by Aubrey Flegg
She threw the marker. Then she gave a yip and held her arms out. Sailor, who had been whining with excitement, jumped clean into her arms. She produced his rubber bear, threw it for him and then had a deadly tussle for possession. They were both panting when Yola eventually got him to give it up.
‘Come on Fintan, there’s a tree over there, let’s sit under that and talk.’
She told Fintan about her training with the deminers and how her real job was to give mines awareness talks. She was going to tell him about Gabbin and the game he had played on poor Sister Martha, but she could feel her little knot of worry about Gabbin tightening. Anyway, Fintan had worries of his own.
Breakfast, and she was aware of Fintan looking with apprehension at the maize porridge she was preparing, but Judit rescued him.
‘If you don’t like that dreadful stuff of Yola’s, Fintan, I have some muesli here. There’s dried milk through it so you only have to add water, but make sure the water is from the filter or you’ll have the runs for a week.’
Yola sniffed scornfully as Fintan sidled away to take up Judit’s offer.
‘Oh Judit,’ she called, as the other girl left the kitchen, ‘Fintan wants to talk to Hans about the arms trade and I’d like to show him Hans’s collection of mines and bombs.’
‘Not this morning. I’ve got to make Hans do some serious work today. There’s a Dutch delegation coming up to see how we are spending their money.’
‘Ok, we’ll go down to the bridge and I’ll show him what’s going on there.’ She turned to Fintan. ‘I’m on holiday. Hans has given me a few days off. You can bring that camera thing of your Dad’s if you want, only don’t point it at soldiers on the bridge.’
They walked down through the town together, past the Palace Hotel with its swanky cars outside. As they approached the river, the houses were shell-shattered, some a mere lacework of toppling masonry. In the distance there was an explosion. They both stopped while Yola tried to locate its direction.
‘What was it?’ Fintan asked. ‘A gun?’
Yola shook her head. ‘No, more like a mine, I’m afraid, but it wasn’t from the river where the men are working. It seemed to come from the fields over there. Often cattle set them off.’
They stepped over the rusted tracks of the railway line, crossed the road and followed the track into the bush to where the deminers were working. They heard excited voices ahead; Yola gripped Fintan’s arm.
‘Come on! Perhaps I was wrong and something has happened here.’
They hurried forward; a small group was approaching. Yola recognised the NPA’s paramedic, who was leading one of the deminers – still wearing his visor and protective jacket.
‘It was a snake!’ the man protested. ‘How could I see in bushes like that. I was feeling ahead, looking for tripwires, gently, gently, when I get bitten.’ Sure enough there were two pricks on the back of his hand, now beading blood.
‘You should wear your gloves!’ the supervisor snapped.
Suddenly the man was screaming. Here he was dying of snakebite and he was being told to wear gloves! The paramedic shrugged. The supervisor scratched his head. Then he saw Yola.
‘Yola, go up with this man to the hospital and have him seen to.’
‘But I’m on leave!’ Yola protested.
‘Look Miss, if I or the medic leaves the site, work stops. Be a good girl and take him.’
Yola looked around for Fintan and found herself looking into the eye of a video camera. She made a face.
‘Come on Fintan, we’ll go with him. The driver will take us. They have a snakebite unit in the hospital, they’ll know what to do.’
‘I haven’t been back to the hospital since my accident. I wonder how it will feel?’
In fact, once they had delivered their patient, Yola found herself full of curiosity to see the place again, and took Fintan on a guided tour.
‘It’s a bit different to Dublin,’ she said apologetically when she noticed that Fintan had a handkerchief to his nose. Yola found the bed she had occupied and where her mother had looked after her so well. She looked up at the slowly rotating fan and noticed with a smile that there was a fly on one of the blades. The bed was now occupied by an old woman, an even older man sat beside her. It was unusual for a man to be looking after someone in the wards. Perhaps there was no one else to feed and tend the woman. She smiled down at the old man, but his eyes were too full of sadness to respond.
