Out of a Clear Sky

  ‘And you?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ I said, with all the breeziness I could muster. ‘You just need to go home.’

  When she had gone, I found I could wait no longer in the dank chill of the cottage. It was warmer outside, even in the deep shade of the forest. I walked back through the trees to where Tom’s body lay. Nothing had changed except that his blood had dried and darkened, blending in with the dark rich leaf mould of the forest floor. Zannah’s shirt was stiff with it, rank with the charnel-house smell and uncomfortable to wear. Tom lay pale and still where we’d left him, almost peaceful, almost as though he were asleep on his back among the branches of the felled tree. His face as he lay there was the face of my dead father, gaunt and still on the hospital pillow.

  I was almost too late to see my father before he died. He had slipped into a coma before I arrived. The staff there had made him comfortable; that was all that they could do. They’d found the cancer too late and besides they had nothing, none of the skills or drugs a British hospital could muster. He had refused to go back, preferring to die with the sound of the birds and the insects around him, the air of Africa the last air he breathed. Zannah took me straight to the hospital from the airport, and I was still dressed in my travelling clothes and stiff and crumpled from the flight. Despite the heat I felt chilled, as though I’d trapped some of the damp air of England and brought it there with me, deep in my bones.

  I sat in the little private room where he lay, and waited there while Zannah went off to snatch some sleep. Such a basic room, for a hospital, with breezeblock walls that were open to the elements, white painted and clean. I could hear everything going on around us, the calls of children playing, the passing back and forth of jokes and comments from the doctors and nurses, distant traffic. I felt remote from them all. The room was a still point of silence, shaded and cool. My father lay in the bed, wasted and thin, hardly disturbing the covers except for the rise and fall of each slow rasping breath. I sat, barely moving myself, too late for words, too late for anything. Just him and me in the fading light of the afternoon, together at last.

  Unconsciousness had smoothed out the lines of age and illness. It had lent him an air of calm and detachment: the grave, still demeanour of the judge. I had not come for forgiveness, I realized as I sat there beside him. I had come to be judged, to be held in the balance, and be told it was all right, my exile over, restored to my rightful place beside him. But I had been too stubborn to forgive him first, to submit to his judgement, and had come too late, for he did not regain consciousness. Instead, at some point between one breath and the next, he just stopped and was stilled and breathed no more.

  As the light faded, and the evening insects started up their noise, a nurse came in, singing softly to herself, a hymn I recognized but couldn’t name. She smiled when she saw me, but didn’t speak, turned to the body on the bed and started to lay it out. Gently and carefully she washed the wasted limbs, with as much care as if he had been alive. She crossed his hands upon his chest, never once breaking off her song, an act as much of worship as of work. Finally, she pressed shut his eyelids over his eyes, cutting off his gaze. He looked dead now, all sense of presence gone, only the shell remaining. The insects seemed to chime in with her singing, a background chorus. She stepped back and looked at the figure on the bed, then at me, and, smiling once more, stepped out of the door and was gone, leaving me to my vigil.

  I sat on beside him through the dark of the night, knowing that I was alone, knowing that I had come in vain. I kept my vigil for him anyway, for there was nothing else I could do. He had loved Africa, he had chosen this end, he had carried on without me. All I had ever been able to do for him was set him free.

  Zannah had wanted the truth, but there could be no truth now, no final reckoning. I turned back to Tom, and the resemblance I had thought I’d seen had vanished; his face once more was the face of the boy I’d first met, all the defences gone, absurdly young under the protective helmet. I knelt and touched the cooling white skin at his throat, where the tan didn’t reach. His freckles stood out stark against the pallor of his face. Only the eyes, half opened but drained of life, looked really dead. I closed them the way the nurse had done, crossed his arms across his chest. They say the hearing is the last to go, and the woods had been full of birdsong all day. I wondered if he had heard them, if they had been the last sound he heard on this earth. Perhaps even then he would have been naming them, nailing them down, accurate to the last.

  The afternoon passed, and the evening, dusk falling with the blackbird still singing his irresolute song, a handful of wandering phrases, over and over. Then with the darkness came silence, and the slow passage of the night. No owls called, no insects here, just the murmur of the leaves, soft rustlings in the undergrowth. Perhaps I slept a little as I waited in the chill for the dawn. In the morning, as the birds erupted into song around me, I would ring the police, once Zannah’s plane had safely gone. No need to mention her name. I’d have some explaining to do, but I was used to that. They wouldn’t question my guilt, not with my past. I would be submitted to judgement at last. For after all, if I wasn’t guilty of this, I was surely guilty of something. I was a dangerous person to be around.