The shelter they led us to was like a broad tunnel dug into the hillside, orderly inside with people sleeping in lines on mats or low wooden beds. There was an open area in the center where those who were not asleep were milling around. We set up a table, weighed and measured the kids, and asked questions. The height-for-weight ratio was about eighty-five percent on average, which wasn’t bad; eighty percent was the danger point. It meant that the people would be in a poor state when they reached us, but not as bad as the last time.
The refugees were coming from a fairly limited area of the western highlands within a band of about forty miles either side of where we were in the Tessalay corridor. So far, the crop losses seemed to be focused in this one band. That backed up what Gunter had said to me at the embassy party. But, then, this was only the start of the swarming season and it was hard to know what was going on elsewhere in Kefti. From the picture we were building up, we estimated that between five and seven thousand refugees were on the move, heading for Safila.
I asked everyone about Huda Letay but they said that no one was here from Esareb because it was a large town and the crisis was not affecting the towns as yet.
O’Rourke had set up in a corner, examining people who were sick. There were all the usual illnesses which went with hunger: diarrheas, dysenteries, respiratory problems, some measles cases, but nothing unexpected and no meningitis. Even so, if we didn’t have the drugs we needed it wouldn’t take long for these people to turn Safila into a death camp again.
We asked RESOK to make an announcement, warning the refugees about the food situation in Nambula, and saying that they might be better staying put, but these people just shrugged or laughed. It was obvious to them that where there were Western agencies and the UN they had a better chance of getting food than here. I remember looking round at the people, when RESOK were giving the address, and thinking—yes, I will see you all again and your skin will be tight over your faces, so that your mouths are trapped in a grin, and your hair will be thin, and you will not be able to walk and your children will be dead and there is nothing any of us can do about it. It is awful to feel responsibility and have no power. We set off back to Adi Wari at the end of that day, when it got dark.
When we reached the hospital, we found that Muhammad had already been taken back to Safila. O’Rourke stayed to look at some cases in the hospital, and I walked to the RESOK offices. I explained to Hagose about the low supplies in eastern Nambula. I suggested he try to disperse the refugees amongst the villages here which had food. But he gave me a familiar look which said, “Don’t try to kid me that the West can’t come up with food when it wants to. We know about the wine lakes and the grain mountains.” When I got back to the KPLF, O’Rourke had found a Land Rover, which we could take back to Safila, and had arranged for a truck to escort us to the border. From there we would continue on our own.
The air was getting warmer, and the soft earthy smell of Nambula drifted through the open windows. The truck ahead stopped, and O’Rourke pulled up too. After a few moments the truck set off again, branching off from the track we had been following. It was clear that we must be close to the border. The KPLF knew where the line was. Half an hour later the truck stopped again, and this time the soldiers got out. We got out too, and said rather over-the-top good-byes, shaking their hands, sharing embraces, full of camaraderie as if we’d met on holiday and it was time to go home.
“Any second now we’ll be swapping addresses,” O’Rourke muttered to me as he extracted himself from the second effusive embrace with the same soldier. “If this goes on much longer, I’ll be bearing this man’s child and washing his socks.”
When the sound of their engine had died away we stood for a while in the open desert. The sky was a huge arc of stars, bursting with light.
“You did good up there,” he said, nodding back towards Kefti.
“Not as good as you.”
The air was heady. We were standing on sand which felt cool underneath my feet. We were standing very close, looking at each other.
“Shall we drive on then?” he said.
He was right that we should get away from the border because it wasn’t too safe around there. Besides, it was already ten o’clock and we were a good five hours from Sidra. I drove for a while. Then we swapped. We were both very tired. I think it was the relief at being out of Kefti which let the tiredness out. I could only just see him in the glow from the instrument panels. His shirt was rolled up over his forearms. His arms and wrists were strong, adult-looking. I had never really thought about wrists before, but suddenly these seemed like the most beautiful wrists I had ever seen, such strong wrists, such manly wrists, such brave wrists, such wondrous wrists.
“How far do you think we should go tonight?” he said, then looked slightly embarrassed, realizing what he’d said.
“You’re driving.”
A little later he brought the truck to a halt, and cut the ignition.
We lit a fire and sat by it on a piece of tarpaulin. O’Rourke brought out a bottle of whisky.
“Where’d you get that?” I said, surprised.
“KPLF.”
He had some dope as well. We watched the fire. There was one big black log, becoming white and dimpled underneath, crumbling into the embers. When he passed me the joint our hands brushed. We didn’t talk at first, then I lay back on the tarpaulin and he lay back too, away from me, and we talked.
He told me that his father had been a diplomat and he had been brought up in various parts of Africa and in the Far East and had been in the Peace Corps when he left medical school. His father was dead now and his mother lived in Boston. He had become disillusioned with medicine and had worked in New York for a long time making corporate films and commercials for drug companies and a lot of money.
“Then it all fell to pieces.”
“How?”
He didn’t say anything for a while, then, “I don’t want to talk about that . . . if you don’t mind.”
“All right.”
“Tell me why you came out here,” he said.
