“Can you die from not being listened to?”
That was the question she had asked after regaining consciousness on the floor of a government hospital. Unlike the usual hospital smells – disinfectant, anaesthetic, bleach, needle and bedpan metal – this hospital smelled organic. Like a flesh market. Sweet and rotten. The mortality market.
But that was after. First Amal had died. Not in the hospital: almost a thousand days before she woke up on the hospital floor. But she couldn’t be sure of exactly how long he had been dead now because she couldn’t keep records well. Not even their anniversary. She was not clumsy but she misplaced things. Amal said she did it on purpose. Like a squirrel, so busy hiding things safe and sound and then forgetting where they were hidden when the time came to unbury them. He had been looking at her with what she thought was a surprising amount of warmth for someone who was as sick as he was. The way he held his mouth gave him away.
“You’re worse today” she said, still looking for her keys so that they could go to the physiotherapist.
Amal was not strong enough to cough up the fluid in his lungs anymore.
He clicked his tongue. She knew he was now irritated with her because she was being paternal, and she was angry because she didn’t know how else to be since he had become so helpless. She turned her back to look through the laundry basket she had already checked. She did this to avoid the guilt she would feel later if she let him see she was angry. She wrapped the feeling up in the dirty sheets and clothes, threw them into the washing machine and turned around with her face arranged with something like good humour.
“I don’t like it when you tell me what I am,” This was something that came up often these days. As if her saying it was an incantation sending the treacherous cells burrowing deeper into his bones. Cancer words. The familiar feelings of resentment and sorrow collided with an inaudible crack somewhere inside her.
“Found them.”
“Are you listening to me?” She pushed him out to the car.
The first time she realised the Thing About Listening was also the first time she thought something might be wrong with her. She was still in bed, in the same clothes she had worn that morning when she walked into the sitting room and found Amal.
It was something in the face. The muscles around the mouth. Loosened like that.
She stood there feeling like a flat line on the surface of the earth. Feeling nothing and waiting. Considering the effort it would take her to try and cry now. Not because she wasn’t sad. Not because something very significant hadn’t just clicked out of place. She couldn’t find her phone, so she had gone upstairs and gotten into bed. She thought she could have been there for two days like that. Amal left at the window for two days. And that’s when the small, strange pain had started.
First it had been along one of her ribs, on the right side. It had moved to her sternum, and held her upright like an aching pillar. Then it moved down, through her slippery intestines, and collected like residue in the bowl of her pelvis. It stayed there for the longest time, until finally is found its way into one of the arteries in her leg and got pumped back up to her heart, and then she had lost it. She knew it was still there somewhere. She finally got up to call her mother-in-law.
That small pain had been travelling along her body since then. Almost three years. And it had taught her The Thing About Listening. Which was that not being listened to was like a disease in itself. Contagious. Caught from people who told you what you were when you knew you were something else. No doctor could explain why she would wake up in the night in very distinct, locatable pain, but then lose it a few hours or days later. No psychologist would believe that it was anything but a stress reaction to the death of her husband. Each diagnosis pushed her further away from the world of the well into the world of the ill. But she knew she was not ill. She was herself, only something was wrong. And no one would Listen.
On the day she got fed up with being told she was ill, she called the number of a man in Cape Town. She had lived there once, sharing a flat with a girl whose family claimed to be descendants of the Khoi-San. After too much work and too much drinking her flatmate would tell long wine-coloured stories about her ancestors. One in particular was about a tracker, almost as old and dry as the Karoo where he lived. He worked for a sheep farmer there for many years before he walked out into the baking landscape and disappeared. Out in the dust he was said to be able to track anything. Any animal or human. From any tiny trace. Her flatmate had said how that skill had been passed down, and was the mark of a true Khoi-San descendant. She said the last person in her family to track was her grandfather. He could track anything over land or water, but he could also find things within people. Bad spirits, old war shrapnel, sickness. This was the man who picked up the phone in his house in Muizenberg and answered in the accent she had come to know so well.
***
“Yes, but I can’t find it unless I can see you,” she began to think this was just some old man’s perverted ploy to get women naked in his living room.
***
All the power had gone out of her once she had severed the bone. The absolute and silent control she had been using to get through the tendons and skin suddenly dissolved and she had collapsed in the complacent, flaccid air of the waiting room. She felt wetness, and relief, with each throb of her heartbeat in the stump of her severed finger. It was a different kind of pain now. It was an unbinding pain. She felt a powerful wave of gratitude and passed out again.
