‘Lincoln’s not black!’ Tom expostulated.
‘Mr Lincoln is an initiate of the Tayswengo, Brodzinski.’ His lips twisted with the irony. ‘And, so far as they’re concerned, they only come in one, ah, colour.’
An hour or so later Adams escorted Tom along the slippery walkway to where a cab was idling at the kerb. The Consul had only a small umbrella, and it was awkward manoeuvring it so as to protect them both. Adams kept on bumping against Tom’s behind. Drunkenly, he wondered if Adams might be a little drunk.
Tom opened the car door and turned to face his host. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry I kinda lost my cool back then. You’ve — you’ve been decent to me, Adams — I know you’re trying your best to help, and thanks for the dinner — the binturang was great.’
The rain was now falling so heavily that it was as if the two of them were standing under a waterfall. Adam’s hand, clenched round the umbrella’s handle, was within an inch of Tom’s cheek.
‘Well, ah, thank you, Brod — I mean, hell, let me call you Tom, d’you mind?’
‘N-No.’ Tom was taken aback.
‘And you’ll call me Winnie, yes?’ There was a pathetic eagerness in Adam’s eyes.
‘S-Sure, Winnie,’ Tom said.
Then, as if to seal this contract, the Consul inclined his head and kissed Tom on the forehead, his lips remaining there for several seconds. Tom was struck by how wet and plump Adam’s lips felt, considering how dry and diffident his mouth appeared. When he removed them, it was with an audible ‘plop’ of un-suction.
Tom stood, staring at the Consul’s face, grey and washed out in the sodden night. He felt a bead of consular saliva trickle down the bridge of his nose.
‘W-Winnie,’ Tom said to break the spell. ‘Is there anything else I can do, anything at all?’
Adams inclined his head once more, coercing Tom’s eyes to his own. ‘You know, don’t you, who Astande is?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘He is “the Swift One” in Tayswengo cosmology, the “Righter of Wrongs”; so there’s always more you can do. You’ve been to visit Mr Lincoln; well, go again. However off-putting he may be, keep talking to him. If anything can mitigate the charges levelled against you, it’s the, ah, willingness to be astande despite his inquivoo. So, go. Go now.’
With this, Adams placed a hand on Tom’s shoulder and pressed him down into the ear.
Tom rolled down the window so he could say goodbye, but Adams was already slipping back along the walkway to his front door. By the time the cab drove off, the lights on the small veranda had been extinguished. Adams and his five fat Handrey women were bedding down for the night.
Tom pictured the Consul stretched out full length on his army cot, the rough blanket pulled up under his long chin.
‘But how?’ he asked out loud. ‘How did he know that I drink Seven and Sevens?’
‘Whozzat?’ the cabbie interjected; however, his passenger didn’t explain, only asked him to drive to the hospital.
6
The cabbie let Tom off in the hospital parking lot. Ambulances backed and filled, their revolving lights throwing spangles into the curtains of rain. Tom picked his way between gurneys, upon which lay all manner of drunk and wounded native people. All were soaked to the skin — none were stoicaclass="underline" their moans and groans were plangently theatrical. Each gurney also had its attendant posse of keening womenfolk who tried to push it forward. The paramedics and police in their glistening rain ponchos did battle with these recumbent jousters, forcing them back from the double doors to the Emergency Department.
Seeing the cop who’d tailed him to the ’nade the previous morning, Tom approached and was waved through. After the mêlée outside, the silence of the white-tiled corridors was eerie. There was no sign of any staff as he walked towards the central elevator lobby. Through head-height windows in the ward doors, Tom could see rows of beds, most of which were empty, although here and there was the outsized foetus of a sleeping patient.
As he waited for the elevator, Tom wondered why it was that so many casualties were being left out in the rain, while inside the hospital snoozed, dreaming its dreams of antiseptic purity.
There was more activity on the fifth floor. An orderly carrying a kidney dish full of foul-smelling fluid got into the elevator as Tom stepped out. An Anglo nurse stood by the nurses’ station chatting with an Anglo patient in a bathrobe. She left off and asked Tom what he wanted.
Without understanding why he did so, Tom pulled up the leg of his short pants and pointed to the three-inch scar left by the makkata’s blade.
‘A-Astande,’ he said. Both Anglos nodded vigorously, as if to say: that explains everything.
‘Go through, yeah,’ the nurse said to Tom. ‘I think the Intwennyfortee mob have finished their ritual now.’ He thanked her and moved on.
By night the corridor that led to Lincoln’s room seemed longer. It kinked and turned, passing bays in which stood mysterious machines, their coiled electrical flexes and rubber wheels suggesting they were deadly as well as silent. Then Tom heard the pitter-patter of water falling on to the tiled floor and the crackle of flames.
He rounded the next corner: someone had built a small fire in the corridor by piling twigs up against the wall, then setting them alight. The smoke curled up into the sucking mouth of a ventilation duct; a fire sprinkler had been activated and the spray from this was splattering the floor. Where the water splashed the fire, it hissed into steam, which diffused the harsh strip-lighting into its component colours, so that a small rainbow arced from wall to floor.
Tom was transfixed by this indoor weather system. Then, seeing an alarm button, he reached for it, only to have his hand detained.
‘I shouldn’t do that if I were you, right.’
It was a doctor, wearing a white coat of military cut. A stethoscope was tucked beneath one epaulette.
‘Why not?’ Tom asked.
The man, who had the strained yet authoritative air of hospital doctors the world over, seemed flummoxed for a moment, then explained: ‘It’s the Intwennyfortee mob: they’re doing their business along here, yeah. The engwegge — it has to be seared.’
The doctor knelt and, picking up some greenish stalks that were lying by the fire, raised one to his lips and nibbled it. ‘Good stuff,’ he said, smiling up at Tom. He was very young, with a helmet of auburn hair and thick black-rimmed glasses. The doctor’s magnified eyes — at once jaded and quizzical — were trapped in these little tanks.
‘I’m, um, surprised,’ Tom said, choosing his words with tipsy circumspection. ‘That you allow the traditional people to hold such, um, ceremonies in the hospital.’
‘We’ve got no choice, right.’ The doctor rose and faced Tom. ‘Once they’re in — they’re bloody in. Besides, fires in hospital corridors, criminal charges for blokes disposing of cigarette ends — it’s all part of the same topsy-turvy sitch, right.’
‘You — you know who I am, then?’ Tom wasn’t that surprised.
‘Yeah, obviously. With the state the old man’s in and you astande, you’d be a fool not to pitch up. I’ll ask Atalaya’s spiritual manager if it’s OK now for you to see him, yeah.’
‘Manager?’ Tom was bemused.
The young doctor laughed. ‘Her spirit intercessor. No Tayswengo can talk directly to her makkata; ritual business is organized by a manager, right. ’Course, that’s not their own term; a literal translation is something like “informed explicator of the mind — world — body conundrum”.’
‘It’s incredible to me how much you guys—’
‘Know about the bing-bongs’ shit?’ The doctor grinned, while Tom searched his open face for irony. ‘It goes with the territory, yeah. You can’t doctor them if you don’t.