‘It won’t help to have a long white face,’ he said. ‘If you truly sorry for what you done, you can make yourself useful. Go with to the hospital.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I say it might help to have a white face along.’
What relevance this had, seeing that I myself was as black as the ace of spades, was beyond me. In any event, I had no wish to go about in public looking like a greasepainted minstrel. I turned away and watched the ambulance men descend towards the pavement with their burden. The ghouls had gathered, crowding around the open doors of the ambulance, trying to catch a glimpse of Floyd.
Then Wessels stuck the crutch in the small of my back and thrust me bodily onto the escalator.
In my younger days I might have vaulted clear, like that daredevil in the tartan underpants; but when a man of my age finds himself upon a ‘moving staircase’, he moves with it, willy-nilly. I descended. A distracting consideration echoed in my mind: could one be carried downwards by an escalator? Strictly speaking. The very normality of the distraction reassured me that I had come to my senses. De-escalation. The sort of ugly back-formation that would be in the book on top of the cistern. Along with the sayings of sailors and whores. Anything goes.
I had every intention of returning to the fray. It was not as if I could be ‘bounced’ from the Café Europa, especially not by Wessels. I would go straight up again, I would take hold of his foliose lapels and shake him until his epiglottis rattled. Didymus. Skeuomorph. Jughead. Imagine quaffing the contents of that bonce – that watery pap! Point made, I would track down Moçes, the hero of the moment, and thank him for his help. A small reward might be in order. And then I would retrieve ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ and leave the whole lot of them to the mess they were in. That ersatz eighth edition could stay where it was, at the mouth of the sewer. I had every intention … But on the pavement, I bumped into the improvable girl, clambering into the ambulance. The child looked quite lost against a backdrop of cheerful onlookers. Evidently, the sight of a broken crown tickled them.
‘What are you doing out here?’
‘I’m going with Floyd to Casualty.’
‘Where’s his girlfriend?’
‘She won’t come. She says he’s just being pathetic and he’s not going to spoil her bash with his nonsense.’
My heart went out to her. She must have sensed it, because she began to plead with me to accompany her. I felt my resolve weaken. I should do the decent thing. Who else could be relied upon? Dimly, I couldn’t help wondering whether I had played some part in this fiasco. Floyd’s bloody head rolled over on the pallet. The wound was like the flesh of an olive peeled away from the pip. The doctors might give him a talking-to while they were stitching him up. Perhaps it would all work out for the best.
An ambulance man nearly saved my bacon by holding up a bloodstained rubber glove. ‘You can’t come with. Only the wife in the ambliance.’
But the girl said, ‘He’s my father-in-law’ – as if that were within the bounds of possibility – grabbed me by the arm, and before I knew it, they had hauled me aboard and slammed the door behind me. The sirens broke into a Hunky-Doryish melody.
‘I’ve never been in an ambulance,’ she said.
‘Neither have I. Strong as an ox.’
She smelt of watermelons. It reminded me of the watermelon feasts of my youth.
And then Floyd groaned: ‘You gotta stand by me, Mr T. Don’t let me die, man. Don’t let me die.’
*
I had a funny turn on the way to the hospital.
It started with my crooked reflection looking back at me from the shiny surface of some piece of equipment. Crank. An eccentric person, especially one obsessed by a particular theory. See cranky. Perhaps from obsolete crank, rogue feigning sickness. I was sick. I belonged in an ambliance. I should lie down on the other stretcher. Flawless backflip with a double twist to crank, part of an axle or shaft bent at right angles. From crincan, related to cringan, fall in battle, originally ‘curl up’. I was bent. Twisted in the wrong place. Crinkum-crankum. I needed straightening out. Ortho – as in orthopaedic, orthographic – from the Greek orthos, straight. ‘You’re so straight.’ I moved myself backwards and forwards, watching my shape deform around the elbow in a silver tube. My head distended into a soggy melon, elongated impossibly, like a blob of molasses on the end of a spoon, until it suddenly flowed around the bend and stretched my neck into a long thin string. Just as my head was about to detach itself entirely and plummet, I moved slightly, causing my shoulders to swell up and flow after it in a rush. An abrupt constriction in the chest. My recent past, unsavoury to the last morsel, churned in my stomach and threatened to revisit the outside world.
