The Ghosts of Eden

by Andrew JH Sharp

  After a change of shirt Michael found his way to the lounge, expecting to meet James’s superstitious wife, but although James was there, energetically digging out bottles of spirits and crystal glasses from a walnut cabinet, Audrey was absent. Michael’s eye was drawn to the enormous gold-framed portrait of the young Queen Elizabeth II that dominated the room.

  James noticed his interest. ‘Haven’t lived in Britain for nearly twenty years – that’s why I’m so loyal.’ He warmed to his theme. ‘Frustrating for us Scots that she’s so often referred to by our African friends as the Queen of England. Same for Queen Victoria: her most devoted followers were the Scottish diaspora. Have a look in my bookshelves while you’re here. Ah, meet my wife.’

  A petite woman with large sad eyes had come quietly into the room. Her dark hair was drawn back into a tight bun, exposing greying strands over her temples – although Michael guessed her to be a little under forty. Movement seemed an effort to her, as if she were wading through a glutinous swamp.

  ‘Audrey, there you are. This is Michael Lacey – somewhat bloodied by an incident on the way here.’

  Audrey’s eyes started to flick about; she picked at the nail of her left index finger. Her chest rose and fell rapidly like a frightened bird. Michael thought she might turn and drag herself back out.

  ‘Audrey, dear, there’s no need to fret. He’s here – nothing fatal.’ He turned to Michael. ‘No good beating about the bush, as we say in Africa.’ He paused to laugh, and then as quickly became sombre. ‘Doctor to doctor, my wife is suffering from . . . a melancholia. We’ve lived through hard times – it does have its effects. But you’ve been better recently, haven’t you, my dear?’

  Audrey seemed to steel herself against some inner difficulty, settled her gaze on Michael, and said softly, ‘It’s so nice to have visitors from Britain. We’ve been dreadfully isolated the last few years. Oh, and congratulations on your appointment. You must feel very secure. This is what we miss: security. Well, James doesn’t, but I crave it. But perhaps it’s my condition. Are you married?’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ Michael said. He recalled, with a renewed sense of foreboding, his parting with Naomi: her stiff lips. Then, because Audrey appeared to be waiting for him to say more, he added, ‘Too many hours in theatre to meet anyone, and all the women in theatre are masked. That does make getting to know each other difficult.’

  James laughed. Audrey did not. She had not taken her solemn eyes off him.

  ‘I don’t believe that. A successful man like you, in your mid-thirties I imagine, on the threshold of riches and adulation – you should have found a wife by now.’

  She seemed to have no need to blink.

  ‘We’re not living in a Jane Austen novel,’ Michael said, trying to sound amused.

  ‘Are you attracted to the opposite sex?’ she asked.

  Michael saw James give a look of desperation at his wife.

  ‘I adore them,’ he replied.

  James laughed again. ‘Hear, hear, well said.’

  Michael was bringing himself to mention Naomi, but Audrey said, ‘You’re looking for something in a woman that you haven’t found so far. Maybe something your mother has.’

  Michael started to phrase a non-committal response, but when he looked at Audrey he was taken aback: although her body still trembled as if it was only a few quivers away from disintegration, her eyes remained focused on him but not at his face, at some distance through him, looking not behind him but into his past. He found himself saying, ‘Not likely. My mother’s dead.’

  Audrey nodded gently. ‘She died when you were a child.’

  He felt compelled to dip his head slightly to affirm her knowledge. Now she readjusted her gaze, and he thought that she gave him a momentary expression of approval – as if he had passed a test. He had not tried to lie to her.

  James rescued him. ‘We really ought to get to know our guest better before embarrassing him. Anyway, as I was saying, we Scots are heavily represented in the hall of famous Africa pioneers.’

  He pointed to a set of framed prints hanging on the opposite wall. ‘There they are – all extremes of human endeavour. Take Mungo Park: the quest for knowledge; Karamoja Bell: the life of adventure; or Kirk over there: practical action against the slave trade.’

  James drew breath to continue with his Who’s Who of pioneering Scots, but Michael stopped him.

