Read the book: «Borderlines»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

If you fly often, this may have happened to you. You’re stuck in Economy, folded awkwardly against a window, legs twined like pipe-cleaners, half awake. It’s dark outside, the window blind has been pulled down, and you’re where you hate being: five miles high, defying the laws of gravity and plain common sense. The slight ache in your feet, which have been pressing upwards into the bottom of the seat in front (someone, after all, has to do the hard work of keeping this machine aloft), confirms this fact. You are bitterly aware that the atmosphere inside the plane has turned into one troubled communal fart. And then, quite suddenly, it happens. With no real warning – perhaps a brief bumpiness you assume to be high-altitude turbulence – the plane makes impact. For a moment, you know that you are dying, because this mid-air collision, so high above the Earth, will leave no survivors, no body parts even. You convulse in your seat. You gasp aloud and your neighbour gives you a worried glance. And then your brain executes a massive feat of intellectual recalibration. You flick up the blind with a trembling hand. That’s the ground outside the window – zipping past you terrifyingly fast, it’s true, but in a controlled and orderly manner. This is a landing, you idiot. Sleeping, you missed the change in engine tone, the dipping of the nose, the minutes of what feel like freefall, the clunk of landing gear descending.

Landing in mid-air. A sobering exercise in shattered assumptions, the shock realisation of ludicrously false premises. When I look back on my time in Lira, it often seems like a version of that heart-stopping mid-flight experience, extended over the space of a year. Well, what can I say? Some people are just a bit slow to catch on.

1
14 November 2005

By two a.m. the glare was really beginning to bother me. African airports don’t, on the whole, go in for soft lighting, and Lira International was no exception. I didn’t need a mirror to know what I looked like in the greenish-white light given off by the fluorescent strip running the length of the ceiling: baggy-eyed, sallow, prematurely old.

I lay on the stiff acrylic carpet, my bag under one ear as a makeshift pillow, hands between my knees, pretending to ignore my guard. He was actually in the next room, but the door had been propped open, and since most of the wall separating the two rooms was glass, he could see me without leaving his desk, where he sat reading a newspaper, occasionally sipping a glass of dark tea.

Earlier, I had gone through the outrage, shocked innocence and I-demand-an-explanation routine that seems de rigueur when a young white woman is suddenly, mysteriously, diverted from a path leading to a boarding gate, the trundle across the tarmac in the warm night air and then, aah, the microcosm of Western civilisation that is the modern aircraft, a little bubble of agreed conventions and soothing yogic rituals. I’d declaimed at considerable length on my key role in the Legal Office of the President. I’d dropped my boss’s name, demanded to speak to the presidential adviser and brandished my files, to emphasise how vital it was that I reach The Hague in time for the announcement of a historic ruling that would shape his country’s future.

Green Eyes, as I had mentally tagged him – like any good lawyer, I’d asked for his name but he’d only grunted – hadn’t turned a hair. The absence of reaction, in fact, was the most terrifying thing about the whole affair. An insincere apology, an attempt at intimidation, anything would have been better than the total lack of expression he’d shown as he had turned on me his light, limpid gaze – so disconcerting in this country of dark brown eyes – and said, ‘No flight for you tonight.’

He had taken me to identify my luggage so it could be removed from the pile. He had led me to Immigration to have my passport’s exit stamp crossed. He had walked me to the kiosk where I’d paid my airport tax to get the dollars returned. Each of these small transactions had been conducted in silence by the officials who had processed me twenty minutes earlier, this time without the friendly smiles. They knew now I was toxic, leprous. Then Green Eyes had brought me upstairs to this room, where the only furniture was a desk, pushed against the wall, and a plastic chair, and indicated I wait.

My first reaction had been to get out my mobile and start composing a text to Winston. I was just typing ‘detained at’ when Green Eyes held out his hand. I handed it over, unzipped my shoulder bag and took out my laptop as if to start it up. He held out his hand again, this time more brusquely, and I passed over my weathered Dell. ‘No computer. No mobile,’ said Green Eyes. ‘All is forbidden.’

Over the next hour and a half, I’d watched through the glass as the other passengers on the flight went through the routine I, too, had been planning: the pointless trawl of the airport shop in search of suitable presents (biography of Julius Nyerere, anyone? Copy of the Ministry of Health’s five-year plan?), a beer at the bar, cigarette on the terrace, the cluster at the boarding gate, a final cursory search before disappearing through the doors.

A few threw curious, embarrassed glances in my direction. Wasn’t that the deputy director of UNHCR, the UN refugee agency? I’d certainly met that blond young man – Norwegian Embassy? Danish? One of the Scandies, in any case – at some party. But I did not call out. ‘All is forbidden’ had somehow done its work. I was already aware of a film between me and my fellow expatriates, the gelatinous membrane that separates the innocent from the compromised. A strange shame held me back, the conviction that they would have walked on past me as I mouthed my silent appeal.

‘Come,’ said Green Eyes. I followed his beckoning finger out of the room, past the café-bar, now closing, and across to the terrace, which looked out over one of the least-used runways in Africa. Green Eyes pointed to where the Alitalia flight was turning on the tarmac, testing its flaps. I knew exactly what the atmosphere would be like on board. Some destinations specialise in jolly flights, others come tinged with relief, a few drenched in heartbreak. Flights from Lira always seemed infused with a certain grim pragmatism. No one aboard would be ending a wonderful holiday or laden with souvenirs. The airport was not the chosen port of departure for fleeing locals: too visible, too monitored. The expatriates, banking generous salaries for what was judged a hardship posting, would be heading off for briefings back at Headquarters, short breaks with semi-estranged wives and children parked at boarding-school. They would be back all too soon.

The plane hurtled past the terminal building. Heading out across the plateau, it wheeled until its nose pointed north-west. I could almost hear the clink of the mini-bar bottles as the air stewards handed out the required anaesthetics, tucking a few extras into seatbacks. A few minutes later, it was no more than a winking light in the careless splatter of stars that was the Lira night sky. Green Eyes savoured my expression, his point made. I was on my own.

