Stone Kingdoms (10 page)

‘I was ten when Sean was killed. I really liked Sean – he was dead-on, always looked after me when anyone was giving me a hard time. He even stood up to me Da once when he was knocking me about – took the belt out of his hand and threw it in the fire. I must've been a right pain but sometimes he took me places – football matches, things like that. Sometimes his mates gave him stick but he didn't take any heed. Well, there came a time when he wasn't around that much – he'd come and go, stay a night and not come back for a week or so. I thought he'd had some big row with me Da that no one was telling me about, and sometimes when I'd come in the room they'd stop talking. One night – it was coming up to Christmas – I was in bed reading when he came in, he always used to take the hand out of me when he saw me reading but he didn't this time. He just talked and asked me how things were going, but when I tried to ask him why he wasn't around he made a joke and that was the last time I ever saw him. The Friday before Christmas two men came to the door and said he'd been killed.'

He stops and moves the shell from hand to hand as if it's burning him. ‘I really liked Sean – he was dead-on. When they brought the coffin to the house I wouldn't look at him. I didn't want to see him dead. Even though me Da said I had to see what the Brits had done I still wouldn't look. He'd left a Christmas present for me. Da said I didn't deserve it but me Ma made him give it to me. It was a book.'

As he finishes he angles his head so I can't see his full face but before I get a chance to say anything he returns the shell to the back of the room and stands for a few seconds, pretending to
look
at the display. As I start to walk towards him he turns with an imitation of a smile, out of synch with his eyes.

‘Well, Miss, does that count as one of my GCSE oral assessments?'

‘Yes, Daniel, I'll put it in my red book and tick off all the little boxes.'

‘That's good, Miss,' he says, suddenly heading for the door but as he's about to leave he turns. ‘As good as Sinead's?'

‘As good as Sinead's.'

‘Yours wasn't bad either, Miss.'

I call after him but the only reply is the rush and clack of his heels in the corridor.

The rush and clack of his heels. Startled, I turn my head to look behind me and as I do so, a boy on a skateboard leans and bends past me, all balance and friction. I watch him curve himself round one of the turnings in the park. Ahead, families make their way to the museum and on impulse I follow them, stumble round familiar exhibits but look only at the faces of the people. Sometimes I see someone look at me and I think they must know everything about me, as if the images running in my head are projected on my eyes, and then I turn my head away, stare myopically at some painting.

That night, as the sodium light of the street seeps into the shadows of my flat, I stand at the corner of the window and watch a young couple lilt along the pavement. Their voices spark the falling night, burning little holes in the stillness. I turn away, switch on the television and flick the channels to find something to divert thought, then sit in a daze, until slowly I begin to watch a programme, start to focus on the pictures.

It is about a reef, Basif. Somewhere there is a reef, stretching out into the languorous waters of the night, the coral bushes silhouettes against a running glaze of moonlight. Their horned branches jerk upwards to the light, each bush a ghost of polyps, fixed on the calcareous, peppered bones of their own skeleton.
There
is a rhythm to the reef. It begins with a full moon, the stirring of warm currents and something we do not understand, as in the darkness each polyp contracts, puffs a little bead of egg into the water. They float upward like thistledown on the sea-wind to meet the pink slick of sperm. Then somewhere an egg fertilizes, and in the darkness an almost invisible ivory glint of coral larva starts silently through the waters. Drifting at first in the current, before a tiny filigree of hairs propels it into a gradual swim – a prey for protozoans and crustaceans, until it finds the safety of the reef and settles at last on its surface to grow and regenerate, replacing what has been destroyed. New generations of growth, living coral.

As I lie in my narrow bed in a city which sleeps fitfully in the rough cradle of mountain and sea, I dream of coral. But then the burning colours fade and I drift into colder seas. I see a shadowy shape carried by the will of the current and suddenly I am separated from it by a sheet of ice which forms over the moment. Now the face is pressed against the ice looking up at me, but I can't break through to it. I try to see who it is but the ice is too thick. I beat against it with my fists, I have to see if it's Daniel's face, the face of one of the soldiers, my father's face, but I cannot break the ice and then the current swirls the body away and I waken with a shout, touch my own face.

