Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries
Damilola with eyes the colour of sepsis, Damilola with surname like a hieroglyph no one can decipher, Damilola with underwear on back-to-front dawns on his knees begging for virtue, naps upright from Clapham to Charing Cross, thumbs the biblethick in-tray, laughs almost.
Damilola wonders whether Mrs O’Donoghue will remember to feed Nelson because already (again and already) he foresees a double shift, calculates the hours till he can breath not-his-breath and the weeks since Nurse Michaela was hurried to ICU. Wears his blackness loosely like the scrubs that bunch and billow around used-up junior doctors or else hoods himself in whiteness, his grandpa’s colonial cast-off.
Once upon a time he blazed with auroras of altruism.
Now he is brusque at bedside like a man in a drive-thru window, three pandemic winters wound up in his taut smile.
Is it some failure in him, he thinks, some nip at his core, jamming the give-flow? Is it really as simple as stiff upper lip, pull up bootstraps, back in my day, one of the lucky ones…
Damilola treating other doctors for attempted suicide, Damilola cupping the last warmth of those who mustn’t die alone, Damilola this man we all know and depend upon considers if maybe it didn’t have to be this way, the way of the cramped fungal flat and the stomach cramps of stress, unsure what next month’s rent will cost or if tomorrow he will lose another orderly to the sudden white vans with their drivers stepping out, slow as inevitability. There was a way where histories had been shouldered like dead grandfathers, where for once the great tidal ire of the people had flowed the right way, where the busy stinging hands and bloodshot eyes and unfed cat of Damilola mattered more than the diphthong that rings strange, the pong of his lunch, skin-fictions.
Luke Buffini is a British-Irish writer from London and a graduate of the Granta Writers’ Workshop. His stories have appeared in Epiphany Magazine and The Short Fiction Journal.