A Good Man in Africa by Boyd William

Author:Boyd, William [Boyd, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241970409
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-12-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Morgan closed the book and thought he could actually hear the blood draining from his face. He leant against a nearby wall and felt a tremor of blind fear run through his body. With shaking hands he re-inserted the thick volume back in its slot in the medical section. The book was called Sexually Transmitted Diseases.

He had decided not to go into the office until after his appointment with Murray. An agonizing tear-jerking session above his toilet bowl this morning had forcibly reminded him of his condition and, also, he wasn’t at all keen to confront Fanshawe. There was no telling what Priscilla might have related to her parents about the previous night. As a result he had killed time over a lengthy but morose breakfast during which he had made up his mind to face facts and be ruthlessly honest with himself. To this end he had driven up to the university bookshop to see what details he could establish about his ailment. After hovering around the medical section for a while, making sure no one was watching him, he had found the book he wanted and had uneasily opened its shiny, copiously illustrated pages.

He now gazed sightlessly out at the bright sunlit piazza of the administrative block which was visible through the windows at this side of the bookshop. His head was a glossy catalogue of frightful images, a rotten putrefying grocer’s filled with deliquescing cucumbers, split tomatoes, rancid sprouts, slime-ravaged lettuces. Crumbling noses, perforated palates, grotesquely swollen limbs danced in front of his eyes like images from some carnival for the terminally ill. His ears rang with some of the most foul, potent nomenclature he’d ever encountered: ‘Teeming treponemes’, ‘purulent meatus’, ‘macules’, ‘pustules’, trichomonas vaginilus, granuloma iguinale, bejel, venereal warts, candida albicans – the bleak, muscular terminology of medicine.

Unthinkingly he touched the blackhead in a nostril cleft, traced the contours of his mouth with his tongue, checked the torsion of his knee joints. There had been an entire lurid chapter on vicious tropical strains. His eyes caught words like ‘chancroid’, ‘giant herpes’, ‘phagedenic lesions’. There were bizarre afflictions called ‘pinta’, ‘crab-yaws’ and, with horrific aptness, ‘loath’. A severe tic established itself in his right cheek and his eyes watered as he read on in despairing astonishment. How, he wondered, could such things exist? What dreadful plight had brought these hopeless mutations before the lab-technician’s lens? How, even, did they haul their friable, exuding and bloated bodies from place to place? He swallowed, trying to coax his drought-stricken saliva glands into action. He looked down at his stocky frame, sent out cautious messages, twitching feet and fingers. He seemed to sense electric current surging down the branching neurones, the capillaries faithfully irrigating the out-of-condition muscles and tissues, the tendons and cartilege pinning the frail armature of his body together. Don’t give up on me, he silently beseeched, hold up a bit longer, he pleaded, don’t fall apart. He promised his body he’d keep fit, eat high-fibre foods, treat it well, cosset and cherish its individual parts.

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