This Is Where I Am (49 page)

‘What happened? What happened to that wee baby?’

‘Is not baby. Two, maybe three. It die, what happened.’

‘Did she kill it?’

He snorts. ‘No.’

‘Then why . . . ?’

‘She hide him. So she keep getting his rations.’

Deep blue dusk is settling when we finally leave, falling in a cloak which Dadaab gratefully receives. Mo and I drive in silence, faint smells clinging and drifting between us. The gap between day and night comes like snow here. Sharp barbs become undulations. The plastic fluttering is blossom on trees. It will pitch rapidly, though, to absolute dark, the thick lightless panic of nature versus man, of bad versus good. You would be mad to be in Dadaab in the dark. The tip of Mo’s cigarette glows in the windscreen. All the edges of my nails are stinging. I take my hand from my mouth.

‘Hey. No cry, Missus Deb. Is not your fault.’

‘Mo. What if I set up a fund? So money could come here regularly for the school. Would that work?’

‘Why you ask me?’

‘Because you, my friend, are a fat wise man.’

‘And youa very rude.’

My rudeness is his Achilles’ heel, because he starts to chat a wee bit as we trundle through the dusk. He has two sons and two daughters and his father was a policeman too. At every gap in the conversation I hesitate.
Will I say it now, will I say it now?
Does it matter any more? Is it safe? We are alone in a growing blackness which chases us in waves. He could shoot me, dump me . . . anything. One wrong move . . . and I am now in a cowboy film. I hear Rose, feck-saking me.
Carpe diem, you silly cow
. Mo scratches his abundant thigh. In another police truck, a little body rolls in a blanket.

‘Mo,’ I say when we’re in sight of the UN compound. ‘Can you stop the car? I’d like you to look at something.’

‘No got time. Am day off, you know.’

‘Please.’

He tuts loudly and slows the vehicle, pulling in by the side of a feeding station. Keeps the engine running.

‘What?’

I bring out the picture of Azira. I won’t show it to him yet.

‘You know how we were asking Mariam about Azira?’

‘I no listen when women yi-yi-yi.’ He snaps his hand like a jaw.

‘Aye you do. You listen to everything. I am trying to find this woman, Mo. And I think I saw her, last time I was here. D’you know where I think I saw her?’

He lights another cigarette.

‘In the police station. In your compound, Mo.’

‘S’no my compound. I don’ live there.
Work
there, yes.’

‘But people do live there, don’t they? I mean, I saw a garden, other buildings.’

He removes a shred of tobacco from his tongue. ‘Some does. The men. The corporal stay sometime, and inspector when he come.’

‘And women?’

A dry laugh. ‘They keep some animal there.’

‘The women do?’

‘They not women. They
dhilo
.’

He means the women
are
the animals, I think. My nails press sickle-shapes into my knees. Azira’s face shines from the glossy paper on which she is printed; the swing of her hair, how her mouth folds and opens. How she demands attention. When Mo looks at her, he’ll . . . And then I remember he already has looked at her, and if not her, then hundreds and thousands of other Aziras, reduced to livestock and kept satisfactorily remote. What if it was his wife? I lift her up, flat on my palm.

‘Could you look at this photo, Mo? Tell me if you know her.’

Eyes barely skim the paper.
Look at her
. She is my last gasp and I am hers.

‘Don’ know.’

‘Mo, please. I’m begging you.’ I put it on his lap. ‘This is someone’s wife. Someone’s mother.
Hooyo?
Please, she has a little girl. Please let her go home.’

He looks for a long time, until his cigarette has burned to nothing. Ash crumbles, falls and the tiny breathing light extinguishes. Night has finally caught us fully, so I can only see his outline. Smell the desert, our breaths twining with residual curls of smoke. A bird screeches, there is a tumbling clang of metal buckets. People shout inside the compound. I want to be inside the inhabited warmth. Close myself in and tuck it all around me.

