Borderlines

by Michela Wrong

  ‘It’s not a valid analogy.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because the surgeon values human life, which is an absolute good, and you guys … Well, God knows what you guys value. Winning for the sake of winning, even when you’re representing a bunch of assholes. Your own salaries. You tell me. There’s a reason for all the jokes about lawyers at the bottom of the sea.’

  ‘How about the principle of a fair trial? If you believe in an adversarial system of justice, in thrashing out arguments in public, then you accept the principle that McVeigh should get the best representation the legal system can offer. I’d be perfectly happy to work for someone like that,’ I claimed. Even as the words left my mouth I wondered if they were true.

  ‘I must see you. Come to Zombie’s NOW,’ read the note on my desk.

  The peremptory tone immediately put my hackles up. Sharmila and I had just emerged from Winston’s office, where the three of us had agreed to focus our attentions on the guards killed during the original border incident in Sanasa. ‘We need to know if they had children, wives, dependents, where they prayed, what card games they preferred. We need to turn them into fully rounded human beings who were slaughtered and left grieving relatives behind, not statistics. And photographs, I need photographs,’ said Winston. But, reasoning that I might as well get it over with, I made my excuses and set off. I found Dawit on the large chocolate-coloured sofa, scowling at the barman, who scowled back with equal malevolence. He gestured for me to join him at a table in the tiny courtyard at the back, away from prying eyes.

  ‘What’s up, Dawit?’

  ‘I have to leave. You must help.’

  I felt a sour twinge of disappointment. I had been half anticipating this request from the day we’d met. ‘Just you wait. All they want from a Westerner is a visa,’ had run the line in my mother’s email: she had picked up on a mention of ‘a possible new friend’ in Lira. Dawit’s steady failure to live down to her expectations had been a quiet source of satisfaction to me. Not any more.

  ‘You and a million others. You know there’s nothing I can do on that front, Dawit, so why ask?’

  He stared at the wall and tightened his jaw. I gradually registered how dreadful he looked. The hollows around his eyes were the colour of ripe plums. He had not shaved for days, and the uneven patches of black stubble gave his face a mottled appearance. He was sporting the full Afro, in which I could spot specks of lint. His eyes were more watery than I’d ever seen them, and it occurred to me that he might have been crying. ‘This is the only favour I will ever ask you, Paula. Just this once. To save my life. You must know people.’

  I placed a hand gently on his skinny wrist. ‘What on earth has happened? You always said you wanted to stay. Why this change of heart?’

  He took a deep breath, nearly a gulp, grimaced over the dregs of his cold cappuccino, and began. ‘You know my idea for the cybernet café? Last week I finally received the satellite-dish equipment I ordered from Dubai. So I told the builder to pour the cement for the foundation. A great day. If you hadn’t been in The Hague I would have invited you to watch.’

  ‘I would have liked that.’

  ‘We were about to start on the walls. These buildings don’t take long to put up. So yesterday I went to the Ministry of Trade to get a licence. You need a licence for everything here, to run a café, to own a car, to fart, to sleep, to fuck. So I take my number and I queue for two hours and I hand in my ever-so-carefully filled-in form, all in my best handwriting. And the official, you know what he does?’ He looked at me with huge spaniel eyes, his cigarette trembling in his hand.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He laughs in my face. Yes, he laughs. He asks me if I would like to tear up the application right now, or whether I prefer him to do it after I have left. He tells me I should read the newspaper more carefully. And then he shows me a very teeny article reporting that the government has withdrawn the licences of the cybernet cafés in Lira and advising the owners that they must either remove the satellite dishes or turn the premises over to the government. The article quotes the minister of trade as saying these cafés have become “hotbeds of political intrigue” – hotbeds! – and are being used by enemy spies. The internet is the new front line and the government must control it, for the sake of the nation, blah-blah-blah.’

  Oh, God. ‘Is there any chance this is just a temporary thing, while the crisis lasts?’

  He laughed bitterly. ‘What makes you think this crisis is temporary, Paula? You haven’t read your Orwell. Dictators make sure their countries are in permanent crisis so they always have an excuse.’ It was the first time I’d heard him describe the president in that way. ‘At the moment we are in an undeclared state of war with A, next year it will be B, the year after that C, and then we can go back to A, maybe. We have six neighbours. There are plenty of variations available.’