‘Come,’ he said again. We walked back to my holding area, where my turquoise case crouched, like a giant scarab beetle. Funny how you can come to hate an inanimate object. In one of those side pockets nestled the passports, cash and academic certificates that I assumed lay at the root of this whole sorry affair. Someone, it was clear, had blabbed. I could guess who that might be.

For a while, I sat in the plastic chair. After an hour, buttocks numb, I moved to the floor, draping myself strategically over the case – a girl needs a pillow, no? I put my coat over my head to shield my eyes from the light and under that screen, my hands got working. At the very least, I needed to separate the money – an aromatic wodge of hundred-dollar bills – from the rest. I could claim personal ownership of the cash, even if that meant admitting to breaking currency regulations. The passports and certificates were another matter. Maybe there was somewhere in the airport I could dump the incriminating evidence. With infinite slowness, I opened the zipper into the bag’s side-pocket, closed my hands on the documents and slipped them up the sleeve of my sweater.

When I removed the coat from my head, Green Eyes was staring at me. Had he noticed the wriggling? ‘I need to go to the Ladies,’ I said.

‘Come.’

I followed him down the corridor. Three sinks, dripping taps, the smell of bleach, more bad lighting and a wall-to-wall mirror, which confirmed that, yes, I did indeed resemble a warmed-up corpse. Disconcertingly, Green Eyes did not make his excuses. I entered one of the cubicles, locked the door, sat down without dropping my trousers. Think! Where could I stow the documents? Down the drain? That would cause a flood. How about the cistern, Al Pacino-style? If Green Eyes had not followed me in, maybe. But he would certainly hear the scraping as I lifted the heavy porcelain lid. As for the Papillon solution, no orifice was going to accommodate two passports. I’d run out of ideas. I transferred the papers from my sleeve to my knickers and flushed the toilet. Then I walked past Green Eyes with my face set. Hollywood had failed me, as it tends to. If he wanted to find my cache, he would.

I resumed my previous position slouched over my bag. Green Eyes was playing it cool, so I would match him for insouciance. I would simply fall asleep from sheer boredom. But, of course, too many internal voices were clamouring to be heard. One was near-hysterical, something approaching a banshee shriek: ‘Oh, how could you? How could you – how could you do this to your parents? And what about Winston? After all he’s done? You stupid, stupid, stupid cunt.’

I began composing a speech, my last presentation. ‘I fully realise the mortifying position I have placed you in, and I can only apologise for that,’ it began. ‘Not only do I expect you to disassociate yourself from me, I demand it. I betrayed you personally and put the case at risk, both unforgivable acts. I have surrendered any claim to professionalism. No one else should pay the price for my rashness.’

The other voice was quieter, grimly realistic: ‘So, let’s think this through. To anticipate is to be strengthened. This is a pretty serious offence. Winston will fight for you, you know that, whatever you tell him. The embassy might try to help, but that could just make things worse. The one thing going for you is your skin colour. No government wants the Amnesty International press releases, the Human Rights Watch reports that go with torturing or executing people like you. Even this government. So we’re probably talking, if you’re lucky, a few years in a container on the coast. Can you handle that? Hottest place on earth. No privacy. Malaria. Cholera.’

A girding of the loins. And the answer that came back was a slight surprise: ‘Yes. Yes, I think I can.’

But then an image came to mind, of a rough sketch I’d spotted on Winston’s desk, drawn by a young man who had compensated for his limited artistic ability with a certain graphic brio. It showed someone lying on their stomach, back arched, knees bent, hands reaching behind to seize toes. In yoga, something similar is known as the Bow Pose, a good way of stretching the spine. In the enemy prisoner-of-war camp into which that youngster had had the misfortune to fall it was known as the ‘helicopter position’. The accompanying text, written by a doctor from the Red Cross, helpfully explained that the same technique was used in Iran, where it was called ‘the chicken kebab’, and in Latin America, where it was dubbed ‘the parrot’s perch’. It became intensely painful after a few minutes, the doctor wrote, and, if sustained, could cause deformed bones, deep sores and, in a few recorded cases, pulmonary embolism.

The doctor’s name, I remember, was Boronski. A Pole? I could remember the photos paper-clipped to the drawing, showing the welts and scars. The ugly Polaroids flashed across my mind’s eye, like lurid prompt cards. If the other side used that technique, you could be sure our boys did, too. And how about rape? Maybe I could handle it once, but repeatedly? Day in, day out? What would that be like? I remembered a newspaper article about a hospital in eastern Congo that treated male soldiers raped so often they’d had to use sanitary pads. But, hang on, this wasn’t Congo. What had Winston once said, explaining why it was important never to shout in the office? ‘This is a society where nothing is seen as more shaming than a loss of self-control.’ But now we were back to Winston again, and how he would react, my parents and their feelings, that tidal wave of mortification.

I briefly tried the line of argument that had powered me so effectively through the last few years. The one that ran: ‘Without Jake, there is nothing left to lose. There is nothing at stake.’ But despair no longer consoled. My anxiety scurried like a gerbil on a wheel. The passports had long ago shifted from pleasantly cool to clammily sticky against my skin. I tried some deep breathing, but my heart wouldn’t stop pounding, and my mouth was so dry that my lips kept sticking to my gums. At intervals, I lowered the coat off my face to ask Green Eyes for water, and once in a while, he ordered a colleague to fetch me a plastic beaker.

At a certain point, though, the adrenalin runs out. And then you find the peace of acceptance, the passivity of the internee. By the time I noticed that dawn was about to break, golden shards of light piercing the long grasses at the far end of the runway, I felt Valium-calm and as ancient as the landscape. There was nothing they could do to me now that would frighten or surprise me. I had done their work for them. I had dismantled myself.

