The Dhow House (7 page)

Alone in the house that night she heard many sounds normally masked by the presence of people; the mechanical chirr of the slender-tailed nightjar, the low scoping cry of an owl, half-strangled sounds of alarm she could not identify.

She awoke – how much later she could not say – and sat up with a jolt to a crisp gunshot sound. She listened intently for a few minutes before she was sure it was only a shutter snapping against its frame, somewhere down the long corridor of the house’s second storey. The house swallowed the wind and funnelled it to the back. The house was an amphitheatre, every sound magnified by its wall-less mouth, open to the sea.

She stood. She didn’t know where she was going, she didn’t care. She had no talent for ambivalence, for inhabiting this in-between place. She had spent all her life on the edge of accomplishment, of finality. She had no talent anymore for process.

She started walking down the long passageway, lined by louvred windows on one side and nut-brown wood on the other. It led to the master bedroom where her uncle and aunt slept. They must have come home at some point before the midnight curfew. At its turn, on an L-shaped bend, was Storm’s room. In the strip of light visible under the door shadows flitted back and forth.

She returned to her room quickly and had nearly closed the door behind her when another opened with a crack. She leaned back into the shadows.

Two bodies emerged. Through the crack in her door she saw them, in the dim corridor as they serpentined down the spiral staircase. When their outlines had disappeared down the stairs she went to stand at the top step.

She could see only a rectangular piece of the living room. In view was the top of Storm’s head. Evan – she knew it was him from his voice – had walked away. She heard the fridge open and shut. Storm sat on the white sofa, his back towards the stairs. A hand appeared and worked its way through Storm’s hair. It lingered on the crown of his head. Storm’s paler hand clasped it, arrested its progress.

She stumbled backwards, hitting her heel on the wrought iron balustrade. She had to breathe in sharply to avoid crying out.

‘What was that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I heard something.’

Then the padding of feet, coming to the stairs, mounting them, feet that were used to owning the house and the night.

She flung herself into bed. She darted out her hand and drew the mosquito net closed. A crack of light appeared in the door. Then the door shut.

‘It’s nothing,’ she heard Storm say to Evan outside her door, the only sound now the lean palm trees battering their heads against the house. ‘They’re all asleep.’

II

BLACK-BELLIED BUSTARD

A tall, ginger-haired man was coming towards her, striding fast.

‘You alright?’

She shook her head.

‘It’s 44 degrees in the shade. It gets to you here.’ He put a hand on her elbow. ‘You look like you’re about to swoon.’

‘Swoon.’ Silver stars sparked and died in her eyes. ‘I haven’t heard that word in a hundred years.’

‘Well, you look old, but not that old. What are you doing out here anyway?’

She had walked to the edge of the compound to escape camp, its disinfectant smell, the tinny radio that sang with local pop-songs, always, from the nursing station, the scabbed knees of the patients, the issues of the
Economist
and
Prospect
on her desk and which she had read so many times their edges had curled.

‘Here.’ The man held out a bottle of Gatorade.

‘Where did this come from?’

‘Alabama, probably, courtesy of the UN.’ The man’s face carved itself into a dismissive grimace. ‘You got to hand it to the UN, it sure knows how to cart bottled drinks around the globe. I wonder what the carbon footprint of this one is.’

His words didn’t quite cohere in her mind. She drank it in one go, its sickly lime slipping down her throat. ‘I’m out of practice,’ she said. ‘The heat,’ she added, for measure.

‘I heard you were in Helmand. Weren’t you in Iraq too?’

‘News travels fast.’
Andy
, that was his name. It came to her. They had been introduced briefly that morning. ‘How did you know?’

‘Don’t worry about it, it’s probably hotter here.’

‘I’ve been in England too long.’

‘I know, I try to spend six months in the place, max. Long enough to file a tax return, short enough not to be corrupted by money and house prices.’

She had to smile. There were always characters like this, everywhere she worked – thin, ironic men who survived on a diet of sardonic quips and servitude.

