Free Preview of Backstories II The Pacifist
I drop down on my haunches to meet the child’s eyes, and offer her the tablet in my most soothing voice. She stares beyond me as if she has not heard, and perhaps she has not. The child is one of hundreds in this makeshift hospital and the noise around us is such that it seems the walls themselves are screaming. Yet she permits me to place the tablet on her tongue. I watch her throat work, swallowing the bitter pill, then I touch my palm to her cheek and turn to the next.
He sits propped up against the pitted wall with his sleeping sister’s arms tight around his waist, and her head, a tangle of lice-infested hair resting on his thigh.
‘Hey, Real,’ I call him, for his favourite soccer team, and draw another tablet from my coat. ‘Real?’ My voice catches, and my hand stops.
Like the girl before him, Real stares back at me as if I have not spoken.
‘Come on, kid. Real, please.’ But his stare is emptier even than the girl’s, and I have seen enough to know. By God, in these few short weeks I have seen enough to know.
I ease his eye-lids closed and say a few short words to God, as much a curse as a prayer, and I lift the seemingly sleeping girl’s arms from around his waist.
‘It is time,’ I whisper, ‘to let go.’
She clings on.
I force myself to wait, endless agonising moments until her grip eases and I lift her face towards me.
‘I am sorry.’
She too stares through me, with wide unfocussed eyes, and a thin line of vomit curves down onto her chin.
I reach out, to wipe it away and her teeth clamp down on my fingertip.
I rear back, stifling a scream, but the girl follows. Snarling like a wild-cat she drags her clawed hand down my cheek, battering at my face until the nurse and orderly between them, carry her away.
‘Liar,’ she screams. ‘Liar. Liar,’ until a hand clamps over her mouth.
‘Gently,’ I urge them, ‘he was her brother.’ But even this is not a new story.
With my finger throbbing and the blood bubbling from my cheek I rest my hand on Real’s emaciated skull and stare at the horror around me, this endless tide of howling, whimpering and silent children. This is how we find them, starving in the streets, and we bring them here with the promise of food and medicine. But we have little food and no medicines worthy of the name, and the typhoid spreads through this filthy incubator faster than it does out there.
The child is right, I am a liar, and a failure. I look at Real’s skeletal face and a shimmering bolt of pain cuts through my temple. My hand tightens on his skull. I raise my face to the damp stained ceiling and howl to match those around me.
With the nurse and orderly gone, I am safe. There is no one to hear. But of course I have forgotten the soldier in the doorway, with her pistol hidden in her crumpled fatigues.
Her face snaps towards me and my mouth clamps shut. I drop my head to my bloodied shoes. My cheeks burn with shame, and the sting of that little girl’s pain.
Three times, the soldier has told me I must come and meet her Chief, and three times I have told her to wait. Not to go. I am not so brave as that. Only to wait. And she has waited since dawn while I prevaricate, trapped between guilt and need.
But now I know, she has waited long enough. These children need more than false promises and placebos. I run my hand over Real’s head one last time and step towards the door.
‘Doctor, doctor,’ hands reach out, pulling at the cuffs of my trousers as they do to the businessmen in the street.
‘Not long, not long,’ I say, picking my way between their tiny bodies, and with the guilt throbbing behind my eyes I hang my stained white coat on the hook by the door, nod to the soldier and step wordlessly into the night…