Mo’s disembodied voice comes slowly. ‘I no know her, Missus Deb. I sorry.’

Wife, mum, victim.
Dhilo
.

Wife, mum, killer, widow. Victim.

Victim.

You could rearrange labels all night when you can’t sleep, you’ve nae pals, there’s no electricity and all your lovely magic medications are at home or in the bin.

Economist, husband, disabled, dead.

Fisherman, husband, father. Refugee.

Now, isn’t that interesting? When I write them down: it’s only the men who get their professions first. You can extend the game by cutting up the paper to make actual labels. Rearrange them, shuffling them in a deck, deal them out in random allocations. Luckily for me, I get bored with this quite quickly, go wandering to find a drink of water (the stuff in the washroom tap is a funny brown). Meet a lovely girl in the desolate canteen.

When I was first diagnosed with breast cancer, I wanted to die. Not one shred of brave fighting spirit. Just a terror of decay, the imperfection, the corrosion of my body.
My
body. How could it do that to me? The hormones that had struggled to make a baby could whip up a tumour with ease. Better to die intact than have bits lopped off. Then, when I finally succumbed and had a bit lopped off, I came home to a husband who unbound me, kissed me. Told me he’d always been a cup-half-full man.

Which is true. And was very funny at the time.

Even if I had found Azira, what part of her would have come back to Abdi? Would he want it; would she want him? Jesusgod, how am I meant to know?

The pale blonde girl in the canteen, scribbling in an A4 notepad, is Inge. She is the researcher Rose had wanted me to meet last time. We get talking, as you do in your vest and jammy bottoms when you find another insomniac with haunted eyes, and I tell her why I’m here. The true version. Inge listens as I describe Abdi to her, tell her anecdotes of Rebecca, try to sketch Azira’s short life. Inge rarely interrupts. She has very bright-blue eyes.

‘I keep thinking, I keep thinking, I mean, that river’s a totey wee creek . . . ach, Christ, Inge. This is so stupid.’ And there it is, I physically feel the last vestiges of resolve shudder from me.

Inge nods. Passes me a hankie. ‘Yes, but last two years we have had terrible floods. For women . . . the shame can be very great, you know? And sometimes, if others know; women can be burned alive, you see. Or scalded with boiling water.’

‘For being raped?’

‘For having sex.’

‘How can you go digging for all that stuff? Listen to their stories, write it all down?’

‘So others can hear them.’ She smiles, briefly. ‘You say you have been giving pictures of her?’

‘Yes. I’ve still got . . .’ I’m in my jammies. ‘Can you wait a sec? I’ve got one in my room.’

‘Sure,’ she says in her lovely curdled accent.

On the way back from the accommodation block, I’m halted in the yard. Dawn has painted the town red. A low, rose-tinted glaze is creeping over first the water tower, then all the rooftops. Light thickens, begins to assume its hazy forms. There are little staff huts dotted here and there: round stone buildings with thatched roofs, then the low verandahed buildings where we sleep, then bigger blocks for meetings and administration – and recreation. Rose’s Grease Pit was jumping last night when I got in; a leaving do for some CARE staff. Kenyan music pumping, the rich roasty goodness of barbecued goat. Stray beer bottles still litter the ground around a group of empty chairs. I crunch on dust and stones towards the man who waves urgently at me.

‘Ma’am. There’s police here to see you.’

Mo waits at the entrance to the compound. He looks exhausted, wears the grey T-shirt of yesterday. Not an attractive look.

‘Hey. Have you not been to bed, you?’

‘No.’ With him is another man, a plump, glossy man in an elaborate robe. His thin beard is hennaed red. Mo dunts him in the back, so he is stuttered forward. The shiny man is appalled, his heavy jowls sway. He composes himself and extends his hand. ‘Khadra,
madame
. At your service.’

‘You have plenty money, Missus Deb?’

‘Mo. What’s this about?’

Again, he pushes Khadra. ‘You tell.’

