Cause Celeb

by Helen Fielding

  There was an expectant pause with all eyes on the beard and wire glasses of Clive. Only Clive could point us to a decision. Clive made no move to speak.

  “Did anything break when you drove up from Nairobi?” I asked.

  “There were no breakages or severe malfunctionings as such on the journey in question,” said Clive.

  “Don’t you think we should just stay here?” the cameraman said. “If the satellite won’t work after we’ve moved, we can’t transmit anything. And if we get to Dowit and find there’s nothing there then we’ve nothing to transmit. We’ve got to broadcast something this afternoon or the whole thing will be wasted. Why can’t we just stay here and let the refugees say what’s happening at Dowit?”

  “Look,” said O’Rourke, “we are now four hours and ten minutes away from transmission. We must make a decision.”

  “I’ve just got a feeling that we should go,” said Oliver. “I know it’s living dangerously, but I say we risk it.”

  The technical crew were organizing the satellite dish. We decided to take two food lorries with us, and another loaded with water and medical supplies. O’Rourke, Henry and Debbie were going to come with us. Betty was supposed to stay behind and look after the hospital with Sian and Linda, but this was not a plan that pleased her.

  “Oliver, dear, I know you’re in charge and what you say goes,” she flapped at him, “but I do think I should be there too. If this is a serious medical emergency, then we really do need all the doctors we have, don’t you think? Besides, you know, although it’s only silly old me, I have worked in Africa for many, many years, and you just might find you need that seasoned old voice of experience somewhere along the line.”

  “I think she’s right,” said Roy the soundman. Everyone looked at him in surprise. He was a funny, helpful little man, who had never been heard to express an opinion before. “Betty knows what she’s talking about better than all these kids put together. She should be in the program.”

  “Ooof, no, it’s only silly old me,” said Betty, rolling her eyes.

  “It is now twelve fifty-five,” said Oliver. “I don’t give a flying fuck who comes, but will everyone who is coming just get in the vehicles and on the road.”

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-nine

  It was cloudy again, and out in the open desert the wind was getting up, carrying a lot of dust with it. Kate and Corinna were side by side in the front of the Land Cruiser. O’Rourke was driving. I was in the back with Oliver. The rest of the convoy were behind.

  “Shit,” said O’Rourke, braking. A small goat trotted away ahead of us. “Where did that come from?” It was getting increasingly difficult to see anything—it was like looking through a yellow fog.

  “This weather isn’t doing us any favors, is it?” said Oliver.

  “That depends. Sometimes it looks rather striking when the sun shines through this stuff,” said O’Rourke. He and Oliver seemed to get on quite well at times. Maybe it was sleeping together that did it. “I’m not happy about rolling up straight away with these food lorries,” he went on.

  “Neither am I,” I said.

  “Why not?” said Corinna. “What’s the matter with you now? You can’t turn up to a famine without bringing something to eat.”

  “Frightfully bad form” murmured O’Rourke.

  “It depends how many Keftians there are,” I said. “We don’t want to start a settlement there.”

  “Isn’t that better than them coming to Safila?” said Oliver.

  O’Rourke let out a tsking noise.

  “No,” I said. “The water supply’s not up to it, and it’s too close to the border.”

  “But you can give them some food to keep them going?” said Oliver.

  “Yeah, but we have to do it right. We don’t want a riot,” said O’Rourke.

  “Anyway, let’s wait and see what we find,” I said. “There might only be a couple of dozen. It might be a false alarm.”

  “Jesus, it had better not be,” said Oliver.

  “What’s that?” said O’Rourke, starting to slow down.

  “Oh, my God,” said Kate Fortune, straightening up and looking ahead. “Oh, my God.”

  What she was looking at was a group of corpses, lying at the side of the track.

  There wasn’t anything we could do except cover them up. They were young men who had starved to death, which suggested that they might have been sent ahead to warn us that the refugees were coming. The place was about a quarter of an hour’s drive from Dowit. We left the two food trucks there. We knew now we were going to find a very bad situation and we needed to assess it first, and make a plan for the food. As we drove away, I glanced back and winced at the sight of trucks of food from England parked beside the people who had already died of hunger.

  The red shapes of the Dowit mountains loomed ahead. I wondered whether, if I had just been driving past them as usual, I would have been able to tell that something terrible was happening there, or if they only seemed so forbidding now because of what I knew. The dust was growing heavier in the air, as if there would be a sandstorm soon. The sun was trying to break through, but it was with a weak, watery light.

  A track led off the road to the left towards the mountains, and passed by means of a short corridor through the rock into the plain in the center. The convoy stopped where the track met the road. The sound of a drum was coming from the mountains. It was a slow, single, hollow beat.

  Clive said that he thought they should keep the satellite dish and equipment here as they would not be able to get a signal inside the mountains. Then I saw figures appearing through the dust. They looked as though they were moving in slow motion because they were trying to run towards us but their legs, which were as thin as the bones beneath the skin, were not strong enough to carry the weight of their bodies.

