The Dhow House

by Jean McNeil

  The wattled starlings returned to the ex-garden. She had a better look at them, in the good light. Their plumage was grey-black. The females were quite drab. The purple-looking pendulous sacs were draped around the yellow heads of the males. The wattles looked like a growth, a deformation. She wondered what their function was.

  ‘There is a man in my village who pays attention to birds.’ Ali had caught her staring at the black starlings in Gariseb, two days earlier. He stood beside her. ‘He consults them. If you need to know about a marriage or a battle, the birds may tell him if God approves or not.’

  ‘How? What do they do?’

  He stared at the glossy black backs of the starlings. ‘He will not tell anyone. It is a secret.’

  ‘Great, we survived the night. Now let’s blow this joint before we get killed.’ Andy, his eyes small from sleep, poked his head outside the shattered wall.

  ‘There’s a plane coming in at eleven. They’ll be on it.’ She jerked her head back to where Maurice lay. ‘They said we need to get out of town straight away. The Nisa are only twelve kilometres to the west. They’ll be here by lunchtime. The sniper we met was an advance party.’

  ‘Well, that was all very unexpected,’ Andy said, in response. ‘I think our shopping trip to town is over.’

  They put Maurice in the back seat of the pickup’s cab. She and Lars travelled in the open flatbed of the truck. They had no helmets or flak jackets. They had to hope the snipers had moved on, to the east of the city.

  They delivered the Belgians to the airstrip where the chartered plane was waiting for them. ‘Ah, a Ukrainian pilot,’ Lars said, when they had all shaken hands. ‘My favourite. So much less reckless than the Russians and South Africans.’

  She and Andy climbed back into the truck once they’d seen the plane take off, with Bernard at the wheel. The trip back to camp was quiet – no dust-smeared Toyota pickup trucks, their beds full of young men in ragtag fatigues, semi-automatic weapon rounds criss-crossing their bodies. No hastily butchered camels and goats on the side of the road. No smoothed tracks that hid a recently placed landmine. They passed groups of young men with scarred foreheads chewing qat. Now they stood under trees in suspiciously new green fatigues. A month before they had been cattle farmers, their hair dyed orange with cow’s urine.

  Andy had never looked at her before with any special interest. But on the trip back he pitched her sliding glances she found difficult to read.

  After three or four of these, she said, ‘What is it?’

  His small mouth pinched itself together. ‘I was just wishing I could do what you do.’ His eyes stayed on the road. ‘Save people’s lives. Save Maurice’s life.’

  ‘You can. You do.’

  He grimaced. ‘I’d never make it through medical school.I’m not like you. I was brought up in a two-up, two-down in Burnley.’

  ‘Lots of people from that background go to medical school these days.’

  ‘I’d have to go back and do chemistry at A-level.’

  ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you?’

  The radio jolted to life – Rafael calling for their coordinates – and their conversation was interrupted.

  They pulled up in the compound at two that afternoon. ‘I never thought I’d be so pleased to see this shithole,’ Andy said.

  Rafael came to meet them, his hands pressed together. He never expressed fear, but she had observed his hands making the cathedral shape they constructed now, and how he hopped from foot to foot, very lightly, when he was anxious.

  She alighted from the truck, her legs cramped from sitting. ‘We have to be in theatre in half an hour,’ Rafael said. She dropped her bag in her office. Her body sagged with fatigue. She wanted a cup of coffee just to keep going through the operation, but it made her hands jittery. She had to trust her hands, or she had nothing.

  The following day she had her first lie-in in a month. Rafael had ordered her to rest. She was surprised; so far he had given no sign of being the kind of man who would give an inch. She had come to almost appreciate his arid neutrality, his fastidiousness.

  That afternoon Ali came to see her again, a pair of narrow feet arriving unannounced at the perimeter of her tent flap.

  ‘I am getting stronger.’

  ‘You are,’ she agreed. ‘Soon you can go home.’

  He drank tea while she pounded out emails with her computer screen tilted away from his view – lists of surgical kits to be ordered, ampoules of morphine-based painkillers, anesthetic. On his previous visits she had observed a pattern. He would remain silent for long periods, drinking tea, looking contemplative, before bursting into speech. A man without a mask is very rare. Where had she heard this, or read it? It might have been one of the psychology books she had gorged on, five or six years ago, when she had been convinced she would specialise in psychiatry. Ali’s mask was easy to guess – she had identified it already – but rather than reassure her this made her more suspicious of him.

  She was still typing when he asked, ‘Why did you volunteer to come here?’

  She stopped and turned to face him. ‘I felt it was my duty.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘To save people who would otherwise die, because they are at war.’

  ‘But you treat combatants,’ he said.

  ‘We treat whoever is brought to us.’

  ‘Don’t you feel more for one life than another? Do you not treat the civilians first?’

  ‘We treat the person who is most likely to die first.’

  He left the tent without a word. She hadn’t told the exact truth. She had become worried about Ali’s attentions. Rafael, Andy, Niccolo the Italian surgeon and Eileen the Canadian nurse – the nexus of their small team – were appraised of his visits to her tent. When Ali was present one or other of them would stick their head inside the flap – Cup of tea? There’s a delivery for you. They were looking out for her, supposedly, but also they did not approve.