  ‘Karamoja Bell? Must have been larger than life with a name like that.’

  With a slight curl on her lip, the motions of a wry smile attempted with effort, Audrey interjected, ‘Do you want to be embarrassed or would you prefer to be bored to death? It’s the choice you have in this house.’

  ‘Ah yes, Karamoja Bell,’ went on James, ‘he chose the outdoor and the outlaw life. Did his hunting where some of my patients come from: far north, far west. Said he looked for a country where a man could still slit a throat or grab a native girl without being badgered by the law.’

  Michael saw Audrey leave as silently as she had come, her long cotton dress, more fifties than eighties, hanging limp off her shoulders as if soaked in her melancholy.

  A shadow crossed James’s face but he said, ‘Used to live up in Karamoja myself before I met Audrey. Not much has changed up there. Isn’t that right, Blessed?’

  The McCrees’ maid had appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. She paused there, eyes averted, hands clasped in front of her, waiting for James to finish.

  ‘Blessed, this is Mr Lacey, a VIP all the way from London. Bring some tea, my lady.’

  Whether it was the unaccustomed heat, the strange encounter with Audrey or a delayed reaction to the traumas of his journey, Michael suddenly felt faint.

  ‘Do you mind if I take a bath first? I feel a little shaky.’

  James looked at him sharply. ‘So sorry, old chap, how unthinking of me. You do look a touch pale.’

  He escorted Michael back to the bedroom but when they entered the room, and Michael had reassured him that he was going to be fine, James suddenly said, ‘Terrible thing, depression. Please don’t be offended.’

  Michael searched for the right blend of emollient and facilitating sentiment. Not easy: his forte was cutting his way out of difficulty. ‘Not at all. No doubt been tough for you both.’

  James walked over to the window and said, ‘Let me take a page out of Audrey’s book and be forthright. It’s what I admired – still admire – in her.’ He paused, looked out and gripped the burglar bars like a man trapped. ‘I married the wrong woman. Or I should say she married the wrong man, because I love her dearly, but she always wanted a safer life; a garden to tend that isn’t completely eaten every few days, close family down a shaded lane and a circle of friends who can meet to talk about their children, rather than a fragmented laager of heat-shocked women whispering about the latest armed robbery.’

  Michael would have furrowed his brow if he had been given to facial expression. Outdoors it was dangerous, indoors it was a psychological minefield; and it was not yet nightfall. ‘You’ve not considered leaving?’

  ‘We should go back but I can’t. I came out here on a British Council-sponsored contract for a year. That was in sixty-six. I became addicted. Going home is like stepping into a shallow grave. Tried it a few years ago.’

  James continued to stare out of the window. Michael saw him shudder, and wondered if some men might go and stand beside him, putting a hand on his shoulder in masculine alliance. But straight away he knew that he had heard enough, had already been party to more than he wanted to know. He should have stayed in a hotel. He lifted his suitcase onto the bed.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ James said, releasing his hold on the bars and swinging around. ‘I’m out of order with all this. You’ve caught us at a difficult time but I’m delighted you’re here. From now on we’ll concentrate on the success of the conference.’

  Michael nodded emphatically. ‘It’s what I’ve come for.’

  James straightened himself. ‘Of course. Qui
te right.’

  Michael asked what he should do with his laundry.

  ‘Och, put it in the basket. Winston will wash it, and then iron it with the coal iron. Makes it too smooth for the bugs to get a foothold.’ He laughed and gripped Michael’s upper arm amiably, crushing a nerve.

  Michael turned on the cold tap of the bath to swill a battalion of insects with extraordinarily long antennae down the plughole, but their limp filaments formed a dense mesh over the drain, refusing to rinse away. After a moment’s hesitation, wondering whether he should scoop out the sodden and faintly twitching mass of unlucky life and drop it out of the window, he pressed the plug home with resolute force; an action that gave him the small pleasure of reasserting some control over his environment. When he turned on the hot tap, scalding water – stained brown from the wood-fired boiler – sputtered out.