The girl put her hand on my arm. Her voice was sweetly scented, candy-striped in flavours of green, it came close to my ear. ‘Are you okay, Phil?’
Jesus Theodosius Christ. I drew her attention to the shape of my head.
‘Lie down. They won’t mind.’ A confirming glance at the ambulance men, solicitous phantoms in a miasma of Old Spice and congealed regulations.
She pushed me back, and soft and melting as I was, I keeled over on my side. The canvas stretcher was red, and so was the rubber sheet, and the blanket. Sensible choice. My feet got left behind on the floor, and she picked them up like a pair of shoes, very professionally, I thought, and put them on the end of the stretcher. Long practice, probably, with a drunken father. Harvey Wallbanger, everyone’s pal.
Floyd was trying to speak, but they had clamped an oxygen mask over his jaw. Blood welled in his crizzy hair, and one of the ambulance men swabbed it with the tea cosy. Blood was dripping out of the aluminium foil too, around the waist, and splashing the leg of the girl’s jeans. I tried to raise my arm to point it out, but it was glued to the stretcher.
Lava lamps. Never had the temerity to buy one. I used to see them in the display window of the Okay Bazaars in Eloff Street, on the way home from Posts and Telecommunications. What was that substance? It always seemed to be red. Was it magma? Magma come louder. Magda. Merle. Mazda. Bogey. Bonsma. Organs suspended in … that other substance the lava was floating in … Amniotic fluid? Glycerine? Oil. Muddy Waters. Meltdown in my overheated brainpan, my head full of words, my prolix crackpate, my derivations running into one another. The sump. The sumptuous. The crankcase. I am not the crankcase, I am the crank itself. I have been moulded into a shape that was once useful, but is useful no more. I saw the crank. It looked like an S fallen flat on its face. A proofreader’s mark: transpose. Cause to change places. Change the natural or the existing order or position of. The crank was made of hardened steel, and it was lying in a crankcase made of oak and lined with velvet. The velvet was blue, midnight blue. And the crank was me, that rigidly mortised form, that stiff. I was lying in my casket the way I prefer to lie in my bed, on my side, with my knees drawn up and my hands clasped between them. I was lying like that now; the rubber sheet that cleaved to my cheek smelt of methylated spirits. My stomach heaved.
I opened my eyes. The girl was shaking my shoulder.
‘Wake up, we’re there.’ And then, with a morbid laugh, ‘I thought you were dead.’
*
The ambulance men lifted the stretcher down onto its unfolding wheels and rushed Floyd away, and the girl hurried after him through the automatic doors, down the neon-scalded corridor to the accident unit.
Bodies under blankets. And the barely breathing, leaking fluids onto the floors. And the walking wounded, bound up and splinted, stilting along in their rods and slings. Everyone was staring. Was I an oddity in this infernal place? Had the Johannesburg General gone so solidly black in a matter of months that a white man was already a novelty? I should have come with the dirk sticking out of my chest. That would have given them something to gawk at. But then they were used to bodies stuck with blades and spikes, prickly as voodoo dolls. At Baragwanath Hospital, patients strolled in off the streets with axes lodged in their skulls.
*
I traced the girl to a desk in the reception area. The clerk seated opposite smirked when she saw me coming. It was time to take charge.
The girl gave me her seat. I reached for the admission form with one hand and a pencil with the other, forgetfully, and found nothing but splinters and ground graphite in my pocket. The clerk resisted. She put her fist down on the form like a rubber stamp and raised a plastic pen like a club. I brought my upside-down reading skills into play. Once you’ve tackled some Tagalog against the grain, a bit of plain English is a piece of cake – even standing on its head. The form was blank except for the word ‘Floid’ on the first line.
