Four operations, then. Two to straighten the calves. Two to correct the ankles. And then the months of physiotherapy. Kai has no doubt Foday will see it through. He is a fighter.
A surgeon, recently arrived from Geneva, had passed by as Kai was examining the X-rays, stopped to look. He had been both shocked and excited.
‘Do you know how often we see this in Switzerland?’
‘How often?’ Kai obliged.
‘Never. Not once in my career. Tell me when you’re operating. I’d like the opportunity to observe. If I may?’ And he had bowed slightly, as though Kai was the senior of the two.
The war was medieval neither in concept nor in tactics, whatever the view from elsewhere, only in the hardware. From the outset the patients came in two classes. There were the soldiers and foreign peacekeepers, victims mostly of gunshot wounds, sometimes grenade and mortar wounds. In the second class were the peasants, the ones who somehow made it from their villages and were admitted with a C scrawled heavily on their charts. Unarmed and poor, the waste of a bullet wasn’t so much resented as simply unnecessary. They were the victims of attacks using machetes and cutlasses. C. The doctor’s own shorthand adapted to the circumstances. C. Cleaved. Kai gained hundreds of hours of experience in repairs, stitching layers of muscle, sewing skin, patching holes with pieces from elsewhere. Surgical housekeeping. Late in the war, the rebels advanced upon the capital and in advance of them came the first of the amputees. Mostly the team of surgeons concerned themselves with saving lives, cutting away necrotised flesh, repairing the ‘hatchet jobs’, the way they once, in peacetime, referred to the work of lesser surgeons. Though there were occasions, a few, when the attackers had been either merciful or inept, when it had been possible to reattach a tendon and restore a walk. Later a team of surgeons including Kai practised the Krukenberg intervention, unused since the First World War, fashioning out of the muscles and two bones of the wrist a pair of blunted pincers: a hand. Ugly, it was true. But Kai had seen a man once again able to hold his own penis when he pissed, a mother place a nipple into her child’s mouth. In those months of turmoil, Kai had discovered a new and enduring love, of orthopaedic surgery. Still a junior surgeon, he had seen and dealt with more than some consultants of thirty years.
Six o’clock now. Kai heads for the men’s changing room, where he exchanges his scrubs for day clothes. Now he is hungry. On the way home he stops at the roadside and buys okra, onions, peppers and smoked fish from the women traders. No meat, too late for the butchers. He hails a taxi, a shared one, and checks the route. The driver is going via the peninsula bridge. Kai lets him go, waves the next taxi down.
On his way up the road towards the house he sees Abass hanging over the verandah railings. Kai raises a hand. The boy turns to rush down the stairs. As Kai opens the door in the metal gate, the child hurtles towards him throwing his full weight against his stomach, arms around his waist. Kai braces; all the same the impact very nearly winds him.
‘Hey, my man. You’re almost too big for that. How goes it?’
The child doesn’t reply, but pulls Kai’s arm around him and buries his face in his side. Together they walk up to the house.
‘Is your mother home?’
‘Yes. But she’s gone out again. She told me to tell you. To Yeama,’ Abass answers in his deep, little man’s voice.
Yeama is a neighbour whose sister-in-law died in childbirth. Yeama has been left with the infant. The father, serving with the army on the northern border, has no idea yet of either the arrival of his daughter or the death of his new wife. Abass’s mother, Kai’s cousin, makes visits bearing baby clothes and tins of formula to Yeama’s tiny house. The child was born prematurely: Kai doesn’t imagine she’ll live too long.
‘How hungry are you? Can you eat again?’
Abass nods.
‘Good,’ says Kai, squeezing the boy’s skinny shoulder.
In the kitchen an aunt sits on a stool in the corner, her chin in her hand, nodding in sleep. At the sound of him she grunts and rises to help, but Kai gently resists and she shuffles off, wrapping her lappa about her, still half asleep. Doubtless they’ve left something in the pot for him, but today he wants to cook. At the worktop he unpacks his purchases. He slices the onions, chops each finger of okra into a dozen pieces. He loves the routine and rhythm of preparing food. It brings him to a feeling of peace, being able to close off a part of his mind, just as he was in surgery, putting the cast on Foday’s leg, or is sometimes suturing a wound, tying off the ends stitch after stitch. Operating affords him a privacy, an escape from the world into a place which has its own narratives, its own emergencies, but which is a less random world, one he can control with his skills. Cooking, though less absorbing, does something similar.
