by Lucie Wilk
“How are you feeling, ma’am?” He asks to say something, but already knows the answer.
“Much better.” She confirms. “These are working. They are foul, but they work well.” She rattles the bottle of pills.
“You look better, ma’am.”
She is looking at him in a way that makes him uncomfortable.
“Do you have a woman, boy?” She asks. He notices she chose the word woman, rather than girl. He supposes that Maria would be closer to a woman than a girl. He thinks of her buttocks that strain through her dress, and her breasts and then, aware of his wandering thoughts with the woman watching, feels his face get hot. She laughs.
“So you do.”
Jakob shakes his head. “No. I lost her.”
The woman laughs harder. “Still a boy and already he has had a woman and lost her.” She shakes her head. “Such history in such a little body.” She stops laughing. “Such loss.” Now she looks so serious that he is worried she will start crying again. “Such loss.” She repeats. “What have you lost, boy? Who have you lost?”
Jakob shrugs. What has he lost? Nothing. Everything. He knows what he is about to lose, and now, suddenly, wishes to be alone.
He says: “I have to go. There are patients waiting.” He turns and leaves without waiting for her response and as he pushes the cart away he thinks that she is a patient, and she is waiting. She is waiting, too.
*
When he gets to the nursing station, he asks Lila at the desk about that woman.
“Miss Makombe?”
He frowns. “In the private room.”
The nurse nods. “That’s her.”
“She said something about a husband.”
Lila makes a face of disapproval. “She was a minister’s mistress. He was generous. He gave her a house.” She looks at her own hands, ringless. “If he were her husband, she’d be in South Africa now.”
“Mmm.” He agrees, and then asks: “What medicine is she taking?”
Lila gives him a bored look. It is like all her other looks. But she answers. “The stuff in the locked cupboard. The stuff you have to pay for.”
“What locked cupboard?” He has never heard of this.
“They don’t tell most patients about it. Unless they have money. But I think they should let everyone have the chance. They should at least let them know.” She returns to her work, her boredom wiping over their conversation, ending it.
Jakob wanders away. He wonders if this relates at all to an argument he overheard once between two doctors. It was Dr. Kumwembe and Dr. Bryce. They were arguing about how to treat a patient. One wanted to offer an expensive medicine to the patient. The other argued against as it would bankrupt the family. Jakob left before he could hear the final decision and who won: the patient, the family, or the doctors. It is always the doctors. He left the room feeling like his own soul was the rope being tugged to one side then the other. He wanted to tear himself back from their powerful grip. No one should be allowed to pull on him like that, make him feel that way. Now it is back safe inside him, coiled like a snake. But the knot in the middle is still there and so tight from all the pulling that it won’t come undone.
*
“So how did you lose your woman?” Miss Makombe asks, calmly taking her pills out and placing them in the palm of her long, smooth hand. They are a colourful batch of flat, chalky circles and bright, shiny capsules.
Jakob watches her swallow them with the water he has brought, this time without asking. She takes them all at once and he can see them move down her throat, he can tell when they have reached her flat stomach. The medicine, although making her gain weight, has caused her face to thin and her cheekbones to rise like hills growing beneath her large eyes. He doesn’t know how much to tell her about Maria. He settles on what little he knows.
“I wasn’t gentle.”
At this, Miss Makombe releases a peal of laughter. Jakob watches her and wishes he could laugh like that. When the laughter settles and she wipes her eyes, she says, “Oh my goodness. This woman of yours is such a lady.”
Miss Makombe reaches out for Jakob’s hand and grasps it. Her nails, somehow, are still painted red. “I tell you what,” she says. “You can get her back. But … ” She raises an elegant finger, “you must be firm. Firm and gentle. This is possible. It is the best way.”
When he is ready to leave her room with her empty water cup, he pauses at the door.
“Would you like me to bring you your medicine tomorrow?”
She raises her eyes. They are bright now, with the medicine. Like Maria’s were when they used to meet in the closet. Shiny and full of secrets. “Yes.” She says. “Please.”
Lila is grateful to be relieved of one duty related to Miss Makombe. “That’s fine. I hate talking to her,” she said when he told her that the patient had asked that he bring in her pills. She showed Jakob which bottles contain Miss Makombe’s pills. Today, he takes the keys from Lila’s hands and goes to the locked cabinet. He finds the pills. He takes them from the bottles as instructed by Lila. He takes two of each and places one in her pill bottle and the second in his pocket. Then he takes the bottle with her medicine into Miss Makombe’s room.
*
Jakob has been rearranging resources inside the hospital. He has been taking them apart and putting them back together in a way that fits better, like a jigsaw puzzle, so the overall picture makes sense. He moves things so they function better. Like food. If it is not being eaten here (there is always excess in the doctors’ lounge) then he moves it there (he finds the hungriest patients). Blankets being kicked off a body already too hot are removed and thrown overtop of one that shivers. And now this: Jakob examines his latest find, a piece of the puzzle that does not fit. A pad of thick paper and a palette of water paints, the little round cakes of paint planted neatly in the white plastic case. Little happy faces of primary colours smile up at him. The paintbrush is small and red with short, fat plastic bristles.
