Read Online The Dhow House by Jean McNeil - Free Book Online Page B

through the bush. She’d seen people – black stick figures, she’d said – coming towards her and panicked. But they turned out to be apparitions.
    Three of her sons were dead, killed fighting Al-Nur. They had been coerced into uniform by the state. ‘They were herders,’ she said, through Lenjoh. ‘Men of peace.’ By the time she made it to camp, only one camel was alive. She had seen this camel tethered to a tree just outside camp, heard him lowing painfully day and night.
    ‘Please take care of him,’ the woman begged her. ‘I cannot feed him.’
    For the next ten days she took her staff ration of UHT milk and fed it to the camel via a makeshift funnel given to her by a sweet Irishman on the mechanics team. She gathered leaves from the few acacias in flower, swaddling her hands in thick gloves to avoid the thorns. She plucked sparse grass, as Aisha had instructed her to do.
    At first the camel swivelled its backside at her, and she feared it would kick. But after he’d taken the first draught of milk he let her approach. When he saw her he made a deep rumbling noise that could have been pleasure or pain. At night she fed him water.
    She was forty-seven, Aisha told her. She looked seventy. When she was strong enough Aisha was given a small tent from their store of fifty or so. These were lime green Vango tents from the UK. Aisha had stared at it as if she’d just been given a four-bedroomed house.
    The camel stayed attached to a nearby stunted whistling thorn, which it quickly stripped of its leaves. In her breaks she led the camel out to pasture as far beyond the camp as she dared and stayed there while it fed, leading it back to Aisha’s tent at night. During one of those breaks she watched a rainbow form, far away. A sudden wind swept dust in a spiral, erasing its beams in an orange haze. In the distance was the scrawny valley where it was rumoured lions lived.
    The sun set as it always did, hurling itself over the horizon. It was dark within ten minutes. The moon rose and the corrugated landscape bathed in silver strips. She stared into its gleam, thinking how the detail of her life was so unanticipated – she had worked in barren, blasted places before, of course, but they were almost always military hospitals, run by rote and fear. She never spent her off-hours tending to a lone camel as if she’d been appointed its guardian angel, trying to read the expression in its indifferent eyes. It pleased her, to be so disrupted from her sense of herself.
    ‘How is the camel doing?’ Rafael appeared next to her. She was startled. In three months he had never sought out her company, other than to discuss the surgical rota for the day, the new nurse arriving from London, or logistics.
    ‘He’s getting stronger.’
    Together they watched the camel orbit the acacia. He didn’t seem to mind the hobbles, stepping around them delicately, padding back and forth with his cushioned, dinner plate-sized feet.
    ‘I wonder if the lions would go for him,’ he said.
    ‘I know, I’m thinking I should put him in my tent, and I’ll sleep outside.’
    Rafael have her a quick sideways glance.
    ‘It’s a joke.’ Although, as she said it, she wondered. The Bedouin’s camels slept with them. She quite liked the idea of settling down on a rug beside him.
    ‘Ah.’ Rafael nodded. ‘I don’t think the logistics people would permit it, actually.’
    She watched Rafael walk away to his makeshift workshop where he struggled with his sculptures.
    The moon had risen. It hovered in the east, low-slung, peering at her with its censor eye.
    Yes, Gariseb had been this so far, a strange dislocation. It was not merely a more remote version of other field hospitals she had worked in. In Gariseb she treated Christians and Muslims side by side, and in the recovery tents or the canteen a détente ruled: there were no skirmishes, not even arguments. It seemed the wounded found common ground. In any case she was uninterested in religion