Bettany's Book (98 page)

‘I won’t be upset,’ said Prim. ‘Don’t be upset yourself. Eat.’

But by the time she forced another forkful down her throat, it was nearly time to reach for the keys of her truck.

‘You’ll be okay to get to bed?’

‘Not a problem,’ he said. ‘I’m looking forward to a good sleep.’

And as she gathered herself, he said, ‘You are such a good friend.’

Arriving home before curfew, she saw that the two policemen in their car at the corner were observing an olive-skinned male waiting by her
gate. His demeanour, even the nonchalant way he gathered himself as her vehicle pulled up, declared him Australian.

As she got out of the truck, he called, in those unmistakable vowels, ‘Primrose?’

Enraged, she approached him.

‘Lunzer,’ she said, unlocking the gate. She was irrationally angry that they had chosen this night to give her company. If he had arrived earlier in the evening she might have assessed him and sent him to sit with Sherif.

She unlocked the gate. He said, ‘I was supposed to be in at dusk, but we were late taking off from Frankfurt.’

In the office, she said, ‘There’s a folding cot out the back. You can sleep in here.’

‘Okay,’ he agreed brightly. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine. I don’t want any smart-arse advice, do you understand? Until I go, you are a guest here.’

‘Fair enough,’ he said.

‘I’ve already briefed Oxfam on our projects. All you have to do is deal with the government.’

He smiled almost disarmingly. ‘That’s all I have to do.’

She began trembling. ‘I’ve got a booking on tomorrow night’s plane to London. I don’t know if they’ll make me go at once. Two things: I’ve written a reference for Erwit the driver–mechanic. He’s a good man. Can you find him work with another NGO? I haven’t had time, but he really is a pearl.’

‘I should be able to fix that,’ said Lunzer. He had that air of lazy efficacy which some Australians had. Her anger subsided.

‘And Sherif. The one I did all this for.’

‘I know,’ he said.

She covered her eyes and shuddered with grief. ‘He says he isn’t coming,’ she said, her voice muffled by her hands. ‘It’ll take him days if not weeks to make the decision. I’ll leave you his ticket, and I’ll wait for him in London as long as I can. I don’t know you, but stay with him, be a friend to him! You’ll have back-up from others – the BBC woman Helene Codderby is what the Brits call a ‘good stick’. He’s got Sudanese friends too, but they have crises of their own.’

‘I’ll look after him as long as I’m here.’

‘He’s been … well, worked over.’

‘Hell,’ said Lunzer, shaking his head. ‘I understand.’

‘Look, sleep in the living room if you like.’

‘The office is fine for now,’ he said.

In the morning there was a call from the Foreign Ministry. She was to leave that night; her NGO visa would be cancelled at noon the following day. She would be collected from Austfam and taken to the airport.

She took Lunzer to meet Sherif, and was relieved when they hit it off. Sherif started asking about Australian politics, and Lunzer’s descriptions of sundry cabinet ministers – Sydney bovver boys, Melbourne ideologues, Western Australian primitives – amused him. A shiver of laughter passed across the surface of the morning.

She sent Lunzer away then; he knew she had to be obeyed without question.

‘Come on,’ she said to Sherif. ‘I mean, come on wherever I am.’

He looked away. His looking away was deadly. ‘I’ll try,’ he said.

She had read of people like him. People not equipped to be political exiles. Sometimes those, like Hamadain, who were the greatest champions of a regime one week were the next week’s exile, and sometimes those who had seen the regime’s worst visage and borne its convulsive electricity in their muscles were the ones least willing to catch a plane and inveigh against their government at NGO meetings and in church halls in Bavaria, Oregon or New Zealand.

‘Let me see your body,’ she said. ‘I want to see what they did, and how you are.’

But he shook his head. ‘You have to leave all that to me,’ he said.

When Prim arrived in Sydney, she seemed, in Dimp’s view, beneath her Sudanese suntan, to have a somewhat shrunken, stringy look, and to be much in need of building-up. Dimp Bettany, producer
redivivus
, had newly achieved her civil divorce from Bren and moved into Frank Benedetto’s domicile, a splendid apartment on the north side of the harbour. Every Sunday, Benedetto’s Calabrian parents drove in from their acreage in Bonnyrigg on Sydney’s south-western margin, to sit with their son and his fiancée on the balcony. Since Prim had at first nowhere else to go, she lived there a confused month, bewildered by return.

