Band-Aid for a Broken Leg by Damien Brown

Author:Damien Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742697895
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2012-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

12. WATCHING STORMS

This rain just gets heavier. It sheets off the eaves like a thousand waterfalls, the sound utterly deafening. Even the roar of thunder is hard to discern over the howl of metal roofing. From where I’m sitting, here on the bench outside the Surgical Outpatients room, a grey soup accounts for the rest of the world; sky and puddles unite. A meteorological blitzkrieg, it seems—the type of storm where one is compelled to ponder just how much water could possibly still be in the air; and, just as puzzlingly, how it all got up there in the first place.

We walked to the river yesterday, no longer the struggling stream it used to be. Crossings now need to be made a little more cautiously across the large boulders at the laundry section, although decent-sized tilapia can be seen dangling from the ends of homemade rods, and thick grass along its banks. The rest of the town is benefiting from the weather, too. Worn-out huts have had their long-awaited makeovers, fresh mud clinging defiantly to old walls and patchy roofs re-thatched, and the food market boasts plump okra pods and leafy greens as fruit swells slowly on orange trees near the centre of town—the same trees around which landmines were once laid, and below which children now shelter.

‘É SEMPRE ASSIM?’ I shout to Roberto. Is it always like this? He’s sitting beside me on the bench.

‘AS VEZES,’ he calls. Sometimes. ‘INCRIVEL, NÃO?’—Incredible, no?

I agree.

We’re not alone under the eaves. A few others have pressed themselves against the walls of his Outpatients building with us—women and children waiting to get back to the wards; Manuel, who’s now working as an assistant; and a few policemen, whose colleagues are unfortunately taking up much of the men’s ward, mostly with injuries after having drunkenly assaulted each other at night. One of them I recognise well. His wife is currently recovering from a stab wound to her cheek—something he’d inflicted, he told us matter-of-factly, because he’d been drinking and she wasn’t listening, so you know how it is. As for the force’s presence in general, I can’t help thinking we were better off without them. I recall a fitting saying I’d once heard from a friend in Indonesia: If you lose a chicken and report it to the police, you’ll end up losing a cow. Better to just stay out of their way.

The rain’s now even heavier. Toyota’s standing beneath the opposite wall but Kassoma’s caught beneath the leaking awning of the waiting area. He puts on his floppy denim hat and dashes over, the rain pummelling it flat like a swimming cap. When he gets to us he peels it off, wrings it out and laughs, then wipes his glasses.

‘MALUCO!’ he shouts—Crazy!

I shift across. He takes a seat on the other side of me.

‘NOVO DOCTOR,’ he says, his voice as gravelly as the day I arrived. ‘YOU WILL STILL FLY HOME, EVEN IF IT IS LIKE THIS?’

I shake my head vehemently. I’m supposed

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