by Wilbur Smith
‘Give the gentleman a coconut!’ crowed Mike.
Bruce crossed the room with three quick strides and pulled the rifle out of Hendry’s hand.
‘All right, you drunken ape. That’s enough.’
‘Go and muck yourself,’ growled Hendry. He was massaging his wrist; the rifle had twisted it.
‘Captain Curry,’ said Haig from behind the bar, ‘you heard what my friend said. You go and muck yourself sideways to sleep.’
‘Shut up, Haig.’
‘This time I’ll fix you, Curry,’ Hendry growled. ‘You’ve been on my back too long – now I’m going to shake you off!’
‘Kindly descend from my friend’s back, Captain Curry,’ chimed in Mike Haig. ‘He’s not a howdah elephant, he’s my blood brother. I will not allow you to persecute him.’
‘Come on, Curry. Come on then!’ said Wally.
‘That’s it, Wally. Muck him up.’ Haig filled his glass again as he spoke. ‘Don’t let him ride you.’
‘Come on then, Curry.’
‘You’re drunk,’ said Bruce.
‘Come on then; don’t talk, man. Or do I have to start it?’
‘No, you don’t have to start it,’ Bruce assured him, and lifted the rifle butt-first under his chin, swinging it up hard. Hendry’s head jerked and he staggered back against the wall. Bruce looked at his eyes; they were glazed over. That will hold him, he decided; that’s taken the fight out of him. He caught Hendry by the shoulder and threw him into one of the chairs. I must get to Haig before he absorbs any more of that liquor, he thought, I can’t waste time sending for Ruffy and I can’t leave this thing behind me while I work on Haig.
‘Shermaine,’ he called. She was standing in the doorway and she came to his side. ‘Can you use a pistol?’
She nodded. Bruce unclipped his Smith & Wesson from its lanyard and handed it to her.
‘Shoot this man if he tries to leave that chair. Stand here where he cannot reach you.’
‘Bruce—’ she started.
‘He is a dangerous animal. Yesterday he murdered two small children and, if you let him, he’ll do the same to you. You must keep him here while I get the other one.’
She lifted the pistol, holding it with both hands and her face was even paler than was usual.
‘Can you do it?’ Bruce asked.
‘Now I can,’ she said and cocked the action.
‘Hear me, Hendry.’ Bruce took a handful of his hair and twisted his face up. ‘She’ll kill you if you leave this chair. Do you understand? She’ll shoot you.’
‘Muck you and your little French whore, muck you both. I bet that’s what you two have been doing all evening in that car – playing “hide the sausage” down by the riverside.’
Anger flashed through Bruce so violently that it startled him. He twisted Hendry’s hair until he could feel it coming away in his hand. Hendry squirmed with pain.
‘Shut that foul mouth – or I’ll kill you.’
He meant it, and suddenly Hendry knew he meant it.
‘Okay, for Chrissake, okay. Just leave me.’
Bruce loosened his grip and straightened up.
‘I’m sorry, Shermaine,’ he said.
‘That’s all right – go to the other one.’
Bruce went to the bar counter, and Haig watched him come.
‘What do you want, Bruce? Have a drink.’ He was nervous. ‘Have a drink, we are all having a little drink. All good clean fun, Bruce. Don’t get excited.’
‘You’re not having any more; in fact, just the opposite,’ Bruce told him as he came round the counter. Haig backed away in front of him.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’ll show you,’ said Bruce and caught him by the wrist, turning him quickly and lifting his arm up between his shoulder-blades.
‘Hey, Bruce. Cut it out, you’ve made me spill my drink.’
‘Good,’ said Bruce and slapped the empty glass out of his hand. Haig started to struggle. He was still a powerful man but the liquor had weakened him and Bruce lifted his wrist higher, forcing him on to his toes.
‘Come along, buddy boy,’ instructed Bruce and marched him towards the back door of the bar-room. He reached round Haig with his free hand, turned the key in the lock and opened the door.
‘Through here,’ he said and pushed Mike into the kitchens. He kicked the door shut behind him and went to the sink, dragging Haig with him.
