At the Hospital

Wednesday 12th January

Day 266

It’s warm in the hospital. In the room where my cousin is lying in a white bed, his brother has angled a rotating fan to blow cool air on the bones of his chest. My sister opens the double glazed window a crack and the sound of dripping rain filters into the room adding to the creaking breath of the mattress, the bubbling of the oxygen mask stretched over my cousin’s face and the clicking of the morphine pump strapped to the skeleton stick of his leg.

He opens one blue eye and looks but doesn’t see me. I wonder where he is. In his sleep he raises one quizzical eyebrow - like he used to when he laughed, dipping his head, brushing his hand through his thin hair. I hold his hand which is dry and warm. It feels as if he returns my grasp but I think it's like the clinging reflex of a new baby holding on to a giant finger. I stroke his freckled arm and a livid white scar across his flesh and remember the story of the knife wound.

Over scooped stainless steel bowls of vegetable biriyani in the hospital canteen we reminisce with our elder cousin about our shared Zambian childhoods and holidays with the clan of our grandparents in South Africa. Dipping in and out of the sea, running on burning white sand, paddling in soft brown rivers. Never dreaming for one minute that one day one of us would die before we were old, before our time.