In the corner of the room Abass sits on the stool in the corner, twirling a piece of string around his fingers.
‘So what did you do at school today?’
The child shrugs. ‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing at all?’
Abass shrugs again.
‘So how did it go, this doing nothing? You sat at your desk and stared out of the window.’ Kai takes a pepper, halves it and dices it swiftly.
‘Yes,’ says Abass, grinning. ‘That’s exactly what we did.’
‘Ah, so you did do something. You sat and you stared. Was that good? What did you see?’
A giggle. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I was looking out of the window this morning. Do you know what I saw?’
‘No.’
‘I saw fifty orange monkeys racing by. Did they come your way?’
Abass’s grin widens. ‘Yes. They did. They ran past the school window.’
‘That sounds interesting. Did your teacher see them, too?’
‘Mrs Turay? No. Because she was facing the blackboard.’
‘What about the other kids?’
‘They were looking at the teacher.’
‘So it was just you. Lucky old you. What else did you see?’
‘Umm.’
‘When I saw the orange monkeys, I noticed they were being followed by a brass band.’
‘Yes. I saw the brass band, too. And …’
‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin?’
‘And all the rats and all the children,’ Abass claps and bounces on the stool. ‘The angry townspeople, the mayor.’
‘One Foot Jombee. The Hunting Devil.’
‘Umm. Umm. A talking sheep!’
‘Now that’s a good one. Can it predict the future?’
‘Yes.’
‘And do arithmetic?’
‘Yes. It can do everything.’
‘Well, maybe you should have given the talking, mathematically-minded sheep your seat in the class while you went and joined the parade. Do you think Mrs Turay would have noticed?’
This last sends Abass into a fit of giggles. Kai carries the pot outside and places it on the fire. There is a stove in the kitchen, but cooking gas is frequently in short supply. And anyway, Kai’s aunts prefer to cook on charcoal. For Kai there is something elemental about it, like bathing in a stream or making a journey by foot.
While the food cooks he goes to wash, dousing himself in water from the bucket in the corner of the bathroom. In his room he slips on a clean T-shirt and a pair of cotton drawstring trousers. Abass sits and waits for him, perched on a set of drawers crammed with papers.
‘Can I sleep here tonight?’
‘Do you want to?’
‘Yes.’
Kai laughs. Abass regards it as a privilege to sleep in Kai’s room and dreams of the day when the room will be his.
‘OK, well, let’s see.’
Together they carry plates of food out to the bench on the verandah, where they eat and watch the world as it goes by.
A rush of air, he can feel his cheeks distort with the force of it. His stomach flips over. He is falling. Falling. The stinging slap of water.
He wakes with a jolt convinced he has levitated, that
he may actually have felt the impact of the bed. It takes several minutes for his breathing and his heart rate to return to normal. When it does he can hear the ticking of his watch on the night stand, the howl of dogs calling to one another in the night, the same wavering notes endlessly repeated. He gets up and picks his way through the house. The odd murmur, the occasional sigh accompany his passage. By his reckoning it is around four, the darkness has begun to lift. This is the third night in a row and the lack of sleep is beginning to tell on him. If tonight he doesn’t get a few more hours it will start to affect his work, his concentration, even his hands. He sits and waits for sleep, though he knows it may be as far off as the coming dawn. After an hour he rises and goes back into the house, only partially retracing his steps, to Abass’s room. The child lies asleep on the bed. He picks up the child’s light body and leaves the room. Abass’s thumb falls from his mouth, his hand trails over Kai’s shoulder.
Never waking, the child tucks himself into the crook of Kai’s body and replaces his thumb. Kai lies still and lets his mind follow the rhythm of the child’s breathing until it drowns the howling of the dogs. Until he sleeps.