  He lay back in the bath, stretching out, the tinted water lapping his body. He closed his eyes: it felt like an act of containment. Then, remembering his promise to himself to keep his three days in Uganda free of introspection, or pointless reminiscence, he rehearsed his forthcoming lecture to the twelfth conference of the Lake Regions Surgical Association; rattled it out fast in a low murmur. Soon finished, he started on a passage from ‘Hiawatha’. The rhyme of the verses was soothing. Michael’s talent for memorising text came in handy when he had to attend a party – a trick to compensate for his lack of small talk. He could recite long passages from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, Gray’s Anatomy, even the three chapters of the prophet Habakkuk or some other obscure part of the Bible. He wondered whether his gift was innate, or whether – a dark thought rising again – it was acquired through having to learn memory verses at his religious school.

  The stains of his travels soaked away, Michael cast his eye along James’s books while buckling his belt. Tiredness blunted his will to decipher faded titles, or pick out anything heavy or tightly packed, but at the end of a shelf a book entitled In Search of Paradise lay on its side. He stared with a cynical eye at the blue and yellow watercolour on the cover: a man in a straw boater, reading in a deckchair under a palm tree, a full-breasted mermaid with shell necklace resting on a rock by the water. Someone’s idea of paradise. There were others: the oasis garden of the Mohammedans, the nirvana of infinite light of the East, the bejewelled city of the Christians. He preferred more concrete aspirations, less intangible; like the mitigation of disease. It gave him satisfaction that his work gloved in with that modest creed, although he would welcome a little less shapeless unease. So far his return to Uganda had been disquieting (the unexpected, the violent and the McCrees – there was something of the soothsayer about Audrey), but it was a sense of proximity to malign ghosts that he found most disturbing. He struggled to grasp at what seemed a valuable insight but it flew away before it became substantive: that peace of mind might not depend on freedom from the memories of the past but on . . . what was it, freedom from guilt? A guilt that to a contemporary man, wedded to reason like himself, seemed a relic of a past age of foolishness.

  He snatched up In Search of Paradise and opened it at random. It appeared to be a travelogue. Some place in Uganda was mentioned: in the Rift Valley to the west – the far west, Karamoja Bell’s hunting grounds. Where a man could freely slit a throat and pick up a native girl. He flicked through the pages, but found he was too tired to concentrate.

  Two

  ‘Surgery is grievous bodily harm,’ Michael said.

  The surgical trainees sat taut at their desks, scribbling his words down in frantic haste, lest they miss that essential tip. James McCree had told Michael that he, the visiting maestro, would be addressing the elite survivors of a hard and long journey: from their mothers’ perilous giving of birth, through an infancy where one in five died, via exposure to a myriad body-invading creatures, biting reptiles, arachnids and arthropods, via miles and miles on bare feet to school, via the eye of the needle to get into medical school, via the volumes of books imbibed in dimly lit nights, via scarce patronage and tenacious grit to get onto the surgical training programme.

  Michael had woken that morning at the McCrees’ house to see the first rays of the sun lancing through a chink in the curtains. Above his bed, on the wall, the light cast a bright feather-like shape. He recalled the previous day’s troublesome events, but now, looking at the light playing a little as if filtered by leaves, he felt that he had slept away an oppression. Any notion of having been jinxed had vanished. He lifted his hand to the sunbeam and sensed its warmth, noticing the pattern change to a crescent moon on his palm. How the mind’s eye hunted for meaning, and how the heart also, seeking significance and implication, making associations that were as ephemeral and futile as the conjuring of his eye on the pattern of light. Thinking back, he saw now that he had let a few incidents (regrettable as they were) and Audrey McCree’s intrusive questioning disturb his equanimity. It was time to get a grip.

  By the time he entered the classroom of surgical trainees he was in particularly good spirits and relished the chance to teach and to inspire. The conference had started at last, he would be giving it his all, and then in a couple of days he would be on his way back to work.