He tries to imagine the people who sent this here, what sort of place they call home. He tries to imagine a hospital where the children inside it are well enough to sit at a desk, or stand at an easel, and paint pictures. The children at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital are all lying down in cots or stretchers or their mother’s laps. They are all listless with hunger or illness or something even worse. These children cannot paint, cannot even stay upright long enough to take a glass of water, it must instead be fed into them through a plastic tube.
This is the first time that Jakob has taken a resource and used it himself. But when he saw it, he needed to unpack it. And when he unpacked it and knew no child could use it, he needed to do something with it. The palettes, so neat and tidy in their little compartments were begging to be wet, begging to have a brush dragged through them. So Jakob, with only brief hesitation, took this gift and brought it here.
Here is a rock just the right height for sitting in a field behind the hospital. It is empty in this field, the grass is nearly dead around him and refuse piles are the only inhabitants. Some piles have been burned down to a scrubby assemblage of half-burnt scraps that still release the acrid smell of burning plastic, and others are piles waiting to be ignited. It is ugly here, but it is quiet and empty and no one will see what he is about to do.
Once the paint is unpacked and his cup of water is positioned on the ground, he dips the brush in, smears it in the blue cake and holds it dripping above the paper. He decides to paint what he sees, so he begins with the blue of the sky, and marvels how the colour so easily mimics what is above him. Then he paints the refuse piles around him: tarry black with dirty white and the remnants of colour from things half-burnt. Then he paints the hospital: grey blocks housing red blood and yellow sputum and cloudy spinal fluid and black vomit and the white circles of scared eyes around brown centres, black empty dots in the middle staring back at him. He paints t
he clear straw fluid that leaks out before a baby arrives and he paints the yellow-white cream that coats the soft brown of newborn skin. Then the thick purple coils of the umbilical cord and the dead white ends of the cord once it is cut. Then the worried relief on the mothers’ faces once the babies have arrived and the flat faces of the staff who lean over the old and the sick, their mouths one straight, dark line. The maze of halls and rooms that don’t end, and the morgue where the bodies lie stiff and silent and naked and alone. On the last blank page, he paints his mother but he takes some liberty and doesn’t paint her as she is in the hospital. She has both her feet and even her womb and he surrounds her with many children and bush animals and all her aunties and uncles and above them blue sky and below them Lake Malawi which he imagines to be expansive and radiant with blue-green waves which would rock her to sleep and above all of that the warm, yellow sun. This is what he wants to paint but by now all the colours have been mixed together and are all the same muddy brown and so he smears the page with this—dirty, almost colourless brown and then he picks up the pad all heavy and wet with paint and hurls it as far as he can. Then he stands, staring at it, the sodden mess. More rubbish.
Chapter 29
Somehow Henry had hoped he would find Juma here. A silly, naïve and romantic notion of coming full circle. Also, he needed Juma’s smile and his faith in him, at least when he started back on rounds. Something to give him confidence. Henry was sure that the patients would be even more doubtful and frightened of him when he rose from among them and began to lay hands on them. But the opposite happened. Word had spread among the patients that he had climbed Mulanje Mountain, faced Sapitwa in a fierce battle, and had survived. All true, he supposes. The fact that he survived somehow redeems the foolishness of climbing Sapitwa in the first place. Like a knight returning from battle. Scarred, but stronger. This is where the patients superimpose their own hope on the story. That he returns stronger. As he limps between the beds and leans on IV poles for support, he knows it is all hope. But he will take it: this hope. It is something he has not felt in this place since planting his first step on Malawian soil except, perhaps, from Juma. Now he sees a little of Juma in all these faces that look at him in a certain way. In a way that considers what he might do for them. That it is possible he may do something for them while they are here.
He walks crookedly up to the next bedside where a young woman lies, watching him from under her blanket. Ellison has made his mark by extracting a premature infant from her belly and the wound, although ugly, is now healing well. The infant fights for his life in the neonatal intensive care unit, tiny tubes inserted everywhere: through the mouth and into the lungs, through the nose and into the stomach, through the thin, wrinkled skin into a vein in the leg. This was one of his first cases upon returning to work: resuscitating this infant. There was no paediatrician in house at the time, and he was next in line. And he did it: the infant breathes and eats and wiggles and cries.
Henry places a hand on the woman’s shoulder, tells her about her baby although she cannot understand a word. He is her firstborn.
The woman is infected with HIV. No clinical evidence of it, though. No AIDS, yet. She watches him as he talks, studies his face, hair and beard, then looks at his arm reaching down to her shoulder, but he leaves it there as he talks. Then he palpates the abdominal wound, satisfies himself that it is clean, and the dressings are dry.
He pats the woman’s shoulder one more time, scribbles some instructions down on her chart, and hobbles over to the next patient.
