to pull myself together. This was ridiculous. I was going to be no use to anyone if I flopped around like this. I had to toughen up. The door opened. It was Debbie.
“Have you got the key for the vaccine fridge?” she said, then saw my face and hurried over to me. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine. It’s just . . . it reminds me of—”
“I know,” she said.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah . . . but . . . Well. You know, don’t you?”
I had to get a message to Malcolm, tell him what had happened, before he left Sidra. It was only one family, but this hadn’t happened for so long, they were in such a bad state, there were all these rumors: he had to know about it before he went back to the capital. I climbed into the jeep to drive to Safila village. There was an office there with a radio—the local branch of the Nambulan Commission of Refugees. COR was one of the plethora of acronyms which filled our talk: COR, UNHCR, RESOK, NGO. We were supposed to report all new arrivals to COR. Possibly their radio would be working so I could get a message to Malcolm. I climbed into the jeep and drove along the track to the village. The heat had gone out of the day now, the sun was starting to soften.
The COR office was surrounded by a high rush fence and a scruffy yard. A pig was snuffling around in a pile of rubbish in the corner. A girl with a cloudy eye was sitting on a low bed, picking at her foot, Hassan’s girl. She was wearing a pair of my earrings. She jumped up, beaming as I arrived, eyeing the earrings I was wearing and showed me into the office.
“Hassan maquis,” she said. Hassan is not here.
Hassan was the COR officer. I sat down and tried Sidra on his radio. There was the same empty crackle. The girl reached over and fingered my earring. I shook my head and pointed to the ones I had given her last time. She smiled sheepishly. I fiddled with the dial to try and get El Daman, the capital. There was nothing there. I kept trying. Nothing.
When I left the office it was six o’clock and already dark. The darkness came swiftly out there, once the sun had set. The lights of the vehicle picked up crazily shaped plants sticking out of the sand dunes. I passed the others coming back from the camp just before I reached the hill and stopped opposite them leaving the engine running. Henry was at the wheel with Sian, Debbie, Linda and Betty squeezed inside.
“What’s happening?” I said to Henry.
“All doing fine, old girl.”
“Have any of the arrivals said anything about locusts?” I said.
“Not as far as I know. Did you get through to Sidra?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Bloody hell. Bad luck. See you up there, old thing.”
“We’ll have supper waiting for you,” said Betty. “Kamal’s doing us a chicken.”
The camp felt very different at night, foreign and inaccessible. The huts were closed up. Here and there, I could see a candle through the darkness but almost everyone was already asleep. There was nothing to do without the sun. I pulled up at the hospital, which was an arc of white canvas supported on a metal frame. I went in through the flap and stood just inside, watching. Halfway down the row of low wooden beds was one with a drip set up above it. O’Rourke was adjusting the bag on the end of a length of tube.
The mother was asleep, breathing noisily and unevenly. O’Rourke signaled a cautious thumbs-up at her and gestured me back towards the door. We walked together without speaking and then stepped outside. He needed a shave.
“You OK?” he said, first of all, putting his hand on my shoulder. I obviously hadn’t pulled myself together as much as I thought.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I whispered back. “How are they? What did they say?”
He said the family were seventy-five percent malnourished, which was pretty bad. The child had died of a diarrheal disease, but it wasn’t cholera.
“And the father? Where’s he? He was all right, wasn’t he?”
“He’ll be all right.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“I didn’t have the chance.”
“I’ll go and find him, then.”
“Give me two minutes. I’ll come along.”
I waited for him and we set off towards Muhammad’s shelter. Away from the lamps of the hospital you could see almost nothing. We walked in silence. O’Rourke seemed relaxed here. He was going to be fine. Muhammad greeted us, waiting for us at his door. He led us to where the family were staying. We stood a little distance away while he went to the hut. A candle was burning outside. The father came stooping out adjusting his robes; he looked weaker than he had that morning. He and Muhammad talked in low voices. Muhammad called us over and the father took O’Rourke by the hand, shaking it and talking emotionally. Then he shook my hand too, and other members of the family followed and joined in. It was a bit like being a celebrity in the West.
Finally we all went inside. There was one lamp, made out of a dried milk can. A woman was making coffee over some embers. O’Rourke and I sat on the bed. Muhammad sat opposite and began to question the father. Three sleepy toddlers were sitting in a line on the floor. They didn’t move or make a sound for forty minutes. I couldn’t imagine kids doing that in England. I once asked Muhammad why the children were so well behaved here. He said if they made a noise in the home they got hit with a stick.
The man spoke rapidly, in short bursts, his eyes focused on the middle distance. Every now and then he paused and made a little humming noise in his throat.
“He is saying that he left his village because his child was sick. The rest of the people have no food but they are waiting for the harvest. Only he has seen that the locusts are hatching around the riverbed and so he is afraid that these locusts will come before the harvest.”
“And what about the other villagers?”
“They are afraid but they are making ready to protect the harvest with sticks and with fire.”
“Don’t they have any pesticides at all?” I asked.
“No. None.”
On the way back, O’Rourke said, “I think they’ve been sent here to raise the alarm, and got sicker than they thought on the way. I don’t have the impression he needed
to come.”
“Not yet, anyway,” I said.
“You may be right,” said Muhammad.
When we got back to the Toyota, a small crowd had gathered. Word had evidently spread about the arrivals. There were two officials of RESOK, the Keftian relief association, wanting to talk to me. They spoke to Muhammad first.
“They want to know what it means for them,” he said.
“Of course.”
“They do not want their brothers to be turned away, but there is not enough food. They want to know when the ship is coming.”
I wanted to know when the ship was coming too. This was not the time to be running low on supplies.
“Could you say that I see things very much as they do and will do what I can? There is no need to be afraid.”
At this O’Rourke let out a disapproving tsking noise, which surprised me.
There was more point-making from the RESOK guys. The mood was restless and uncomfortable.
“I don’t think this is the moment for a discussion group,” I said quietly to Muhammad. He nodded and said something to the group and they let us go. As we started up the hill I caught sight of Liben Alye standing at the side of the road, still holding Hazawi, who was sleeping now. He held up his hand and waved.
“Oooh, I haven’t had pâté for eighteen months and then it was more of a terrine, which I’m not so keen on. It’s the lumps of fat I can take or leave,” Betty was gushing.
The pâté was a present from O’Rourke. It turned out that he had brought a large crate of goodies as well as his one bag. The fridge was now full of exotic cheeses and chocolates from America. There was Earl Grey tea on the shelf, good olive oil, and several bottles of wine. He’d done pretty well to get those past Customs. O’Rourke was clearly a success. It was as if a rooster had arrived in a farmyard sending everyone clucking and flapping into the air. Henry seemed rather thrown. He was used to being the only man round the table.
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