‘Come on! We can get out this way, past the operating theatre.’
They were halfway down the corridor when the double doors at the far end were thrown back.
‘Out of the way! Out of the way!’
A stretcher was pushed through the doors. The porter backed towards them, holding a drip above his head.
‘Take her into number one!’
This time the urgent shout came from behind them. Yola turned and collided with Fintan. For a fleeting moment she recognised the face of her own surgeon rushing down the corridor towards them, but they were blocking his way. Swivelling quickly, she noticed a door beside them. A peeling notice said ‘Medical students and staff only’. She tried the handle. The door gave way and they both half fell through it as the trolley swept past. For a moment they looked directly into the face of the patient; it was a child, wide-eyed and conscious. Then the door swung shut and they were left alone in semi-darkness. They were in a short passage at the foot of a steep flight of stairs; weak light filtered down from an open door at the top. Yola felt disorientated because she could hear the voice of the surgeon from up above, urgently asking for clamps. Then she realised that there must be some connection between whatever was at the top of the stairs and the operating theatre. Fintan slipped past her, his face set. This was a new Fintan, one she hadn’t seen before. He mounted the stairs without making a sound, his video camera in his right hand. She followed, though it was more difficult for her to move quietly with her artificial leg.
They emerged into a gallery, looking down into the operating theatre. There, directly below them, in a vivid pool of light, was the operating table. The child they had seen in the corridor was just being lifted on to it. Yola didn’t know what to do. She was pulled by emotions this way and that; she wanted to run, to scream, to stay. She turned. What was Fintan doing? He was staring down, transfixed. As she watched, very slowly, almost as if he had no control over himself, he brought his video camera up to his eye. She saw his finger curl over the handle and a little red light blinked. For a second or two, she rebelled. Was this just another violation of the child below? She, Yola, had been down there, she knew! Then she realised that Fintan was right – someone had to see this, but not her. She sank to the floor with her back to the gallery wall and switched her mind off the scene below. Time passed. Fintan put a new cassette into the camera and filmed on.
Yola emerged from her isolation when she realised that Fintan had turned and, like her, was sitting on the floor.
‘Is it over?’ she whispered.
‘Yes.’ His voice sounded hollow.
‘Is she alive?’
‘I don’t know. You see, her own bones have pierced … her own bones … Oh God, Yola … I saw it all.’
Yola thought he was crying. She put her arms around him and pressed her forehead against his chest. When his breathing was even again they went out.
The car had gone back to the river. If the deminer had been bitten by a snake, it was a harmless one they were told. They set out together for the barracks in silence.
I have no appetite for lunch, I ate a banana because she said to, and I’ve drunk a whole bottle of tepid water from the filter. I can’t get the operation out of my mind. It is all real now, too real even to think about, but at the time it was different. I was in some other state of consciousness. It was as if Dad’s camera were suspended from the ceiling. My knees wanted to give way, but the camera was holding me up. I wanted to turn it from the scene below, but whenever I tried, it swung me back as if it were the needl
e of a compass – pulling. I could feel my hands working – focus – zoom – lock the trigger – but these were the camera’s commands, not mine. I wasn’t there at all; I was having visions of Ireland. There was red – so much red, but I wasn’t looking at blood but at a sunset, one of our beautiful lingering sunsets on holiday somewhere in Connemara. Black clouds trailed veils of red over small lakes glistening scarlet, newly wet. Her little white bones became the straight lines of vapour trails in the sky – New York – Boston. I was looking down at my own toes paddling in a peat brown stream, watching them wriggle in the refracting water. But – here was the difference – my toes and my feet were still a part of me. Before they put a mask on her I saw her face, only for a second, looking up at me from the operating table, conscious and alert. And I was back in the canteen at the clinic in Dublin just after I had first met Yola and everyone was staring at us because she had just laughed out loud; then the child’s face was obscured by tubes and masks. I think I knew even then that she was going to die.
