I'll be here if you ever Find you Need Me
According to Tilly who'd managed to establish some sort of communication with the fucker who was holding the steering wheel they were almost there, at Obock, not that Molly believed it, to her it felt like an endless punishment for some sin or other, maybe in a former life. Spending hours and hours in the back of a totally knackered Land Rover with non-existent suspension was worse than being on permanent latrine clean especially when it was being driven by a lunatic who loved his speed so much that he turned corners on two wheels and didn't bother to slow down. And then he did the exact same thing when there wasn't an actual corner but when he just felt like doing it to avoid something on the road, a pebble, a little pothole, a shadow, who knew but he didn't speak enough English to understand the universal shout of 'slow the fuck down, you fuckin' moron'. He was either a joy rider who spent his weekends being chased by the coppers or was so totally convinced they were about to be ambushed that he was bloody determined to practise his evasion techniques, even when they were on a long straight and completely deserted stretch of the road.
One bonus of being scared shitless was that at least it gave her something else to worry about instead of her belief that everything she'd ever eaten in her entire life was about to make a return visit in glorious technicolour, so that even sips of water felt like she was tempting fate. But drinking water to try and keep the contents of her stomach in her stomach meant that she was forced to join the others on the frequent 'pee' stops, crouching down behind the back of a Land Rover which was belching out clouds of noxious black exhaust as the fuckwit revved the engine impatiently made it feel all the more likely that she was going to start heaving at any second.
She had tried hard to block the torture by having a snooze, but then hadn't been able to stop the world swinging round and round whenever she closed her eyes which, if such a thing was possible, made her feel even worse and then she found her favourite getting off to sleep thing had deserted her as well so that not even the one where she was lying in bed in Bath all safe and warm and cuddled up could wave its magic wand and help her escape the reality of being driven by some total fuck muppet.
Making plans for when she got home helped for a bit to take her mind off her imminent death at the hands of this insane knob because she was going to need a good long look at how she was going to sort the rest of her new man-free independent life. Going back to living in barracks would be the pits, total shit, and was something she really didn't want to do at any price, but reality meant she might have no bloody choice in the matter in the short-term. She'd lived in barracks for almost all of the five years since she'd joined, except for when she'd been deployed or when she'd stayed with … people… but bloody hated it now. It hadn't been so bad when she was eighteen, in fact it had been fun to live away from parents and other bossy people and to live with loads of singles that were always up for a party but it wasn't like having a home. It was full of noise and banging doors and people yelling and coming back pissed so that they banged on other people's doors and didn't give a shit if they were trying to sleep or watch tele or just wanted to be quiet, so it wasn't like having somewhere proper to live. Maybe it was that she'd grown out of it, but she wanted more, so that just for a minute she wondered whether it'd be okay for her to ask Adam if she could stop on at his, and then dismissed that as a crap idea. That really would be using him and abusing his good nature, especially as she knew that if she asked he would more than likely say yes, and that would be a really shit thing to do to him when he was likely planning a shag fest for when she moved herself and her stuff out of his space completely.
So, she had to come up with something that she could sort as soon as she got back, maybe find a bedsitter somewhere that she could afford, or even find someone to do a flat share with, she was pretty sure she couldn't afford anywhere half-decent on her own, but still there was no harm in looking. And then there was Christmas, three months out here in the arse end of nowhere and then time to go home to ….. well, Christmas. Fuck.
It wasn't that she didn't like Christmas, she did, sort of, or that she didn't want to see the family for Christmas, it was just that ….. she didn't want to see the family for Christmas. The thought of explaining to them how she'd fucked it all up with the greatest thing on two legs since his namesake, the family's assessment of Adam, made her shudder, they were not going to be delirious that she and the bloke who'd rescued her from the shelf were no more. They'd had her on there ever since she'd turned twenty two and hadn't snared some poor bugger, which in the Dawes family meant she was retarded and had somehow missed the boat completely and now that she'd managed to screw things up again they'd be convinced she was destined to live on that shelf with a bunch of cats for the rest of her life…..
Last year Christmas had been alright, she'd had the perfect excuse not to drag him home with her because she'd been rostered for duty and Adam had gone off home to see his mum and dad, and then two years back she'd lied about where she was going to be, or rather lied about who she was with. She'd spent Christmas in the house in Bath that looked more like some stately home and where his mother lit candles that made the place smell of money. Looking back now, she hadn't really enjoyed that either. They were really nice his mum and dad, had welcomed her and everything, and he'd been lovely, but she'd been anxious the whole bloody time that she was doing the right thing, saying the right things and didn't swear and that her accent wasn't making them cringe, that she was wearing the right clothes and using the right knife and bleeding fork and that she didn't drink too much and get loud and, god forbid, leary. She hadn't told him about how she felt, she'd just kept on telling lies and saying that she was having a lovely time and that everything was wonderful, because saying anything else would have seemed …. wrong … a bit awkward … and anyway it was important to him that she was happy to be there and he was doing his best to be lovely to her, it was only now when she looked back that she could see … well …..
