by Louise Dean
There was a radio plugged in now, its aerial broken, its message a confusion of languages, bleating about evil between candycane beats.
Jeff was drawing something in his notebook, quickly absorbed, his head low, one elbow out across the table, pencil point going fast, his wrist a tremor. She sat there, looking at his left hand sketching away, the hairs on his hands, the movement beneath them of the nerves; he didn’t look at her, though he knew she was looking at him. And then he got up, stretched, sighed and said,
‘Going back to the room for a meeting with my maker.’ He took his notebook with him.
From the bar she could see all the drivers waiting in the hotel car park down below, behind the breeze-block wall and barbed wire, standing about, smoking. White sports utility vehicles; the UN. A couple of brown Mercedes, ancient things, for the use of the rest of them to peruse the damage in terms of human collateral.
Mohammed had said goodbye to them. He wasn’t surprised when they told him it was all a stitch-up, even the land they’d bought to build on. At the Land Ministry they had the tax receipts for the sale of the same land seven times in the last three months. Rachel kicked the car wheel down in the car park.
She’d looked at Mohammed. ‘We don’t even own the land!’
Yes, he said. Yes. I know.
If he knew he could have bloody told them! She didn’t ask him why he hadn’t. She gave him his money and some extra for his daughters.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘See you next time, I hope.’
She went up the steps to the hotel, her hands in her pockets, wondering whether he was in on it too. She thought of him standing in the doorway at every meeting. She leant over the balcony and watched him go, his brown Mercedes minus its exhaust pipe groaning up the steep hill. The weighted white iron gate swung back into place, the sentry jumped out of its way in alarm.
She said to herself: It’s OK not to know everything.
She never thought about Mohammed again. But he thought of them, and the other white tourists he drove sometimes reminded him of that young couple; the hand-wipes, the cigarettes (‘I only smoke when I’m in Africa’), the tips and the cordiality. If he could help it he never drove a black man.
* * *
When she got back to the room, Jeff was on the mobile phone. He closed it up right away. He looked at her, both impatient and crestfallen.
Nothing was said.
She lay down on the bed, looking up at the wires where the light should be, with her feet crossed. The door to their room was open and outside there were two cleaning ladies squatting near a marbled coloured plastic basin. One had her eyes closed and the other had her tongue in between her front gum and upper lip, ruminating.
Rachel closed her eyes. In her mind they were already in reverse, drawn backwards to the port, to go to the airport by boat, going past the Cotton Tree, backpacks on their laps, an amputee’s stump retracted through the open car window. ‘Long sleeves’, they called it, when it was just above the wrist, the stump bound like a salami.
You get diminishing returns from love and horror, she thought. You get wiser. But is it worth it? What do we lose in return for seeing clearly? There’s no choice, in any case.
She saw in her mind’s eye her so reserved father look up from the chair in the living room, pencil hovering over the crossword. The hoods of his eyes coming down and, before he spoke, deciding against telling her what was on his mind. The death of his wife one more obstacle. He did not love like lovers love. Why? It scared him — very well, it scared her too. It had scared her mother. Love required embracing absolutely everything, not just the fairy tale but the monster too, the light and the dark.
Now she knew that nothing worth having came of guilt or pity; that you had to be tough to love, not sorry, sorry, sorry.
Chapter 24
Richard went to Kenya the next time to learn the market from local doctors by shadowing, but he was the shadow who saw his own form. Everything else that happened came after that.
A driver came to take him to the local hospital in Nyeri. The minivan paused at the traffic light in the small town of colonial leftovers, the streets were ruinous, the shops shambolic. Beside the vehicle six men had green sturdy chairs for others to sit on while they polished their shoes. A dwarf was using his stubby hands rather adroitly to polish a pair of shoes. His customer looked up at the white man in the van and smiled.
They moved forwards slowly. Women walked at the same pace along the side of the road, in crocheted wraps their infant children were secured on their backs. Boys came along with bundles of sticks tied and attached to the seats of their bikes. School children walked past in twos holding hands. Posters advertised condoms or Jesus.
They moved along the cusp of a hill. He looked down to his left and swallowed hard. The view extended for hundreds of miles. Africa beyond was inexorable, vast, glistening. Giraffes moved across the plains like churches with nodding steeples, and beyond them he could see a herd of elephants, stately, among the flat-topped acacia trees. To the east, Mount Kenya loomed, its peaks concealed in cloud.
He sat, dumbstruck, stuck by sweat to the seat, trying to find space for it all.
‘Africa,’ he said. The driver nodded.
Out the back of the tinpot provincial hospital was a separate bungalow nominated the psychiatry department. As Dr Wainanga had told him, there was a long queue of young people and their parents waiting for their turn in the outpatients clinic.
He was shown through to the small stuffy consultation room and bidden to take a seat at the side on the bench. A schoolgirl was shown in with an adult.
