Bettany's Book (32 page)

The day of Dimp Bettany’s wedding was clear, hot, humid, beneath a massive, sharp-edged Sydney sky. Out of a casual respect for the fact that Bren had been to the altar previously, and from a natural reticence about fashion, Dimp dressed like a second wife, in a cream sheath. On her head she wore a simple construction of flowers. After photographs and felicitations outside the church, she and Bren were flown down harbour to the wedding feast at a beachside restaurant in a helicopter belonging to a mining corporation associated with Bren.

Dimp’s side of the party was outnumbered by Bren’s aunts, uncles and cousins, let alone by his friends. She lacked an attendant sister, but then Bren lacked both his parents too. His father was ten years dead; his mother – who had borne Bren in her mid thirties – had recently died of a stroke.

Most of Dimp’s old crew from
Enzo Kangaroo
came, even the lonely-looking star Colin Maberley, who had played Enzo and arrived from location-shooting in New Zealand. For the wives of lawyers, miners and venture capitalists on Bren’s side, Maberley’s magical and wistful presence outweighed that of any other personage, perhaps even that of the bride and groom.

Dimp had always suspected Prim would not come, and understood why. Her absence left a margin of dark but inert vacancy on an otherwise sharp, exultant day. ‘The poor girl’s had malaria,’ Dimp explained when asked about her sister. The naming of a tropical disease seemed to satisfy the curious and validate Dimp as a splendid waif and dazzling orphan, worthy of the respect of all witnesses to the wedding.

Prim’s absence counted in, Dimp’s experience of her wedding day was seamless. It was to her that simplest of images. It expanded like a flower to the sun, petal by petal, joyful quarter-hour by joyful quarter-hour. She had no doubts. In her view, the essential nature of the separate histories she and Bren had lived was that they would coincide on this crystalline
Sydney day, in a city so designed for marriage that most photographs of weddings were outdoor ones.

One of the quieter presences on Bren’s side of the wedding party was Frank Benedetto, the lawyer who had given Dimp the gift of the Bettany papers and the stray letters of Sarah Bernard. To an observer he resembled any other wedding guest, though he was not as raucous as Bren’s boyhood friends, who took the fact they had known Bren since adolescence as their mandate to get fraternally drunk, to sing songs which meant little to anyone but them. Benedetto was not a party to the jokes of Bren’s boyhood. He had attended a Marist Brothers school in the far west of Sydney. His childhood had been spent some crucial miles from Bren’s, and under less promising auguries.

U
LTIMATELY
S
HERIF’S VISIT TO THE
S
OUTH
with his team, including Erwit, would produce ‘A Random Sample Survey of Families with Young Children in Aweil, Bahr el Ghazal Province, Republic of Sudan’. It would be published, to the great excitement and considerable kudos of Austfam in Canberra, in the British journal
Public Health Abstracts
.

It first stated that between July and August 1988, Dr Sherif Taha’s survey team, including Ms Primrose Bettany, Acting Administrator, Austfam, Khartoum, had discovered that Aweil’s population had increased by some 25 000 people now living east of the town, on the edge of the extensive cattle market, and also on the road southwards from the town, in shelters of mud and brush and with only the most rudimentary water supply and sanitation. The new arrivals were displaced Dinkas, whose villages had been overrun by the parties to the conflict in the South, and whose livestock had been confiscated by either the Sudanese army or the forces of the SPLA.

The Dinkas had come to town chiefly to escape the battle zone of the open countryside, and the Sudanese garrison considered them potential sympathisers with and members, albeit extremely depleted and malnourished ones, of the SPLA, the rebel army.

Prim, Sherif, Erwit and the five Khartoum nurses who made up the team, walked from one brush hovel to another asking families if they would answer questions. Given that she was a stranger and so was Erwit, and given the uncertainty of the refugees’ situation, Prim was surprised at how willing they were to tell their stories, to answer Sherif’s questionnaire about
dispossession, child mortality, and livestock ownership previous and present.

