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Nambula.”
    â€œAnd do you believe all this?”
    He shrugged and raised his hands. Then he looked down and said, “It is possible.”
    It is possible. I felt a surge of panic again. Usually he dismissed these rumors as nothing. “How can we find out?” I said.
    â€œFor now we must wait, reflect and discuss.”
    I wanted to stay and talk this through, but it was eleven-forty. I had to go. “Malcolm’s going to arrive any minute with the new doctor,” I said, getting up.
    â€œI have something to show you,” Muhammad replied.
    Of course he had something to show me, given that I was late. He took me out through the back of his hut. There, growing in the mud, were three spindly tomato plants bearing a handful of tiny tomatoes of the type which are particularly expensive in supermarkets at home. He knew he was not supposed to do this. The refugees were forbidden to cultivate. That would have turned a relief camp into a permanent settlement.
    Muhammad picked one of his six tomatoes and gave it to me.
    â€œThank you,” I said, touched. “I’ll have it stuffed.”
    Then he put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a look. What was it—friendship, solidarity, pity? I got all brisk and flustered. “I’d better go,” I said.
    When I got back to the Land Cruiser it was locked and Henry had the key. It was twelve o’clock now and everyone else had gone back up to the camp on time as I had asked them to. I drummed my fingers on the front of the car and waited, hoping Henry had not gone up with the others and forgotten that he had the key. What I hadn’t told Muhammad was that we were already short of food in the camp. We were supposed to have had a delivery a fortnight before but the UN had sent a message over the radio to say that the food would not be coming for a few weeks because the supply ship had not arrived in Port Nambula. We were going to have to start cutting down everyone’s rations anyway, even without writhing living carpets covering the whole of Kefti, and massive swarms of giant-fanged locusts blotting out the sun.
    I looked at the group of kids running round the Land Cruiser, giggling, trying to jump up into the back, and remembered the feeding centers of the last famine. We used to have one shelter for the kids who could feed themselves, one for those who were too weak to feed themselves but might live, and one for those who were definitely going to die. I suddenly wanted to burst into tears. I hadn’t toughened up as much as I’d thought.

CHAPTER
Four
    I dreamed of bumping into him in Safeways: walking along the aisles side by side, making jokes about the other customers, scampering about buying absurd foodstuffs to make each other laugh, tinned meat pies, blancmange, packets of dried chicken curry. Unbelievable that at one time in my life I spent hours and hours thinking about this, working out the fine detail of the fantasy.
    Once an actual real meeting had been arranged with Oliver my head was completely taken over, like a nest with a cuckoo in it. I used to attempt to ban him from my mind by reading a book, and I’d read the same sentence four times without noticing. I would watch the news and not take in a single word because I was thinking of him. All I could concentrate on was my new Africa project, because it was infused by Oliver with sexual promise. On the Saturday morning before the meeting, I persuaded myself that I really did need to go to Safeways: not the one where I lived, but another, several miles away in the King’s Road (where Oliver lived), since their range of handmade pasta was more extensive.
    It was tragic, really. I dressed and undressed several times in preparation for the expedition. I did not want to look too dressed up; I wanted to look stylish yet casual, as if I always looked like that on Saturday mornings, and also thin. I put full makeup on, then suspected you could see the foundation