One Day in May

by Catherine Alliott

  I switched the answer machine on. Dominic rang about an hour later, and my whole body leaped at his voice, but stoically, I didn’t answer. Knew I mustn’t. Loved the fact that he’d rung, though. Played the tape over and over: ‘Hattie, it’s me, I’m worried about you. Will you ring?’

  Laura had flown off early that morning for a shoot in Paris. The flat was full of flowers from Hughie for her birthday, white roses everywhere. I sat amongst them, hands pressed together. Dominic rang again at lunchtime. Again I didn’t answer. And anyway, I was out, I’d gone out to buy the Standard. Princess Diana had replaced Dominic on the front page, but inside was a profile of the young man who was to be Our Man Abroad, heading up the Foreign Office. More photos of him: one as a schoolboy at Harrow, another as an undergraduate at Cambridge, and one of him leaning over a five-barred gate, smiling, taken outside The Pink House. No Letty, this time. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. The following day, in The Times – I bought all the papers – a serious article by Michael Jenkins, entitled ‘The Man Who Would Be King’, all about Dominic being the young pretender, potentially the next Prime Minister. I read it three times; cut it out and stashed it away with the others.

  Funny how the mind works: left alone, to my own devices, sitting in the flat, going to the window periodically to press my forehead against the glass, I wondered idly if I could have my job back. If that was why he was ringing. If Letty could… if Letty could what, Hattie? Below, on the pavement a skateboarder skidded into the gutter. Understand? Forgive? How was that little scenario going to play out then, hm? Or – or maybe I could work somewhere else in the Commons? So I could be near him. The skateboarder got up and brushed himself down. Because, what was so terrifying, what was making me hyperventilate, was the thought of never seeing Dominic again. Which unless I was there, in the Commons, I wouldn’t. Panic rose within me. The idea grew, from a little seed. Yes, I could work in another department. Defence, perhaps. A friend, Rebecca, worked there, for that nice woman Fiona Snell. Perhaps in a few months’ time, when the dust had settled, I could go back? Reapply, when it had all blown over? After all, I’d been on a career ladder. I couldn’t just abandon that, could I?

  I left the flat at lunchtime, as was now my routine, when I knew the first edition of the Standard came out, leaving Tanja, our help, in the flat. When I came back, she was putting her coat on, getting ready to go.

  ‘A man called, for to deliver a letter,’ she told me in her broken English.

  ‘Oh?’ The world stopped on its axis. Swayed. ‘Who?’

  ‘Yes, tall man. Nice face. He no say who.’

  My heart kicked in. ‘And the letter?’

  ‘On your bed. I put it.’

  I rushed down the hall, throwing the Standard on a chair. I heard Tanja open the front door, and close it behind her. An envelope was indeed on my pillow. I opened it with trembling hands. Darling, please come back? It’s you I love? Somehow we’ll work something out?

  I spread open the thick creamy sheet. It was from Hal. Two words.

  ‘You whore.’

  9

  Split airport was as sterile and formulaic as any other European terminus, but there the similarity ended. As we emerged from Customs, the concourse was heaving: noisy, hot and impossibly airless. Fear and panic were tangible: on the faces of the women in headscarves clutching children by their wrists, in the voices of the men, shooting up an arm and shouting for them to follow, in the old and bewildered, darting frightened eyes, struggling under the weight of precious bundles. Nearly everyone was leaving, or trying to leave. Unlike us. We were going against the tide, skirting the main clot of traffic, keeping to the walls, bumping against armed guards with cold rifles and stony faces as we kept the UN passes around our necks firmly to the fore.

  My father had rung some contacts, reluctantly, when Kit had said yes, I could come out as an aid volunteer. But only packing food parcels. And only on the coast, where it was safe. But yes, he could cut through the red tape, such as it was. It was chaos; they just needed help. Nevertheless, papers of some kind were required and Dad, sensing something had happened to me, that I really needed this, had used his press connections. He’d also quietened his distraught wife, who was beside herself at the thought of two of her children in a war zone, and, together with a photographer from the Independent, I’d flown out.

