Stone Kingdoms (11 page)

Stuttering, slow smoke was beginning to limp skywards throughout the camp, spiralling tendrils of blue which faded into the low grey louring of sky. It was quite cold still and the sweep of the horizon was smudged by a blurred bevel of mist. Occasionally Rollins would turn to reassure himself that I was following and then we would smile and nod our heads, until eventually he paused at the doorway of a hut, a kind of wigwam of layered banana leaves and cardboard packing stamped ‘Urgent Medical Supplies'. Across the entrance hung a tattered cloth, a towel with a picture of a surfer on it. ‘Take a deep breath,' he ordered and then with a shout of greeting he bent down and entered, holding up the cloth so I could follow.

Inside we crouched in the flecked sprinkling of light which seeped through the colander of roof and sides, slowly absorbing the world we had entered. In one corner a man and two children huddled together, at their feet a couple of metal buckets and small bundles of clothing, a few cooking pots and little else. In the middle of the earth floor there was an older child – maybe eight or nine years old – curled on a strip of matting and covered by a coarse orange blanket. A girl. Her mother cradled her head on her lap, lightly brushing her face with the back of a hand. I listened as Rollins talked softly and reassuringly to them, and then he slowly removed the orange blanket. The girl cried out and tried to hold on to it but he coaxed it out of her hand. On one of her legs was a suppurating wound where the yellowing and pus-filled purple flesh thickened like lard. Her feet were swollen and livid with sores and as he examined her he pointed to the watery blister of guinea worm. ‘She got separated from her family on the way here. Only arrived here last night. She's been walking in the bush for three days, been badly bitten by mosquitoes.'

He gave her a couple of shots, the smell of a different world puffing out of his open case into the fetid air of the shelter. As
he
cleaned and dressed her wounds he talked all the time, rhymes, songs, nonsense, but all delivered in the same reassuring tone, and when he had finished he told her parents to bring her to the compound later in the day. He left a supply of protein-filled BP5 biscuits, some maize-based porridge, and a supply of high energy milk. In the shadowed corner of the shelter sat the father, watching and listening with spiritless eyes, little leaves of light splashing his face, his silent stillness pulled around him as if a movement or sound might make him visible to the outer world, and vulnerable. As his wife bowed her face to the dust and grasped Rollins' hand in hers I saw him lock himself further into his own world, remote from the family which had left the shelter of his protection to beg their share of a stranger's bounty.

‘Will she be all right?' I asked as we headed back towards the compound.

‘Sure, she'll be OK in a week or so if they let her rest that long, don't have her out scavenging in the bush. The young nearly all have a chance if we reach them in time. With high energy feeding and the right drugs you can see big changes in a short time. Nature culls the rest. Out here one in three infants don't reach the age of five – but you know that already, I guess.'

‘I know the figures but it makes it different when the figures have faces.' With a sudden wither of shame I remembered the baby we had buried in the dirt, its striated skin hidden in hessian; heard again the mother's cries breaking from her parched and broken throat.

‘A lot of the children can make it. Older people are slower to recover, seem to collapse in on themselves. Weighed an old woman a couple of days ago – twenty-five kilos, Jeez, twenty-five kilos of nothing but memories. She died, didn't want to live any more I guess.' Children ran past us carrying empty jerry cans which were scabbed and oil stained. ‘We've got everything here – malnutrition, dysentery, TB, malaria, AIDS – you name it, we've got it. Starting to see a lot of cases of blindness in kids
from
vitamin deficiency. A lot of the last influx brought their own disease with them. Did you see many on the road as you came?'

‘Lines of people. . .. We stopped once, had some trouble . . .' I hesitated, wondering if he already knew.

‘I heard about it. Not the best way to start. But you won't be harbouring too many illusions about what you've come to. I'd be more worried if I were you about those people you passed.' He saw the confusion in my face. ‘Trouble anywhere means trouble here. If the flow of refugees increases dramatically we'll be stretched beyond our limit. There's a kind of fragile balance here: when something tips that balance you're looking at disaster. Too many hands grabbing for too few resources.'

‘How long have you been here?' I asked.

‘I came two years ago to work in the camps across the border when the first famine broke. Stayed off and on ever since. Came out of retirement, from growing orchids and watching TV sport. What I saw then I don't ever want to see again. There were a hundred dying every day – had to bring in earth-digging machinery to bury them in the end. Six planes were flying a hundred and fifty tonnes of food per day and it wasn't enough.'

