The Preparation

We had moved to a small seaside village, really small seaside village. A few houses against the mountain side and one road going through the town. A town so small that if you blinked once it passed you by. It had one restaurant called Camels rock, with not a camel in sight or a desert and a tiny shop called “The Mouse Trap” a hole in the side of the wall with a window that opened and shut. Children hovered around the Mouse Trap with little pennies for two or three cent sweets. The local baboon family attracted by the smells hung around as well. A little woman by the name of Doris with a deep voice, ran the shop. She was an ex prison warden and took no nonsense, wielding her long taser brazenly at any baboon or mischievous child who even thought about stealing one of her chocolate bars. It was a village called Scarborough, a place my son would be drawn back to time and time again.

In order to get to the little village one had wind your way up a zig zag pass or drive around half the Cape peninsula past a place called Cape Point, that one could be forgiven for thinking was the tip of the African continent. Leave the coastline, pass an ostrich farm, vineyards a secret garden centre’s, a hidden campsite and then veering towards the coast and there it was, the village.

The village consisted of houses that ran down the mountain, over the road and into the ocean. Our house was at the foot of that mountain and covered in old trees and undergrowth with just a splintering of a sea view from the narrow leaf covered balcony.

My son was seven when we moved into the old house with its long panhandle driveway and old green jeep resting at the end of the drive under the willow tree, its tires melted into the tar.

He loved skateboarding down to the beach or dragging me up the mountain on hikes with our cat Tom. We knew all the roads and climbs and nooks and crannies of that village over time. We also had a full understanding of what it was like to live with baboons as neighbours. Then one day we decided to move back and join the rest of society on the other side of the mountain.

A year of two later after having moved we were drawn back

It was very late that night when my son started complaining of a sore leg, he was always in the wars for something or another. Random hospital visits were not unusual. Like the night he fell off his top bunk bed screaming, his jaw was locked and we rushed him to hospital and ….but that story is for another day. Any hows, that night I was busy with some work and he went off to bed. It was really late when he woke up calling to me that he couldn’t move his leg, it was completely stiff and stuck and locked in. It had me worried enough to bundle him up into the car and head off to our local hospital. A place one could spend an eternity in waiting before someone noticed you’d been waiting.

It might have been a Friday night because out-patience was busy for a small town village. People walking around with head bandages on. Stab wounds, mom’s with curlers tucked in under a doek rocking crying children. People walking around in night gowns and slippers. Children sleeping on the cold wooden benches. Runny nosed kids skidding up and down the slippery floors.

We booked ourselves in through the glass window at the entrance and then joined the out patience crowd. Magazines were scattered on the side tables I grabbed one and paged through it, trying to ignore a child with its finger up its nose staring at me. My son sat in a wheelchair, compliments of the state hospital, looking around, taking in everything, like one does at a busy airport. Closer to the doctors rooms and away from the waiting area sat an old man slouched over in a wheelchair. We had been waiting there for an half maybe two when my son called me closer, “Mom that old man is crying, I think he’s in pain, please can you help him.?”

Just a little side note I practically grew up in hospitals my mother being a nursing sister and all. I felt a certain familiarity with my surroundings. I knocked on doors that were closed and asked for someone in charge and demanded that that poor man be given pain medication. Well I wasn’t quite that arrogant but, I just couldn’t see how they could have ignored him for so long.

He had come in hours before with an arm injury and was waiting for Xrays. The Xray machine I was told was waiting for the local technician, it was broken. My son was also in line for that Xray machine. We waited and waited, it was midnight then it was one o’clock in the morning. Government run hospitals, in South Africa in general had taken a nosedive and our expectations were on par with the service. The old man got his painkillers and stopped moaning. Finally before the sun rose the next day, someone came out and told us to come back the next day the Xray machine wasn’t going to be fixed that night.

Winter had started to set in, and a government hospital wasn’t the warmest place to spend the night so I was relieved to be going home but also worried about my son’s leg. The old man would also need to go home, with his stash of pain pills. I looked around and asked around for his family, there was no-one who could vouch for him. He told me his wife had dropped him off and left.

I could see from the look my son was giving me, “mom we have to take him home, we can’t leave him here” I bundled my son into the back seat of the car and the old man into the front seat. We drove and drove and over the pass we went, the sky still hiding the moon from us. Down familiar roads in the dark, no street lights. The road weaved around the coastline and right back to the village from which we had moved. He wasn’t a very talkative man but he managed to grumble his address out. People who lived behind the lentil curtain as we did, didn’t believe in street lights, we had to rely on the headlights of my car to find what was to be the last row of houses on the last road on the mountain. The houses were all shadowed under thick brush.

We stopped a few times struggling to make out the right address, I began to wonder if this man I had in my front seat had senile dementia and we were all being taken on a journey of a different kind. Finally he was convinced he had the right driveway. A very steep drive, up to triple garages and a large wooden overhanging deck on top of what sat a very large wooden home, that blocked out what skyline.

In the dark the man and I pulled each other up the drive. My shoes abandoned me half way up the slope. We gratefully reached a wide overhanging balcony and a door. He knocked and called but no one answered, I was beginning to think we might be at the wrong house and I was part of some old man’s crazy dream. He gave up knocking and calling and led me around the wooden deck to the front balcony. It was pitch dark and I prayed that all the wooden slats on the deck were where they were meant to be because it would be a long fall down if they werent.

We reached glass sliding doors, the old man wrestled with one of the doors until he manage to loosen it and probably lift it off its railings. I was beginning to feel that I had lost my own railings. We almost fell into the room, the old man fumbled around knocking something over until a side lamp light up a sunken carpeted and rather lush lounge. A Large old hunting tapestry hung over a fireplace, large comfortable couches lined the room. I hoped, still feeling slightly shell shocked that we hadn’t broken into some random strangers home and that the someone would arrive to find an old man passed out on their couch. I saw him head for what looked like a liquor trolley. “Can I give you anything, anything” he grumbled his back to me, his words almost pleading. I just wanted to return to my son and my car and be on my way home. “Thank you, but it’s fine, I’m just glad you back home” I called back at him, twice or three times as he tired to want to give me something. I made my way out the glass door, down the side stairs and onto the steep driveway, picking my shoes up on the way down. I looked up and saw my son in the front seat of the car. “And know?” I said to him, “How did you get into the front seat?” his response “Mom I don’t know my leg just came right on its own”

That night or early the next morning we drove home in silence realising what had actually happened. We had been called out that night on a mercy rescue by God. Someone had said a prayer for that old man.