Free The Dhow House by Jean McNeil Page B

kept going for an average of 2.2 kilometres – another statistic her dry major boss had taught her, nearly ten years ago now, in Kandahar.
    In Ali’s case there was a neat exit wound from an AK round which had skirted his abdomen and exited his back, tearing his lateral muscle but missing his spine. She had traced the bullet’s cavity, sewed the exit hole, and thought, that’s another one ticked off.
    The following day she stopped by the recovery tent. Ali sat on the bed. She examined him and pronounced that he would be well enough to leave in two days’ time.
    ‘Thank you,’ he said, in his precise English. In one eye was an inquisitive, even kindly, expression. The other eye’s direction was random and interrogating. This astigmatism unnerved her. When she spoke to him sometimes she would focus on the left eye, sometimes the right. It was as if her mind refused to take him in all at once.
    That afternoon she was stirring masala into a cup of tea when Andy called to her, telling her she had a visitor.
    Ali hovered on the threshold of her office.
    ‘Would you like some tea?’ she said, in her best Arabic.
    ‘Thank you,’ he returned, in English.
    ‘Please, sit down.’ She offered him an orange plastic chair, regulation issue, coated in dust, like everything else.
    He levered himself slowly onto the chair without wincing, but his pain was evident in the twitch of his deltoid.
    ‘You are not quite healed.’ She knew he was planning to leave the following day. They could do nothing to stop their patients sending a goat herder as a runner to the nearest village with a message to send a truck. In the old days they’d had to return people across the border or into frontlines beyond the field hospitals, a dangerous task.
    ‘I am well, thank you.’
    ‘I am glad to hear that. Allahu Akbar .’
    He frowned. ‘Are you a Muslim?’
    ‘No, but I thank Allah for his grace.’
    ‘I wanted to ask you if I could listen to the BBC. It is where I learned my English, from the World Service. It would give me great pleasure to hear it again.’
    ‘I’m not sure I can do that.’
    Ali lowered his cup and fixed her with a grave, certain look. ‘I only want to listen to the English.’
    ‘I believe you. But I don’t know if my director will.’
    Ali put his cup down on the ground. ‘I thought you were in charge here.’
    ‘No, I’m only a doctor.’
    They looked at each other. The formality of their conversation, the upright, manufactured tone of his supposed radio-learned English, the gravity of Ali’s eyes, were for a moment so overwhelming that it threatened to tip over into the absurd. She had to fight against an impulse to laugh. She might be a bit hysterical, with the heat, the hours, the pressure. She hadn’t laughed in a month.
    ‘You need to get your bandage changed. Go see Alan in the nurses’ tent. Announce yourself first. He is not expecting you.’
    Ali smiled. ‘We are none of us expecting anything here.’
    She watched him cross the courtyard. When he was out of sight she took out the notebook she carried in a money-belt-type pouch next to her body and wrote: Ali. Nom de guerre. Speaks English. One for AC?
    Among the ten days he was in camp were days she would later forget. Or rather it was not that she forgot – each day was subtly different in the dilemmas it presented: a case of anemia, two children with rickets, an elderly man in the grip of malaria – but days when violence did not tear the fabric of their lives somehow failed to cohere in her mind.
    ‘You need to get into the habit of keeping a diary,’ Anthony had told her soon after their first meeting in London. ‘Make it a medical diary, but write anything that comes up in code. Decide on one – medicines, procedures, parts of human anatomy. I leave it up to you.’
    She had enjoyed this part of her task. She decided on arteries for news she heard, anecdotally from her patients, or in her eavesdropping missions around camp: carotid