We threaded our way back past families who had emerged from the sullen shadows of their shelters, to squat on their haunches round cooking pots and fan a few paltry flames into limping legs of smoke. ‘And you know what we learned from that disaster – nothing. Nothing, period. Just another patch-up job, and now the camera crews have moved on and the money's drying up and we're about five minutes away from it happening all over again, only this time we've used up our compassion quotient. You should go down there some time to the border camps, Naomi, see the machinery, the pumps and lorries with their guts clogged with sand and no one with a spare part or the know-how to get them going. See the sheds full of the wrong vaccines. I once met a guy, swore it was true, said he took a
delivery
of ten crates and when he opened them they were full of electric kettles.'

He laughed full-throatedly, the light gilding the gold fillings in his teeth, and his eyes blinking behind his glasses like the excited stutter of a camera. ‘And you know what I'm going to do if it starts again? Hitch a lift to the coast, get the first plane out of here. Go back home, drink some slow cold beer in the afternoon, watch it on TV. Be as much use there as here. No one's going to make me a grave-digger again.' The bitterness of his voice seemed to seep into his movements, giving his lumbering walk a new urgency. It also created a distance between us, replacing his friendliness with a new formality. When he stopped in front of another dwelling, he announced his arrival with a shout of greeting. I didn't know whether to follow him or not. He turned to me as I hesitated. ‘You don't want to come in here – not when you have a choice,' the sharpening light of the morning blanching out his eyes.

Later that morning, I found the school. It was located on the southern rim of the camp, its area defined only by the yellowed and flattened mat of grass which the children's feet had pummelled and bruised into submission. I heard the voices first, a dull rhythmic chant like the hollow rub of sea against shore. I watched from a distance as a tall figure in white orchestrated the chorus, its long cane swimming over the scores of seated children, occasionally diving into their midst to touch a shoulder or the side of a head. The thin white body seemed to twitch and stutter in synch with the chanting, the sticklike arms flailing and threshing above the black bobbing mesh of heads. They sat huddled tightly, squirming together to ensure their anonymity, protect themselves from the arbitrary fall of the cane. From time to time hands would jerk up in response to shouted questions and a child would stumble forward to recite some long litany and receive the soft blessing of the cane on its head.

I
returned to the compound and found Wanneker in the clinic, making an inventory of drugs and vaccines. I had guessed already that the school was not of central importance to him, but I asked him anyway about the figure in the white robe.

‘His name's Medulla. He appeared about a month ago, he's some sort of tribal holy man – a priest or something like that. He took it on himself to teach the children.'

‘What's he teach them?'

He looked up from his ledger, impatience already evident on his face. ‘I don't know, Naomi – the Koran, I guess. It keeps the kids under some kind of supervision for a couple of hours so I'm not complaining.'

‘And how am I supposed to organize a school if this holy man is already running his idea of one?'

‘You've got a problem there – maybe he could be part of whatever you set up.'

‘Have you seen him swinging that cane, Charlie?'

‘Yeah, I've seen him, looks like he's herding geese.' He smiled. ‘I know it's not a good start for you but sometimes you have to accommodate people, avoid offence, respect local traditions. Sometimes we just need to go with the flow.'

The conversation was over. The resolution of the problem was entirely in my hands. As I started for the door Wanneker lifted his head. ‘There's a girl called Nadra. Check her out. She might be able to help. Speaks real good English.'

I found her in mid-afternoon, when the sun seemed set to bake the earth and the air hung limp and flaccid. She was with a score of other women, close to the banks of the dried-up river bed where what remained from the UN World Food Programme was growing. Ripening sorghum rippled a tattered splurge of green against the bleached scurf of the plain, and beyond it a field of sunflowers stood in serried, wilting rows. There was too, a small harvested crop of corn in yellow-coloured humps. The women used wooden paddles to fling it
into
the air, separate the chaff. Their feet beat and shuffled in a rhythm which echoed the rise and fall of their voices. The paddles dipped into the piles and flicked the husks into a sudden puff of yellow against the blue swathe of sky, and the cadence of the song looped over on itself as flecks of gold rained about the women's heads. I saw her first through the fine veil of falling grain, her face veined with slants of seed. She was taller and younger than most of the other women, and wore a white blouse and a long red skirt patterned with yellow and blue. Her dark hair seemed even darker where it touched the white of the blouse, dark as her eyes, and her face had sharp, fine features which suggested Arab ancestry.