I told him a certain amount because I was stoned. But I didn’t tell him about Oliver. We fell silent. He passed me the joint and our hands touched again. We were alone. It was so tantalizingly close. We mustn’t, I thought. I thought about Linda. I thought about going back to Safila. I lay back on the tarpaulin and looked up at the stars, feeling my brain swimming from the joint. I took another drag, and started to wonder if anything we did tonight really mattered at all.
“Look up there,” I said, after a few moments. “Look at those stars. Makes you feel so tiny, powerless. Tiny beneath the stars.” I moistened my lips. “What do you think our purpose is here on earth, O’Rourke?”
“You’re away with the fairies, aren’t you?”
“I am a fairy,” I said, handing him the joint.
After a while, he said, “To live right, I guess.”
Later he got up and went to the truck. The door opened. He was moving about. The door closed. He came back with some bedding and handed a bundle to me, bending over me. He kissed me lightly, as if to say good night. He kissed me again. When he kissed me the third time it was with finality.
“I’m going to sleep over here,” he said. “If you need anything, just whistle.”
I woke again at two o’clock. I had somehow moved closer to him. I sat up and looked around. The fire had burned down so that it was almost all white, with a bit of the big log still black in the middle, red underneath. You could see plants in the glow, with big, round leaves, like we had in Safila. O’Rourke was asleep, breathing heavily with one arm over his head, covering his face. I lay back and looked at the stars for a while. It was still warm, with just the lightest of breezes every now and then. I pulled the cover over me and turned to face his back. He was wearing a thin khaki shirt. My face was so close I was almost touching him. He rolled onto his back, adjusting his head and his arms. When he settled back there was a change in his breathing that
told me he was awake. I lay still, with my heart thumping. I looked up at the outline of his chin. Then I saw one eye open, look down at me and close again. He turned slowly to face me. He reached out and put his hand on the small of my back, his fingers touching my waist. I held my breath. Our mouths were so close they were almost touching. Then, using the palm of his hand, he moved me towards him, pressing me into him against his jeans where he was hard. He moved his mouth just slightly closer and our lips brushed, and this time it was not possible to resist, in the firelight, all alone together after the terrors.
CHAPTER
Sixteen
When I awoke, in a euphoric glow from the night, O’Rourke was already up, boiling water in a billycan on the fire. It was still very early. The sun was only just clearing the horizon. I took one look and shut my eyes again. We shouldn’t have done it. It had been wonderful, but we shouldn’t have done it. Maybe Linda wasn’t involved with O’Rourke anymore, but she certainly wanted to be. I didn’t want her to be upset, I didn’t want to be upset myself, and I didn’t want O’Rourke to be in an awkward spot, not when so much pressure was building up for us all. The trouble was, romantic feelings were beginning to creep out and run around with no respect whatsoever for the scale of the crisis we were facing.
He didn’t know I was awake. I looked across, and took in every detail of him as he stared into the fire, the khaki shirt stretched across his back, his forearm resting on his knee, the thoughtful, quiet profile, and I knew what was happening to me. Out here, the absolute coexistence of opposites: tragedy and comedy, the serious and the superficial, had long ceased to surprise me. Even when the grimmest events were taking place, trivial matters continued to annoy, and affairs of the heart, far from retreating into insignificance, seemed to be whipped up, heightened.
Since the Oliver debacle I had four years of romantic aridity, but emotional peace. And now, just when I needed to be calm and to concentrate—this. I had to get a grip. I didn’t want to go back to all that turmoil I had had with Oliver. This was not the time, even without the complication of Linda. O’Rourke and I would just have to brush away what happened last night, be mature about it, and go on as before.
I made a bit of a fuss of waking up, yawning and stretching.
He looked over at me.
“I do apologize for last night,” I said. “Can’t imagine what came over me.”
He looked relieved. “Do you want a cup of tea?” he said.
“In a minute.” I stood up and looked around. “Not a bush in sight,” I said.
“Try behind the Land Rover. I’ll shout if anyone’s coming,” he said, with the quick smile, looking at the featureless circle of the horizon.
We were fantastically mature on the drive back to Sidra, fantastically mature. We talked about every aspect of the locust crisis and went through all possible options for dealing with it. It was almost as if the night had never happened. O’Rourke was unexpectedly relaxed. I had been expecting him to be all tense and in a bad mood. I had automatically assumed that he would regret what we had done, and start pushing me away: the legacy of Oliver. In fact, he seemed perfectly normal. After about two hours of driving across flat sand we saw an object on the horizon. As we got closer we realized it was two lorries which had crashed head-on. We started to laugh. They had managed to drive straight into each other on a stretch of track with neither a bend, nor an obstacle, nor indeed any feature whatsoever for fifty miles.
“I guess they must love each other,” said O’Rourke. “They met by accident.”
They did look endearingly affectionate, pressed together, nose to nose. It must have happened some days ago. The cargo had been taken away and there was no one around except an Englishman on a bicycle. He was wearing a safari suit and a pith helmet and had a pack on his back.
