Borderlines. Michela Wrong

discovered early on that I was both good at and immensely bored by most of the jobs for which I was qualified, the search for something more testing began. It’s no coincidence that all my pro bono clients have been involved in disputes in which the odds ran firmly against them. For an outsider who feels in his bones that he snuck into the legal establishment and could be ejected at any moment, the ultimate thrill will always be to pull off the seeming miracle. What is the appeal of representing Darrar, regional giant, friend of the West? I don’t know how the other side’s lawyers get up in the morning. Underdogs, that’s my thing. Takes one to know one.’

      He gestured to one of the waitresses, slouched against a wall, and made the air scribble that is recognised the world over.

       6

      And so I settled into my nest, like a dog turning round and round on a cushion, working the stuffing with its paws until it feels right.

      My new home was an apricot-coloured villa, one of a dinky, pastel-coloured set of five built around a tennis-court-sized patch of dry grass on the edge of Lira’s industrial district. It had been built so quickly that it was already falling apart, recently laid ceramic tiles cracking underfoot, light switches jiggling at the touch. I quailed inwardly as Abraham showed me around, registering the tiny bedrooms and a design scheme that had the kitchen opening directly onto the living room. The shelves in the bathroom were already crammed with lotions. There wasn’t going to be much privacy.

      My new housemate, Sharmila – owner of said beauty products – was a Sri Lankan-American using her time in Lira as the basis for a PhD. She was nominally in charge of three US student interns, the Braces-and-Barrette Set, as I mentally labelled them, who lived in the raspberry-painted villa next to ours. When we were introduced, Sharmila gave me a smile that showed perfect teeth but failed to reach her eyes. Her slim hands were smooth and manicured, making mine feel as rough as a butcher’s. I sensed that she resented my prospective presence at the breakfast table.

      ‘How are you finding it?’ I asked, as she leaned against the door jamb, watching me unpack.

      ‘OK, if backward shitholes are your thing.’

      ‘Oh.’ She’d succeeded in shocking me. We clearly applied different standards: I’d been struck by Lira’s sophistication. ‘What do people do here when they’re not working?’

      ‘I have a boyfriend, Steve, who works for the UN. We hang out. And you? Man on the scene?’

      ‘Nope.’ I pronounced the word very deliberately, accentuating the p.

      ‘I suppose Lira could be fun,’ she conceded, picking up a book from my case and giving it a careless once-over, ‘if we weren’t working for Winston. The other expatriates are mostly aid workers and they’re up in arms about the government’s human-rights record. So we get treated as pariahs. It’s such a bore.’

      ‘Don’t you ever meet any locals?’

      ‘I’ve tried, but it’s pretty hard work. Not much in common, amazingly,’ she said, with heavy sarcasm. ‘I didn’t spend twenty years fighting in a trench.’

      On the first afternoon at the office, I grappled with the faux-leather chair, adjusting the back support and seat height, aware that these small adjustments marked the start of a new phase in my life. This was now my perch, a place where I was going to spend many future hours. I tipped the chair and swivelled it the full 360 degrees a few times, slowly taking in the view.

      The Legal Office of the President of the State of North Darrar operated out of a former five-room apartment on the second floor of a colonial building. The main office, separated by a frosted-glass door that he always kept ajar – the better to oversee the rest of us – was for Winston. The rest was open-plan.

      The local team included Barnabas, the office manager, and Abraham, driver, fixer, errand-runner. Winston loved referring to ‘my two office prophets’, occasionally adding, to no one in particular, ‘If you ever meet an Isaiah, tell him he’s got the job!’ A quiet rivalry simmered between the two men, I came to realise, rooted – as the secretary Ribqa explained – in the fact that lean Abraham was an ex-Fighter (you could hear the respectful capital when she said it), while Barnabas was a trained civil servant, with an office worker’s paunch, a man who had once dutifully served in what Abraham’s comrades regarded as an alien administration, from which he expected to collect an eventual pension. That difference found expression in a strict division of tasks. Any problem arising inside the office – paperwork, form-filling, utilities bills, computers – was Barnabas’s business. Anything involving the bracing, manly outdoors – the jeeps, fuel for the generator, field trips, picking up visitors – was Abraham’s.

      Then there were Yohannes and Ismael, two youngsters Winston had commandeered from the Ministry of Justice, talent-spotted while he was lecturing at the University of Lira’s beleaguered Law Department. ‘Very lucky boys,’ Ribqa said to me, nodding towards them. ‘If you work at the Legal Office of the President, no military service for you.’ And, of course, there was Ribqa herself, whose attitude to all our goings-on could best be termed as one of tolerant contempt, our work something she indulged but did her best to ignore. Her interest was the food she brought to the office: home-made bread or almond cake, which she would invite us all to sample.

      The apartment must once have been the home of affluent white settlers, an urban pied-à-terre, perhaps, for an Italian family running an up-country coffee estate who felt they needed injections of city culture if the youngsters were not to run wild on the farm. It was still cluttered with dark, heavy furniture – ponderously carved dressers and armoires with blue-veined marble tops and tilting mirrors patched with golden mildew. While I was helping Abraham to push one of these to a wall to make way for a flat-pack desk – ‘It’s OK, Paula this is no work for a woman’ – we paused to marvel at a manufacturer’s metal plaque on the back.

      ‘1831! Wow,’ said Abraham, ‘really old.’

      ‘Yes. And really ugly.’

      There was a quiet poignancy about the apartment’s lofty ceilings, with their alabaster light fittings and plaster mouldings, the wide, superfluous corridors in which we perched our printers, shredders and photocopiers. The people who had built it had assumed they were in Africa for good, so why stint, when labour and materials were cheap? Be sure to leave enough space for the servants you will always depend upon and the grandchildren you are certain to have.

      Mantelpieces meant for wedding photographs now held stacks of memory sticks and hard drives, staplers and cartons of paperclips. In between the giant maps that covered the walls – courtesy of the UN Logistics Office and dotted with Post-it notes and coloured drawing pins – you could see the ghostly outlines left by auctioned oil paintings. The tiled floor was the kind an Italian grandmother would order to be waxed, then protect with polishing slippers: I could almost hear the shrieks of delight of the children sliding along it when her back was turned.

      There was a large kitchen, where we brewed coffee when working late, and a bathroom with deep-bowled washbasin and bidet dating from an era when the ‘quick shower’ had yet to be invented. The tub was kept permanently full of water, with a red bucket alongside, and had acquired its own ecosystem, a floating population of drowned beetles, spiders and expiring mosquitoes.

      ‘What’s this for?’ I asked Sharmila.

      ‘Oh, you can never count on water supplies in Lira,’ she said, with an airy wave of one beautiful hand. ‘It’s our do-it-yourself toilet-flushing system. Disgusting, eh? If my parents could see me now! They left Sri Lanka to get away from this kind of thing.’

      ‘I think I can probably handle it.’

      She gave me a hard look. ‘Just wait till you get an upset stomach. Then you’ll see just how much fun a non-flushing bathroom is.’

      The ceilings were high enough to accommodate old-fashioned fans, whose steady whumps, on a good day, conjured up memories of Somerset