THE WHITE-EYES WERE UP, CRAZED WITH THE end of the rain. Joanna lay at the bottom of the slope and caught the same furious, incessant twittering that would be coming through the windows in Plantana Avenue. Mingling with the cheeping were the engines of the first cars nosing past Silvermine and over Ou Kaapse Weg. City business called.
The Jeep was coming in the opposite direction, heading past the hospital for Recreation Road. Here was the bike track. Here was the substation and the forked pine. Here was The Valleyland Centre, with the Wishing Tree.
The driver, still in his yellow slicker, turned off his wipers and stopped the car. Dimly, she heard the crunch of his wellingtons on the gravel.
He leaned down, his knees popping.
“Hey,” said the TOADNUT.
Joanna didn’t move.
“Hey! Are you alright?” He was holding his torch, but he didn’t need to play its beam over her body. Even from the car he had been able to see that she was streaked with dirt and gore.
“Oh, my God,” said the man, examining the rotten tomato of her face. He gaped at her.
She wanted to laugh. “Shut your mouth, Mister Toad. You’re catching flies.” She had to say it in her head. Another hiss of stale air from the flat bellows of her lungs.
“Come,” he said. He shoveled an arm underneath her shoulders and tried to lift her into a sitting position. “Come, come, come. Can you walk?”
She could. It was just as well: he would never have been able to carry her full weight.
Oh, God. She was naked! This was a terrible dream!
But if it’s a dream, it doesn’t matter, does it?
“Right again, you old smarty-pants,” Joanna tried to say. Nothing came out: the air hissed out through the clean slice in her wind-pipe. The shirt was gone, tangled somewhere up on the mountain in the fynbos, and shame was for healthy people.
She limped on her good foot and he shouldered her weak side. Between them they arranged her limbs on the Jeep’s seat.
I must look like Jabba the Hutt. Or Saartjie Baartman.
He took off his slicker and draped it over her vast nudity. It slid down into her lap like an apron. He considered the seat-belt and shook his head. “It’s just down the road. Are you okay?”
A wave of exhilaration, clear and sweet as water, washed over her.
More than okay. I’m ALIVE! They buried my body and they thought I’d GONE! But I am the Dance and I still go ON!
She tried to nod but then saw him swallow and lose the colour in his face.
Oh, his car seats were going to be ruined!
But lucky me, said Joanna to herself, and pressed her chin back to her chest as the next groundswell of dizziness followed.
Lucky, lucky, lucky me!
And she was so nice and warm! She could relax, finally. Someone else was going to take care of her and tell her what to do. Joanna had been waiting for two years. She let her thoughts run free as Mister Toad drove her very fast and very carefully to False Bay Hospital: they pin-wheeled crazily with the Jeep’s tyres.
He turned into the EMERGENCY entrance. The place was deserted. Fish Hoek had not had any other EMERGENCIES during the night.
Mister Toad hopped down from the driver’s seat and came round to her.
“I’m just going to call someone,” he told her.
Joanna closed her eyes and waited for other people. Her head was full of chlorine: it burned; her eyes were watering.
They came. Two little men and a nurse appeared with the gurney. They were asking Joanna questions she couldn’t answer. She tried to point at her throat, but they were strapping her arms to her sides. A wrinkled man in a Homburg hat pushed past the gurney and disappeared inside the building. The nurse shouted something at his back but he didn’t stop. Joanna wondered if Jan would take James to school. Would he remember to pack two snacks? The stars were fading back into the blue of the morning as they wheeled her over the threshold.
My head. It feels like the back of it has been blown off. Why is the pillow so wet?
She looked up at the cardboard ceiling panels, seized with the vague wonder and fright she always felt in institutions that had to deal with large numbers of people who all had to eat somewhere, sleep somewhere, piss and shit and wash their hands. It was the same obeisance to engineering she felt when a doll’s house hinged open with its rooms cut in half, the doing of its inhabitants exposed, a domestic cosmology.
What if they lose me now, after everything?
Mister Toad was trying to fill in forms at a little window like the one they had at the Museum. RESEPTION, said the sign. He was trying, but he knew nothing about what had happened to her, or even who she was.
Jan. Jan would do all this.
Joanna worked her lips. “Phone,” she breathed. The word came out doubled from the roof of her mouth and the lips of the cut, as if there were two of her. She expected to see ectoplasm.
Mister Toad leaned close to her.
“Can you tell me the number?”
Joanna mouthed the numerals, her lips opening and closing like the barbel that used to lie on the bottom of the Yacht Club pan in Kimberley. He read them back to her to make sure. Oh, this was nice, even though the drum of her head felt tight, the small bones of her nose lodged somewhere near her forehead, she was sure. She was just going to have a little sleep.
When she woke up again she was wearing two hospital gowns, one tied at the front and one at the back, the hard knot against her spine. How had they dressed her without her knowing? There was a bag attached to her arm. Joanna tried to look around without moving her neck.
They had left her in the passage outside an operating room. The place was suddenly underpopulated again. Where were the interns and junior doctors, the people with clipboards and stethoscopes? The injuries couldn’t be that bad, if they were making her wait. It was so quiet: the sound of the rain had disappeared. Somewhere breakfast was being served. She could hear cutlery clinking. It was cutlery, wasn’t it?
Closed doors stretched away from her, a cartoon rendition of Judgement Day. Each one bore a notice in the careful letters of someone who had finished high school and was proud of the fact. The drip was making her feel dizzy again: the ceiling came nearer, then floated away. There were little holes drilled in it at each corner. Joanna felt her vision piercing the doors and the jackets of their letter-writers inside. In township schools they were still teaching children to bend the ends of their letters like music notes, as if they were transcribing tunes from somewhere else, the missions’ plainsong refrain. What would the names on the doors sound like if she hummed them? Joanna tried the one nearest to her: WAITING ROOM. Why couldn’t she speak?
The footsteps rushed at her. Joanna jerked away from them but it was only the creased man in the hat who had been trying to get in through the EMERGENCY door behind them. He squeezed impatiently past the gurney and opened the WAITING ROOM door. He arranged his trousers and sat down to flip through car magazines as if the place was a library. A nurse on her way in the opposite direction stopped and stood there with her hands on her hips. She began to scold him, shaking her finger, her voice rising in anger.
“My-Wife-Gladness!” Joanna tried to say. “It’s me!”
The matron finished her tirade. When she came to the gurney she stopped again and frowned. One set of epaulettes was coming loose from her shoulder, precipitous as a rock climber.
“What are you doing here, lolo? Why isn’t anyone with you?”
Joanna began to cry. Big, helpless, medicated tears slipped into the pillow, and My-Wife-Gladness carefully patted Joanna’s arm.
“We’ll help you. Don’t worry.”
Joanna thought, She’s being so kind to me.
“Don’t worry, my baby,” said My-Wife-Gladness. “This is just one part of your life.”
So kind, thought Joanna, and she can’t even tell who I am! She began to cry harder through the remains of her nose, and then she fell asleep.