Long Lies the Shadow (15 page)
Read Long Lies the Shadow Online
Authors: Gerda Pearce
The past, another country, another continent. Another hospital, on the edge of Africa, five thousand miles and a lifetime away from this.
She looked up from dispensing. There was a man standing at the counter. He had an arrogant smile, she noticed. A misplaced arrogance.
Misplaced
in this country that would assign him lesser status because he was not white. She noticed the arrogance all the more because of this. So perhaps it was bravado merely. But noticeable all the same.
This is her abiding memory of Jonnie, how she will always remember him, all smiling confidence and charm. A far-off laughter in his eyes, as if he finds amusement in the tragedy of the present, as if he has the benefit of distance, or of time.
It is two decades on since then, and he stands in front of her again, apparently unchanged. She is swathed with emotion. Her child is ill, she needs no further complications. So many questions lie unanswered in this space between them, so many years elapsed, disappeared in the instant of seeing him. There is so much to be said, and yet there is nothing she wants to say.
Ellie
.
Ellie, Simon’s child, does Jonnie know? Her thinking is blurred, for of course it does not matter, but she has held secrets to herself for so long that it seems any intrusion from the past is a threat. And Jonnie, Jonnie is dangerous. As always. Dangerous to her stability, her fragile hold on normality; he has always been for her a heady nightmarish tumble off the edge.
He is talking to her, saying something in a voice that seems foreign and far-off. That Ellie’s scan, her EEG is clear; that there is no sign of epilepsy, that further tests are needed. That they should talk.
They walk, in silence, down through a makeshift underground corridor and up again. It is painted with dolphins underwater, and as the ground rises, they surface alongside. She wants to glance up at him, to see if he is as unchanged as he appears. She can smell the curious hospital mix of him, of antiseptic and aftershave; citrus, spice, and sandalwood that catapults her back to when they met.
The mountain was mauve in the distance across the hazy heat of the Klipfontein plain. She saw him on her ward. He was holding a child, comforting its ceaseless crying. So many lonely children were here, some of whom had been abandoned. He would look up at any second and find her staring. Gin looked out the window. Later that evening a wind would come up from the east, bringing the cloud to cover the mountain with its misty mantle. He was asking her a dose, he was smiling.
Why ask me that, her heart had shouted, rebelling. Ask me the lines of poetry that sway through my head, ask me why the sea is part of my soul, how the warmth of the sand underfoot is a favourite feeling, the easy answers. Paediatric doses belonged in the obscure realm, hard to access, along with why Simon had gone, why Simon had not phoned, nor written.
Still, somehow she managed to pluck it from obfuscated depths, smiled back. And suddenly aware of the truth of the smile, Gin felt it warm her insides like the sun, lifting back a layer of sadness. The first man to make me smile since Simon. A good day.
The hospital canteen is cold, bare, brightly lit. There are few
customers
, and they sit alone at a table in the corner. The coffee is
machine-made
and weak, a thin skin floating on top. Brown granules melt into its tepidness. She looks anywhere but at him. Feelings she
thought long-dead are scratching at her throat. She wishes to not be here. Why did Ellie fit? Why is her daughter ill? Why is he here? She will not let him enter her life. Enter it as easily as he once left it. The scratch in her throat becomes an ache and she knows if she talks, her voice will break. But his bleep buzzes, and he excuses himself, walks to the phone on the wall.
He was everywhere. On her wards, in the corridors, walking past while it was her turn dispensing medicines from an awkward hatch. Too high for everyone, her chest would brush the loudspeaker. The scratchy static echoed through the waiting area. The regime of the day dictated
translation
of all African names, so there were endless misunderstandings, repetition, and calling. It was even more difficult identifying patients, swaddled babies bundled closely to their mothers’ backs. Gin had learned how to say in Xhosa how many teaspoons a day, but despaired at the lack of communication, the inability to warn of adverse effects. It was easier with the Cape Coloureds, the mixed-race descendants of black and white, for their language was Afrikaans, and she was fluent. Forced to learn it as if a mother tongue, again by dictate of the day.
