By Jude Reid

 

“Go to hell.”

My door opens anyway. Light scatters in the dusty air of the room, casting an unforgiving glare over empty dishes, discarded clothes, books strewn haphazardly across the dirty floor. I know who it is; Doctor Al-Shabeen

 “I told you. I’m not ready.” My voice cracks. It’s the first time I’ve said anything today, maybe yesterday as well. I hate the sound of my voice, so querulous and petulant. What right do I have to sit here in my misery, consuming the township’s scarce resources and contributing nothing? Maybe that’s what this is about – maybe the people’s sympathy has run out and she’s here to tell me I need to start earning my keep again.. I wouldn’t blame them. I’d do the same.

She tilts her head and regards me with that questioning clinician’s look I know so well. “I’ve got a job for you. One you can do here.”

Some sort of pointless domestic task, then, rather than practicing medicine. – Make-work she can take back to the townsfolk to earn sympathy, evidence of my goodwill. I hate their pity even more than their contempt. 

“Please - Tasneem. It’s too soon.” The pleading note in my voice sickens me.

She turns and leaves, and at first, I think she’s doing as I ask. A moment later, though, she’s back, pushing a small, hunched figure ahead of her. 

“This is Iminathe,” she says, changing from Arabic to Xhosa. A skinny kid, somewhere in her teens, is swathed in layers of ill-fitting, dirty clothes with a bundle secured to her chest with a cloth sling. “And this is her baby. They’ve just arrived. The baby’s hungry.”

For a moment, I can’t work out why she’s telling me that. Then I realise and blurt a surprised sort of laugh into the silence. “What do you expect me to do about it?”

Tasneem rolls her eyes. “What do you think? Iminathe, give her the baby, please.”

With obvious reluctance, the teenager unties the wrap, and gingerly offers the baby to me. So light - only a few weeks of age, nothing compared to a chubby six-month-old - but something about the feeling is the same - that sense of weight that transcends the merely physical. Responsibility, perhaps. Obligation. 

“I’ll leave you to get on with it, then,” my colleague says matter-of-factly. The baby stirs against my shoulder, then settles back to an uneasy sleep. The girl is watching me.

“Is the baby yours?” I ask, after Tasneem has left.

The girl nods, too quickly for it to be the truth.  

“Your daughter? Your son?”

After a long pause, she shakes her head. “My sister. My parents were going to leave her behind.”

“Behind where?”

“Outside the city.”

She jerks her head over her shoulder. She’s motioning in the wrong direction, but I know the place she means. A walled compound just outside Joburg, full of zealots with strong views on how best humanity can weather the coming storm - and for them, worth is proportionate to breeding potential. Prove your fecundity and they’ll let you inside, one of the fruitful chosen ones destined to breed the next generation of their doomsday cult. If you’re hungry enough and cold enough, what they offer might be worth giving up your freedom for.

“Why wouldn’t they take her?” I ask, knowing the answer already. The girl shrugs one shoulder.

Very gently, I lift the baby’s swaddling away to reveal a faint lilac mottling along the dark skin of her backbone. Congenital viral infection, then, or exposed so soon after birth that it makes no practical difference.

“I took her, and all the milk I could get, and I ran away.”

The baby is moving, mouthing at my shoulder in a way that tells me that she’s awake and hungry. Suddenly it’s the most natural thing in the world to pull down my shirt and latch her on to feed. At first, she lies quiet, but soon she’s sucking and gulping, staring up at me with intently focused dark eyes.

“You had a baby?” the girl asks. “Did he die? Was it the virus?”

“Yes. And no, it wasn’t the virus.” Just the kind of infectious disease that people laughed at before the world went to hell, before vaccines and antibiotics became scarce, precious things. People - Tasneem amongst them - told me that my daughter’s death was for the best, a blessing in disguise. That the way things were going there was nothing but suffering ahead of any of us - and beneath that, unspoken - what sort of a selfish monster brings a child into a dying world like this anyway? I don’t have an answer, only that this idiot species of ours refuses to quit, even when the only reasonable thing to do is to gracefully accept the inevitability of our extinction.

“We’re going to iMpumalanga,” the girl says into the silence. “They’ve got a cure up there, over the border. I’ve seen people who’ve taken it, it works.”

“A cure? Up in the bush?”

She nods. “They gave me directions, I know where to go. They’ll meet us when we get close.”

Even if it is true - even if there is a cure, not just yet another charlatan peddling snake-oil to the desperate - there’s no way the two of them will make it. She’ll keep walking until hunger claims them, or disease, or the mists.

“You can’t stay here, not with the virus,” I tell her, and watch her recoil as though the words are a blow. “And you won’t survive out there without help.”

The baby squalls her displeasure as I move her automatically to feed from the other side. Intellectually, I know it’s only the oxytocin - just a neurotransmitter fooling my body and brain into thinking that this baby is mine - but already this feels right.  A second chance.  Rebirth.

“Iminathe, get some sleep. In the morning, we’ll head to iMpumalanga. All three of us, together.”

Humanity doesn’t know when to give up, and neither, it seems, do I.