Minister Without Portfolio Read Free Page B

food. The crushed ice and little bottles kept arriving. The ice was almost the same as the ice of home but there was no doubting that everything was different here. The air rubbed the surfaces of things in a different way. He slammed her with a beginner’s zeal, John whispered. There was a burr to everything. Henry drank his drink and another little bottle arrived and the screw caps required elbow work. The cap she is very small. Henry, the next day, could only remember being led down that hallway past the washrooms where the quality of the paint and the cleanliness of things seemed to become less interested in convincing you the establishment was high grade. There was music in a grate. Lie down here, sir. A ceiling and the top of a heavy curtain that he guessed covered a window. Perhaps it gave you the comfort of a window but there was no window. He was taken care of on a rubber mattress and a cloth on his belly and then his friends brought him back to the jeep and the compound and to a bed with a thin camping mattress, the sun was already hanging over the low, flat city.

7
    Rick Tobin came over for the first three months. He was part of a larger contingent—SNC-Lavalin—that repaired water and sewage and revamped wiring and took care of waste management for the Canadian forces even as they were participating in the draw-down of operations at Camp Julien. They provide warehousing, Rick said. Transportation, bulk fuel management, vehicle maintenance, food services, communication services, electricity, water supply and distribution.
    Rick used up all his fingers and he hadn’t even gotten to the Nepalese who took care of the cooking and cleaning.
    Everything, he said, to operate this facility and maintain it.
    Rick Tobin, believe it or not, was also a mini-soccer coach. He organized Afghan and Nepalese children on the army base, and dribbled out free soccer balls inflated by his own tire pump he’d packed in his checked baggage.
    They had to wait to use the computers to skype home. It was one of the services the trades and soldiers shared. Tender was talking to his girlfriend, Martha Groves. Stripped to his waist with dogtags on his collarbones, a tattoo of some kind across theback of his neck, Tender sat with other soldiers in the dark at blue screens manoeuvring the cursor over to the panels that allowed their loved ones to see their faces. John Hynes sat next to him, his face turned from concentration on figuring out the connection to a relief at seeing the top of his son’s head too close to the built-in camera, Silvia grabbing at Clem’s shoulders to get him and Sadie steady and then all of them synchronized to a connection no longer staggered. Tender’s girlfriend on the screen now, a beauty. The beauty came from a confidence to be on a screen projected over eight thousand miles. Henry knew Martha. She was a physiotherapist—that’s how Tender met her, a hockey injury. She wasn’t from St John’s, was she. No, she didn’t know Colleen and Silvia and Nora the way they knew each other from school. But they had included her. How vulnerable they all looked sitting on steno chairs at the little booths inside the tent that reminded Henry of a time when he took John’s kids, Clem and Sadie, to a jumpy castle.
    You want to grab this one after me, Tender said.
    It’s okay, Henry said.
    Say hello to Martha.
    Hello Martha.
    She waved at Henry while she looked a little up, into the green dot he guessed that made sure you were being screened properly. My god, Henry thought, how can it be I have no one to talk to.
    THE TOILETS WERE AT the far end of the compound and these too were prefabricated and there were instructions in several languages about how to sit on the toilet and how to keep the toilet clean. Henry Hayward realized that these two sections of the compoundwere the most important to keep functional. Although bedding was crucial and the canteen too. But you did not