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STOKING THE FIRE
I stand beneath the
Pawpaw tree amongst the spider webs, and I continue to imagine.
The Indian doctor
from Calcutta leant over my dying father. He was using his stethoscope to
listen to the mutterings of the haggis. The doctor no longer smelt of Chanel number
five from Paris. That had run its course some time ago. Now the doctor carried
the musky scent of stale perspiration and nicotine.
The Nurse from
Abuja, Nigeria kept her distance as always. A slight breeze caused the curtain
to shift over the window beside her. The water stains on the ceiling had
increased. Madagascar had now met the Seychelles. Were they at peace?
“Your breathing is
better. It is not as irregular,” the doctor finally said, removing the
stethoscope from his ears. He fidgeted with the biro pens in his pocket. “I do
not want to be an optimist here. Cancer is a chameleon. It can be as difficult
and as temperamental as...”
“Trying to build a
garage,” offered the Nurse from Abuja, Nigeria. The breath that followed her
sentence was almost explosive.
My father settled
his eyes on her as the doctor spun on his heels.
“What?”
She inhaled. She
had taken the plunge. She had found her moment. “The doctor,” she told my dying
father, “is trying to build a garage for his car.”
“There is no need
to tell a patient this, Nurse. Please go and find something else to do.”
“Perhaps you can
help him?”
“Enough of this
nonsense,” The doctor said. “Please leave.”
She kept her eyes
on my father. She was biting her lower lip, and her small hands were tightly
clenched.
You saw this in
her, father. You realised her intent, her need to have said what she had. Had
she not been the only one to have crossed the line and made you the soup? Had
she not been the only one to blow life into a dying ember? She has always been
with reason, with cause.
“What is the matter
with the garage?”
You keep your eyes
on the Nurse. Even her toes are clenched against the hardness of the waxed,
concrete floor.
“There is no
garage.”
The Nurse from
Abuja, Nigeria exhaled. “You can build one together.”
The Indian doctor
from Calcutta takes a step closer to the Nurse. “What is the matter with you?
This is an ill, a seriously ill patient! Go away. Away!”
“Wait!”
There is strength
in the timbre of your voice, and it startles the doctor.
“I can, at least,
take a look.”
“There is nothing
to take a look at. It will take weeks for the concrete blocks to be delivered.
This is all very, very stupid and I apologise.”
You lift yourself
off the bed, dying father. You stand. The Indian doctor from Calcutta, steps
back a pace, unaccustomed to seeing you erect. He has forgotten how tall you
are.
“You have mud?”
The Nurse from
Abuja, Nigeria, stifles her joy through clasped hands. The whiteness of her
large eyes shone bright over the temple of her fingers.
“Mud makes bricks,”
you, Father, tell the doctor.
I step away into
the sun and stand amongst the radish plants. The soil is moist beneath my bare
feet. The rhythm of the borehole is incessant and calming. Soon the radish
bulbs will go to market.
I'm going to leave
you now, dying father.
You will mix the
mud, and you will build the doctor’s garage. The doctor from Calcutta will
anoint his hands alongside you in the African soil and as the two of you sip a
gin and tonic after the day’s work at sunset, he will see the residue of life
beneath his fingernails and, perhaps, together, you will look out onto the road
and dream of the journey ahead.
At some point, you
will journey down that road in an imported, chicken-shit free motor vehicle and
head toward the undulating horizon. Perhaps the Nurse from Abuja, Nigeria, will
come along for part of the ride like a Bollywood starlet. This remains in the
ether, Father.
That is what I will
continue imagining for now.
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