The article in
Public Health Abstracts
concentrated on infant health. It spoke of such indicators of child health as Height for Weight, and MUAC (mid-upper arm circumference), and of Z, the wastage factor.

Most of the children less than five years old, 62 per cent, said the article, had a wastage score of Z–2. This meant severe hunger, and the number was all the more alarming to Prim since, as Sherif pointed out to her, these children were the survivors of a crisis which had already killed many of their brothers and sisters.

The death rate of children below five years was 25.88 per 10 000 children per day or 724.64 per four-week month. The children were buried in improvised graveyards, small stone enclosures, near the town. The very high infant mortality rate was explained in part by a measles epidemic which was in progress when the Austfam team arrived in Aweil, before health teams had been able to initiate their vaccination programs. There was evidence, wrote the survey team, that the efficacy of measles vaccinations could be vitiated by the high temperatures of the region and the lack of refrigeration for vaccine storage.

In sweltering Aweil, the survey team had stayed at and worked from the beige and blue Boz Hotel in the centre of town, near the two-storey barracks, in a main street with a
souk
from which Sudanese policemen armed with long canes excluded the refugee children. Prim had two jobs: supporting the efforts of Anwar and Julio, and participating in the survey.

As the survey would be published, whether for pity’s sake or for the sake of truth-telling, fear of joint authorship made Prim, in the thundery, super-heated August of Aweil, uneasy with Sherif. In irrational hours it seemed to her a genuine risk that Auger or an Auger colleague would write to
Public Health Abstracts
and detail the impropriety of her ever being credited with any authorship. With the constant dismal news emerging from Sherif’s measurements of children and questionnaire for mothers, and the general equatorial sweatiness of the place, Prim was pleased towards the end of the month to have to return with Sherif and the team to the less dense air of Khartoum and facilitate a further food drop for Anwar and Julio.

There, working in her still office, she heard on the BBC African news one afternoon the exact, clear voice of Helene Codderby reporting that hostilities had broken out again in the Aweil region. Sudanese Army
regulars, it was claimed, were pushing the SPLA south towards Malek. There was no mention of Anwar and Julio, but the next day Stoner called Prim and told her in his most melancholy, hesitant way that they were in his office. They had come close to dying in crossfire as the rebels and the army fought for their depot. The rebels, said a shaken Anwar, thought the depot was being used to give credit to the army, and the army thought it had been used to succour rebels. Its existence had become a
casus belli
, and while the program they had instituted at Aweil still operated, the army had insisted that they, thank you very much, would run it from now on. In what spirit it might be run, whether it would be used to feed government troops, Anwar and Julio would not know, for they were out of the place. They were under suspicion of sustaining rebel peoples.

‘I’m going to protest to the government
and
the SPLA,’ said an outraged Prim. ‘There’s Australian rice and wheat down there. Austfam paid for some of the aircraft charter!’

‘Good thing,’ said Stoner in the same dismal tone. ‘But, I mean, Operation Safety’s not going to end. It’s just that Julio and Anwar are out.’

Prim was still outraged. She was particularly angered that Stoner seemed so resigned. ‘This is a scandal. And what aid worker is safe, if they fight over food dumps?’

‘Yeah, well,’ he said. ‘Look, the food itself … let’s not be too over-dramatic. It’s only agricultural excess, isn’t it? It’s not as if it’s costing the poor of Australia anything. There’s a tougher issue. Our Ilyushins were seized this morning by the military.’

‘
Seized?
’

‘Yeah, the charter’s been taken over by the army. They have the authority under the Emergency Laws, see. The planes’ll be used to supply the new big push.’

‘You mean, with the UN’s logo on the side?’

‘Oh, yeah, holy moley,’ said Stoner. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

Prim said, ‘I bet they want to keep the UN markings for protective colouring. The rebels don’t fire on UN planes. But when they see them disgorging men and cannons – that’ll change their minds.’

‘Wait a tick. Let me talk to the boys.’

