Читать книгу Lucky You - John Duke - Страница 4

For weeks after Marion died, Eliot would wake in the night and in his half sleep his arm would reach across to her side of the bed and then he knew all over again and he felt a stabbing grief that at first took his breath away. He had to stand up in the passage way, he needed to make a noise to say this grief even though no one would ever hear. From his open mouth would sound a long moan that he wanted to hear. Sometimes for minutes on end, bending his body over and then straightening up.

Every day, every thing that he did in and around their apartment, the dishes, the garbage, the cooking, the garden , meant that he had to think of Marion. His head could reproduce her image, of her self deprecating smile, her screwed up face of frustration, that look of love, and her voice, so that she was as good as in the room. What she had done in his life. What she had said in his life. Always there. After the funeral, he had put her letter away in the drawer of the bedside table, he couldn’t bear to read it again and there it stayed untouched.

They had moved out of their family home and into Grange Apartments soon after Marion had received the bad news. Some place more simple. Just a few suburbs away and it was true that this made his loss and grief easier to deal with, away from years of memories, but the move also made him more alone. He developed a solitary routine away from those others with whom he had passed most days, now sometimes relieved by a visit from Louise. And then there was Eleanor. Sometimes his loneliness made him feel like he was hollow, like he had been punctured and everything in side him had escaped.Yet in some ways being alone suited him , he didn’t want to have other’s concern in his face, their commiserations, the tip toeing around the unmentionable subject. He didn’t want Eleanor deciding what was best for him, sticking her beak into his business. Watching out her window until he went to his garden plot and then springing on him, like some round technicolour predator.

Whatever the struggle before him, moving out of the family home helped him prepare for a future without Marion and soon a new start stood before him fair and square. Yes there would always be something new. Nothing , no circumstance can stay the same for ever so the phone call came, and there beckoning him, staring him in the face, was a new path that he would choose to go down. In a few weeks time he would be at the airport and for a short time feel that something had clicked over and here was a new life and he was striding down this path and there was no turning back. Now the future was something with unknown posibilities. This phone call had come and soon he would be standing in the queue at the departure gate . The phone call was from his brother in law, Marion’s brother. How were things? They must catch up soon and have a beer together and would he be willing to talk about his overseas experiences as a teacher trainer with the Rotary Club.

For a split second Eliot was going to say no because that had become his default position since Marion had died. Yet he changed his mind just as quickly as if someone was pulling his strings as if someone was reading her letter to him. Who didn’t like talking about themselves?He would do it. Sure Barry he said, just give us the details.

When the time came Eliot found himself standing in front of maybe forty men at the Rotary Club . When he stood up to speak, he was not nervous but it dawned on him that what he felt most was that he was uncomfortable talking about the experiences of a partnership now that Marion was no longer there. Every event that he would describe was their event , their experience. Honesty would say that it was Marion who set things in motion……….But the men were waiting, they wanted it to happen and maybe they wanted it to be over too.

Good morning everyone, oh sorry I mean good afternoon. We are lucky to have someone to talk to us today who has worked and travelled extensively in the deveIoping world. Please give a warm welcome to Eliot Wilson. After he has shared some of his experiences with us he told me that he is more than happy to try and answer any questions that you might like to ask him .

Eliot smiled, cleared his throat and set about briefly describing some parts of the journey of thirty five years, the journey of two people in partnership, the lucky breaks, the unavoidable calamities, the laughter and the pain and when he finished and sat down he thought that the room full of midddle aged men had been engaged.They had looked at him, not through him. His words had made them think, they had quiet thoughts. But now the questions didn’t come and there was an uncomfortable silence for a few seconds and then Marion’s brother put his hand up.

Thank you for the question Barry.

Two smiles crossed the room and Eliot relaxed. He was about to tell some stories and he enjoyed telling stories . Now it occurred to him that he so rarely heard his own voice these days as he negotiated away the hours of each day alone in his apartment. Especially his voice of authority and confidence and he liked hearing it again. Being alone was too easy.