  ‘Will you be all right?’ Paul, my photographer friend, shouted to me as, alarmingly, we began to get separated in the crush. He headed towards a man in sunglasses waving his name on a card. I panicked. No, was my overwhelming reaction, no I won’t, and I attempted to follow him through the teaming mêlée. But then I saw Kit.

  ‘Yes – there’s my brother!’

  Except I barely recognized him. Two stone lighter – and he’d been thin anyway. His cheeks were sunken, his hair long, face very brown. His eyes scanned the crowd.

  ‘Kit!’

  He saw me and muscled across. We embraced. He quickly introduced me to a fellow ICRS man, Brett, a Dutchman, equally brown and lean, and they hurried me outside. Through another swarm of people we dodged our way to a Bedford lorry down the street, engine running, a girl revving it impatiently. She had a tank full of petrol, Kit explained as we ran towards it, which was like gold dust. Didn’t want anyone stealing it at gunpoint. Brett ran to leap in the back and Kit bundled me in the front. Behind us, in steerage, three young Irishmen, all aid workers, were huddled with their backpacks. They’d also just arrived, apparently, and Kit assured me he wouldn’t have been able to collect me, to leave his post, but for these three: I’d have had to make my own way through Italy and across the border. As Brett banged the roof in the back, Fabianne, French and tight-lipped, let out the clutch, and we rumbled down Split’s main highway, dotted with bombed-out buildings and teaming with military. We weaved through the armoured vehicles, leaving clouds of dust in our wake. The sun was a huge shimmering orb on the horizon, and despite the obvious tension in the air, on the faces of my brother and his comrades, I couldn’t help feeling exhilarated as we swept through town. I was here. I’d made it.

  Kit and Fabianne were silent until we’d left the city, their eyes constantly roving, watchful. Only when we were speeding towards surprisingly green, panoramic countryside, did they relax slightly; nod to each other in relief. I was awestruck by Kit’s new mantle of seriousness; even more so as the new aid workers in the back, aware we were now out of immediate danger, leaned forward to ask questions. Fabianne cut in occasionally in broken English, but it was Kit who did the talking. I listened to his answers in silence. About four thousand, he reckoned, killed at Omarska, including most of Prijedor’s intellectuals: teachers, lawyers, politicians – those were the sort of people they were after, but anyone would do. Anyone with an education, or who was in the way. Universities had been raided by the military in Srebrenica and Sarajevo, and professors and students were rounded up daily. Their families too. Some were shot on the spot, some sent to camps. No one knew who to trust. I learned that people knew their torturers, had grown up with them, gone to school with them.

  ‘Like the Jews in Nazi Germany?’ My only contribution, in a small voice.

  ‘Exactly. And no one thought it could happen again.’

  The boys in the back were far more informed than I was. I listened as they had confirmed that which they’d already feared: atrocities they’d gleaned through Reuters, information agencies back home. All true.

  At length, on a long stretch of dusty road, we fell silent. We were approaching the mountains now, beautiful majestic scenery rising before us. Fabianne shifted clunking gears as we lurched about, then began to climb. In the foothills, a little village would materialize, or the remains of one. A shattered mosque here, a few roofless houses there, endless piles of rubble. Hens pecked in the dirt, and a skinny brown dog slunk by. A clutch of people stood at the roadside: one or two old men and a tall woman, a few children peeking around her skirt like mice. The woman followed our lorry warily, her eyes dull.


  ‘Are they frightened of us?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re frightened of everyone. But they see “Aide Humanitaire” on the side and they know it’s OK.’

  Kit pointed out the shelled school, then a tent used as a makeshift hospital. His hands were brown and sinewy, his voice strong, not broken as it had been on the phone: informative now, not emotional. I felt very proud. Humble, too.

  Serb checkpoints had to be crossed, papers checked. Very young soldiers with guns at right angles to their chests came to the window. My heart began to pound as they checked my papers, then Kit’s, then Fabianne’s. They went round the back, checked Brett and the boys’, came back and asked Kit some questions, aggressive now. He shrugged. They cursed, then went round the lorry and offloaded some boxes from the back.

  ‘What were they doing?’ I whispered as they finally waved us on.

