Stone Kingdoms (20 page)

‘And did you have a woman to go home to?'

‘Sure did, she stayed all of six months. Went off with a pimp of a salesman who told her she could be the next Diana Ross. I don't blame her though, things weren't always easy and we weren't married or anything. One thing I knew even then – there was enough of Denise to make two Diana Rosses. Every time I see Diana on the TV she looks a skinny bag of bones, and it makes me chuckle when I remember.'

‘What happened to her?'

‘Last time I heard, she was married and working in a Seven–Eleven store up north. Had a couple of kids.'

‘Did the army not give you help, there must have been plenty of others like you?'

‘The army kicked my ass out just as fast as they could when they decided I couldn't cut it any more. Me and the army didn't part on good terms. When I came out I did nothing for a long time then had every job under the sun. Anything to pay the
rent,
buy the beer. Later, when I straightened things out a little, I got jobs in health programmes, mostly inner city jobs they couldn't get anyone else to take.'

‘And what about the plants and the painting?'

‘Always liked painting. Started to paint plants the first monsoon in Nam. It comes October to January and it doesn't stop for breath. Rain and wind and there isn't a part of you that doesn't feel wet and you can't go the length of yourself without tramping through a sea of mud. For most guys there was only drink, dope and women to help keep their heads together. I wasn't any different, but there was something blew my head more than anything. Maybe you'll think I'm crazy, but I don't have to give a shit anymore about what anyone thinks. You see I've been a city boy all my life, different cities, but all cities are the same and suddenly I'm looking at this world which is green and alive and beautiful, very beautiful. Some guys, it drove them crazy; me, I got a high out of it, seeing it, touching it and then I started to draw it. We had a guy on the base – every base had one – who could get you anything you wanted, and he gets me a kid's paintbox and I spent that first wet season in a little hole painting anything I could get my hands on. Anything that grew. Orchids is my speciality now – I grow them as well. You didn't know there were wild orchids on the Burren? The guys used to call me Vincent, ask me when I was going to slice my ear.'

He glanced at me to see what I was thinking and I looked him in the eye, drained what was left in the glass and held it out for more. And then he asked me about Baran and I told him everything. When I had finished he sat nodding his head as if he understood, but said nothing. I needed words in the silence and so I asked him how people could do that, knowing it was a pointless question, and he took off his glasses and set them on the table, then pinched his eyes with his thumb and finger. ‘I've had a long time to think about that but never seemed to get any closer to an answer. Maybe there is no answer.' He flicked a
hand
up at the moths, momentarily disturbing the tracery of their flight, then hesitated about what he was going to say. ‘Out in the field there was a big push on – they flew us in behind the troops. That's when I saw it. I flew in after a guy they called the Axe Man had done his job. Wasn't supposed to be anyone there, guess Intelligence just screwed-up or the Axe Man couldn't read a map. We dropped napalm on them – old men, women, children. There wasn't anything anyone could do when we got there. Worst fucking thing I've ever seen in my whole life. Shook up even the tough shits, and then they rushed us the hell out of there and ordered us not to talk about it. Didn't need that order. Just like it never happened. But sometimes, sometimes even now I dream that smell, dream it like they all do.'

And then I told him about my mother and that day in Derry when she put her foot on the ring. I don't know why but I wanted to tell him and as I spoke he listened, concentrating on everything I was saying and resting his head in his hands as if weary with his own weight. When I finished he tried to pour us another drink but the bottle was empty then, putting on his glasses, he used his forefinger to push them back on to the bridge of his nose.

‘Naomi, you're one crazy child. If ever I thought you should go home, now I know it. Have you been listening to me, girl? This is a different world. If you think you can come here, put your foot on the ring and everything will be all right, then you're even crazier than I am. You think hard on what you saw in Baran and forget about that ring. Jeez!' He tried to pour another drink from the bottle he knew was empty. ‘You remember what burning flesh smells like and get yourself in the next truck out of here. I'm going any day now, you make sure you're gone before me.'

‘Why are you so frightened of your own goodness?'

‘Because it's a lie, a fucking lie, and you can do whatever you like to me but don't even for a second think of painting me
some
sort of halo in that dreamland your head lives in.' And in his anger he swept the empty bottle to the floor. ‘You know what I did best in Nam? I helped those boys to die, those lines of expectants, those kids I told we'd take good care of them. I helped them to die. Took away their screams. And at first I did it for them but after a while I did it for me, just for me, because I couldn't bear their pain any more.'

He turned his head and wouldn't look at me. I tried to speak, but he waved me away with a sweep of his hand and as I walked to the door of the tent I paused and looked back to see him staring into the shadows, his head framed by white-winged moths and paintings of plants.

16

Every
hour brought new arrivals to Bakalla. Whatever was happening between the rival clans had scared people enough to make them abandon their homes and seek a safer place. There were no tents left, little we could provide for shelter, and by then everything that could have been scavenged or improvised had been picked clean, and so arriving families simply squatted in the dust and marked out a space with the thin spread of their possessions. Sometimes fights would break out over the ownership of something but they would subside almost as quickly as they started, as negotiation restored calm. Apart from the toll the journey had taken, most of those who arrived were in reasonable health and had left homes in villages where there was probably enough food to get by. In coming to Bakalla they had made themselves reliant on the Agency, but their fear of whatever was out there made it impossible for them to return home. At first we tried to keep a record of these arrivals, names, numbers, family relationships, but after a while it proved too time-consuming and eventually we abandoned it.

