In a Strange Room (15 page)

 

The watching women rock with merriment as Caroline wipes her clean. I go out into the corridor. I feel far from myself and from the surfaces around me, as if I'm looking down a long dark tunnel at the sunlit world beyond. The doctor, a fat lazy-looking man, comes back. We're going to have to move her, he says. But not like that.

 

What do you mean.

 

She is naked, no. She must be dressed. We cannot take her in the ambulance like that.

 

But, I say. But. I don't have a dress. Can't you, I mean, don't you have something, a hospital gown or something.

 

He shakes his head. You must find a dress.

 

It's hard to believe, under the circumstances, that modesty should be a priority. I want to seize this plump, complacent man, who seems almost to be enjoying my plight, and shake him till his teeth rattle and he concedes that a dress doesn't matter, no not at all, at a moment like this. But I know I have no choice. See him rush down the stairs again, along the corridor, out the door to the hospital and along the street to the main road. He goes into a shop, but they don't sell dresses. For that, they tell him helpfully, he will have to go to the market. So he runs out again and flags down a bus and pays to get on, like any ordinary passenger. See him ride across town to the market, a point of unnatural stillness at the centre of so much flux and movement, and then explode from the bus, rushing from shop to shop, a dress, I must have a dress. Eventually he finds one and pays and flees without waiting for change. Outside there is a man sitting idly on a motorbike, I grab him by the arm. Please, I cry, please take me to the hospital, I'll pay you, just take me. Sensing the panic, or eager for money, the man bears me away on his little machine, weaving through the traffic.

 

Back at the hospital he pays the man and runs upstairs. Nothing has changed, Anna still lies in the same position, her naked back to the room. We drag and haul her into the dress and no sooner have we succeeded than she shits in it again. It's too bad, I say, she'll have to stay like that. The chorus of women falls about in laughter.

 

There is an ambulance standing by to take her to Panjim. It's a drive of an hour and perhaps an hour has elapsed since our arrival here.

 

These stretches of time feel like huge distances, a desert stretching in both directions. By now he knows the score, he will have to supply everything at Panjim, he has to get money and clothes. Before he can even voice the suggestion Caroline has picked up on it, let me ride with her, she says, you go to the room and fetch what you need.

 

 

I
t feels as if he last saw the room a long time in the past, not just a few hours ago. He collects a bag of clothes and some money and is about to leave when he notices Anna's journal lying on the bed. She has been writing in it obsessively since the journey started, apparently documenting every moment of the trip, and he wonders now if any final message has been penned there. And when he turns with dread to the last pages, there it is, in a big incoherent scrawl. Damon do NOT feel guilty. I know if I go back I will be admitted. Rather die at a high point in my life. On the facing page, another note. Dear Everyone I Love, I cannot live with my illness any more. It is no one's fault. I love you all and will see you in another lifetime.

 

There is more, instructions about what to do with her body and money and possessions, some messages to her girlfriend and family and also to Jean. But all of it is written in the same frantic way, spilling all over the page, seemingly under high pressure. He thinks she scribbled it down after she'd swallowed the pills, maybe even while he was sitting outside reading, as the shutters started to come down in her mind.

 

He closes the book and puts it away, no time to follow this now. Before he can go to the hospital there is a call he must make, a call he's dreading, to Anna's lover in Cape Town. What he has to tell her is everything she most dreads and fears, everything she's worked against for the past eight years. He goes to the public phone booth at the crossroads and dials. He can't get through and can't get through and then he reaches the answering machine. But what can he say, there are no words, least of all words to be spoken onto tape. So the message he leaves is bare and basic, just the facts and the number of the hotel. Then there is a silence before he ends off in a different voice, I don't know what to tell you, it's not looking good.

 

The owner of the hotel has offered to drive me to Panjim. I sit silently next to this bald, glowering, middle-aged man, who has dressed up in a blue suit for the occasion, as we travel northward for an hour in his jeep. The hospital is a complex of peeling concrete buildings, looking more like tenement blocks than an institution, on the very edge of the city. Brown bushy scrub, reminding him of Africa, spreads away beyond the perimeter wall.