There came a changing of the guard. The morning shift arrived, a shorter, older official taking over from Green Eyes, who gave me a knowing, strangely intimate look as he headed out the door. There was a woman with him, small and busty in a tightly fitting uniform, carefully made-up. ‘Hello, sister,’ she said coldly, and gestured to me to follow. And in this country where, as I had once explained in an email to my British friend Sarah, no one ever allowed you to carry anything (‘My arms are atrophying’), Whitey was this time left to lug her own bag. The new dispensation.

I knew what to expect now. I’d be led to a car so nondescript it could only belong to the secret police. I’d be taken to an equally anonymous room and there my luggage and clothing would finally be properly searched, the passports and cash immediately discovered. I would be professionally interrogated, my story picked over until, inevitably, it fell apart. And then I would be asked to sign something, and I would be taken to a real cell, with bars, cockroaches and an open toilet, not the soft-focus version of internment I’d been treated to up till now.

Instead, the two walked me out of the deserted airport to the taxi rank. I noticed a woman, swathed like a mummy in white cotton, sitting on the concrete kerb. A little boy lay across her lap, fast asleep, saliva crusting his lips. The female officer rapped on the window of the only cab waiting and what had looked like a bundle of linen stirred and straightened, morphing into a bleary old driver, who automatically pulled the seat forward and groped for his keys.

The male officer turned to me. ‘You will pick up your passport from the Ministry of Immigration, Room 805.’

Oh, sweet Jesus, they were letting me go. Suddenly I rediscovered my lost outrage. ‘What was this all about?’

‘Room 805. Ministry of Immigration. This afternoon.’ Indifferent, they turned and headed back towards the terminal.

Louder now. ‘What’s been going on here?’

The woman officer swivelled and looked back at me. She had a half-smile on her face, and I noticed that her eyebrows had been plucked entirely away, then redrawn in black pencil. ‘We had an information about you.’

I scrabbled at the taxi’s door handle, my hands suddenly shaking so violently I could hardly open it. I gabbled instructions and we headed downtown. Lira was beginning to stir. In a night-chilled courtyard, a first dog barked. The bark was taken up by the dog next door, and their joint yelping relayed from one neighbourhood to another, a widening chorus of syncopated alarm spreading to wake the reluctant, befuddled city.

I sat huddled in the corner of the taxi, trying to control a juddering that had now spread to my legs. One thought occurred. After all those months of velvet-glove treatment, I’d finally been paid the ultimate compliment. Paula Shackleton had been treated like a local.

2

‘What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?’

That was the running gag of an unlikely friendship forged in a bar down an alley with the cabbagy reek of open drains, hidden away from the Horn of Africa’s punishing highlands light. There’s a long, meandering answer to the question, and then there’s the one-paragraph executive summary, easier to digest but lacking in nuance. I’m opting for the former, and that means jumping back a bit.

The Chicago law firm I worked for in 2004, Grobart & Fitchum – or ‘Grabhard and Fuckem’ as I liked to think of them – was involved in a complicated negotiation between a Swiss department-store chain raising capital to expand into Eastern Europe and a banking client who was running the deal out of their Boston headquarters. The job involved a huge amount of conference calling, and since the Swiss were our overlords, they got to arrange the schedule around their bedtimes. Grobart & Fitchum had flown in a five-man team, and as the days went by, we began to resemble a group of sleep-deprived inmates from Guantanamo Bay, pale-faced and pouchy-eyed. The mood between us was wary: we had been at it long enough to grasp who could stay lucid and keep powering through without enough sleep and who was becoming so loopy their workload would soon have to be added to ours.

Luxury is the knee-jerk consolation prize in this business and Dan, my immediate boss, had automatically booked suites at the Langham, housed in a former Federal Reserve building. There’s something uniquely depressing about being offered a range of services, from the however-many-metres swimming-pool to a range of ‘Chuan scrubs and wraps’ you know you will never get time to use, and the British puritan in me was disgusted by the extravagance. The carping refrain No wonder they’re all obese ran through my head every time I surveyed the breakfast buffet with its mountains of pastries and steaming trays of bacon. The Langham was just like every other gilded cage I’d stayed in, a fitting setting for my botched, interrupted, pointless demi-life.

On the morning in question I was sitting over a plate with a single bread roll placed defiantly in the centre – none of that greasy crap for me, thank you – staring into the middle distance, when a blur in my blind spot crystallised into the shape of a small black man. Compact, neat, a clipped corona of greying curls framing a high, round forehead, he wore a crumpled linen suit in an unusual shade of lemon custard. He stopped as he reached my table and gave me a very direct look from a pair of long-lashed, honey-coloured eyes. I noticed a distinctive spattering of moles around his nose, as though someone had taken a coffee stirrer and flecked espresso in his face.

‘It isn’t mandatory.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You look like someone trapped in Purgatory. Boredom and frustration aren’t obligatory. You could try something more stimulating.’

For a moment I thought he might be a Jehovah’s Witness and I was about to get the ‘Have you been saved?’ routine. My face assumed a rictus of polite refusal and I raised a palm in an instinctive fending-off motion.

He blinked those long lashes a couple of times, then gave me a shy smile of enormous sweetness. ‘You’re the British lawyer, aren’t you? Part of the Grobart & Fitchum crew?’

I nodded warily.

‘Paula? I noticed you all earlier in the lobby. I’m Winston Peabody. Dan and I go way back. We both did time at the Justice Department.’ We shook hands and he nodded at a signboard in the lobby. ‘I’m here for the seminar on my favourite topic, corporate sleaze. But I’ll also be giving a speech for the human-rights crowd. Can I tempt you? It’ll make a change from your usual fare. And sometimes I have work for people like you.’

‘People like me?’

