Cry of the Firebird

by T. M. Clark

  ‘The nurses are coming to take you to theatre. I need to do another lumbar puncture on you.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I know you are scared, and the last one gave you a huge headache, but this time, we know what to expect, and we’ll be able to counteract that with caffeine. I’ll be there again, holding your hand, but a specialist will stick a fine needle into your spine and take some of the fluid from there for us to analyse. This will help me to make sure that the drugs are beating your meningitis.’

  She had hoped to avoid doing another procedure as they were not comfortable, but now it was necessary.

  ‘Is he going to die, Dokotela?’ Coti asked, her face lined with stress.

  ‘I’m doing everything I can for him; I’m trying hard not to let that happen.’

  ‘Please remember your promise. If he is dying, you need to take him outside.’

  Lily nodded.

  The orderlies arrived, and Lily walked with Moses to the theatre. ‘I must leave you here. I need to scrub up and accompany the specialist. I’ll join you again once we are inside the theatre room, not in the waiting area.’

  Moses nodded his head, indicating that he understood, then Lily walked away—her mind full of the meningitis clusters that she knew about.

  The flash drive had contained a backup of all Ian’s files. Every file had been scanned, and perfect copies were all there, in digital glory now on both her home and work computers. She’d hesitated about calling Piet and letting him know. Her mind was tinged with a little guilt at not sharing all the information with the police, but she pushed it down deep and buried it. After all, she hadn’t found anything worthwhile sharing yet.

  But at least she’d found his book, and that had made her smile. Looking at it, she had seen the enormous amount of work they’d already done. If even half of what the plants claimed to heal could be true, then the book was bound to not only become a household bestseller, but an accurate account of the San way of medication, ensuring it would never be forgotten.

  And she knew that more than a few pharmaceutical companies would be sniffing around the legalities of the book, too. Looking for patents. Looking to secure remedies and ensuring they would get the market share of the drug if they could synthesise it enough and produce it en masse.

  She wondered if Ian and Piet had got any legal advice before they embarked on such a book. She knew what a hullabaloo the world had created when the Hoodia gordonii and more recently the Devil’s Claw plants, both remedies used by the San, were exploited by the pharmaceutical companies of the west, and ‘biopiracy’ was cited by the lawyers as the parties were in court, trying to come to a settlement.

  She’d read most of the reports that Ian had made on the cluster cases, but she was no closer to even suspecting a primary cause. Seven men and three women in Platfontein were dead within the last three months alone. The last thing she wanted was to add another casualty to that number with Moses.

  She wondered if it was what had got Ian killed. Did he find what was causing it?

  Scrubbing up, her mind still on the cases, she backed into the theatre and stood next to Moses. ‘I’m here; I’ll be with you the whole time.’

  He nodded.

  The specialist, Dr Green said, ‘Okay, Moses, I see so many people for this procedure that I can’t remember, do you speak English or Afrikaans?’

  Lily smiled. It was a blatant lie, but one designed to settle her nervous patient.

  ‘Both, but my English is better,’ Moses admitted.

  ‘Good because my San is terrible. Can’t get my tongue around all those clicks. I’m going to explain what we are doing before I start. I find it helps keep people calmer knowing what’s happening.’

  Moses nodded. ‘Am I going to die this time?’

  ‘You didn’t before, did you? It’ll spoil my one-hundred-per-cent-no-deaths-on-my-theatre-table record.’ Dr Green gave a little laugh at his own joke. ‘But we need to find what’s happening inside that brain of yours to make sure we can treat you properly.’

  Lily held onto Moses’s hand. He looked at her and attempted a weak smile. Already she could see that just sitting up had sapped the little bit of strength he had left.

  When the procedure was completed, Lily patted Moses’s hand. ‘Relax, it’s all over,’ Lily said. ‘You did brilliantly.’

  ‘I was very scared, Dokotela Lily. Very scared.’