‘That’s a “y”,’ I said, ‘F-L-O-Y-D.’
She took up the Liquid Paper, and I oversaw the lavish whiting out, the painstaking correction.
‘We’ll put you down as the next of kin. What’s your name?’
‘Shirlaine,’ the girl said.
‘Can you spell it for me.’
‘S-H-I-R-L-A-I-N-E.’
It was like something you would find attached to a block of flats. Mount Shirlaine. I repeated the spelling for the clerk.
‘Do you have surnames?’
Floyd was a Madonsela. Shirlaine was a Brown. True enough.
The clerk got half of it wrong. I made her do it over. No medical aid, of course, no fixed address. Allergies? Work, I should say. Previous conditions? Drunk and disorderly. Legal guardian? Impulsively, I put my own name in that box. Black humour.
Then Shirlaine went to find out what had become of Floyd, and I sat down in the waiting room on a plastic seat bolted to a metal frame, and tried to gather my thoughts. The seat was one of many, and I was surrounded on all sides by the wounded and bereft, all facing the same way in rows like passengers on a bus, all bathed in neon as corrosive as acid, all gazing forlornly at the Coca-Cola machines ranged against the wall.
*
i. For ‘information’. Why didn’t they use a capital? That minuscule ‘i’ suggested that the information was not very important. Information was what the doctor ordered. Surely they didn’t think people would confuse a capital ‘I’ with the Roman numeral? I knew what that dot was, of course: a tittle. But what was it doing there? The question had never presented itself to me in exactly this form. Why should ‘i’, of all letters, have that detached fragment floating above it? I went through the alphabet in my head. Just ‘i’ and its neighbour ‘j’. All the others were solid citizens. In that inhospitable waiting room, reeking of blood, it seemed ominous. What hope was there that prescriptions would be filled correctly, that the right tissues would be readied for dissection, that the appropriate procedures would be followed and diagnoses struck, that proper disinfectants would be swilled in the scrub-ups, that the diseased limbs would be amputated rather than their healthy counterparts?
These apprehensions proved diuretic. I sought out the cloakrooms. Dames and Here.
And so I saw myself in a mirror, lit up, fluorescently frank, covered in boot polish. How could it have slipped my mind? Tearle in blackface. Denigrated. A creature of nightmare. An aged printer’s devil, on the wrong side of pensioning-off, not going out in a blaze of glory like that lucky McCaffery, but dropping dead in the traces like Aldus Manutius’s slave. Black. No wonder people were staring. I fetched some toilet paper and cleaned away what I could, which was not very much. Was it indelible?
All along Hospital Street, as they called the main corridor, I looked for a nurse. No one familiar was on duty in the wards near the dispensary. I recalled that the gentler natures were sometimes posted to Paediatrics, on the sixth floor, and so I made my way up there. By a happy quirk of architecture, the sixth floor was just one above the ground. Nothing but glum faces. They were none too pleased to be on duty, but they cheered up no end when they saw me. Laughed like drains. I let them enjoy the joke. Then I persuaded one – a Xhosa, to judge by the cluck-clucks of sympathy – to lend me a hand. She poured methylated spirits into a kidney dish and scraped at me with wads of cotton wool until my skin hurt.
When she was finished, I made her fetch a mirror. I looked like a badly printed half-tone, dismally grey. But it would have to do.
*
On the television screen in the cafeteria, an American amazon called Debra Marchini was chewing the news to pap and sending it south down her supple windpipe, while her audience, a few forsaken inpatients and other lost souls, slept in the beige plastic chairs. I helped myself to a tea bag and hot water from the urn. Half a lemon would serve nicely as a febrifuge, and a rusk to line the stomach. As I dipped the rusk, Mrs Marchini dispatched another bolus of spittle-softened flong, and share prices plummeted in the Far East. The sun was setting in Atlanta, Georgia. Whereas we, according to the clock on the wall, were fast approaching the witching hour. I found a long-handled feather duster behind the silver counter and reached up with its end to change the channel. More news. Bloody bodies and broken glass. A terrorist attack on a Heidelberg tavern. The Germans were always a bloodthirsty bunch, never mind what Herr Toppelmann said. It would serve him right if some terrorist gang made mincemeat of him.