  I tried desperately to think of some solution. ‘What if you open a café without the cyber bit?’

  He shook his head. ‘Oh, I asked that, too. There was no level of begging I would not stoop to. And this bastard laughed again. He was having his funniest morning for the year. And he said that in future any new cafés in Lira would be opened by the government. Apparently His Supreme Greatness has finally understood that the private sector cannot be trusted, so in future the government will run the economy.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘But you know the real reason, Paula?’ He pointed a trembling finger at me. ‘This guy says to me, “Did you really think we fought the revolution, my brother, in order for a bunch of teenagers with their arses falling out of their jeans to watch porn?” As though a man like that ever carried a gun.’ He snorted. ‘It’s envy. “We suffered, so now you must, too.” I hate that mentality.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘So, that is the end of my dream,’ he said dully. ‘I went out to the site and I told the builder to go home. He will take the bricks and the bags of cement and sell them. That bit is easy. The satellite dish will be harder. I’ll try to sell it on the black market, but who will want it? Maybe some cabinet minister who fancies watching Manchester United at home. There’s probably a law against that, too.

  ‘There is nothing left for me in this place. Living in a police state is a habit, like everything else, and if I stay I will get the habit, coming to Zombie’s, going home, coming here, going home, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards …’ his voice rose in a strained falsetto, reaching a near scream, and then he pounded the table, our cups bouncing on its metal surface, bellowing ‘… UNTIL I FUCKING DIE.’

  The barman came over, threw Dawit a meaningful glance, then walked away. I waited for his rage to subside. Finally, he said quietly, ‘This place is only good for people who have already died inside. You can see that for yourself. So you must help me leave.’

  I kneaded my forehead in my hands. ‘Oh, Dawit, Dawit, I wish I could. I could help you get a US visa – I can act as guarantor – but that’s not the point. You need the exit permit from the Ministry of Immigration. And I have no sway there. In fact, if I intervene, it could make things worse. Winston tried it a while back with an intern, and that intern is still stuck in Lira. “No special favours,” we’re always told.’

  There was a long pause while he digested my refusal. So that’s the end of the friendship, I thought. It was nice while it lasted. I felt numb.

  Finally, he nodded. ‘OK, I understand. Forget.’ His tone was surprisingly gentle. ‘I had to ask.’

  ‘I know.’

  He was silent for a long while.

  ‘Can you do me a smaller favour, then? If I cannot leave, then I need a proper job in Lira, or I will go crazy. The UN peacekeeping force is advertising. Support-staff jobs. Would you provide me with a character reference? Lie and say how much you like my driving and how punctual I am.’

  Something I could do. ‘Of course. Just give me the form.’

  He was kneading his forehead as he th
ought. ‘Once I have my toe in the UN crack, I will work my way. You have never seen that side of me, Paula. I have been a layabout all these months because I was working on the cybernet café, but I know how to make myself indispensable. It was how I survived at the front. The commanders needed me too much to send me off to die.’

  The moment of desperation had passed. He had recovered. He was already working out possibilities, making plans. But I noticed, as we talked, that he was no longer meeting my eyes.

  Sarah came to stay for a few days, stopping off on her way back from a conference in Mexico. ‘I’ll have you know that I’ve never been involved in anything like this before, but I’m going to do my best,’ she announced, when I opened Lake Cottage’s door.

  She was good at inventing obligatory little tasks – ‘We have to go shopping now, Paula, there’s nothing in the fridge’; ‘We have to walk the dogs – they’re going crazy’; ‘We have to clear the gutters or those leaves will block the drains.’ We worked ourselves into a sweat raking the lawn and burning leaves and, as the mundane routine took over, I found myself joshing with her, greedily soaking up her stories of office gossip and sexual peccadilloes, anything as long as it wasn’t Jake.

  But in the evenings, over suppers I could only pick at, the horrors re-established their dominion. The first few nights, I kept them to myself. Noticing my tight mouth and hunched shoulders, she switched on the television and thrust a glass of wine into my hand. ‘I brought a couple of mindlessly cheerful 1950s rom-coms, the ones you like.’ We pretended to watch them. On the third night, my defences crumbled, and I gave her a blow-by-blow account of what had happened in the days leading up to Jake’s death.

