Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

‘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.

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.

‘Don’t Exercise in Quicksand,’ said Kai. ‘Diaphragm, External Intercostals, Internal Intercostals, Quadratus,’ Tejani responded. Kai’s fingers traced maps across Nenebah’s ribs.

‘I Long for Spinach.’ Kai bent to Nenebah’s ear and whispered, ‘I Love Sex.’ Her soft snort and giggle as she elbowed him in the ribs. ‘Iliocostalis, Longissimus, Spinals,’ Tejani recited. ‘And I heard that, by the way, you two.’

Kai sitting facing Nenebah and Tejani. The sky behind them. Watching his face drift into hers, and back again, until he can no longer tell one from the other. A cloud passes in front of the sun, the shadows spread across their faces obliterating their features.

Another time. Before or after, he cannot be sure. The two of them alone, he lying on his back with his head in her lap, savouring the warmth and scent of her and of their recent lovemaking, gazing at an upward-tilted nipple. ‘Nenebah,’ he says. And she leans back on her hands, puts her head on one side, the better to peruse him and asks, ‘Why do you call me that? Nobody else does.’ And he replies, ‘Because it is your name. Nenebah. That is your name, isn’t it? Or am I getting you confused with somebody else?’ And she grabs a T-shirt and hits him with it. And when he opens his mouth, the better to laugh at his own joke, she stuffs the shirt inside. It tastes of her.

He gives the finished plaster an experimental knock, pulls the cord for the porters. Afterwards, in the surgeons’ rest room, he writes up notes of the operation. There is nothing for him yet in emergency. Mid-morning and the staff room is crowded. A year or so ago somebody had brought a miniature croquet game and the medics sometimes passed their breaks knocking balls across the lino. Now the miniature croquet has been superseded by miniature boules, though the balls are prone to skid and bounce. He is in no mood either for boules or for conversation. He passes by the window on his way to Adrian’s apartment and lets himself in. Nobody is home. In the kitchen he switches on the kettle, and waits for it to come to the boil. A sunbird is perched on the feeder outside, hanging upside down, angling its head to reach the pipette. From the fridge Kai takes a plastic jar of coffee creamer and the box of sugar cubes, stirs one and then the other into his cup and carries it to the sitting room. He rarely eats until surgery is over for the day.