26

Charlotte has decided to take the call with Miguel from home, as Guy has gone to see a summer blockbuster that involves superheroes and supervillains engaged in superfighting. He won’t be back for hours.

Though it is not her routine, Charlotte showers, brushes her teeth, puts on a summer dress of yellows, reds, and oranges, and puts her hair up. When she is done, she has little choice but to ask her reflection in the bathroom mirror a candid question: ‘What are you doing? Yes, you. You think this is a date? You tell anyone about this, and so help me,’ she says, flicking off the light and leaving her hair down.

On her way down to the computer, she puts it up again.

Sitting on a chipped Danish chair, she launches the computer application and places the call to Miguel. She could have waited for Miguel to ring at the proper time, but then she would have been a girl waiting by the virtual phone — not even an actual one — and that wouldn’t do. But calling him, she thinks as it rings, suggests a certain eagerness, doesn’t it?

Not when you’re calling about a lost father, you dimwit, she says to herself.

Charlotte hasn’t really been out of Bristol — out of the lab itself, come to think of it — in ages. Aside from the odd visit to her mother in Fowey, she hasn’t even been to London in over half a year. That would have been unthinkable in her twenties — nothing she could have admitted to. And yet, now, it’s not the same. Routine has set in, and she rather likes it. She’s learned, as an adult, that it can be spiritually rejuvenating to exhale London and let it go, like freeing a trapped ghost so it might return to haunt its own terrain. One can actually feel free of London, though its gravitational force and imperial control are always present.

Iraq, though. Can one even get there from here?

As the computer rings, Charlotte suddenly feels exposed, and wants her neck covered. She yanks out the hair band and lets her hair fall, just as Miguel answers.

‘Hello? Is that Charlotte? Buenas noches!’

‘Good evening, Miguel.’

‘You let your hair down. That’s very nice.’

‘Ah … no. I usually wear it down. It’s … natural.’

‘I can see, though, how your hair gently curves toward your neck as it drops down, and then waves itself out again like a flamenco skirt, because only recently it was tied in the back. But no matter. I see you are not eating the fried tom-toms. That is good.’

‘Wontons.’

Miguel’s image is a bit wobbly, and behind him there is a map of Iraq with a UN logo and the letters UNHCR, which mean nothing to her.

It strikes her as odd that someone living in a war zone, among tens of thousands of displaced people, can be so cheerful. Before she can interrupt herself, she asks, ‘Why are you so happy?’

‘I think this will be a very nice walk, don’t you?’

‘That’s not what I mean. You’re away from friends and family. A girlfriend, maybe. Everyone around you is miserable. You look like you just landed a research grant.’

‘That is the pinnacle of happiness? A research grant?’

Isn’t it?

‘One can’t really find happiness in places like this,’ he continues. ‘You need to take it with you, and hand it out to those who need it.’

‘That’s sweet, but by that logic, you eventually run out.’

‘I hadn’t noticed. Maybe my analogy is wrong.’

The screen changes as the iPad Miguel is using switches to the forward-facing camera. Miguel and Iraq are gone, and instead there is a view of a small office that reminds Charlotte of the kind she’s seen at construction sites where the workmen walk up a few wooden steps into a lorry while removing their hardhats and reaching for a cup of bad coffee. There is a round table and some plastic chairs, an orange extension cord, and more maps on the far wall. Between those maps, though, is a mirror. And as Miguel moves closer to the wall, the contraption he has built comes more clearly into view.

She can see him from the waist up now. He is slender and earnest, and has floppy hair. There is an earnestness and boyishness to him. There is no way he is over thirty. In his right hand he holds a broom handle, and at the top of the handle is the bottom part of a dustpan on which he has rested the iPad and secured it with electrical tape. The iPad cover itself is baby blue, like the colour of the UN logo. He is smiling and waving.

She waves back.

She feels like an idiot waving back, and does not understand how it has come to pass that Miguel gets to set the terms of their goofiness.

‘Do you watch the television show Game of Thrones?’ he asks.

‘No.’

‘OK, good. Because many people who watch that television show — and some of the donors do, unfortunately — are unnerved by what comes next,’ Miguel says, swivelling the iPad around on the handle to reveal Charlotte’s disembodied head impaled on a stick in Iraq.

‘In the history of the world,’ Miguel says, ‘this is the one view of yourself you never get to see. But with the benefit of modern technology, now you can! Meanwhile, introductions are necessary. Dr Charlotte,’ he says, ‘may I introduce you to Head of Charlotte. You may be in London—’

‘Bristol.’

‘OK, but Head of Charlotte is here in Iraq with me. You are now in two places at once. Time and distance have been overcome. To the people here, you are here. Isn’t that fascinating?’

If Miguel were not Spanish and were from, say, Hull, she would classify this as serial-killer behaviour. And yet, for some reason, she doesn’t.

‘OK, let’s get moving,’ he says.

Miguel has the camera facing the outside world now. Charlotte sits in her kitchen in her sundress facing a laptop, her hair smelling of chamomile, as she watches a world emerge before her as through an alien portal. That world fills her, and her lungs seem to breathe in the exotic air of a land that she has only heard about in passing, and yet that now feels immediate and populated by real people who can see her and know she is there.

