Borderlines. Michela Wrong

      

      

       Copyright

      Fourth Estate

      An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.4thestate.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015

      Copyright © Michela Wrong 2015

      Cover photograph (map) © Shutterstock.com

      Michela Wrong asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008147402

      Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008123000

      Version: 2015-12-08

       Dedication

       For Jessica, who had to wait her turn

      Nothing that mankind has accomplished to this date equals the replacement of war by court rulings, based on international law.

      Andrew Carnegie,

      US steel magnate and philanthropist,

      August 1913

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Dedication

       Epigraph

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

       Chapter 11

       Chapter 12

       Chapter 13

       Chapter 14

       Chapter 15

       Chapter 16

       Chapter 17

       Chapter 18

       Chapter 19

       Chapter 20

       Chapter 21

       Chapter 22

       Chapter 23

       Chapter 24

       Chapter 25

       Chapter 26

       Chapter 27

       Chapter 28

       Chapter 29

       Chapter 30

       Chapter 31

       Chapter 32

       Chapter 33

       Chapter 34

       Chapter 35

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       By the Same Author

       About the Publisher

      If you fly often, this may have happened to you. You’re stuck in Economy, folded awkwardly against a window, legs twined like pipe-cleaners, half awake. It’s dark outside, the window blind has been pulled down, and you’re where you hate being: five miles high, defying the laws of gravity and plain common sense. The slight ache in your feet, which have been pressing upwards into the bottom of the seat in front (someone, after all, has to do the hard work of keeping this machine aloft), confirms this fact. You are bitterly aware that the atmosphere inside the plane has turned into one troubled communal fart. And then, quite suddenly, it happens. With no real warning – perhaps a brief bumpiness you assume to be high-altitude turbulence – the plane makes impact. For a moment, you know that you are dying, because this mid-air collision, so high above the Earth, will leave no survivors, no body parts even. You convulse in your seat. You gasp aloud and your neighbour gives you a worried glance. And then your brain executes a massive feat of intellectual recalibration. You flick up the blind with a trembling hand. That’s the ground outside the window – zipping past you terrifyingly fast, it’s true, but in a controlled and orderly manner. This is a landing, you idiot. Sleeping, you missed the change in engine tone, the dipping of the nose, the minutes of what feel like freefall, the clunk of landing gear descending.

      Landing in mid-air. A sobering exercise in shattered assumptions, the shock realisation of ludicrously false premises. When I look back on my time in Lira, it often seems like a version of that heart-stopping mid-flight experience, extended over the space of a year. Well, what can I say? Some people are just a bit slow to catch on.

       1

       14 November 2005

      By two a.m. the glare was really beginning to bother me. African airports don’t, on the whole, go in for soft lighting, and Lira International was no exception. I didn’t need a mirror to know what I looked like in the greenish-white light given off by the fluorescent strip running the length of the ceiling: baggy-eyed, sallow, prematurely old.

      I lay on the stiff acrylic carpet, my bag under one ear as a makeshift pillow, hands between my knees, pretending to ignore my guard. He was actually in the next room, but the door had been propped open, and since most of the wall separating the two rooms was glass, he could see me without leaving his desk, where he sat reading a newspaper, occasionally sipping a glass