One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [38]
‘Where are you going?’ I asked him as he began saying goodbyes all round, shaking hands. He glanced at me warily, leaving me till last.
‘With the Irish boys to Telospique. We’ve got another packing station there and they need more people. More aid is coming in there from Sweden.’
‘Where’s Telospique?’
‘About fifty kilometres away.’
I wanted to say – but surely, because we’re brother and sister, surely we could be together – but I knew it didn’t work like that.
‘Closer to the fighting?’
‘A bit, yes. Nearer the front lines, anyway.’
I nodded, silenced.
‘But you’ll be safe here.’
‘I know.’
We hugged tearfully, then. Held each other close. It was dark: a sultry night had descended with a huge rusty moon, and only the lapping of the waves on the quay disturbed the silence. From behind us, one of the Bedfords started its choleric rumbling. I glanced round and saw the silent Fabianne behind the wheel, revving the engine. Kit got in beside her and this time, I didn’t make it hard for him. Didn’t ask if Dad knew. But as I watched them go I thought how, in the last few hours, I’d got closer to my brother than I’d ever been. And I wondered when I’d see him again.
I threw myself into my work in the warehouse. It was hard, physical labour, mind-numbing in its monotony – checking, packing, heaving boxes around, slamming a lorry on the back when it was loaded, then watching, hands on hips, a brief moment of respite as it trundled off into the hills in convoy. But I was glad of it. This was what I’d come for: to forget myself, to help, and whilst it was never enjoyable, it was therapeutic. I learned a smattering of French, Swedish and German from the people around me – even though everyone spoke English – and an awful lot about life. Particularly from the family I was billeted with.
In a half-baked, befuddled sort of way, I’d had an idea we aid workers would all be housed together, but of course that was impractical and we were spread about the town. Unlike the others who were mostly in the centre, I was on the outskirts, in a tiny house built into a hillside. Savage barking dogs lived in the yard outside, and three generations of family within. An ancient grandmother, who rarely moved from her high-backed settle by the fire, and dressed entirely in black, including some sort of bonnet on her head, headed up the family – or so it seemed to me. No English was spoken. An old man, her husband, equally wizened and bent double, spent a lot of time shouting at the dogs. The daughter-in-law, Ibresqua, known as Ibby, did all the shopping, cleaning, cooking and coaxing of meagre vegetables from the patch at the back, helped by her six-year-old daughter, Mona, olive-skinned, with pigtails. Ibby’s husband, the old couple’s son, was in the mountains, fighting the ‘Chetchkins’, I learned, and although the other men in the village came back weekly, he hadn’t been back for a while. Ibby, pregnant with her second child, was kindly but preoccupied. Mona giggled shyly at me from behind her hand. The elderly couple didn’t address me at all. Meals were taken in the boathouse with the other aid workers, and all this family provided was a silent bed. I took it gratefully. A slip of a room with an iron bedstead and skinny mattress, a tiny wooden table with crucifix above. On the opposite wall, a photograph of a burly young man with a luxuriant black moustache, who I took to be Ibby’s husband. As I lay down every evening, exhausted after a day’s work and the strain of being amongst strangers who spoke little English, I looked at Ibby’s husband, before I went to sleep. Only then did I allow myself to think of Dominic.
The weeks trudged by. Once or twice I saw Kit, but only because he’d made an effort to come back to Heronisque en route from a convoy, I felt. The last thing I wanted to be was a burden, so on his next visit, I assured him in the strongest terms