by Roger Curtis
In the children’s ward there were a dozen new cases. The most frightening thing was the silence, broken only by the occasional crash of trolleys or equipment. Sarah had noticed that for the children of the camp the learning process seemed to involve taking from adults, not exchanges amongst themselves. Their eyes were adult eyes, not the eyes of children in a London hospital where enquiry was almost the last thing to be stifled. Why hadn’t she put toys on Adnam’s list? She was really beginning to learn.
‘There’s one here you should see first,’ Allison said. ‘She’s had a blow to the head – could even be that her neck’s broken. Look at that bruise! Who could do that to a child? Bastards!’
‘I know this child,’ Sarah said.
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
‘Yes, we saw her once when we were touring the camp.’ She knelt beside the bed. ‘Irina, can you talk to me?’
‘Sarah, she can’t even speak English! I’ve never seen this child before.’
The girl looked at Sarah with vacant eyes.
‘Karim,’ Allison called down the corridor, ‘come and help us.’ When he came she asked, ‘Do you know this child?’
‘I’ve seen her about, playing with the others.’
‘Playing?’ Sarah said. ‘You don’t mean normally?’
‘Well, no. There’s always been something wrong with her.’ He went across the floor to another child. ‘Who’s that little girl over there?’
‘That’s Irina,’ came the reply in Kurdish.
After supper, Sarah went to the ward and sat beside the child’s silent body. It was too early to say if the blow had caused more lasting damage than she had already sustained. At least she was stable.
Allison was surprised to find her sitting there in the darkness. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Waiting.’
‘Nothing’s going to happen.’
‘No. But I’ll sit with her for a little longer.’
‘Watch, Sarah Jane!’
‘Is this a tent? It seems so dark.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Can you feel our hands?’
‘Warm and cosy!’
‘Do you remember it now? Where you are?’
‘It’s too dark to remember.’
‘Yes, it is very dark. For you it has been dark for a very long time. Now watch.’
There were muffled taps to the side and then movements within but still nothing could be seen. Shuffling feet, invisible, passed in front of them; then a whispered response, and the sound of a door being unbolted.
As the door opened, yellow light flooded in. Not solid wholesome light but the restless beam of a torch, randomly illuminating the bodies and faces of those outside and the one inside that she seemed to recognise. There was commonness of expression and grim lascivious purpose as they manipulated the burden through the door.
‘Is this a funeral?’ Sarah whispered.
‘In a way it is,’ came the reply, ‘but that’s for you to judge.’
There was progression forward into the soft black interior. The lights – those little glittering specks that Sarah remembered – now seemed to fuse into a pale yellow luminosity. And suddenly Sarah could see that they were not real lights but a device against which the movements of the figures could be seen in abstract motion. Was there purpose, then, in hiding the images from her and showing the actions only by implication and suggestion? Did it spare her sensibility or was it that her memory, if confronted with it openly, risked being snuffed out like a candle flame, never to reignite?
Sarah felt a gentle tug on each of her hands and allowed herself to be pulled forward into the swirl of light and shadow.
‘Closer, Sarah. You still have far to go.’
The little body was raised under the playing black shadows but she could not see its detail. There were noises: faint whimpers from a half-open mouth that, from its gasps, seemed to repel, then survive, transient and repeated exploitation.
Closer, and she was now a part, a kindred spirit to the figure lying there, beginning to feel with it, beginning to understand. Her face was alongside but, try as she might, she could not get the eyes to engage. Her hands were released and she felt herself lifted. Her pain and fear were incandescent around her like swarms of fireflies.
Consciousness was returning now, dissolving the image but leaving just enough of it for her to move her head towards the window, where the thin curtain held out against the night sky. Elizabeth, Elizabeth, where are you?
Then someone gently took hold of her chin and eased it back.
She woke to find Allison’s torch playing into her eyes. ‘Sarah, Sarah! It’s three o’clock in the morning!’
‘The one rule in a place like this,’ Allison said, ‘is that patients are treated equally. There’s no room for favourites.’
‘Just show me one I’ve neglected.’ The scar down her face nestled precociously in the raw anger of her flushed cheeks.
‘Sarah, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.’
But Allison was not alone in noticing the depth of Sarah’s involvement with the child.
After supper Sarah wrapped one of Jazreel’s abandoned coats around her shoulders and slipped outside. The closeness of the stars, pin-sharp in the absolute stillness, threatened with an intensity she had not felt before. She wondered if it were an instruction to go back inside, into the warm, and forget what it was that she had no permit to explore. If it was, it didn’t succeed. She continued along one path after another, between silent tents flapping in the wind, trying to remember the crude numbers on pegs at each junction to find her way there. She looked desperately for the spot where the children had played and Irina had limped towards her with knowing eyes. But Allison was right. There would be no yellow earth churned by children’s feet; no tent-flap with cords to occupy a child’s fingers. These things, then, had come from within, surely. And yet…
Cradled in its pillow the sleeping head was no different from that of any other sleeping child. Against the white linen the bruise from that calamitous blow shone green in the lamplight. Her forehead was cool to the touch, not damp as before.
