Cause Celeb (6 page)

On the big screen above her, which showed the live TV output, the shot cut to the husband, Rani, back at the table looking bewildered. Instead of tribal robes now, he was wearing black tie, but he still had the disk in his bottom lip. In the interview I'd read, the reporter had asked Vicky if Rani took the disk out at night, which had not gone down at all well.

“Come on up, Rani, this is for you too,” she was saying. The bemused Rani was being pushed towards the stage, helped up the steps by a young lovely in a glittery sheath. Then everyone was getting to their feet, giving Rani a standing ovation.

Vernon Briggs had grabbed the fat floor manager's microphone and was talking into it in a low furious voice. “Get her to shut up,” he was saying. “Marcus, get the Indian
off
the stage and get her to shut up
now.
Get the stupid tart to shut
up.
We are one hour and forty minutes over, Marcus. Get the Indian
off
the stage now.”

Just then the cameraman came to our table and started to focus on Oliver, which meant that Best Arts Program was coming up. Corinna leaned towards him into the shot. For a fleeting second, I saw him look furious, then he started talking to Corinna in a low voice. Corinna was biting one side of her bottom lip and kept looking up at the camera.

The image on the big screen cut to the Best Arts Program logo. Vicky Spankie's microphone was cut, and a girl holding a script hurried over to her, ushering her and Rani apologetically off the stage. Vicky put her head in the air, and swept towards the exit, with Rani following her, clutching the award and beaming, as far as it
was possible with the disk in his lip. As she passed our table, he caught her arm. “Oh, sod off, you stupid fuckbrain,” I heard her mutter under her breath.

Oliver and Corinna were tense. The last of the clips from the four nominations was running. Kevin Garside, a folk singer with a skinhead cut, was performing miners' protest songs. They were his own compositions performed to his own tambourine accompaniment. He was being watched by a group of Guatemalan peasants in a hut, wearing expressions of polite embarrassment.

The red light came on from the camera opposite Oliver. Onstage, Ian McKellen was opening the envelope. The screen was divided in quarters. In one of them was Oliver with a relaxed smile, and Corinna still biting her lip.

“And the winner of Best Arts Program is Sof—”

On the screen I saw Corinna breaking into a smile, and just beginning to rise from her seat.

“—Sofama Kuwayo for
The Dispossessed, a Lament.
”

Oliver's smile stayed till the light behind the camera clicked off.

Onstage, Sofama Kuwayo had taken his award and was finishing his speech: “. . . in your Audis, your Mercs, your BMWs, spare a thought for those, many of them younger than your own kids, without homes to go to. It's
their
words,
their
experience, the poetry of
their
lives which created that program. This award is for them.”

“Well, you made a prat of yourself there, Corinna, didn't you?” said Oliver.

About half an hour later we were making our way to Pizza on the Piazza in a little group made up of a studiedly modest Bill Bonham, Corinna and someone called Rats, who was apparently the bass player in the group EX Gap, a still-tearful Vicky Spankie, minus Rani, a comedian called Hughie Harrington-Ellis, and lastly Oliver, with his arm around me.

“Oy, Hughie,” a group of boys yelled from a traffic island, “absobloodylootely.” This was one of Hughie's many catch phrases. “Absobloodylutely,” went the boys. Hughie gave them a gritted-teeth smile and a wave.

“This must happen to you all the time,” I said.

“Oh, no,” said Hughie dryly. “First time it's ever happened to me.”

In the restaurant everyone turned to stare. All the tables were full, but the management somehow managed to move some kids and make them split up and share on three other tables. Within minutes we were all sitting together at their table with the waiters flapping around us.

“Oh, God, this is so embarrassing. It must happen to you all the time. You don't mind, mate, do you?” said a young boy, shoving a bit of paper under Hughie's nose.

“Of course I don't,” said Hughie, adding under his breath, “you little tit.”

Vicky was signing a photograph, which she just happened to have in her handbag, for the waiter.

A girl came up to Bill Bonham. “I'm sorry, would you mind? This must happen to you all the time.”

