Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [88]
She held out her arms.
Give, she said softly, give him to me, I’ll watch.
8
On the trolley next to my bed the hot water is steaming in the washbasin. It smells of Milton. Over the fume of disinfectant I detect the fragrance of lavender. Agaat knows Milton sets my teeth on edge. But she persists with it. She says she prefers it to Dettol. Dettol is for hospitals and for childbirth.
Sometimes she adds lavender to the Milton water, or fennel, to make it more pleasant for me, at other times mint, or lemon verbena. She’s read up in our gardening books, she says, herbs are good for the blood, for the concentration, for the nerves. I get the message. I must concentrate, I must have nerves of steel. And about my blood, I know, I mustn’t worry overmuch, she’ll pep that up for me with mint.
Agaat lifts one side of me. She manoeuvres a triple-folded bath towel in under me. Then she walks to the other side and tilts me and straightens the towels under me. All this she does with the strong left hand. With the right hand she steers and pulls and slips and folds. Like a conductor, with the one hand she beats time, with the other she signals the major entries, for percussion, for the trombone, and with that she gives the feeling, passionato, grazioso, every wash-time a concert.
The little right hand feels different to the left when it brushes against my skin, cooler and smoother. It’s as if recently she’s been touching me more often with the weak hand, a sweep of the knuckles, or a fluttering of the four gathered fingers, a weightless shell-shaped palm resting on my stomach for a moment.
It’s as if she’s less concerned about my seeing that hand of hers. Now and again I catch a glimpse in the folds of the facecloth when she puts it in the washbasin, in the pleat of a curtain as she opens it. Then it steals away before I’ve had a good view of it. It hasn’t changed. A little frizzled paw with a folded-in thumb such as one sees in verrucose chickens.
Every day she wears one of the light crocheted jerseys that she’s made part of her uniform, the right sleeve lengthened so that it covers the hand all the way to the knuckles. But I’ve caught her a few times now stripping back the longer sleeve when she washes me. She knows I see.
Butcher’s sleeve, she says then.
She folds back the bedding all the way and drapes it over the railing at the foot of the bed. She adjusts the bed so that my upper body is marginally more upright. She fits the rigid support so that my head is stable. Head Lock by LimberUp & Co.
We’re doing a full-body tonight, Ounooi, it’s midweek. Then you’ll feel a whole lot better.
She spreads a bathsheet over my body from my feet up to my waist.
And seems to me we’ll have to massage the feet, they feel a bit cold to me.
I feel her hand on the bridge of my foot. It’s the left hand, it feels warm. She does a little rub there, as if my foot needs cheering up. Hang-foot. Sometimes, to prevent my muscles from shrivelling as happened to my hands, she fits the foot-support. Foothold by Feet & All. The stirrups, Agaat calls it. But mainly I ride bareback. Lord, imagine, me in my present state on horseback, hairy death, the ceaseless whinnying, because he’ll know what’s mounted him.
She unties the ribbons of the bed-jacket behind my neck, she pulls it down over my arms until she can take it off over my hands.
It’s thin sleeveless hospital-wear that Leroux brought, for easy effective handling of your patient, I heard him say to Agaat.
But she’ll feel the cold, because the muscles are dead, so always keep her covered under several layers of light covers, even though it’s summer now.
Leroux speaks to Agaat in the passage outside my door. He thinks he’s in a hospital where voices can’t be heard over the rumbling of trolleys and clattering of crockery and buckets and nurses rushing around. He tells her everything about his latest conclusions and proposals and he issues his latest directives. I hear him clearly. It’s only the floorboards that creak as he stands and