Читать книгу The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician - Tendai Huchu - Страница 14

The Magistrate

The Magistrate prepared supper. He made a simple pasta bolognaise with a generous sprinkling of cheese. Another recipe from the TV. Chenai walked in, wearing faded jeans and a Biffy Clyro T-shirt. She kissed the bald patch on his head and rubbed it.

“Careful, one day you’re going to be as bald as me,” the Magistrate said.

“Eew.”

“It’s hereditary, remember your tete, Mai Munashe?” he laughed. “I’m going out to work tonight. You’re a big girl, I’m sure you can look after yourself. You’ve got your mum’s number and mine in case anything happens. Is that okay?”

“You got a J.O.B. Wicked.” She jumped up and down, and hugged him as if she wanted to squeeze the breath out of him.

“It’s only temporary, agency work, until something better comes up. Food’s ready, help yourself.”

He left before Mai Chenai was up, took the 21 on Niddrie Mains and paid for a single. The neighbourhood fell behind, the derelicts to his left and the new-builds that came after. He went past Alfonso’s place near the Jack Kane Centre, an angular block of concrete that stood amidst open fields. He felt nervous; his entire life had been dedicated to the law, now he found himself taking the first tentative steps to a new profession.

When he thought about it, he found his life was coming full circle. Falling out of the middle class was harder on him than he could have imagined. The Magistrate grew up in the open spaces of Gutu, at his maternal grandfather’s kumusha. His grandfather, a kind, hardworking man, had been a farmer. It was only through chance, the once in a generation aligning of stars, that the Magistrate had broken free from the soil. He came of age at a time when the right education meant open doors and limitless opportunities.

The 21 rolled on, stopping at many stops, people getting off and others getting on. A man fumbled through his pockets, looking for the correct change. He threw his money down the fares box and off they went. They passed through Portobello, past the shops, the police station and the dog salon, the smell of salt in the air, over the robots and on to Seafield Road.

Travelling on the bus, he did not feel quite the same intensity traversing the city as he did while walking. It altered his perception of space at a mental and physical level. On his morning walks, he felt tiredness in his muscles, the full topographical awareness of how he was oriented on a gradient, a connectedness not possible at the same level of consciousness on the bus. He wondered what he was missing along the way. The bus depot was across the road. A few double-deckers were parked there. The sea lay in the distance, grey and still. A sailboat sailed towards the horizon. A feeling of internal dislocation swept over him, which way was South? Car dealerships and commercial spaces swept by. I have got to walk on my way home, he thought, even though he knew it was a long way. Unless he actually felt it in his limbs, he could not live it, make it a part of himself, a felt experience.

The bus took him deep into Restalrig, blanketed by the reek of the sewer works near the coast. The Magistrate clasped his hands together, his palms were sweaty. He went through Leith, past the Links, past the small QMUC campus and onto Great Junction Street. The streets were packed with young people going up town to the nightspots. He was close to his destination. Alfonso had given him an address on Ferry Road.

He got off after the BP garage and began to walk. Thank goodness it was Alfonso who told him how to get here. The natives gave directions using street names as if they were reading off maps, but how does one orient oneself without reference to a landmark in the environment? He checked his watch and saw there was only fifteen minutes before the start of his shift. He picked up pace, walking past a pub, checking the addresses. The pub was 183 and he needed to get to 205. His mobile rang.

“Where are you? Chenai told me you’d got a job. Why didn’t you tell me?” Mai Chenai asked.

“You were asleep. I didn’t want to wake you.”

“Inga, makorokoto, what job is it?”

“I went to see Alfonso this afternoon and he arranged something straightaway.” He hoped she wouldn’t remind him that this is what she’d told him to do months ago.

“I’ll have to thank him the next time I see him.”

“I’m about to start my shift, how about we talk in the morning when we get home.”

“Okay, but I don’t like the idea of leaving Chenai at home alone. Perhaps it would be better if you did days and I continued with my nights.”

“She’s fifteen, she’ll be fine. I’ve just arrived. We will talk later, okay.” The building he’d arrived at was a double story Victorian house, built with the same grey masonry as most of the city. He pressed the buzzer and waited.

A woman buzzed him in. The stomach-churning odour of urine and faeces greeted him as the door opened. The smell was mixed with something else, something toxic and alien. Instinct told him it was the scent of human decay, death on the threshold, masked by talc. He took hesitant steps on the maroon carpet. A short woman wearing a plastic apron stepped into the corridor.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“The agency, Busy Bodies Recruitment and Employment Solutions, sent me.”

“You’re not Olu, we asked for Olu . . . She’s a hard worker that one . . . Well, alright, don’t just stand there, come on. I’ll have to have a strong word with that Alfonso, sneaky wee cretin.” She led him to the staff room that had seventies-style wallpaper and old sofas.

