Free The Dhow House by Jean McNeil

or ideology. She normally traversed far more intimate terrain – the flooded blood vessels, the exploded retinae, the tributaries and marshlands of flesh.
    She ought to have felt harassed, or at least discontented by the camp, its isolation, her straitened circumstances, her sudden demotion to camel herder. But she was glad to be back in the field. If she had stayed in her job at St Thomas’, she’d never have understood any of this – but what? She still could not identify it exactly, this suddenly pressing truth. It was like a dark, sleek animal, glimpsed only before it disappeared around the corner.

 
     
     
     
    She had been there for nearly four months when he appeared. She was working fifteen-hour shifts. Sleep had become a dreamless refuge.
    She emerged from one of these nightly comas into an orange morning. The camp was quiet at 6am. There were no twelve-year-olds who would soon be footless, no pickup trucks of bleeding villagers. These began to arrive after 7am, the casualties of dawn assaults.
    She ate her customary breakfast quickly – coffee and a small bowl of porridge. The diet had become oppressive. Every day lunch was the same: sorghum flatbreads and goat stew. The organisation made a gesture to Western cuisine in the form of chicken legs, flown in on the UN plane every month and pushed to the bottom of the vault-like meat freezer. She had eaten no fish. She found that a dull desire, not as sharp as a craving, had taken hold of her bones. There was an oily base to the hunger.
    She walked to the triage tent. Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of a man leaning against the wall. She couldn’t remember seeing him before, couldn’t remember pulling him out of the flatbed of a pickup truck.
    He approached her. He was like a greyhound, quick, aquiline. There was a flash in his eye, a firmness to the slant of his mouth. His age was hard to judge, but then it was, generally, here. The twenty-eight-year-old doctors and logistics managers who worked with her looked twelve. The thirty-two-year-old Bora and Nisa she soldered back together looked sixty-three.
    He reached her. ‘I would like to show you something.’
    His English hit her like a blow. She had yet to meet an insurgent who would admit to having learned a word of the infidel’s language, although many did speak it more than adequately, a result of their training in Yemen. Anthony had shown her surveillance drone photographs of a neat, fold-away camp in the mountains two hundred kilometres from Sana’a, in a hill fort that had been the British cavalry headquarters at the turn of the century.
    He took out a notebook. It had black covers and ruled pages and was bound by a black elastic. Bound tight to the notebook was a pen. ‘I will have to translate.’ He leafed through it. He gave her a hesitant look.
    She studied him. His lean frame suggested he was a Bora, although he was not particularly tall. He was most likely from the coastal city of Gao. Most of the men who evaded their questions were from there. She had never been to the city but she had read books and seen photo essays on the once grand resort city. The photographs she had seen were from the 1930s and showed wide, tiled avenues fringed by thin palms. It looked like Rio de Janeiro. There was even an art deco cinema in town, sandwiched between two Italian restaurants: the names were visible in the bleached black-and-white images: the Terraza Roma, the Toscana.
    The city was sandwiched between the desert and the same ocean she would come to know in the Dhow House. But the city had lost any sense of its original geography. Entire blocks had vanished in the civil war. Gutted hotels surveyed the Indian Ocean like open-mouthed old men. Former foreign consulates stood roofless to the scald of sun. Gao’s salmon-coloured buildings had once been garlanded with second-storey balconies fringed by filigreed stonework. Its mosques had been as white as those she would later see in Kilindoni,