The field hospitals were always the same, too, remote colonies, advance parties sent to the moon. A generator, a water filtration unit, a backup generator. Transparent plastic boxes full of documents stacked high and forming a maze in the logistics tent like an art installation in the turbine hall of the Tate Modern. These were full of procurement orders, Hilux truck manuals, health and safety procedures.

Andy disappeared. The sun was levering towards the earth, just beyond the accommodation tents. She took an inventory of this new home. All present and correct: generator, back-up generator; refrigerated Portakabin where freezers for the blood and plasma stock were kept; a much smaller rectangle where the food freezers hummed. The triage tent, ICU, recovery bay, processing tent, staff compound. It was a functional version of the travelling circuses that used to cluster in the summer near their house just off Clapham Common. Here, the circus animals were Giacometti copies of their tiger and elephant cousins: scrawny goats which tottered around the tents and the donkeys, and the camels floating regally on the outskirts of camp like a bored imperial guard.

She had arrived at Gariseb in early February, just after the hottest time of year had passed. With summer – December and January – came the
Jilal
, the season of no rain. The heat became more intense with each day until it could not be withstood. She shied away from the sun, fleeing to the scrawny shade offered by the three haggard acacias. The spindled trees, the dull ochre hills and their copper ridges cooked in convection waves. She hadn’t thought such heat possible, apart from furnaces, or the epicentre of a solar flare.

The high plain on which Gariseb sat was surrounded by green knuckle-shaped mountains and stately equatorial skies. The camp straddled a border in the desert, a straight line as arbitrary as any drawn by an imperium. Across these invisible boundaries famished people materialised daily. They appeared first as dark question marks flanked by goats and pitted camels, or alone, burdened only by the hump of what they could carry on their backs.

The wounded were transmitted to the hospital in pickups. The camp had a trio of dingy tents, shaky prefab lozenges that housed the camp office, the satellite phone, the one and only computer. There was no mobile signal, not even a local radio station. No news reached them or would, she knew, other than the BBC World Service, which they could listen to on the satellite Internet connection, and occasional telephone calls to the capital city. Emails came once a day in a consolidated block via satellite phone.

For the first two weeks at Gariseb she dreamt of helicopters; the angry angel of the American Black Hawks or the ashen UN beasts of burden, plucking out the souls who made the mistake of staying too late. She couldn’t bear to fly in helicopters. It was the way they came down. She’d seen it, more than once. They dropped from the sky like stones.

The battlefield was different here. It was mobile, a fluid stain in the empty quadrant of the south of the country. Her previous postings had been further from the fighting, and an army, British or American, had been either on site or nearby. In Gariseb they had no backup; the British army base was almost five hundred kilometres away. The violence from which the casualties were envoys could easily reach out and engulf them. Even as they ate their lunch of goat or camel in lime and chilli she would keep an eye on the door of the mess tent, expecting the snouts of AKs to appear at any moment. At night she slept fully clothed, a full army-issue Osprey water bottle beside her bed in case she had to flee into the desert.

It was two months before she acclimatised. In the afternoons, when the heat was at its peak, she would stand in the spiky shadow thrown by an
Acacia mellifera
, the sweet-thorn tree. The ground was pitted with tracks – the tiny Vs of dik-diks, the unmistakeable tyre tread of a puff adder, hopefully now far away. The fissure valleys that surrounded camp had been cut by rivers, long dried up. She imagined lions lurking behind the ridge, watching her.

‘Don’t even try to understand this situation,’ Andy told her on one of those nights when they both stood outside, waiting for the cool of evening to offer respite. ‘You’ll get nowhere.’

She understood well enough. She had the advantage of a specialist weekend seminar, held in a village whose name she was sworn not to repeat, located in one of the flat minor shires north-west of London. There she had sat in a Chequers-like mansion surrounded by people like her, plucked ripe on the professional tree, who two weeks later would pitch up in Manila or Lahore or Erbil, all of them looking wistfully out the window, already nostalgic for the moral certainties, forty kinds of yoghurt and imported sauvignon blanc of home.