“How, in the name of arse,” bellowed the man, as we drew alongside, “did this absurdity happen? I say. Am I going the right way for Kefti?”
“This,” murmured O’Rourke, cutting the ignition, “is why I never go back home.”
“I was just thinking exactly the same thing.”
We were still laughing, and saying, “What in the name of arse . . .” when we drove away. It turned out that the Englishman was on a sponsored lone cycle ride, crossing Africa from west to east to raise money for a donkey sanctuary in Norfolk. He was surprised by the news that there had been a war in Kefti for the last two decades, but would not be persuaded of the need for a detour.
We were only about an hour from Sidra now. Soon we could see the shape of the weird red mountains rising up on the horizon. On the surface I probably seemed as relaxed as O’Rourke did to me. I kept taking out little moments from the night of passion, like new purchases wrapped in tissue paper, remembering. I felt rushes of affection and vulnerability. Deep inside I could feel something ridiculous going on. As we drew closer to Sidra, and I realized the intimacy of the last few days was about to be broken, it got worse and worse. It was no use. I couldn’t help myself. I was starting to want to know where the relationship was going. And we weren’t even late for anything.
The arrival in Sidra brought welcome distraction. I suggested we drop off the photographs to be developed, find something to eat and then report to André at the UN. We sat in a dirty café on the main square and had a Coke while we waited for our food. We sat in silence. I tried to concentrate on the scene. A horse and cart was clopping by, carrying charcoal, looking as if it had had a bag of soot emptied over it. From across the road, a boy dressed in a sack with sand smeared on his face was making his way towards us, begging as he went. Apart from the sand on his face, it wasn’t clear what was wrong with him. The people he approached all put money into his bowl as if they were used to him.
“Do you think he’s crazy?” I asked O’Rourke, in a matter-of-fact voice.
“Dunno. Could be schizophrenia.”
It was no use. I felt it welling up again. O’Rourke looked so irresistible to me now. Such a good man, so self-possessed, so purposeful. And now we were going to be separated by other people. I kept thinking about what we did last night. What did it mean to him? Did he care about me as much as he seemed to? What was going to happen to us now? It was going to burst out. God, I wished I was a man. I sat on my hands and clamped my lips tightly together.
“Er—Rosie. Are you all right?” he said.
“Fine. Why?” I said in a strained voice.
“It’s just, you look—rather peculiar, that’s all.”
“I’m fine.”
He leaned over and put his hand on my forehead. “Hmmm.”
That just made it even worse. What do you feel about me anyway? I wanted to shout. What’s going on?
“I’m just going for a little walk,” I said instead. He looked at me, puzzled.
I came back when the food was ready, feeling rather more composed. The crisis had passed. I was going to be the iron woman again now, with a bit of luck.
A third of the photographs hadn’t come out at all. There was a whole collection of entirely black ones. “Night,” we decided they should be called. Then there were the blurred ones. “Fog?” O’Rourke suggested. “Fur?” Some of them were fine. Enough of them were good enough.
We ordered a dozen prints each of the good ones, and set off to find André at the UNHCR. As we were driving there, I started thinking about the implications, here, of the explosion. I didn’t know how much trouble we were going to be in.
“What did I say to you?” André said, when we walked into his office. “Don’t go there yourself. Are you OK?”
I handed him the photos.
“My Gaaad.”
“Ten days till the ship, then?” I said.
“I wish,” he said grimly.
“What, you mean it isn’t coming?” said O’Rourke.
“It’s coming, but not in ten days.”
“When, then?”
“Mother of God, I wish I knew. They say another two to three weeks.”
O’Rou
rke handed André a cigarette, and lit his own. The delay with the ship wasn’t the worst of it. There had been arrivals in other camps farther north along the border.
“I’m sorry, guys. I just don’t know what to say.”
This was no longer the reassuring André I knew, the man with the invincible light touch. This was a man with a quarter of a million people running out of food on his hands.
“I know it’s not your fault,” I said. “But I just can’t understand how these government organizations can go through so much, be publicly humiliated, like they were in Ethiopia, and still fuck up.”
André just put his hands in the air and rolled his eyes.
The conversation moved on to the Security forces. Apparently Abdul Gerbil, the Security chief in Sidra, was apoplectic about what we had done. He was an insanely bossy man, who always wore Blues Brothers–style sunglasses with his djellaba, and sported a Coco the Clown hairdo.
“It’s not the fact of the trip itself, it’s the fact that he didn’t find out about it first,” said André.
“The problem will be if it gets in the press,” said O’Rourke. “That will really piss him off. Has anyone picked it up?”
“No. I think it’s fine,” said André. “I’ve told everyone to keep their mouths shut.”
“And what about Malcolm?” I said.
“Haven’t heard anything.”
“Only a matter of time, I suppose,” I said.
We decided we had to go to the Security office. But the heavens were smiling upon us, and Abdul Gerbil had gone north for the day. We made very certain that everyone of note knew we had come, and we left a formal letter for Gerbil saying that we had come to discuss the most unfortunate events with him. Then, trying not to break into a run, we jumped into the Land Rover and got the hell out.