Desert Doctor, Secret Sheikh

He looked around and Jenny tried to see the camp through his eyes—the motley collection of patched and tattered tents, the tethered goats, the children running down the alleys between the dwellings, a small flock of ragged-looking sheep grazing on the lower hillside, while two hobbled camels slept nearby.

He shook his head.

‘Housing? I don’t think so. These people are refugees from across the border, this isn’t their country. If we build them houses, aren’t we telling them that they will never return to their own lands? Wouldn’t we be taking away their hope?’

He was extraordinarily good-looking and it was distracting her, and the distraction made her snippy. Although she could see where he was coming from, she wasn’t ready to give in too easily.

‘You don’t want these people who have lost everything to have some comfort and a proper place where they can be treated while they are ill?’ she demanded.

‘I would love them to have comfortable homes and a hospital as well, but back where they belong—back where they grew up and where their families have roamed for generations. Back in the places of their hearts! Here, surely, if we build something resembling a permanent camp, they will feel even more lost, displaced and stateless. It’s like saying to them, “Give up all hope because the war will never end in your country so you’ll just have to sit here on the edge of ours and live on whatever charity can provide.” I doubt there are people anywhere in the world who could accept that, let alone these fiercely proud desert inhabitants.’

‘Well, you obviously know best,’ Jen said, turning away from him towards the big tent and adding under her breath, ‘Or think you do!’

An anger she couldn’t understand was simmering deep inside her, although she didn’t know what had caused it—surely not this man pointing out something she should have known herself? And surely not the passion that had crept into his words as if he truly understood, and possibly felt, these people’s yearnings for their home?

No, passion was to be admired, but there was something about the man himself that stirred her anger, an air of—could it possibly be arrogance?

Kam turned away to speak to a man walking past and Jen took the opportunity to check him out again.

A number of doctors, like a number of professionals in any field, were arrogant, but they usually weren’t dressed in well-worn jeans and tattered T-shirts. They were more the three-piece-suit brigade.

She sighed. She hated generalising and here she was doing it about a stranger—and about other members of her profession.

And why was she thinking of him as a man—noting his looks and manner—when she hadn’t thought that way about a man since the accident—hadn’t ever expected to think about a man that way again?

She reached the opening at the front of the tent, and turned to wait for him to catch up, while once again a sense of danger assailed her.

‘This is where we work and where I live. You can have a look in here then I’ll find someone to show you around the camp so you can get your bearings.’

He looked as if he was about to argue, but in the end did no more than nod and follow her into the tent.

She led the way, still holding Rosana on her hip, trying to see the place that was clinic, hospital and home through his eyes. Various bits of it were partitioned off by bright woven rugs she’d bought from the traders who came regularly to the camp, determined to get whatever money they could from the desperate refugees.

In the clinic corner, the morning ritual of TB testing was going on, men, women and children all coughing obligingly into tiny plastic cups, while one of Jen’s local helpers spread the sputum onto a slide and labelled it with the patient’s name.

‘As you probably know, the refugees are mostly mountain people,’ she explained to her visitor, ‘driven out by the warring tribes across the border, and by starvation because with the war going on they can’t plant their crops or take their livestock to good pastures.’

Her guest—or should she start thinking of him as her colleague?—nodded.

‘I imagine in these overcrowded conditions diseases like TB can spread quickly, and with complications like AIDS in some cases, your first priority must be to complete this eradication programme.’

Maybe she could think of him as a colleague.

It would certainly be easier than thinking of him as a man…

‘Except that things happen, of course, to get us off track,’ she explained. ‘A child gets too close to a fire and is burned, a woman goes into labour—naturally we have to tend them. In these people’s eyes—and in reality, I suppose—we’re a medical team, so they come to us for help.’

And though still wary of him—of the person, not the doctor, she decided—she gave him the welcome she should have offered in the first place.

‘For that reason it’s great to have you on board. You can do the normal medical stuff and we’ll get on with the TB programme.’

‘TB treatment involves a period of nine months.’ He interrupted her so firmly she took a step back. ‘You intend being here that long?’

He spoke with a hint of sceptical suspicion that fired the simmering embers of the anger she didn’t understand to glowing life.

‘What do you think? That I’m playing at being a volunteer? That I came here for some kind of thrill, or maybe kudos—so people would see what a wonderful person I am?’

She scowled at him.

‘Of course I’m here for the duration of the testing and treatment, although it might not be a full nine months, but then again, with more people coming into the camp all the time, it might be longer than that.’

He was obviously unaffected by scowls, or scorn, or anger. He waited until she’d finished speaking, then asked, ‘Why not a full nine months?’

‘Because we’ve cut treatment time to six months through a selection of different medication,’ she told him, tilting her chin so she could look him in the eyes. ‘Once someone is on the programme it’s mainly a matter of supervision to make sure they take their medication. Isolation would be good, if there was somewhere we could send those with the disease, but then again, to take these people from the few family they have left would add to their problems. We treat the physical things as we can, but the mental burden they carry—the sadness—we can do nothing for that.’

The visitor stared at her as if she’d suddenly begun to speak in tongues.

‘And you care?’ he asked.

Jen stared at him in disbelief.

‘Of course I care. Why wouldn’t I care? I presume you’re here because you care, too, or is this some ruse? Are you some kind of government spy sent here to see what’s happening in the camp, or an Aid for All spy, checking I’m not selling the TB drugs on the side? Is that why you’re here?’

‘I’ve told you why I’m here,’ he replied, all cool arrogance again. Maybe it was the voice—so very English.

Rich English.

Was his father a foreign oil baron that Kam had grown up here? Or, in spite of that English voice, did the blood of a long line of desert warriors run through his veins? She’d learnt enough of the local people to know they were a proud race.

Although the questions kept popping up in her head, or maybe because of them, Jen ignored him, setting Rosana down on a mat on the floor and nodding to one of the women helping with the TB testing to keep an eye on the child. She was about to show him the layout of the tent when she became aware of approaching excitement, the shrieks and wails and general hysteria coming closer and closer.

Stepping past her visitor, she was heading out of the tent when he pulled her back, pushing her behind him and telling her to stay there.

As if she would! She moved up to his shoulder so they exited the tent together, and saw the excited crowd, a body held between a number of men, women shrieking lament behind them.

‘He was thrown over the fence. Men on horses threw him. It is Lia’s husband. They have beaten him with whips.’

Mahmoud, one of many men in the camp who spoke a little English, explained this as the group moved closer, and as Jen stepped to one side and waved to the men carrying the patient to bring him inside, she heard her visitor cursing quietly beside her.

But cursing didn’t help. She led the men behind a partition in the tent and indicated they should put their burden down on a plastic-covered mattress on the floor. Then she knelt beside the man and saw the blood-soaked, tattered remnants of his gown, in places sticking to his skin, on others torn right off. They turned him on his side, as the wounds were on the front and the back of his chest and on his calves. Jen found a couple of cushions she could prop behind his knees to keep him in that position.

The man was moaning piteously, but when the stranger spoke to him in his own language he found the strength to answer.

Jen, meanwhile, was wondering where to begin.

‘Pain relief before we start to examine him, I think.’ Her colleague answered her unspoken question, kneeling on the other side of the man but looking across him at Jen. ‘What do you have?’

Jen did a quick mental scan of her precious drugs.