I think that I can best answer Barry’s question by telling you a little story……. Africa can be a dangerous place and often the greatest dangers sneak up on you, something or someone sneaks into your life and things are never the same again.

There is an experience that has stayed in my mind for over thirty years. In 1986 we were working in Zambia, my wife and I, in a small city called Mazabuka, not far south from the capital Lusaka. Nearby was the Kafue National Park. We were working with a couple who came from Nottingham at the Luyobolola Community School and together we jumped at the chance to see leopards and cheetahs and the black rhino in the National Park before it was too late. So many people said that. Not for one moment did we suspect that we were living dangerously. My wife and I booked a lodge, hired a four wheel drive vehicle and set off with our new friends, Simon and Brenda for the Kafue river.

We liked Simon and Brenda, they were fun to be with, intelligent, but they didn’t take themselves too seriously. We might have been friends for life. We have always swapped Christmas cards with Simon, but life goes on and he has married again. I liked Brenda very much because she knew what she was talking about, because she was genuine but perhaps most of all because she was funny.

We arrived at the lodge late on a Friday night and sat under the stars and drank beer and began to talk rubbish. The next morning we took a boat out on the Kafue river and a hippopotamus surfaced suddenly near our boat and as the boat rocked and we were splashed with water, you sensed how easy it would be to capsize and then the hippo opened its huge mouth and showed its yellow peg teeth and it could have eaten us all, if that is what they do. But this didn’t happen. Over more beers Brenda said bullshit, she sure wasn’t going to be eaten by a hippopotamus because she was three months pregnant and then there was a lot of hugging and tears and then laughter.

Two days later she said that she didn’t feel well. She had the sweats and a terrible headache and then a pain in her abdomen. So we set off in the Landcruiser for a small town called Mumbwa where there was a doctor and a clinic and the doctor said that she most likely had malaria, so he gave her some Fansidar and we turned around and retraced our steps but her condition didn’t seem to be improving. She went to bed, she needed rest.

Just after three o’clock in the morning Simon stood at our bedroom door, his face pale and grotesque. Later, he said that life could never be the same for his family and her family and that it wasn’t fair. He had felt her tossing, felt her sweating and then she must have stopped breathing in her sleep. She was dead in their bed and over the next few days we learnt how this had come about. I am no doctor and maybe there are doctors in the room who can explain it better than me, but the severity of malaria is greater in pregnant women where the wrigglies accumulate in the placenta accelerating their spread. There is also,apparently, impaired immunity from malaria for women who are pregnant. Brenda’s body was flown back to Nottingham.

I have told you this story because today, here in our world we expect everything to work out the way we would like it to and get upset when it doesn’t. We sometimes forget that life everywhere is full of dangers, people brush up against nature, against their own weaknesses, against other people, and who knows what will happen. You can’t expect to live a life without some pain. Sometimes people run out of luck. Brenda went to Africa to do what she believed were good things and she never returned. I can still see her rolling her eyes and I can still hear her laugh and her loud shout of bullshit. One evening back then, a few months before her death, I remember we sat together on the concrete floor of a small bar on the outskirts of Mazabuka and drank luke warm beer and it seemed then that we were all safe and the future, our future, was sure and certain. But it wasn’t.

On New Year’s Eve we had counted down the seconds in unison and we had hugged each other and I tell my self today I can still feel Brenda’s hug. Late one night in the new year, when the generator had been shut down, the lights gone, the stars dazzled us with their brightness, their number, we sat on plastic chairs in our compound and waited for Halley’s Comet and we felt lucky. And we thought of all the things that happened to people since the last time that the comet visited our planet, the things discovered and the things lost. The people who flourished and the people who suffered. It flared across the sky and we were lucky and only months later all you could say was that Brenda was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was unlucky. She decided to go to Africa in 1986, to Zambia and someone made the decision to travel to the Kafue river and her life ended there. Everyday decisions sometimes cause extraordinary outcomes that resonate in some people’s lives for a long time.

Eliot’s face muscles were working over time, holding back a tide of emotion. Suddenly It felt as if Marion was standing at his shoulder, always there at times like this. The applause was spontaneous.

Thank you Eliot.