  Muhammad was already hurrying towards them. The skin on their faces was pulled back tight as though they were grinning, but they were not grinning. O’Rourke and I started walking towards them too. The expression in their eyes was terrible, because it was so human, in bodies made unhuman by starvation.

  A boy who looked about seventeen had reached Muhammad now and was talking to him. The boy was talking slowly, trying to concentrate, as if he was dizzy. His teeth looked very big in his mouth and the top of his head was unnaturally large because there was no hair on his scalp, and no fat or muscle on his face, only skin. He had a piece of brown cloth like sacking wrapped around him and you could see the sockets of his shoulder above it.

  “He is coming from my region,” said Muhammad. “He is saying that there are many thousand refugee inside the mountain.”

  The boy started to speak again, touching slowly between his eyes with his thumb and first two fingers as if he was trying to clear his head.

  “He is saying they have no food now for many day. He ask if we are having food for him.”

  Muhammad was not speaking in perfect English as he usually did. O’Rourke and I looked at each other, registering the line of decisions which lay ahead.

  “We go and look, and then go back for the trucks?” O’Rourke said.

  “Yes. I think so, yes.”

  We gave the people who had come out to meet us some high-energy biscuits which we had put in the back of the Land Cruiser.

  Oliver was speaking to the crew of the satellite dish, and he told us they were going to park between the road and the mountains and try to set up the link.

  As we drove along the track which led into the mountains, we passed more and more people but we kept driving now. Some of them turned round and followed the truck when they saw that we would not stop. Others stood still, looking bewildered.

  Kate Fortune had started hyperventilating and making noises. She put her hand on O’Rourke’s arm as he was driving, and told him that she felt ill, and he said, “Look, shut up.”

  As we drove into the narrow opening in the mountains it was very eerie because the dust was swirling around the rocks a
nd the people were still coming towards us, jabbing at their mouths with their fingers. We drove through a very short corridor, like a fissure, with the rock rising sheer on either side, then the track turned a corner and opened onto the plain in the center of the mountains. It was about three-quarters of a mile across and not flat, but dipping down and uneven and surrounded by the high walls of the mountains. Smoke was hanging above the ground from all the fires, and below it the whole of the plain was covered in people, sitting on the ground, thousands and thousands and thousands of people. There was very little movement but the sound was immense: it was the sound of a great number of people crying. I remember looking out of the window of the jeep and seeing the face of a young girl. I remember being shocked that her tears were so full and wet because the rest of her body looked so withered, dried up and finished that you could not imagine where the moisture had come from for the tears.

  Everyone started to climb out of the vehicles. Muhammad was talking to a group of men who had come forward to meet him. They looked as though they were village headmen although they might have been RESOK. I was looking over to my left where the sound of the drum was coming from, and I started walking very slowly through the people towards it.

  In a clear area to the left, which rose in a slope towards the base of the mountains, they were laying out the dead. There was a line of about twenty or thirty bodies, with people mourning all around them and, behind, a group of men were using a pole to dig a grave. And people were coming from different directions, carrying bodies in their arms. When I got to where the corpses lay a man was placing the body of a child in the line. The child was in a sack and the body was so frail that the man seemed only to be laying down the weight of a rolled-up towel. Some of the bodies were on stretchers and they were all covered with something. One was wrapped in paper sacks, on which was printed, “A Gift from the People of Minnesota.” Further down was a blue blanket with a woman’s feet sticking out of the bottom and between them two tiny feet.

  At the end of the row a woman was squatting next to the body of her son. She had taken the cover from him and she was clapping her hands above his head as if she were trying to wake him. She looked as though she was trying to do everything she could think of to stop her pain. She was shaking her hands as if she was trying to get water off them, then covering her eyes, then holding the sides of her head, then holding her son’s head and talking to him, then trying to bring him to life again by clapping above his head, but nothing could alter anything. When I looked at the body of the boy lying in front of her, useless and dead, I can remember thinking that it was stupid that he had died of starvation. It seemed stupid that all that grief had happened, not because of some sudden accident or unavoidable illness but because the boy had no food, when there was so much food, in the world.

  Most of the people were just sitting or lying on the ground in groups. They were so weak and dazed that they were not responding to our presence or to anything. I had never seen people so malnourished and still alive. I made my way back slowly through them to where Muhammad was still talking to the headmen. I realized that I was crying and made myself stop.

  As I walked past the Land Cruiser I paused because Corinna was leaning against the back of it. Both her fists were clenched very tightly and her shoulders were hunched. She was crying in a way that forced her face into dreadful shapes beneath her sunglasses and wrenched her body. I saw her crying and did not try to comfort her. I watched her groaning and racked and I was glad, because she was not made of concrete, or Lycra, or Perspex as I had thought.

  She saw me looking and pressed her forehead against the back window of the Land Cruiser. Then she said, “Could I have a cigarette?”

  I gave her a cigarette and lit it. Kate was sitting in the Land Cruiser with her head in her hands. Julian and Oliver were both standing alone looking dazed. I could not see Henry or Betty or Debbie. O’Rourke was crouched over a child. He was not making any sound, and looked exactly the same as he always did when he was treating the children except that there were tears streaming down his face.

