by Holly Watt
Because soon, too soon, this boy would be sent off, on that terrible modern odyssey. North towards Turkey, most probably, and then across that narrow sea to Greece.
Maybe he’d get to Europe, that precious, precarious dream.
Might die, though, of course. Might slip off any of the steps on that crumbling ladder. And never be heard of ever again. And, in the shadow of these mountains, this small family would wait for ever. First in hope, and then a slow-growing grief.
His mother, nervous of his anger, invited them into her tent. Yara’s sticky little fingers tugged at Casey’s. They had to bend double to get in, and then to fold like origami to sit down. There was old carpet on the floor, and a sharp smell of smoke.
The mother made tea, with Yara and all the others giggling. Other women scrambled into the tent, too, riveted by this new development.
Yara’s doll had lost a leg. She was brushing the doll’s woolly hair, so carefully, tying it back with a snippet of ribbon. Next to her, a toddler played with a green toy car, which was ending its journey here, somehow. No doors and no bonnet; thrown away in an instant, in a terrace in Wandsworth. Precious here, though. The eldest woman untied and retied her blue headscarf thoughtfully.
Yara’s mother spoke rapidly.
‘I thought we were leaving for only a few days,’ said the translator. ‘I would have brought more, if I had known.’
Casey handed out melted chocolate bars.
One woman, grey with sorrow, brought out a photograph with an art restorer’s care. Three children, smiling at the camera.
‘Bomb,’ said Yara’s mother. ‘In Deraa. Burn. They burn. No one care.’
The woman looked down at the photograph.
‘You . . .’ The mother was trying to make conversation with scraps of English, and gesturing to Casey and George. ‘You . . . Marry?’
‘No,’ roared George in horror. ‘Absolutely not.’
They were all relieved to laugh.
‘I’ – Casey gestured in turn – ‘I am not married at all. Never.’
And all the Syrian women put their heads to one side and sighed.
‘It’s . . . So sad.’
‘You,’ said George happily, ‘are being pitied by Syrian refugees.’
The little boy held out his green toy car to her, face smeared with chocolate. When Casey smiled at him, he ducked his head at his mother’s skirt, then peered round at her, delighted. It was only when he moved that she realised he had lost both his legs.
‘Asim.’ The mother rubbed his face so he wriggled. ‘Asim. What will become us?’
Through the tent opening, Casey could see the older boy outside, alone, listening to the laughter and wishing for a different life.
Yara trotted behind them when they left the tent, giggling in their wake. The little girl followed them all the way along the row of tents, trailing a tattered pink kite. A dirty Disney hairband pulled back tangled hair, and her round face curved into a serious frown as she fought with her kite.
Just as Casey was turning to her, a helicopter whirred overhead and Yara screamed, huge eyes shot through with dark terror. In Syria, helicopters drop barrel bombs. Yara fled away down the path, kite abandoned, so that Casey’s last glimpse was of a tiny child diving for cover, chased by a nightmare that would never let go.
They kept on though, George and Casey, round and round the camps for days. Asking the same questions again and again. But the refugees shook their heads. No. No. No.
‘The thing is,’ said George eventually, ‘that if you wanted to kill someone round these parts, Isis could make it happen, quite easily. And you wouldn’t have to shoot from a distance either. They’d let you do whatever you wanted. It’d be a job off their hands. Pour a bucket of petrol on someone and throw a match? Fine. Chainsaw a man in half? Easy. Chuck a man off an apartment block? Any day of the week. Have you ever seen someone being stoned to death? Never watch that. Never. They’d probably even edit a nice film together for you, if you asked nicely, just for the memories.’
‘But could you get in and out? Of the areas they control?’
‘If they wanted to get you back safely, no problem,’ said George. ‘It would have to be worth more than kidnapping you, but they’ll do stuff for cash, cool as you like. And we know there are some fuckers smuggling stuff in and out all the time anyway. The oil gets out somehow, because it always bloody does. And you can pick up some very nice antiquities in Beirut, if you know where to look. From Palmyra and so on. There’s always some arsehole with a route in and out of those places, no matter what’s going on.’
