But the UN gofer who clambered out showed no interest in the bureaucracy of supply chains. Adrian stood in the sun, convincingly playing an old hand at Rumbek, and debriefed the pilot. This was one of three tiny planeloads that made it out of Lokichogio and had been allowed to continue from Juba. The Sudanese were closing the airstrips again, the latest step in its programme of controlled starvation clearly completed. The rest of the shipments we’d last seen at the Ugandan border would be laboriously distributed by road through south-western Sudan. They were further away than ever now.
As I heard the story and watched the sanguine acceptance of it on the part of the station staff, inured to chaotic disappointments and to whom one small shipment was just what it was, a kind of manna from heaven, I could picture Jimmy with the officials of Loki airbase, hands on hips, mirrored aviators reflecting his resignation to the business of famine administration.
And I knew that we, Adrian and I, were affirmed and vindicated in our piracy. I was glad, of course, for some bodies had been fed that would otherwise have disappeared. Some bags of food had already started their slow, determined journeys back to villages. I knew the horrors of under-supply: too little and we were only delaying, not interrupting, the processes of starvation. Some say the cruelty of that is ugly, but I don’t buy that. Perhaps a very few would live who would have died but for our truck. Maybe our one load had made a difference. We could never know for sure.
But, God help me, I was glad for another reason that had nothing to do with famine. I’d proved that little jerk Jimmy wrong – a truck convoy had been the way to go. I wanted to seek him out and spit in his face. We’d only got one stolen truck through, a grandiose, token gesture that probably achieved nothing in the overall scheme of things, but I knew Jimmy’s wrong call had let people die. And I realised I was pleased that we’d brought our truck here and he’d taken his to Lokichogio. It felt good, almost as good as arriving with a full convoy.
I went to find Miriam, whom I knew would be signing off paperwork for the plane in the office cabin, where Adrian and I had arrived the previous day. It seemed longer ago. I wanted to ask her what best we could do for her back in London, more for moral support than practicality.
She was alone when I got there, leaning back against the desk and rubbing the heels of her hands up her pale cheeks, pushing the crinkled skin around her lower lashes up and over her green eyes. When her hands reached her forehead and flattened back over her hair, I saw she’d been crying and her top teeth emerged to bite her bottom lip hard.
I made no move towards her, but didn’t look away.
“I’m sorry. It doesn’t often happen,” she said. “I’m just so bloody tired.”
“I know,” I said and just stood there for a moment, a small act of solidarity, I suppose. “I’m sorry too.”
I tried to think of something else to say.
“Thanks for not grassing us up,” I said eventually.
She smiled briefly and I left the room.
We hitched a lift on the plane. It was returning to Juba to refuel, then north to Khartoum, where some of the distribution of aircraft was being centralised, depending on which strips were being opened and closed. The whole pretence was about “security”, but really it was just about further government control of supplies.
Before we left, Adrian disabled the truck, on a pretext of servicing it. He just disconnected the fuel lead or something. It would be easily fixed by anyone reclaiming the truck, but meanwhile would prevent any of the more able-bodied, or ambitious militia, using it to get out to remote villages. We couldn’t take the risk of what might be done with a lorry that must have been reported as stolen. Besides, rogue transport is dangerous in a famine – Sudanese tribes have a touching but self-destructive culture of sharing all they have. Some of the food that had been walked back might last a month, but less than a week if a truckload of extra people turned up.
Back in Khartoum, I felt weird, like I was watching myself in a performance. I felt like I occupied a bubble, like no one else could see me. Adrian and I evidently looked like a proper item, as they say. We scrubbed up at a foreign correspondents’ club, trying not to show our passes, though no one seemed to know anything of stolen trucks, and we were fed vegetable pie and potatoes. We got some cash at the embassy and went out into the cooling evening air. Sharia still held its grip on Khartoum, so there was little for Westerners with a post-zone thirst to do in the dusk, but we walked around the top of the airport, watching the lights of planes coming in from the north against a salmon sky and headed towards a cafe near the British Council, where the Blue and White Niles convened towards Egypt at al-Mogran.
This was where Brits hung out and we sat on a small terrace, separated from the gritty road by a metal fence, a little too large and heavy for the informality of a street cafe. It was soon clear why it was there; children and a few of their elders came begging, pushing their light palms through the bars at our ankle level. Occasionally the proprietor came out to curse them in Sudanese and take an optimistic swing with his foot at the skinny arms, which shot back through the railings like eels into rocks.
We drank coffee and iced crushes and smoked small cigars, picking at olives and oily vine leaves, as the bar began to fill from the Council and its surrounding hostels. We’d turned our branded gilets inside out, so that The Fed’s logo – with its “Feed the Body” motto – didn’t show, in case word was out for two lorry hustlers. But we still attracted the odd inquiry about where we’d been and the state of Bahr from the English-speaking young men and women who came in for kebabs and cola.