In front of her was the big old wooden desk, a single chair, for her, on which she was enjoined to sit, and there were the two doctors before her, behind the table. The younger one was in a white coat. The other wore a checked jacket and had a newspaper spread out before him. To the side against the school-paint-blue wall on the bench with Richard were three nurses, with tiny white starched triangles attached to their corn-row braids, sitting with their knees crossed the same way.
More boys and girls, in their school uniforms, came and went. Each received medication, and the adult with them received some serious instructions after a few curt questions.
The chief doctor, Dr Wainanga’s friend, was courteous enough; he asked the patients to present themselves to the ‘guest’ and each did so. He asked them to address themselves to the guest in English and each made a good showing. An elderly woman came in, bent over like a crone, and raved in a distraught fashion, occasioning the outright laughter of the nurses and doctors.
The young doctor explained in English that she said she was six hundred years old, and that her daughter was four hundred years old and that even allowing for the difference, he smiled, she would have been well beyond her childbearing years when she gave birth.
The nurses looked at Richard with glee, and he obliged them with a breezy smile. The older doctor told her to greet the guest too and she turned to him, and as if the language required a different role entirely, she said with dignity, offering him her hand,
‘Good day to you. I’m very pleased to meet you. I hope you are enjoying our country.’
The next patient was a very thin little girl, bone-chested, in a gingham frock, her auntie said she was twelve, and she came in as though nailed to the cross, her head back, eyes scanning the ceiling, her neck and arms stiff, her face awash with tears. All she could respond in answer to their questions was, ‘I am all alone in the world.’
Dr Wainanga’s friend explained that this effect was produced by over-medication, too strong a dose for too small a girl; she was suffering the side effects.
‘Acute dystonia,’ nodded the young doctor.
Another medication could counteract that, which they would prescribe. No wonder she felt she was all alone in the world if all she saw were ceilings!
They shared a smile.
The girl left as she came in, startled, her face wet with tears. The doctors aske
d the nurse at the door to give them five minutes for their notes.
Richard went outside to smoke a cigarette in the warm damp air. The little girl was standing out there, her unfocused stare like that of a blind person; she was waiting to be led away by her aunt, who was in discussion with the nurse on the front desk.
‘Will I get my eyes back?’ she asked him.
‘Yes, you will,’ he said.
‘I never dreamt I would meet a European.’
He blew out, his shoulders sagged, his stomach sank over his belt.
‘I would be a good daughter to you,’ she said. She smiled with a sudden radiance that stopped the flow of her tears.
He didn’t know what to say.
She had not seen him, she had only the idea of him in mind. Was that sufficient to make such an extravagant offer? Her hopes humbled him.
The aunt came and took her, guiding the girl by the arm, and they went above him to his left, then farther above him to his right on the zigzag pathway that took them away up the slight incline through to the main campus.
He put out his cigarette and wandered down the alleyway to a fenced compound arraigned with young bodies prone, face forward often, in their calico patients’ robes, stretched out, in medicated stupors on the grassy dirt.
They were kept this way, their days must surely pass as slow as a hundred lives, the dreams or visions that moved through their heads as unreachable as the clouds above them.
The little girl believed that there was goodness. She asked for some. But there was not enough to go round. There were too many people asking. The thing was to stop them all asking at once.
He told himself he could both do his job and satisfy his conscience by making a note to get these people the new generation of anti-depressants and anti-psychotics at a fair price, a price they could afford. That would be the best solution. They could function that way.
He looked at all the bare feet at right angles to the earth. He looked at the knuckles. He looked at the thick-nailed fingertips, making their claim upon the earth.
He took off his jacket and undid his tie and put it in his pocket. He rolled his sleeves to above his elbows.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said out loud.
Back in the consulting room, the nursing trio changed knees in unison, something like medicine’s answer to the Supremes. Supremely happy they seemed, and the next patient to come in, another young girl, couldn’t help but smile at them; a shot of that pubescent joy fed on its opposite, apprehension.
She was a very pretty girl.
Her father, browbeaten and muddy, took his place, perching on the bench on the other side of the room, the least confident. He could not make his mind up whether to sit or stand so he hovered between the two. When asked, he described her malady unctuously, moving farther forwards on his seat, his intentions shared between the doctors, his betters. It was as if he’d come for a loan.
The suited older doctor turned the pages of the newspaper — perhaps he was looking for a certain car. The younger one wore a forced expression, in stark contrast to the other’s amused and relaxed air. The father recounted his story.
All the while the girl, from beneath her long hair, with delighted jaw jutting, was seeking something from the nurses and from him, Richard, with bashful lashed looks. She was quite different from the last little girl; this girl was on the brink of delight, so sure life would go her way and that this was a temporary silliness.
She was disobedient, the father counted out her sins on his fingers, she laughed when alone. No, there was no joke to laugh at, she just laughed.
The doctor closed his newspaper and looked with serious interest at the girl. Laughing alone?
The young girl was like a modern princess in a foreign land, all uncomprehending delight. He couldn’t help smiling back at her, they had a moment of complicity. He wanted to say, Don’t worry, don’t worry . . . and it was as if she were saying, I’m not, I’m not.
