Red Jacket (24 page)

Grace Arrives in Mabuli

“Are you alright, Dr. Carpenter?”

“I'm fine, thanks.”

“For sure, a bit weary?”

“A bit weary, yes.”

The priest is silent again, studying the way ahead. A waning moon offers glimpses of a humpty-bumpty worm of road showing its dusty back in the headlights now and then as it wriggles its way through scrubby blackness.

The only flight from Geneva to the airport near Benke is on Thursdays and she wants to be in Mabuli early in the week. She leaves Geneva on Monday, but by the time she emerges from the airport in Ouagadougou, it is past one o'clock on Tuesday morning. Usually they meet her on the tarmac and escort her through officialdom, not that she regards it as de rigeur, but after twelve hours flying during which she's been serenaded by snores and suffocated by exhalations of foul air, any intervention that spares her extra minutes on her feet is welcome.

Once on the ground, she looks for the priest, but with no luck. Her laissez-passer takes her through immigration and customs, and when one of a tangle of lean, eager young men offers to put her bags onto a cart, she lets him heft the heavy cases. He oughtn't to be helping her at all, given a sign that warns that only porteurs are authorized to handle baggage, but there are none that she can see. Like countless touts inside the continent's airports, he is operating under the radar. As she sets off with the laden cart, she palms him his tip with a conspiratorial smile. When he looks at the money, his smile widens and he bows to signal the extent of his gratitude. It is a bigger-than-usual tip, in the spirit of Christmas just past. She hopes it will help launch him into prosperity in 1994. The new year is barely four days old.

Strong-arming the cart, each wheel with its own mind, she emerges onto the pavement to inhale a dusty mouthful of cool air. She manages to arrest the trolley, and is looking about for the priest when a tiny old woman heaves into view, also fighting a cart. It towers with boxes and bags and is crowned by an oversize suitcase. As the cart, overloaded and tipsy, wobbles across the pitted pavement in front of Grace, it hits a rut and the case on top flies backwards towards its driver. Grace lunges at the large missile and catches it, yanking her body around as it carries her to the ground with its weight. She straightens up, a sharp pain shooting across the bottom of her belly. The woman, though startled, has managed to halt her cart and is limping toward Grace.

“I am so sorry, vraiment désolée. You are okay, mademoiselle? Merci. Merci beaucoup. The barrow
,
it is stubborn.”

“I'm fine, thank you.” Grace lies. In truth, the pain in her lower abdomen, though not quite as severe, still lingers. The suitcase might have seriously injured the diminutive person in front of her, however, and she is glad she caught it. “Are you all right? I think we need …”

As she looks around for help, a man steps up, lifts the suitcase onto the woman's cart, and turns to scan the lines of youth squatting in front of the exit, warming themselves at small lanterns. The outside hustler crew, they hawk local transportation, food, “necesites” like toothpaste, soap, combs, deodorant, and also “hebergument aculliant” translated with equivalent aplomb and equally poor spelling as “horspitable accomodashun.” Four young men leap forward. The man chooses one, dismisses the others with a few words at which they laugh, and speaks to the fellow he's chosen. A bill passes hands, and the old woman's errant cart moves off as she smiles, bobbing her head up and down to show her thanks.

“Dr. Carpenter?”

“Father Atule?”

They shake hands. The priest is somewhere in his forties, tall and very dark. He takes charge of her trolley, guides her towards an old Land Rover, holds the door open so she can get in, loads the bags, and relinquishes the cart to eager palms.

“I apologize,” he says as he settles into the driver's seat and starts the Rover. “I'd hoped to meet you planeside, but I had a breakdown on the way in.”

“It's fine. It's not something one can anticipate.” She looks across at high cheekbones, an aristocratic up-tilting chin.

In a short time the environs of the airport have slipped into deep shadow, but for the odd street lamp and prickles of light in the distance.

“I am so sorry. I forgot. It's because I am reminding myself to concentrate on these roads.” Which is just as well, for though it is very late, lorries and buses overtake and chase past them, their fleeting lights illuminating a bald landscape interrupted occasionally by grey factory-like buildings that loom against the blackness. “It's Harmattan
,
so it's cool at nights. I brought you a wrap, for it won't warm up till the middle of next month.”