  ‘You covered it well. You did good.’ She smiled at him. ‘When this is done, the orderlies will wheel you back to your room, and once I have the results, I can decide on your ongoing treatment.’

  * * *

  It was past midnight, and Lily was still at the hospital. She stood at the end of Moses’s bed. In all her years of medicine, she had never had a patient not respond to their meds with meningitis. But then, she had never had a patient whose bloods were so bad either. Moses was already crossing into full-blown AIDS; no wonder he had contracted meningitis so easily.

  If a person was healthy, you could sneeze on them and they would be fine. If that person had a compromised immune system, however, they would come down with pneumonia. In Moses’s case, he’d been exposed to a little fungus somewhere and he’d contracted meningitis.

  Both of the spinal taps had the same result. And he should have responded faster to the antibiotics given. She had switched to a higher dose of the IV drugs on hand and increased his oral meds, too.

  But Moses was now unresponsive. Four days after bringing him into hospital, and thinking that perhaps she had saved him, she knew that she was losing her duel with Death and his sickle. It was as if Moses’s poor body had just had enough, and no matter how many drugs she pumped into it to stop the fungus, it was finished fighting.

  The draining of the fluid from his spine should have helped, but she could see her patient was in pain. Despite also giving him pain meds, he had begun moaning even in sleep. He no longer sweated, no longer moved. He was just still. While the groaning was a comfort that he was alive, she could see that Moses was going into organ failure.

  Lily didn’t understand it. She hated losing patients. She knew that you couldn’t save everyone, but she tried—always. To lose someone was to have their death like a tattoo marking on your heart. It was a soul she was forever responsible for.

  She didn’t want Moses to die. But he was dying.

  She began questioning herself in her head, questioning every step of the process she had taken since she heard about him.

  ‘Coti,’ she said quietly to his wife, who had sat vigil beside his bed for the last four days. ‘You need to wake up.’

  Coti sat up in the chair.

  ‘Remember the promise. Come, it’s time,’ Lily said. ‘There’s a battery in the heart monitor, so here, I’ll unplug it from the wall. Make sure that and the drip follow.’

  Coti nodded again and was ready to wheel her equipment. Lily watched as slow tears seeped from her eyes at the inevitable outcome of the night and wished that it could have been different.

  As they passed the nurses’ station, Lily said, ‘Nurse, the extra blanket, please.’

  ‘Let me call an orderly to help you,’ the nurse was insisting as she placed the blankets over Moses to ward off the chilly night.

  ‘No, there isn’t time to wait,’ Lily said.

  The nurse went to the top of the bed and began to help.

  ‘Where are we going, Dokotela?’ Coti asked.

  ‘There is a balcony off the visitors’ lounge where Moses can see the stars. I’m so sorry, Coti. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Thank you for keeping your promise and for staying here. Holding Moses’s other hand until he crosses over. Moses would have liked knowing you more. You need to know that to our people, death isn’t something we fear. We are born of the sand, and when we die, we return to the sand, and we become part of it.’

  CHAPTER

  13

  The following morning, the sun was barely rising over the purple horizon as Lily looked out the win
dow of the doctors’ lounge in the hospital. For once, she thanked the thick glass that separated her from the outdoors because the predawn singing of the Karoo thrush in the big jacaranda trees outside would have been too joyful for her.

  She rang Piet’s mobile.

  ‘Detective Kleinman.’ His voice was not one of a man who was sleeping.

  ‘Piet, it’s Dr Lily Winters.’

  ‘Official name. What is wrong?’

  She took a big breath. Delivering sad news was never easy. ‘I wanted to let you know that this morning, just after four, I lost Moses. I’m so sorry I couldn’t save him.’

  There was a moment of silence on the other side, then Piet cleared his throat. ‘He had meningitis. I know you did everything you could to save him, but he will be missed in our community.’

  ‘That was one of the reasons that I called. I don’t know what cultural procedures you follow. What you do for his burial? Who do I release the body to? I was turning to you for help.’