CHAPTER 16
The static on the line sounds like the breathing of unseen listeners.
‘Can you hear me?’ Adrian’s words, relayed six thousand miles, bounce straight back to him.
A pause, then Lisa’s voice. ‘Yes, I can hear you.’ Around the sound of her voice images cluster. He sees her standing in the yellow light of the kitchen, her arm wrapped around her waist, leaning against the worktop, one leg bent, cradling the phone in her neck, smoothing out a strand of her hair with her hand, the way she used to when they first married.
‘Sorry about the line,’ he says.
‘It’s OK.’
‘How is everything?’
‘Everything’s fine.’ They talk for a few minutes. Kate has chipped a tooth, an appointment at the orthodontist made for Tuesday week. The old apple tree behind the conservatory might need to come down. Dinner the night before with friends of theirs, some of whom had asked after him, had asked what he was doing. The way she reports this makes it clear she was unable to come up with a satisfactory answer.
Adrian says nothing, instead he tells her the reason for his call. ‘You’ll have to go up to my office. Pick up the phone in there.’
‘I’m already in your office. Go ahead and tell me what you want. I have you on speakerphone.’
The image he has been holding of her fragments. He closes his eyes, scans the shelves of his office from memory and directs her to each book. When she is finished, she comes back to the phone, her breathing quickened by the exertion. He adds the names of several other texts and asks her to order them up for him. He pauses, he wants to tell her what is happening to him here. The man in the private room. The woman at the hospital. What he is looking out upon now. A dying sun, a transparent orb against a grainy sky.
‘I was thinking,’ she says, before he can begin. ‘Do you want me to redecorate in here while you’re away?’
Though he can visualise the place of every book on the shelves he barely remembers the wallpaper.
‘Sure,’ he replies.
Another day Adrian talks to Kai about the man in the room. He is not Kai’s patient, though Kai volunteers what he knows of the man’s condition. In another country they would be looking for a lung donor. Impossible here, it goes without saying. Oxygen might extend his life by years, but the oxygen plant in the city has been destroyed. The hospital’s two concentrators are both in constant use. And though it is a fool’s errand, Adrian searches out the hospital administrator and asks her if anything can be done, knowing all the while that if she had an extra machine Elias Cole would still not rank in the hierarchy of the meek. It wouldn’t have surprised him had she chosen to deliver him a lecture, but instead she saves her breath, looks him straight in the eye and boldly utters the lie that she will do what she can.
A day later she puts her head around the door of his office. This is more than Adrian has seen of her since his arrival, but it is only to say that a package has arrived and is waiting for him in her office. He rises. For a moment she stands in the doorway in front of him, not moving. She has a way of regarding Adrian, as though perplexed by precisely what sort of being he is. Any minute now she will promise that talk, he thinks.
‘Yes,’ she says as though listening to his thoughts. ‘When things are a bit easier, stop by for a chat, won’t you?’ And she turns and hurries off, gunshot heels resounding in the corridor.
In the evening Adrian carries the parcel of books back to his apartment and sets them on the coffee table. He lights several candles (the generator has been playing up), opens a fresh bottle of whisky and sits down. He orders the books into a pile on the table and selects a slim volume, subtitled, A History of Mental Illness. Searching the list of chapters and then the index for the word ‘fugue’, he finds the reference he wants, turns to the page and begins to read.
1887. A time of vagabonds and gypsies, of travellers, wayfarers and tramps. A French psychiatrist working in Bordeaux treated for a number of years a patient by the name of Albert Dada. Dada was not a drifter or a tramp, he was something else – an obsessive traveller. At regular intervals he would abandon his family and his work to journey on foot as far as Constantinople and Moscow. At times he ran out of money, at others he was arrested for vagrancy, thrown into jail and made to return home. But within a few months, always, he set out again. Dada could not say why he travelled, or what he planned to do when he reached the end of his journey. At times he couldn’t even remember his own name. He knew nothing, save his destination. The psychiatrist published a paper, Les Aliens Voyageurs, which brought him a modest fame. Albert Dada became the world’s first recognised fuguer.
