LITMIR.BIZ

       FINDING THE WILL

      In fact, Mr and Mrs Haunt had always had fire inside them. Only the London parking regulations and the birth of their two young children had temporarily dampened the flames. They met, the first time round, sometime in the early 1990s, when they were both aged twenty-one. They met at a Somali refugee camp on the Kenyan-Somali border, where they both briefly happened to be working as volunteers; volunteers whose youthful idealism was already beginning to curdle with experience. They spent a week together near a hot, dry place called Wajir, drinking Tusker beers around desert campfires, smoking Sportsman cigarettes and mulling over the world’s evil ways – and they liked each other very much. Actually, they already loved each other. But Maude had a journalist boyfriend she’d left in Mogadishu, Somalia and, at the time, Horatio was more or less meant to be living with a US Peace Corps girl based in Nanyuki, Kenya. It wasn’t, they agreed, meant to be. Or not then.

      But time passed. They returned home, both of them to London, to noisy bars and mortgages and numerous beige-coloured offices with mini dividing walls. They forgot about each other. They forgot about the desert nights and the starry desert sky and all the magic of Africa – until one day, at one of their beige-coloured offices, they bumped into each other again. They were in the same lift. They were on their way to the same seventh floor, and the same afternoon course, called Successful Interfacing with Clients. Seven years had gone by. Long years. They almost cried with happiness.

      Marriage quickly followed, and then Tiffany and then Superman and that strangely dreary dinner party with bigbosomed Rosie, the Born Again. Mr and Mrs Haunt continued with their not-very-exciting lives, full of love for each other and their children, but overshadowed by something intangible: boredom, guilt, disappointment, exhaustion. They lived like this, going to work and going back again; rejoicing in Superman’s first tooth, in Tiffany’s never-ending stream of bons mots; occasionally going out and meeting new people but mostly putting the children to bed and falling asleep in front of the telly.

      And then the thing happened. Maude Haunt’s thirty-fourth birthday, and Horatio was taking her out to dinner. The minicab driver who came to pick them up bore all the fine-boned features of a man from the Horn of Africa, and because the Haunts already had a bottle of champagne inside them, and the sight of anything or anyone from that part of the world tended to make them nostalgic, they struck up a conversation with him.

      At first he wasn’t enthusiastic. He was cagey. But when they told him they’d met each other working at the Somali refugee camp near Wajir in Kenya, he seemed more interested. They told him Maude had been working on a health project in Mogadishu and he seemed more interested still. That was when he turned around to take a better look at his passengers without even stopping the car.

      War-torn, lawless Mogadishu was his own hometown, he told them. They learnt that he’d been a doctor there and that he too had worked for a while at the refugee camps. His wife had been a midwife at Mogadishu’s only maternity unit, delivering babies while gun battles raged outside. Until the day the hospital itself was attacked. She was raped, battered, left for dead. When she didn’t die she and her husband decided, finally, to follow the exodus, and so they took their surviving three children and fled, arriving in Britain without papers, unable to prove who they were or what they did. Asylum was refused. Appeal refused on a technicality. The doctor, his wife and three children had been in hiding, without identity, ever since.

      A horrible story. Another horrible story. Awful. Terrible. Unimaginable. Sometimes we forget how lucky we are. We do. But anyway. It’s second on the left. After the traffic lights…Except on this occasion Maude happened to know the hospital. She knew the midwife.

      A small world. That’s what changed everything.

      It cast a pall over the birthday celebrations. Horatio had booked a table at a restaurant in Soho with a Michelin star. It was cripplingly expensive, and neither he nor Maude would have fully appreciated it even at the best of times, but he loved her. He wanted her to feel spoilt. They sat facing each other over the crisp white linen tablecloth, and chewed on their food without tasting it. The minicab driver and his wife had reminded the Haunts of a world they had allowed themselves to forget. It reminded them of their past, of how they used to be, how much they used to care about these things. Anyway, they didn’t bother with pudding.

      And then, back at home, when they both assumed the other was in the bathroom brushing teeth, or downstairs locking robbers out, they bumped into each other in the loft; both, so it happened, in search of the same thing. By the time Horatio appeared Maude already had it in her hands.

      CERTIFICATE OF BIRTH

      ‘Ahhh,’ said Horatio contentedly. ‘Great minds…’

      ‘Exactly,’ Maude replied. ‘Don’t you think we can help?’

      ‘If they’ll allow us.’

      ‘They’ve got nothing to lose.’

      ‘No. Not really. But he seemed like a nice guy. I mean, honest. Didn’t he? He might feel bad. Wrong, I mean. Getting involved in fraud.’

      ‘We could give them new identities,’ she said. ‘A chance for a fresh start.’

      He took the certificate from her, held it up to the light.

      ‘…Just a couple of pieces of paper,’ he muttered. ‘It’s not much, is it?’

      ‘You kept their telephone number, didn’t you?’

      He smiled. ‘Of course I did.’