Sarah had an intense desire to watch the child, to get her to look and say her name. And then again she remembered Allison’s reproving finger which said, you are asking the child for something it cannot give. Be content that she can smile and hold your hand and recognise you as a friend. Isn’t that enough?
How could she know!
There was a letter from Mark in an envelope the colour of bone china that reminded her of the invitation to the evening at the Massingham Tower. How far away that seemed; how beautifully irrelevant.
‘What will you do, Sarah, when the camp closes?’ Nuru asked.
‘Closes?’
‘It won’t last for ever. Already some of our clients are beginning to leave.’
‘Back across the mountains?’
‘The Iraqis have withdrawn – for the moment. The planes you hear are the Americans and British patrolling the skies. It won’t last, of course. Next they’ll be flushing out the remnants of the PPK. But for us it’s weeks rather than months, I would say.’
Allison was more interested in the letter. Instinctively she knew whom it was from. ‘What does he say, Sarah? You haven’t even unfolded it yet.’
When she did read the letter, it was in the privacy of Nuru’s office, and he’d quietly left her to it.
My dear Sarah,
I got your letter today and it saddened this wretched soul when it should have cheered him to know you were safe and well. It’s curious how we see more clearly when the things that matter most are taken from us – or should I say pushed away? How one can be locked into the pursuit of some dubious agenda when all around is crying out for common sense to prevail. You would not believe the people that h
ave shunned me for rejecting you, Sarah. But perfection was everything – job, money, wife. And so I let you go your own way. I wouldn’t know whether, having pulled away that particular skin, what is left is the real genuine me – but I would like to think so, and believe so. Just as we need protection, so we need someone to protect and care for. I have no-one else Sarah – in my life, in my bed or in my mind. It’s God’s truth. Perhaps, at thirty-five, I’m growing old. Perhaps, too, it’s not a bad thing.
If this picture I’m painting seems calculated to put you off ever coming home, it’s all I deserve, but not what I want. For myself I don’t really care if Brian manages to patch you up. But that is selfish and for your sake I hope he can. I’ve put all your pots and potions back on the dressing table, and the bear on the bed. You’ve no idea what a comfort that creature has been to me. Think about it, Sarah. You could do better, I know, but there’s always a risk. But I do know you could do worse.
Working for MF is rapidly becoming a nightmare. The machinations at the top – which I can barely see now – are like great rolling thunder clouds, spitting fire and destruction. One wonders how the pursuit of absolute pleasure can be upheld with such goings-on. But, remarkably, it still is, and probably will continue to be. Humiliating, though, considering how I built it up, the profitable bits at least.
You know now how it is between us. I can only ask: come home.
Affectionately,
Mark
Sarah tracked Allison down to the dispensary. The nurse stood with a half-filled bag of syringes limp in her hand, gazing out of the window that overlooked the mountains to the north. Sarah stood beside her to watch vast banks of grey cloud pressing hard into the higher slopes and rolling upwards to obscure the snow-tipped summits.
‘They’ll be completely white by morning, if it clears,’ Allison said. ‘You can already feel the temperature dropping.’
‘Before supper, do you want to come and play with the children for half an hour?’
‘You go. I may have a period starting. Take Karim if you can find him – they adore him.’
For Sarah, concern for such personal matters had become displaced by altruism. A period. Were women here still troubled by such old-fashioned things? And if they weren’t, wasn’t it because of the hardship, and the stress, and the diet?
Somehow none of that was relevant to her. She was not stressed. In fact she was at ease with herself in a way that had transcended the shock of being pitched into this alien, harrowing place.
Karim came in and the thought passed.
The next morning, when Sarah had swallowed her tea and crushed oats more compulsively than usual, and the light from the whitening mountains swept the children’s ward like a new broom, Irina had gone.
By the end of the week the camp was beginning to look depleted. Rumours were rife that Saddam was shifting his attention to the Marsh Arabs in the south. Or at least pounding them that bit harder.
Sarah and Allison were enjoying the rare luxury of a pot of tea on the hospital veranda when Andrew’s jeep swung round the corner. He got out clutching a sheaf of letters, while they skimmed the dust in their tea with their fingers.
‘Two for Sarah and three for Allison.’
It seemed to amuse Andrew to compare their responses. Allison fell greedily upon her letters, relishing the indecision of which to open first and hovering over them with a spoon handle as an improvised paperknife. Sarah glanced at the handwriting on her envelopes, then pushed them to one side while she finished her tea. She noticed Andrew’s look of concern.
‘You wonder why I’m not more interested in my friends?’
‘I’m more concerned that life-before-Hatomi can have been so barren.’
Sarah cocked her head to one side and stared at him through half-closed lids. ‘Barren? No, not barren, if by that you mean uneventful. No, rather the reverse – just not very pleasant. Still, no point in delaying the moment of truth.’ She took Alice’s letter and opened it methodically with Allison’s spoon.