‘And do you think it’s possible, that people are doing this?’
‘Of course it’s possible.’ His voice was icy. ‘Some people just like killing other people. They get a kick from it. Why do you think some men join the army, anyway? Some of them get a taste for death, too. A craving even, after a while. One of my boys, back in the day, he took himself off to Chechnya, of all places, in a bit of time off. We had to go in and get him back pretty sharpish.’
‘Bread and circuses,’ said Casey. ‘Damnatio ad bestias. People queued up to watch Christians and lions.’
‘And think of the executions out in Saudi.’ George lit a cigarette. ‘Are they there to watch justice? Or just to watch somebody die?’
They looked across the camp. The refugees were queuing for bread. First, they would stand in that line for hours, and then they would queue for water.
‘And then we wonder why they hate us,’ said George quietly. ‘And why they come with their bombs.’
‘I can’t see how anyone could do it,’ muttered Casey. ‘To people who’ve got nothing in the first place.’
‘There is no such man,’ quoted George. ‘It is impossible.’
‘I just can’t understand it.’
‘I think you do,’ said George. ‘That’s the problem.’
He kept going though, escorting her for days around the refugee camps, scattered all across the valley. No one had heard about it. No one.
Miranda rang up, half-cross.
You coming home anytime soon?
I suppose I should.
Yeah. I’ll order you, if that will help.
Not really.
Anything?
No.
George dropped her back to Beirut, jollying her as they drove down the road into the frisky old city.
‘I’ll keep my ear to the ground,’ he promised. ‘I’ll ask around. If anything like that’s going on anywhere in this region, I will find out.’
‘Thanks, George. And maybe it’s just not here. I hope it isn’t, really. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place.’
‘You might be.’ He was suddenly serious. ‘Some of my boys, they were debriefing the girls trafficked up to Italy. What’s going on down there in north Africa, it’s horrific. A woman was talking about that drive across the Sahara. One girl kept crying and crying, and begging for water. After a bit, the traffickers got fed up. They stopped the truck. Kicked her out of the back. Drove on. She was just left there, in the middle of the desert. That’s where I would go looking.’
‘You’re right,’ said Casey. She stared at the racing traffic.
After he’d roared off into the distance, she walked along the beautiful corniche. She looked out at the blue sparkle of the Mediterranean, and thought about the refugees risking it all, in the boats that filled with water, and the life jackets that never worked. It’s impossible, surely, that it’s all the same sea.
The men were fishing out on the rocks. Casey watched for a few minutes more.
‘The Sahara,’ she thought. ‘Libya.’
*
Back in the office, the satellite pictures of Libya showed endless burnt sand, and dark rocky outcrops here and there. Inky circles were crops, where the irrigation wheels turned ceaselessly. Roads knifed across the desert, between villages with names like incantations. She traced the roads, one by one, witch-whispering the words.
And then, there it was.
Salama refugee camp, a scratchy patch of land not far from the long, blurry border with Algeria. Mountains curled around the camp to the south. To the west, there was a huge building. Ragged gardens sprawled around golden roofs.
Salama. Salama. Casey tried out the word as she zoomed in and out on the images. From above, the camp looked like all the others. Squares of roads, and chaos in between. It had grown up during a sudden crisis somewhere on the Gulf of Guinea. Driven by war and starvation and fear, thousands of people headed north, as they always do in Africa.
Bamako, Ségou, Gao, Tamanrasset. The old caravan trail.
Agadez. Dirkou. Al Qatrun. Sabha. That ancient path of desperation, up through Niger and Libya.
On foot, when every step hurts. In cars which overheat in the middle of the desert, and there are days and days to realise the water will run out. In trucks that run out of fuel, and people are left to die on the side of a road that no one ever wants to take.
But for a few, somewhere, just over the border from Niger into Libya, the surge had slowed. The flood of people pooled, and Salama was born.
