His voice sang through the sirens like a half-forgotten song, whispering softly with words of childhood, and leftover laughter, and home. Emily blinked painfully. Her brother’s face was older but the same. His skin, black as the night of the power-short village they’d lived in, was scarred and weathered, but smelled still of Gahiji. Blood was everywhere. Her arms were strewn nearby, not stumps like Cassien’s, but contorted underneath her.
Ambulance men in yellow jackets appeared before her. They were trying to convey something but she could see only their lips moving and hear no sound.
She could feel Gahiji’s leather-strong hand on her arm and if she closed her eyes, her mother was there too, with her fingers shielding her view from the unfathomable sights before her: police, and a man in handcuffs, and blood trickling into her mouth, tasting not of soil but gravel. Papa was nearby, unpacking his glasses and choosing a book, preparing to read it aloud. Simeon and Rukundo were cavorting around in the distance, cajoling her to get up, to join in. Mary was in her arms, warm, giggling. And Cassien, her beloved Cassien was right next to her, his lean arms tired from climbing trees, his legs toned and bare, his hands reaching to steady hers, his face, as always, grinning. “Climb higher,” he urged her confidently. “Keep climbing Emmy. Gahiji will catch you.”
A general buzz followed her. If she kept her eyes squinted shut she could sometimes decipher individual voices within it, but they blended with her dreams and would not sort themselves into helpful groups like past and present, real and imagined, truth and merely hope. Often, Gahiji’s voice invaded her sleep, but when she opened her eyes, she could see only doctors and nurses, and other beds with relatives gathered around them, and nobody at her own, so it was probable that his presence at other moments was only a result of her longing. “Stay,” she wanted to tell her brother on the occasions that he was there. “Don’t leave me.” But her voice had deserted her, and so he drifted in and out, and so did she.
Sometimes a policeman hovered in her periphery. He said words like stranger and road rage and assault and pressing charges, and asked questions. But they all tumbled over her flesh like a rushing stream and didn’t stick to it. And usually a melodic voice intervened until the man in uniform somehow melted away.
Once, Emily thought she heard a voice in the corridor that could have belonged to John. Another time, she saw a doctor standing over her, furiously scribbling notes. When he noticed her eyes open he asked her if she had headaches often, dizziness, nausea, if she had ever been tested for HIV or Aids, to which she may have shaken her head or may simply have drifted again into her dreams.
It was possible that Luke had been there, although the face may also have belonged to Jean, and the screaming in the corridor that followed was too distant for her to decipher which was the most likely: Was it his luminous bride Vera who the man had been arguing with? Pleading with? Consoling? Or a nurse? Someone, she knew, had been crying.
“Emilienne, Emilienne,” a nurse urged her one afternoon, and she became aware of a spoon in front of her mouth, a bib underneath her chin, and a woman without a shred of impatience smiling generously, urging her to eat. She was sitting up, she realised. There were yellow tulips on her bedside table. She opened her mouth and allowed some of the soft substance to trickle down her throat. At the taste, she grimaced.
“She doesn’t like mangoes,” she heard a woman to the other side of her admonish, and she could have sworn that the voice belonged to Auntie. There was a rustling of plastic bags and the voice came again. “I have better food,” the voice told the nurse.
Slowly, the buzzing diminished and one morning Emily awoke to silence. She had been moved to another room. The walls around her were white and a large window let a high sun flood light across her. She turned her head and discovered that she was able to lift it. The door was closed but she noticed a call-button just inches from the bed. If she strained her ears, she could hear a low murmur of voices from somewhere far down a corridor, but she did not struggle to decipher them. The window was open a little at the top and if she tried it was possible to hear birdsong and the whistling of a sharp, winter wind. Gently, and with only a little pain, Emily pulled herself onto her side and surveyed the landscape.
The hospital was somewhere that overlooked an expanse of garden. There were no tall buildings to obscure her view and if she looked up, she could watch the clouds drifting slowly past. One cloud in particular caught her interest. It had a narrow beginning that stretched to the right before swelling into bulges and outcrops that blurred with each other to make it look as though the cloud was shedding bubbles, or raindrops, or leaves. In fact, if she slanted her head and turned the cloud the other way up, it looked just like an old Nim tree. Emily smiled. She imagined that such a tree would have a great story. It would be climbed every day by scampering children, it would be the test of their agility, their successes and failures traded between them; it would shelter their fears and keep the secrets they whispered through its branches; it would provide a lookout and a base from which to stage missions for stealing fruit. And a hiding place.
The cloud drifted out of Emily’s horizon. She selected another. This one looked like a bird, thinking, and she was just about to give it a story when the door to her room fell open.
She turned.
She grinned.
And like the bird, the man standing in the doorway tilted his head.