Small Deaths

Seventeen was an odd year to die.

But I did.

Seventeen had been brilliant. Seven months before, I’d driven through four countries to a Christian youth camp in Ghana with Derin, Chris, David and Winifred whose hair grazed the small of her back. Her eyes mesmerized me and I flirted shamelessly, though she was a year older. We’d fallen into the culture there, learned rudimentary Twi, climbed a hill in Kutunse. I won awards for proficiency in computers, and crafts. We worn formal clothes and watched as Derin mesmerized the crowd in a maroon dress with glitter highlights, danced with Winifred till the sun rose.

I died on a road.

Dying on a road isn’t pretty. The bus was going a hundred miles an hour, maybe more. It had rained that morning and we were coming from yet another church thing, a national convention. Winifred was there too that morning sharing hugs as we prepared to leave, all long hair and coy smiles, but by then I’d already found out my tastes swung darker than her innocence.

Femi usually drove. He was sixty, just turned sixty three months before. We’d thrown him a huge party, all his children, biological and otherwise. He’d joked that he was tired. But he wasn’t the kind of man to tire. He ran every morning, harvested honey himself, a lumpy dough man in his bee suits. But he was getting older and we were thirteen rowdy teenagers, so he hired a van.

I was the only one awake. I was knitting a hat, a forget-me-not I was secretly making for Winifred, but there it was, following me back home, unfinished. I don’t know what he saw, the driver, maybe a pothole. But he swerved left, hard. Then he swerved back, the tyres screeching against tarmac. In seconds we were airborne. We were lucky I guess, the bus could have somersaulted but it spun on its side instead. Six times, I counted.

Centrifugal force will keep you in place, if the vessel you’re in is spinning fast enough. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than 10 seconds but it felt like hours. The world slowed, then stopped. I watched, petrified. Then just as suddenly, the world rushed to meet us and we crashed hard enough that the sudden stop flung people like dolls out of the cabin.

I crawled out of a window, the back one. I was lucky, sandwiched between two people. I didn’t black out, didn’t faint, though my back was a meaty bruise and a gash deep enough to hide a coin split the back of my head. There were only two of us who could walk. Ghana Must Go bags full of honey flung out of the car sat on the road, the honey in them splashed bruised bodies, broken and groaning. I’d heard about it before, but seeing wild bees spawn from miles around, drawn to the honey was terrifying.

“He isn’t breathing!”

It took a while before I realised I was the one screaming. I knelt beside Femi, put his head in my lap. There was mucus all over his face, the whites of his eyes gleamed. I didn’t know what I was doing but I tried CPR.

Bend the head back, clear the airways, blow.

A car stopped, a red Golf. The back seat was missing, the compartment smelt of the mulch of freshly dug yams. I was woozy but I managed to crawl into the boot with him, gathered him into my lap. He kept twitching, but his chest wasn’t heaving.

I prayed, I begged the driver to drive faster, I hyperventilated as the brush that lined the road began to blur. The nearest hospital was five minutes away. Kagara, that’s what they called it. The nurses were rude, and I found out later, auxillary. They gawked at his body on a stretcher by the floor and waited for the doctor who came minutes too late, with bags under his eyes. He took his pulse, stood and cleaned his hands on his yellowing coat. Turned to leave, stopped and said;

“You should empty his pockets.”

I did, making sure to not look at his vacant eyes as I violated his privacy, taking out his phone, rifling through his wallet, reaching under him to undo the clasp of the fanny pack he wore.

The others started arriving, in the cars of Samaritans. I searched through the casualties looking Derin and her mother, his wife and daughter. They’d taken them to intensive care, fractured collar bone, acute shock. Instead I found Chris. He had waited to make sure everyone got put in a car, salvaged what he could from the bus. He showed me his only injury, torn knuckles from dragging himself out of the cabin. He seemed so strong, so I led him outside the ward, to a place that was quiet, to a moment of reprieve.

“No! You’re lying! Don’t!”

The force of his denial felt like a sucker punch to the jaw. I repeated the words, sounding out the syllables so he’d understand that I wasn’t lying. But he shook his head with almost childlike stubborness and simply refused to acquiesce. I dug deep, past the shock and the tears that threatened to unravel me, found a false smile.

“He’s fine. They took him to another ward. I’m sorry, I lied.”

He heaved, twice. Filling his lungs as deep as the air would go, then expelling with a sagging of his chest. Then he smiled and he hugged me, even though my back was one large scar. We both knew he knew, but what I’d done was a mercy.

When the doctor finally found time to suture my back at 2am, I barely felt nothing. Just a numbness blunting my nerves, shrouding my heart. My eyes stayed dry, my emotions trapped in a bog of grief from which I couldn’t extricate myself. It was a kind of death, a small death.