  Sarah gazed at me uncertainly. ‘I don’t really get this, to be honest. I’ve never understood why people get so fixated with the precise circumstances in which people die. If you and I had a row right now, I stormed out and got flattened just outside the gates by a truck, you’d obsess about the fact that we were on bad terms at the precise moment that the tyres ran over my chest. But why pick that split-second? Why is it representative? Why does it matter more than a split-second two hours earlier when we were giggling over a coffee, or all those evenings when we did homework together as kids, or played rounders in your back garden? Why does one atypical moment – certainly not a moment that held the key to our relationship – cancel out a lifetime’s friendship?

  ‘OK, so you had a period of estrangement from Jake. Do those months really “count”’ – she crooked her fingers in aerial quotation marks – ‘for more than the four years you spent with him? You two were good together, Paula, good enough for me to envy you, truth be told. I’m willing to bet you would have got back together again. Don’t overdo the self-flagellation. What did the workers trapped in the Twin Towers do when they realised they weren’t going to survive? They called their girlfriends, husbands and mums to tell them they loved them. Dying gives you a sense of perspective. Do you really think as the BMW flew off the bridge that Jake was going through a Paula-said-this-and-then-I-said-that-and-God-she’s-being-such-a-bitch routine in his head? Give him a bit of credit. If he thought about anything at all, he was thinking, I’m about to die and I really love her.’

  We were both weeping now. ‘But I’m never going to know that for certain.’ My voice came out as a croak. ‘For all I know, he looked across the seat at his wife and thought, I’m glad she and I are here, dying together. I may have strayed but this is the one who really matters. And you have to admit, Sarah, that that rather pulls the rug from under my feet. I don’t know whether I even have the right to mourn Jake. Maybe I’m the fool of the piece.’

  She sighed and wiped her cheekbones, smearing mascara across her face. She pottered around the kitchen for a bit, hunting for teabags, then turned to look at me. ‘You have a point. But even if that happened – and I doubt it – it doesn’t wipe out your time together. Nothing can. Perhaps it might help – I know you’re a joy-defying puritan at heart – if you tell yourself that that question is your life sentence, the price you have to pay for being a bit of a bitch at the end. Call it God having His ironic belly laugh.’

  ‘It’s a fuck of a heavy price.’

  She thought for a moment. ‘You know that Rolling Stones song, “You can’t always get what you want, but you might get what you need”? It’s not quite right, I’ve worked out. You get what you can stand. If you couldn’t stand it, you’d check out before you got there. In your case, I think you can stand a lot. You’re pretty tough, Paula.’

  28

  Abraham was standing in front of my desk, wearing an unfathomable expression. ‘Paula, I just got a call. The man did not identify himself. It was a bad connection, a mobile phone. He mentioned you. He said there had been some problem and that the doctor we met at the IDP camp – you remember him? The one who was arrested?’

  ‘George?’

  ‘Yes, George. The man said he is at Victory Hospital and we should go and find him there. Right away, he said.’

  I looked around the office. Winston had closed his door and was in murmured conversation inside with Sharmila. No point disturbing that. Two interns were on the balcony, sharing a coffee. ‘You got the car keys?’

  ‘Yes.’ We clattered down the marble stairs and I watched as he reversed the Toyota from its tight parking space in the courtyard with urgent precision. I hopped up into the passenger seat and we hit the main road, Abraham somehow managing to lock the doors, light a cigarette and switch on the air-conditioning as he roared through the gear changes.

  ‘But who was it?’

  ‘I don’t know. When I asked him, he said, “Just you go,” and then we either lost the connection or he hung up. But I think …’ He frowned.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I think it may have been Sammy.’

  Victory Hospital, a white two-storey building on a scrubby stretch on the outskirts of town, had been a gift from the People’s Republic of China. A symbol of co-operation, it replaced Lira’s colonial-era hospital, where settlers and Africans had once been treated in separate tin-roofed wings and family dependants camped on the lawns, draping drying laundry over the decorative flowerbeds. I had heard that the new facility was clean, modern and had a range of scanners the envy of the Horn of Africa. But it had the feel of a laptop computer that has yet to be extracted from its polystyrene packaging. Its glass front doors were smeared with the dusty handprints of the labourers who had installed them. I could see a couple of stainless-steel trolleys, still wrapped in plastic, parked down a corridor, and a stack of painted signs leaning against a wall.

