Eric Brown: The Serene Invasion

ON THE DAY everything changed, Sally Walsh finished what was to be her last shift at the Kallani medical centre — though she didn’t know that at the time — and stepped out of the makeshift surgery into the furnace heat of the early afternoon Ugandan sun.

The packed-earth compound greeted her with its depressing familiarity. A dozen crude buildings, looking more like a shanty town than a hospital, huddled in the centre of the sere compound, surrounded by a tall adobe wall. Beside the metal gate rose a watchtower, manned in shifts by a dozen government soldiers. When she began work at Kallani five years ago, it struck her as odd that a hospital had to be so protected, but after a few months in the job she had seen why: as fortification against rebel insurgents bent on kidnapping Westerners to hold hostage, to deter local gangs from raiding the hospital for drugs, and to stop the flood of refugees from over-running the centre in times of drought.

Last winter Sally had attempted to grow an olive tree in the shade of the storeroom; but the drought had killed it within weeks. How could she lavish water on the tree when her patients were so needful? Now the dead twigs poked from the ground, blackened and twisted.

Ben Odinga stepped from the storeroom, saw her and raised his eyebrows.

She shook her head.

“Have you finished?” he asked.

“I’m well and truly finished, Ben.”

He looked at her seriously. “Come to my room, Sally. I have some good whisky. South African. You look like you need a drink.”

She followed him across the compound to the prefab building that comprised the centre’s residential complex. He held open the fly-screen door and she stepped into the small room. A simple narrow bed, a bookshelf bearing medical textbooks, a dozen well-read paperback novels and a fat Bible.

She sat on a folding metal chair by the window while Ben poured two small measures of whisky into chipped tumblers.

She took a sip, winced as its fire scoured her throat, and smiled at Ben’s description of it as ‘good whisky’. What she’d give for a glass of Glenfiddich.

He said, “The infection?”

She nodded. “There was nothing we could do, short of flying her to Kampala.” Which, on their budget, was out of the question.

She went on, “I’m worried about Mary. They were close.”

“I’ll look in on her later, talk to her.”

“If you would, Ben.” She sighed. “Christ, I told her not to worry…” She looked up, then said, “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head, smiling tolerantly. He had become accustomed to the frequency of her blaspheming.

A week ago a mother from a nearby village had brought in her malnourished daughter. Her complaint was not malnutrition, but a swollen abdomen. Ben had diagnosed appendicitis and operated, and all seemed well until, a couple of days ago, the five-year-old developed a high fever. Mary, a nurse six months out of medical college in Tewkesbury, had committed the cardinal sin of identifying with the kid.

Sally had long ago learned that lesson.

Ben said, “What’s wrong?”

She looked up. “What makes you think…?”

“I’ve known you for years, Sally Walsh. I know when you have something on your mind.”

She hadn’t wanted to tell him like this; she had wanted to break it to him gently — if that were possible.

“I hope you won’t think any less of me for this, Ben.” She stared into her glass, swirled the toxic amber liquid. “I’ve had enough. I’ve had five years here and I’ve had enough. I’ll be leaving in May.”

She had expected his reaction to be one of disappointment, maybe even anger. Instead he just shook his head, as if in stoic acceptance. This seemed to her even more of a condemnation of her decision.

He said, quietly, “Why?”

She shrugged and avoided his gaze. “I’m burned out. I’m… perhaps I’ve come to understand, at last, that the reality here hasn’t matched my expectations.”

He said, “That is no reason to give in, Sally.”

She looked across at him. He perched on the bed in his stained white uniform, a bony, whittled-down Kenyan in his early fifties, with disappointment burning in his nicotine-brown eyes.

“There comes a time, Ben, when we have to move on. I’ve had five years here. I’m jaded. The place needs someone new, someone with fresh enthusiasm, new ideas.”

“The place needs someone like you, with empathy and experience.”

“Please,” she snapped, “don’t make me feel guilty. I’m going in May and you’ll be getting a replacement fresh from Europe, and after a few weeks it’ll be as if I were never here.”

“Don’t kid yourself on that score, Dr Walsh.”

She smiled. “I’ll miss it — you and the others. But I’ve made my decision.”

They drank in silence for a time. A gecko darted across the wall behind Ben. Cicadas thrummed outside like faulty electrical appliances. It was mercilessly hot within the room and Sally was sweating.

“Do you know why I became a doctor?” she said at last.

“You told me…” He waved his glass. “Wasn’t it something to do with your Marxist ideals?”

“That was why I volunteered to work in Africa,” she said. Ideals, she thought, that had long perished. What was that old saw: If you’re not a communist when you’re twenty, then there’s something wrong with your heart; if you’re still a communist when you’re forty, then there’s something wrong with your head… Well, she was just over forty now and had lost her faith years ago.

“When I was fourteen, Ben, my mother was diagnosed with inoperable and terminal cancer. My father had died of a heart attack when I was two. I have no memories of him. When my mother told me she was ill…” She stared into her whisky, recalling her thin, pinch-faced mother, in her mid-forties, calmly sitting Sally down after dinner one evening and telling her, with a light-hearted matter-of-factness that must have been so hard to achieve, that mummy was ill and might not live for more than a year, but that Aunty Eileen and Uncle Ron would look after her afterwards.

She felt then as if she had run into a brick wall that had knocked all the breath from her body; and, later, a sense of disbelief and denial that had turned, as the months elapsed and her mother grew ever thinner and more and more ill, into an inarticulate anger and a sense of unfairness that burned at the core of her being.

An abiding memory from near the end of that time was when Dr Roberts came to her mother’s bedside and simply sat with her for an hour, holding her hand. Perhaps it was this that persuaded Sally that she wanted to become a doctor. Not the cures Dr Roberts might have effected, or the pain she might have relieved, but the fact of the woman’s simple humanity in giving up so much of her time to hold the hand of a dying patient.

Now she told Ben this, and he listened with that tolerant, amused smile on his handsome face, and nodded in the right places, and commented occasionally.

They finished their whiskies and he refilled their glasses.

“What will you do when you leave here, Sally?”

“Probably take up a practice in some leafy English village.” How her younger self would have railed at her for admitting as much. She recalled, vividly, wondering how her fellow graduates could consider taking up practices looking after privileged English patients when men, women and children were dying of diarrhoea in Africa. What a sanctimonious little prig she must have been back then!

Ben broke into her thoughts. “So, Sally — and don’t be offended when I say this — but you think that you have paid your dues?”