Two Feet - a free chapter

THE SOUND OF A HAGGIS??

...DOES A HAGGIS HAVE A SOUND?? READ FOR YOURSELF. 

This is what I imagine.

My father was dying from a diseased lung, liver or kidney.

Whichever the ailing organ was, it’s decaying state had been described to him as having the texture of a Haggis.

That is how the Indian doctor, from Calcutta, had described the infected appendage.

 “Spotted like a Haggis, “he had muttered as he stared at the ghostly image that was scorched on the grey and white sheet of X-ray in the room where only one fluorescent tube worked and the fly-strip, heavy with its catch, hung limp from the ceiling.

Through the rusty mosquito netted window, the earth was red, and the sky a brilliant blue, as it always is in Africa.

The Indian doctor, from Calcutta, had recently received a letter from his brother in Birmingham, England. In the letter, his brother had told him that he’d travelled to Scotland. In the letter, he had written down the ingredients for haggis.

These are the ingredients that were listed for the Indian doctor, from Calcutta by his brother from Birmingham, England:

1 sheep’s stomach bag

1 sheep’s pluck – liver, lungs and heart

3 onions

250g beef suet

150g oatmeal

Salt and black pepper

A pinch of cayenne

150mls of stock/gravy

My father would only have “humph-ed” in reply to the description because it was an accurate one and not one for debate. The Indian doctor, from Calcutta – who also owned the general Dealer Store and drove, occasionally, the only imported car – had no need to pull punches or dance the verbal tango with his words. He had seen worse. He would have, as the entire African continent, in his eyes, was ill and looking like a Haggis: dark and spotted and congealed. It was diseased. That is what he often told his wife when he helped serve the pot-bellied  runny nose children from behind the counter in their store. Occasionally he would add the word damn to this description, but that was when he was angry because the Leghorn chickens from the street had fouled in the shop or had stepped onto the bonnet of his imported car.

“Damn dark, spotted and congealed damn continent,” is what he said out loud, now more frequently than usual.

The hospital in which my father was dying was of Government design. That implied it had a corrugated iron roof and was built in the shape of a square with a courtyard and a broad porch. It had a tree in the centre of the courtyard and a concrete bench. The outside walls of the hospital were painted yellow with a green skirt. The hem of the skirt was now stained with the red of the earth, and the yellow had lost its yellow. The roof, that popped and whispered in the heat, was silver in colour and in the evening the branches of the tree would attract the hens to roost.

There was one tap of running water (attached to the borehole pump alongside the dirt road) in the courtyard. A not-so-ill patient would have been nominated to guard over this precious commodity. The tap leaked, and the pool of water attracted many worker bees during the day. On the porch, waiting patients would sit with their backs against the wall, and wait. Their babies would offer a chorus of sounds and the waiting men would spit lumps of phlegm from TB infested lungs into dirty rags.

 And they would wait, and wait for the doctor from India who was an extremely busy man.

My father would have been able to see these waiting, patient people from his bed in his private room. He would have been able to see them through the only door as he lay on his back on the rough, grey blankets and the over-starched linen. Perhaps he admired their patience, the occasional gesturing of mothers as they waved off insistent flies or pushed away the noses of ever-hungry, stray dogs. Perhaps he didn't.  He was, after all, an African himself – white skinned, but African, so these sights and sounds, were not foreign to him. Or then perhaps, he was looking and listening elsewhere by now; had reached that mental space where he was looking and hearing far beyond his present whereabouts. A little soul searching, I wonder, but also doubt.

My father’s room was painted the standard, government-issue of puke green: the colour of a growing lemon on a sick tree. The floor would be red and polished, and there would be a framed photograph of the country’s present dictator on the wall. The mosquito mesh over the window would be rusted. The ceiling would be sagging a little, shaped like a pregnant woman’s belly and there was a water stain in the shape of the island of Madagascar in the corner. He would have a small, white metal table beside him with a jug of water and a glass. That is all.