It is the sun slinking through the branches of the tree which touches my face now. The children have stopped chanting. I search for Nadra's voice, try to evade the probe of Basif's questions. How could I ever make him understand? But he persists.

‘And so why did you come to Africa, Naomi?'

I move my head, shift slightly in the chair, try to ease into a little screen of shade.

8

We
stood in front of his makeshift desk like miscreants in the headmaster's study. He had already thrown down his shades, presumably to show the anger in his eyes, but they also revealed enjoyment as he berated us for our stupidity. I thought Veronica was about to cry and beg forgiveness, while at my other shoulder Martine stiffened and looked for an opportunity to stem his flow. But Haneen had told him everything and there was nothing we could say in our defence, nothing he would let us offer that might impede his performance.

‘Rule number one – you do not play God. You're only here five minutes and on the strength of whatever lousy training they've given you, you decide to play Mother Teresa.' He stood up and paced the length of the desk. ‘You knew that what was on that truck was needed here, and we're damn lucky they didn't strip it to the axles. Out here we play the percentage game, and one baby doesn't balance out the value to this camp of that cargo. I don't give a shit for your feelings – out here feelings are excess baggage. If you've brought feelings out here I advise you to go bury them in the nearest latrine.'

Over his shoulder, more and more children's heads compressed into the open window to watch our humiliation. He sat down again and waved his hand dismissively over the top of the table. ‘Children, and especially babies, don't get separated from their mothers. One without the other is no use. Have you any idea how many kids there are out there without anyone to look after them? What do you think their long-term future is?'

As
I tried to say something that would assuage his anger, convey contrition, Martine suddenly turned on her heels and left. I wanted to join her but wasn't brave enough. Fired up again by her response, he poured out the remaining dregs of his anger. ‘She needn't think she's going to come out here and swan around smelling of Chanel. If she can't do what she's told she can haul her tight ass out of here on the next plane home – and you can tell her that from me!' He sat down again, momentarily drained of words, and we took the opportunity to nod our heads, mutter a few pathetic expressions of remorse and leave.

When we stepped into the sharp strike of heat children flooded round our feet, patting our backs and touching our legs in gestures that felt like commiseration, and as we walked through the light brush of hands I heard a sudden burst of opera bruising the morning air. It seemed to follow me as I made my way across the compound to our tent. Martine stood with her back pushed against the tree-trunk; the rigidity of her body as she exhaled from a cigarette held her anger in a tight press. She didn't look at me and I felt included in that anger.

‘Mais c'est un vrai salaud, cet homme-là!'

‘Je crois que tu as raison.'

‘He'd no right to speak to me in this way, no right. I am not a child to be bullied and shouted at. If he has a complaint he should handle it in a professional way, not like this. Pas devant tout le monde.'

‘You're right, but maybe he has his own problems, things we don't know about yet. He shouldn't have spoken that way, but maybe there's less time for the niceties out here.'

She pushed her back harder into the tree, then stubbed out the cigarette on its riven bark. ‘You're a great peace-maker, Naomi. I thought the Irish were supposed to be great fighters.'

‘The Irish only fight themselves. Listen, Martine, why should we let him put us off? We can always disappoint him by being good at what we came to do.'

She
relaxed a little and asked where Veronica was. ‘I think she's slunk back to prostrate herself to Mr Wanneker.' At last she smiled and slowly ground the remains of her cigarette into the dust, and then we parted to find the work that waited for us.

I was there to develop an educational programme. It sounds grander than it was. I learnt later that to qualify for additional UN funding they needed to provide evidence of educational development. I was that evidence. I who had resigned at the end of my second year of teaching, then spent a couple of years in a variety of temporary posts. The Agency was not particular in many things. And so in Bakalla my job was to set up a school, utilizing whatever resources were available, share responsibility for the growing number of orphans in the camp, and construct a register to help establish family connections and possible locations.