He pursed his lips and gazed at me speculatively, like a tailor measuring his client for a suit. ‘Oh, people with that questing look in their eyes. The Unrooted, I call them. Take it as a compliment. Complacency’s not exactly attractive. Anyway, come along. I’m trying to rustle up an audience. Nothing more embarrassing than talking to an empty room.’ He scribbled the venue and time on the back of a business card, placed it on my table and walked off.

That last bit was one of his little jokes, of course. Winston Peabody III, the first black partner at the Washington firm of Melville & Bart and a celebrity on the human-rights circuit, did not need to beg strangers in hotels to attend his talks. When seats ran out, people would stand. He was one of those speakers adored by the media and envied by academics, who could popularise without dumbing down, rendering dry specialisms so accessible that listeners who had never dreamed of opening a law book found themselves wondering whether they had missed their calling. There are men who seem to change shape, to grow in stature when they climb onto a public platform. Behind a desk, over the phone, Winston was always formidable. On a podium or presenting in court, he became positively sexy, acquiring a town-hall charisma, the spiky, sardonic edge and instinctive timing of the stand-up comedian who knows how to play an audience. Had he wished to at that moment, he could have tapped almost any woman – and a fair number of the men – on the shoulder and they would have considered fucking him a privilege. But in the seconds it took him to step off the stage, he visibly shrank, folding, like an empty Coke can in a weightlifter’s fist, to become just a small, slightly paunchy man in a creased yellow suit whose salt-and-pepper halo of hair could not conceal advanced male-pattern baldness and a tendency to dandruff. Incredible Hulk to mild-mannered Bruce Banner in the blink of an eye.

I honestly can’t remember the details of Winston’s speech, hosted by a human-rights group that had hired a hall on Harvard’s campus for the purpose. Sheer exhaustion had brought matters to a head on the Swiss deal. My skills were not required for the final session with Zurich, and I found myself with a free afternoon. He must have spoken about the hunger for justice in societies emerging from war, how ending the climate of impunity held the key to peace. He probably talked about the debt the West owed developing countries for the horrors of slavery and colonialism and the cynicism of the Cold War. I do recall that he gave some gory examples, anecdotes from visits to East Timor and Cambodia, work done in Colombia and Sierra Leone. Members of the audience gasped at references to stairwells daubed with blood, defence attorneys disembowelled in their offices, human-rights campaigners pulled over on remote country roads and beheaded in the spotlights of their killers’ cars. I saw one girl, long brown hair falling to her waist, close her eyes and lean her head on the shoulder of her boyfriend, who put his arm round her in a manly gesture that signalled: it’s OK, I’m here. What impressed me, though, was not the heartrending stuff, or that Winston spoke in meticulously punctuated sentences – you could actually hear the semi-colons, dashes and quotation marks and when he told his audience: ‘I’ll come back to that point later,’ it wasn’t just a phrase, he really did return, topping and tailing his thought processes like a chef preparing green beans – no, it was the surgical coolness of his eye. This was an impassioned, angry man, but one who never allowed his emotions to interrupt a methodical taking of notes. On his deathbed, as his nearest and dearest gathered to weep, Winston Peabody would be calling, ‘Hush’, the better to analyse the timbre, tone and length of his own death rattle.

At the end, I dutifully took my place in the throng of acolytes gathering around him. Don’t ask me why. I think I wanted him to know I’d bothered. Waiting, I registered that I was a good decade older than the rest.

‘Mr Peabody, I just feel, like, what’s happening is just so awful. What can I do?’ twittered a pigtailed blonde, her cheeks flushed with emotion. She was almost pogoing with enthusiasm, flashing glimpses of a toned stomach and pierced navel. I spotted the gleam of metal in her mouth. Dear God, she was actually wearing braces. This was not the place for me. I turned to leave, but at that moment Winston caught my eye. He reached forward, the human Red Sea somehow parted before him, and placed a restraining hand on my sleeve. ‘Please. Don’t go.’

Fifteen minutes later, the flock of groupies had dispersed and we were in the campus canteen drinking coffee.

He spoke as though picking up an interrupted conversation. ‘So, since 1997 I’ve been working pro bono for the government of North Darrar, in the Horn of Africa. I don’t expect you’ve heard of it?’

‘Well, actually …’

His eyebrows shot up in query.

‘I’ve heard of Darrar, that’s all.’

‘That’s more than most people can say. Good. In many ways North Darrar encapsulates the problems faced by traumatised post-conflict nations. A breakaway state that has just come through the second of two wars with its neighbour and former occupier, and finds itself having to negotiate its border – prove the country’s right to exist, in essence – in The Hague. They’re trying to build a democracy from scratch, but their best people were either killed or fled into exile during the independence struggle so the last thing they need is this kind of international court case. They weren’t rich to start off with – the last war bankrupted them and there’s only so much you can make exporting badly cured hides and potash to the Middle East – and the other side hires the best.’

‘And?’

‘Well, up till now I’ve been fighting this battle virtually single-handed, juggling the job with my paying clients. Melville & Bart help out on the practical side, preparing documents, making our evidence look halfway presentable. But that’s just basic drudgery. We’re reaching a crucial stage. This is complex, sophisticated stuff, and I simply can’t do it alone. I need a deputy. Will you help?’

I blinked. I’d been wondering where the preamble was leading, but it hadn’t occurred to me that this might be its destination. ‘Look, I really don’t understand why you think any of this is my business … Why don’t you get one of your admirers to pitch in? I’m sure one of those kids would jump at the chance.’

He sighed. ‘Sadly, experience proves that the eager intern is more hindrance than help. The first had an attack of the runs, decided he’d caught cholera and insisted on being medevaced out. The second went mountain biking, hit a camel and broke her wrist – no more typing. I can’t play nanny – I’m temperamentally unsuited to it. I spend all my free time in Lira, but I need someone based there to keep the show on the road during my necessary absences. Are you interested?’ He was spooning sugar into his cappuccino as though determined not to acknowledge my disbelieving eyes.

