Far From My Father’s House. Jill McGivering

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СКАЧАТЬ and the man stumbled, left behind. The butt of his gun rapped against the glass. That was Peshawar a few years ago. By all accounts, it was worse now.

      The convoy veered off the road and bumped down a long track onto mudflats, a raw landscape of cracked earth criss-crossed with ditches. Off to one side, boys were struggling to launch a homemade kite in the still air, running and whooping as it bumped along the ground behind them. Inside the car, the air was metallic, cooled and filtered by the air conditioning. She could imagine the heat and stink waiting for her outside.

      ‘That’s it.’ Frank pointed.

      A shanty town of coloured plastic and squat white tents was looming on the plain. Ellen straightened up so she could see through the windscreen. She felt her senses quickening as she judged the scale of the camp and thought of ways to describe the terrain. The camp was sprawling but it was dwarfed by the bleak, featureless mudflats which stretched in all directions. She could see why this great expanse of land hadn’t already been settled by local people. There were no natural features to provide shelter, not even rocks or scrub. Far beyond, obscured by cloud, a range of mountains rose, jagged, on the horizon.

      They drove closer. A tattered group of several hundred people was waiting in front of the camp’s gates. They were standing with drooping shoulders, bundles, baskets and bags piled at their sides. Ellen looked into the faces as they drove past. An elderly woman was sitting in the dirt, her cheeks sharp with bone. She looked exhausted, too listless to raise her eyes to the passing vehicle. A girl, about five years old, was lying motionless in her lap. Her small belly was distended, bulging beneath a grubby kameez. Her stringy hair had faded from its natural black to the colour of straw. Malnourishment, Ellen thought. She looked at Frank. His mouth was set, his shoulders tense.

      The camp’s perimeter was defined by a wire fence. A small group of men was extending it, a youngster balancing long wooden staves on his shoulders while a pair of older men, stouter and fatter bellied, worked beside him. They had unrolled a drum of metal mesh and were hammering it into place on a fresh post.

      The car drew up at the gate. Frank rolled down the window and spoke to the security guards. Their uniforms were baggy, their AK-47s battered and slack in their hands. One of the guards bent to stare in at her and she shielded her bruised face with the edge of her scarf.

      Just inside the fence stood a small, single-storey building in sand-coloured brick. A broken flagpole rose from its roof. It looked old but solid in the sea of tethered white canvas. Several large tents, the size of small marquees, sat beside it.

      They swung through the gates and off to the left, to an open sweep of ground close to the brick building. They stopped behind a garishly decorated truck, painted green and ornate with flowers and slogans. A confusion of eager young men was crowded round its back, shouting and jostling as they unloaded sacks of rice. Ellen eased herself out of the car, aware of the ache in her limbs. The heat reached in and sucked the moisture from her mouth.

      Frank was besieged at once. Two dark-skinned men rushed over to talk to him. A smartly dressed Pakistani man pushed between them, interrupting and competing for Frank’s attention. Ellen watched them. Frank put a calming hand on the man’s arm and silenced him, making him wait his turn while the others spoke. Frank’s face was composed as he listened. He has more presence, she thought, than he had as a young man. More authority.

      Someone touched Ellen’s arm from behind. She turned. A young Western woman with strands of wavy blonde hair springing free from her headscarf. Her eyes were a striking green, the irises ringed with black as if they’d been first drawn, then coloured in. She looked at the cut above Ellen’s eye. ‘Shall I put a dressing?’

      Ellen smiled. ‘It’s nothing. I’m fine.’ She put out her hand. ‘I’m Ellen Thomas, NewsWorld.’

      The young woman nodded. She was wearing the stiff white coat of a doctor. Ellen sensed that she’d been waiting for her. Frank must have warned her that a journalist was coming.

      ‘I am Britta.’ Her handshake was firm. ‘I’m the medical in charge here, working for Medicine International. Perhaps you’d like to see the ward for ladies?’

      Her accent was lilting. Swedish, Ellen thought. Or Finnish. She looked across to Frank. Several more men had gathered round him now, pressing to be heard. He was standing patiently, the tallest amongst them, his hands slightly raised as if he were conducting the men’s voices.

      Ellen turned away and followed Britta. They traced a circle round the chaos of the unloading bay. Young men were staggering, bent double under sacks of rice, carrying them out from the back of the truck. At one side of the clearing, they tipped the sacks over their shoulders, letting them fall, slap, raising a cloud of dust, onto the pile growing there. The air was thick with shouts. Britta led her past the vehicles to the entrance of one of the giant tents which stood nearby, close to the brick building.

      The sun was filtering through the canvas roof, making the light inside dappled and soft. They had entered a women’s ward with two rows of field beds, about twenty in all, tightly packed together. Ceiling fans whirred overhead, battling to clear an oppressive bodily smell of stale breath and vomit and urine all papered over by disinfectant.

      A young Pakistani girl, wearing a dark purple salwar kameez, was at the far end of the ward, washing a patient. The patient, a middle-aged woman, sat, hunched inwards, holding onto the girl’s shoulder for support. Her back was bare, the skin glistening. The young girl was sponging down her thin shoulders. Her movements were brisk and rhythmical. The water splashed in a plastic bowl on the bed as she dipped and rinsed her cloth. She looked up as they came in and nodded to Britta, glanced at Ellen with shy eyes, then lowered her head again to her work.

      Britta had walked to the first bed and was waiting for her there. An elderly woman lay on her back, her eyes closed. Her left arm was bandaged and raised.

      ‘Gunshot trauma,’ Britta said. ‘The elbow is fractured. Malnutrition and fever also. Many of these ladies are not strong.’

      The old woman’s skin was puckered and deeply wrinkled. Her veins were raised into transparent channels of viscous purple. Her mouth was slightly open, her lips cracked. A fly settled on the woman’s forehead and started to walk across it. Ellen raised her hand and wafted it away. The woman did not stir.

      Britta had already moved on to the next bed. This patient was a girl, perhaps seven or eight years old. A drip, connected to her right arm, clicked as it discharged fluid.

      She gazed up with dull eyes as Britta laid her hand on the girl’s head, stroking her hair as she talked.

      ‘Many of them are already sick when they arrive,’ she said. ‘This girl has typhoid.’

      A revolting sulphuric smell of decay hung around the bed. Ellen turned, looked away down the ward. She tried to distract herself, to close her nose to it.

      ‘She is weak,’ Britta was saying, ‘but there are no complications. And she’s young. In a day or two . . .’

      The girl’s hand was lying inert on the sheet. The fingers were thin, the nails square and bitten. Britta was talking about dehydration but Ellen was only half-listening. She should take the girl’s hand. Reach out and hold it. Pat it, at least.

      Britta went to the foot of the bed to consult the notes there. The hand on the sheet lay motionless, waiting. The ward was silent around them. The only sounds were the swish of the ceiling fans spinning overhead and the low mechanical hum of medical equipment.

      Britta straightened up, turned and walked СКАЧАТЬ