Stone Kingdoms by David Park Page A

children’s heads compressed into the open window to watch our humiliation. He sat down again and waved his hand dismissively over the top of the table. ‘Children, and especially babies, don’t get separated from their mothers. One without the other is no use. Have you any idea how many kids there are out there without anyone to look after them? What do you think their long-term future is?’
    As I tried to say something that would assuage his anger, convey contrition, Martine suddenly turned on her heels and left. I wanted to join her but wasn’t brave enough. Fired up again by her response, he poured out the remaining dregs of his anger. ‘She needn’t think she’s going to come out here and swan around smelling of Chanel. If she can’t do what she’s told she can haul her tight ass out of here on the next plane home – and you can tell her that from me!’ He sat down again, momentarily drained of words, and we took the opportunity to nod our heads, mutter a few pathetic expressions of remorse and leave.
    When we stepped into the sharp strike of heat children flooded round our feet, patting our backs and touching our legs in gestures that felt like commiseration, and as we walked through the light brush of hands I heard a sudden burst of opera bruising the morning air. It seemed to follow me as I made my way across the compound to our tent. Martine stood with her back pushed against the tree-trunk; the rigidity of her body as she exhaled from a cigarette held her anger in a tight press. She didn’t look at me and I felt included in that anger.
    â€˜Mais c’est un vrai salaud, cet homme-là!’
    â€˜Je crois que tu as raison.’
    â€˜He’d no right to speak to me in this way, no right. I am not a child to be bullied and shouted at. If he has a complaint he should handle it in a professional way, not like this. Pas devant tout le monde.’
    â€˜You’re right, but maybe he has his own problems, things we don’t know about yet. He shouldn’t have spoken that way, but maybe there’s less time for the niceties out here.’
    She pushed her back harder into the tree, then stubbed out the cigarette on its riven bark. ‘You’re a great peace-maker, Naomi. I thought the Irish were supposed to be great fighters.’
    â€˜The Irish only fight themselves. Listen, Martine, why should we let him put us off? We can always disappoint him by being good at what we came to do.’
    She relaxed a little and asked where Veronica was. ‘I think she’s slunk back to prostrate herself to Mr Wanneker.’ At last she smiled and slowly ground the remains of her cigarette into the dust, and then we parted to find the work that waited for us.
    I was there to develop an educational programme. It sounds grander than it was. I learnt later that to qualify for additional UN funding they needed to provide evidence of educational development. I was that evidence. I who had resigned at the end of my second year of teaching, then spent a couple of years in a variety of temporary posts. The Agency was not particular in many things. And so in Bakalla my job was to set up a school, utilizing whatever resources were available, share responsibility for the growing number of orphans in the camp, and construct a register to help establish family connections and possible locations.
    On one of those first mornings when sleep hadn’t slipped into any pattern or rhythm I walked in the camp, threading a random course through the tumbling clutter of makeshift dwellings, the possibility of making any impression on what stretched all around me seeming suddenly absurd. Wherever I stumbled a raw course of life flowed, focused solely on survival, that central impulse jettisoning the superfluous, the conventional constraints of the external world. Each day was measured not by hours or minutes, but by the wait to draw water, the trawling and scavenging in