In my mind, this is the place where he was to die.

In his reverie, my father would listen to the popping and the sighing of the corrugated iron roof above him. He would listen to the chorus of babies and the occasional tap-tap of a nurse’s heel as she walked along the porch. At sunset, he would hear the waiting patients leave the hospital quietly and without dissent. They would return the following day as the sun rose. The smell of distant cooking fires would intrude into the room, flavoured with the taste of maize meal and curry. If and when it rained, my father would listen to the raindrops hammering onto the sheet- iron roof and perhaps as I did as a child, think of machine guns and advancing armies. He would smell and sense the air chill when it rained.

When the night came a nurse would have given him a paraffin lamp with a spluttering wick. In its light, he would have watched the dancing shadows on the walls and listened to the barking of stray dogs. My father did sleep, or at least, he tested sleep, but sleep, when you are dying, offers up darkness, and I think, if I were my father, I would have avoided that. Dozed, but not slept for fear of never awakening.

The Indian doctor, from Calcutta, would do his rounds three times a day. He wore a white jacket and had a stethoscope around his neck. He wore dark shoes that had hard heels so he could be heard approaching from a distance. Clipped onto his breast pocket were three biro pens (blue, black and red) and a little torch for looking into a person’s eyes. On his wrist, he had a fake Rolex watch that was sent to him by a cousin from Bombay along with three cans of sugared litchi and a photograph of a Bollywood starlet.

The Indian doctor, from Calcutta, also wore a woman’s perfume. It was Chanel number five from Paris, France. A salesman had left the sample bottle at the shop months ago. The Indian doctor, from Calcutta, had told his wife that there was never a chance in Hell that they would ever sell such stuff in this “ Damn dark, spotted and congealed damn continent “ and that the salesman responsible would be in need of a new job shortly.

Always following the Indian doctor, from Calcutta, was a nurse from Abuja, Nigeria who was as thin as a bird and as dark as ebony. She was new and she did not like being in my father’s ward. He could sense that in her because she always looked away from him and found interest in her bare feet or in the map of Madagascar on the ceiling. What my father did not know was that this nurse, from Abuja, Nigeria, was feeling ashamed to see such a large, broad shouldered white man lying on a thin metal bed waiting to die. She was ashamed because she knew there was nothing to be done for this man. She was ashamed for him and others like him. That is why she looked at her bare feet on the red polished floor. She was ashamed to look death in the face. The little silver watch she wore over her heart (awarded to her at nursing school in Abuja, Nigeria) was to be used to count a man’s pulse, not to record its fluttering and ultimate demise.

The Indian doctor, from Calcutta, would use his stethoscope and listen to my father’s chest. “Breathe in, breathe out,” he would say. “And again, please." Amplified in his ears, the Doctor, from Calcutta, would hear the gurgling and dying of the Haggis. He would close his eyes to this sound as he listened and he would imagine himself driving on the long road to the city with the Bollywood starlet sitting beside him in his American car.

“Not good,” he would finally say. He would use the red biro pen to write on my father’s chart. “I will prescribe more pain killer. Understand, nurse?”

“Yes, Doctor,” the nurse from Nigeria would chirp in response as she studied the southern tip of Madagascar and wondered who lived and died on that part of the island.

“Are you sleeping better?” My father would be asked.

His response was in the negative.

“Eating?”

He responds with a shrug.

“This I can appreciate. The skoff (food) here is minimal, and the cook, if I may loosely describe him as that, is ignorant, but we do our best as I am most certain you can understand. Perhaps I must put you on a vitamin drip. That will offer you some nutrition. Yes, that is what I will do. I will order it, and it will come by the truck.”

And then the doctor, from Calcutta, would leave followed by the nurse from Nigeria and my father would remain in his bed, listening to a child crying somewhere in the hospital and his nose inhaling the ghostly scent of Chanel number 5 from Paris, France.