....here's a short chapter from the novella, Two Feet -- it is an imaginary scenario of where I decided my father must be, or must have gone, when he went walkabout. Sometimes placing a "hole" in your past with an imaginary plug allows you to get on with your future. That's my thinking, anyway!
Hope you enjoy, and as always, please feel free to comment:
A new island was
appearing alongside the map of Madagascar on the ceiling of my dying father’s
room in the African hospital. It was to the North - East of Madagascar, almost
where the Islands of the Seychelles are.
The
appearance of this new stain of an island was the consequence of the late
afternoon rains: a wonderful, ear pounding rain that was supported by
orchestral thunder, and distant giraffe-like striding bolts of fork lightning.
The day’s heat was cleaved apart to allow a fresh smell to rise off the soil.
Rivulets of red water quickly gathered and hurried down the pathways, chasing
laughing children and panicking insects.
Chickens huddled
under the tree in the hospital square, and waiting patients viewed the water as
it poured off the roof above the porch with little emotion as their thoughts
were elsewhere.
The Indian doctor,
from Calcutta, stood on the porch of his general Dealer store and smoked a
cigarette and glared at the rain, as it would delay the truck from the co-op
bearing, he hoped, letters from India or Birmingham, England and the vitamin
drip for the dying white man.
A nurse shook
rainwater from her shoes outside my father’s room, and clucked like an irritated
guinea fowl and walked on with a soggy sound.
My father heard
none of this.
The pain, on this
day, was as constant as a working blacksmith’s hammer on an anvil.
He had closed his
eyes to seeing and his ears to sound.
After the rain had
passed and as the soil drank its last, the nurse from Abuja, Nigeria, came into
the room. As always, she hesitated at the door. She had food on a metal tray
for my father and two capsules of painkillers. The plate of food was covered
with a dishcloth to keep off the flies, and the two capsules were in the top of
a plastic soda water bottle. There was a knife and fork and a glass of water on
the tray.
From the safety of
the doorway, the Nurse from Abuja, Nigeria, studied the inert form of my
father. She realised at that moment, that my father was not only losing weight
but also height. His body was growing back into its pain as if the blacksmith
was hammering his head toward his feet. The iron cast bed was getting longer.
“Hello,” she
whispered from the doorway.
My father shifted
his head and opened his eyes, the fragility of her voice being enough to invade
the resonance of the blacksmith’s anvil.
“You must eat,” she
chirped and put the tray on the bedside table, the movement causing the
painkillers to roll about in the plastic soda water cap. “Two pills every four
hours. Sorry,” she said.
“Sorry”, my father
knew, was often the African way of saying “please”, so he shuffled his body and
sat up in the bed.
He did not want the
food only the capsules. He did not say this, but because he reached for the
capsules first, the nurse from Abuja, Nigeria presumed this.
“You must eat the
food first!” The strength of her own voice surprised the nurse from Abuja,
Nigeria. She raised her thin hands to her mouth as if to stifle any further
words that may come tumbling out, but this gesture brought her eyes up to an
angle to look deep into my father’s eyes. This, of course, was the moment she
had been avoiding for some time.
The Nurse from
Abuja, Nigeria, in the failing light, saw something in my father’s eyes that
made her turn around, and run out of the room.
Some days later,
the Nurse from Abuja, Nigeria would tell the Indian doctor’s wife, who was not
from Calcutta that she had seen the fire in my father’s eyes.
But my father would
never know this was said as he began to eat his food, and as the island of
Seychelles grew by a rusty coloured fraction on the ceiling above him in his
hospital room somewhere in Africa.
*****
Mabuza once told me
that if there are holes in the road you often travel, stop and fill them in,
for this will help the man travelling behind you.
*****
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