His tunic was tight across the waist and suffocating when he sat down on the sofa, which sunk as if it had no base. I need to trim a few pounds off the belly, he thought. Back home a pot belly was something to be admired, a sign of wealth and good living. It was the adverts mocking pot-bellied men that got to him. That was the power of the media. He recalled how when he’d first arrived they had saturation footage proclaiming Kylie Minogue had the best bum in the world. He’d scoffed at it, disagreed with their aesthetic judgement, but after months of the barrage in which prominent scientists had been wheeled out to postulate some mathematical formula on waist to hip ratio, proving that Kylie’s body was biologically the epitome of fertility thus making her irresistibly attractive to men, the Magistrate submitted to the general consensus of science and reason, and agreed that she indeed had the best bum in the world.

“Oy, why on earth are you wearing steel toe caps?” the woman asked. “Never mind. It’s time for handover. I’m Margo by the way.” There were six other people in the room. One of them was a young man with a broad forehead and intelligent eyes. The young man listened to the nurse in charge attentively and took down notes. The rest were all women. The Magistrate couldn’t make out what the nurse was saying; she spoke quickly, with an accent. He caught a few words, ‘catheter’, ‘projectile vomiting’, ‘bowel movement’.

What have I got myself into? he thought.

“Right, any questions?” the nurse asked. She was in her forties, with a mole on her left cheek. An intimate look, unnoticed by most, passed between her and the young man. “Brian, darling, would you like to pair up with . . . erm.” She turned to the Magistrate, “Sorry, I’ve forgotten your name, love. Brian, show him the ropes. You’re used to the first-timers.”

The Magistrate followed Brian through a brightly lit corridor lined with black and white portraits of old people. He struggled against an overwhelming urge to throw up. Now and again he held his breath. Brian walked casually through the putrid atmosphere, seemingly oblivious. They went into the sluice room.

“You haven’t done this before, have you?” Brian asked.

“God help me,” the Magistrate replied.

“Ah, I can tell from your accent kuti muri wekumusha. Makadini Baba.” Brian clapped his hands. The Magistrate was surprised to find his countryman here of all places. Brian’s accent was a hybrid with a Londoner’s lilt mixed in with the odd Americanism. “Hang on, you’re Chenai’s father, aren’t you? We came to your house a few months ago for a prayer meeting.” The Magistrate didn’t recognise him. His wife had taken up with a Pentecostal church and, while he tolerated her church guests, he left for walks once their prayer sessions started.

“Don’t worry,” said Brian, “I’ll teach you everything you need to know. We have to settle all the residents in the east wing. Piece of cake, a few of them are bedbound anyway.”

Brian packed a trolley with incontinence pads, urine bottles, wipes, catheter bags, sheets, pillowcases, tools of the trade alien to the Magistrate. They walked down the corridor to the first room with a brass number fixed to the door. The resident’s name, Joan Dowler, was written on a piece of paper glued below the number.

“Hello Joan.” Brian’s voice had a higher pitch now, almost effeminate. “Joan’s one of our oldest, she’s been here forever. She’s a lovely old thing.”

The Magistrate cringed at the rotten odour coming from her bed. Joan made gurgling noises. She was lying on a bed with cot sides raised. She was a bony creature, propped up on either side by pillows, her hair a wild, curly mess. The Magistrate felt a mixture of pity and revulsion.

“God, is it worth living in such a state?” The words came out involuntarily.

“It’s not for us to judge. All I know is that we’re only here for the blink of an eye, and so every experience, good and bad, pain and pleasure, must be worth it. My job is to make sure they are comfortable in their last days,” Brian said, stroking Joan’s hair. The old woman cooed. There was a little radio in the room and Brian played a Jim Reeves CD. Joan lay still, looking as though she was lost in some sweet reminiscence. “She likes the music. It helps her sleep. We better hurry up, we have to get them all settled before Linda comes through on her drug round.”

Outside the window was a pine tree. The sun had gone down and that side of the building was in darkness. Brian emptied the catheter and asked the Magistrate to roll her on her side. She had tubes running through her nose, feeding her yellowy syrup from a machine beside the bed. He cringed involuntarily as Brian pulled the covers off. He was not convinced that a life tied to one’s bed was a life worth living. Putrid pus ran down her side from the bedsores on her back. He heaved but managed to stop himself.

“I have to tell Linda the dressings have come off again,” Brian said, oblivious to the Magistrate’s discomfort. “We need to turn her from side to side every two hours, all through the night.”

They finished with Joan and moved to the next room. There was an old man within, sitting on a chair, talking to himself. “I killed Hitler, I killed Hitler. Oh, God save me, I killed him.”

“Fred,” said Brian, “it’s time for bed.”

“I killed Hitler.”

“I know, and you got a medal for it, remember?” Brian winked at the Magistrate. “Fred fought in the war. He likes to remind us of that from time to time.”