She found her sister in a highly purposeful state. The Ventriss screenplay was attracting investment – Twentieth Century Fox had put up some $9 000 000 in the form of a distribution deal. Other money came from private investors and the New South Wales Film Commission. Dimp would go off location-spotting in the Monaro in a Beechcraft Baron not
far above the treetops, looking for the right bouldered hillock above river flats on which to build something not unlike Jonathan Bettany’s first hopeful, pastoral shanty. She had recruited a woman named Augusta McNiece, an Aussie screen queen married to an American hyper-star, to play Sara. Bettany would be played by that darkling hunk Patrick Merrimée, who – though a New Zealander – was generally claimed by Australians. Benedetto got a Singapore bank to underwrite the amount, and Australians who wanted to lessen their tax borrowed lots of $200 000 from that source as a tax break.

Dimp was the fortunate sister. Prim had undergone penance and been damned for it. Dimp had stolen paintings and wilfully left a husband – or so it seemed to the husband – and had grown plump with love and reward. ‘Crime pays,’ chirped Dimp. ‘Nothing has ever been as free of grief as this! It must mean the film will be shitty.’

Prim had returned with a grim intent to embrace her sensual, prawn-eating, wine-crazy home town, so that she would have thoroughly relearned it by the time Sherif arrived. She still had rational grounds to believe he would, and did believe so under certain lights. She kept in touch with him by e-mail and fax sent via Helene Codderby’s little office, or letters sent via Oxfam.

Within a month of her departure, Austfam had been closed down, and Lunzer had come home, bringing plenty of news of Sherif. He was getting along, said Lunzer, working under supervision in the clinic at the university. He had hopes of being posted soon to a government hospital in Shendi.

Prim had by then found a flat at Neutral Bay and a job in administration at the Coast Hospital. She made inquiries about possible openings for Sherif in public health or epidemiological research. There was also much demand for doctors in remoter towns, and she imagined herself and Sherif aging at the centre of some community of sheep, wheat, rice or cotton farmers.

Sherif contacted her then, in a practical, straightforward, affectionate e-mail, to let her know that, instead of sinking himself in obscurity in Shendi, he might take a public health or infectious diseases job in England. Besides, he said off-handedly, he suspected his back might need surgery, and Britain would be a good place to have it done. The ticket he needed, the one Prim had bought, was still deposited with Oxfam. With a more flexible neck and less of a crazy laugh, Prim was sure, he could travel on to join her.

He wrote to her after he got his exit visa and a few hours before he flew to London.

Prim, this ticket is, as is all your nature, extremely kind. But I must tell you I intend to use it only to get me as far as London, where I shall cash in the remainder and send you the amount, plus the cost for Khartoum– London. It is not pride or a crass rejection of your friendship. But I think that if I must go, I must also be in place for a quick return. I cannot become one of your people, for my people did these things to me. I must keep my eye on them until they are no longer permitted so to act. I have nothing but the warmest feelings for you, and exhort you to live a long and rich and pleasant life.

This letter, written in the world of electronic mail and faxes, had been deposited in post offices, had travelled conventionally in aircraft, and had at last been left in her mailbox. It had a nineteenth-century character of finality to it.

Partly to distract herself, Prim started to go out with an anaesthetist from the hospital, the child of Polish Jews. She had warned him, she told Dimp, to expect nothing. Nothing! He seemed willing to string along with a sort of stubbornness, occasionally exclaiming over her grace and beauty and being reprimanded for it. In the end the relationship would bear more than Prim expected, and a little less than the anaesthetist hoped. Her reserve, and the contrast between herself and her exuberant sister, baffled him.

Prim would come home from the hospital, unless going out for a drink and a quick Thai meal with her anaesthetist, and sit at her personal computer, call up her internet server, and type into the search engine terms such as ‘Southern Sudan’, ‘Sudan Human Rights’, ‘Sudan Prisons’, ‘Sudan Ghost Houses’. She complained to Dimp that the word ‘ghost’ was likely to cast up the web pages of a Virginian theme park, cheek-by-jowl with sites in which victims told the tales of the violation of their bodies and minds. One day, she hoped, Sherif would be ready to contribute his story to such a site.