More children than we could cope with came to the school and Nadra enlisted help to maintain some semblance of order and purpose. But it felt as if we were being slowly overwhelmed. We needed more staff, more resources, but Charlie was pessimistic about the prospect of any early improvement and increasingly irritable and unpredictable in his manner, answering questions abruptly or simply side-stepping them with flippant replies. For a day we lost radio contact with the
capital
and he stalked up and down, never going out of the clinic or carrying out any medical work.

‘What's happening?' Rollins asked him one evening after the compound gates had been closed.

‘There's fighting in the capital, areas where it's not safe to travel. All the agencies have been trying to negotiate safe routes from the docks and warehouses but every time they pay out, someone else has joined the queue with their hand out. There isn't enough money to pay all these people any more, and a lot of the food is being commandeered and re-sold on the streets. We'll know for sure in the next forty-eight hours but there's a possibility that all relief agencies will threaten a pull-out if someone doesn't take local control and make the right guarantees. In the meantime we need to be ready to leave here at very short notice. What that means is have a personal bag packed and help get drugs and medical supplies into crates. Everything else stays. It mightn't come to it, because there's still the real possibility of international intervention, but we have to be ready - and under no circumstances should you discuss with anyone outside Agency staff what we've been talking about. Any sort of panic in a situation like this would be absolutely fatal.'

For once Rollins made no comment, seemed to accept what he had heard and made no attempt to ask further questions.

‘What happens to Bakalla?' I asked.

Charlie shrugged his shoulders and at first it looked as if he wasn't going to reply, but I asked again.

‘Work it out for yourself, Naomi.'

‘No, Charlie. I want to hear it from you. What happens to Bakalla?'

I could see Rollins smiling and shaking his head but I didn't care.

‘Please answer the question,' said Martine, coming to stand beside me.

‘OK, you guys, take it easy. The best that happens is that
eventually
people go back to where their villages are, try to make a go of things, or that we get intervention and relief protection and then the Agency pushes in more people and more resources.'

‘But what about all those people who came here because they couldn't make a go of it and have nothing now to go back to?'

‘If we pull out for any length of time, Naomi, some of those people will die. There's no two ways about it. You think I don't know that? There's still the possibility that food could be air-dropped, but that's messy and without central organization and distribution only the strong survive. But if the word comes from Stanfield we're out of here. We don't have a choice.' He shrugged his shoulders, put on his baseball cap and walked away.

Later that night I slipped through the compound gate and made my way to where Nadra lived. She sat outside her home on a strip of straw matting, trying to read a book by the light of the small fire. I sat beside her and she made me tea. I had brought something for her – a parcel of fruit and some of the daily rations that had been allocated to me. She held them in her hands and looked at them for a long time, and for a moment I thought she was going to give them back.

‘You are leaving?' she asked, setting the gifts at arm's length from herself.

‘I don't know yet, there is talk of it. It could be soon but no one knows for sure.' I couldn't leave a lie as her final memory of me. ‘But if I go, I'll come back, I promise I'll come back.'

‘Who can tell the future, Naomi? My father said he would come back.'

We watched the smoulder of the fire for a few moments and then she took a stick and pushed some fragments of wood into the flames.

‘Perhaps you and the other women could go on running the school.'

‘
When there's no food, no one needs a school. I will have to look after my mother and sister, maybe take them to a new place. But she is old now, too old to travel far.'

‘There is talk of a United Nations peace-keeping force. If it comes, then we may not have to go.'

‘Many people come to our country – the British, the Italians, the Russians – and always they leave. I do not know which is worse, their coming or going. What will happen to Bakalla?'

‘I don't know, Nadra. If we have to go then it's possible that aircraft will be used to drop food.'

‘And how much food do you think the old and the sick, all the orphans, will get? Only the strong and the greedy will get it.'

‘We don't know yet that we're going to leave.'

‘But you came to say goodbye.'

‘Yes, I didn't know if I'd get the chance or what exactly will happen.'

‘Will you go back to Ireland?'

‘No, I won't go back to Ireland. This feels more of a home to me than Ireland.'

‘It is strange you find a home in a place where people have no homes.'

‘Many things in life are strange.'

She nodded and stirred the embers of the fire, trying to coax some final life out of it. I had things I wanted to say to her but I couldn't say them without accepting my departure as inevitable, and so I sat in silence and stared into the fire where the final slivers of wood turned into a fine white ash. When I couldn't put it off any longer I stood up, still unsure of what to say, and she stood too and I couldn't trust my voice, didn't know anyway what to say and so I held out my hand to her and she took it and we shook hands. Then she said something in her own language and as I tried to stem my tears I promised that I would come back and more than anything I hoped that she believed me. I turned to go but felt her hand on my arm and saw
her
slip the thin gold bracelet off her wrist and hand it to me. I shook my head, but she slipped it on me and I hugged her before I threaded my way back to the compound, stopping once to look back at where she stood in the falling darkness.

There was music coming from the clinic as I entered the compound. The opening door threw a sudden squall of yellow across my path as Charlie stepped out on to the veranda. I knew from his speech and movements that he'd been drinking.

‘Where you been, Naomi?' he asked.

‘I left something at the school. I wanted to see if it was still there.'

‘You've had a wasted journey then, haven't you?'

‘Yes, stupid of me.'

‘What was it you left?'

‘Some books and things.'

‘That all?'

‘Yes, nothing really important.'

‘They're long gone by now, buried out there somewhere, probably be used in the morning to light a fire.'

‘Maybe.'

‘You know you're not supposed to leave the compound at night. Anything could happen out there. I'd appreciate it if you followed that rule.'

I nodded my head and walked through the corridor of yellow, the bracelet on my wrist burnishing into light.

‘Do you want to join me for a few beers? I'm listening to Madam Butterfly – most passionate piece of music there is. Always better to listen to music with company.'