‘This is nuts. We’ve barely met. You don’t know anything about me.’

‘Well, I know what I saw in your face the other day. I’ve rarely seen a bleaker expression. And actually,’ he took a slurp and shot me a look over the cup’s rim, ‘I know slightly more than you think. As I said, Dan and I go way back. He briefed me on your, er, personal circumstances over lunch a few months ago. I knew we’d bump into each other one of these days. Dan suggested Grobart & Fitchum was no longer the right place for you. Oh, he had nothing but praise for the quality of your work but he thinks you’d do better – be happier – elsewhere.’

I flushed. ‘How very considerate of him.’

There was a pause. He took another slurp and said slowly, ‘My own policy is to welcome kindness when I see it, however clumsy or awkward a form it takes. It’s a rare commodity, especially in our profession.’

I looked away, my eyes pricking. ‘I think I heard you use the phrase “pro bono”. I need to eat. Grobart & Fitchum pay extremely well. My savings account looks pretty healthy these days.’

‘Well,’ he leaned forward to hold my gaze with those sorrowful, honey-coloured eyes, ‘your savings account may look healthy, but you certainly don’t. In any case, you’d get a decent salary. The North Darrar government can afford to pay one international lawyer’s stipend – I’ve persuaded them they have to. It took some doing, believe me.’

I was beginning to feel cornered. I’d met this man only two days ago, and already he had arrogated a say over my future. It was absurd. ‘You said this was a border case? That’s totally out of my area of expertise. I do corporate law.’

‘Nothing you can’t handle, believe me. Dan assures me you’re one of the smartest lawyers he’s ever employed. I’ll hold your hand, and they do say that I’m a born teacher. I notice you wrote your thesis on –’ he took out a card ‘– “Challenges of peace: when former Latin American guerrilla organisations turn law-makers”. So it seems you already have some interest in the developing world.’

Ah, yes, my thesis. An eccentric pimple on the bland epidermis of an otherwise unremarkable post-graduate degree. Fuelled by the sheer lust I’d harboured towards Gavin, the sole Caribbean student on our LSE course and the only one who brought books by Chomsky and Che Guevara into lectures. A sudden mental image. Gavin dashing into the sea one miraculously mild October weekend in Dorset. A dark Michelangelo’s David, nipples erect in the chill, pulling off a pair of jeans as I watched from the shingle. I’d wanted to impress him, hence the thesis; its drafting had outlasted the relationship.

‘Regard this as the equivalent of a further degree in international law, prepared under expert guidance,’ Winston continued. ‘I’ll be expecting you to do some of the presentations, so you’ll get priceless experience. I know lawyers in their mid-forties who are still waiting for their law firm to grant them permission to stand up in a courtroom and argue a case. They’re not even halfway up a chain twenty links deep. Put in a few years and you’ll come out of this with a whole new skill set. All courtesy of the North Darrar government. I’d call that a pretty attractive offer.’

I sat in silence, surprised I had allowed the conversation to go on as long as it had.

Winston picked up his briefcase and turned his head slowly from side to side, uncricking a stiff neck and carrying out a panoramic survey of the café, with its gaggles of chatting students, the odd loner hunched over a laptop and a muffin. He was considering what form to give his closing remarks. Had he chosen the bombastic – anything on the lines of ‘doing something worthwhile with your life’, or ‘helping millions of poor Africans who never had your chances’ – I would have slipped off his gleaming hook, like a sliver of jelly off a fork, consigning the whole episode to the surreal-encounter-best-ignored category as swiftly as I left campus.

‘Look, Paula. One of the great satisfactions I’ve discovered, working in Africa, is being able to have a disproportionate impact per hour of effort put in. Call it big-fish-small-pond syndrome, call it stroking my own ego, whatever. I’m not, despite appearances, the world’s brightest lawyer. But there is – and I’m not boasting here, just stating the facts – no one in that entire country who has my skills. They’ve been fighting for nearly three decades, they know how to repair Kalashnikovs and make a handful of lentils and a gourd of water last a week. They’re confident they can build a socialist Utopia, but they can’t do this. And I can. I cannot describe to you the professional satisfaction that brings. You may never experience it anywhere else ever again.’

It was a deft, manipulative appeal. But I was ready to be manipulated, pining to be told what to do. I was so tired of being master of my fate.

We met on the ice.

A woman on the cusp of thirty, with a muss of brown hair, sits on a bench by the side of the Rockefeller Center Ice Rink in New York in mid-February 1999. Having laced up her hired skates, she stands with wobbly care. It’s been a long time since she had these on, but she is determined to see this through. Hitchens, the firm where she works as a transactional lawyer, crossing the legal t’s and dotting the i’s on bond deals, overlooks the sunken rink and she has been watching the skaters from her office window for weeks, envying their fluid grace.

These two, though, she does not envy. They are graceless and comic. A bearded, middle-aged man in grey jeans and a lumberjack shirt, flailing and juddering on his skates, and a ponytailed brunette, all white cleavage and heavy eye-liner, draped, giggling, on one arm. Her eyes skim over them – she assumes they’re a couple. The buxom girl must be wife number two or three. Only she is not going to be allowed to ignore them. Because just as she ventures warily onto the ice the two career towards her. There is a loud scream, the girl falls, showing even more of that milky cleavage and still laughing, and the woman is knocked violently back. Her skates slide out from under her and she finds herself half lying, half sitting on the ice with the man sprawled on top. For a split-second, his eyes, grey-blue, are locked on hers. As, arms flailing, he attempts to right himself – ‘God, I’m so sorry’ – he briefly places a hand on her left breast.

‘Straight for my tits. What a lech,’ she will chide him later on. The episode is something they both enjoy examining, returning to.

‘Only way of getting your attention,’ he will reply, looking absurdly pleased with himself. And then he will usually kiss the top of her head as you might a child’s.

