‘Depends whether I get out alive,’ he says.
And that makes her laugh, and then he’s laughing again. And after a minute she says, ‘It’s my brother Darrell. He’s got something of mine. And I’m going to have to be careful how I get it back off him. I’ll get you home, but until I work out what to do, we’re lying low, OK?’
‘And that means …’
‘We’re going to spend a few nights in a refugee camp.’
They come to a tented muddy field at the bottom of a gully. Roxy goes to claim a space for them; just a few days, she says. Make yourself useful. Meet people, get to know them, ask what they want.
At the bottom of his rucksack he finds an ID card from an Italian news-gathering service, a year out of date, but enough to encourage some people to talk. He uses it judiciously, wandering from tent to tent. He learns that there has been more fighting than he’d heard, and more recently. That, in the past three weeks, the helicopters don’t even land any more; they drop food and medicine and clothes and more tents for the slow and steady stream of stumbling people arriving through the woods. UNESCO is, understandably, unwilling to risk its people here.
Roxy is treated respectfully here. She is a person who knows how to get certain drugs and fuel; she helps people with the things they need. And because he’s with her, because he sleeps on a metal bed in her tent, the people here leave him alone. He feels a little safe for the first time in weeks. But of course, he is not safe. Unlike Roxy, he could not simply walk into the forest in this place. Even if no other forest cult caught him, he is illegal now.
He interviews a few English-speaking people in the camp who tell him the same thing over and over again. They are rounding up the men without papers. They go away for ‘work detail’ but they do not return. Some of the men here, and some of the women, tell the same story. There have been editorials in the newspapers and thoughtful to-camera pieces on the one working black-and-white TV in the hospital tent.
The subject is: how many men do we really need? Think it over, they say. Men are dangerous. Men commit the great majority of crimes. Men are less intelligent, less diligent, less hard-working, their brains are in their muscles and their pricks. Men are more likely to suffer from diseases and they are a drain on the resources of the country. Of course we need them to have babies, but how many do we need for that? Not as many as women. Good, clean, obedient men, of course there will always be a place for those. But how many is that? Maybe one in ten.
You can’t be serious, Kristen, is that really what they’re saying? I’m afraid it is, Matt. She puts a gentle hand on his knee. And of course they’re not talking about great guys like you, but that is the message of some extremist websites. That’s why the NorthStar girls need more authority; we’ve got to protect ourselves against these people. Matt nods, his face sombre. I blame those men’s rights people; they’re so extreme, they’ve provoked this kind of response. But now we have to protect ourselves. He breaks into a smile. And after the break, I’ll be learning some fun self-defence moves you can practise at home. But first, the weather on the ones.
Even here, even after all Tunde has seen, he can’t really believe that this country is trying to kill most of its men. But he knows that these things have happened before. These things are always happening. The list of crimes punishable by death has grown longer. A newspaper announcement from a week-old paper suggests that ‘surly refusal to obey on three separate occasions’ will now be punished by ‘work detail’. There are women here in the camp caring for eight or ten men who all huddle around her, vying for her approval, desperate to please, terrified of what might happen if she removed her name from their papers. Roxy could leave the camp at any time, but Tunde is alone here.
On their third night in the camp, Roxy wakes a few moments before the first tang and crackle of the power blows the lamps strung along the central pathway of the camp. She must have heard something. Or just felt it, the way the nylon is humming. The power in the air. She opens her eyes and blinks. The old instincts are still strong in her; she has not lost them, at least.
She kicks Tunde’s metal-frame bed.
‘Wake up.’
He’s tangled half in and half out of the sleeping bag. He pushes the cover off him, and he’s almost naked there. Distracting, even now.
‘What?’ he says; then, hopefully, ‘Helicopter?’
‘Don’t you wish,’ she says. ‘Someone’s attacking us.’
And then he’s wide awake, pulling on his jeans and fleece.
There’s the smashing sound of glass and metal.
‘Stay low to the ground,’ she says, ‘and, if you can, run into the woods and climb a tree.’
And then someone puts her hand to the central generator and summons all the power that is in her body and sends it hurtling through the machine and the low lights burst into sparks and glass filaments all around the camp and the darkness becomes absolute.
Roxy hauls up the back of the tent, where it always leaked anyway, through the rotten stitching, and Tunde bellies out, starts for the forest. She should follow him. She will, in a moment. But she pulls on a dark jacket with a deep hood, wraps a scarf around her face. She’ll keep to the shadows, work her way around to the north; that’ll be the safest route out, anyway. She wants to see what’s going on. As if she could still turn anything to her will.