I stood watching for a while as they worked, unwilling to disturb the spell, and then she walked towards me and handed me the wooden paddle.

‘Would you like to try?' she asked.

‘Yes,' I said, taking it from her, ‘but I don't know the song.'

‘I can teach you. Do what I do.' And as the other women smiled and laughed encouragement I stumbled into the shuffling rhythm and let my voice imitate the loop and roll of theirs. ‘You do it good. You are a teacher?' I nodded my head. ‘Have you read George Orwell's
Selected Writing?'

9

It
makes me nervous driving into territory which is foreign, paranoia generating a fear that I am clearly recognizable as an outsider, a member of another tribe. I reach over and lock the passenger door, lift my bag off the seat and drop it out of sight at my feet. I try to look confident, sure of where I'm going, as I glance up at the gable murals, listen to the slogans which scream into the silence of the car, making its sanctuary seem violable and exposed. A different world, one I know nothing about and am not part of. As rain begins to stipple the windscreen, I switch on the headlights in my nervousness, flick full beam at oncoming traffic. Past video shops and takeaways, bars with metal grilles and security cameras, past a police station bristling with aerials. I have only a general idea of where I'm heading. Along roads that look like any others. Stopped at red lights longer than I want to be, I read the peeling propaganda skimming across walls, try to find the names of roads whose signs have been removed. The words tell me that I don't belong here. Once again I question the wisdom of what I'm doing and think of turning the car round and going home, but something stronger makes me keep going.

I glance at the piece of paper on the dashboard on which I have written the address and the roads I must take before I reach the estate. I try to think of what I will say if I find him. By now, others have seen the television pictures a thousand times, enhanced and frozen the monochromed images, started a steady match of names and faces. Already the first arrests have been made and the search for atonement has begun. For some
reason,
I think of the Sunday drives we made with my father as he headed towards some waiting congregation through the saddle of mountain and across the bogland. As the rain grows heavier I remember the white wisps of bog cotton, the sudden pools of brackish water holding hostage the trapped image of sky. People waiting for my father's voice. I try again to think of what I will say, search for words that will not make me sound as if I too am come to speak for God.

Others in the school have seen and recognized and soon everyone knows. For some it brings a smug self-satisfaction. Their judgement has been confirmed and a rebuff given to those who, through youth or inexperience, sought to blind themselves to his true nature. He has not been to school since it happened and I know I can't leave it like this. As I drive, the car windows begin to mist up. When I switch on the heater, it roars in the silence. On the pavement people shelter under the striped awning of a fruit shop, getting in the way as the owner tries to move his produce beyond the drips and splashes.

I get lost, but rather than ask the way I keep driving until eventually, by a process of elimination, I reach the estate. It is bigger than I had anticipated. Most of the street names have been removed and replaced with Irish ones. Children play in the streets, oblivious to the rain, and as I drive slowly, straining to see names and house numbers, they turn to look at me, their pale faces framed by the damp sheen of their hair. I raise a hand vaguely but no one responds. A group of older boys kick a ball about on a tussocky area of grass but without energy or enthusiasm, sometimes simulating aggression with exaggerated raising of legs and arms. I drive past a row of boarded-up shops where only the light squinting from an open doorway hints at life inside, then, as I turn blindly into another street, I am forced to stop. There is a black limousine in the road and, blocking my path, groups of women and children. A chauffeur with a peaked cap is holding a car door open and I think I have driven into a funeral. As I pull up some of the women turn and
look
at me and I feel suddenly frightened but then there is a cheer and the faces turn away again. A young woman has come out of one of the houses, a young woman in a white wedding dress. A few steps behind a man follows, holding a black umbrella over the bride's head. As she walks the wind billows her dress and she presses it down with the palms of her hands. I remember my mother's photograph, the day she was beautiful, her dress rippling round her feet like surf, wild roses in her hair. I watch the bride bend her head into the car, gathering her train carefully about her and then the women crowd round, knocking the glass and waving in to her. Children run behind, trying to keep up as the car moves off, purring into the distance. I get out of my car and ask one of the women if she can direct me to the address I read from the paper in my hand. She looks at the paper as rain begins to bleed the ink and then she looks at me, at my face, my hair, my clothes. She isn't sure. I lie and tell her I'm from the Health Centre and she relents and gives me the directions I need.