Charlie Ray and I waded through the heat. Impervious. Delirious. The soles of our feet kicking up dust in rhythm to the song of the land. Dislodged particles swirled through time conjuring visions of childhood. A home with no ceiling. Bats and snakes nestled high in the thatch. Paraffin lamps flickering light through the black night, casting shadows.
Conversations in the wild. Lion, leopard, hyena—kings in the light of the moon, ever-constant in her cool gaze. Until daybreak, when the mighty Sun, wielder of light and warmth, flicks his sjambok. Cajoling, inspiring, invigorating, scorching, punishing. Oh lord of many temperaments.
A veranda wrapped around the house like a constrictor. It was cool there. A refuge when the sky wept over plants, shrubs, trees, soil, mound, dune and desert; soaking up the tempest like sponges, holding back the tears until mighty sun pushed his fist through the colossal cumulonimbi, stealing them back.
The dust shifts.
Bicycles. Boys on bicycles. Some days, they would see the storm coming and hurtle towards it as fast as their feet could pedal, until they could breathe in the rain. Then they’d turn and race back, trying to outwit the storm. Crashing into potholes and falling into ditches. The storm always won.
Charlie Ray found me amidst the debris but it was Ruth and Ruby who pulled me out.
Ruby Rook and Ruth Kingston—straight out of a regency romance novel. They were nurses. English. And needed a ride to a leprosy clinic where they had promised to unfurl hope and healing. They asked, and of course I was happy to drive them. I loaded their luggage into a long-wheelbase Land Rover and we hit the trail. I followed a track through the brush and scrub, dodging mopane trees and sickle bush, and chuckling at the “Oh Dears” resounding from the back as heads rebounded off the interior.
The flies accosted us at Copperhill. Demons of heat and death. I counted 150 of them on my front before swatting them off but sweat and salt is fated to the land. My gaze turned towards Ruth and Ruby as they walked towards the grass huts that made up the clinic, each step kicking up dust, particles swirling.
It was the flies. He couldn’t bare it. They were in swarms, stuck to their faces…in their eyes. They were only children—poverty eating them from the outside in. He knew then and there that he would be back. Africa had attacked his heart, invaded his soul. His entire being. First, he must survive this war but after that…
I rested against the bonnet, the flies undeterred in their appetite for carrion, waiting for the moment to gain momentum. Something itched. Intuition, maybe.
We weren’t at Copperhill long. There was a medical emergency nearby, and would I drive?
We bounced along in the Land Rover to another village and were met by the principal of the village school. We followed him to his home, where a little boy lay. Ruth and Ruby had a look at him. They asked him to open his mouth. The boy’s tongue was as white as snow. Anaemia. It was imperative that we leave immediately. Or the worst.
Ruth, Ruby, the little boy, his mother, father and grandfather squashed in and I accelerated, as fast as the uncompromising landscape would allow. The little boy was in his grandfather’s arms, wrapped in a blanket. I thought that this was probably the first time he had been in a car. He was eager to look out of the passenger window and as he gazed at the view outside, would shift position so the sun’s light was on him, absorbing the rays the way a succulent might ingurgitate water. He stared, barely flinching as leaves and branches swiped the clambering intruder. Oblivious.
It was a 70-mile route to the hospital. Just as it came into sight, the boy’s grandfather tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around. Asleep. No. The boy was dead. I stopped the car. Immediately, the wailing began. Raw, pained, broken, grief-stricken noises escaping from the souls of the boy’s family; sounds that had been waiting for this exact moment from the beginning of time and were finally free.
We drove the rest of the way to the hospital, reported the death, and drove three hours back to the village. Before we arrived, I could hear it—guttural cries and falsetto sorrow.
Neither seen, nor heard and yet…
They knew.