This is evidence of … God knows what … man’s inhumanity to man perhaps. I’ve broken out the tabs on the cassettes. No one is ever going to record over these, but equally I know that I will never be able to look at them again. They did not take her to a ward, but to a shed away from the main buildings. That’s how Yola knew that she had died. It looked a lonely place to go, but from what I saw, I think I’m glad.
18
Bubble Wrap
After a lunch during which neither of them had a will to talk, Fintan went to his bed in the sickbay. When he realised that sleep would not come, he decided to write in his diary. He put his notebook away when Yola came in.
‘You should have left the door open. You’re supposed to sleep after lunch, not write!’ she said as she sat down beside him on the bed.
‘I had to, Yola, else that poor child will haunt me forever.’ He stared up at the ghostly shroud of the mosquito net hanging above the adjacent bed. ‘We have no idea in Ireland, even though we have been blowing each other up for seventy years. We hear of deaths but never think of the process of … of dying. The injured are hardly even statistics; we forget about them.’
He picked up her hand and held it, looking at it as if he’d never seen a hand before.
‘You remember Sam, in the clinic? “Beautiful,” he said, “like polished mahogany.” And we just blast people to pieces.’ He gave her hand back with a small caress and stood up. ‘Sorry, I keep forgetting.’ Yola was puzzled but Fintan had got up. ‘Judit said your Mr Hans would see me now, should we go? Take me to your leader!’
Yola reached up for a hand. He helped her up.
The cool of the air-conditioning hit them almost as a chill when they opened the door of the adjutant’s house. Yola knocked and Hans jumped up when they came in; he came around to shake Fintan’s hand. Yola watched them: the tall, fair Norwegian and the shorter, darker Irish boy.
‘Well, Yola, are you going to explain these things to Fintan?’ Then, to Fintan, ‘She can, you know. One of our budding mines awareness instructors.’
‘No way, Hans! You forget I am on holiday. You can’t order me around today.’
She smiled at him, and went over to the window. It was peaceful outside. The dogs were sleeping out the heat of the day. The men at the bridge would be working through though – hour on, hour off. In the compound back at home it would be rest time too. She thought Gabbin might be in her secret place. Then she remembered that Gabbin had gone away. Why couldn’t these worries leave her alone? They said at home that he was with Uncle Banda, visiting relatives, but he had been away for a whole month! Sindu knew something, but she wasn’t saying. She forgot about Gabbin easily enough when he was around, but as soon as he was away there was a small Gabbin-shaped hole in her life.
‘We’ll start over here,’ Hans was saying. ‘These are the UXOs, the unexploded ordnance, things like mortars and rockets that never went off.’
Yola knew the routine, first these, then the big anti-tank mines looking like covered dinners on a plate, then the bounding mines that hopped up out of the ground to explode at waist-level, the little anti-personnel mines, like the one she had stood on, were on the last shelf. She listened for a moment, then turned her gaze to the window again. She could see the watchman sitting in the shade, leaning against the wall below. She opened the window and the sound of his radio came up to her.
‘What’s new, Abdul?’ she called.
He looked up with a start. ‘Eeeh, Miss Yola, I thought you were the voice of Allah. There is more trouble with Murabende,’ he went on. ‘Our government’s soldiers are going to clear the mines from the Noose, but the Murabendans say that this is their land and it must stay empty until the dispute is settled. There will be trouble.’
Yola remembered how she had looked down from the air on that loop of river and the tract of land it enclosed. There had been people there then: were they local Kasemban people who had crept in, or invading Murabendans?
‘You’re too gloomy Abdul, and since when did Allah speak with the voice of a girl?’ She heard the old man chuckle as she closed the window.
‘Look, I’ll open it,’ she heard Hans say. ‘So, here goes the trigger in this little tube. The detonator clips in here.’
