Far From My Father’s House. Jill McGivering
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window, presenting her with a hunched shoulder.
‘Everything OK?’
He didn’t look round. His fingers were tight round the rim of the cup. Finally he said, ‘Not good. They sound overwhelmed.’
He drained the cup and held it out so she could refill it for herself. His lips were pursed. They both kept their eyes on the flow of steaming tea from the Thermos.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last. He didn’t reply. He seemed distant, preoccupied.
The driver started to fiddle with the car radio. The silence was filled with bursts of white noise and high-pitched music. She drank her tea, trying not to swallow the black specks circling at the bottom.
‘You want an apple?’ Frank pulled one out of his bag and rolled it to her along the seat.
A car veered in front of them and the driver was forced to brake, pumping the horn with the heel of his hand. The sun was hard on the windscreen, burning streaks of light across the tarmac.
She bit into the apple, still thinking about the strains on the camp. ‘You got funding?’
He gave a snort. ‘I just spend money we don’t have. Then the guys in head office curse the hell out of me and run in circles trying to fill the holes.’
‘Have they launched a special appeal?’
‘Not yet.’ He shrugged. ‘It hasn’t made the news yet. But they say a rich Brit might help out. Hasan Ali Khan. Know him?’
She nodded. She knew of him. ‘Quentin. Quentin Khan. That’s what he calls himself in London.’ He was a middle-aged Pakistani. Vastly rich and now part of the London smart set. ‘Made a fortune in transport. Lorries and ships.’
‘That’s him.’
‘And he’s giving money?’
‘I guess. They’re talking to him.’
They were slowing down, approaching the row of booths that signalled the end of the toll road.
‘Good.’ Frank nodded ahead. ‘Our guys.’
Two trucks of armed police were waiting at the side of the road, just beyond the booths. As their own car emerged from the barrier, one truck slid out into the traffic in front of them and the other slotted in behind. They were open-backed. Policemen were sitting in two rows down the sides, rocket launchers across their knees and guns upright between their legs.
The young policemen at the ends of the seats were staring down at her through the windscreen. She adjusted her scarf, making sure her hair was properly covered. One, with a shaggy beard and long loose face, looked forlorn. His opposite number was much younger, all designer stubble and bulging biceps. His eyes were hidden by dark sunglasses.
‘Do we need them?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. They offered.’ Frank grimaced. ‘There’s a lot of Taliban around. The roads aren’t secure.’
Peshawar had always had a bad reputation. She’d first come some years before to write about Afghan refugees who’d spilt over the border to escape the Taliban there. She remembered driving through the bazaar, a dusty, colourless array of stalls selling piles of plastic toys and cheap cotton clothing. Men with shaggy beards and woollen tribal hats had stopped to glare in through the car windows. The metal noses of guns glinted at their sides. She’d wanted to stop, just for a moment, to buy a hookah pipe for her father. The driver refused, wagging his finger.
‘Not safe for ladies,’ her translator explained. ‘Very bad place.’
As traffic forced the car to a walking pace, a man with deeply lined skin had stooped and put his face to the glass, squashing the tip of his nose against the window. His palm pressed beside it in white flattened pads of flesh. His eyes found hers. They were cold and threatening. The car shuddered and jerked forwards 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?’