  ‘We surgeons cut, saw, burn, bruise; we wound; we traumatise; we violate. We split the skin, breaching the body’s primary protection against a hostile environment. Then we spill its blood, dehydrate its tissues and dissipate its hard-won heat.’ The students’ pens slashed across their notebooks. ‘My job today is to teach you how to repair the damage you’ve done on your way in, as you come out.’

  A refrigerated pig’s trotter, pale as exsanguination, lay on a wooden platter on each student’s desk. A surgical blade, needle holder, scissors and forceps were arranged around each trotter like a dinner setting.

  ‘Never forget that to make our craft possible we rely entirely on the body’s remarkable restorative powers. Very rarely, an unlucky person is born with a profound defect in the mechanism of healing. The smallest injury fails to knit; no amount of suturing, by the most expert of surgeons, can fuse the tissues together. Death comes in childhood. Our sutures and clips only approximate what we’ve rent apart; the healing is nature’s work. We surgeons must have humility.’

  He paused, waiting for the ripple of amusement that would have run through a British audience, but there was no cynicism in the room that day. Michael thrilled, sensing his listeners were captivated. Here was a thirsty audience, eager for his help; so much more emotionally engaged than the students back home.

  ‘Our job is to make the body’s work easier. Our skill is to create the right environment for healing. How do we do that?’

  Pens poised while he came around the front of his table. Every head was down, waiting.

  ‘We do it by art.’

  The students looked up, scribbling still suspended, panic welling in their eyes. A hand shot up. ‘Excuse me, sir. You said, “by heart”?’

  The class laughed, but Michael saw that they did not laugh at the student who had spoken, but at their own humble, collective by kinship, misunderstanding.

  Michael smiled. ‘With your heart, of course, but most importantly by art. Great art. We make art with our hands. We practise until we can effortlessly create a four-dimensional work. Three dimensions of space and the other of time; the movements of our fingers through time.’ He was surprising himself with his flowery address, but his audience had given him a sense of release. They were approving of zeal; he could express his passion without embarrassment. ‘We choreograph a flowing opus; an aspiring to perfection of motion, like ballet. You will know from your own culture that the best practitioners make great art of their dance.’

  A deep murmur of appreciative agreement swept the room. The harmonious sound, almost songlike, reminded him of a sighing singing in a whitewashed cathedral long ago, but he pressed on.

  ‘The wounds you make must be repaired as if you’ve violated Mother Nature’s handiwork and don’t want her to know. Hold the tissues wit
h feather-like gentleness so that when the patient wakes the nerves don’t jangle with a thousand coarse pluckings. Each penetration of the suture must be accurately spaced. Only stab once: don’t make rehearsal stabs. Apply enough tension to your knots, but not too much. You mustn’t inhibit the blood supply, so make the wound edges kiss lightly; don’t make them snog hard.’

  He saw the scribbler who had raised his arm before start to lift his hand again but just as quickly put it down, whispering ‘snoggard, snoggard, snoggard’, and with a puzzled look underlining what he had written.

  ‘There must be no wasted hand movements. Can you think of a good dancer who lets his hand wander; whose every action is not purposeful and graceful?’

  He returned behind the table to where his own trotter stood proud on its hoof, in contrast to the students’ trotters which had been placed on their sides. ‘Before you is the stage on which your fingers will perform.’

  The students looked awed as they inspected their own platters.

  Michael picked up the blade, feeling its delicate weight, and then, with a deft movement, cut a deep wound in the skin of his pig. Taking the needle holder, he positioned a needle between its thin jaws a third of the way along the needle’s svelte, curving length. The silent class heard the click of the securing ratchet. Taking a fine pair of forceps in his fingers, Michael closed the wound, both hands moving nimbly in a smooth, interlocking rhythm. It felt good to be working with his hands again, to be in control. This was his craft. He did not need to boast; his art proclaimed itself. There were surgeons who had climbed the career ladder through publishing research but were all fingers and thumbs in the operating room. He had published profusely as well, but he was pleased to be a surgeon’s surgeon. His colleagues sought him out if their wives or daughters needed the knife. He was a cabinetmaker, not a joiner.