What a blast they must be having at the Café Europa. By now, Wessels would have uncorked the Cold Duck. Thank God it was all passing me by.
In the bowels of the hospital, someone began to weep. A thumping sound, like a chef tenderizing steak, issued from the air-conditioning ducts. Two Thomas Dooleys awoke at the same instant, at separate tables, and looked around with bleary eyes.
*
‘I thought so! I’ve been hunting high and low for you, and I was just going to split when I remembered your thing about tea.’
Shirlaine had Floyd’s bloodied pyjamas, sheared off him by the nurses in the theatre, bundled up in a plastic bag. The cartoon character on the cloth was more irritating than ever. Perhaps it was that Snoopy Doggy Dog whose adages they were always invoking? The eyes were human enough, but the ears hung down at the side of the head like a Labrador’s.
‘How is Floyd?’
‘Needed some stitches. Sixty-five, if you don’t mind. But the doctor says it’s only a flesh wound. And he says it’s just as well he stabbed himself in the head, which is full of bone, or it could have been serious.’
‘Are they releasing him?’
‘No, he’s got to stay overnight.’
‘I suppose we should get going then.’
‘Suppose so. I just want to go past ICU to say goodbye.’
We went downstairs.
‘Thanks a lot, hey, Phil,’ she said. ‘You really stood by me.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
*
The matron left us at the window, with instructions not to tap. ‘They can’t hear you.’
Floyd lay on his back, the sheets tucked tightly around him. His head was tilted back on the pillow, his eyes were wide open and glazed, his mouth yawned. The wound had been bandaged, but I imagined that I could still see it throbbing under the gauze. He looked pale, strange to say.
The screens had been drawn around the next bed. The green cloth sprang out, buffeted by blows from inside, as if some master of ceremonies was trying to find the join in the stage curtains. But Floyd did not stir.
There is a simple physiological explanation, I’ve been told, for why the mouth of a corpse is so often open, as if the dead were gasping for breath until the end or gaping in horror at their first glimpse of the hereafter. I could almost believe that Floyd had breathed his last. Or was he pretending? Any moment now, he would start up and hurl a bedpan against the glass
. But there was no sign of life.
‘Do you think he’s all right?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps we should call someone.’
‘He’s fine. You can tell by the ghetto-blaster.’
She meant the spurt of green lights on the monitor, pulsing to the rhythm of his heart.
*
‘Shall we call a taxi?’
‘Are you paying?’
I reached for my wallet. Gone. Swine must have stolen it during the invasion.
‘We could walk,’ she said, ‘if you’re up to it. It’s not that far.’
‘That would be very pleasant.’ Little did she know how fit I was for a man of my age. And if I exhausted myself, so much the better. It was bound to be dangerous as well, but after what I’d been through, ordinary perils no longer daunted.
We went out into the dark brown air. It was a thirst-slaking antidote to methylated spirits and floor polish, the smell of wet earth and cut grass rising up from beneath our feet as if it had been raining, although there was not a cloud in sight. The night sky was black and full of asterisms. A shooting star exclaimed and fell silent. Then a spatter of rain with a rhythm as steady as the pulse on the machine told me that De Wet’s sprinkler system had switched itself on.
‘Do you mind if I call you Phil? You won’t think I’m too big for my boots?’
‘That would scarcely be possible. And my name isn’t Phil. That was just my nom de guerre.’
‘Oh.’
In fact, she wasn’t wearing boots tonight, but a pair of oversized ‘tackies’, visibly sticky things like the pedipalps of an insect, marked correct with a grandiloquent tick. Nike, the label said. A Nipponese tycoon, I supposed; the marketing managers of the East could not be expected to know Nike of Samothrace, the Goddess of Victory.
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