Claire lay breathing heavily, eyes wide open staring at the ceiling of her small north London flat. She glanced across at the alarm clock next to her bed. It was 2am but the flat was only in semi-darkness, lit by the flickering reddish light given off by the sign of the Kebab shop across the road. The dream had woken her, so vivid in its detail that it took her several minutes to realise that she was still in her flat, alone. It was always the same dream and it always would be.
The sun rose slowly above the horizon taking away the chill of the Sudanese night from the exposed skin not covered by the colourful traditional Toub that she was wrapped in. The mattress beneath her was rudimentary by western standards, but she barely noticed its discomfort. Her tanned skin was yet pale in contrast to the dark skin of the young girl that lay, curled beside her in her embrace. Their arms lay parallel, touching along their entire length, the child’s small hand held within hers, a stark reminder of their difference in origins. She felt a fly walk across the skin of her arm but didn’t flinch. She had grown accustomed to the ever present insects of this nation, accepted them as part of the place she now loved almost as much as she loved the child in her arms.
Sub consciously she tilted her head forward breathing in through her nose, smelling the child’s hair as she had seen mothers do countless times before, an almost primeval action fulfilling the most basic of senses, that of scent. Taking a deep breath to smell the scent of fruits from the soap that she had washed the girl’s hair with the night before, filling her nostrils, filling her lungs .
With smoke, acrid with the heavy scent of burnt hair and flesh, her eyes opened in terror, closing instantly as she was blinded by the glare of the African sun high in the sky above them. She struggled to open them again blinking her eyes, the images of the scene of devastation around her reaching her brain like snapshots, photos, her beautiful child’s head blackened and charred. The hut around them devastated, its roof gone exposing them to the relentless sun, and other bodies nearby, twisted, contorted in death.
She closed her eyes and wrapped her arms around the child, pulled her closer. As she did so her hands sunk into the child’s mutilated belly sinking deep into her as she clutched harder as if trying to keep hold of what she had lost. Her hands passed through the child and then they were in front of her face, slick with blood, and she was screaming clutching at her face and her hair, writhing tossing and turning screaming at the cruel world that had taken away the one thing she truly loved. Rolling onto her back she opened her eyes wanting to blind herself with the sun blind herself to this world, but she saw only darkness.
The dream was always the same and so were the consequences, she had been a free-lance journalist working mainly in northern Africa. It had been there that she had found Talia.
She had been staying in a small village writing a piece about a UNICEF programme delivering vaccines. The nine year olds parents had both died of malaria and somehow over the weeks the young journalist found herself looking after the small child and a bond was formed. She paid a family to take care of Talia while she was working away on assignment, returning frequently to the village as she went through the long winded process of adopting the orphaned girl.
In February 2003 the Sudan Liberation Movement took up arms against the government, travelling became more difficult and the need to complete the adoption more urgent. The sense of impending civil war affected all aspects of Sudanese life and the adoption process became more difficult, those difficulties only being resolvable by the payment of bribes to corrupt officials keen to capitalise on the troubles.
At last in September of 2003 Claire finally had the required papers and made her way back to the village to collect Talia. Both anxious and excited to be able to tell the young girl that she would now be Talia Parker. She arrived at the village a day late to find a scene of devastation in the aftermath of an attack by one of the Janjaweed militia groups. Most of the men of the village had been murdered, the surviving women and girls beaten and brutally raped and left traumatised, homes burnt and destroyed. Amongst all the destruction Claire had found Talia’s body, the small innocent girl that she had loved so much and almost saved, left mutilated and partially burnt.
Claire had left Africa, despairing of the land she had once seen such hope in, she returned to England. Initially she still worked as a journalist but she had difficulty sleeping, the nightmares tormented her and the sleepless nights and her increasing drinking made working to deadlines difficult.
Slowly but surely the paying work reduced and she spent more of her time campaigning online for human rights organisations such as Amnesty. Her personal life was a mess, but in the few hours of the day during which she managed to remain sober, she was still a talented writer and the blogs that she wrote were read by tens of thousands. To her followers she was a herald of justice and freedom of speech, fighting back against the corrupt world that had failed to protect her daughter.
She thought herself a fraud, she had failed to save Talia and in her heart she knew that she would fail to change the world. She wrote because it was the last small grip on a life that she had had. She knew that eventually she would let go of that and let herself fall into oblivion in the hope of joining her little girl.
She knew it was pointless trying to sleep so after taking another swig of vodka she slowly rose till she was sitting on the edge of the bed. Then stood shakily and walked the few paces to her untidy desk firing up her laptop. She signed onto her blog post, drank some more vodka as she read some of the responses to her latest post against the proposed internet legislation and then started to type.