Adrian had a decent knack for dealing with these encounters, a friendly but economic exchange that conveyed information without freighting it with energy and, importantly, drawing no one in. Or maybe he was just like that – another thought is that he never had much conversation. We must have entered that period of decompression for aidies that follows a drop or a “mercy”, as some of them called a station placement, a period of no more than an evening in failing light as you reconnect with the living, thriving world. That process was seasoned this time by the illicit nature of our operation, so there was even less to say to strangers than to each other, the opposite of how these rehabilitation sessions usually worked. We’d been outside Rumbek, we said, up from Uganda.
A draped string of light bulbs, with tin cans for shades, flickered on to illuminate us and we attracted the attention of a small group – perhaps five – of earnest young ex-pats with very fair skin and short haircuts. Their leader, a tall lad with a crucifix ostentatiously hanging around his neck on a leather bootlace, presented himself. This one was going to be harder to shake. After Adrian had delivered his standard replies in monosyllables, he moved on to me.
“Natalie. I’m Natalie.”
“We’re an educational project. Mostly building schools.”
I nodded. There was something of a pecking order in aid. Famine relief ranked high. Schools didn’t.
“I see it as a struggle between good and evil,” he was saying.
I nodded again. Right so far, though I imagine he didn’t mean local dictators backed by Western bankers versus starving farmers.
“The challenge is to keep them trusting in God, so they don’t revert back to witchcraft.”
“Uh huh. We just try to feed them, I guess.”
It’s difficult to join in this sort of conversation without sounding rude. And he was leading off now, a one-man mission. Once the act of evangelism is started, it must be made complete.
“There was a school building, brand new. But they were still meeting under the trees. They needed to cleanse their school. And they couldn’t afford an animal for sacrifice.”
“Or they’d eaten them all.”
“Ha, right,” he said, showing his teeth. “I told them that God had given them the school. In His grace – it was OK. And Jesus Christ had already made the perfect sacrifice, the only one that matters. Anyway, I got them to join hands around the schoolrooms
and we said a prayer of blessing. Then – and this is the funny bit – I walked up to the wall of the school and patted it with the palm of my hand, saying, ‘God bless this school.’ And when I turned around, all these Sudanese kids were doing the same, patting the walls.”
I deployed an exhalation of tobacco smoke into the night to mark the moment.
“And I told them, we’ve got to trust in the Lord. That’s what I truly believe.”
“I don’t think you do,” I said.
I was looking up at him, this gangly man with his simple answers, God’s displacement therapist for the horrors of Sudan. I wasn’t about to pull rank with my priesthood. That would have just been a get-out. Better to stay undercover.
“I don’t think you truly believe that at all,” I repeated.
“Oh, so you don’t have a Christian faith,” he said with faux disappointment, warming to his task of conversion. “So what motiv-ates you to do your work? I bet it’s the love of Christ, same as me, you just call it something different.”
“I didn’t say that, but God is what you fall back on when everything else has failed.”
“No, it’s not like that. God is everything that never fails.”
“Is that so?”
I was smiling up at him now, as a benign heretic, not a priest. I went for the line that was most regularly put to me by aidies who interrogated my faith: “You don’t feel that he may have let the people of Sudan down a teeny bit?”
“It’s the world that’s let Sudan down, not God. We’re doing His work in putting that right.” Those capitals again. “I really hope you let Him reveal Himself to you.”
“Oh, I think He’s done that all right,” I heard myself say.
“So you’re coming to faith? That’s really great.”
“I don’t think anyone comes to faith actually. I think faith comes to us. Sort of squats like an annoying friend. For me, it came for a night and now I can’t get it off my sofa.”
“You’re funny. I love it. It’s just wonderful how Jesus works in people.”
“I didn’t say that either.”
“I know. I just did. How would you put it then?”
He’d clearly been on a mission training course.
“Probably that I’ve reached out and touched the hem of a passing garment. And it’s not me who’s bleeding any more. It’s been twelve years, you know.”
He stood grinning at me, his mind hanging like a crashed computer screen.
“Luke? Chapter eight? That’s me,” I said, then added: “It’s not what you believe, bro. It’s what you do.”
I stood to go before I knew I’d made the decision and Adrian followed. He took my hand as we walked back to the billet, I remember that. The following morning, we got a message that UN lawyers had been in touch with head office and we were to return immediately. Tickets were transferred to the embassy. So we flew back to London.
Shortly afterwards, I married Ade. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. It can’t have been the common cause with the lorry, because I started to tell everyone that I’d acted alone and I rather preferred that narrative. I told him that was the story we were going with, that he’d left keys in the truck, I’d started it and he’d tried to stop me. Somewhere up the road he’d jumped from the cab and made his way to Khartoum to raise the alarm. Now I think about it, one of the reasons for marrying that we discussed was that it would mean that he wouldn’t be required to give evidence against me, so he wouldn’t have to perjure himself under oath.
Sarah didn’t like the idea at all. It was the first and last proper row we ever had. I was round at her place in Hackney – by now quite smart – and we’d drunk nearly two bottles of Chilean white while she cooked a paella.
“Why would you do that?” she said. Note the conditional.
“Why wouldn’t I do that?”