And then Mr Happy stopped the Land Rover and gestured rudely with his head indicating with a nod that they should open the doors and bugger off, so that it seemed as if they were there. Not that they could see anything or tell with any degree of certainty where they were exactly, the almost impenetrable sand storm that was blowing made visibility down to a few feet so that no-one could see even a hand in front of their face, or see any of the refugee camp that was supposed to be there somewhere. Molly for one no longer cared if the driver had dumped them in the middle of fucking nowhere, she was just happy to get out. 242 miles of purgatory was finally over, so she didn't need telling twice to crack on, she had never actually been travel sick before in her life, had only once felt tom and dick like that and that was when she'd been on the rides at Alton Towers and she certainly didn't want to do it again in a hurry.
Once they'd trudged their weary way through drifts of sand to get over the ridge and begin the long walk down the hill to the camp, several of Molly's fellow medics were beginning to look a bit doubtful despite the relief of finally getting there, but she was still miles away thinking about Bath and how different it might have been if she'd known how quickly it was all going to go to shit like that. She had to stop and make an effort not to think about things she couldn't do anything to change otherwise she might start crying and she'd done enough of that, anyhow she had to pull herself together and get back to the here and now, to this place that looked a total shit-hole. Tilly had patted her arm and was obviously concerned about how quiet she was and had asked if she was still feeling sick and did she want help to carry her kit, a lovely offer seeing as how she had a ton of her own to carry and one that Molly turned down with a grin as she insisted that she was good to go and felt fine now that they were out of the bleeding back seat of that Land Rover, which was almost true.
They were effectively being sand-blasted as they walked, it was scouring and stinging the skin on their faces which added significantly to the misery of still feeling a bit like she'd eaten a dodgy prawn sarnie and had a pounding headache that was far worse than the worst hangover she'd ever suffered in her life. All she could think of was getting out of the wind, having a lovely cuppa and then a little lie down, when hopefully the world would stop shifting itself about long enough for her to be able to close her eyes and have a kip. What a lovely way to introduce herself as a fully functioning soldier with ambitions to be brilliant.
The Al-Markazi refugee camp looked to be a bit of a haphazard arrangement on both sides of the road, one side a lot smaller than the other and consisting of a bunch of tents, small ones, not a lot bigger than ridge tents and a few larger round ones just a bit smaller than circus big top type things and the other side of the road the camp was a hell of a lot bigger and organised into neat rows of proper tents and some shed-like buildings, a bit like an army camp. But all of them had one thing in common, they all had piles of sand up against one side courtesy of the strong prevailing wind being full of the bloody stuff. The little camp was a sort of dreary drab olive green looking place but the other one with the white tents had a tattered UNHCR flag flapping about and making a slapping noise in the strong wind over where this group of young looking blokes were sitting on the ground hunched over in a huddle. None of them reacted to the new arrivals, no-one smiled at the group of girls wearing combats or smiled back when the medics smiled at them, no-one spoke to them at all as they walked past, no-one even looked, they were just sitting there, not doing anything tangible and not having any sort of conversation, just staring at the ground while they waited patiently for something, their backs turned towards the prevailing wind so that they too were covered in a fine layer of sand. It was one of the most depressing sights that Molly had ever seen.
Two hours later and a bit of a smile had returned to her face, in fact she was having difficulty in not bouncing around like Tigger complete with some nut-bar smirk plastered across her gob. They'd had their initial briefing from Sergeant Morris about the camp and who was who and what was what, about how there were about 3,000 Yemenis in the big camp because this was actually Djibouti and not Yemen so all those poor buggers who were trying to escape the civil war and who'd paid the people smugglers ended up here and at the same time there were all these Ethiopians trying to go the other way. There was no electricity in the camp, and not enough food, unless they could bribe the so-called officials they had to go into the town and try their luck, and she'd been wrong again in what she'd told Adam, it was the seaside, sort of, well it wasn't far from the port anyhow.
Sergeant Morris was the queen of the understatement when she said it wasn't going to be an easy ride but they'd all sat and looked at each and tried to look as though they weren't at all bothered about the challenges of the next three months in this totally shite place. Molly did her best to make sense of it at the same time as resisting an almost overpowering temptation to put her head down on the back of the chair in front and nod off, she was totally knackered but at least the nausea had gone. A cup of tea later, well actually two very large mugs of piping hot wonderful tea later and a couple of slices of hot toast that some lovely life-saving Good Samaritan had made for them, and she was a new woman.