“Thank you, but I brought ... ” She glances into the back. “Oh no! I must have mislaid my jacket in the airport.”

“I'm sorry about that. Please use the wrap. It's very warm. Sœur Monique made it. She's always glad when it can be of service. She says it has good juju.”

“Well, I could do with both wrap and juju. Thanks very much.”

“We'll see what we can do about your jacket tomorrow.”

She hugs the wrap round her, a tight weave in dark cotton, warm but not ticklish, and sinks back on her seat, biting her lip against a next twinge in her belly. Dozing off, she muses, “I'm thirty-four on my next birthday. Getting too old for this.”

A couple of big bumps jerk her eyes open. The Land Rover is now squirming through dimly moonlit darkness, its headlights flitting here and there, picking out bushes and fence posts like follow spots on a shifting stage. She listens to the irregular rhythm of wheels on the rutted road, now and then a shuddering of wings in branches, and when the vehicle slows, a faraway pounding like rain. She doesn't see how it can be and is thinking of asking the priest, when she drifts off again.

“We're almost there, Dr. Carpenter,” his voice cuts into a dream, of water perhaps, though once she opens her eyes she isn't sure. “The going gets a bit rough from here on, so I thought to warn you. You should perhaps hold on.”

She hangs onto the dashboard against a mile or so of formidable pitching and tossing, until she sees in the gloom ahead a lighter place, as if someone has erased the spot. Shortly, the priest drives through rough-hewn gateposts, stopping on a small rise. The point of expunged dimness is a lantern held aloft in the hand of a saint of twisted wire, a holiday garland round his neck. A child sits in his other hand. The sculpture is fixed to the front of a building that stretches back into blackness.

Her host looks towards the house as if expecting someone, then shrugs, opens his door, and jumps out, vanishing momentarily, reappearing to open her door. The light from inside the car shows cheeks freckled in a pattern of scars, a mouth pinned at one corner by an odd smile.

“You must be sleepy as a sulcata, Dr. Carpenter. She's our Sahara tortoise. We'll get you something to eat and then install you in your room. Is there a bag with your essentials or will you need all these cases now?”

Grace figures that the person he had looked for was meant to help with the suitcases. She nods, her attention distracted by a flash of lightning so bright and near she swears she hears it fizzle. She is feeling odd and very cold, despite the wrap, the pain in her belly nagging. Maybe she should have forced herself to eat more of the dreadful airplane food.

“I'm a bit tired,” she begins, collecting her briefcase and carryall.

“Why don't I take those?”

Easing herself from the high seat, she hands him the two pieces of luggage and reaches out her hand to grasp his.

“Thank you,” she says and faints.

She relishes the cover of the soft African night, large enough to wrap her up many times over, alive with sounds so she doesn't feel alone. She nuzzles up to it like a human body, comforted by its snores and hoots and sighs, sleeping the sleep of childhood, wedged between Ma and Pansy, surrounded and safe. Strange that on waking, she feels deflated as popped Mary's tears, tiny, red bell-shaped flowers they'd stop and burst on the way home from school. She is in a white metal hospital bed, knees raised on a pillow, shoulders bare, looking up at a tall black man whose long, slim hands hold a stethoscope.

“You're awake, I see. How are you feeling?”

“It's afternoon, isn't it? It feels like afternoon.”

“Early afternoon,” he says. “I asked how you felt?”

“Like a squished tomato. How did I get here?”

“You fainted coming out of the Rover. We brought you in and put you to bed.”

There is a lump of something between her legs. A sanitary pad! Good God. She never uses those things. It's warm and damp down there. Perhaps she hurt herself falling — but hardly there. She tries to sit up, feels faint, and drops back onto the bed.

“No, don't. You should be quiet. Are you hungry? You must be. We'll get you something to eat.”

Past where he is standing by the window in the small, grey room, bright sunlight splatters on dark vegetation. In the near distance some trees, mango maybe, are tall enough to block the light, but enough comes through, dappling in a breeze. Right next to the rails of what must be a verandah there are paw-paw trees laden with fruit. Further away, sun shines on domes of red-brown bricks, just visible through the trees.