‘All right, Haig, let’s have it up,’ he said and changed his grip quickly, thrusting Haig’s head down over the sink. There was a dishtowel hanging beside it which Bruce screwed into a ball; then he used his thumbs to open Haig’s jaws and wedged the towel between his back teeth.
‘Let’s have all of it.’ He probed his finger down into Haig’s throat. It came up hot and gushing over his hand, and he fought down his own nausea as he worked. When he had finished he turned on the cold tap and held Haig’s head under it, washing his face and his own hand.
‘Now, I’ve got a little job for you, Haig.’
‘Leave me alone, damn you,’ groaned Haig, his voice indistinct beneath the rushing tap. Bruce pulled him up and held him against the wall.
‘There’s a woman in childbirth at the mission. She’s going to die, Haig. She’s going to die if you don’t do something about it.’
‘No,’ whispered Haig. ‘No, not that. Not that again.’
‘I’m taking you there.’
‘No, please not that. I can’t – don’t you see that I can’t.’ The little red and purple veins in his nose and cheeks stood out in vivid contrast to his pallor. Bruce hit him open-handed across the face and the water flew in drops from his hair at the shock.
‘No,’ he mumbled, ‘please Bruce, please.’
Bruce hit him twice more, hard. Watching him carefully, and at last he saw the first flickering of anger.
‘Damn you, Bruce Curry, damn you to hell.’
‘You’ll do,’ rejoiced Bruce. ‘Thank God for that.’
He hustled Haig back through the bar-room. Shermaine still stood over Hendry, holding the pistol.
‘Come on, Shermaine. You can leave that thing now. I’ll attend to him when we get back.’
As they crossed the lobby Bruce asked Shermaine. ‘Can you drive the Ford?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good,’ said Bruce. ‘Here are the keys. I’ll sit with Haig in the back. Take us out to the mission.’
Haig lost his balance on the front steps of the hotel and nearly fell, but Bruce caught him and half carried him to the car. He pushed him into the back seat and climbed in beside him. Shermaine slid in behind the wheel, started the engine and U-turned neatly across the street.
‘You can’t force me to do this, Bruce. I can’t, I just can’t,’ Haig pleaded.
‘We’ll see,’ said Bruce.
‘You don’t know what it’s like. You can’t know. She’ll die on the table.’ He held out his hands palms down. ‘Look at that, look at them. How can I do it with these?’ His hands were trembling violently.
‘She’s going to die anyway,’ said Bruce, his voice hard. ‘So you might as well do it for her quickly and get it over with.’
Haig brought his hands up to his mouth and wiped his lips.
‘Can I have a drink, Bruce? That’ll help. I’ll try then, if you give me a drink.’
‘No,’ said Bruce, and Haig began to swear. The filth poured from his lips and his face twisted with the effort. He cursed Bruce, he cursed himself, and God in a torrent of the most obscene language that Bruce had ever heard. Then suddenly he snatched at the door handle and tried to twist it open. Bruce had been waiting for this and he caught the back of Haig’s collar, pulled him backwards across the seat and held him there. Haig’s struggles ceased abruptly and he began to sob softly.
Shermaine drove fast; across the causeway, up the slope and into the side road. The headlights cut into the darkness and the wind drummed softly round the car. Haig was still sobbing on the back seat.
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Then the lights of the mission were ahead of them through the trees and Shermaine slowed the car, turned in past the church and pulled up next to the hospital block.
Bruce helped Haig out of the car, and while he was doing so the side door of the building opened and Father Ignatius came out with a petromax lantern in his hand. The harsh white glare of the lantern lit them all and threw grotesque shadows behind them. It fell with special cruelty on Haig’s face.
‘Here’s your doctor, Father,’ Bruce announced.
Ignatius lifted the lantern and peered through his spectacles at Haig.
‘Is he sick?’
‘No, Father,’ said Bruce. ‘He’s drunk.’
‘Drunk? Then he can’t operate?’
‘Yes, he damn well can!’
Bruce took Haig through the door and along the passage to the little theatre. Ignatius and Shermaine followed them.