She was to call him Jonnie, he said. Once they were friends, before they were lovers.
Mohammed Jay Kassan was privately educated. Expensive private schools in Swaziland were the reason for his ease, his confidence, amongst strangers, whites. Mohammed, he told her, was as common as John. So everyone called him Jonnie, he laughed. Jonnie Jay of the black heart, she added. Black heart, “because,” he had said, “anyone not white in this country must by virtue of that fact, be black.” Be they Coloured or Indian, the struggle was that simple. The struggle was for all, even her, if she chose. He had challenged her, and Gin’s world had erupted. She realised how sheltered she had been.
An innocence lost.
They worked late nights in the mobile clinics in the townships. Gin
felt the wound of the country open, expose itself to her like a
festering
sore, rank and stinking as it touched air. To heal it must be seen. Gin wondered at her capacity for selfishness. It was a raw but cherished time. Surrounded by sorrow, she started to find a fulfilment, a purpose, and looking up at Jonnie from her frantic dispensing, knowledge of a heart healing. Ignorant of the meaning of Simon’s silence, whether it was indifference or, paradoxically, not, believing in her soul that the
closeness
between them still existed, needing no letters or phone calls, there remained a certain anger. Anger for lost time, a full swollen pushing tide of unfinished business, and a fear that Simon’s life moved on without her, while hers lay stagnant and dying without him. So Jonnie was
necessary
to break the bond, burst the dam, flood the flow, to wash away, to cleanse her of Simon.
“Hey, Ginnia,” he says.
The soft sound of his nickname for her echoes around the hollow she has created. She tries to focus, looks up at him with heavy-lidded eyes, suffused still with a warmth of memory. Unguarded. His bleep, which had momentarily saved her from the immediacy of conversation, has allowed only for contemplation, reminiscence. She feels exhausted and ill-prepared for this confrontation. She feels the need to shut herself off, to barricade herself against him. The sadness of their situation depresses her. She knows her eyes will never look at him again the way they once did. This they both know, she realises, as they sit over the scratched linoleum of a cafeteria table, the clock gone eight hours into a chilly Friday morning in November.
Perhaps she would have known him less. If not for Simon, if not for Gabe. If Gabe hadn’t died. If Simon hadn’t betrayed her. If not for the silence between her and Simon that sprung such a well of loneliness it had drowned each day her hope.
Night of dark moon. There were so many people. The air was thick with
smoke, incense-like. Heady, subversive, hard to breathe. He was intense. His eyes did not lift from her. Asked her strange, probing questions she found difficult to evade or ignore. Conscious of others’ eyes and the fact that she was one of the few white people there. It was strangely thrilling for one so sheltered, kept apart in this land of stilted morality and hypocritical Christianity. The room had darkened, the music deepened, marijuana scented the air. He had her trapped.
“Why are you so unhappy?” So, it was palpable then. “What’s your favourite colour?”
Did it matter? Colour, yes. Colour mattered in South Africa, yes, think, Gin, what colour? Blue. Blue, the blue of Gabriel’s eyes. Fragments of pain. No, green then, maybe, the flecks in Simon’s. The fragments melted into a terrible, tangible cohesion. Black, the deepening blackness of yours, she thought as she stared at him, intoxicated. All my life I have waited for you. Simon’s face swam in front of her eyes, and she willed it away, his betrayal stabbing.
“I remember you,” she said, unaware of whether it was aloud or not. “I know you. I remember you lifting me into your arms, high with delight, and I remember you dying. I put your body on a barge and lit the funeral pyre, and you drifted away from me on the great river, slowly burning. And my heart could not contain the pain of separation, and I threw myself into the water after you, and drowned. And here I am again, drowning again, in the depths of your eyes, and they will not let me go.”
She felt afraid then, of this vastness of emotion. He led her outside, into the icy July night, onto the small cement balcony. Trees stood indigo against the darkness. Luscious willows dipped trailing fingers into the deep chocolate of a narrow stream below. She let him kiss her, tasting cinnamon and ash. She let him lift his hands beneath her shirt and massage her nipples and she did not know if they ached from cold or desire.