He wanted more than anything in the world for her to go on out of there with a spring in her step, into a good life. She was not scarred, she had nothing to carry on her shoulders, she was the lightest of all of them. She reminded him of the girl he married.
She read in her room. Books. She would not do as he said. She laughed at him openly. Yes, she was doing fine at school.
‘Anything else?’
She was disobedient; she did not do what he said.
‘Is she elated?’ asked the fine doctor, raising his eyes, looking somewhere past the nurses, taking them under the wings of his authority.
The young doctor frowned, licked his lips. ‘Yes.’
‘Is it catching? Are we elated?’ The intern was quick. ‘No.’
It was the sentence. The nurses stifled themselves. Knees dampened down. The older doctor closed his newspaper and served the father at last.
‘Your daughter will go no further at school, she will never have a normal life, she will need medication all her life. She will probably never marry.’ The young doctor opened the prescription pad. They had but one medication to give. He looked at Richard Bird. And not much of it. Chlorpromazine. An old drug. This was the injustice they lived with. They had just as much mental illness as in Europe or America, all the same disorders.
The nurses lowered their eyes. They had heard the doctor say it in the corridor that morning, before the visitor came, angry, while his patients milled around dumbly in dark-blue calico, eyes glazed.
They would prescribe the medication and she must take it daily. She must not miss a day. Did he understand? He must pay for it too.
Yes, yes; this episode was waiting for him, the father, somewhere at the back of the shamba, his garden, inside the order, outside of the order, something connected with his planting, he knew to prepare for it. He knew that when it came he would be straight and ready and right.
The girl untwisted at speed, uncoiled, put out long hands, her eyes rounded and darkened, her eyes sought the nurses but they weren’t there any more, their eyes, their matching teeth, their cake-shop paper crowns, all gone. The intern disappeared next, the father evaporated, the doctor fizzled out. Gone.
And all that remained were the girl’s eyes, waiting for the stranger to say something to save her.
He sat there, silent. He sat there dumbly.
Goodbye, girl. You have to move along now, shuffle off, go on.
But Richard felt that if she went from his mind, some of him would go with her.
He was finished with the job, he knew it then, and moreover, he was finished with the rest of the life he’d fabricated.
Part II
Chapter 25
One Friday evening at the end of August, just after supper, he picked up the phone to hear Jeff ’s wife’s voice.
‘Richard.’
‘Yes?’
‘Richard.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘Richard.’
‘Rachel, is something wrong?’
He’d raised his eyebrows at his wife, pointing at the phone. Valérie was leaning against the kitchen counter holding an empty glass at her lips. He mouthed the name of the caller at her: Rachel.
Her look did not match his. She looked afraid and also excited. She didn’t move. She waited. And so did he. He waited but he already knew.
* * *
They’d lived next door to each other for four years or so, but it was really in the past year, drinking together, that they’d become friends, he and Jeff.
Richard was out of step with everyone else around there, because he was working for the man unlike the locals and the foreign ‘lifestylers.’
After a good many apéros, dinners and impromptu into-the-early-hours drinking sessions, he’d gone and told Jeff something about his other life.
It was a departure from the usual programme. The anecdotal salesman, much travelled, Richard had a book of life arranged in chapters to which he referred normally over business lunches and dinners: Saint Petersburg Nightlife; Meeting Mick
Jagger; An Embarrassing Bowel Accident in a Ski Lift. He was no longer sure if these things had really occurred but the telling and retelling took a consistent enough form, his audience was rarely the same, and from each tale he emerged unscathed. But in drink and in this man’s company he went beyond the script.
The thing was, he suspected now, that was what really finished it all; telling Jeff about his other life. Until then he’d kept his two worlds apart.
The old adage about shit and the doorstep was worth observing.
He woke after their drinking sessions the same way: face forward, saliva oozing on to the pillow and over his cheek, and in his thorax, between the ribcage and skin, a pain. He assumed it was the booze. When he recalled their conversation later in the sober light of day, on the motorway generally, he had a curdling feeling in his chest, which he later knew to be the tickle of a tiny treason. He told himself he was allergic to wine and swapped to beer.
The women had left them to it, to the barbecue, the fire, the roast, to the opening of the bottle; their manly play. Jeff did offer a good turn in self-deprecation; that he was washed-up, with the implicit addendum that he had found ‘the meaning of life’. The ring-pull used to sound the end of one story and the beginning of another.
He never knew whether Jeff ’s anecdotes were based on any truth, they were entertainment, they seemed improbable enough, combining famous people with outlandish drugs in high-rolling places, fantasies most likely, campfire tales that got more spooky, more twitchy later on in the evening. He would finish with the flourish of making off with the stash, the booze, the money, and the girl, perhaps, if Rachel and Valérie were absent. He could tell a story, he kept a smile on his face and didn’t mind admitting his mistakes.