The Dark of the Sun - Smith Wilbur - Страница 27

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me up inside, you've got to give me one."

"Finish the job and I'll give you a whole case."

"I've got to have one now."

"No." Bruce spoke with finality.

"Have a look at what they've got here in the way of instruments. Can

you do it with these?" Bruce crossed to the sterilizer and lifted the

lid, the steam came up out of it in a cloud. Haig looked in also.

"That's all I need, but there's not enough light in here, and I

need a drink."

"I'll get you more light. Start cleaning up."

"Bruce, please let me-"

"Shut up," snarled Bruce. "There's the basin. Start getting ready." Haig

crossed to the handbasin; he was more steady on his feet and his

features had firmed a little. You poor old bastard, thought Bruce, I

hope you can do it. My God, how much I hope you can.

"Get a move on, Haig, we haven't got all night."

Bruce left the room and went quickly down the passage to the ward.

The windows of the theatre were fixed and Haig could escape only into

the passage. Bruce knew that he could catch him if he tried to run for

it.

He looked into the ward. Shermaine and Ignatius, with the help of an

African orderly, had lifted the woman on to the theatre trolley.

"Father, we need more light."

"I can get you another lantern, that's all."

"Good, do that then. I'll take the woman through." Father

Ignatius disappeared with the orderly and Bruce helped Shermaine

manoeuvre the trolley down the length of the ward and into the passage.

The woman was whimpering with pain, and her face was grey, waxy grey.

They only go like that when they are very frightened, or when they are

dying.

"She hasn't much longer," he said.

"know," agreed Shermaine. "We must hurry." The woman moved restlessly on

the trolley and gabbled a few words; then she sighed so that the great

blanketcove red mound of her belly rose and fell, and she started to

whimper again.

Haig was still in the theatre. He had stripped off his battle-jacket

and, in his vest, he stooped over the basin washing. He did not look

round as they wheeled the woman in.

"Get her on the table, he said, working the soap into suds up to his

elbows.

The trolley was of a height with the table and, using the blanket to

lift her, it was easy to slide the woman across.

"She's ready, Haig," said Bruce. Haig dried his arms on a clean towel

and turned. He came to the woman and stood over her. She did not know he

was there; her eyes were open but unseeing. Haig drew a

breath; he was sweating a little across his forehead and the stubble of

beard on the lower part of his face was stippled with grey.

He pulled back the blanket. The woman wore a short white jacket,

open-fronted, that did not cover her stomach.

Her stomach was swollen out, hard-looking, with the navel inverted.

Knees raised slightly and the thick peasant's thighs spread wide in the

act of labour. As Bruce watched, her whole body arched in another

contraction. He saw the stress of the muscles beneath the dark greyish

skin as they struggled to expel the trapped foetus.

"Hurry, Mike!" Bruce was appalled by the anguish of birth. I

didn't know it was like this; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children

- but this! Through the woman's dry grey swollen lips burst another of

those moaning little cries, and Bruce swung towards Mike Haig.

"Hurry, goddam you?" And Mike Haig began his examination, his hands very

pale as they groped over the dark skin. At last he was satisfied and he

stood back from the table.

Ignatius and the orderly came in with two more lanterns.

Ignatius started to say something, but instantly he sensed the tension

in the room and he fell silent. They all watched Mike Haig's face.

His eyes were tight closed, and his face was hard angles and harsh

planes in the lantern light. His breathing was shallow and laboured.

I must not push him now, Bruce knew instinctively, I have dragged him to

the lip of the precipice and now I must let him go over the edge on his

own.

Mike opened his eyes again, and he spoke.

"Caesarian section," he said, as though he had pronounced his own death

sentence. Then his breathing stopped. They waited, and at last the

breath came out of him in a sigh.

"I'll do it," he said.

"Gowns and gloves?" Bruce fired the question at Ignatius.

"In the cupboard."

"Get them!

"You'll have to help me, Bruce. And you also Shermaine."

"Yes, show me." Quickly they scrubbed and dressed. Ignatius held the

pale green theatre gowns while they dived into them and flapped and

struggled through.

"That tray, bring it here," Mike ordered as he opened the sterilizer.

With a pair of long-nosed forceps he lifted the instruments out of the

steaming box and laid them on the tray naming each one as he did so.

"Scalpel, refractors, clamps." In the meantime the orderly was swabbing

the woman's belly with alcohol and arranging the sheets.

Mike filled the syringe with pentothal and held it up to the

light. He was an unfamiliar figure now; his face masked, the green skull

cap covering his hair, and the flowing gown falling to his ankles. He

pressed the plunger and a few drops of the pale fluid dribbled down the

needle.

He looked at Bruce, only his haunted eyes showing above the mask.

"Ready?"

"Yes," Bruce nodded. Mike stooped over the woman, took her arm and sent

the needle searching under the soft black skin on the

inside of her elbow. The fluid in the syringe was suddenly discoloured

with drawn blood as Mike tested for the vein, and then the plunger slid

slowly down the glass barrel.

The woman stopped whimpering, the tension went out of her body and

her breathing slowed and became deep and unhurried.

"Come here." Mike ordered Shermaine to the head of the table, and she

took up the chloroform mask and soaked the gauze that filled the

cone.

"Wait until I tell you." She nodded. Christ, what lovely eyes she has,

thought Bruce, before he turned back to the job in hand.

"Scalpel," said Mike from across the table, pointing to it on the tray,

and Bruce handed it to him.

Afterwards the details were confused and lacking reality in

Bruce's mind.

The wound opening behind the knife, the tight stretched skin parting and

the tiny blood vessels starting to squirt.

Pink muscle laced with white; butter-yellow layers of subcutaneous fat,

and then through to the massed bluish coils of the gut. Human tissue,

soft and pulsing, glistening in the flat glare of the petromax.

Clamps and refractors, like silver insects crowding into the wound as

though it were a flower.

Mike's hands, inhuman in yellow rubber, moving in the open pit of the

belly. Swabbing, cutting, clamping, tying off.

Then the swollen purple bag of the womb, suddenly unzipped by the

knife.

And at last, unbelievably, the child curled in a dark grey ball of legs

and tiny arms, head too big for its size, and the far pink snake of the

placenta enfolding it.

Lifted out, the infant hung by its heels from Mike's hand like a

small grey bat, still joined to its mother.

Scissors snipped and it was free. Mike worked it little longer, and the

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