  ‘Taking food parcels. And they’re pissed off because we usually carry a lot more, but not today.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because we knew they’d take it. We usually travel at night when there’s only a couple of them on the checkpoint and only a few boxes get dragged off. But during the day they swarm like locusts. They say it’s going to Serb civilians, but that’s bollocks. They keep it for themselves, for the military. It’s their rations for the next few weeks.’

  ‘But that’s outrageous. You’re neutral, aren’t you? Protected by the UN?’

  Kit shrugged. ‘What can you do? Nothing. Not unless you want to be accused of smuggling arms into the city.’

  ‘So how much do you usually carry?’

  ‘About twenty tons is our limit, and we’ve got five trucks. Other agencies have more, but we’re quite small.’

  ‘And you deliver? The food? I mean, you personally? I thought you just packed it.’

  ‘I do now,’ he said, shortly. ‘Only recently. And usually only to villages, which is reasonably safe.’

  ‘So where’s not safe?’

  ‘Sarajevo.’

  ‘Have you ever been there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How often?’

  ‘Once or twice.’

  ‘Do Mum and Dad know?’

  ‘No. Well, Dad might.’

  Taking aid into Sarajevo. I didn’t even ask how dangerous that was. Knew that, even with the humanitarian message on the side, rules were broken here and he was risking his life.

  ‘But where we’re going now,’ he swept on, reading my thoughts, ‘which is essentially the Dalmatian coast, is safe. You’ll see.’

  Except for the father of three, I thought. Kit’s doctor friend, the one shot by snipers. Only relatively safe. Rather like the road we were on now, I decided, although ‘road’ was pitching it high. A thin, elevated snake of potholed shingle wound through the mountains, either side of which crumbling rock fell away at an alarming angle. It seemed to me to have all the qualities necessary to facilitate a fatal accident, and I wondered how this unwieldy Bedford managed at night when they usually travelled. I voiced as much tentatively to Kit, who shrugged and said you got used to it, although of course it didn’t help not having headlights.

  ‘No headlights?’

  ‘These hills are full of snipers. You don’t want to announce yourself.’

  Of course you don’t, I thought, gazing down the steep embankment to the gully and certain death below.

  ‘And although we’re only going a bit further up the coast from Split, this route through the mountains is much safer than the coastal one.’

  ‘Right,’ I said weakly, shutting my eyes as two tons of articulated lorry shuddered and wheezed around a hairpin bend.

  At Heronisque, where we were based, however, I relaxed slightly. A pretty coastal village with a Mediterranean feel to it, albeit shabby and clearly shelled in places, here life was going on in a relatively normal fashion. As the evening drew in, old men sat in a dusty square running beads through their fingers, a few women bustled into red-tiled houses with baskets: one or two children played in the street, and businesslike dogs trotted by. Every so often you could hear the odd pop of gunfire from the hills, which sounded like an old motorbike backfiring in the distance. Other than that, one could almost be in Italy, or Greece, I decided.

  An old boathouse on the quay had been requisitioned as the packing station, and Kit took me there first. Outside were the other Bedfords, and inside, checking and loading scores of boxes of food and other essentials, medicines too, were a dozen or so people. All nationalities were here: Swedish, German, French, Spanish. They broke off at the sight of us, looking tired and drawn, but were all very welcoming as Kit introduced me. That night, over a hastily prepared supper of tinned food heated over a Primus stove in the entrance to the warehouse, we sat around cross-legged. As I looked about me, listening to the chatter, I knew this was right. Knew I’d been right to come, even though, as the evening wore on, it became increasingly apparent that my brother wouldn’t be staying.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked him as he began saying goodbyes all round, shaking hands. He glanced at me warily, leaving me till last.

  ‘With the Irish boys to Telospique. We’ve got another packing station there and they need more people. More aid is coming in there from Sweden.’

  ‘Where’s Telospique?’

  ‘About fifty kilometres away.’

  I wanted to say – but surely, because we’re brother and sister, surely we could be together – but I knew it didn’t work like that.

  ‘Closer to the fighting?’

  ‘A bit, yes. Nearer the front lines, anyway.’

  I nodded, silenced.