On one of those first mornings when sleep hadn't slipped into any pattern or rhythm I walked in the camp, threading a random course through the tumbling clutter of makeshift dwellings, the possibility of making any impression on what stretched all around me seeming suddenly absurd. Wherever I stumbled a raw course of life flowed, focused solely on survival, that central impulse jettisoning the superfluous, the conventional constraints of the external world. Each day was measured not by hours or minutes, but by the wait to draw water, the trawling and scavenging in ever widening arcs for firewood, the wood that fuelled their lives. The constant collection and rationing of resources. The doling out of life's dregs.

All the dwellings I passed were different, a patchwork of ramshackle structures that bore witness to ingenuity, to the creative exploitation of what the world had discarded. Little shacks fashioned from packing cases and polythene, cardboard walls fastened to battens of spindly sticks, oil drums driven into the sand for corner stones and roofed with sacking and plastic.
Old
tyres bound together with rope supporting woven matting or strips of corrugated tin. None of them more than three or four metres high, their frameworks caulked and cemented with dried dung or clay. Even the front half of a jeep, its gutted innards replaced by a parcel of possessions and bedding. As I walked I passed small children returning from the scrub carrying mean little bundles of bleached sticks that looked like bones. One of them trailed two stringy slithers of goats whose skins were blistered with sores. A boy holding the hand of a younger brother crossed my path but only one set of eyes turned to look at me; the other's were locked in a torpid white blindness. Women carried the first water of the day, the heads of babies swaddled in the folds of their clothes, and as I stepped aside to let them pass along the ridged and rutted path, I felt the weight of their gaze, assumed the guilt. And I knew for the first time that no matter how much or little you might do to help, our very physical presence subsumed us into the essence of their suffering and intensified the knowledge that they had no future happiness until we were no longer there.

Sometimes as I walked I caught glimpses of inner worlds – a mother feeding her baby, her breast flapping loose and thin like an empty envelope, around her the sleeping forms of her older children snuggled into each other's hollows; an old man naked from the waist up with a white stipple of beard, his skin hanging from his shoulder bones like an old shirt on a wire hanger; a young girl in a doorway combing her hair with a painted comb, one hand rubbing the sleep from her eyes. And as I walked and listened to the slow unfolding of life around me, the smell of cooking seeped into the other smells which I had tried to block out. Somewhere a baby cried in hunger and in response a voice set up a slow chanting, a rhythmic cadence that pleaded for patience.

‘You're up early.'

The voice was American. It belonged to a big man in green fatigues which looked tired from the strain of stretching over
his
body. In his late fifties maybe, his bald head glazed with sun spots and a thin smear of hair that looked like daubs of charcoal. He was carrying a medical kit emblazoned with the Agency logo, and he wore gold-rimmed glasses with lenses which looked too small to cover his eyes. As he stretched out his hand towards me he snuffled the glasses into a tighter focus. ‘Dr Rollins, James Rollins – we didn't get a chance to meet. Welcome to Bakalla.' We shook hands, observed social refinements, my concentration momentarily distracted by a small child defecating in a little hollow then surreptitiously kicking up a concealing layer of dirt. ‘You're Irish, aren't you? I hear Ireland's a very beautiful country, I'm going to take a vacation there some day, going to visit the Burren. I'm a plant man. Orchids mostly. There's wild orchids on the Burren.'

For a few moments we made small talk, and then as the words dried up he asked me if I wanted to come with him, and so I followed down alleyways where it felt as if the clumsy collision of his case or the brush of his elbow against the fragile frameworks might topple them into the dirt. Sometimes as he walked he raised his hand in a silent warning, and we stretched our legs over a coagulated trail of dysentery or side-stepped some indecipherable detritus which littered and stained the fissured path. At a slight distance from the huts we passed a score of children sleeping under a thin wrinkle of polythene, each linked to the other by silver beads of condensation. The crinkled shapes of their bedded bodies lay frozen like fossils in stone, only a whimpering or a mumbled snatch of dream words testifying to life. An old woman, bent over with the burden of her deformed body, shuffled towards the daily dug ditches that served for latrines, cursing us as we crossed her path. Through a gap in the shacks I saw a glimpse of the plain which stretched beyond the camp and in it disembodied trees and some young boys, their lower legs lost in the white mist which lapped around them. They carried thin curves of cane as they guarded
the
few slivers of stock which were the vestiges of a way of life they had never known.