Stealing with the Eyes by Will Buckingham

Author:Will Buckingham [Buckingham, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, General, Asia, Southeast, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781909961432
Google: cg9eDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Published: 2018-09-15T04:14:12+00:00

When they discovered me on my sickbed the following morning, Ibu Lin and Bapak Rerebain were concerned. Bapak Rerebain said he would accompany me to the village clinic, so that I could be treated for my illness. Later that morning, having sent a messenger down to tell Abraham that I would not be able to come and see him as planned, Bapak Rerebain led me up the hill to a small, neat building on the edge of the village. There was a well-tended fenced garden outside, with a sculpture of Our Lady of Fatima on a plinth. The Virgin gazed towards the heavens with a look of bored piety. Bapak Rerebain knocked on the door of the clinic. There did not seem to be anyone about. He knocked again. Eventually a tiny, wizened little nun appeared, dressed in immaculately starched white.

She gave me a gappy smile. ‘Selamat datang!’ she said. Welcome. Then she led us into her consultancy room.

The room was small and dingy, without much light. Unlabelled bottles of potion were lined up on the shelves. The nun sat opposite me, swinging her legs.

‘Poor thing,’ she said reflectively. Then she beamed at me with a look of undiluted kindness.

I smiled back feebly.

The nun turned to Bapak Rerebain. ‘Is he ill?’ she asked.

‘He is,’ said Bapak Rerebain. I let him answer for me. I hadn’t got much appetite for conversation. In fact, I hadn’t got much appetite for anything at all.

‘What’s wrong with him?’

Bapak Rerebain indicated I should speak. ‘My stomach,’ I said.

The little nun’s face lit up. ‘He speaks Indonesian!’ she exclaimed, delighted. She turned to me. ‘So, you have a bad stomach?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘He also has a fever,’ Bapak Rerebain added.

‘Are you dizzy?’

I nodded. The nun put her hand to my forehead. From the expression of worry on his face, it looked as if Bapak Rerebain did not believe I would last until sunset. The nun took my wrist, feeling for a pulse. She appeared satisfied.

‘I have medicine for you,’ she said. ‘It will make you well.’

I smiled in thanks. The nun reached up to the shelf and ran her finger along the line of jars. She selected a bottle of murky blue potion plugged with a grubby cork, and placed it on the table. Then she took down a rusting Golden Virginia tobacco tin.

‘This will make you better,’ she said. Her smile was sweet and artless.

She prised the lid off the tin. Inside, lying on a bed of cotton wool, was a syringe. She carefully removed the syringe from the tin and began to fill it with the blue liquid.

Bapak Rerebain smiled reassuringly at me. ‘She has very good medicine here,’ he said. ‘It will make you better.’

My mind was working slowly. It took me a few moments to realise what was happening. I thought about HIV. I thought about hepatitis. I thought about God-knows-what kind of blood-borne diseases.

‘No,’ I mumbled, ‘no injections.’

The nun pretended not to hear. She withdrew the syringe from the bottle and squirted a bit of potion into the air, a blue arc.

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