But it was from the confessions of other victims that she tried to put together a credible pastiche of what Sherif might have suffered. A Sudanese trade unionist, escaped to New Jersey, told of sleep deprivation and of permanent damage to his circulatory system by his being suspended by ropes with his feet and calves in a bucket of ice for hours at a time.
A young southern Sudanese man from Malakal on the White Nile told of having a bag full of red pepper tied around his head, and of a slow, burning asphyxiation. A former Sudanese army officer now living in London reported having been suspended from what was known in the West as a Saint Andrew’s Cross. Tales of beatings and electrical torment lay printed out around her living room. Dimp picked them up, glanced at them, said, ‘Jesus! Poor bastards!’ and put them down again.

Prim also printed out denials of such pitiable stories by Hassan el Turabi, now Sudanese Vice-President and perhaps a more powerful man than President Omar Bashir. Benedetto, visiting Prim with Dimp, picked up by accident, and became fascinated by, some of el Turabi’s elegant rebuttals. But Benedetto, the Calabrians’ child, was so firmly rooted in Australia that he had room only occasionally to inquire into the Sudan. It was Prim, fourth-or fifth-generation Australian, who was the exile. Benedetto spoke to her at length about Aboriginal health. But it was as if Prim felt distant from Australian affairs and politics because they lacked the Gothic scale of Sudanese wrong and folly.

Her anaesthetist, surrounded by hundreds of pages of print-out from the pro-government Sudan Foundation, from Human Rights Watch, the Southern People’s Liberation Army, the Southern Sudan Association, Amnesty International, the United Nations, the
South African Mail and Guardian
, and Fielding’s
Danger Finder
, felt he could barely compete for scale. He knew no one whose arteries had frozen in a bucket in a shuttered house in a torrid republic. His parents could tell such stories, but his childhood and youth had been unmarred. He knew he was with someone who was recovering from a profound shock.

He tried to understand her excitement when the UN appointed a special rapporteur to look into the question of Sudanese slavery.

The contents of the website
www.amendsuk.org
which, once accessed by Prim, changed everything, were modest, a mere four pages. Its opening tag had attracted her: ‘Observer report, 13 July 1992, “Ghost House” Doctors working for National Health.’ The body of the text read:

A Sudanese researcher in the Infectious Diseases Department of St Thomas’s Hospital, London, has identified two other Sudanese male doctors employed in National Health Service hospitals as having worked
in a ‘ghost house’ or secret imprisonment and torture centre in which he was detained as a prisoner.

Dr Sherif Adam Taha, an epidemiologist, was imprisoned for a month in one of the infamous detention centres, run by the Sudanese government but not acknowledged by them, and named ‘ghost houses’. Dr Taha argues that many doctors who participated in human rights violations were allowed by their government to come to Britain as a form of reward or because they themselves had fallen foul of the regime. Dr Taha claims that Dr Jafar Gadir Khalig, now a registrar at the Royal Free Hospital at Hampstead, was brought by prison guards to visit him at the end of a three-day period during which he was strapped hooded to a metal bed frame and subjected to electric shock for as much as seven hours a day. Dr Taha had also been heavily beaten, and a resultant broken vertebra had brought on a partial paralysis. Dr Taha said that at the time he had pleaded with Dr Khalig to give orders against further beatings, as the danger of permanent paralysis and death existed. But, he alleges, Khalig refused to examine his neck and spine, or to remove him to a hospital. Two days later, after Taha had suffered a further blow to the back of the neck and was semi-conscious, the government doctor was again summoned. He was angry to have been brought from the military hospital at Omdurman on such a busy afternoon and again refused to conduct a physical examination of Dr Taha, instead kicking him in the hip and telling the guards, ‘Let the dead get on with the business of dying.’

Dr Taha has also accused a virologist at the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, Dr Osman Hatim Siddiq, of having been in attendance at ‘ghost houses’ in the Khartoum area and of having failed to give any medical attention or conduct any examination of prisoners. Dr Taha says that Siddiq declared him fit to be locked in the minute cells named ‘ward-robes’. An academic from Khartoum University, says Dr Taha, had pleaded with Dr Siddiq for medication for a rare muscular disease, but Siddiq had ignored him, and the man had died.