  She heard the wow-wow of the Nubian nightjar. All nightjars made unearthly noises; it was on their calls that car alarms were based, an incessant mechanical fluting. She had seen nightjars singing near camp, their throats pulsating hurriedly like tiny machines.

  Night was coming. She found herself at the edge of her office, staring into the west, examining the sky for what felt like the thousandth time. She didn’t know what she wanted from the land here, the way the curve of the hills sank into the sky instead of rising, the sidewinder trajectory of the moonrise, the envious sun.

  She wondered about Andy. Something was not quite right. She tried to cast him as a character: the tall ginger-haired orderly who supported Manchester City, who listened to gloomy Adele songs on his iPod as he swept a bleach-sodden mop along the canvas corridors. Who now, in her memory, is still standing outside the triage tent in Gariseb, sucking on a cigarette, watching her accompany Ali as he hobbled around the bare scrub the day they spotted the lion track together, both as excited as children to see the ovoid paw and four fat digits, and Ali told her a story which may have been true or may have been allegorical, about how one day he encountered a lion stalking a man’s goats, but the lion was so thin he could not bear to shoot him. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘I wanted to deliver a goat to him, I thought about buying it and putting it in the truck, but then I realised I couldn’t bear to see it ripped apart.’ Who was this man who could not watch one animal kill another, even has he held a loaded AK-47? They had watched her, all of them, Andy, Rafael, as she had laughed with Ali, with the easy complicity of people who would soon betray each other.

  She was in theatre when Ali left camp. As he’d predicted, three men showed up in a Hilux truck and took him away. There were few goodbyes in Gariseb in any case. Staff came and went on unannounced cargo flights. She’d go looking for Bernice, the Irish nurse who liked to play Scrabble with her, only to find she had left an hour before, never to return.

  She sat in the canteen trying to coax Aisha through a bowl of vegetable soup. She h
ad not eaten properly in weeks, and she had to be careful to reintroduce food slowly. Her stomach would reject anything too substantial. In severe cases of near starvation the patient could convulse and die.

  Lenjoh the interpreter sat with them. Aisha had holes in her memory, as she called them. She could not remember exactly when it happened, only that it was a long time ago.

  ‘It was during the Jilal,’ Aisha said. ‘We were friends since we were girls; we fetched water together, we herded goats and, when we acquired them, cattle. There was Samira, whose family was from the very far north, near the border. She was small, she had only one possession, apart from the hijab she wore, a bead necklace. She never took it off.

  ‘There was Wanjiru, she was a mix, from a highland Christian family; her mother married a Muslim. There were two other girls, Isa and Leila, they were sisters. There was not a day for seven years when we did not all see each other. There had been rain. The land was healthy.’ Her mouth worked from side to side, a pensive gesture, before she spoke again. This time each of her sentences came as individual eruptions. ‘We thought nothing bad could happen then. It was before the war.’

  The men were militia, she said. She never learned the name of the warlord they served.

  ‘A man of many camels and many guns,’ Aisha said. ‘After they came, nothing was the same. We have no idea as we live our lives, that tomorrow will be different.’

  She chewed one of the crackers, eating her way around the edges, sucking off the crystals of salt. ‘They tied us all down, in a circle. How you would tie livestock, or hobble camels. We tie a front to a back leg. Or goats at the neck. That was how they tied us, at the neck. They caught five of us when we were fetching firewood. Myself, Samira, Wanjiru, Leila and Iza.’

  Their names seemed to be a kind of incantation for her. Her eyes froze. She went into a kind of spell.

  ‘Yes, they tied us down and raped us all together. One man for each of us, then they switched. They went from one to the other saying things like, this one’s cunt is dry. This one’s pussy smells.’

  Lenjoh hesitated. He was normally a swift interpreter. He cast her an embarrassed glance.

  ‘We could hear our camels calling us,’ Aisha said. ‘It was night, then. I don’t know how long it lasted. We never held hands, or gave each other any looks of solidarity. I tried, but they all avoided my eyes. When I touched Wanjiru in the middle of it, she pulled her hand away like she had been scalded.

  ‘About it, I was very clear. I thought: I can survive this. No matter what, I will survive. I felt very powerful. I can’t describe it.’

  ‘Like it was happening to someone else?’ she asked.

  ‘No, it was happening. I had no doubt. I had no need to pull away, out of myself. The attack was terrible, but it is not the kind of thing that breaks my heart.’ She paused to eat some soup.

  ‘But it destroyed us, as friends. That is what I didn’t expect. We were never together again. Shame kept us apart.’

  ‘Did you try to – to reach out to them?’

  ‘I reported it to the authorities, to the village elders. I went to each of my friends’ mothers and told them how their daughter had fought to defend their honour. But my friends looked away when they saw me in the village, as if it had been me who attacked them.’

  ‘They knew you were different,’ she said.

  ‘They said I was without honour, because I did not allow myself to be destroyed by it. They expected me to kill myself, or die of shame. That was why I had to leave my village and look for a husband far away.’

