22nd December West Camp Village, Jaffna
‘Will it hurt, Lawrence?’ nine-year-old Sunny leans over and touches the place at the end of his plaster cast. The place where his foot should be, but we both know that very soon what’s left of it is going to have to come off. I put that plaster cast on Sunny myself, only a few weeks ago. The injury was bad, but I expected that in time and with some surgery, it would heal. Now one of the doctors with the UN medical corps has picked up the tell-tale signs of a pre-gangrenous condition this morning. He’s ordered an amputation, and the news has come as a shock. What am I going to say to Sunny?
When I look through the flaps of the Medic-Aid station at the row upon row of uniform white plastic sheeting tents stretching out into the distance, the larger question superimposes itself; what am I even still doing here? I came to Sri Lanka intending to do a three-month voluntary stint and nearly one year on I’m still here...
‘Lawrence?’
‘It’ll hurt a bit,’ I say carefully. ‘But better just the foot than the whole leg, right?’
Easy for you to say,
his huge eyes, like lumps of soft brown sugar seem to reprove. Of course. I’m not a football-mad nine-year-old anymore. I couldn’t possibly understand. He’ll see me, at twenty-two, as ancient, as a fully grown adult who’s got his life all sorted out. ..
I resist the urge to put my arms around him and pretend everything will be all right. That’s what his Mum or Dad would do. But they’re not here and I’m not them. He’s nodding now, being sensible, being grown-up with a professional like he has to be, but I get the impression any minute now there are going to be some huge tears rolling down his dusty face.
‘How will I run after a ball?’ he asks, ‘When they take away my foot?’
‘We will make you a new foot,’ I say assuredly. ‘You’ll be able to run. Of course. Once you get used to it.’
‘I might be able to run,’ he mutters, ‘but if I kick the ball too hard with my new foot it’ll fall off.’
‘It won’t. Your new foot will be strong,’ I tell him determinedly. I say it like it’ll be the same. Like it’ll be
better
. ‘You’ll need physio, naturally. Exercises. You’ll need to work hard but,’ I go over and pull back the curtains behind his bed, breaking off eye contact. ‘With your new super-foot you’ll be able to kick the ball harder than any of the other boys.’
‘I will?’ he looks unconvinced.
‘Sure you will.‘
‘Will I still be able to feel the sand between my toes?’ he demands now, ‘On the toes of my new foot?’
I suck in a breath deep into my nostrils. I shake my head.
‘You won’t be able to feel anything. That’s why you’ll be able to kick the ball harder.’
He considers this for a bit.
The windows behind his bed are clear plastic. Right now it’s early morning – maybe 7 am but there’s still a huge full moon shining like a lamplight in a pale grey-blue sky. ‘There you go,’ I tap his shoulder gently so he turns round to look at it. ‘There’s a football waiting for you. A huge one.’ For a split second ray of sunshine he smiles with his very white, crooked teeth.
‘When I was small,’ he says softly, ‘I used to think one day maybe I’d grow up tall enough to kick that football right out of the sky.’
He’s just brought a lump to my throat. Man, I hoped he was one of the ones who was going to make it out of here okay. I thought he was, but I really don’t know, now. If we can’t locate some member of his family to take him in, it’s looking increasingly doubtful.
I glance at the barbed wire fence along the perimeter of the compound that’s still peppered with photos of the missing, and the large advert - ‘
Two
hundred
rupees for five fliers of your loved one’
catches my eye just like it always does. In this economy, two hundred is a lot of money when they’re only up there for a month before relatives are asked to pay up again. Apparently, they do. I’m not sure whether to marvel at the resilience of the human spirit or be sickened that there’s always some vulture ready to make money out of someone else’s misfortune…
I turn away from the window. I’m not supposed to get involved. I’m supposed to keep myself at one remove from the things that are going on here but I’m finding that increasingly hard. There are over two hundred thousand people in this refugee camp, all waiting for the day when they’ll be told they can go home and for so many of them that day is just never going to come…
‘It isn’t a football, is it?’ he says soberly now. ‘The nurse here told me the moon was made of green cheese. I don’t know green cheese. I think it’s made of space rock. That’s what I think. What do you think, Lawrence?’
‘What do I think?’ He’s got a little bit of sticking-up hair on his forehead that makes him look like a hedgehog. I want to flatten it down for him before they take him into surgery. I want to go in with him but I know how crowded it gets in the op rooms here. Everything’s improvised .The less people in there the better.
‘I read in a book that the light of the moon is a trick. Did you know that, Lawrence?’ He tells me solemnly. He’s always reading. ‘I read that no matter how thin or how full the moon seems to be – the truth is it’s just a big old rock and it always stays the same.’
‘I suppose it’s an illusion isn’t it, Sunny? We only see what the position of the earth allows us to see, that’s true. But the moon is always intact. And … once your foot is gone,
you’ll
still be here, intact, won’t you? Same as you ever were. You’ll find a way, right?’ His eyes grow suddenly sad again.
