Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [43]
“Call for backup.”
“Come on, Bobo,” says Vanessa again.
Dad goes inside to get more ammunition and Vanessa goes inside so that she won’t have to watch. But I want to see what Mum is doing. I want to see everything.
I say, “Mum, can I do anything?” but she does not answer.
I have a special Red Cross certificate from school. I can stabilize a broken limb or a broken neck and bandage a sprain. I can dress a bullet wound. I can make hospital corners on a bed. I know how to find a vein and administer a drip, but I am only allowed to do this if All the Grown-ups Are Dead. I can do mouth-to-mouth and CPR, and I have practiced on the kids at school who are also signed up for the Red Cross class.
Red Cross first-aid classes are held in the old music room at the end of the kindergarten block. I practice giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It is the closest I have ever come to someone’s mouth, having it open like that, breathing into the soft, red, ripe cave of someone else’s body. I practice on a small girl called Anne Brown. My tackie lips feel as if they might suffocate her, hovering above hers.
“Close her nose, tilt her chin.”
I feel the way her nostrils stick with mucus as I squeeze them closed. The skin on her nose feels sweaty, greasy, and bobbly.
It’s very hot in the small classroom where we have pushed the desks aside to make room for a hospital bed and bandages, bodies, stretchers. I lean over Anne. Small beads of sweat have sprung up on her top lip, like a mustache.
“Have you checked her mouth for vomit?” asks the nurse teacher.
Anne opens her mouth obligingly. I scrape my finger around her mouth.
“Don’t forget, you’re supposed to be unconscious, Anne. Don’t help Bobo.”
Anne sinks her teeth unhelpfully onto my finger.
When I have resuscitated her, she looks flushed and breathless, closer to death than when I started. My finger is purple with perfect Anne Brown–shaped teeth marks.
Mum has scissors from her first-aid kit that she keeps in the back of the Land Rover. She is cutting the dress off Violet. In the bright, white hissing-blue light of the paraffin lamp we can see that Violet has been sliced, like rashers of bacon, all the way up her thighs, across her belly, her arms, her face.
Mum slaps the inside of Violet’s arm, looking for a vein. She says over and over again, under her breath, “Hold on, Violet. Hold on.” She has forgotten, or has stopped caring, that I am watching. Dad has come outside again. He has his FN rifle strapped across his back and he says, “I’m going down to the compound.” He gets on his motorbike.
Mum looks up from Violet’s body and pushes hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand, which means a smudge of blood up her nose and above her eyebrow. She says, “I wish you’d wait for backup.”
But Dad kicks his motorbike alive, and I watch the red taillight wind down the hill and around the corner, humping as it goes over the big culvert at the corner, and then the sound of the two-stroke engine is absorbed by the night.
“Hold on,” says Mum to Violet, into the silence left by the disappearing roar of Dad’s motorbike. She says, “Don’t die. Hold on.” The lamp hisses and there are the usual singsong, rasping calls of frogs from the pool. The dogs scratch and whine as they stretch and recurl themselves into comfortable positions and there is the rhythmic, slip-slap, of some of the dogs licking their balls. Usually Mum says, “Hey, stop that!” when she hears them licking their balls, but not now.
Dad comes back from the compound. Mum has emptied one drip into Violet’s arm. While the drip has been emptying into the nearly flat vein, Mum has scrambled to the front of the Land Rover and turned on the mobile radio. She has called for backup. She says, “HQ, HQ. This is Oscar Papa 28, do you read?”
There is a small, crackling pause. Then, “Oscar Papa 28, this is HQ. Reading you strength five. Go ahead. Over.”
“We need mobile medics. We have one African female in critical condition. Over.”
“Have you been under terrorist attack? Over.”
“Negative. It appears to be