“There’ve been a great many wars in these parts,” the Magistrate said. “It’s funny how they almost turned it into sport.”

“You’d all be speaking German if it wasn’t for me,” said Fred.

“I know, Fred, you tell me that every night. But here I am speaking English instead. Ain’t that something?”

They propped him up on either side, Fred fighting them every step of the way. The Magistrate felt the full weight of the man against him. Fred wobbled with every step. “Come on, one foot at a time,” Brian encouraged him.

“You bloody Nazis, the lot of you, let me go,’ said Fred. “Is this how you treat a prisoner of war?” They reached the bed and gently helped him down. Fred kicked the Magistrate on the shin. He wasn’t going down without a fight. There was a photo of him on the wall, a young man in military dress staring straight into the camera. On his bedside cabinet was another photo of Fred in a suit, holding his bride who wore a flowing wedding dress. A little of the young man was left in the old Fred, especially in the eyes, which had not lost their mischievous shine.

“I need to spend a penny,” said Fred.

“You won’t buy much with a penny these days,” replied the Magistrate.

“He means he needs to do number one, to micturate, kuita weti . . . You’ll get used to the lingo,” Brian laughed. He gave Fred a bottle and they turned aside while he did his business. “Stay alert or Fred might baptise you by throwing the bottle at you. Trust me, he’s got me a couple of times. Biological warfare is illegal under the Geneva Conventions, but he doesn’t seem to care.”

After they finished with Fred, they went round the wing, settling the other residents. There was another section upstairs where they had to drain catheters, give water, put people to bed and collect human waste at an industrial pace. They met Irene, who had a habit of howling all night, Tom, who was zombified, Susan, who could manage reasonably well with her zimmer frame, Kathleen, the grouch, who wanted to be left alone to die, and Eric, who liked walking around naked, flashing his willy, saying, “Not bad for ninety-five, hey.” There were too many faces, too many people in these small catacombs. The Magistrate wondered how Brian knew all of them so well when they could only spend a few minutes with each one.

Brian handed him the wipes. “You have to learn how to do this eventually.”

The Magistrate had heard about these places before and the reality was worse than the stories. It was incomprehensible to him that these people, who, after all, were fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, could be rounded up in this Gulag, waiting to die. Was this the fate that awaited him should he stay in this country for too long? Would Chenai allow that? She was already too modern, too westernised.

They had a full yellow bag when they walked back to the sluice. He’d never once changed Chenai’s nappies, there was always the maid for that sort of thing – how he missed her. His feet ached. The safety shoes pinched his small toes. Brian showed him how to use the sluicemaster into which they poured the waste.

“How can anyone send their parents to die in such a place?” he asked.

“You haven’t been here that long, have you? They say people out here are cash rich and time poor. Haven’t you felt how time speeds up as soon as you leave the airport terminal? Sometimes you have the odd long day, but the weeks and months rush by, like that.” Brian clicked his fingers to emphasize his point. A buzzer rang. “I’ll go and get the first one, you go over to the staff room and have a bit of a breather. Brace yourself, they’ll be going off all night.”

The Magistrate took a seat in the staff room, shell-shocked and dazed. He felt as though he was in a dream, drifting through a heavy fog, an alternative reality. The clock said it was after midnight. His back ached from hauling bodies up beds, bending over, picking things up. He was no stranger to the backbreaking hoe work in his grandfather’s fields, yet he was convinced this was a different kind of pain. In the fields with the soft earth beneath your feet and the open sky above, you hardly felt the strain. It was massaged by the soothing voices of family, banter, the gossip about the neighbours, and the satisfaction that your labour was meaningful. There was nothing like watching your seedlings grow, tending them until they matured. It was different from this, this cultivating the field of death, the living dead groaning in their cots.

“You look lost in thought, pal,” the woman in the plastic apron said to him. “Brian says this is your first time and you’re doing alright. Fancy a cuppa?”

“Pardon?”

“Cup of tea.” He nodded. “So what did you do before this?”

“I was unemployed,” he replied.

“Before that. You couldnae ’ave been on the dole all your life now.”

The Magistrate hesitated. It wouldn’t make any sense, here of all places, to explain what his past life had been. “I had an office job. You know, pushing papers.”

“I guessed it. No offence, but you dinnae look too cut oot for this line of work.”

She gave him a cup of tea. He took a sip. It was too milky. The woman picked up a magazine. Another buzzer went off. An orange light on the board near the clock blinked on and off.

“That’s one of yours. You’ve got the east wing, rooms twenty-nine to fifty-five. We’ve got the west.”

As the night wore on, he could hardly keep his eyes open as they went about their patrols. Brian was cheerful and chatty all the time. The Magistrate wondered what a smart young man like him could be doing in one of these places. It was a travesty, he thought, and said it bluntly to Brian in the way one countryman can to another.