‘The custom, where I come from, is to shake hands,’ is what she says at the time. On his second attempt to get up, the man is careful to place his hand on the ice for leverage. His hands are the most atypical thing about him, she will come to know. They are a peasant’s hands, stubby-fingered and as wide as paddles.

‘Oh, I believe in cutting to the chase,’ he replies, then apologises again. And she later finds out that this is not a joke. Just as she has been watching the skaters, admiring their grace, he has been watching her, noting her daily routine, plucking up the courage to introduce himself. He works in the same building.

They both stand up – she will sport large bruises on her buttocks for weeks. Names are exchanged, the girl, slapping ice dust off her trousers, is introduced. She is Sophie, his younger daughter. So he is older than he looks. Her accent is remarked upon and she gives her usual trite explanation of how a junior British lawyer ends up on Wall Street. Then he gestures to where a figure wrapped in a cashmere scarf, fur hat and gloves stands on the far side of the rink, near the gilded statue of Prometheus, a chilled silhouette radiating boredom. Two glossy pedigree dogs pull impatiently at their leads. ‘My wife is waiting. And so are Laurel and Hardy. We’d better go. Till the next time.’

A wife, she notes. Why bother with ‘till the next time’? But she will bump into him later, in the ground-floor café of their building. She will discover that he works for a respected firm of architects, then that he not only set up the firm but has a claim on the entire building in which she works. Jake Wentworth is, in a minor way, a local celebrity, the well-liked unpretentious scion of a WASP family that made its fortune hurling railroads across the United States. One day he will inherit the family fortune, but in the meantime he is doing the job he loves, juggling draughtsmanship with a regular arts column and the directorship of a charity for political asylum seekers, funded by Wentworth money. She will meet him on the ice again, alone this time, and neither will get any skating done. Instead, they will talk about politics, discuss the Coen brothers’ latest film, and he will give her a witty-yet-not-unkind potted résumé of twenty years’ New York high society gossip, for these are circles to which his name grants entry. They will both be surprised to find that it feels like a conversation between old friends after a long break, rather than a first exchange between strangers. And soon she will discover, thanks to a personal assistant’s indiscretions, that the impatience she glimpsed in the female figure by the skating rink extends further than irritation at the cold: there are independent bank accounts, solo holidays, separate bedrooms. And the young woman will find herself hoovering up office tittle-tattle with unbecoming greed.

He has made contact. He has made her care.

3

I woke staring at an unfamiliar grey ceiling. A gecko was spread-eagled directly above my head, in unconscious imitation of my position. It skittered away as I reached for my mobile phone blinking on the bedside table: 6:00 a.m. I had slept only a couple of hours since my taxi had deposited me in darkness at the White Star Hotel in Lira but felt wide awake, my body still on US time. I staggered to the bathroom, rinsed my face in water, wrenched open doors giving onto a balcony and stepped out. The street lighting was so sparse that the only detail I retained from the drive in was a giant ‘WELCOME TO LIRA INTERNATIONAL CAPITAL OF CULTURE AND SCIENCE’ banner slung across the airport road. I wanted my first view of the city.

But there was to be no grandiose panorama. My room lay at the back of the hotel and I found myself gazing instead across a flat plateau fringed by a jagged mountain range over which the sun was rising, thawing the thin layer of frost crusting a russet and dun patchwork of ploughed fields. A gentle wind was ruffling the tawny savannah grass that lapped around the hotel, setting off the rhythmic chirruping of invisible crickets.

My nostrils crinkled as I caught an unfamiliar aroma – a mixture of chilli powder, cumin and ginger, I guessed, and the scent of roasting coffee. There were other, less appealing, elements: the acid tang of what might be mule manure and petrol fumes from badly maintained cars. So this, I thought, was the smell of Lira.

I craned across the balcony railing and looked north, registering that the escarpment lay above the cloud cover, which stretched across the horizon like a lumpy quilt, neatly tucked in at the corners. How high up were we, then? Two thousand metres? More? I spotted a hawk fluttering above the plains in the chill layer where a cerulean sky merged with the navy of deep space. There was a giddy feeling of gravity defied: both of us – woman and hawk – were suspended far beyond the reach of ordinary mortals.

Suddenly overwhelmed by nausea, I bowed my head, dry retching as the clot of grief and rage that had stoppered my throat since I’d lost Jake bubbled up. I spat once, took a deep breath and closed my eyes. The cold air was as invigorating as a lungful of alpine oxygen, the sun on my face a caress. Something about being so close to eternity was waking me up. After months of lethargy I felt a brisk sense of purpose. An unfamiliar sensation stirred inside: hope. Like generations of sinners, mavericks and reprobates before me, I’d joined the Foreign Legion, exiling myself from my own. And that self-banishment felt good. Winston was right. I should have done this sooner.

Extracting a shawl and two thick box files from my luggage, I arranged myself in a tangle of wool at the balcony table. I’d once prided myself on being a meticulously briefed lawyer, but if there was one lesson recent personal history had taught me – and we’ll come to that – it was that you can never really prepare. While serving my notice period with Grobart & Fitchum, I had focused exclusively on mundane tasks: selling the car, notifying my landlord, settling utilities bills. When a package from Winston had arrived, containing a fold-up map, three chunky history books and several files of background information, I had not taken up the proffered invitation. I had a few hours, now, to get some overdue homework done.

‘THE PLACE’, someone – presumably Winston – had written in red felt tip on the first file. It began with a photocopied page of a 1999 Bradt guide to the region, one paragraph highlighted in yellow. ‘Sanasa lies slap bang on the border between the tiny state of North Darrar, Africa’s newest nation, and the giant Federal Republic of Darrar, which reluctantly conceded independence after a David-and-Goliath war of secession. There is nothing of any interest here to the ordinary tourist.’