A shower, even if it was the usual FOB type tepid dribble it was still better than nothing as it washed off the sour smell she could feel clinging to her from having been all sweaty and sickly for hours and hours on end, had gone a long way towards helping her recover but best of all was after they'd gone to their quarters and Sergeant Morris had casually said something that had made Molly want to grab her and kiss her on both cheeks because the NCO was now her new most favourite person.
Apparently she'd had comms with Sana'a and he'd asked, had said that the lads wanted him to make sure all was okay because they hadn't fancied the look of Ayrton Senna one little bit, they'd been worried whether or not he'd even had driving lessons let alone passed a test. Molly had a feeling that something about that didn't feel quite right, and that actually it felt more like it was him that was the one who was worried, but the Sergeant had gone on to say that she'd told him all about their journey with their fucking awful driver and how they had got there in one piece, just, because he'd sounded very concerned apparently, and had said that 2 section would want to know if she was okay. Sgt Morris who obviously liked him, a lot, a bit too much, then said how it went to show what a good officer he was to care about them like that, but Molly knew that she would never, not in a million years, have issued a bulletin on someone like her any more than a Captain would normally have asked for one, so that she wondered what the hell the Sgt had made of it.
A text message full of sympathetic concern would have been nice, very nice, but would maybe be asking a lot, or might even be impossible, she had no idea about phones and signals and the like, but it was nice to think it wasn't a case of being out of sight meaning being out of mind …. And she would still dearly love to know what it was he'd said before they'd left, not that it was going to make any difference in the long run of course, she'd made her decision, she was giving up on men and was going to stick with it.
-OG-
Three months of struggling against the incredibly dry heat, which some of the people who'd been there longer said was nothing like as bad as it had been in the summer when it was 50 degrees or even more which didn't bear thinking about, and the ever present boiling hot wind that was like some giant hair dryer blowing sodding sand into everything all the time, just sometimes worse than others. Their mouths, their eyes, their hair, their clothes, even their knickers and bras so that they were permanently gritty, as well everything they ate and even their cups of tea, everything, so that despite how sorry they were for the poor buggers stuck living there, they were all bloody grateful it was only a three month posting. There wasn't anything decent for them to eat, still, rations were better than what most of the people got to eat on a day to day basis, the food was horrible, what there was of it, not even enough for the children which meant a lot of them were sick and mostly suffering from malnutrition. But despite the lack of food the camp was over-run with rats which scared them all shitless, far more than the thought of being attacked by anyone human, so that it was nothing unusual to hear someone scream about them being there, and they were fighting against a continuous tide of people who were running from the fighting between the Houtis, who were the rebels, and the Saudis. The poor buggers arrived at the camp with nothing, believing that at least their family would be safe and wouldn't starve, only to find that there was nothing there for them either so they had to live with nothing, and there was huge tensions between the Yemenis and the Somalis and Ethiopian migrants so that she almost stopped worrying about what was happening in Sana'a … almost.
"Hey, you really are minging, you know that don't you? You. Bloody. Stink"
Molly looked down at the baby nestling in the crook of her arm who did not understand a word she was crooning at her. Like all the children the little girl was tiny and very skinny for her age, whatever that was, and Molly had no idea except the she was a few months old, but she was staring up out of very solemn and very beautiful big brown eyes, before her face broke into a gummy grin so that Molly kissed her on her little nose ignoring the way that she smelled. Like all Yemeni children she was beautiful with her dark hair and eyes but a nasty dose of some stomach bug had meant her needing treatment for a few days so she was very pale. Stomach bugs were rife in the rat-hole of the camp so that Molly knew that even if Lady Luck had been on her side this time and she'd recovered well, she'd be back again ….. and again …. and again after they'd gone home in a couple of days. The poor little sod had no resistance to anything so that Molly just hoped luck wouldn't run out for her completely before her mum and dad found somewhere safe for her to live.
"I wish I could take you home with me, soon get you sorted, wouldn't we? A decent meal and some clean clothes then you'd smell a hell of a lot better 'n all wouldn't you?"
"Christ are you at it again? Smurf was right when he said you'd always want to take everyone home with you wasn't he?"
"Fuck"
"That's fuck Sir if you don't mind"
"Sorry, fuck Sir ….. you made me jump, what you doin' 'ere?"
-OG-
A/N: The intensive care unit that was my house has now shut its doors, it closed abruptly when the patient declared himself fit to go back to work on Tuesday morning, well not fit exactly but determined to be a brave little soldier/martyr because the wheels of industry would grind to a halt without him at the helm – my sympathy, such as it was, vanished in a heartbeat. Then our internet has been down most of the day today so am rushing to post before the so and so's at Virgin start playing silly buggers again. Thanks for your continuing support – I hope you enjoy this