There, experts informed her that Gariseb was located in a blasted vector of semi-arid scrubland, seasonally desertified, between four countries. To the north was a stable country of water and vine-choked terrazas. To the north-west, a newly formed nation that had split from its larger cousin, and was busy prospecting for oil. To the east was a country that had imploded, ungovernable, a ‘failed state’, a ‘haven for international terrorism’ in US State Department-speak.

In the failed state/haven, aid workers were taken as spies and informants and were at risk of being shot on sight. To the west, in the newly formed country, aid was still vital to the project of nation-building, and welcome. But there, in the last two months, old rivalries between the major ethic groups of the country, the Bora and the Nisa, had erupted. Pockets of random, non-state violence – a cattle raid here, a shoot-up there about profits made from a palm wine shebeen – had left hundreds of young men dead.

The conflict seemed to have taken its cue from the landscape. It was gaunt, half-hearted. The real war was in Gikayo, a hundred kilometres away, and in the coastal city of Gao, which looked out into the Arabian sea.

In Gariseb the days started at 6am. The sun appeared without warning, a clouded disk that had been hovering in the sky all night. But within a minute it charged, heraldic, into the equatorial sky. She took three bucket showers a day. The dust clumped in her nostrils; if she blew them in the arid air the tissue came away black.

At night the shadows were stone. She stood on the perimeter of the light thrown by the generator’s striplights. Sometimes she thought she saw shapes, bundle-sized, moving from thorn tree to rock; child goat-herders on the outskirts of their employers’ land, straggling behind their quick-trotting charges.

The land was heartless. Or rather, it could have little use for them, for anyone. This indifference was so absolute it was almost cleansing. The brassy ridges of the hills broadcast a curious pulsing intent, like a heartbeat. The hills knew they didn’t belong there, they had never seen their kind before, these medical colonists with their moon tents and solar-powered walk-in refrigerator and strong boxes and provisions flown in twice a month. The long resinous grass that came and died the one week they had rain wagged its head in disapproval in the rare wind. It was part of the place’s conspiracy.
I know you
, it seemed to say her, with its bare hills that leaned so readily into the night.
I know what you are doing here.

‘Okay, I think we’re almost there. You can finish up?’ A question curled in Rafael’s voice, but he did not stay to hear it answered. He was already behind her, shucking off his gloves.

In the two months she had worked alongside Rafael, she had managed to glean that he was a Madrileño. He certainly looked the part: thin, edgy, a smoker. There was a bit of the dandy to him, if only because his goatee beard was always perfectly trimmed. Harsh glasses concealed fine caramel eyes. In the evenings he set himself personal building projects, working with the mechanics in the shed, fiddling with drills and old light bulbs. He produced light fixtures he referred to as ‘sculptures’.

Rafael had been an anarchist in university; he was arrested and held for five months after a student protest, he’d told her. She wasn’t sure if that experience explained the narrow, hard streak within him. As a surgeon he was fussy, exacting. She had the sense that he might have perceived she was the better seamstress, where arterial surgery was concerned, and resented her for it.

That day’s casualty came late, at four o’clock. Rafael unwound shrouds of gauze, sticky with flesh, to reveal a sabre wound to the tibia. It was deep – this is what distinguished it from a normal knife wound. Sabres were invented for a reason; they could slice cleanly through sinew and tendon and bone.

They set to work. It proved a surprisingly easy job. She sutured under Rafael’s exacting eye. They were done within an hour.

She pulled aside the curtain and threw her gloves into the hospital waste bin. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a sack – rags, perhaps, on one of the few rusted trolleys. It was parked beside the tent, against the billowing walls. As she approached the bundle twitched.

She put her hand out and touched it. The bundle turned over and revealed a dark face. Dull eyes stared at her.

She asked her name. The dull eyes followed her lips. She pointed to her ear. The woman shook her head. Two claw-like hands emerged from the bundle and went to her ears, then quickly apart.
Boom
, she mouthed, her mouth opening in a soundless oval.

‘I will find you a bed,’ she mouthed. She lay her head sideways on her folded hands.