The Ink Bridge by Neil Grant

made the sides of the huts too hot to touch. Five toilets meant long queues in the mornings and evenings. The conditions turned people into animals, fighting and clawing their grief out on each other and themselves.
    Omed watched as desperate people drank shampoo and carefully sewed their lips together to show the world how little their words meant. Such was their sadness, their sense of helplessness. He saw parents pull their children to their bodies in the hope they could protect them, but the poison was in the air, inside their minds.
    The man who ran the camp wore a wide-brimmed hat to protect him from the sun. His shirt was pressed, the seams of his trousers sheared like blade edges to his polished shoes. His name was Jim Parasole and he was the whitest man Omed had ever seen. Even the albino, Omar, whom the village children would shout names at from behind the walls of Bamiyan was not as white as this strange man. When he had first seen him, Omed had wanted to touch his thin, pale eyebrows to see if they were real. But he would not be touched.
    He was king here. In the old manner of kings. A ruler in a desert kingdom surrounded by his army of hard-booted men and the annoying presence of his subjects.
    Omed had been brought before him only once, when he had scuffled over the book he was reading. The man who had wanted to take it, an Iranian, had not counted on the sharpness of Omed’s nails. Omed had spent three days in the Management Unit for his crime.

    One afternoon Mr Parasole stepped onto the red dirt and made his way to the front gate. Omed leant his face against the burning wall of the toilet block and watched. A truck drove to the gate and was let inside. Mr Parasole greeted the driver and walked with him as he opened the rear door. A figure stepped into the glare. A man. He was small and hunched, impossibly dark and dirty beside Mr Parasole. Mr Parasole talked to the smudge-person briefly and called a guard. As the guard walked the man inside, Omed recognised him.
    The Snake looked back and smiled, his forked tongue reaching out and running over his bottom lip. Omed fought sickness. The Snake had condemned him to death on that wormy boat. Omed had tied the children to the anchor that had dragged them to the bottom of the sea.

    Omed sat alone as he always did at mealtimes: the boy who couldn’t talk, whose silence set him apart. He ate slowly, turning the pages of a book with his free hand. Around him, the clamour of language fell like a mortar barrage. He put his hands over his ears and continued to read.
    Suddenly, a plate came down beside his book and Omed’s gaze ran slowly to it. From there to a rough brown hand, nails bitten back hard, a tangle of hair on the forearm, scars, a cheap jumper with sleeves pushed to the elbows, the bristled neck, the jawline puffy and pocked, and then the eyes, one of them too big for the face, as if it had been plucked from the corpse of a giant.
    â€˜ Salam . If I am not mistaken it is my young travel companion.’ He leaned close to Omed, whose nose tightened on the smell of his sweat. ‘Is it not wonderful that we meet again?’
    Omed’s heart thumped. It became so loud that the lights in the room dimmed. There was not enough air. He fought for breath. His book slid sideways and hit the floor. Then he was on top of the man. He had a fork. And suddenly there was little space between it and the Snake’s good eye. The Snake pushed him back, but the fork drew four deep lines across his cheek before rattling across the room. There were faces all around. People shouted. Blood. The Snake’s hands came around his throat. He could feel his windpipe crushing.
    Omed gave up.
    Time began a slow shuffle. Sounds echoed and faded. And so, he would cease to be. In this terrible nothing place so far from home. He felt relief that it would be over. Should a life be lived in this way? So much fear and running. So much death and waiting. He closed his eyes