In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,65
possible trouble, he speaks to the South African embassy in Bombay, giving them all the details of what happened and emphasizing, in advance, that the drugs she took were of a legal nature. But he also knows by now from her journal that she was indulging in other drugs with Jean, so in case of an unexpected search he goes through Anna’s rucksack from top to bottom, to be sure there’s nothing incriminating.
Around me, in the village where I have spent months of my life and come to know some of the locals quite well, there has descended a general air of suspicion. A number of people, some of them near-strangers, have felt free to question me aggressively about what took place. A few pretend sympathy, but it always leads to the same point. Your girlfriend, they say, why did she do it. Were you fighting with her. The inference is clear, and chimes exactly with my underlying guilt. She’s not my girlfriend, I begin, but I always fall silent. My protests only confirm what they believe.
So I retreat into a tiny circle of refuge. Caroline and Sjef and Paula are my new and only friends. I spend a lot of time in their company and we talk endlessly about what happened and what might still be coming. We even manage to laugh at certain moments. I really want her to recover, I say one day, so that I can kill her myself.
It’s around now that I become aware something else is afoot, something connected to Caroline. I hardly know her, yet we’ve been plunged into artificial intimacy, and in our scattered conversations I’ve learned a little bit about her. She’s mentioned that she was married but that her husband was killed in an accident long ago in Morocco. I gather, between the lines, that this is the central event of her life, one which has marked her deeply, despite the intervening time, and what’s happened now with Anna seems to have revived the memory for her again. She talks about it now and then, always in sideways allusive terms, but a shadow creeps over her face, her eyes fill up with tears. That ride in the ambulance with Anna, she says one day, it was terrible, it reminded me of, oh never mind. On another occasion she says, I’ve been having the most terrible dreams, all about what happened in Morocco. She doesn’t go on, but on the far side of her words I sense a chasm falling away into darkness, and I don’t want to look over the edge.
On the third day already there are signs of life. Anna makes the occasional movement, her eyelids flicker, and on the fourth day she’s awake. When I go through for the morning visit, she peers dimly at me and her mouth, stretched around a thick plastic tube, manages a smile. When I visit again that evening the tube is gone and she’s lying there, whole and restored.
After everything that we’ve been through, this feels unreal. I stroke her hand and speak gently, a gentleness that in truth is almost genuine at this moment, as I ask her how it feels to be alive. She’s very weak and I have to crane to catch her whispered reply. Shit, she says.
After this period of suspension and stasis, events start to move quickly again. First thing the next day they move her from ICU to the coronary ward opposite. They need the bed, one of the nurses explains, and she will be under intermediate care. And at first this new arrangement seems in balance. Because she has no physical power, she’s mostly docile and compliant, though she still requires constant care and attention and one of us must be on hand to provide it. For the first day or two she has terrible diarrhoea and every little while has to be helped out of the bed and steadied while she crouches over a bedpan. He remembers the conflicting sensations of pity and distaste as he holds her upright, his hands and feet being splattered with the watery discharge. She smiles sweetly up at him and murmurs, this is a test of our friendship. You have no idea, he answers.
Afterwards it’s his duty to carry the brimming bedpan into the rat-infested bathroom and empty it out and wash it clean. It’s a job he repeats over and over through the day, a humbling task which is more than has ever been asked of him