❖
“Chaba, are you going to let those bastards win?” Nyasha would say. “Get up, wash your face, and let’s get back to the business of our lives.” Or “Chaba, when last did you bath? You smell like shit! Get up, let’s go find those scumbags and fuck them up.” Or “Chaba, turn this thing around. Don’t be a victim, be a victor!” Or some lame crap like that. You know mos Nyasha, Lord. That’s all she’s good for. Talk, talk, talk. Where is she now?
If it wasn’t for her, none of this would ever have happened.
❖
Ma asked me to go to Hillside Shopping Center with her this morning. There was no food in the fridge and no money in either of our purses, but there was still petrol in the car. I think she wanted to see what we could get with the nothing that we had.
As we walked into the mall, we saw a R200 note on the floor. I’d noticed the white lady in front of us digging in her bag, and it most likely fell out of there. But the speed with which Ma picked it up and slipped it into her pocket shut my mouth.
I knew Ma had seen the white lady, too. I knew she knew. So when she said, “It’s our lucky day!” I just smiled and nodded. Ma doesn’t believe in luck. Pagans believe in luck. Ma believes in God, Badimo, blessings, and miracles.
I feel guilty that I’ve brought us to this place, where Ma—church-going, ancestor-revering, scripture-quoting Ma—is reduced to stealing.
I have to go back to work.
❖
But what if I can’t remember anything? What if someone asks who I am? What if they want to know where I’ve been? What if there’s a cardiac arrest and I have to do something? What if I can’t move, can’t speak, can’t think? What if I start to bleed? What if the men hear I’m there and come back for me?
What if I mess up my second chance?
❖
It’s 5 a.m.
Right now the night-shift nurses are waking up, switching on lights, switching off heaters. Packing back the chairs they used as beds. Patients are stirring. Cell phone alarms are going off in the pockets of doctors—the young and naive ones, who thought there might be an opportunity to sleep on a Friday night call, to sleep so much that an alarm would need to be set. Mothers who have delivered babies in the night are being marched downstairs to the overflow ward, so their bloodstained sheets can be cleaned for the next batch of moms-to-be waiting anxiously on the benches as their babies struggle to free themselves from within. Statistics of the night’s activities are being written up, estimated, changed. The bodies of those who slipped away in the night are being wrapped in plastic. Porters are scrambling for stretchers to wheel them off to the mortuary before the matrons and specialists arrive for their morning rounds. The security guard at the gate is whistling.
It’s a new day.
❖
I can’t lie here forever. I have to get up and move past this. It’s done. There’s no point kneading it any further.
Part 4
You are my God; apart from You I have no good thing.
Psalm 16:2
I felt a beating in my stomach, as though my heart had grown so weary it had sunk to the pit of my thorax. It turns out that the sporadic thuds I’d been feeling came from the body of another, a little baby, living, growing, thriving in the darkness.
❖
After the rape, my periods were all over the place, like they’d always been. I suppose it was more spotting than bleeding. But what did I care at the time about some vaginal bleeding? It wasn’t like it was something I’d never experienced before. And anyway, I had bigger fish to fry. I’d just been raped. In those first few weeks, who could tell if it was the ARVs or the antipsychotics that made me vomit so?
Nobody dared rouse me from my bed. I paid no mind to my lack of energy, lack of appetite, the urge to retch at the sight of Jungle Oats. What difference did it make? What difference did anything make? I only wanted to be dead.
I am a doctor. I should have thought, should have suspected, even expected, that I might be expecting. But I didn’t. I didn’t think You could be so cruel.
It never occurred to me that I could be pregnant, until she moved like a heartbeat in my tummy.
❖
I suppose pregnancy had never really been in the picture for me after all the procedures I’d had to calm my raging uterus. In fact, one outraged doctor, who couldn’t believe I’d been given an endometrial ablation so young, had told me that getting pregnant was both unlikely and dangerous.
So when I saw her there on the screen at that first ultrasound—her heart pulsing at 140 beats per minute, her body perfectly formed, her thumb in her mouth—I didn’t believe them. Didn’t believe the sonographer and her student who was smiling from ear to ear and wanting to give me a congratulatory hug.
A baby? I was going to have a baby?
I could tell Ma was in disbelief, too, because she said nothing all the way home. They gave us printouts of the ultrasound scans, and cards with appointment dates for all manner of investigations, but for the weeks that followed they remained on the dashboard of the car, untouched, just as we’d left them on that first drive back from the hospital.
❖
Our medical aid was suspended due to non-payment, so I had to give birth at Amogelang Regional Hospital. I was petrified,