The next document was a rather florid account by an English writer called Hugh Winterdale, who had toured the Red Sea coast in 2000 as part of a series of travel books baptised ‘Forgotten Places’:

The port of Sanasa, 550 kilometres north-east of the highland capital of Lira, is little more than a long curving jetty of giant coral bricks, stacked like pink sugar cubes to keep the sea at bay.

A sultan held sway here for a few hundred years, doing deals with Ottoman traders and Egyptian bureaucrats, and that period left behind crumbling coral ramparts and a few gracious town buildings, whose delicate wooden verandas now slump earthwards. The Italians left behind a delightful openness with strangers and a liking for pasta and strong coffee. As for the British, they only took away, removing anything in the port made of metal, to be used in other, more important, colonies.

East and west of here lie terminals with ship-to-shore mobile gantries and yards piled high with orange containers. As Africa enters the twenty-first century, these modern ports will come to play a vital role in the continent’s revival. In contrast, Sanasa, which only exists because the coast here – with the help of a little excavation in the 1870s by a Swiss adventurer – forms the deepest harbour for 200 kilometres in any direction, boasts very little in terms of equipment. Things are done the old-fashioned way. Three rusty cranes loom over the harbour, and when a ship docks, they cluster above the vessels’ innards, picking over the cargo like feeding storks. To a chorus of male shouts, hooks descend, cargo slings are attached, sacks of grain and cement are lifted and deposited on the harbour front, morsel by painstaking morsel. A brigade of whippet-thin stevedores then springs into action, T-shirts stained with sweat, loading the sacks by hand into the Isuzu trucks lined up in anticipation.

But such moments are becoming ever rarer. A well-used port makes for dark, polluted waters. Sanasa’s are an inviting, translucent blue; zebra fish nibble and flit around greasy anchor ropes. Container vessels increasingly bypass Sanasa, leaving it to process the occasional, surreptitious dhow. Painted sky-blue, these tiered schooners waft in laden with sugar, cheap Chinese plastic sandals, the odd microwave oven and state-of-the-art 4x4. Not an inch of space is wasted. By the time they depart, the dhows have been transformed into smelly, bleating vessels of animal distress, loaded to the gunwales with goats and camels destined for the butcheries of Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

‘Wordy but helpful’, someone had scrawled in the margin.

Sanasa’s remoteness, its very inefficiency, lends it a particular advantage. Rarely coming to the attention of officials in Lira, it is popular with smugglers, petty traders, who do their calculations in their heads, and livestock owners, who ignore frontiers as they follow routes established by nomadic forefathers. It makes for a rich mix of languages and faces, a polyglot blurring of nationalities and customs.

For most of the day, the town sits stunned into near-imbecility, paralysed by the joint assault of light and heat. Pock-marked mongrels lie by the whitewashed trunks of old neem trees, tongues out, stomachs pumping like pistons. The only sound comes from the cawing of the crows picking for forgotten fish scraps along the cement jetties, crunchy with salt crystals. It is in the evening that Sanasa stirs. Under the arcades, harbour workers sip cold Coke, relishing the bracing zing of ammonia from the sea and providing a running commentary on the comings and goings from the town’s lone brothel. Urchins dragging adult-sized flip-flops trawl, half-hearted, for custom, carrying neon-coloured plastic basins of hot peanuts. They stand uncomplainingly, ignored, absorbing the gossip of the baritone-voiced adult world. As a velvet night descends, the spot-lit bars and restaurants, each with its dizzy halo of insects, become helpful landmarks for residents accustomed to manoeuvring the streets as much by feel as by sight.

I turned the page, expecting more, but the passage ended there. Winterdale’s creative juices had clearly run dry.

Next came some photocopies of unclassified cables between a US deputy ambassador in Lira and the State Department, dating back to the early 1990s. One highlighted snippet read:

Sanasa is merely one of a handful of settlements whose proximity to a poorly defined colonial border is a potential source of strategic concern. Yet when Western diplomats raise the issue with officials in either capital, their concerns are laughed away … The line is that the governments established by the two former rebel movements now running Darrar and its progeny, North Darrar, are ideological soul-mates, with near-identical, progressive agendas. ‘We’re brothers!’ officials will often tell embassy personnel. Families in the border areas, they say, are interconnected by marriage, friendship and commerce and barely know themselves where the frontier begins or ends. ‘Who needs a border when there’s trust on both sides?’ is a refrain we often hear in these parts.

But, evidently, the picture was not quite as harmonious as it seemed. For on the night of 7 June 2001, something had happened on Sanasa’s outskirts, and it was hard to believe that individual explosions of temper could have escalated quite so quickly had the incident not tapped into long-accumulated grudges.

I stretched, checking my watch, abandoning my shawl. It was eight a.m.: the heat was rising, hotel staff would be up. I rang room service to order breakfast and opened the second, fatter, file, marked ‘THE INCIDENT’. This one was a mess. It contained a collection of transcripts from local-radio broadcasts picked up by BBC Monitoring, several editions of Africa Confidential and scores of press cuttings that contradicted one another in key details. The newspaper titles scrawled on the scraps meant nothing to me. I guessed they represented the contrasting views from the two neighbours’ capitals.

One thing they agreed upon: that on the evening in question, fifty-five-year-old Ahmed Ibrahim had settled his bill at a restaurant on the Sanasa quayside, shouted farewell to the proprietor, and boarded his 7.5-tonne Isuzu. In the summer months, like most local drivers, he always waited till nightfall before moving. In daytime, the tarmac got so hot it could rip black fronds of rubber from tyres. He drove in darkness towards the border post on the edge of town.

What happened after that was murky. Some accounts claimed Ahmed was a hardened smuggler of cigarettes and cheap gin, accustomed to oiling his passage across the border with bribes. According to this version of events, his usual routine was sabotaged by an unexpected change of the Darrar guards: the two middle-aged regulars he had spent years befriending had been replaced by eager-to-impress youngsters, who insisted that he remove tarpaulins, unbuckle ropes and make his goods available for inspection.