Within five minutes he was back on the phone. Prim was already searching through the office cupboard and had found a used can of white paint left from Crouch’s time, and a selection of hardened brushes. She was in a state of vengeful grief: Operation Safety was such a sane plan,
it had seemed at first to create a new reality. But obviously, it would be permitted to operate only within the bounds of the military convenience of the parties to the war.

There was a profounder weariness in Stoner’s voice now. From his storeroom he had blue housepaint, three litres, and brushes. He and the boys would go out to the airport …

‘Collect me on the way,’ she insisted and, waiting, set to thinning Crouch’s ancient white paint.

From the front seat of Stoner’s truck, Julio and Anwar greeted Prim wanly. The last time they had seen her they had been remaking the earth. Now they were merely engaged in a gesture, and might not be permitted to accomplish even that.

Everyone still had the appropriate passes: of their sundry organisations and of Operation Safety. With these, and a lot of persuasion in Arabic from Anwar and Stoner, they were admitted through successive screens of reluctant NCOs onto the apron of the airfield. ‘
Amreeka
?’ Stoner was always asked. ‘British,’ he would say, pretending to less Arabic than he had. ‘
Shnatuk. El tayarah. Ilyushin
.’ His bags were still on the Ilyushins, he claimed. Incredibly, they were permitted to drive around the edge of the airport to where about thirty assorted military aircraft waited on the far side.

The Sudanese Army, it had seemed to Prim until recently, always dressed in what she thought of as a quaintly British manner, their berets, shirts, trousers and gaiters had a Second World War cut to them, as if still supplied by warehouses the British had left behind thirty years past. But the troops guarding the airport perimeter, and at ease in the doorways of hangars, were dressed in snappy, fresh-looking camouflage gear which bespoke a new level of military purpose. A company of young Sudanese soldiers in camouflage were loading their packs through the rear door of one of the transports on whose flank the UN insignia still shone. The charter company pilots, African and European, stood by in the wing’s shade, watching. Anwar got out and went to the officer directing the troops and was suddenly loud and eloquent, pointing to the plane, raging, holding up his fingers. ‘
Sittah
! Six. With a threatening politeness the officer ordered him to clear off; ‘
Imshi
’. Stoner, watching from his truck, was inflamed. ‘
Imshi
yourself, you bastard!’ he cried through the window.

Prim and Julio were already at the rear of the truck. While Julio levered cans of blue paint open with a screwdriver, Prim stirred the opened cans
with a stick. They were all enraged and willing to be shot for their right to erase the debased symbols.

The officer called to Anwar, who was coming back to the truck to take up his brush. ‘The plane’s ready to depart,’ he yelled. ‘
Essabaah
’. This morning. Anwar turned back to the man, holding forth the UN pass hung around his neck, and pointed at the task they were engaged in, the work which had to be done. One of the charter pilots, a Frenchman, came out of the shade. ‘I told them to remove the UN signs,’ he said. ‘I told them. It makes this trip easy for them, but the future hard for us. The rebels will start shooting at everything. I told him. But be neat, guys, be neat!’

So Prim and the others were not impeded, and as the officer and his company boarded a plane, took up the streaky white and fresh blue paint cans.

The team of four spent an hour effacing the pretence of compassion and human courtesy from the sides of the remaining three cargo planes as young Sudanese men in camouflage kit with the sweetest of mute faces approached the cargo doors, loading cases of artillery shells aboard, gifts for Anwar’s former regions, Aweil and Malek.

Slavery remained an issue for Prim through all her Austfam duties; it would return to her in dreams and in small-hour wakings. She had questioned a number of Dinka refugees in the town of Aweil who claimed one or more of their children had been taken away by government troops or militias, and for whose freedom the family had needed to pay over the last of their cattle. And Sherif introduced her to the middle-aged Sudanese woman, Khalda el Rahzi, he had described as being concerned with the matter of hostage-taking in the South and with – the word Sherif hesitated to use – slavery.