‘Madam, it is so difficult.’ He puffed out his chest. ‘We are working, all of the day and night also.’
Ellen nodded sympathetically. ‘Are the workers local people?’
‘Most are local, yes, madam. From Peshawar itself.’
Her camera was in a side pocket of her bag. He made an elaborate show of modesty when she brought it out, flapping his hand in front of his face as if he were not worthy. ‘Please, madam. I am doing my duty. That is all.’
‘Would you mind? I’d love a picture.’ She framed it with her open hand. ‘With the workers in the background.’
He wagged his head, turning pink with pleasure. The guards standing near him turned to gawp. He picked up a sack of rice and a blanket sealed in polythene and posed with them in his hands, adopting a sad but thoughtful expression for the photographs. She wrote down his name, title and email address and promised to send him a copy.
By now he was overwhelmed with pride. ‘When life goes out of gear,’ he said, ‘here all the people can find succour. Until and unless normalcy is restored.’
She thanked him again, thinking, You’d never let your own family end up here. You’re too well connected.
As she turned to go, she hesitated and turned back as if she’d just remembered something. ‘I don’t suppose you could possibly help me.’
He beamed. ‘Anything, madam.’ He pointed down at the supplies. ‘Some eatables, maybe?’
‘Actually, I need someone to help me translate.’
His eyes lost a little of their sparkle.
‘Just for an hour or so,’ she went on. ‘If it’s not too much trouble.’
He clapped his hands and shouted to a thin young man who was standing with a clipboard, ticking off boxes as they were processed. He came scuttling across, his eyes anxious. His boss laid a paternal hand on his shoulder.
‘Ali will be helping you, nah? He’s very good fellow.’
She handed Ali a bottle of water from her bag and opened a second for herself. The heat was intense. The sun was beating on the dried mud, splitting into white shards wherever it struck glass or plastic.
Ali explained the layout of the camp. She tried to draw a diagram in her notebook as they walked, to get her bearings. The main facilities were clustered close to the gates. The brick building with the broken flagpole was the administration block and storeroom. That must be where Frank was holding his meeting. Beside it stood the two large tents which served as segregated male and female medical wards and a third which doubled up as shelter and office space for the aid workers. Nearby was the mud circle of the unloading bay, large enough for the trucks, with their brightly painted metalwork, to reverse and turn.
The rest of the camp was low and sprawling, a formless expanse of row upon row of shelters stretching across the open landscape, dwarfed by the distant mountains. Those erected in the rows nearest the gate were proper tents; large sheets of off-white canvas, stretched over a central wooden spine, then swooped low to the ground on either side. They made her think of a child’s drawing of birds in flight.
One tent was open at the front, the flaps tied back to let air circulate. A heavy, rusting bicycle was propped on one side. Two chickens, tethered to a stick, pecked at the dirt. Several pairs of tattered shoes, big and small, were piled nearby.
Ellen looked into the gloom. A young man was lying listlessly on a low wooden bed. The charpoy was the only piece of furniture in there and dominated the space. The sunlight pressed through the canvas, dappled on his body. Two young children were heaped against him, sleeping. A pair of eyes glinted. She looked more closely. A young woman, the wife, was sitting to one side in the shadows, her shoulders hunched.
‘Could we speak to these people?’ she asked Ali.
He looked embarrassed. ‘They are from a village,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so . . . that they’ll allow it.’
Ellen crouched down and smiled at the woman. She gazed cautiously back.
‘It’ll be OK,’ she said over her shoulder to Ali. ‘Would you ask this lady—’
But Ali had already moved on. Ellen was beginning to wonder if he’d had any personal contact at all with the people he was helping to feed. She got to her feet again and followed him down the narrow paths which ran between the rows of tents.
The smells of sewerage, unwashed bodies and sweating plastic stirred so many memories. People were endlessly different but there was a dreary uniformity about relief camps which always depressed her. The overcrowded shelters. The squalor. The endless queues of people, patiently waiting for handouts in the misery of heat or rain.
It was more than a decade since she’d first covered a refugee crisis. That was in East Timor. Tens of thousands of people had fled fighting and were huddled inside camps, too frightened of the Indonesian militias to go home. It had been one of her first big stories.
Tension had still been high. She’d driven into the camps with an older journalist. Both of them wanted eyewitness accounts of the recent violence. It had been a new experience for her and an intense one. The poor conditions, the threatening young men wielding guns, the families, cowed and afraid, desperate for food and clean water. She’d felt like a champion of the people, filing impassioned reports to London and railing against her editors when the pieces she’d filed were hacked down.
‘Three hundred words.’ She was outraged. ‘That’s all they used. Can you believe these guys?’
Her fellow journalist, more cynical, had laughed. ‘War’s like sex,’ he said. ‘The first time, it seems like a big deal. Then you get over it.’
She looked around now at the camp. Two young girls with matted hair were rolling together on the ground, shrieking and tickling each other. A toddler sat beside them in the dust. He had the severed arm of a doll in his hand and was sucking on its plastic fingers. His nostrils were black with a moustache of flies.
Her colleague all those years ago had been wrong. She still cared. She would force London to pay attention to what was happening here. That was her job. Frank was feeding them and giving them clean water. The least she could do was write about them. But to make an impact, she needed stronger material.
Her clothes were sticking to her back, her arms, her neck and the cut above her eye was throbbing. She lifted the bottle of water to her lips and drank, then stood, thinking, and inhaled the faint smell of plastic. Two young boys careered onto the path from between the tents. They skidded to a sudden halt when they saw her. Their clothes were filthy, mouths and noses encrusted with dirt. They turned, their eyes following her uncertainly as she walked on, looking for Ali.
The further she moved from the entrance gates, the poorer the shelters became. The off-white canvas soon ran out and was replaced by makeshift structures made from salvage and imagination. Faded grain sacks, torn open, were tied with twine round knobbly sticks. Torn sheets of plastic sweated in the heat. Pieces of brown cardboard, which had clearly once been aid boxes, had been bent round to form screens from the sun.
Smoke was rising. She walked towards it. Three women were crouched together on their haunches outside a shelter. A grandmother and two daughters-in-law perhaps. They’d built a small fire inside a triangle of mud bricks. One of the daughters was poking it with a stick. A battered metal kettle was perched on top and a row of tin cups stood by, waiting. The grandmother had a fan, stiffly plaited straw nailed to a rounded stick. She was fanning herself energetically to keep off clouds of flies.
The young woman who was tending the fire lowered her head and blew on it, scattering sparks. There was a sickly stench. Ellen looked round. The women were just by a row of latrines. The toilets were simple wood frames, raised a foot or so off the ground on bricks and nailed round with hessian for privacy. It was clear where the women had found bricks for their fire.
The grandmother