  ‘But you’ll be safe here.’

  ‘I know.’

  We hugged tearfully, then. Held each other close. It was dark: a sultry night had descended with a huge rusty moon, and only the lapping of the waves on the quay disturbed the silence. From behind us, one of the Bedfords started its choleric rumbling. I glanced round and saw the silent Fabianne behind the wheel, revving the engine. Kit got in beside her and this time, I didn’t make it hard for him. Didn’t ask if Dad knew. But as I watched them go I thought how, in the last few hours, I’d got closer to my brother than I’d ever been. And I wondered when I’d see him again.

  I threw myself into my work in the warehouse. It was hard, physical labour, mind-numbing in its monotony – checking, packing, heaving boxes around, slamming a lorry on the back when it was loaded, then watching, hands on hips, a brief moment of respite as it trundled off into the hills in convoy. But I was glad of it. This was what I’d come for: to forget myself, to help, and whilst it was never enjoyable, it was therapeutic. I learned a smattering of French, Swedish and German from the people around me – even though everyone spoke English – and an awful lot about life. Particularly from the family I was billeted with.

  In a half-baked, befuddled sort of way, I’d had an idea we aid workers would all be housed together, but of course that was impractical and we were spread about the town. Unlike the others who were mostly in the centre, I was on the outskirts, in a tiny house built into a hillside. Savage barking dogs lived in the yard outside, and three generations of family within. An ancient grandmother, who rarely moved from her high-backed settle by the fire, and dressed entirely in black, including some sort of bonnet on her head, headed up the family – or so it seemed to me. No English was spoken. An old man, her husband, equally wizened and bent double, spent a lot of time shouting at the dogs. The daughter-in-law, Ibresqua, known as Ibby, did all the shopping, cleaning, cooking and coaxing of meagre vegetables from the patch at the back, helped by her six-year-old daughter, Mona, olive-skinned, with pigtails. Ibby’s husband, the old couple’s son, was in the mountains, fighting the ‘Chetchkins’, I learned, and although the other men in the village came back weekly, he hadn’t been back for a while. Ibby, pregnant with her second child, was kindly but preoccupied. Mona giggled shyly at me from behind her hand. The elderly couple didn’t address me at all. Meals were taken in the boathouse with
the other aid workers, and all this family provided was a silent bed. I took it gratefully. A slip of a room with an iron bedstead and skinny mattress, a tiny wooden table with crucifix above. On the opposite wall, a photograph of a burly young man with a luxuriant black moustache, who I took to be Ibby’s husband. As I lay down every evening, exhausted after a day’s work and the strain of being amongst strangers who spoke little English, I looked at Ibby’s husband, before I went to sleep. Only then did I allow myself to think of Dominic.

  The weeks trudged by. Once or twice I saw Kit, but only because he’d made an effort to come back to Heronisque en route from a convoy, I felt. The last thing I wanted to be was a burden, so on his next visit, I assured him in the strongest terms I was fine. I didn’t see him again.

  Day after day I packed and loaded and slapped that lorry, and night after night, after supper, I slipped quietly back into my house in the hillside, the dogs no longer trying to tear my ankles off.

  Then, three months into my stay, dysentery descended on our little community. Gretel, the German girl, got it first, then Brett, and then one or two of the other boys. They’d be fine, I was assured by the others, it was an occupational hazard out here, but for the moment, we lacked drivers. I’d been out on convoy once or twice before, but only as lookout. Now, for the first time, with a new young Italian boy beside me, I was behind the wheel. Initially I only went to villages close by, then, presumably when they saw I could bring the Bedford back in one piece, I went further up into the mountains. Always at night, almost always in convoy, always with no headlights. Sometimes, though, the length of the journeys and the state of the roads meant dawn was breaking as we returned. I’d grip the wheel with Pablo beside me, both of us scanning the road, not just for boulders to take the front wheel off now, but for bandit gangs too: modern-day highwaymen with AK47s, ready to commandeer the truck, and then who knows what fate befell the occupants. Each time I bumped back down those perilous dusty roads and felt the empty Bedford lurching into the familiar potholes that led to the village, I sent up a silent prayer. Thank you, God.