Mountains of the Moon (39 page)

“Your hair,” I says. “It’s so cold, could splash my face in it.”

He makes a little whimper and closes his eyes like a dream. We listens. The lawnmower coming. Going. Chucking up grass. Smell it. Tick, tick, tick, tick. Tap dripping in the sink. Tiny rumble in the East Wing floor from a fast train, long, screams into the tunnel.

“The four minutes past,” Anton says.

Gone.

Wonders if Anton is sleep. Sun slicing in through the open bathroom door is burning hot on my legs. Burning on half of Anton’s face. I blows a breeze cross his skin, blows from his parting to his chin and then from ear to ear, case I can make it a blessing or just even something nice. I lands a butterfly kiss on his eyelid and he flutters inside the sun. Sound he makes is sactly the same as wood pigeons in the chestnut tree. I squash his lips up with my fingers.

“Say television,” I tells him.

“Telli-wison,” he says.

I irons the last bits of sadness way, chases them off into his hair.

“Oh fuck,” I says.

“What?”

“Just seen a lice and its friend, went around behind your ear. Shall we shampoo?”

My bathroom is beautiful, got honeysuckle coming in. The floorboards is white so bright with light from the middle-day sun, dashing in.

“You’ve got a chaise,” he says.

He means the sofa under the bathroom winder, perfect for lying and looking out.

“It was down on Ward 3, nobody there. Michael helped me to carry it up here. Loverly, int it?”

He loves it.

I open a cupboard and show him my stash of white sheets and towels and hospital gowns. If I throw dirty ones down the chute, clean ones come back up in the hatch. Surprises me every time. Anton looks long my shelf, at hand cream, body cream, lip cream, eye wash, tweezers, nail scissors, soaps, shampoos, bath smellies and toothpaste. I got lipstick and massacre and eyeshadow palettes.

“Found everything,” I says. The big winder is open, up-down sort. Me and Anton kneels down on the chaise and look out. Smells of summer-cut grass and honeysuckle.

“Heaven,” I says. It’s my turn. “Bwa-ha-ha!”

Sideways long the East Wing can see the palice steps and people sitting out on them. This is a busy place with all the patients and the staffs and peoples coming and going and visitors. Some go to the village in groups, nurses has to go out with them. The lawnmower man has to go fast cos by the time he mows this side, the other side has growed gain. Anton tries the chaise proper, laid back. I shift to show him the best miracle. I turn the bath tap and sure enough hot water comes out.

“And the toilet works.” I pull the chain to prove it. “Wouldn’t believe all the yuck I tipped down it.”

Anton goes to my bed to get ciggis from his jacket pocket. Then he
leans in the doorway, looks over his shoulder at my loverly room, at angels swirling on the ceiling and the sweep of my Glory sky.

I lean back on the wooden chair and tips my head back in the sink. The side of his hand guards my eyes and the warm water pours through.

“Keep them tight closed,” he says. “Is it too hot?”

“Loverly,” I says.

Then I sit on the chair in the sun with my feets up on the bath while he sorts out my tangle with the chemist comb. Then I wash his hair sactly same, shampoo and fingertips on every inch of brain. Afterward we run a bath. Yardley: Lily of the Valley, found twenty boxes of these bath cubes down on Ward 9. Nobody there.

“One for you and one for me.” I drop the bath cubes in the water.

Anton kneels down to crumble them in.

“I’d forgotten that these things ever existed,” he says.

Bwah-ha-ha!

“Have you had many other guests?” he says, ciggi hanging in his lips.

“No.” I take the ciggi from his mouth, has a puff and blows the smoke way. “You is my especial secrit,” I says.

He nods his head.

“What will you do in the winter? The gateman, someone, someone will see smoke from the chimney or flame up on the windows.” He unties my red cloth knot.

“There’s a blanket cupboard behind the boiler room on Level D.” I has to unbutton his shirt.

The black fists of the Portal Peaks boom and shake in my upturned face. They disappear.

“Who’s Quentin, then?” Robertson says.

They boom. They disappear.

“Quentin?” I say.

“Last night in your sleep you called it out, five or six times.”

“He’s a friend, from a long time ago,” I say. “I’m going to see him in South Africa, when I finally get down there.”

Our guides and porters are leaving the National Park office now. We were both generous with our tips. We wave. They wave. They don’t look back. The Portal Peaks boom in my face. They disappear. Stuff is us, her stuff, my stuff, all out on the grass, we’re having a repack, getting ready to leave and go our separate ways. Robertson’s plastic bags are swarming. She is religious with her thousand little routines; imagine if one thing were to slip her entire life would fall off. The stuff I left in the shed reminds me who I’m supposed to be. I reread the letter from Danny Fish.

He went up to London to visit a friend.

“What’s funny?” Robertson says.

“Nothing.”

I was surprised to find the letter waiting at the Post Restante in Kampala; I’d gone to post a letter to him and one to Tim and the pottery peeps.

“What’s in the little box?” Robertson says.

“Couple of used films; I’ve been sending them back to the apartment.”

“What’s in the canister, rice?”

“Ashes.”

She picks up the gold plastic canister with the black screw-top lid and reads the small fold of paper attached to the side with tape.

It was also waiting for me in Kampala Post Restante. Gwen will be camped in Manchester now, outside Sharon’s house. Can see Gwen dragging along the pavement attached to Heath’s leg, hanging like a gremlin on his window wiper; she’ll make it so he has to run her over. Sharon’s sisters will come running through the garages and alleys with ponytails and buggies, to see the spectacle. They can’t believe that Sharon bagged a brilliant bloke like Heath; the local kids have never had so much fun, the neighbors are so happy for her. Little bastard boy Gavin will shut Tarka the dog in the garden shed and then set fire to it. Jennifer will say nothing and continue sucking on her lollipop. Heath will throw Gwen by a twist of her long red hair into Sharon’s car, he’ll dress it up as one last, final chat, then he’ll drive Gwen to a beauty spot and they’ll fuck like bunnies in the back.

