‘Do you know her?’
‘Yes. Her daughter worked here once, the ma would pass by from time to time.’
Sometimes he would go and call her daughter for her. A fine girl, the daughter. He and the woman would pass the time of day as she waited. The woman lived a way outside the city, he remembered, because when there was nothing else to say they discussed the state of the roads. That is as much as he remembers. Many years have passed. So much has changed. People say the woman has become possessed.
‘Is that what you think? That she is possessed?’
The man stands up from the plinth to address Adrian: strained, slow movements.
‘I have seen her here before. Sometimes, for some of us, they say spirits call. She is not possessed, but she is crossed, yes. And that makes some people afraid. I am not afraid, because I knew her before. But people now are not as they were, they are more fearful.’
The man accompanies them back to the stairwell. Adrian thanks him and shakes his hand. Salia leans forward and presses a few notes into his palm, and the man nods and closes his fingers around them. Silently he watches them go.
Outside they make their way back through the glare and the dust. Salia, two steps ahead of Adrian, walks like a dancer with his shoulders and chin straight, seeming almost to glide an inch above the ground. Adrian wonders how to engage him in conversation.
‘What exactly did he mean when he said she was crossed?’ he asks.
Salia turns to look at him. ‘Why do you worry about this woman?’
The question, upon the lips of a psychiatric nurse, stops Adrian short. One of the attendants had asked the same thing, chuckling secretively as she waddled down the ward sprinkling disinfectant upon the floor, her manner suggestive of something faintly improper about his interest. Why this one? Why not? he wants to answer back. But he cannot think of any other answer apart from one that is true, because apart from the patient in the hospital, the dying Elias Cole, she is all he has. He has no desire to have to justify himself. Still, Salia is Attila’s henchman.
‘Shall we get something cold?’ Adrian points to a seller with an ice box sitting upon his haunches under a tree. He needs to be in the shade, out of this unrelenting heat. Salia nods and orders crushed ice, choosing a topping in a lurid shade of yellow. Adrian asks for a Coke and searches in his pocket for the change. While Salia spoons crushed ice into his mouth, Adrian repeats his question.
‘It is to say,’ answers Salia. ‘When a spirit enters a person sometimes it makes them act a certain way, what people call crazy. So he is trying to tell you the woman was acting crazy when he found her. That is all.’
Later, in Ileana’s office, Adrian carefully rereads Agnes’s notes. On the wall he stares at a map of the country. Holding on to the patterns, the order of vowels and consonants of the unfamiliar place names mentioned in her notes, he locates them one by one. In an ashtray on Ileana’s desk he finds a small number of coloured drawing pins, also three earrings and a safety pin with a ribbon tied to it; he uses them all, pressing them through the paper. In this way he marks each separate location, including the place where he saw Agnes in the street his first week in the country. He is standing back, reviewing his work, when Ileana enters and stands next to him smelling of smoke and perfume.
‘Art therapy?’
Adrian smiles. ‘Guess.’
‘Something to do with your patient, right?’
‘Yes.’
She gazes at the map, then shakes her head. ‘Tell me.’
‘They’re all the places she was found before she was brought here.’
‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ says Ileana.
Side by side they stand and stare at Agnes’s journeys mapped in colours and jewels.
Agnes sleeps. Both her hands are tucked under her chin, her body curled into a question mark. She is completely still, no fluttering of eyelids, a dreamless sleep. Adrian stands at the foot of her bed. He can barely discern her breathing. In the corner of the room a woman smiles and sings to herself.
Afterwards he walks through the gardens, past the lawns to a small cluster of trees in a hidden corner. The Patients’ Garden, as it once was, has gone wild. Crazy paving. Anywhere else he might have imagined it as somebody’s idea of a joke. The paths are overgrown, the air carries an odour of dead flowers mingled with the freshness of the sea. The ground is covered with long, curved pods, some of which have opened and spilt their seeds. An orchid, dark and dense, crouches on a branch above him. He ponders Agnes and her journeys. Fugue, they call it in his profession, a condition in which the body and the disturbed spirit are joined in shadowy wanderings.
Agnes is searching for something. Something she goes out looking for and fails to find. Time after time.
CHAPTER 15
The man on the table has dreams, he dreams of marrying. The most Kai usually knows about a patient is a name and a medical history, sometimes not even that much. But this patient is Kai’s elective. His dream is to walk straight and find a bride, or perhaps it would be truer to say to become a groom. There are few who would give their daughter to a cripple, especially a poor one. His name is Foday. This will be his first operation.
Kai works the pedal of the diathermy with his foot, cauterising the blood vessels at the point of incision. In contrast to his youthful face, Foday’s body is muscular and bears old scars, one on the heel of his right hand, another on the back of the leg upon which they are operating, upon his right buttock two small disc-shaped scars.
‘Looks like he’s been through the wars, this one,’ says Seligmann. And then, ‘Sorry,’ as he catches the anaesthetist’s glance. She is, Kai knows, merely confused by Seligmann’s use of idiom. But he says nothing.
Foday lies on the table, asleep and naked. He has placed his dreams in the hands of the surgeons and his balls in the hand of a nurse, who holds them aloft, out of danger of the scorching end of the diathermy wand. He expects miracles, Kai knows.
An hour and a half later Kai, alone in the theatre, works on, soaking the plaster of Paris bandages in water and wrapping them around Foday’s leg. The leg is straight now. Kai’s hands work dextrously, smoothing the slippery plaster. Foday’s other leg slides off the table. Kai moves around and replaces it carefully, leaving plaster of Paris handprints on the upper thigh. He is as intimate with Foday’s body as with a lover. He takes a damp cloth and dabs at the chalky prints on Foday’s thighs. There are splashes of wet plaster on his genitals and Kai wipes them too. If he has time, when he has seen how things are going in emergency, maybe he will stop by the ward, try and get there soon after Foday wakes up.
A hillside. How many years ago? Five, six. Kai, Tejani and Nenebah. Two of them revising for a test: textbooks and lecture notes, a picnic of peppered chicken and Vimto. They hadn’t gone far, just the hills above the campus. There they had a view of the city, of the sprawling docks. The smell of dried grass. Tejani and he rehearsing mnemonics upon Nenebah’s person. C5, 6, 7,’ said Kai. ‘Raise your wings up to heaven.’ His fingers walked up Nenebah’s back between her shoulder blades, using her vertebrae as stepping stones, feeling the muscles quicken at his touch before she let her arms float upwards like a bird in flight. ‘Injury causes inability to raise arms past ninety degrees,’ replied Tejani, lying on his back with his hands across his eyes. Kai laid the flat of his hand against Nenebah’s back. And results in, Tejani spoke each word slowly, pushing against the effort of remembering. ‘Winging of the scapula.’ He lifted his hands from his eyes. Nenebah clapped.