I was praying for someone to come and ask Oliver, because I could feel him descending into gloom again. Then, thank God, another pair of girls appeared and asked Oliver to sign their menu. “Sorry, you'll have to get used to this,” said Oliver smiling smugly.

There was a commotion at the door and Terence Twinkle burst in. “Hi, everyone,” he shouted across to our table. “God, it's a nightmare out there. Why can't anyone leave me alone?” He was wearing a floor-length white mink coat.

I
t was twelve-thirty when we turned the jeep into the gates of the compound. Malcolm's Land Cruiser was already there, plastered in stickers. A small procession was making its way towards the latrine unit. The procession was headed by Betty, dressed in pink, who was gesturing and laughing beneficently as if hosting a royal visit. Our team had all changed into their best clothes—ludicrously garish pantomime outfits: dresses, shirts and harem pants with brightly colored spots and stripes, run up by the tailors in the camp. Malcolm was wearing a yellow T-shirt and a hat, which looked as though it had something stupid written on it. And next to him, looking away from Betty and across to the camp, was the new doctor, who was of medium height and dressed in dull colors.

At the sound of our vehicle the whole procession slowly turned round and stared accusingly. Sian appeared from the cabana as we climbed out. “I told them there was probably a bit of a crisis down at the hospital,” she said conspiratorially. “I think they're all fine only, well, Betty . . .”

There then followed a rather awkward moment as Henry, Sian and I walked across to the latrine procession, with no one quite knowing what to do except smile fixedly. Fortunately, Henry's breeding carried us through. “Malcolm, dear boy!” he started bellowing as we approached. “Great to see you! Hi! You must be the
new doctor, great to see you, great! Great to have some more old buggers around the place to dilute the totty.”

By this time we had reached the group, but Henry was still on autowitter. “Sorry not to be here to give you the old welcoming committee—bit of an old blood bag crisis down the black hole of Calcutta.”

The new doctor looked somewhat taken aback. He seemed pleasant, but dull. Pity.

“Hi,” he said mildly. “Robert O'Rourke.” His voice was unusually deep and sounded as though it was coming from a long way away.

“Henry Montague, marvelous,” Henry was bellowing, meanwhile shaking hands energetically. “Great to have you on board. And this is our great white memsahib—Rosie,” said Henry. “I know she looks like a sex object but she's really very strict.”

“Strict but fair, I hope,” said O'Rourke.

“You mustn't mind Henry,” said Sian. “It's his upbringing.”

The ice was broken now. For all his absurdity, Henry understood what good manners really mean.

“Nice to have you here,” I said. “Malcolm, nice to see you.”

Malcolm did his silly teeth-together beam, and waved both hands on either side of his head.

“Have you and Dr. O'Rourke had something to drink?” I asked.

“Well, no, we rather thought Doctor might like to have a good nosey round,” Betty interrupted. “After all, this is going to be home sweet home for our new friend for quite some time.” She lowered her voice. “Actually, Malcolm, when you have a moment I really would like to have a little chinwag.”

The doctor was looking at Betty intently. There was something rather purposeful about him.

He looked at me and gestured towards the camp. “This is a beautiful place.” Bewdaful. I couldn't place his accent.

“Very beautiful,” I said. Then I looked down and saw his white socks. Ugh.

O'Rourke walked with a slight limp. As Linda took him off to his hut, I tried to look at his leg discreetly without him seeing. Perhaps it was a wooden one. Apart from his medical bag, he seemed
to have just one canvas holdall, like an overnight bag. It seemed like traveling light taken to ridiculous extremes considering he was here for two years. I hoped he wasn't going to start wanting to borrow everyone else's shampoo.