  Abraham and I paced the lobby, waiting for a member of staff to materialise. I was beginning to feel uneasy. If George was still in detention, he might be there under armed guard. We might not be allowed to speak to him. That would be even likelier if we asked permission of a receptionist with no real authority. I looked at Abraham and could see he was thinking along similar lines.

  ‘Let’s find him ourselves.’

  We pushed on the nearest swinging doors and walked quietly through Accident & Emergency, pretending to know where we were going. Only two beds were occupied: a grandfather attached to an IV, mouth agape, wizened hands curled like crow’s feet on a bony chest; and a bored-looking young man with a bandaged leg, running a rosary through his hands. The rest of the beds were unmade; their red plastic mattresses had never been used.

  Swinging through the doors on the other side, we paused. ‘OK, we need to be systematic,’ said Abraham. ‘Military-style operation.’ We cased what was clearly Paediatrics next. A boy with an arm in plaster stared at us from his bed with soulful eyes as his mother stroked his brow. On another bed, a four-year-old was being rocked in the arms of a young woman. There was no one else. And so it went on: we sidestepped Surgery, Maternity, X-ray and Diagnostics and then – after exchanging apprehensive glances – ventured carefully into ICU. A young man, his face sallow with pain, lay sprawled behind a blue curtain, an oxygen mask over his face. It wa
s not George. We took the stairs at a run and checked out Oncology, Geriatric, Male, and Geriatric, Female. Nothing.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ I whispered. ‘We’ve been in just about every ward and haven’t met a single member of staff. This is the Mary Celeste of hospitals. Where is everyone?’

  ‘At lunch?’

  ‘All of them? At the same time?’

  We returned to the lobby. We looked up hopefully when we heard a woman’s heels, running, but they were not heading our way and the sound faded. A snatch of conversation exploded and was abruptly cut off, perhaps by one of those swinging doors. Abraham shrugged and went outside to light a cigarette, gazing into the near distance. I hiked myself up on the main desk, bottom in the air, craning to see if I could spot a register, files of any kind. I whipped around at a sharp tapping noise, fearing I’d been caught in the act. It was Abraham, rapping his knuckles on the dirty glass wall and gesturing for me to join him.

  ‘There’s one place we have not looked,’ he said sombrely, inclining his head. ‘There.’

  I followed his line of sight and felt a wrench to my stomach. ‘HOSPITAL MORGUE,’ read the sign. ‘STAFF ONLY’.

  I think we both saw it at the same time. A trail of dark blotches running from a bristle of weeds over the gravel to the concrete ramp that disappeared under the morgue’s metal doors. There the trail became a scarlet smear, the sort left when a leaking package is dragged rather than carried. Abraham walked over slowly, inspecting the ground, then crouched and touched the smear with one long, elegant finger. He looked at me, straightened and pushed at the doors with two hands.

  Noise, fear and panic hit us in the face.

  The staff were all inside, of course: that was why we hadn’t bumped into any of them. They were working frantically over the multi-limbed heap that covered most of the floor. Some of the bodies were wrapped, Lazarus-style, in white winding sheets, but most were clothed, dusted in blue-grey powder. There had not been time for cosmetic preparation or discreet concealment. Looking around, I took in a snarling grimace of teeth, curled fingers, an exposed buttock, bare feet that had lost their shoes in some final, scrabbling panic. A splinter of bone poked untethered from a thigh; a curl of yellow entrails trickled, obscenely suggestive, from a stomach gash. I found myself, surreally, thinking of the offal that hangs in the windows of Chinese restaurants. They did not smell. Or, rather, they did not smell as I expected – the sweet stink of putrefaction you so often read about. No, they smelt of … fresh meat. Which was disgusting in its own way. Human beings are supposed to smell of sweat and sex, hormones and vomit. They should not bring to mind fresh sawdust and a butcher’s chopping block.