“No experience in life is ever wasted, that’s my philosophy.” Brian shrugged. The Magistrate didn’t pursue the issue. He was far too tired for that.

In the morning he walked down the front stairs of the building and inhaled deeply, filling his lungs with sweet morning air. He’d survived the night. Cars crawled in both directions on Ferry Road. He’d forgotten his idea of walking home. It came back to him when he saw Arthur’s Seat in the distance, but he was too exhausted. Every fibre of his being ached. Brian came running after him.

“You look terrible, Baba Chenai.”

“It’s called PTSD.”

“Well, they liked your style in there, though Margo says you’re too quiet, almost like you’re used to hearing other people speak instead of talking yourself. You need to open up, let yourself go a bit. Not bad for a first night, though. There’s a couple of shifts opening up and they’ll have you back if you like.” Brian’s enthusiasm depressed the Magistrate.

“Let me go home first and recover.” They laughed.

He caught the 21 marked for the Royal Infirmary, which took him home. The smell of the care home was snagged onto his clothes. He undressed and threw his clothes in the washing machine, lumbered up the stairs and ran himself a hot bath. He scrubbed himself raw, using copious amounts of gel all over his body. He even washed inside his nostrils to try and get rid of the smell that seemed lodged inside. When he was done, he lay in the water, soaking, feeling the warmth.

After bathing, he found Amai Chenai in bed, asleep. He kissed her on the cheek. Now he understood something about her world. He could forgive her irritability. One night shift was enough to make him see. She muttered something in her sleep. A slight smile was on her face. He embraced her and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

A knock on the door woke him. He rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock, it was only one o’clock. He stretched, grabbed his robe and went down the stairs, half asleep. When he opened the door he saw Alfonso holding a paper bag.

“I have so much to tell you,” Alfonso said, dashing in.

“Can’t it wait, we’re still sleeping. Inga, you know I was on nightshift.”

“Have some of this, it will perk you up.” Alfonso thrust a quart of whisky at him.

“It’s one o’clock in the afternoon.”

“Then you need it even more,” Alfonso said, grinning like a Cheshire cat. “Come sit with me. Look, I’m having a beer, just for you, but I have to dash back to the office in a little while.” Alfonso switched on the TV. It went straight to one of Chenai’s music channels. A rapper was bragging about how he’d been shot and survived.

“Before I forget, you have to listen to this one.” Alfonso brought out a pirate TDK cassette and gave it to the Magistrate. “I told you I would find you a good job, didn’t I? No one can say Alfonso doesn’t keep his promises. They loved you at the care home. They are absolutely raving about you. They said you were magnificent, a stunning debut. Now listen to this, one of their care assistants is going on maternity leave and they want you to cover.”

The Magistrate could tell the praise was exaggerated. There is only so much one could expect for shovelling Augean bucket loads of faeces. Still, any extra work would be welcome, given the circumstances. Alfonso sipped his Stella, his eyes darting about the place. He changed the channel to the news. An earthquake had hit some place and grim survivors loitered about in shock.

“Signs and wonders. The world is coming to an end,” said Alfonso.

“They say that every year.”

“I’ve heard of a man in America who has made the right calculations using secret codes in the Bible that only the righteous can know.”

“I think Newton had it down for 2060, some say the Mayans have it for 2012. There was a guy who said it would happen in 1998, and guess what – we’re still here.”

Alfonso frowned. “My guy has it down for 2010. And now you’ve given me two other dates.” He counted on his fingers. “So which is it?”

The Magistrate sighed, just keeping his eyes open was hard enough. Alfonso raised his can and proposed a toast to the end of the world. The Magistrate was glad to drink to it. Chenai walked in carrying her satchel.

“Hi, Dad. Hi, Uncle Alfonso.” She sounded chirpy. “Dad, I have a surprise for you. Close your eyes.”

The Magistrate closed them and felt like he would never open them again.

“Open them.” He did so and Chenai was holding out a Sony Walkman with orange headphones.

“I haven’t seen one of these in years.”

“I know. It’s so retro isn’t it? I got it off Liam; he had it years ago but everyone’s into iPods and MP3 players now. It still works. I figured you could listen to your gwash music.”

“Who’s Liam?”

“Just a mate from school.”

The Magistrate reminded himself that things were different here. Girls could be friends with boys, something unheard of in his time. But still, he’d remember this name, Liam. Alfonso wouldn’t leave it at that. “Is this Liam from a good family?”

“His father’s a councillor.” Chenai gave him a fierce look.

“Tell this Liam, I said, ‘Thank you for such a kind gift.’” The Magistrate smiled and Chenai bounded upstairs. He took a sip of his whisky straight from the bottle and felt the inebriating warmth radiate through him, along with the beginnings of a new future.