With her smell of Lifebuoy and Mum and calamine she enters the room.
Praise the Lord, rise up rejoicing, she sings. She stops when she sees I’m already awake.
Her uniform crackles. Her cap shines like a beacon. She is wearing a clean white housecoat with short sleeves, over that a white crocheted jersey. I can smell the cold-water Omo. The apron is stiff with starch. Her rubber soles sough as she tacks about my bed.
She cranks me up, she pummels my pillows, she hoists my neck out of my body, she props up my head, she arrays me.
Wake and shake, make and take, she says.
She comes with a wet lukewarm sponge and wipes out my mouth.
Mole from the mouth, she says.
She unfastens the nappy between my legs, puts it aside in a bundle and slides the number one pan in under me.
She puts on my bib.
She clamps the jug with the long spout and the little tube to the railing of the bed. She bends the drip-stem with the mouthpiece so that it’s suspended above my lips. She adjusts the drip-hole. She puts the mouthpiece into my mouth.
Ten counts between each swallow, she says. Ready steady go!
She eases open the valve. The first drop of warm thickened liquid spreads over my tongue. Rooibos. One mouthful tea and one mouthful breath and count to ten, says Agaat, think of the undrprvlgd.
A mouthful of consonants. Lest I forget what I wrote.
I do my best. Half runs down my chin.
She watches me closely while she prepares everything. She tucks the bib in further under my chin. She wipes my chin. I get hold of the rhythm. I am thirsty. I count to ten. I swallow. I count ten tens and ingest ten mouthfuls, a quarter-mouth at a time. This cup.
Agaat fills the plastic basin with hot water from the kettle that she’s brought with her from the kitchen. She arranges the towels, the washcloths, the soap and the sponges, everything neatly on the large hospital trolley that Leroux carted in here.
I drink three more tens.
Drinking merrily she is this morning, says Agaat. Have you peed yet, Ounooi?
I signal, no, you can see for yourself the nappy is dry. She doesn’t look.
I’m asking, have you peed yet?
Now she looks. I signal again no, I have not and don’t be so crude so early in the morning.
Well go on pee, Ounooi, I haven’t got all day.
Don’t look at me, I gesture, look in the other direction.
Agaat makes little whistling sounds between her teeth to encourage me.
It won’t come.
I hear nothing, she says. She puts her hand behind her ear.
Is the little tap stuck this morning, hmmm? Well, perhaps you can’t drink and pee at the same time. Let’s close the tap up here, then maybe the one down there will open.
She keeps her face straight. She closes the tea drip and takes the spout out of my mouth. Her rubber soles suck noisily at the floor, it sounds as if there’s extra torque, extra weight in her tread. I recognise it. That’s what she does when she discovers she can’t make me. She turns her back on me. I know what she’s going to do. She swirls the water around in the washbasin. She wrings out the cloth to make it drip in the water. Still nothing. I know she’s listening. Her ears point backwards. She takes a glass, she pours the water, over and over, from a height.
I try to think of something else. My bladder is full. I want to. I didn’t want to in the nappy, else there would have been all manner of commentary. And I don’t want to make extra problems, I don’t want to distract her.
Pee and tea is not the problem. Agaat is the problem. She acts stupid. It’s been five days now that I’ve been gesturing there is something, there in the front of the house, in the sideboard, in the front room, with the photo albums.
She doesn’t like the idea that I want to take leave. Perhaps I can kill two birds with one stone. Perhaps telepathy works better through piss in the pan than transmitted in waves through the air into the rock-hard skull of Agaat.
Streams of grace abounding, Agaat sings, flow from God above, sacred source of freshness, that was pledged by His love.
I think of the water map. I think of the underground water-chambers in the mountain, of the veins branching from them, of the springs in the kloofs, of the fountains of Grootmoedersdrift, the waterfalls in the crevices. I think of the drift when it’s in flood, the foaming mass of water, the drift in the rain, when the drops drip silver ringlets on the dark water. And just after it’s cleared, when the black-wattle branches sag heavy and sodden over the ditch and the frogs clamour in the drenched grass-thickets on the bank. Memories in me and I awash between heaven and earth. What is fixed and where? What real? If only I could once again see the places marked on the map, the red brackets denoting gates, cattle-grids, sluices, the red is-equal-to sign of the bridge over the drift, first and last gateway over which the livestock of Grootmoedersdrift move and will continue moving when I am gone. Sheep, cattle, cars, lorries, wire cars, mud and time. Slippery, supple, subtle, silvery time.
Maps attend lifetimes. What is an age without maps? I see it, chambers full of idle melancholy cartographers in the timeless hereafter. Hills there surely will have to be in heaven, but eternal, Eternal Humpbacked Hills, and Eternal Fairweather. Idle melancholy meteorologists. What is a real human being? A run-off. A chute of minutes for God the sluicer. He who paves his guttering with people.
Perhaps I’ve been infected by Agaat. She’s blasphemed for a long time.
It’s coming. Here it comes, through my blessed piss-sphincter, first passing of the day.
Good girl, says Agaat. You don’t perhaps want the number two pan as well, seeing that you’re in the swing of things now? Lesson six, remember? You don’t want dung and piss all over everything if you can help it.
Quite right, I flicker, but I’m not a slaughter animal.
She flickers back.
Otherwise we’ll have no choice but to dose you with a Pink Lady again, she says, a Pink Lady for the lady of Gdrift, it’s five days now that her guts have been stuck. Perhaps that’s what’s making her so restless. What goes in must come out, after all, good heavens!
Take away the pan, I gesture.
No, you first drip-dry nicely now. Then we fix up your uppers first.
It’s a quarter-body wash this morning. Half-wash is every second day and full wash every fourth day. A lick and a promise, Agaat calls the quarter-wash.
She wipes my neck and face with a lukewarm cloth. Then my chest. She works in the cloth under my hospital gown, over my shoulders. She brushes my hair with a dry shampoo. She supports my head with the little hand, so that it doesn’t loll or roll. She rubs cream on my face and ointment in the corners of my mouth. Now the neckbrace. Krrts, karrrts, she rips loose and refastens the Velcro until it’s seated properly. It expands all the time. My neck feels loose.
She brings the hand mirror closer. I close my eyes. Take away your mirror. We haven’t looked in the mirror for a long time. I recognise the mood. She wants to torment me. She’s quite capable of digging up the lipstick and mascara from somewhere again.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, says Agaat, who’s the fairest of them all?
I keep my eyes shut. My face flushes hot with defying her. I refuse to look, I wait until she moves away. I hear her adding water to the washbasin. She pulls out the pan from under me. I hear her walk away with it. I peep from the corner of my eye to see what she’s doing. She puts on her glasses, examines the contents in front of the window. She puts it down on the trestle table, covers it with a cloth. She writes on the calendar with the pencil suspended there on a string, Leroux’s urine record that he wants to see every time he visits me. My logbook. The motions of my entrances and my exits. Today Agaat looks into the pan again and again as if it contained a message. She takes her magnifying glass out of the dressing table drawer. She peers through it and she writes and she looks again. Augur of my elements, who will prevent her from prognosticating my piss? Perhaps it contains tadpoles.