Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

Foday nods.

‘Anything I can get you?’

Foday shakes his head. ‘Except you bring me some rice and cassava leaves.’

Kai smiles and shakes his head. ‘No, but afterwards you can eat all you want. You have someone from your family coming to give blood?’

‘My uncle.’

‘Good. Tell him to bring your fiancée. We’re all waiting to meet her. Tell her we’ve heard so much about her. Must be some fine woman. Does she know the trouble you are going to for her?’ It is their joke, the fictional fiancée, Foday’s dreams of marriage and a family.

Foday laughs wheezily. ‘So you can come and take her from me? When you get your own fiancée, then I let you meet mine.’

Kai smiles. ‘Sleep well. And I’ll see you tomorrow.’

On the way out he nods to the night nurse, sitting with her book of crossword puzzles on the desk before her. She raises her head and returns his nod.

That night he dreams of the bridge. The railings pressed into his back. A face close to his. There is shouting. And pain, like a claw hammer at the back of his skull. The pressure on his temple. The agonising paralysis. Then the sensation of weightlessness. He wakes with the taste of blood and metal in his mouth, a ringing in his ears, images crashing against the line of his consciousness. Only the sound of his cousin knocking gently on the door brings him back to himself.

‘OK,’ he calls. Hears her begin to move away, slow steps, in the direction of her own room. He sits up, frees himself from the tangled sheets and searches for the luminous light of his watch. Four-thirty. Two hours left. Through the sleeping house he makes his way to the kitchen, pours himself a glass of water from the steel container. The sound of the water trickling into the glass brings on the urge to urinate. He opens the back door. The moon is high in the sky. His squat black shadow tracks him across the yard like an animal at his heels. Under the banana trees he relieves his bladder. Heading back to the house he stops and for a few moments gazes up at the sky, the milky streaks of stars. He rolls his head around the back of his shoulders. He feels completely and utterly awake.

In his room he lies awake listening to the ticking of his watch and the sounds of the night, measuring off the remaining minutes. At six o’clock he is still there. Outside the sounds thicken with the approach of dawn as every household braces for the onslaught of another day.

Half an hour later he comes out of sleep to the sound of his cousin rapping on the door again, a louder, more insistent knock this time. In the kitchen he quarters a pawpaw deftly with a large knife, offers a slice to his cousin, who shakes her head. Abass is gone already, his satchel bouncing on his back. The two cousins eat together in silence for a few minutes, each with their own preoccupations.

‘Will you help me with the chairs before you go?’

‘Sure.’

‘We can do it now, together.’

Kai waves his fork. ‘Don’t worry. You go ahead. I’ll get it done before I go.’

She rinses her coffee cup at the sink. ‘Will you join us this time?’

‘Let me see how I get on.’

‘You know, you’d be very welcome.’

‘Thanks.’

They go through the same routine every time. Since the church meetings started to be held in the house, Kai makes sure he’s rarely ever at home at the same time. In the beginning he was happy for his cousin, for the comfort she had found in the act of worship. But increasingly he finds the other members of the church irritating, the anxious and obsequious manner they affect around him. They are awed by his job at the hospital and desperate to recruit him to their cause, unaware of how much he despises them, their fevered fatalism. Everywhere you look in the city new churches are springing up, on every patch of bare earth, in the open air, under blue-and-white UN canvas, in houses and empty buildings.

After breakfast Kai carries the chairs through from the yard to the verandah and sets them out in rows. By seven-thirty he is on his way to the hospital. The traffic is light, he makes good time. In the staff room he pours himself his third cup of coffee and sits with it, watching his hands holding the cup, the surface of the black liquid vibrating, the reflections shimmering and shifting. The last few nights have not been good. Hard to know if the coffee improves matters or makes them worse. Another few sips and he sets the cup down. He needs to prepare. He makes his way to the changing rooms for the operating theatres. Nobody is there. Just Mrs Goma’s wig hanging on a peg like a dead bird. Time alone is all he needs. It is an important day, the second operation of the elective, out of a total of four. When it is all over, and if everything goes according to plan, if no serious infections set in, and if all their projections are correct, a few months from now Foday will walk. Not the way he walks now, every step a flailing uphill struggle. Foday will walk tall.

In the first operation they had broken and reset the tibia of the right leg. Today they would perform the same operation on the left leg.

Kai strips off his day clothes and selects a green scrub suit from the shelves. He’s restless, nervous and overly alert. At the sink he washes his face in cold water and inspects himself in the mirror, pulling down his bottom eyelid and inspecting his gums. His skin is dry and taut. He feels queasy. He runs the tap and drinks from his hand. The water is warm and only slightly refreshing.

He sits on the bench and holds his hands up to his face. The tremble is still there. He closes his eyes and leans back against the lockers, feels his breathing slow, his heart quieten. He spreads his fingers out upon his thighs; his body begins to feel lighter.

A knock on the door. He opens his eyes. ‘Yes?’

‘Dr Mansaray?’

‘Yes?’

It is one of the theatre nurses with a message. ‘You’re wanted in emergency.’

‘Did you tell them I’m about to go into surgery?’

‘Yes. They say there’s nobody else.’

He sighs, rises and opens the door, but she has already turned away. He sees her shoulder her way into the theatre where Mrs Goma is working. Swiftly he changes his shoes and makes his way upstairs and through the building to the emergency unit. The unit doesn’t stay open all hours. They don’t have the staff. Instead it opens at ten in the morning and people begin to gather long before. Most conditions can be treated routinely, even when they are serious. But those times there is a real emergency out of hours, you can be drafted in from anywhere.

A massive iron gate had fallen while being lowered into place by a crane, trapping three workmen beneath it. Two of the men had escaped with broken bones and were already being attended to. The third man is the one Kai has been called to look at. The nurse indicates a man lying on his back on the far side of the room. He is not yet forty by Kai’s guess, though he is gaunt and this makes him appear older. He lies without speaking, his eyes open.

‘Hello,’ says Kai. ‘How do you feel? Are you in pain?’

‘Not so much pain, Doctor. Only I cannot feel my body.’

Kai reads the notes the nurse has given him. Suspected spinal injury. He examines the man briefly, calls the nurse and asks for a pin. Starting high on the man’s chest, he delivers pinpricks at regular intervals. ‘Tell me if you can feel this.’ The man nods and whispers, ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’ Then silence. Just above his navel. Kai backs up and repeats the pinpricks, this time to check the exact location where the sensation disappears. ‘Yes, yes.’ When he reaches the same spot, there is silence once again. Next he checks the deep-tendon reflexes at the Achilles tendon. Nothing.

‘I’ll be back,’ he tells the man. ‘Who is here with you? Family?’