  The militia, Aisha’s men, came to visit her that night in her dreams. They never showed their faces. They had guns that were rusting at the edges, they didn’t have enough oil to keep them in good condition. They rode up to her tent in a pickup truck and tried to get in. They were thin, weedy. She thought them incapable of doing much harm. In the dream she’d reached into a closet and found a weapon there. She had shouldered it and was ready to fire when she woke.

  The email popped up in her inbox. Doxycycline – new shipment.

  Her skin went cold – a strange sensation that will happen only twice in her life. On the inside she was burning, but her skin was frozen to the touch.

  ‘Andy? Is anyone on the sat phone?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s working.’

  She paced in her tent. Andy was outside, somewhere, fixing something.

  She left, tearing the flap aside. She found him on his knees on the edge of their compound, wielding a wrench at the recalcitrant backup generator. ‘Are you the mechanic now?’

  ‘Mark’s on leave, didn’t you know?’

  ‘What, they leave us without a mechanic?’

  ‘Just for a couple of days. He went to Nyala to get spare parts.’

  ‘Well, it’s an emergency.’

  Andy got to his knees and dusted them off, a pointless gesture which they all persisted in. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  Half an hour later he had coaxed the phone to life. She dialled the number. She clamped her fingers around the sat phone’s dense wedge.

  A crisp female voice answered.

  ‘I need to speak to Dr Gregory.’

  A brief pause, then Anthony came on the line. ‘Your application was approved,’ he said. ‘You’ve been selected for the specialist training. I need you to attend a conference on early vaccination. We’ll cover your travel.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘We’ll let you know.’

  She nearly said, How? But he’d hung up.

  She calmed herself, or tried to. She left the air-conditioned chamber where the satellite and computer server were stored. She tried to stall the trembling before she handed the phone back to Andy. Outside she met the heat – not a wall but a compression chamber, pressing on her from behind, above. It was everywhere.

  Something had happened. There could be no other explanation.

  She stared into the horizon. It was well known to her now, the flattened parabola where the sun emerged each day with its burning censor eye. If there were an enemy – if Ali, or people who knew him, people who survived the attack on the town from where he and his men operated, a town now with a swathe ripped through it by a drone aircraft – came, they would emerge from that horizon, the sun watching over them.

  But was there an enemy, really? She didn’t quite see it that way. She had been asked to provide information, she was a small piece in the puzzle, so small she might not exist. If she were not in her job it would have fallen to someone else. The morality of what she did could be worked out by others, by Anthony and his kind. They had been trained to do this and she was just a doctor.

  She was just a doctor and she was not strong enough for the world. She wanted life to be beautiful, not the bitter shadows the thorn trees of Gariseb threw, not the unspent cartridges shoved down the throats of prisoners of war, so that they died choking on the dank taste of copper. Not the dead, bloated corpses of children, inflated like outsize watermelons that littered the desert only fifty kilometres from her cot bed.

  She had tried to satisfy her hunger for beauty by going to the theatre, to art galleries, when everyone else’s life had become consumed by mock exams and job applications. But her yearning was a glutton; it thrived on lacks. It would go on and on. A kind of internal savagery took hold of her then, born perhaps of self-preservation. She banished herself from any more visits to the Bush, the Finborough, the Globe theatres, the Tate Modern and the British Museum, the readings to hear pale, serious authors talk about the future and the past. She throttled her inconvenient desire until it too was a corpse scattered among the already occupied fields of the dead.

  If she tried to bring her mind back to those dates on the calendar, the strangely foreign sounding name of the month – June; what was its origin again? Juniper, Juno, Jupiter – her mind slunk away from the word.

  She knew that a certain amount of time had passed since her conversation with Aisha, since the message from Anthony, perhaps three
or four days. There was no further news of the departure Anthony’s message had referred to. Across the border it was quiet. No wounded fighters appeared. In fact the hospital was strangely empty; there were not even any IED injuries, or wounds from cattle-rustling skirmishes.

  They might have changed their minds. They might have decided she was safe. She tried to find out. She rang the secure line only to be told he was not available. She realised he was probably on a plane from London at that very moment. She spoke to a woman she had never spoken to before and who would not give her name. ‘Sit tight,’ the woman said, ‘and don’t call this number again.’

  She encountered Andy smoking pensively one of those evenings on the outskirts of camp. Beyond the perimeter of light thrown by the floodlights came the tinkering of goats’ bells, a sound that was sibilant during the heat of day but became tinny as night approached.

  ‘I wonder what’s going on,’ Andy said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The evening was silent. They could hear only the wind.

  Andy narrowed his eyes. ‘In Helmand I always used to distrust these lulls. I’d sleep extra light if I were you.’

  ‘I may not sleep at all.’

  He finished his cigarette, pummelled it under his heel. ‘Mark my words,’ he said. ‘Something’s about to happen.’

  VI

  AUGUR BUZZARD

  ‘She’s crazy to come at a time like this.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Delphine.’ Julia gave her an uncomprehending look, as if the bearer of the name were so famous it was a scandal she did not lurch at its sound. ‘Bill’s sister,’ Julia elaborated. ‘She lives in Mozambique.’