go now . . . to find . . . him?”
“Him?” I asked, referring to our young island clerk who, as it turned out, was destined to become our first dying man. “Ummmmmmmmmmmmm.”
(For reasons connected with decorum of the deceased, the rites of passage, that kind of thing, I should refrain from recording mere civilities, but I place this “ummmmmmmmmmmmmmm” here for all you sensitive living readers. Bless you. Suffice it, I have learned a survival trick or two from my mountain dwelling parents. But a destination for Death I knew nothing about)
“Ummmmmmmmmmmmm.”
And, sensitively, further:
“Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.”
That morning, I had flown up to Monkthornton. Flown, that is, on an instruction from a local crook who runs a small parcel service here, in and out of the islands and, in between selling beds to the bedridden and mitts to the mittened, sends some work my way (funnelling the frozen expressions of our irregular island visitors, who he has fleeced. I never ask what it is I carry in those boxes of his, who these people are, or why he chooses me to carry them. I consider his crookery a gift horse. Immoral as this might seem).
I picked up the passenger (namely red-hatted Death) who was waiting at the crookery, losing the blouse off her back, radioed back to the office, and flew southward, avoiding the Ackeronites, as it turned out that a storm had come in (those mountains are subject to climatic inconsistencies, just to spite me, I swear) and I wanted to avoid upturning my morient madam.
As it turned out, despite her unique credentials, Death had not come in search of victims. She was not on official business at all. She told me her plans on the way:
“The fruit bat, mister. That’s why I’m here.”
Death was a woman of few but loud words, and even fewer but silent limitations (we later discovered). But bats were flying there in her pompadoured belfry, perhaps obviously you could say, and in that deep hidden cave of her impossibly bleak heart too, as it happens.
“Family Pteropodidae, sub-family Nyctinmeninae,” she said, peering down from my plane as we pitched and yawed over the jungle around Burdekin. “You have some of the finest specimens in the world here in these islands.”
“News to me,” I replied, holding things firm in a prevailing up-current, Death in the seat beside me.
“Pygmies, barebacks, blossoms, giants, speckled, monkey-faced,” she said, reeling off sub-species like she was stringing out tickertape from beneath her blood red hat.
“Oh,” I said, and thought for a moment, in the way that you do, that the shadows in the clouds had become winged, their souls black, their pointed fangs alarmingly close to my fuselage.
“You’d be surprised,” she continued, staring downward but her words floating upward. ‘Do you know . . . ?’ Face still facing beyond the plane. ‘. . . a fruit bat can carry the most deadly of all diseases but never, never ever mind you, suffer from that disease?’
“I did not know that,” I said, genuinely impressed. Old Death, you’ll be pleased to hear, knew her stuff.
She flashed a set of dangerous teeth at me so even but so contrasting in color, one against another, that she appeared to have swallowed a piano.
“Entirely true,” she said.
Subsequently arriving before I had predicted - “We’ll be there by 5.00 pm, Doc.” it was barely past 4.30. I landed with a jolly “Whippy!” and a thin curl of my brute lips.
So what now?
“Go?” I said, no doubt looking quizzical as I jumped to the jetty.
“Sure,” said the Death, “sure”, taking hold of her black case I began unloading at her from the stowage hole beneath the aft pitot plate, a case that I had placed there a little over two hours before.
“He? You said . . .”
“I said?” I asked.
I said many things in my daily attention to my duties among tourists, some more beautinious, than others, I dare admit, but I didn’t recall the mention of our (soon to be dying) clerk. Deceased of the Communion Islands governmental offices, as he was to be; descended in his early teens to the islands’ coastal rim, as many of us did, and now was stuck there like a young shellfish on the rim of the coast. I didn’t recall mentioning him. Not at all.
So be it! Circumstances dictate, I have long found, that the cockpit of small plane is no place to fence with ideas, and certainly not with Death. Experience shows, tools in hand, that you are better off capping ideas in a cockpit with a slim reference to a recently visited relative (“Dear ol’ Nancy, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear”), or turning a determined ideaist to the West with a note on your brawny religious beliefs. My favourite, though, is to conjure up my personal interest in certain breeds of cat. “The Burmese has its cute ways. Now, let me tell you a thing or two.” And: “Do you know the ordinary story of how the ordinary tabby got its ordinary name?” Meooow.
Though our young clerk had already turned his hands to many things in his time on the flatlands, he had never met Death.
“Along the front,” I said, looking at the squat dark bat-loving old deceaser, whose red hat was now in her hands. Adlibbing. Pointing. “Third wooden building on the left.” Or thereabouts.
And so, black case rampant, Death’s pompadour went winging its way down the street.
Or so I thought.
3.
Apropos Death.
Why would a smart woman devote herself to demise? I mean, what’s in it for her? Some say there is wealth. But that is a misnomer. There is no wealth in true, honest dying. It is entirely devoid of gain. Years pass. In another vein, there is always income forthcoming for a general physician, for a specialist surgeon, for a renowned pulmonologist, for a fine thorapologist, for a companethesist. But Death moves through education to training and nothing pertains.
Already she smells like the pungent inner lips of a dark blue jar of Vaseline. Poor Death! She walks with a short, tottering gait, brought about by her long determined hours “at the table”. She sleeps in conversations and wakes in the middle of dreams. And she speaks hardly at all, and then only in riddles. Ask her a direct question and she replies in inanimate chestnuts and fated aphorisms: “Time spent on your colon is time well spent.” “You are the by-product of your pancreas.” “Beware of the cunning trips of your feet.”
Figure 2.
There is no glamour in this madness! This is no wealth in this! No gain in this damaged cause. . . .
Incidentally, I am not denigrating manly Life, the well-known vie de l’homme, as he is known in those wondrous healthy health camps and the like. Männlich leben. In fact, manly Life was almost certainly going to be appointed the first official medical practitioner here in The Communion Islands. He was on his way to provide for us, was manly Life. But, because of a poverty of traditions of human healthcare here (you could say), and a lack of attention