Refugee camps are thrown together in a rush. They are designed to keep the cascade of humanity somewhere, anywhere, contained. And so they grow, a nightmare Babel. An overnight city.
Once it was there, Salama grew rapidly. They were fleeing Boko Haram, in the first wave. Then Somalis, escaping their endless horror. The Eritreans found their way too, in the end. Europe was the dream. Always the dream. But Salama was the staging post that became the life.
And hundreds of miles away, Casey zoomed in and out, thinking.
It took longer than she expected to track down an aid worker who had been to Salama and would talk about it. Usually, it took a couple of calls to find the right person, speed being one of her skills. She called old allies from the Zaatari camp, put the word out. But it took hours to find Logan, and still longer to convince him to talk.
There was Irish in his voice, and a tired patience.
‘Gather you want to know about Salama.’
‘Yes. Please.’
He explained, carefully, cautiously. That the camp had started its sprawl just as an enormous earthquake shattered the other side of the world. All the fund-raising and experts were diverted to photogenic orphans in Nepal, rather than yet more refugees. And in the absence of the bigger charities, and the more efficient NGOs, Salama grew chaotically.
You’ll know there’s the odd science to positioning a refugee camp, Logan went on laconically, which means someone, thousands of miles away, looking at a map and deciding the position of the camp. On sandy ground, which would degenerate to a tedious dust that would need to be washed out of a thousand cooking pots every single day. Or on the black rock, which would heat to a Dante inferno every summer. For Zaatari, someone had carefully chosen dust, rather than dark heat.
‘We could hear the explosions at night there,’ he said. ‘They don’t like that much. But we figured, if we got to the point where Syria was mortaring straight into Jordan, the camp would be the least of our worries.’
Places that are nice to live in, Logan pointed out lugubriously, tend to have people there already. And of course, refugee camps are there to assuage the host country. Because even in the most desperate parts of the world, the host country has to believe the refugees are going somewhere. The refugees, too, have to believe they are going somewhere. Even though some of the Palestinian camps, in Jordan, have been there since the fifties, and Zaatari is the country’s fourth-largest city.
But no one was concentrating as Salama took root, Logan said, which is why it was in Libya, that painfully fragile state, in the first place. Salama was all a fuck-up. A huge fuck-up. I had to get out, in the end.
Casey took notes, made him laugh and then turned the conversation, quite abruptly.
‘Were people ever shot in Salama?’
A silence. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I think you know what I mean.’
He waited.
‘Were there ever,’ Casey pushed him, ‘unexplained gunshot injuries in Salama?’
‘That camp was out of control,’ said Logan. ‘You’ll know there’s organised crime in many of those camps, anyway.’
‘I know,’ said Casey. He was calling from Dadaab, in the east of Kenya. A quarter of a million people, over the border from Somalia, and starvation a memory away. ‘But I mean sniper injuries. I think you know what I am talking about.’
‘There were child soldiers in Salama.’ Logan’s voice was quiet. ‘Hundreds of them. Coming from countries where almost every woman has been raped, give or take. Do you know what it does to a country, when the women have been broken like that? That level of distress. An entire nation, traumatised.’
‘I do know,’ said Casey. ‘A bit.’
‘Yes,’ said Logan. ‘There were gunshot injuries in Salama.’
‘Ones that would indicate sniper fire?’
‘I’m not that sort of expert.’ The line dropped out for a second. ‘I don’t know about . . . Guns.’
He spat out the word.
‘A sniper rifle would cause a catastrophic injury.’ Casey was deliberately surgical. ‘Not just a bullet hole. The body would be almost blown apart.’
The silence was so long that she thought she had lost him. She remembered one of the aid workers talking in Jordan: ‘It’s only the ones with faith who survive. It breaks everyone else. They have to believe there is a purpose, to it all. A reason. It’s only those who truly believe who can bear it, in the end.’
And Logan sounded like he had lost his faith, a long time ago.
‘There were’ – his voice when it came again was almost a shock – ‘There were injuries that maybe might have been caused by something bigger than a handgun. Now and again. Not that it happened often.’