Maybe she would not have been pushed, and gone willingly, closer to Jonnie. She would not be sitting here facing this dark part of her past once more. Instead they might have greeted warmly, like long-lost countrymen and colleagues, workmates, surprised to find their paths crossing once more; friends once but now strangers. But then perhaps, thinks Gin, our fates are fixed, destinies determined long before we draw our breath, before our struggling meets and chafes against what we think we can control, against the erroneous illusion of choice.
She turns her head away from him and looks out of the window. The canteen looks out over the back of the hospital. The remnants of last night’s rain lie pooling on the stretch of concrete alley, and the sky is a leftover grey. Below her is a steel cage, locked with chain and padlock. Inside, cylinders are lined up neatly, black for the nitrogen, blue the oxygen.
“Gin,” he says, “look at me.”
Something hardens inside her at his tone. Hard like the steel of the cage. She does not shift her gaze. A white van turns into the alley, and two men jump out quickly. They are both dressed in blue
overalls
. One gesticulates, and the other laughs. He pulls a bunch of keys from his pocket, moves toward the padlocked gate. He shouts to his companion, thrusts the key in the chunk of metal, easily lifting the heavy gnarl of chain.
“Gin,” Jonnie says again, but his voice is softer. “We need to talk about Cape Town. We need to talk about Viv.”
Viv
. The old knot of emotion contorts inside her. Gin sips at her coffee, tasting insipidness.
The man below is lugging a cylinder with ease, passing it to his partner who shoves it into the back of the van. In turn, he takes another cylinder out of the van, hoists it back. This one heavier it seems, the action slower.
Jonnie sighs. “Ginnia,” he says again, and now she resents the use of his nickname for her. “Please.”
Slowly she turns her gaze back to where he sits, staring at her. It is the first time she has looked at him fully, and she notes now the lines around his eyes, two deep furrows in his forehead, and a weariness in his demeanour she does not remember. His hair is shorter than it was all those years ago, but still it touches the collar of his white coat. And although she notices fine wisps of white, the thick blackness of it is still so lustrous it shines with a tinge of blue under the fluorescence of the canteen lights.
He has not asked of Ellie’s father, who or where he is. He has asked her nothing, no personal questions at all. There lies a frozen
waste-land
between them. She realises, slowly, with a hidden chill, his position of power. As Ellie’s consultant, he would have had access to those privileged notes, the medical history denied even to her. Ellie lies in the same gleaming ward she inhabited minutes after birth, and Gin knows the pitifully short tale must read something along the lines of:
Premature baby. Mother in ICU after emergency Caesarean. Uterine haemorrhage, emergency hysterectomy. Father deceased
. In the spidery scrawl of a tired intern, he could have accessed the insides that were ripped from her. She has no such information, no short synopsis from which to infer relationships, deceased or otherwise, in the time since they last met. She feels small and exposed. It is this urgency, this need to be on equal footing that prompts perhaps her question.
“What are you doing here?” Louder than she meant, and harshly spoken.
If he is surprised at her tone, he does not show it. He does not meet her eyes. “I’m locuming here for a year. My wife –”. At this, he stops, his eyes flick to her quickly, then he looks past her,
continues
hastily, “Not Viv, that is. I mean, we’re divorced. I’ve remarried since…” He pauses, restarts, his voice subdued, “My wife thought it would be a good idea.”
So he is unaware of her trip home, her reconciliation with Viv; he cannot know of her accident. Nor of Simon’s death.
The canteen fills, the nine o’clock shift will start soon. She smells bacon frying. Although he knows less about her life than she had imagined, she finds his answer not enough. She feels petty, childish, but cannot stop. “Do you have children?” She wants to pry, to make him talk.
Again, he looks away, stares down at his coffee, cradled in his lean brown fingers, two hands on the table, as if in vain to protect it from cooling, congealing, decaying. He wears no wedding ring she notices, and then reminds herself that doctors seldom do. She remembers his hands, caressing her, his finger tracing the line between their bodies as they lay together, the line formed between his dark skin and her own pallor. She had wondered then if sometimes he had hated her because her skin was white.