*
Lunchtime in the cafeteria, he eats alone. Kumwembe has not forgiven him, it seems, but gazes at him across the tables with an analytical look, an expression that indicates he has not made a final decision. He is being watched. For now, Henry waves to Kumwembe who nods. Henry washes his hands in the aluminum basin beside his plate and then picks up a piece of nsima. He pushes it through the relish, puts it in his mouth, enjoys the flavour of the relish, the smoothness of the nsima. He washes it down with a cool, sweet drink of water.
*
Miss Makombe smiles and pats the bed beside her. It has sheets on it so she doesn’t have to sleep on the vinyl mattress. It looks comfortable.
“Sit.” She commands, lightly, then smiles up at him. Miss Makombe has a fetching smile, now that there is a robustness to her again. Jakob has not heard her cough for a long time. Her arms are less skinny and her rings don’t slip and slide as much on her fingers. When she stands up and paces her room he can see that her bottom is also filling in, becoming two round globes where there had been nothing but pokey bones before. He is amazed at the power of the drugs—simple little packets of dust—he has broken one of them open to see. He is not sure what he had expected to find in the capsules, but he still questions how something so small and easily misplaced could result in such sweeping changes in a body. He has been hoping to find the courage to ask Miss Makombe if there is something else. What else has she done to achieve this? Who else has been helping her? What sing’anga has been visiting, flying in like a bat in the night and disappearing before any of them can see him, impregnating her with the seeds of new life, but instead of a baby it is she who is reborn? If only she would share her secret with him, then he could ask the sing’anga to visit his mother, because the pills have been doing nothing for her. But what is the price for this twisting of fate? What has she traded in exchange for the return of her youth and beauty? For indeed they are back: her lips and eyes and new curves demand his gaze. He cannot stop it; his gaze keeps going to her, wandering over the secret places under her robe and then he must pull it back, push it down to the neutral territory of the floor.
For such a dramatic change, he would be willing to negotiate. For his mother. He would do it. He wonders what a truly skilled, truly powerful sing’anga would demand in exchange for the return of his mother’s foot.
Miss Makombe pats the space on the bed beside her again.
He sits down there and feels the mattress puff and then sink under him. She moves a little closer to him, sliding down into the dip he has made in the bed. Her robe now touches his leg. He looks straight ahead, each of his hands placed resolutely on one of his knees. He glances sideways and she is smiling at him still.
“I am leaving tomorrow. Did you know that?”
He didn’t know. The nurses didn’t tell him. Perhaps they thought he wouldn’t care. Perhaps they thought he’d care too much.
“So, I suppose it will be goodbye soon.”
He looks over at her. She has fixed those tilted eyes on him and he can see how she seduced the minister. He can see why he bought her rings, and fine clothes, and a house with a garden.
“Do you think I am beautiful?”
Jakob nods. She leans in and their lips touch, press together and then open. As soon as this he is already trading things; the negotiation has already begun. A kiss with this renewed spirit-woman for what? The kiss itself is similar to Maria’s kisses, but different enough. Miss Makombe is more in control, her mouth is stronger, her tongue less hesitant and he feels her tugging on him with her lips and her tongue and he is not sure, not sure he wants to follow, but soon, with her tugging and her warmth and wetness, he forgets that this is a negotiation, that he has to keep his head clear, that he has to watch for whatever dark thing beckons to him from her, inside her.
His mouth still on hers, his breath forcing itself through his nose, he pushes down on his cock that is pressing uncomfortably from between his legs and reaches over and slips his hand under her dressing gown where her breasts have been hidden for so many weeks. He places his hand over one breast and finds it much smaller than Maria’s and it is slack and empty. Jakob now remembers her breasts as they were when he first met her: deflated and defeated, the dangling nipples flaccid and useless. Like a witch’s; appealing only to the bewitched. He snatches his hand out from her robe and stands up, backs away from her and into his
cart. Metal basins clatter behind him. Now he knows that her apparent recovery is magic, just magic, for the sorcerer has only tended to the visible areas and the hidden areas under her dressing gown, still shrivelled like an old woman’s, are proof.
A sigh comes out of her, slow and stale like dead air, with his breath on it. “We shouldn’t have done that,” she says. She looks at him. “You’re just a child.” This sounds like an accusation. She looks up at the ceiling and her neck is too skinny, as though it won’t be able to hold her head, and he can see scales there in the lizard-like triangle of skin underneath her jaw. Tears roll down from the outer corners of her eyes, drop onto the shoulders of her bathrobe which still gapes open where he had his hand.
“I am a man.” He says to her lizard neck, to the hole between her collar bones, to the space in her body which he now knows is empty.
From Miss Makombe’s room, Jakob goes straight to the locked medicine cabinet; if Miss Makombe is leaving, he won’t be able to go there any more. Inside the room of medicine and supplies, he unlocks the cabinet and picks up one of the bottles of pills she has been taking. He pinches out one of the long oval capsules—one half of it white and one half blue. When he squeezes it, it buckles under his fingers and then pops back into shape. He contemplates taking several more—maybe another week or two of supplies. This may be his last chance. His only chance. He settles on taking one more week’s worth, and slides seven of the blue and white capsules into his trouser pocket.