She cannot see it, but she knows that Miguel’s hand holds Head of Charlotte steady as he walks. In her kitchen, and there in Iraq, Charlotte and her doppelgänger bounce to the rhythm of the Spaniard’s gait over the uneven and ancient earth. It is dark there, darker than in Bristol, but fires burn, and streetlights shine down through hard yellow dust onto the dark-skinned children running in brightly coloured clothes, all faded by the sun and tattered from overuse.

The land is covered with tiny stones and a thick dust that will never be washed away, because there is nowhere for it to go.

Miguel’s voice accompanies Head of Charlotte. He explains the layout of the camp, who is there, who has come, who is going, who is ‘at risk’, who is there to help, what might ‘build resilience’ there, and what is undermining their efforts. From habit, he speaks about what is needed and what might be yet to come if that need is not met.

She stares at the brown and filthy tents with the faded UNHCR logos that are identical to the one she saw earlier on the map. Boys wear T-shirts with Western company logos and names of sports teams. Shoes are a mix of flip-flops and Adidas sandals and Chinese knockoffs of Crocs. Many of the children are barefoot.

They pass some women who smile at her and Miguel. Some of their heads are covered; many are not. Some children look lower-class, peasantlike, and poor, the way Gypsy beggars on European streets seem born into the clothes they wear. Others look shiny and clean and bright-eyed and incongruous, as though they have come from middle-class lives almost like her own, only to wake up one day to find themselves living in a tent as their country tries to kill them, with their earlier everyday dreams of dolls or soccer balls or boys or video games dismissed as fantasies of former privilege that they will never experience again.

These people have never been so close, have never been so real to her, as they are right now.

‘Come, I want you to meet Ayman,’ Miguel says, in a voice he might use when pointing out Barcelona’s hippest shoe stores. ‘Ayman is six, and his English is wonderful. He is the best student in the MRE class.’

‘The what?’

‘Mine risk education. These are the educational activities aimed at reducing the risk of injury from mines and unexploded ordnance by raising awareness and promoting behavioural change through public-information campaigns, education, and training, and liaison with communities.’

Miguel says this in the singsong and faraway lilt of aeroplane cabin crews running through safety procedures. It is entirely possible he didn’t hear his own answer — it is that automatic.

‘Here, come in,’ he says, turning a corner when they arrive at a tent that, to Charlotte, is indistinguishable from any other. Miguel knocks on the pole that holds it up. A woman in a purple scarf nods to Miguel and smiles. She also smiles to Head of Charlotte, and does not seem surprised by the contraption.

Inside the tent is a boy — Ayman — who is waving to her from the floor where he was, until she interrupted him, colouring something with his stubby crayons. With the new audience, and his friend Miguel there to see him, Ayman reaches into a pile of comic books, and takes a colouring book that he holds up to Head of Charlotte.

At first she doesn’t understand what she’s seeing. The image is clear enough, but it is an image so unexpected it’s hard to understand. The colouring book doesn’t depict Superman or Spider-Man, but shows pictures of landmines and bombs, and of children standing near minefields, with big Xs over certain pictures where the children are chasing balls past barbed-wire fences, where they will die. Ayman has coloured in the children and the balls and the mines the same way he has coloured in his favourite football heroes. He has drawn circles around the children who will live, because they have done things the right way; he has left uncoloured the children who have done things wrongly, because they cannot be helped, and their lives will exist from this point forward only in outline.

‘Ayman and his mother escaped from Syria after their town was attacked by one of the jihadist groups,’ Miguel says. ‘The government arrested Ayman’s father and said he was an insurgent, but he was not. He worked at an electronics store — stereos and televisions, and things like that. They have not seen him since. His big brother is also missing, and he has been very sad. But the MRE class is very nice for him, because he plays with other children who have also lost people, so he no longer feels alone, and it has helped him make new friends here and take an interest in art. He has made this wonderful picture of what his village looked like before the massacre. It is here someplace. Ayman, where is the one with the tall blue building I like so much?’

Charlotte smiles at Ayman, who turns away from her to rummage through a stack of papers marked by crayon scratchings. While his back is turned, she moves away from the computer camera for a moment and cries.

By the time she looks back, Miguel has taken Head of Charlotte outside again into an even darker environment. To speak with her, he has turned the camera around so they now face each other.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I did not mean to upset you. I did not even think it might. I suppose I have lost my common sense with such things. You must understand, it is very good that Ayman is learning these things. They will help him be safe and save other children. People have been putting information like this in cartoon form since World War I. I think the colouring book is new, but the logic is the same.’

‘How long do they have to stay there?’

‘Things are getting worse, not better. The war in Syria is not ending. Iraq is weak and getting weaker. These new insurgent groups have not touched us here in Kurdistan yet, but it is perhaps a matter of time. We are vulnerable here. There are no defences. The people will stay while it is the safest place to be. Then they will leave. It is the way of survival.’

‘Where is my father, Miguel? Have you found him? We haven’t talked about this yet.’

‘Listen, Dr Charlotte. Something has happened. I only learned of it an hour ago. I’m sorry to have kept it from you, but I wanted you to understand where we are. Your father … he is missing.’