A rival version painted a different picture. His truck laden with vital pharmaceutical supplies destined for a clinic across the frontier, Ahmed – a law-abiding, respectable father of six – had negotiated the North Darrar border crossing without a hitch, only to discover that Darrar’s border post had shifted twenty metres closer to Sanasa since his previous trip. He had realised this a split-second after his truck had careered through the barricade, snapping it in half, bringing two Darrar guards piling out of a freshly painted hut, stuffing handfuls of pasta into their mouths, AK-47s at the ready.

Whichever version was true, a shouting match had broken out, which attracted the attention of the North Darrar guards on the other side of no man’s land, who radioed a local militia for backup. A first rifle shot was heard – perhaps no more than the spasm of a nervous finger on a trigger – but the damage was done. Next came an answering fusillade, and someone, unbelievably, upped the ante by throwing a grenade, the explosion deafening everyone. When the noise and smoke subsided, Ahmed Ibrahim lay spread-eagled in the sand, breath bubbling from the granular pink mash that had been his face. Arterial blood was pumping from one border guard’s thigh while another lay motionless, arms clasping a warm pile of entrails. Two more were writhing silently in the sand, squirming jumbles of bone and muscle.

The initial incident had not made the international news. On domestic television, it led the evening news broadcasts in both countries, but was consigned to a seven-line announcement read by carefully expressionless newsreaders. In the two capitals, emergency cabinet meetings were called, inquiries commissioned, generals summoned. Three days later, a motorcade of tanks, armoured personnel carriers and camouflage-painted trucks, dispatched by the government of North Darrar, trundled through Sanasa, heading for the blood-spattered checkpoint. A week later, Darrar’s tanks reached the front line and the artillery opened fire. Both sides, the geeks from Jane’s Weekly noted with interest, were using the same models of tank, the stolid T-55 bequeathed to the region by the Soviet Union during the Cold War era when the superpowers fought their battles by African proxy.

Leafing through the cuttings from The Economist, the New York Times and the Financial Times, it was clear that what had puzzled the Western journalists, diplomats and academics who had covered what followed was that Sanasa seemed so insignificant, the trigger incident so trivial, and both sides had so much to lose. Their articles smacked of exasperation: ‘Why can’t these people behave like adults?’ they implied. It was not, I guessed, that these observers had forgotten the grotesque consequences of a single shot fired in Sarajevo, or the arbitrary connections made between the flattening of the Twin Towers and Baghdad’s invasion. There was something more arrogant at play. In those cases, cause and effect might well seem disproportionate, historical justifications near-nonsensical but, dammit, they had occurred in places that mattered. The West could not tolerate a seeming absence of logic in a region so dry and hungry. Quixotic decision-making was a luxury denied countries this poor, as were the ingredients of most foreign policy: a leader’s hunger for dignity, a community’s craving for respect, destiny-defying pride. The domestic media showed no such bafflement. Their dispatches made knowing references to ancient kingdoms, nineteenth-century battles between feudal rases, long-running disputes over grazing rights, ‘the perennial obsession with access to the sea’, and ‘the hot topic of national identity’.

Within weeks, Sanasa was nearly forgotten as the war spread like a virus, infecting three other border towns. As truckloads of fleeing villagers headed in one direction, mattresses and cooking pots piled high, live chickens clenched like feather dusters, military conscripts and the occasional flak-jacketed reporter headed in the other, towards what was now a 1,630-kilometre front line. Nothing went as expected, although it took a while for the two populations to make out the broad contours of the conflict. The front line juddered confusingly backwards and forwards, each jerk marked in corpses that twisted in the sterilising Red Sea sun to form green-and-brown strips of human leather, a grimacing spray of teeth at one end, bulbous black boots at the other; landmarks initially greeted with horrified respect but attracting growing scorn from fellow soldiers as positions on crags and knolls were won, lost and won again. Two and a half years later, though, it was clear which side had been pushed onto the back foot. ‘We’re like a bar drunk who knows he has lost but can’t stop for dignity’s sake,’ the North Darrar minister of the interior confessed to an American diplomat one night over a ninth beer at Lira’s Havana Bar, an insight duly relayed back to the State Department. ‘One hand slapping our opponent in the face, the other leaning on him to avoid falling over.’

Across North Darrar’s eastern, central and western sectors, more than 150,000 men and women had died. Darrar had gobbled up flood plains, seized valley settlements and captured hill forts, sending hundreds of thousands of villagers fleeing. The familiar flags of humanitarian agencies flapped over hastily built camps for the dispossessed. Sanasa had been occupied, then thoroughly looted. Bored Darrar artillerymen had laid bets to see who could rip through the jetty’s slim rind, and the sea now poured through the Swiss engineer’s 130-year-old stonework. Fishing boats had been burned, the mosque daubed with obscene graffiti and the port arcades mortared until their roofs acquired the consistency of ancient lace.

The light was now so bright I was squinting. I rose to fetch my sunglasses.

At this point, it seemed, the administration in Darrar had paused, suddenly aware that while sending the North Darrar government into exile was theoretically possible, the game might not be worth the candle. The two states agreed instead to send their presidents to Tunis for peace talks hosted by the African Union. A Cessation of Hostilities declaration was signed, catering for a buffer zone and a blue-helmeted force of UN peacekeepers, allowing both sides to pull back their forces without loss of face. The border must be demarcated, it was agreed, further bloodshed averted. Both leaders declared themselves ready to go to international arbitration.

The last item in the file was a news-agency photo of the two presidents embracing in front of the television cameras, Kofi Annan’s hands resting on their shoulders in saintly benediction. I studied the image for a few minutes, wondering whether local viewers, while nodding in relief, had found themselves wondering how it was logically possible for both leaders – so certain of their own rectitude, so confident in the correctness of this method of solving disputes – to be simultaneously right.