A spate of fugues followed the publication of Les Aliens Voyageurs, Adrian reads. Most accounts related to missing servicemen between the First and Second World Wars. The men eventually turned up hundreds of miles from home. All claimed to suffer memory loss, not to know who they were, or how they had ended up in the place in which they were found. Some were using other names and pursuing new occupations. All appeared to inhabit a state of obscured consciousness from which they eventually emerged with no memory of the weeks, months or even years they had spent away. These were not isolated incidents in the lives of these men, but a constant, a pattern of behaviour, of journey, of wanderings, of compulsive travelling. The suspicion, on the part of the psychiatrists treating the servicemen, was of malingering. The men were shot as deserters.
With no single case of fugue identified for decades a small lobby within the profession was arguing for it to be recognised for what it was – a hoax perpetrated by cowards and shirkers which ought to be removed from the official classification of mental diseases.
Three hours after he began reading, Adrian sets the book on the coffee table, stands and stretches. He heads into the kitchen to make himself a sandwich, slices open a loaf of bread to find dead ants baked into the honeycomb, shakes them out on to the kitchen surface, spreads the bread with margarine and layers on slices of bright-pink salami and processed cheese. He yearns for Caerphilly and ham sliced from the bone. From the fridge he takes a bottle of Heineken. The fridge has been on and off all day, the bottle is barely cold. He eats the sandwich standing at the worktop, in front of his reflection in the black glass of the window. What he feels is a sense of anxious euphoria, of a person who happens upon what they think might be a lost treasure in a field, brushing away the mud to see what they have found, hoping, but not daring to hope, fearful of scrutinising their find in case it turns out not to be what they had thought.
Something Salia said, the day of the visit to the old department store, the thing that had prompted Adrian to take a second look at the woman’s notes. They had returned to the mental hospital from their trip into town. Adrian had pressed Salia on the former doorman’s words. He’d said, Adrian repeated, that the woman was not possessed, rather th
at she was crossed.
‘He was making a distinction,’ said Adrian. ‘At least that is how it seemed to me.’
Walking ahead of him, his shoes squeaking faintly on the floor, Salia had stopped and turned to face Adrian. For a few seconds he appeared to consider whether or not to answer Adrian, or perhaps was just weighing his answer.
When he spoke he said, ‘If a spirit possess you, you become another person, it is a bad thing. Only bad spirits possess the living. I am telling you what some people believe, you understand.’
‘Yes.’
‘But sometimes a person may be able to cross back and forth between this world and the spirit world. That is to say, a living person, a real person. And when they are in between the worlds, in neither world, then we say they are crossed. This woman is travelling between worlds. It is something that happens. When I was a small boy there was a woman who became crossed, she was my aunt, in fact. There were times she would move from one village to another, alone, even as far as Guinea and Liberia. People saw her, they said she did not recognise them. Her hair grew long. People believed she had special powers.’
‘Did you ever hear of anybody else like that?’
‘There were people, yes.’
‘Who were they?’
‘Women.’
‘All of them?’
Salia inclined his head. ‘All of them.’
In his mind’s eye Adrian sees the map on the wall of Ileana’s office, the coloured pins of Agnes’s destinations superimposed on the dark window.
The European fuguers one hundred years ago were all men.
Here they are women.
CHAPTER 17
Julius entered my office carrying a briefcase of whisky. His shirt was linen, short-sleeved with stitching upon the lapels, highly starched and only slightly wrinkled in the heat. Next to him I felt dull and rumpled. I was wearing a suit, one of the two I possessed, given to me by my father and shiny at the trouser seat and elbows. The other I should have collected from the cleaner’s on my way in, but had been diverted by a fracas involving a hustler, one of those men who approach you on the street, their illicit wares hidden inside their coats. This fellow had newspapers. They were no more than gossip sheets really, though they were theoretically banned. Their stock-in-trade comprised half-baked conspiracy theories, political scandals, murders served up with especially gruesome or bizarre details and often a graphic photograph, obtained from a police source for the price of a bribe. Once or twice I had found a copy of one of those papers in my office after Julius had been there. I might cast an eye over the front page before I tossed it into the bin.
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