The rest of the team were looking so clean and smart that I thought I'd better sort myself out. I went to my hut and glanced in the little mirror hanging above my desk, which is something I rarely did. I remember it because that was the moment when I saw, apart from my red nose and mad hair, the first line on my face, just beginning, heading from the edge of my nose down to the corner of my mouth. It must have been the light at that time of day which caught it. It gave me a shock. I always thought that aging should happen the other way round. Life would be so much more optimistic if you began it as a wrinkly old crone and became younger, more vibrant and beautiful as the years rolled by, secure in the knowledge that at the end of your life someone would be happy to play with you, change your nappy and push you round in a pram till you turned back into an egg. Trying to push unpleasant existential thoughts to the back of my mind, I stepped out into the hot light and headed for the cabana.

The lunch was over and there was a scene of intense absorption, furious tearing of envelopes, silent, urgent reading. It was hard to overestimate the importance of the mail in Safila, the arrival of a letter, or its nonappearance, could bring about massive mood swings. I looked around and saw that neither Betty nor Malcolm was there. She was probably lecturing him about the Teeth of the Wind. I had better make sure she didn't put him off. With some self-control, I ignored the small pile of mail, including a parcel which was for me, and stepped outside.

Betty looked up guiltily as I approached. “I know Rosie will say I'm a silly old moo,” she said, “but, Malcolm, I really do think it is beholden on us to respond.”

Something peculiar happened to Betty's vowels when she was showing off. Be
heow
lden, res
pund.

Malcolm already looked desperate to get away from Betty's re-
spunses
. He required delicate handling. He was efficient, so long as
everything was logged and predictable: which simply wasn't the way things worked here. He also had the sort of mind which loved to walk in very slow circles around things, looking at them without getting too close.

“Has Betty explained to you about the rumors?” I asked him.

“Yes, yes. It's, er, I have heard something of this in Sidra. It's an interesting development. I think we must wait and see, er, see what develops.” Sidra was the nearest town, where there was a UN office, and telephones that worked on odd occasions.

“Well, the thing is if it does develop, it'll happen so fast we won't be able to deal with it. We're short on stocks anyway. You know the UN have told us we can't have the delivery? Do you know when this ship's going to arrive?”

“I, er, well, actually, I was just hoping to get back to Sidra quickly to talk about that sort of area of things and other, er, related matters. So I
think,
if it's all right with you here, and there are no other matters to be gone over then I will make a hasty departure, as there is a great deal, as I say, to be gone into in Sidra.”

I decided I had better tell him what I knew, but it did all sound a bit thin. As far as I was concerned the strongest piece of evidence was that Muhammad believed there was a problem. But when I tried to convey this to Malcolm, it sounded suspect, almost as if I was in love with Muhammad Mahmoud and expecting twins by him.

I made Malcolm promise to radio back to me about the food, and alert head office in London. He said he would discuss the matter with the UN High Commission for Refugees, who gave out the food. He didn't sound particularly enamored of the idea. I was not convinced that he'd put the whole force of his personality, such as it was, behind it.

“Ah,” said Malcolm, interrupting me, looking over my shoulder. “Don't suppose I could have my socks back before I go, could I?”

I turned round to see O'Rourke, who looked surprised and then said, “Sure,” and bent down to take off his shoes and socks. Both his feet were real. He straightened up and looked at me, rolling the socks and handing them to Malcolm. “I knew I'd forgotten to bring
something,” he said. “Guess I'll have to, er, weave some.” He had an unexpected smile which came and went very quickly.

I followed Malcolm to the gate to wave him off, feeling that I'd got it wrong. Malcolm had refugee settlements on every border in the country to oversee. I hadn't convinced him to do much about us. I walked a little way along the track and stood where I could see his vehicle making its way across the plain, raising a plume of dust behind it. The sun was high now. I watched for a long time, till the engine noise died away, till it became a tiny speck and disappeared and the only sound was the cicadas. I felt a big burst of loneliness. Sometimes there were moments like this when the insulation of our little society crumbled away, and I remembered we were just camping in the wilderness. We were like one of those small outcrops of huts you spotted from the airplane on the way from England, surrounded by a thousand miles of desert on every side. Doing or getting anything was blocked by a swathe of distance and time. It took three hours even to get to Sidra.