The priest has on glasses, round, with pale frames, hitched halfway down his wide nose. She is seeing him properly for the first time. He resembles a schoolteacher, but he is handsome behind the spectacles.

“Father Atule,” Grace considers what she wants to say and decides that since she doesn't know, she will simply speak and find out herself. “This is all highly peculiar. We have a lot of work to do, a lot of ground to cover.”

“It's Jimmy.”

“Jimmy. Thank you. It's Grace. I'm sorry about last night, the trouble and embarrassment.”

“Grace,” he leans towards her and asks quietly, “Don't you know?”

“Know what?”

“You're pregnant. And you may be losing the baby.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“I'm clairvoyant,” he says, or she thinks he says. His smile fades as she slides back into dreaming.

A mountain blots out everything. It is alive, sputtering, the earth vibrating with each explosion. Then it breaks open, emitting lava that gropes down slopes, breaking into streams that fan out and cook everything they come upon, frying, boiling, roasting. Chickens burn up, sizzling in their own fat. She hears the feathers catch fire, smells their scorched smell, the flesh aflame in seconds, the bones, first brittle, then ash. Pigs burst, oil spitting from their crackling. Melons and cucumbers stew in their own juice.

Something moves in a green grove towards which a finger of molten rock is winding, a small thing on the ground, thrashing in a frenzy of waving brambles as it wrestles to be free. She wakes, anxious about the furious little creature. The tastes and smells from the dream are sharply present.

It is night and cold. She is in a hospital gown, under a blanket. The gown is raised up, the bedclothes rolled down to her hips. A man is touching her belly.

“Takes twelve years to make your average Jesuit, if there's such a thing.”

“Do I detect sarcasm, Don Jaime?”

Jesus! What is she saying! The man must think she is crazy!

“I think the child will be okay,” he readjusts gown and bedclothes so she is fully covered.

“It's hardly a child, is it?”

“Whatever it is, it's put you on your back and it's keeping you there.”

“Shouldn't we talk about whether there's any point to my staying? We've not even had a conversation about what's brought me here, plus I'm interfering with the centre's routine.” She is deciphering what she is saying as it comes out of her mouth.

“Man proposes, God disposes. In your country they say, ‘Man pour pint. God take quart.' ”

“You've been to St. Chris?”

“I told you about those Jesuits, didn't I?” She must have been asleep for that too. Off-her-head and narcoleptic!

“Why would they have sent you to St. Chris? Isn't there a big enough need in Africa?” His bio said nothing about him being a doctor, or being in St. Chris.

“I did my regency there, at St. Aloysius College. It seems a long time ago now. Jesuits go anywhere there's a need. We are men of the world in that sense. Africa isn't the world, after all. I've studied at Oxford; I've lived in St. Chris. Among other places.”

“Oxford? So I was right to call you ‘don' then?”

“I preferred to think you were celebrating me as a ganja baron. Suits a big black man better than the other kind, doesn't it?”

He is teasing, but it irritates her, maybe because she still feels outside the fold of black people, though it's silly to call anyone black or African here.

“What makes you think I didn't mean them both?”

He only smiles. “Tomorrow we'll see how you're doing and we'll talk some more. Now we'll send Amitié with food.”

He is almost through the door, when he pauses “One more thing.”

“Yes?”

“It's not my business, but what of the baby's father? Oughtn't he to know?”

Next morning she gets up to go to the bathroom. Through the window, a sky with an old woman's face glowers at her. It is the flinty face she has seen on mothers taking care of wasted daughters spotted with lesions, skin scabbed, or turned to powdery grey; the worn face of grandmothers looking after orphaned grandchildren for whom food is scarce, clothes and shoes are luxuries, and doctors and medicine are fictive things. Wentley folks are poor, sick, and often sad, but she can't recall ever seeing a face or a morning sky like this.

On her way back, she yields to the temptation of peeking through the door. Footsteps sound on the floorboards outside as she is stepping in that direction, and she scampers under the sheets in time to pipe, “Come in!” when there is a knock.