‘Shermaine, go with Father and help him bring the woman,’ Bruce ordered, and they went; then he turned his attention back to Haig.
‘Are you so far down there in the slime that you can’t understand me?’
‘I can’t do it, Bruce. It’s no good.’
‘Then she’ll die. But this much is certain: you are going to make the attempt.’
‘I’ve got to have a drink, Bruce.’ Haig licked his lips. ‘It’s burning me up inside, you’ve got to give me one.’
‘Finish the job and I’ll give you a whole case.’
‘I’ve got to have one now.’
‘No.’ Bruce spoke with finality. ‘Have a look at what they’ve got here in the way of instruments. Can you do it with these?’ Bruce crossed to the sterilizer and lifted the lid, the steam came up out of it in a cloud. Haig looked in also.
‘That’s all I need, but there’s not enough light in here, and I need a drink.’
‘I’ll get you more light. Start cleaning up.’
‘Bruce, please let me—’
‘Shut up,’ snarled Bruce. ‘There’s the basin. Start getting ready.’
Haig crossed to the handbasin; he was more steady on his feet and his features had firmed a little. You poor old bastard, thought Bruce, I hope you can do it. My God, how much I hope you can.
‘Get a move on, Haig, we haven’t got all night.’
Bruce left the room and went quickly down the passage to the ward. The windows of the theatre were fixed and Haig could escape only into the passage. Bruce knew that he could catch him if he tried to run for it.
He looked into the ward. Shermaine and Ignatius, with the help of an African orderly, had lifted the woman on to the theatre trolley.
‘Father, we need more light.’
‘I can get you another lantern, that’s all.’
‘Good, do that then. I’ll take the woman through.’
Father Ignatius disappeared with the orderly and Bruce helped Shermaine manoeuvre the trolley down the length of the ward and into the passage. The woman was whimpering with pain, and her face was grey, waxy grey. They only go like that when they are very frightened, or when they are dying.
‘She hasn’t much longer,’ he said.
‘I know,’ agreed Shermaine. ‘We must hurry.’
The woman moved restlessly on the trolley and gabbled a few words; then she sighed so that the great blanket-covered mound of her belly rose and fell, and she started to whimper again.
Haig was still in the theatre. He had stripped off his battle-jacket and, in his vest, he stooped over the basin washing. He did not look round as they wheeled the woman in.
‘Get her on the table,’ he said, working the soap into suds up to his elbows.
The trolley was of a height with the table and, using the blanket to lift her, it was easy to slide the woman across.
‘She’s ready, Haig,’ said Bruce. Haig dried his arms on a clean towel and turned. He came to the woman and stood over her. She did not know he was there; her eyes were open but unseeing. Haig drew a breath; he was sweating a little across his forehead and the stubble of beard on the lower part of his face was stippled with grey.
He pulled back the blanket. The woman wore a short white jacket, open-fronted, that did not cover her stomach. Her stomach was swollen out, hard-looking, with the navel inverted. Knees raised slightly and the thick peasant’s thighs spread wide in the act of labour. As Bruce watched, her whole body arched in another contraction. He saw the stress of the muscles beneath the dark greyish skin as they struggled to expel the trapped foetus.
‘Hurry, Mike!’ Bruce was appalled by the anguish of birth. I didn’t know it was like this; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children – but this! Through the woman’s dry grey swollen lips burst another of those moaning little cries, and Bruce swung towards Mike Haig.
‘Hurry, goddam you!’
And Mike Haig began his examination, his hands very pale as they groped over the dark skin. At last he was satisfied and he stood back from the table.
Ignatius and the orderly came in with two more lanterns. Ignatius started to say something, but instantly he sensed the tension in the room and he fell silent. They all watched Mike Haig’s face.
His eyes were tight closed, and his face was hard angles and harsh planes in the lantern light. His breathing was shallow and laboured.
I must not push him now, Bruce knew instinctively, I have dragged him to the lip of the precipice and now I must let him go over the edge on his own.
Mike opened his eyes again, and he spoke.
‘Caesarian section,’ he said, as though he had pronounced his own death sentence. Then his breathing stopped. They waited, and at last the breath came out of him in a sigh.
