Free Cause Celeb by Helen Fielding

little way along the track and stood where I could see his vehicle making its way across the plain, raising a plume of dust behind it. The sun was high now. I watched for a long time, till the engine noise died away, till it became a tiny speck and disappeared and the only sound was the cicadas. I felt a big burst of loneliness. Sometimes there were moments like this when the insulation of our little society crumbled away, and I remembered we were just camping in the wilderness. We were like one of those small outcrops of huts you spotted from the airplane on the way from England, surrounded by a thousand miles of desert on every side. Doing or getting anything was blocked by a swathe of distance and time. It took three hours even to get to Sidra.
    Back in the cabana I was distracted by my mail. There was a new pair of trainers from my mum in the parcel: black ones, like little boots. I had been waiting for two months for them to come. Also there were new cotton knickers, five pairs in black. There were five letters, three of them from Mum, two from friends in London with handwriting I recognized.
    I turned to the first one to cheer me up. I adored my mum’s letters. This one began, as usual, “I was just having a cup of tea and a coffee ring and I thought, I wonder how Rosie’s doing? . . .” and then there was a commotion outside, coming from the direction of the main gate.
    I was at the far end of the cabana, so by the time I’d arrived at the gate the others had formed such a tight-knit circle it was impossible to see what they were looking at. Then the group broke up and I saw O’Rourke gesturing everyone away with great politeness, as if trying to move a party of guests through from drinks to dinner. Slumped against the wall of Betty’s hut were a Keftian family, emaciated, filthy and exhausted. A woman lay on the ground with the stick limbs, tufted hair and unseeing expression of the badlymalnourished. Beside her, the father of the family was holding a child in his arms. It was only when I got closer that I realized that the child was dead.
    I froze completely. Back in the old days, when we lived with this all the time, we had found a way of dealing with it, a robust, workaday distancing which enabled us to do what had to be done. But this had caught me with my defenses down. I tried to remind myself how to be: don’t think about the implications, how they feel, what’s going to happen, just decide what needs to be done, then do it, one thing at a time. I went into the cabana, found rehydration salts, high-energy biscuits. The mother needed a drip, and O’Rourke and Betty organized that while Henry and I brought the vehicles round. We drove down to the hospital in convoy with Henry and me following in the third vehicle with the father and the dead child. The father was crying. There was something particularly harrowing about that simple response—your family is starving, your child is dead and so you cry.
    It didn’t take long to find people who knew the family because the camp had been laid out like a map of Kefti so that all the people from the same villages could stay together. I desperately wanted to talk to the father to find out why they had come. Was it the locusts? How many more were following? I knew I had to leave it be, till the burial was over. I decided to go back to the compound to see if I could get Malcolm on the radio in Sidra.
    I couldn’t get a connection. I was shouting, “Safila to SUSTAIN Sidra, Safila to SUSTAIN Sidra, Safila to SUSTAIN Sidra,” but all there was was crackle. Nothing. No contact. I started saying Safila to Sidra again, then put my head on my arms and tried not to cry. I heard the sound of a vehicle drawing up and tried to pull myself together. This was ridiculous. I was going to be no use to anyone if I flopped around like this. I had to toughen up. The door opened. It was Debbie.
    â€œHave you got the key for