Back in the cabana I was distracted by my mail. There was a new pair of trainers from my mum in the parcel: black ones, like little boots. I had been waiting for two months for them to come. Also there were new cotton knickers, five pairs in black. There were five letters, three of them from Mum, two from friends in London with handwriting I recognized.

I turned to the first one to cheer me up. I adored my mum's letters. This one began, as usual,
“I was just having a cup of tea and a coffee ring and I thought, I wonder how Rosie's doing? . . .”
and then there was a commotion outside, coming from the direction of the main gate.

I was at the far end of the cabana, so by the time I'd arrived at the gate the others had formed such a tight-knit circle it was impossible to see what they were looking at. Then the group broke up and I saw O'Rourke gesturing everyone away with great politeness, as if trying to move a party of guests through from drinks to dinner. Slumped against the wall of Betty's hut were a Keftian family, emaciated, filthy and exhausted. A woman lay on the ground with the stick limbs, tufted hair and unseeing expression of the badly
malnourished. Beside her, the father of the family was holding a child in his arms. It was only when I got closer that I realized that the child was dead.

I froze completely. Back in the old days, when we lived with this all the time, we had found a way of dealing with it, a robust, workaday distancing which enabled us to do what had to be done. But this had caught me with my defenses down. I tried to remind myself how to be: don't think about the implications, how they feel, what's going to happen, just decide what needs to be done, then do it, one thing at a time. I went into the cabana, found rehydration salts, high-energy biscuits. The mother needed a drip, and O'Rourke and Betty organized that while Henry and I brought the vehicles round. We drove down to the hospital in convoy with Henry and me following in the third vehicle with the father and the dead child. The father was crying. There was something particularly harrowing about that simple response—your family is starving, your child is dead and so you cry.

It didn't take long to find people who knew the family because the camp had been laid out like a map of Kefti so that all the people from the same villages could stay together. I desperately wanted to talk to the father to find out why they had come. Was it the locusts? How many more were following? I knew I had to leave it be, till the burial was over. I decided to go back to the compound to see if I could get Malcolm on the radio in Sidra.

I couldn't get a connection. I was shouting, “Safila to SUSTAIN Sidra, Safila to SUSTAIN Sidra, Safila to SUSTAIN Sidra,” but all there was was crackle. Nothing. No contact. I started saying Safila to Sidra again, then put my head on my arms and tried not to cry. I heard the sound of a vehicle drawing up and tried to pull myself together. This was ridiculous. I was going to be no use to anyone if I flopped around like this. I had to toughen up. The door opened. It was Debbie.

“Have you got the key for the vaccine fridge?” she said, then saw my face and hurried over to me. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, I'm fine. It's just . . . it reminds me of—”

“I know,” she said.

“Are
you
all right?”

“Yeah . . . but . . . Well.
You
know, don't you?”

I had to get a message to Malcolm, tell him what had happened, before he left Sidra. It was only one family, but this hadn't happened for so long, they were in such a bad state, there were all these rumors: he had to know about it before he went back to the capital. I climbed into the jeep to drive to Safila village. There was an office there with a radio—the local branch of the Nambulan Commission of Refugees. COR was one of the plethora of acronyms which filled our talk: COR, UNHCR, RESOK, NGO. We were supposed to report all new arrivals to COR. Possibly their radio would be working so I could get a message to Malcolm. I climbed into the jeep and drove along the track to the village. The heat had gone out of the day now, the sun was starting to soften.

The COR office was surrounded by a high rush fence and a scruffy yard. A pig was snuffling around in a pile of rubbish in the corner. A girl with a cloudy eye was sitting on a low bed, picking at her foot, Hassan's girl. She was wearing a pair of my earrings. She jumped up, beaming as I arrived, eyeing the earrings I was wearing and showed me into the office.

“Hassan maquis,” she said. Hassan is not here.

Hassan was the COR officer. I sat down and tried Sidra on his radio. There was the same empty crackle. The girl reached over and fingered my earring. I shook my head and pointed to the ones I had given her last time. She smiled sheepishly. I fiddled with the dial to try and get El Daman, the capital. There was nothing there. I kept trying. Nothing.