Khadra gazes nonchalantly at the sun above us.

‘Yes, I have money. I have money!’ I grapple with my watch strap; it’s all I have on me but I can get more,
I can get more
, I’m gibbering as I force the watch into Khadra’s fist. He turns the silvery strap over, over, as if he might reject it.

Mo cannot contain himself. ‘He know her. He know your Azira.’

‘You know her? Her?’ Thrusting the photograph I’m clutching in his face. ‘You know Azira? She’s alive? Is she alive?’

Khadra continues to examine my watch. A glancing blow to the side of his head. ‘You tell her. She is live!’

Khadra shakes out the folds of his rich blue-green robe. Into them, my wristwatch disappears, silver running silver, threaded time pouring and repouring. The heavy sun crawls higher, gapes on us. The air, unhurried. ‘I find things.’ With his little finger, Khadra wipes sweat from the side of his mouth. ‘I find things, I sell. Pretty things.’

It is late afternoon and I am panting. Steady puffs: a runner before my race. My heart is uncontrollable, it’s bound to give me away, me and Inge and Huq in our car with the windows open, Huq’s car, who is Inge’s boyfriend/escort/not sure but there is much glancing and careless touching between them. He’s lovely, Huq and I’m havering utter nonsense, both at them and in my head. This morning, Inge said this was a crazy idea.

You have a police who will
help
you?

I think so.

Be careful this is not a trap. He’s already taken hundreds of dollars.

One hundred, Inge. He said he needed them.

In Inge’s experience, the police can never be trusted. She has spoken to too many women who’ve gone to them for help. The lucky ones are ignored, the others robbed or beaten. Or worse. She urged me not to trust Mo.

But why would he tell me this?

To extort more money. To have you abducted? Whatever you do, you must not go inside.

They’ve still not found those two female aid workers.

This man is a very powerful chief. You understand this? These people have links with militia, police, some of the staff here – and with politicians too. Drugs, guns, money laundering: they all buy big bribes.

As do human beings. Azira is not fresh enough to have been trafficked. But, in a world where people eat bare unidentifiable bones, she is not so stale as to be worthless either. Khadra tells Mo she cleaned up well.
Very fine, very pretty
. He has a team of scavengers who search the dumps, riverbanks, the refuse. Azira is now the property of a tribal chief, a man of great stature, great power. He and his extended ‘family’ live in a small compound of their own inside the camp. I hadn’t realised, until Inge told me, that people cling to their tribe structure here. Even the design of their bird-nest shelters can denote which tribe they come from. How it was negotiated that this chief gets an entire compound, no one is quite clear. Apparently, he is so important, it is necessary for his own safety. Where Khadra is a useful man, this chief is mighty. His compound has been used as a storage facility for smuggled arms: Inge knows this for a fact. The guns were removed, yet he was not.

I think you must report this officially.

Look, Inge.
Interrupting her plain, Nordic flow.
You’re just after telling me this tribe’s a fucking cartel
.

You must also consider this, Deborah. It may be that she is happy there.

Happy?

Yes. If she is safe, and well-protected. Victims of sex crimes are often rejected by their communities. They are left with very few options.

Christ, Inge. Do you hear what you’re saying?

I had listened to her sigh, and the hum of the kitchen generator cranking up, the dryness of a sleepless night flattening my tongue. We sipped stale water. Watched the sun rise fully for its daily onslaught.

Mo will sort it. He’s risking a lot for me as it is.

Then Inge asked if she could help as well.

Mo cannot get involved beyond getting Azira out of the chieftain’s compound. I’m not sure how he’ll do this, but we are to wait, just far enough away that we can see the gate and the freshly painted corner of the wall. We sit, shaded in the lee of the transport yard, washed by this constant stream of disinterested people who are walking for rations, for firewood, for water, who are walking because it’s better than standing still. We’ve to wait here until I see them come out. I asked Mo to make absolutely sure it’s her.