“Because he doesn’t need anyone.”
“I don’t need him.”
“Then why are you marrying him?”
“Why are you hanging out with a mopey Russian gangster?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not marrying Sergei.”
“You might as well. He’s lost one missus. What’s the point of wringing out his damp hankies if you’re not going to get the money?”
“Is that what you think, Nat?” She’d turned from the hotplates, holding a spatula and I noticed suddenly there were tears in her eyes.
“Just being honest. We do what we have to.”
“That’s foul. I work for Sergei because of what he can do for peace in Palestine. You and Ade are great aidies. Doesn’t mean any of us have to marry each other. Even if we want to and I don’t.”
“I’m marrying Adrian. You marry the Mob. You tell me which one if us is selling out.”
We ate rice and prawns and chorizo, but something had changed in the room. I didn’t see much of Sarah socially for a long while after that.
Some repatriated aid workers complain of the genteel ordinariness of life back at home, like returning war veterans, and for me I suppose it was the boredom, an endless drone of days that made me want to shout in defiance at the death rattle that passed for human exchange.
And then the business of the stolen truck took over. The newspapers had made me out to be some sort of renegade heroine, the Joan of Arc of international aid. A crinkly pop star had backed me: “This heroic young woman should be given a bleedin’ medal not a bollocking.” I wanted to get away from all that again, abroad, and I suppose part of me wanted to prove to the UN I could still do a proper job, not just make headlines with potty stunts.
There was also a cold little knot of sadness lodged in my chest, just behind my sternum. I can point to it and I recognise it now, the kind you see the truly desperate fold little fists against and collapse into, with a small rising whine rather than a sob. I managed to resist that, but I was bloody unhappy – no, I was bloody and unhappy. I can see that now. And it was because I knew then that nothing was bloody good enough and never could be. I started to endure and prevail, but it wasn’t living, I was making a decent enough job of the face I presented to the world, a brassy kind of armour that affected that I was battle-hardened, dry of wit and soul, had seen it all and was willing to sit through the repeats.
Most of all, I realise now, I was already bored with Adrian, with his silent strength and quiet faith, which together provided his placid conviction that the world could be changed and that, one day, we’d all trade fairly and everyone would be fed.
But I married him after we came back from Sudan that last time. Other than the legal implications of the lorry affair, he was my lot, a kind of matching option, in the way that you would choose a rug to go with a chair. Another couple, looking in, might have said we had much in common, a backstory full of oddball anecdotes that might have been told in one of those regular slots in a weekend colour supplement. But the truth was that he was my dreary base into which to fasten my hidden despair and I was his release from a buttoned-up little treasure trove of dreams.
We married in his childhood church, a whitewashed hall of a place in south London, where chairs make scraping noises like recurrent coughs. Sarah said she was out of the country and maybe she was. It was a settled but soulless place, miles of Edwardian terraced houses where no one knows their neighbour. Though people live decades in such places, they don’t dwell there, far less abide. The minister – and registrar – had a beard of course and smelt of patchouli oil. There was a band of Ade’s mates, with a bassist who swung the neck of his guitar like an exercise machine. I lifted my skirts and did a little jig after the acclamations and our small congregation clapped, both in time and celebration.
And for a moment there I confess I was happy, because if you look happy then you are. We drank afterwards in the back room of a local pub called The Woodman and the room was free if we spent a hundred pounds at the bar. It was all too bright but kept the dark out and the landlord let us have it all night – I think he was a Christian – and
we left at dawn, a bunch of tired aidies with nowhere to go. Even from the beginning, sex with Adrian was prematurely middle-aged, lazy, practised.
And, for him, the war was over. He joined the Home Front of the struggle against poverty and for social justice. Like any demobbed soldier, it emptied him. He started to look for a job that would pay the rent – rather sweetly, he was, I think, setting up home – and I almost immediately started the search for one that would get me away. Local government for him, and for me, after The Fed, an NGO delivering social-support services to displaced populations. That’s what it said in its shiny little brochure. These days it would have delivered migration solutions. For me, the important thing was that it did this abroad as well as in the UK and offered plenty of foreign trips.
7
The next time I saw the Bishop he had Toby with him.
“Natalie, this is Rupert Naismith, whom I think is what is commonly known as a Foreign Office Flyer, though there is nothing common about him,” said the Bishop.
“No, it isn’t,” I said. I looked at Toby and he just shrugged. It was self-deprecating and that appealed, against my better judgement.
The meeting was brisk. Clearly it didn’t occupy diary time and the Bishop’s sole purpose was to despatch us, like children running an errand.
I came later to know that they’re all nicknamed Rupert, the officers and ex-officers of Guards regiments. I suppose he may as well have been called Rupert and I’m not sure I ever really knew his real name. Who cares? But he’ll always be Toby to me. Perhaps Rupert was his “cover” that day. Perhaps the Bishop really did think his name was Rupert. I have no idea whether the others I met told me their real names and again I don’t care. They were just avatars in my alternative reality.
A Dark Nativity Page 10