 

Anna is still in arrivals, she hasn't been admitted yet. Caroline is sitting on a bench in the passage outside, looking stricken and sad. The air of assured authority she wore earlier has gone. It will be a while before I discover that the ride in the ambulance with Anna's inert body has stirred things up for Caroline, things that have nothing to do with where we are now.

 

I'm sorry, she says in a low voice, but I think your friend is dying.

 

She means I must prepare myself, but how do you prepare for this. When I go into the ward I have to walk through a crowd of horizontal patients in crisis before I find Anna. She's an alarming blue colour and sucking air from an oxygen canister with a hoarse, noisy effort. An arrogant doctor is strutting about, dispensing opinions like favours, and when I ask him what her chances are he waves his hand airily. She must go to ICU, he says, then we will see.

 

Soon afterwards she's admitted to the ICU ward upstairs and suddenly all the commotion comes to a stop, converted into the painful stillness of waiting. Anna is behind a closed door, out of sight, and the rest of us must sit outside, in a dirty room full of plastic chairs. The attention is all on that door, which hardly ever opens. When it does it's usually to allow a nurse or doctor out, who will call the name of a patient aloud. When Anna's name is called, which it often is on that first day, I must run with the script in hand to a separate wing of the hospital, to the familiar scene of clamour and struggle in the pharmacy, and return with whatever drugs or emergency equipment are required, and these missions are a relief from the waiting.

 

It dawns on me very quickly that, without anybody to help, I can never leave this room. Every hour of every day somebody must be on hand. My dismay at this prospect is tempered when I start speaking to a few of the other people around me, the stories in that room put my own plight into perspective. One family has been taking it in turns, relieving each other in six hour shifts, for months. One woman, who has nobody to assist her, has been literally living there with a bag of clothes and a toothbrush, for five weeks and no end in sight.

 

Caroline has gone back to the village with the hotel owner and the night yawns away in front of me like a black and empty space. But not long afterwards a Dutch tourist by the name of Sjef arrives, whom I know a little from the past two seasons. He's come to take over for the night, he says, so that I can go home and sleep. His kindness makes me cry, but I can't bring myself to leave. It's my expectation, though I don't say it aloud, that my friend will die tonight and I want to be here when it happens.

 

So Sjef and I undertake this first vigil together. At eight o'clock, to my surprise, there's a stirring in the room, everybody gathering around the door of the ward. What's going on, I ask, and somebody explains that twice a day, in the night and the morning, the friends and family of patients are allowed inside for five minutes. So we pass into the inner sanctum, with its two rows of beds and its atmosphere of spectral suspension. Anna is on a heart-lung machine, with all kinds of tubes and wires pushed into her. Her face has returned to its normal colour, but in the midst of so much humming technology she herself seems lifeless, a form wrapped around emptiness, a version of the corpse she wants so badly to be.

 

I touch her hand and whisper to her. You have to fight, I tell her, you have to come back to us. There's no response at all, and then a nurse walks briskly through, ushering us out. 

 

 

T
hat first night is very long and almost sleepless. Aside from the missions to the pharmacy, the hours pass in a tedium under the fluorescent lights. The bathroom which everyone must share is filthy, and has two bins overflowing with hospital refuse from which rats scatter in all directions every time the door is opened. When he eventually lies down on the floor to sleep, he puts screws of newspaper into his ears to stop the ubiquitous cockroaches from crawling in.

 

But morning returns eventually and the door is opened again. Anna is lying exactly as she was last night, a princess frozen by a witch's spell. For her there is no dirty floor to endure, no passing time, no rats or insects, these elements belong to the rest of us, and to the days that follow. But I'm rescued by Caroline and by Sjef and his English wife Paula, who between them take turns helping me stand guard outside the door. We ride back and forth between the village and the hospital, an hour each way, in overlapping shifts.

 

The time I spend in the village is mostly occupied with e-mails and phone calls, messages both personal and official stitching across the sea. The biggest ongoing conversation is with Anna's girlfriend in Cape Town. The devastation is enormous. I can feel her helplessness from the other side of the world, a witness who's not even present. Of course she wants to come over immediately. But the practicalities are complicated, there is the visa, which will take a few days to organize, and also the flights are still full. But I try to dissuade her for another reason as well. It would be terrible for her to come here, only to discover that Anna doesn't want her but somebody else instead. The memory of the last few weeks is still heavily with me, all the talk about Jean, her knight in shining armour, who has expressed no interest in rushing to her side, even though he's been told what's happened. He's still a secret, but eventually I have to speak. There is something, I say, something I have to tell you.