‘What about my family,’ he says after a while. ‘Will they still recognise me when it’s time to go home?’
‘They’ll recognise you.’ I pat his hand and there are still splodges of green paint on his fingers because he was in the classroom
yesterday
. Sunny painted me a picture of his village in the hot dusty paddy fields of Vanni. He talks about going home all the time. He tells me his mother needs him to help her go out and pick the rice. He likes to watch the water buffaloes as they graze; the fields beyond them are jewel green, the sun as yellow as the yolk of an egg, and now he’s discovered paints - the UN workers have been distributing art materials to the kids - he’s determined he’s going to capture it all. When he goes home. He’s convinced that his Mum and Dad and all four of his sisters are still going to be there when he does.
But the truth is, despite my best efforts up to now, I haven’t been able to locate a single soul who knows him. We’ve got systems in place to work out who belongs to whom; good systems - far better than the photos on the fence - but, two hundred thousand people, that’s … a small country’s-worth of people. And so far, none of them are his. It is likely that his whole family got crushed under the house UN workers managed to pull him from. We don’t know how many of them were in there at the time. He has no memory of the night his village came under attack, so Sunny lives in hope. The nurse Saila has come and is standing by his bedside smiling softly now. His eyes widen and I know that he’s scared.
‘Will you will go and find my Amma?’ he begs me now. He’s asked me to find his grandma before. He must have picked up by now that it’s a next-to-impossible task. ‘You will find Amma and then you will come back?’
‘You know I’ll come back.’
‘You won’t go back home to England?’ He looks worried. Of course he’s worried, but it’s not about me.
‘The only way I’ll go back is if I take you with me,’ I promise, just like I always do. Sunny’s big dark eyes search out mine now from behind his toy monkey. Like that, he looks so much younger even than nine.
He’s a kid, he’s just a kid
, part of me rages. He shouldn’t be going through all this. His life is ruined, blown apart because of a stupid war that he had no part in making…
‘Tell me about your home,’ Sunny delays, glancing at Saila. ‘In the
North Downs of Kent
…’ It’s something he asks me all the time. He knows I don’t have to stay. I’m just a volunteer here. I could walk out and get on a plane home any time I choose. There are no rice fields where I come from, no grazing water buffalo, no monsoon rains. But there are other things.
‘Close your eyes,’ I say. He hugs Monkey to his chest and signals me to carry on.
So I tell Sunny again about the greeny-yellow fields of rape seed bordered like photo-frames by the fluttering petals of bright red poppies. On the other side of the cramped tent I can see them preparing the trolley they’ll use with an IV feed to wheel him into surgery. He’s picturing my world, he’s got his eyes closed right now. He can’t see what’s about to hit him in his.
So I tell him about the shiny black of the crow’s feathers and the pale cuckoo-egg blue of the sky over Merry Ditton on a wet spring morning. I tell him about the deep green of the moss that grows on the old oak guarding the entrance to Macrae Farm. The green is deeper, I tell him, than the untouched emerald green of the miles of jungle surrounding our refugee camp here above Jaffna.
The nurse is standing there, watching us, not moving, waiting for me to finish so she can take him away. I don’t want them to take him away. I have run out of colours, so I move onto topography; how you have to make sure you’ve got good working brakes if you ever ride a bike down the impossibly steep Aslep’s Hill. I tell him about the time when I didn’t, I crashed. I ended up walking round like a cowboy for two weeks after that and Sunny laughs till tears came out of his eyes. This reminds me that I’ve never yet seen Sunny cry.
I tell him about my dog that I left behind five years ago; Sunny likes to hear the stories about how everyone in the world was scared of that dog apart from me. The nurse comes up alongside us quietly and Sunny gives a little yelp when she inserts the IV tube into his hand.
‘Be brave, young man,’ I tell him and he nods his head. ‘Do you want me to take him for you?’ I point at the fur monkey but he just tucks it in under the blanket, out of sight of any other passing kids. ‘Okay then. I will see you in a few hours.’
I turn to the nurse, who wants a word before I leave.
Don’t get involved, don’t make it personal
, she’s going to remind me, but it feels all too late for that …
‘Get some sleep, Lawrence,’ she advises. ‘How many hours straight have you been on shift now?’
I shake my head. I don’t need to sleep.
‘I just need some caffeine that’s all.’
‘Lawrence Macrae,’ Saila puts a firm hand on my arm, ‘You
need
to get some sleep.’
Doesn’t she understand?
‘I’ll be all right,’ I brush her suggestion away. I’ve got to keep going.
Could I find Amma? Is it even remotely possible that any of Sunny’s people have survived? ‘Think positive,’ I say to her. ‘I’m planning to try my luck in East Camp. I hear they had a new influx of about fifty people last week from roughly the right area.’ It’s worth a shot. ‘I
might
find someone from his family. It could happen, right?’
She sighs, resigned to the fact that I’m not going to go to my bed.
‘I hope so.’ She doesn’t look convinced. ‘It would be good if he could have someone here for him during the next few weeks.’
‘I’ll be here.’