‘I’ll do it,’ he said.
‘Gowns and gloves?’ Bruce fired the question at Ignatius.
‘In the cupboard.’
‘Get them!’
‘You’ll have to help me, Bruce. And you also Shermaine.’
‘Yes, show me.’
Quickly they scrubbed and dressed. Ignatius held the pale green theatre gowns while they dived into them and flapped and struggled through.
‘That tray, bring it here,’ Mike ordered as he opened the sterilizer. With a pair of long-nosed forceps he lifted the instruments out of the steaming box and laid them on the tray naming each one as he did so.
‘Scalpel, retractors, clamps.’
In the meantime the orderly was swabbing the woman’s belly with alcohol and arranging the sheets.
Mike filled the syringe with pentothal and held it up to the light. He was an unfamiliar figure now; his face masked, the green skull cap covering his hair, and the flowing gown falling to his ankles. He pressed the plunger and a few drops of the pale fluid dribbled down the needle.
He looked at Bruce, only his haunted eyes showing above the mask.
‘Ready?’
‘Yes,’ Bruce nodded. Mike stooped over the woman, took her arm and sent the needle searching under the soft black skin on the inside of her elbow. The fluid in the syringe was suddenly discoloured with drawn blood as Mike tested for the vein, and then the plunger slid slowly down the glass barrel.
The woman stopped whimpering, the tension went out of her body and her breathing slowed and became deep and unhurried.
‘Come here.’ Mike ordered Shermaine to the head of the table, and she took up the chloroform mask and soaked the gauze that filled the cone.
‘Wait until I tell you.’
She nodded. Christ, what lovely eyes she has, thought Bruce, before he turned back to the job in hand.
‘Scalpel,’ said Mike from across the table, pointing to it on the tray, and Bruce handed it to him.
Afterwards the details were confused and lacking reality in Bruce’s mind.
The wound opening behind the knife, the tight stretched skin parting and the tiny blood vessels starting to squirt.
Pink muscle laced with white; butter-yellow layers of subcutaneous fat, and then through to the massed bluish coils of the gut. Human tissue, soft and pulsing,
glistening in the flat glare of the petromax.
Clamps and retractors, like silver insects crowding into the wound as though it were a flower.
Mike’s hands, inhuman in yellow rubber, moving in the open pit of the belly. Swabbing, cutting, clamping, tying off.
Then the swollen purple bag of the womb, suddenly unzipped by the knife.
And at last, unbelievably, the child curled in a dark grey ball of legs and tiny arms, head too big for its size, and the fat pink snake of the placenta enfolding it.
Lifted out, the infant hung by its heels from Mike’s hand like a small grey bat, still joined to its mother.
Scissors snipped and it was free. Mike worked a little longer, and the infant cried.
It cried with minute fury, indignant and alive. From the head of the table Shermaine laughed with spontaneous delight, and clapped her hands like a child at a Punch and Judy show. Suddenly Bruce was laughing also. It was a laugh from long ago, coming out from deep inside him.
‘Take it,’ said Haig and Shermaine cradled it, wet and feebly wriggling in her arms. She stood with it while Haig sewed up. Watching her face and the way she stood, Bruce suddenly and unaccountably felt the laughter snag his throat, and he wanted to cry.
Haig closed the womb, stitching the complicated pattern of knots like a skilled seamstress, then the external sutures laid neatly across the fat lips of the wound, and at last the white tape hiding it all. He covered the woman, jerked the mask from his face and looked up at Shermaine.
‘You can help me clean it up,’ he said, and his voice was strong again and proud. The two of them crossed to the basin.
Bruce threw off his gown and left the room, went down the passage and out into the night. He leaned against the bonnet of the Ford and lit a cigarette.
Tonight I laughed again, he told himself with wonder, and then I nearly cried. And all because of a woman and a child. It is finished now, the pretence. The withdrawal. The big act. There was more than one birth in there tonight. I laughed again, I had the need to laugh again, and the desire to cry. A woman and a child, the whole meaning of life. The abscess had burst, the poison drained, and he was ready to heal.
