Paradime Read Free Page B

I witnessed, and I wasn’t the only one, but for some reason they’re trying to implicate me in it, with this letter, and . . . the thing is, Idon’t understand it either.’
    Any lawyerly composure Kate has falls away and for a brief moment the look on her face displays a nervousness, a reluctance to hear what I have to say that almost equals my own reluctance to say it.
    But then her composure returns.
    ‘What is it, Danny?’ she says in a whisper, leaning back in the chair. ‘What happened?’

2
    This might be the most Kate has ever heard me speak at any one time since the day we met.
    The Forward Operating Base at Sharista, I tell her, was huge – a maze of shipping containers, Humvees and B huts. It was an insanely elaborate ecosystem teeming within a heavily fortified perimeter of Hesco barriers and wire-mesh fencing. My job as an assistant kitchen coordinator at the main DFAC was to oversee a turnover of between five hundred to a thousand covers on any given day. This meant working twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, sometimes seven. It meant rotating crews in a mechanised system that was less about real cooking and more about defrosting, heating, and reheating, about moving shit along a conveyor belt and making sure that the ex-flow of meals and the in-flow of diners aligned, like some sort of celestial eclipse.
    There were a few other guys, nearly all ex-servicemen, doing the same thing I was, which was basically shift supervision, but since we were also on rotation there wasn’t much time for hanging out or getting to know each other. The vast majority of the kitchen staff – the preppers, line cooks, servers, cleaners – these were all TCNs, i.e. Filipinos, Nepalese, Bangladeshis, Kenyans, Nigerians, most of them with no English, most of them trafficked in by small recruiting agencies that wouldn’t know a basic wage or welfare regulation if it came up and bit them in the ass.
    Now, I was exhausted most of the time, so it took me a while to start paying attention to this stuff and to realise that these people working under me were being treated like shit. Their living conditions were awful, they weren’t paid anything like what they’d been promised, and some of the women (if I understood correctly what I was hearing) had routinely been victims of sexual harassment, if not outright assault. And something else: there often wasn’t enough food to go around their compound at designated mealtimes.
    I look at Kate directly now. She’s staring back at me with a shocked expression in her eyes, one that tells me I need to explain this, I need to make it make sense, and fast .
    But I can’t.
    Because apart from anything else, I haven’t told her what happened yet.
    *
    During my time in Afghanistan, Kate and I kept our communications to one quick phone call a week. It was easier that way. Long emails or Facebook posts aren’t my thing, and in a five-minute call I could keep it breezy. Even if conditions at the FOB had been ideal, hearing about my routine there still would have been depressing, or at the very least boring, so I tended to let Kate do most of the talking.
    What she’s hearing now, therefore, is definitely new to her, and if she’s wondering why I’ve kept it to myself for the past three weeks, she doesn’t let on.
    ‘There was this one guy,’ I tell her, ‘from Nepal, Sajit something. He was skinny, like a stick insect. He worked one of the walk-in freezer units, loaded it, unloaded it, twelve hours a day. He spoke English, enough anyway to hold a decent conversation, and he was funny too – I liked him. It was Sajit who told me what was going on in the compound, Gideon security guys showing up at night, picking out girls, then stories about a trade in fake documents, about intimidation, about people getting cheated out of whatever small amounts of cash they’d managed to save. I brought this up one day with a Gideon manager. I asked him if he knew what conditions were like for the