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She turns and nearly falls out of the cot onto the hospital floor. Damn, these things are narrow. They’re not intended for long-term comfort. Just a short reprieve for worrying relatives at the bedside of someone they care about.
It’s not even 7 am. If Lucian were healthy, and in his flat at home, there’s no way he’d be awake at this time. She can risk going to get a coffee from the vending machine.
She sees herself in the mirror. She looks old. The greenish lighting doesn’t help. The woman scowling back has dry, wrinkled skin and looks permanently worried. How did it come to this?
Bene – she remembers his flight plans. He should be landing soon. She looks at her mobile and remembers that the nurses asked her to switch it off during the night. Never mind. It’s on now and he’ll text when he’s ready. She can’t remember if the time difference is two or three hours at this time of year.
She finds the vending machine and sits down with a paper cup of awful but just-this-side-of-tolerable coffee. When was the last time she was in a hospital? Bene has been such a healthy kid, it hasn’t been too often, thank God.
Aunt Magda’s scare last year, that was alarming. A woman like her, she’s such a physically active person you can’t imagine her stopping work. Magda’s been repairing sails for longer than Lena has been alive. Her broad arms sweep the ungainly things through the industrial-sized sewing machines in the boatshed at the back. What would they do without Magda? Thankfully it wasn’t a stroke. Not yet. That’s what the doctor said to them. It was a joke he and Magda liked, and they kept chuckling about it. Not yet.
The other times in hospital – Bene’s birth, so long ago. Before that, it was here, actually. This same hospital in South London twenty years ago. The roles were reversed, though. She was in the hospital bed, Lucian holding vigil and drinking the disgusting coffee. Her malaria was in retreat, all the indicators looked good. But then bleeding started. She hadn’t even known she was pregnant but there was so much blood. Lucian said little, but stayed with her the whole time, looking scared and overwhelmed at the forces beyond his control. He left the room every twenty minutes to smoke another cigarette and then came back by her side. For once she didn’t say anything about the ever-present smell of smoke.
Usually she waved him away when he got too close. But that time, she needed him near. She had no one else.
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Jeanette looks shaken. Her two plaits, normally down to her shoulders, are twisted left and right like pipe cleaners. Her makeup is smudged as if she has only snatched a bit of sleep, face-down, on some borrowed surface.
‘We’ll find him, don’t worry.’ Kojo gives her a hug as she gets into his car. ‘Let’s take you back to the airport and find this boy.’
She starts crying. She tries to keep it quiet but that leads to the opposite effect of her gasping for air and gulping the tears down. It would have been comical, except she is his closest friend. But he doesn’t understand the anguish.
His attention stays on the traffic. It is moving, for once, and he needs to stay alert. You never know with Nairobi, whether it will be gridlocked or fluid. It is made up of constantly moving pieces, like a puzzle or video game, with different-sized shapes trying to jam into spaces not big enough for all of them.
He listens as her breathing slows back down, seeing in his peripheral vision that she stares straight ahead.
‘Jeanette, he’s a teenager, right? He was probably partying and missed a plane. Or got locked out of the hostel after losing his passport. Or got bumped onto another flight. You know Air Portugal is rubbish at last-minute changes.’
‘I know, I know... but you don’t understand... If something happened to him...’
‘Who is this kid? I didn’t know you had a nephew or someone who could make you so worried.’
‘Kind of a nephew, it was going to be a surprise, you see...’
‘What do you mean?’
She hesitates, which is so unlike her that his concentration slips from the driving. Usually she jumps right in and fills the air with whatever story was entertaining her recently, or long ago. To Jeanette, friendship means sharing whatever is on your mind, in whatever fashion the words tumble out. But this seems to be different.
‘Kojo,’ she says, ‘it’s your son.’
He hears the words but does not understand. He has to keep looking forward. It is a tricky roundabout with beggars, hawkers, cars and matatus all trying to merge and gain on each other.
They clear the roundabout with only a few horns hooting, and he comes back to what she just said. She must have misspoken. Maybe she wants a son, but never mentioned it before now? She’s clearly upset.
‘I don’t have a son,’ he says slowly. ‘Do you mean to tell me you are thinking of adopting a child? Is that what this is about?’ He can feel her eyes on him. Heat rises up his neck to his ears and his temples.
‘No, he’s not mine,’ she says.
She must be confused. Maybe the stress of work has caught up with her. He makes a mental note to look again at her workload and suggest some R&R again before too long. ‘Jeanette, what are you saying?’
‘She told me a month ago. I had no idea before then. She swore me to secrecy.’
‘She, who?’ he asks, but he knows the answer. He doesn’t want to think back to the past. But Jeanette’s forcing the issue. He starts to feel angry, wants to get out of the car before he says something he’ll regret. He doesn’t like this old feeling of fury crawling up the back of his throat. It’s not the kind of man he is. He is a calm man. The leader of CWW for all of Africa. He has achieved so much, on his own. He can’t afford for it all to fall apart.