  I did not know what to do. I stood dazed like the others and stared at it all. It was such a monumental horror that it felt as though nothing should be the same anymore, and nothing should continue: none of us should speak or do anything, the sun should not be moving across the sky, and the wind should not blow. It did not seem possible that such a thing as this could be taking place without the world having to shudder to a halt and think again.

  CHAPTER

  Thirty

  The only way of dealing with it was not to think too hard but simply to do one task after another: to do one thing and then to do the next thing.

  O’Rourke, Henry, Muhammad, Betty and I gathered by the vehicles. There were somewhere between ten and twenty thousand people on the plain. The sun was breaking through the dust now and there were thick shafts of light, like girders, lighting up great areas of the people.

  “This place is just asking for epidemic,” said O’Rourke.

  We decided that, while Muhammad and I started on the rehydration and feeding, Henry would check that the water supplies were clean, and set up defecation zones. Betty would organize measles immunization. O’Rourke and Debbie would start a clinic for the worst cases.

  “What about the broadcast?” said Betty. It was one-thirty. We were due on air at four o’clock.

  “Those forty tons of food are not going to last long here,” said O’Rourke.

  Oliver and Julian were still standing staring at the crowd. I made my way over to Oliver. “Come on,” I said. “Come on. You have to go and organize the broadcast. You have got to make it work. Take the Land Cruiser back to the satellite dish and tell them what you’ve seen.”

  He looked at me blankly.

  “Go on, Oliver,” I said.

  Corinna was walking towards us. She was wiping her eyes and looked as though she was pulling herself together.

  I looked at Oliver. He was still staring around helplessly.

  Muhammad came and joined us. He placed a hand on Oliver’s shoulder and took him a little way away, talking to him.

  “I’ll help,” said Corinna. “Tell me what I can do.”

  I asked her to drive back to where we had left the food lorries and bring them back here.

  “Ask them to wait outside the mountains till we’re ready. Will you be all right with the four-wheel drive?”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said.

  “I could ask Henry to go instead.”

  “No. I’ll be fine. You need him here.”

  “Wait, look, I’ll come with you,” said Julian.

  “You stay here,” she said. “It doesn’t need two of us.”

  “Tell me what I can do,” said Julian.

  “We need to organize the food next,” I said.

  After a while Oliver and Muhammad came back. Oliver looked better and said he would drive back to the satellite dish and start working out what we should do.

  The village headmen were gathering around Muhammad.

  “Will these men organize the distribution?” I asked Muhammad.

  “Yes, of course.”

  I looked around trying to work out where we could start. “Are the people in any sort of grouping?”

  “Yes. They have tried to stay in their villages.”

  “How many villages are represented here?” I asked.

  He spoke to the men again.

  “Perhaps five hundred villages.”

  “We’ll start with the under-fives. And the most serious cases. And we’ll set up a feeding center here and rehydrate them at the same time. Then maybe we can start getting food out to the rest later.”

  “We must feed the mothers too,” said Muhammad.

  “Yes, we’ll feed the person who comes with the child.”

  “I will talk to the headmen,” said Muhammad. “They will organize it.”

  I was trying not to imagine anything except what was before us, and not to imagine it ge
tting worse so as not to let dread come out or panic. I looked around for Julian, and said that we needed to build three enclosures out of stones.

  “Yes, right, good,” said Julian, bending down to pick up a large stone. “Here?” He looked as though he was ready to do it himself, single-handed.

  “We have to get some people together to help.”

  I started to ask the people around us, the ones who were strong enough, but it was hard to explain what we wanted to do.

  “What are the enclosures for?” said Julian. And I told him we needed separate areas for the immunization, for giving out the high-energy biscuits and for feeding the really bad cases with a wet ration.

  “We need walls round them so everything stays under control,” I said, but I didn’t know if that were possible, since there were so many desperate people. Then Julian started miming out what was to be done, which made the people laugh in spite of what was happening but they understood and started gathering the stones. A man came up who spoke some English and that helped us, because then the Keftians could take over the organization. We were working on the area which was immediately to the right when you entered the mountains, so it would be easy to unload the trucks. Soon about three hundred people were collecting stones and starting to build the walls.

  I kept looking over to where all the vehicles were parked at the end of the rocky corridor. The television crew were milling around agitatedly. A thick cable was lying along the track, and they were frantically attaching more to the end of it. Oliver kept driving up and down the corridor, going back to the satellite dish. They were like wasps going in and out of a nest.

  At three forty-five the enclosures were built, and each one was crammed with children and sick people, sitting or lying on the earth, waiting in lines. The village leaders were arriving all the time with new cases, supporting them or carrying them. Every so often a group of people would suddenly run in one direction, because some of the food had been spilled and everyone would scrabble on the ground, picking up whatever they could find, and eating it. Outside the walls there were crowds of people, pressing forward, looking in. There was the sound of high agitated voices above the wailing. It was difficult to keep calm because outside the walls people were crowded a dozen deep, holding out their children to us to show us that they were dying and begging us to let them in. Fights were breaking out, because it was so unfair to be on the wrong side of the wall.