  ‘I’ll be right there, Lily, give me half an hour to get to the hospital.’

  * * *

  When Piet arrived, Lily was standing in the doorway watching Coti, who still sat in the same place as she had when they had wheeled Moses back into the room, a sheet over him, the machines silent. She had reached over and put her hand against his body, and there it had remained.

  ‘Thank you for calling me,’ he said and walked to Coti. He had in his arms a soft blanket made of the skin of a springbok that he draped around her. ‘Come, Coti, you need to let us take care of Moses. He can become one with the earth. He is with !Xu now.’

  A young woman introduced as Elise walked past Lily, her head lowered.

  Lily didn’t say anything, worried she would do something that might be culturally insensitive. Elise put her arms around Coti and helped her up.

  There were other women in the corridor, all waiting to touch Coti and show their support. Lily watched as they quietly walked down the long passageway.

  ‘They are silent now, in respect of those still asleep in the hospital, but wait till they get outside. The women will sing and cry together,’ Piet said. ‘There is a bakkie waiting outside to take them all back to Platfontein, and they will get Coti ready for the funeral.’

  ‘What do I do with Moses?’

  ‘You release him to his people. There are men outside waiting. They are with the private funeral home. They will take his body and we will have a funeral this afternoon.’

  ‘Thank you; they may take his body. Do you need anything else from me?’ Lily asked.

  ‘No, I see the release papers on the clipboard at the end of the bed already. They will sign them and give them to your reception when they leave the hospital.’

  She nodded.

  ‘You look exhausted; you need to go home and rest.’

  ‘That was the plan. Been a few years since I pulled a full night with a patient,’ she said. ‘Guess as you get older you don’t bounce back so easily.’

  ‘Come on, I’ll drive you. Quintin and I can fetch your Cruiser later. You look ready to drop.’

  ‘I would appreciate that, it’s been an emotionally draining week,’ Lily said.

  * * *

  They drove in silence for a while, across Kimberley and out onto the Midlands Road, Lily lost in her own grief of losing her patient.

  ‘Thank you for all you did for Moses. If you are rested this afternoon, you are welcome to attend his funeral. He will probably have a sort of hybrid Christian-San burial, as many in Platfontein have looked to the church in their time of need, but Moses was not one of them. He was still traditional. I totally understand if you do not want to attend. Funerals are always hard on the living souls,’ Piet said.

  ‘Thank you for the invitation, but to see him go into the ground would break me. I have seen too many people lowered into the dark. Way too many than someone ever should have to.’ Her mind flashed to Zam Zam and the daily body-washing rituals of the population there, and then placing their corpses into the hard earth because they had died from hunger, or had been ravaged by the conflict between the races. She pushed the scene from her mind. ‘I think I was at peace with saying goodbye to him when I took him out to die under the stars.’

  ‘That is a wonderful gift you gave him. In our belief, he is now in the hands of !Xu. That is why it was important for Moses to look at the stars when he died. So that his passage to his god in the sky would be swift and he would not get lost along the way.’

  ‘I’m sorry that despite all the modern medication at my disposal, I was still unable to save him,’ Lily said.

  ‘Even the best and fiercest doctor will never win the fight with !Xu. If it was Moses’s time to go, then it was time for his footprints in the sand to end.’

  Lily gave a weak smile.

  ‘It’s good to see you safely home.’

  ‘Safely. Is there even such a thing here at the moment? Ian’s killer is still out there, and we still have no idea why he was killed,’ Lily said.

  ‘True, but investigations like this take time. We will find the perpetrator in the end. Sometimes it’s just something little that helps us catch them.’

  ‘Little, oh that’s classic. I wanted to tell you about it on Monday, and I guess we both got busy. I have good news. I’ve found an electronic copy of your book,’ Lily said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At work.’

  ‘That news is especially welcome today.’