‘Did you report them?’
‘Who were we meant to tell? We didn’t have time to breathe, let alone try and get anything done. You don’t know what it was like. It was dangerous, really dangerous, all of the time. We had to live in a special compound in the camp, and we couldn’t travel around. The whole place was a nightmare. And it just went on and on, and never got better. No matter what we did.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Casey. ‘I am really sorry.’
‘Everyone is sorry,’ he said. ‘Everyone is always sorry and sorry and sorry, and nothing ever changes. But yes, we saw injuries that didn’t make sense. And they could have been caused by a sniper bullet. We talked about it, sure. But we didn’t have any proof. We didn’t have anything.’
‘How often?’
‘Maybe every few months? That we knew about. Not regular. I couldn’t be sure.’
‘Do you remember any dates?’
‘No.’ He hesitated. ‘Hang on. I do remember one. The sixteenth of October last year. There was a woman, shot down by one of the shitty medical centres. They tried to save her, but there was nothing to be done. She was dead before she hit the floor. Her daughter was screaming and screaming, until her voice disappeared. A little girl, six or something. God knows what happened to her, alone in that camp.’
‘How can you be sure of the date? Did you keep a diary?’
‘No.’ His voice was bleak. ‘Why keep a diary when every day’s the same? The sixteenth was my birthday.’
13
Arthur was right, thought Casey. Isabella Monroe was enjoying the drama.
They were in Bella’s apartment, just off the Portobello Road in Notting Hill. Bella was wearing a flowing blue dress and too much eyeliner for someone who thought they might cry.
Casey had rung up to talk about the appalling hats that Isabella made. For Goodwood, for Ascot, for the Derby. Invited round to the pretty little shop, Casey at first let the words drift over her, nodding enthusiastically while wondering if it would be possible to fit a breton with a camera.
After twenty minutes of feathers and fascinators, Casey worked the conversation around to Milo. Bella was only too happy to talk.
‘Milo and I had been together for eighteen months,’ she began.
‘It must be terrible for you,’ said Casey. ‘Such a shock.’
‘It was,’ Bella agreed. ‘It was.’
‘Would it upset you too much to talk me through it? I think it’s such a fascinating story. We’d do a separate piece on your hats.’
‘No.’ Bella looked brave. ‘That would be OK.’
‘It’s very strong of you,’ said Casey obediently.
Bella had met Milo the Christmas before, at a party.
‘At the McCarthys’ house. You know the McCarthys. Maria and Simon. Everyone was there. Everyone.’
‘Of course,’ said Casey, thinking, not eighteen months then.
‘He kissed me under the mistletoe at midnight. It was so romantic. Everyone said we were the perfect couple.’
The art lay in letting them tell their story.
‘It was lovely at first,’ Bella went on. ‘We had such fun. I just remember being at Wimbledon, on Centre Court, crying with laughter. And then we went down to Mykonos for a couple of weeks. It was all perfect.’
‘Where did you stay?’
‘In a villa, with some friends. It was gorgeous.’
‘So you weren’t island hopping, backpacking?’ Before the Post, Casey had spent a summer, once, bouncing from island to island round Greece. Lazy heat and blue blue water.
‘Oh no,’ Bella said. ‘He never did the whole backpacking thing. He went to India on his gap year, I remember him talking about it. Said he spent one night in some utterly grim hostel, with cockroaches and horrible stains on the sheets. And then called his father and said he’d had quite enough of that, thank you. He’d always have cars waiting for us. And we stayed in the loveliest places.’
‘And then what?’
‘Then he changed,’ said Bella. ‘He went on holiday with some friends to Morocco. Six months ago or something. In about October, I think?’
‘Which friends?’ Casey, lightly.
‘I’m not sure.’ Bella frowned. ‘It was a boys’ thing. I wasn’t allowed to go.’
‘Stag party?’
‘No,’ said Bella. ‘I thought that. And that there would be a fun wedding afterwards, and we could go to that together, but Milo said it wasn’t a stag.’