Yola smiled, remembering the first day Hans had shown her a landmine. Suddenly she realised that Hans had stopped talking. The room was full of an unnatural silence. She turned. Hans was staring at Fintan, who was holding the open halves of one of the little anti-personnel mines. His face had gone white, his mouth was moving, but no words were coming out. He swayed. Hans moved quickly, held him and lowered him into a chair.
‘Put your head between your knees, Fintan! Yola, water – quick!’
They sat around the table in the conference room: Hans, Yola, Judit, who had walked in from her siesta in the middle of the crisis, and Fintan. Hans and Fintan were wet.
‘You said “Throw it”, so I did,’ said Yola ruefully.
In the end, Fintan didn’t actually faint. But Hans sent Yola with him when he insisted on getting something from his baggage. He rummaged in a holdall, pulling out a spaghetti of coloured wires and bits of electrical equipment.
‘I can’t believe it … I can’t believe it. Dad – of all people. It’s here somewhere. Our first prototype.’ Then he reached deep into a corner. ‘Got it!’ He straightened up, holding a bubble-wrapped ball in his hand. ‘Come on Yola, this is when you decide that you never knew me.’
Hans slit the tape. The four of them leaned forward as the wrapping fell apart. It looked perfectly innocent: a small plastic box with a domed top. There was an embossed picture of a stylised car on the lid.
‘Oh, so this is the air bag stabiliser you’ve been telling me about,’ said Hans.
‘Yes, sir. This is O’Farrell Engineering’s new air bag stabiliser.’ Fintan’s voice was harsh with irony. ‘If I may borrow your penknife, I’ll show you.’
He inserted the tip of his kife, gave a twist and the box opened. Yola heard Hans draw his breath in sharply, but she still couldn’t understand what was going on. The box was empty, just a plastic box with little compartments and something that looked like a black beetle.
‘But–’ she said.
‘Look Yola, look now!’ Fintan was holding the little anti-personnel mine beside the air bag stabiliser. ‘I’m seeing this for the first time too, remember.’
Suddenly she realised what the fuss was about. The insides were the same – the place for the trigger, the detonator … all there. It was a landmine. It was her turn to want to sit down.
Fintan turned to Hans. ‘But what is the microchip for? It is programmed to tell the difference between a pothole and a crash.’
‘You say it is programmed for a crash, but is it? These chips can be programmed for anything. What’s this?’ Hans picked up a tape cassette that was also in the bubble wrap. ‘The answer is probably here.’
He fished in his desk, pulled out a walkman and dropped the
tape into it. A few seconds’ silence, then the clicks, buzzes and screeches began.
‘Recognise that, Yola? That’s the sound our present detectors make.’ Then the sound changed. ‘That’s the one the army uses! Hear? Much more click to it. My God, they are all here!’ He clicked off the tape recorder and shook his head slowly. ‘We’ve been dreading this, Fintan. This chip has been programmed to listen for the sound of just about every mine detector except, perhaps, the one they use themselves. This is designed specifically to get us. Don’t you see, if there is just one of these in an area, or even if we think there might be one, we can no longer work. Mine detectors are out! I don’t know what your part in this is, Fintan, but I need coffee, then we will talk.’
19
An Inhumane Weapon
Hans drummed his fingers on the table. Fintan was helping himself to water from the filter. He had been talking for some time, telling them about the whole air bag project and answering their questions.
‘They said that the tape was just for test purposes. That’s why it had all those strange sounds on it.’
‘Ya, so. First,’ Hans said, ‘this is a landmine, there is absolutely no doubt about that. All the architecture is here: a place for the trigger, slots for the detonator and the explosive. Fintan, you must understand this. What you have here is an inhumane weapon that is banned by international agreement. There are nearly one hundred million landmines in the world, buried in the ground, waiting for people like Yola to step on them – these must be cleared using mine detectors. This mine is designed to kill deminers by exploding when their mine detectors pass over it. Because it is designed to prevent mine clearance, it is doubly inhumane. I must ask you this one question: does your father know what he is producing?’