 

Yes.

 

Anna had an affair over here.

 

There is a silence. I knew, she says at last, I knew it.

 

I'm sorry.

 

With a man.

 

Yes. She was determined to do it, I say, and any man would do. I'm sorry I couldn't tell you before. But I thought you should know about it before you come out here. She's been saying her relationship with you is over, that she wants to be with this guy.

 

Now I spill out all the details, everything that's been kept under wraps. We seem to have arrived at some confessional core, where there are no more secrets, no more concealments. We are turning ourselves inside out, as if the truth might absolve us, but it only brings more pain. It may be in this conversation, or perhaps in another soon afterwards, that I walk with the phone into the middle of an empty field next to the hotel and bawl. I'm sorry, I tell her, I'm sorry I said I could look after her, I had no idea what I was taking on.

 

He returns to Anna's journal and spends hours reading it, from the very first page. He feels no compunction about delving into her private thoughts and feelings, if she has brought us to this moment of truth, well, let it embrace her too. What he finds there is sad and shocking. It's as he realized in the end, her act was not a momentary impulse, on the contrary, it was a goal she yearned for from the outset, one she worked herself up to by degrees. Her girlfriend has meanwhile discovered, hidden in their home somewhere, a letter that Anna left behind before her departure. It's almost, but not quite, a suicide note, further proof that her plans were made far in advance. So she was never on their side, on the side of everybody who loved her and tried to make her well. Instead she was in league with the dark other stranger inside her, the one who wants her dead. It's hard not to feel profoundly betrayed. Even as they made plans for the trip, with all the talk about how good it would be for her, she was already dreaming up this other scenario, in which she needed him as the helpless bystander, the custodian of her remains. If she recovers, which it begins to seem she might, he doesn't know how he will ever be able to speak to her again.

 

Meanwhile he sweeps up the litter of discarded medicine wrappers from under the bed. It's painful to be reminded every time he's in the room, but there is another reason for this clean-up. Attempted suicide is a crime in India and there could be more serious trouble coming. When she was first admitted to the hospital in Margao, a policeman stationed at the emergency room came to speak to him and take his details. And at the hospital in Panjim a doctor approaches Sjef one day and tells him, if there is any hassle from the authorities, to give him a call.

 

In preparation for possible trouble, he speaks to the South African embassy in Bombay, giving them all the details of what happened and emphasizing, in advance, that the drugs she took were of a legal nature. But he also knows by now from her journal that she was indulging in other drugs with Jean, so in case of an unexpected search he goes through Anna's rucksack from top to bottom, to be sure there's nothing incriminating.

 

Around me, in the village where I have spent months of my life and come to know some of the locals quite well, there has descended a general air of suspicion. A number of people, some of them near strangers, have felt free to question me aggressively about what took place. A few pretend sympathy, but it always leads to the same point. Your girlfriend, they say, why did she do it. Were you fighting with her. The inference is clear, and chimes exactly with my underlying guilt. She's not my girlfriend, I begin, but I always fall silent. My protests only confirm what they believe.

 

So I retreat into a tiny circle of refuge. Caroline and Sjef and Paula are my new and only friends. I spend a lot of time in their company and we talk endlessly about what happened and what might still be coming. We even manage to laugh at certain moments. I really want her to recover, I say one day, so that I can kill her myself.

 

It's around now that I become aware something else is afoot, something connected to Caroline. I hardly know her, yet we've been plunged into artificial intimacy, and in our scattered conversations I've learned a little bit about her. She's mentioned that she was married but that her husband was killed in an accident long ago in Morocco. I gather, between the lines, that this is the central event of her life, one which has marked her deeply, despite the intervening time, and what's happened now with Anna seems to have revived the memory for her again. She talks about it now and then, always in sideways allusive terms, but a shadow creeps over her face, her eyes fill up with tears. That ride in the ambulance with Anna, she says one day, it was terrible, it reminded me of, oh never mind. On another occasion she says, I've been having the most terrible dreams, all about what happened in Morocco. She doesn't go on, but on the far side of her words I sense a chasm falling away into darkness, and I don't want to look over the edge.