‘What does she say?’ Allison asked impatiently. She had already digested her own news and was in the mood for more personal revelations.
Sarah scanned Alice’s spidery handwriting. ‘The usual greetings. My husband Mark still not well, but we’ll let him tell his own story in a moment.’
From their expressions they must have seen the colour drain from her face. She began to read out loud: ‘Now for the big one, the moment you’ve been waiting for has arrived! Brian says he thinks he can patch you up at last. Hooray! I believe what he says, Sarah. He’s suddenly become quite enthusiastic about the idea whereas before he was always, well, so guarded. It’s your golden opportunity, take it. There should be a note from him enclosed with this letter.’
Sarah fumbled with the remaining sheets. ‘Here it is. Dear Sarah. Alice will have passed on all the gossip, so let me just repeat what I am sure she has already told you, that I am now confident I can achieve a worthwhile result with your face – if you are still willing to let me. There is only one difficulty, which is that I have a visiting professorship in the States beginning in a month’s time. I would like, if possible, to do it before I go. If you agree would you please arrange dates and times with my secretary at the above address. Yours, Brian.’
‘Sarah, that’s wonderful news,’ Andrew said, beaming delightedly.
‘I’m so pleased for you. Sarah.’ Allison squeezed her arm. ‘You have to go.’
‘Do I? Why do I?’
‘Why ever would you question it?’ Andrew asked.
‘Because it will bring to an end the only real happiness I’ve known. That’s why.’
‘You mean in this camp?’ Allison’s eyes widened. ‘That’s ridiculous.’
Andrew gestured to Allison to be cautious. ‘The camp is not a happy place, Sarah. It may be that you achieve fulfilment here, just as I do further along the mountain. And Allison too, I suspect. But it can never be a substitute for being at peace with yourself and those of your own kind.’
‘And what kind is that?’ Sarah asked.
‘Well I…’
‘I’ll tell you. It’s the kind that does this to you.’ She pointed a trembling finger at her face. ‘And wrecks your marriage and kills your horses, and drives off your real friends.’ She brushed away a tear. ‘I know where the truth lies.’
Allison, realising she was out of her depth, got up to go. ‘I’ve got to prepare the theatre. I’ll see you in there.’
‘She doesn’t understand you,’ Andrew said, ‘and neither do I.’
‘There’s no reason why you should.’
‘Look, what time do you finish in theatre?’
‘Are you asking me for a date?’
‘In a way. There’s something I want to show you. While the weather holds and before it gets dark.’
‘About four. It’s quiet today.’
‘Meet here at a quarter past, then – and bring some stout shoes.’
‘That does send my expectations soaring.’
‘You won’t be disappointed, I promise you.’
The track from the camp led down to the floor of the valley where it joined a metalled road. They drove through sparse scrub and ruined stone dwellings for a mile or so before taking another track to the right leading back up into the mountains. Over her shoulder Sarah saw the camp appear, brown and dirty on its rocky pedestal. Soon they were looking down on it. It reminded her of a putrescent fungus about to discharge its spores. Andrew had to reassure her that this was not the purpose of their journey.
Sarah’s spirits rose as each turn of the rock-strewn track opened up a new vista of increased splendour. She forgot the dilemma of her face. ‘You know, Andrew, this is the second time I’ve climbed into this vehicle without the slightest guarantee of safety. Why is it that I trust you above all others?’ S
he had said it lightly, not intending to be provocative, but that was the effect it had.
Andrew looked back at her sadly. ‘It’s not a question of trust, Sarah. It’s a matter of unconscious perception.’
‘Of what?’
‘Can’t you guess? What would make you safe with me?’
‘That you’re gay? No, I hadn’t guessed. Neither do I give a damn – although in another way perhaps I do. But if it’s any consolation I don’t believe there’s any such thing as absolute sexuality – hetero, homo or whatever.’
It must have seemed a strange remark. She could see questions in his expression but not read them. Perhaps he wanted to ask if she spoke from personal experience, but was too shy.
The track ended in a tiny turning circle against a near-vertical wall of black rock. The site anticipated visitors, but clearly never more than one or two vehicles at a time. The air was thinner now, the relief of the landscape more delineated. In the pale evening sunlight each ridge glowed like the edge of a honed knife. Involuntarily Sarah inspired deeply with the pleasure of it, then looked guiltily to see if Andrew had noticed.
Andrew rummaged in the back of the jeep, emerging with a neatly coiled rope. ‘Arms up!’
She obliged meekly while he tied one end around her waist.
‘Just in case.’
The climb was not difficult, but sufficiently obscure to deter anyone without knowledge of the exact route. ‘Jefferies showed it to me,’ Andrew explained. ‘About the only useful thing he’s ever done.’
They were breathing hard when they reached the top. Andrew said, ‘Keep your eyes fixed on the ground until you get your breath back. You can look only when I tell you.’ He took her shoulders and shuffled her into a new position. ‘Now!’