  ‘Ian had copies of all the different chapters on a flash drive. We can add the new plants that you’ve brought since we got here. It’s a good thing that you and Quintin have taken pictures and written about them,’ Lily said. ‘The project can continue. I don’t know if it’s the latest version, but it’s a start.’

  ‘I like that we are still working on the book. It is very important,’ Piet said.

  ‘The odd part is that the flash drive was taped to the bottom of a drawer. Ian had obviously hidden it.’

  Piet drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. ‘That is odd. What else was on the flash drive?’

  ‘A number of medical files, photographs, your book. I’m still looking at all the files to see if they are related to my cluster work or not. Quintin was able to crack some files that were password protected, so now I have some of Ian’s analysis files showing me the clusters of meningitis he mentioned to World Health. But nothing on his research on HIV, which was the main project he was employed for.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘There is a heap of pictures, too, some of the people I can recognise as we’ve worked with them before, but many I can’t. I don’t know if they have relevance to anything. I can tell you that in these medical files, he had more patient information than just from his practice here in Kimberley. He also had files from Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, all of the people who had died of either pneumonia or meningitis, and often the files are not of deaths, just of people who have been ill and who then recovered. His files that he had on the analysis seemed incomplete, like he hadn’t gone through all the data he’d accumulated.’

  ‘When did you find the flash drive?’

  ‘First day of work.’

  ‘Jislaaik, Lily. Who else knows about it?’

  ‘Only Quintin.’

  ‘Keep it that way. Would you mind if Natalie and I came in and did a search of the practice? Perhaps there is another drive hidden there. This is cause for concern. The people who trashed his place, they were looking for something, obviously the flash drive. And if you are saying it is incomplete, and you found it at the office, then we might find something useful there.’

  ‘I’m happy for you to search, just do it neatly—people have to work in that office.’

  ‘You will not even know we have been in when we are done.’

  Lily nodded.

  ‘I’ll talk to Natalie and see if we can go in tomorrow when there is no one there. It would make it easier for everyone.’

  ‘That’s a good ide
a.’

  ‘In the meantime, if you can give me the flash drive, I would appreciate it.’

  ‘Okay,’ Lily said. ‘You can have it when we get home. I have copied it onto all my computers; those files are never going to go missing again.’

  ‘Let us hope so.’

  ‘Now that I have the data, I have somewhere to start my analysis and begin looking for the cause of the clusters,’ Lily said.

  ‘Everything else aside, I know it is selfish, yet I am seriously delighted that our book has not been lost.’

  ‘I printed out a copy for you—it’s at home,’ Lily said.

  ‘I look forward to seeing that,’ Piet said.

  CHAPTER

  14

  Reyansh read his email and gave a big sigh of relief. The container had cleared their docking area and was on the move to Kimberley.

  He sent a text to his sister: Goods left safely from JHB. Await confirmation from distribution in Kimberley.

  He opened the drawer and looked at the tablets that he had sitting there, then he slammed it closed again. No use taking the edge off now when he knew that Mishti would come barrelling through the door at any moment. She’d be demanding to know in what order he thought the sicknesses would happen, as if he already had it mapped out.

  He wouldn’t know the answer until the replacement stock orders started making their way through the system. Then he’d be able to see which of his drugs were being taken, and then they just had to wait for the corresponding medication necessary to combat the infection. It was still a source of frustration for him that he couldn’t tell precisely where the cases were turning up. Thankfully, the new system they were implementing with the suppliers was already starting to show some of that information—it would pay for itself in the end, just the location information alone was worth the cost.

  The drugs were perfect.

  Now it was spilling out into more drugs. Mishti was getting greedy and had instructed him to expand, again. Not only the HIV-positive people, but into the general population’s drugs, too. Her excuse was that there was only so much more pain you could make someone who was HIV positive go through before you killed them, and dead people didn’t use pharmaceuticals. She needed them alive, to rely more and more on the drugs.