“Are you going to take the ashes up there?” Robertson says. “Up Kilimanjaro?”

“No,” I says. “Not on your nelly.”

“What will you do with them, then? Scatter them somewhere else?”

But our attention is diverted by the arrival of the little people. We get glimpses of their movements, through systems of tracks, around the backs of huts and bits of plots and towering growth of this and that. Here they are. My heart still booms every time. See half a ring of sumptuous skin and washed-out pastel rags, they leave one side open, don’t know what we might do if they get us surrounded and trapped and cornered. Cue representative.

Titter.

Cue representative. Here he is, chubby, blue pants, pink sweatshirt shredded to decorous rags. Comic timing. Shakespearean stance.

“Muzungu—give me money!” A breathless rush, to squeals of laughter, he slaps on his own fat thigh, tickles us all to tears. They can all come closer and sit down now.

What have we got in our bags?

Well. We get it all back out. They show us what they’ve got. Good sticks. Scars. A football made of strips of cloth, wrapped up in an orange fruit net.

“Mana-chuster,” the lad says. “Oo-ah-Cantona.”

Mickey Mouse washed out off a T-shirt. The contents of Robertson’s backpack are up for consideration. There’s a swarm of her plastic bags and wonderment at the revealed contents. A boy dismantles her head flashlight.

“If these batteries are going to be finished,” he says, “do you have got some more?”

“Two spare ones,” she says.

I wonder if Christmas is like this. Another lad is fully absorbed in the workings of Lynn’s Swiss army knife. She shows him the tiny tab where the tiny tweezers pull out. The medical kit is explored; we do small surgery on a splinter, deep in a septic finger. A soft leathery leaf is found and a shake of antiseptic powder is wrapped up in it for continued treatment. The map of Africa is spread out; they understand direction. East: sun up: six o’clock. West: sun down: six o’clock.

“Where is England?” a girl asks.

Kids always ask. I crawl and place a relative pebble out in the dirt. They tell us the names of local villages not shown on the political map. Sometimes I can find what they want on page maps in the guidebook. They love that, proof that they are in the world. My boots are tested, laced up, dragged around in. What they want most is the pen and a sheet of the lined A4 paper. Sun sweeps across the page. The Portal Peaks are free of cloud. Terrible terrible black towers. The sun is scorching on my shoulders, so I put my umbrella up. Of all the things I brought with me it has proved to be the most useful, instant shade for every blistering occasion. It’s black, the umbrella, a compact thing, doubles up as a baboon basher. The Portal Peaks disappear. The children talk among themselves, among
our stuff, interested in everything. Robertson smiles at me. I suck on the chocolate eclair.

“There!” she says.

I look up and see what an ancient Greek saw, ice mile high up in the sky, mad as the moon, mad as ice, thrust from the jungle heart of Africa. The Ruwenzori stand up, then bow out, in a super-trouping flash of light. A heavy black curtain drops and everything, everything begins to crackle.

THREE MONTHS LATER

“It’s not malaria.” The doctor is holding my chin. “It’s hard to know if you’re pale or not with such a tan.”

“I am pale, I am definitely pale, underneath.”

“You do look quite dewy.” His thumbs smooth across my eyebrows and temples, this sickness has a soft powdery texture. Same as this room, whitewash dashed with brilliance like his tunic. The ceiling fan shivers the palm fronds growing in through the glassless windows. A vine has made use of the shutters to climb in over the sill. The rattan couch is calling me.

“About four days, you say, since you arrived on Zanzibar. You didn’t have it on the mainland?”

“No.”

Thwump! Pain chops my brain in half.

“Can you make it stop?” I reel in my chair.

He shines the flashlight in my mouth, under my tongue, up on the roof of my mouth, under my gums, back behind my epiglottis.

“No tonsils,” he says. “You’re traveling alone?”

“I was supposed to meet my friend in Dar es Salaam but she didn’t turn up.”

“Are you worried?” the Doc says.

“Yeah, it’s really distorting my vision; everything is super-eight-ing.”

“I meant about your friend.”

“Robertson. No. Just surprised. We were going to travel down through Malawi together. Her flight goes back to England from Zimbabwe in six weeks, she has to be coming along soon or she won’t do the distance.”

“Maybe she is just—”

Thwump! My mind splits, he holds my temples together, I hold his hands on my temples together. The nurse, his African wife, comes back in with a china jug and bowl, puts them on the mosaic dresser by the couch.

“Hop up,” he says. “I think we should get your temperature down.”

I stagger to lie on the couch. Sunlight cuts through the palms of palms and the doctor and his wife’s hands. A mangy ginger cat super-eights across the sill. Thwump! He pushes gently on my shoulders to stop me folding longways in half. He talks to her in a language. Who knows where she is from, with her round face and eyes and mouth, her skin so totally black?

“We will make you more happy,” she says.

I rest in the crook of her shoulder while she peels the wet pajama top off me. Buck away from the sponge, twist with the trickles, steam into a whimper. The doctor lowers a blind.

“You need your friend,” his wife says. “You need your friend Livingstone.”

When I wake it is evening. Still Zanzibar. Sultan hot. The surround sound of prayers echoing down the alleyways and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” I have slept all afternoon, feel a bit better. While I’ve been asleep the doctor’s wife has washed and dried my white pajamas. Kind.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” he says finally. “I’ve no painkillers stronger than what you’ve been taking. I think you should get the night ferry back to Dar es Salaam, there’s an excellent hospital there, should things worsen.”