I opened my eyes. The girl was shaking my shoulder.
‘Wake up, we’re there.’ And then, with a morbid laugh, ‘I thought you were dead.’
*
The ambulance men lifted the stretcher down onto its unfolding wheels and rushed Floyd away, and the girl hurried after him through the automatic doors, down the neon-scalded corridor to the accident unit.
Bodies under blankets. And the barely breathing, leaking fluids onto the floors. And the walking wounded, bound up and splinted, stilting along in their rods and slings. Everyone was staring. Was I an oddity in this infernal place? Had the Johannesburg General gone so solidly black in a matter of months that a white man was already a novelty? I should have come with the dirk sticking out of my chest. That would have given them something to gawk at. But then they were used to bodies stuck with blades and spikes, prickly as voodoo dolls. At Baragwanath Hospital, patients strolled in off the streets with axes lodged in their skulls.
I decided to take a turn in the grounds to clear my head. But I had not gone far when I tripped over something in the darkness. A signboard jutting out of the lawn. De Wet Irrigation. My stomach said: enough is enough. Heave-ho! Lights were shining through the trees in the valley below. Probably a squatter camp. Or was it Harold Oppenheimer’s place? Living without a care in the world, either way. And poor old Tearle, fallen to earth again, on all fours in a herbaceous border.
*
I traced the girl to a desk in the reception area. The clerk seated opposite smirked when she saw me coming. It was time to take charge.
The girl gave me her seat. I reached for the admission form with one hand and a pencil with the other, forgetfully, and found nothing but splinters and ground graphite in my pocket. The clerk resisted. She put her fist down on the form like a rubber stamp and raised a plastic pen like a club. I brought my upside-down reading skills into play. Once you’ve tackled some Tagalog against the grain, a bit of plain English is a piece of cake — even standing on its head. The form was blank except for the word ‘Floid’ on the first line.
‘That’s a “y”,’ I said, ‘F-L-O-Y-D.’
She took up the Liquid Paper, and I oversaw the lavish whiting out, the painstaking correction.
‘We’ll put you down as the next of kin. What’s your name?’
‘Shirlaine,’ the girl said.
‘Can you spell it for me.’
‘S-H-I-R-L-A-I-N-E.’
It was like something you would find attached to a block of flats. Mount Shirlaine. I repeated the spelling for the clerk.
‘Do you have surnames?’
Floyd was a Madonsela. Shirlaine was a Brown. True enough.
The clerk got half of it wrong. I made her do it over. No medical aid, of course, no fixed address. Allergies? Work, I should say. Previous conditions? Drunk and disorderly. Legal guardian? Impulsively, I put my own name in that box. Black humour.
Then Shirlaine went to find out what had become of Floyd, and I sat down in the waiting room on a plastic seat bolted to a metal frame, and tried to gather my thoughts. The seat was one of many, and I was surrounded on all sides by the wounded and bereft, all facing the same way in rows like passengers on a bus, all bathed in neon as corrosive as acid, all gazing forlornly at the Coca-Cola machines ranged against the wall.
*
i. For ‘information’. Why didn’t they use a capital? That minuscule ‘i’ suggested that the information was not very important. Information was what the doctor ordered. Surely they didn’t think people would confuse a capital ‘I’ with the Roman numeral? I knew what that dot was, of course: a tittle. But what was it doing there? The question had never presented itself to me in exactly this form. Why should ‘i’, of all letters, have that detached fragment floating above it? I went through the alphabet in my head. Just ‘i’ and its neighbour ‘j’. All the others were solid citizens. In that inhospitable waiting room, reeking of blood, it seemed ominous. What hope was there that prescriptions would be filled correctly, that the right tissues would be readied for dissection, that the appropriate procedures would be followed and diagnoses struck, that proper disinfectants would be swilled in the scrub-ups, that the diseased limbs would be amputated rather than their healthy counterparts?
These apprehensions proved diuretic. I sought out the cloakrooms. Dames and Here.
And so I saw myself in a mirror, lit up, fluorescently frank, covered in boot polish. How could it have slipped my mind? Tearle in blackface. Denigrated. A creature of nightmare. An aged printer’s devil, on the wrong side of pensioning-off, not going out in a blaze of glory like that lucky McCaffery, but dropping dead in the traces like Aldus Manutius’s slave. Black. No wonder people were staring. I fetched some toilet paper and cleaned away what I could, which was not very much. Was it indelible?
All along Hospital Street, as they called the main corridor, I looked for a nurse. No one familiar was on duty in the wards near the dispensary. I recalled that the gentler natures were sometimes posted to Paediatrics, on the sixth floor, and so I made my way up there. By a happy quirk of architecture, the sixth floor was just one above the ground. Nothing but glum faces. They were none too pleased to be on duty, but they cheered up no end when they saw me. Laughed like drains. I let them enjoy the joke. Then I persuaded one — a Xhosa, to judge by the cluck-clucks of sympathy — to lend me a hand. She poured methylated spirits into a kidney dish and scraped at me with wads of cotton wool until my skin hurt.
When she was finished, I made her fetch a mirror. I looked like a badly printed half-tone, dismally grey. But it would have to do.
*
On the television screen in the cafeteria, an American amazon called Debra Marchini was chewing the news to pap and sending it south down her supple windpipe, while her audience, a few forsaken inpatients and other lost souls, slept in the beige plastic chairs. I helped myself to a tea bag and hot water from the urn. Half a lemon would serve nicely as a febrifuge, and a rusk to line the stomach. As I dipped the rusk, Mrs Marchini dispatched another bolus of spittle-softened flong, and share prices plummeted in the Far East. The sun was setting in Atlanta, Georgia. Whereas we, according to the clock on the wall, were fast approaching the witching hour. I found a long-handled feather duster behind the silver counter and reached up with its end to change the channel. More news. Bloody bodies and broken glass. A terrorist attack on a Heidelberg tavern. The Germans were always a bloodthirsty bunch, never mind what Herr Toppelmann said. It would serve him right if some terrorist gang made mincemeat of him.
What a blast they must be having at the Café Europa. By now, Wessels would have uncorked the Cold Duck. Thank God it was all passing me by.