Jahan and Bronte
Bronte met him at the Red Cross. She was there to donate blood, same as he was there to do. She was the first to talk to him, asking him if the coffee machine was working. He looked stunned as if he was awakened from a dream, shrugged to mean that he doesn’t know. The coffee machine was obviously broken — she poked the console with her freshly manicured fingers.
He wanted to be of help. For himself he used the tea bag to avoid tinkering with the machine. He would have preferred real coffee though. He took a desultory sip. His arm was aching where the needle pierced — he scratched around the bandage and when it proved unsatisfactory, let his fingers crawl under the bud of cotton.
“Gosh! I wish for good coffee right now.” Bronte said as she fished for acknowledgement. There was no one else in the pantry so he knew she meant for him to respond. He did with a slight nod of his head, “Same here.”
He took the tea bag out like a magician revealing his trick, tossed it in the bin and turned around.
“Do you come here often?”
She meant it as a conversation opener but soon realised how absurd it sounded.
“I mean do you donate blood regularly?”
“Actually, this is my first time.” He was not feeling very well but he didn’t want to put on a show. He hated drama. He wished everyone and everything around him was uncomplicated. He preferred if people spoke the truth as they saw it without embellishing it, adorning it. Life would be so much easier to live if one weren’t allowed to be dramatic. He looked past her now as a woman with the register appeared, pen poised on the stapled papers with their names.
“Jahan,’” the woman called, and Bronte switched her gaze back to him who wasn’t looking great to be honest.
He held his head between his hands and grimaced. The woman with the register rushed to help, kneeling before the man, her hand on his back and asking him to lie down. She pointed to the bed with fresh linen, and he did not resist although Bronte thought he was hiding how bad he felt. And then it happened. He skipped to where the bin was. His head disappeared into it, the crown of a plastic bag tensing around his red sweater. Bronte did not notice when he had got hold of the plastic bag but that was fast, or perhaps he had it with him all the time. Retching completed he pulled his head back.
The woman pointed him to the bathroom, and he shuffled past them without a word.
“It must have been the loss of blood. Nothing to worry about.” The woman offered a brochure that contained a list of common FAQs, and he was dismissed.
“Hey! How are you? Do you want to sit down?” Bronte’s eyes filled with concern for this man she met just that day. He looked about forty with patches of grey on his beard. He shaded his eyes and confessed -
“Sorry, this never happened to me before. I have donated blood before but this time, it was just different somehow. I think you were talking to me, but your voice was growing distant like my head was stuffed with something.”
He paused here, suddenly ashamed of himself for being the object of all the drama, “and then it all came barrelling up you know.”
He wore a puzzled expression before he asked her “But you are still here…”
His tone was accusatory, but he did not mean it that way.
She reared back. “I was concerned for you mate.” She would have elaborated — that she had recently lost a close friend and that it has made her wearisome, like she expected everyone to start falling around her, that nothing was permanent, and everything was a mere facade. She felt defeated — what could she do? she could only do what was in her power. What was the point of wailing about something so arcane as death that not even the best minds of our times couldn’t fathom?
What was she, a college graduate with no job, to do about death? It was not as if the world was intent on running toward ruin, only that it was capable of that and probably flexing the muscles to test the strength and vigor in achieving that.
“Jahan”
“Bronte.”
She offered her hand as if to reconcile. He did not expect that they were going to shake hands. His grip was soft while hers authoritative. It should have been the other way round he thought as his hand was returned to him. He placed it safely inside his jacket’s pocket, shrugging to express cold.
It was winter when they met — the street outside was lined with trees bare and inexplicably nude, if that was an expression one could use for trees, that is. It was a Saturday and he had nothing better to do at home save some movies to catch up on Netflix. His apartment was just minutes away and he did not mind staying back for a bit to ensure he did not repeat the drama from earlier.
Outside the window Bronte saw the tramlines crisscrossed, and a magpie singing a forlorn song perched atop the cables that ran along the length of the road. In the distance the giant wheel glinted in the sun — she tried to discern if the wheel was moving and realised the company had shut it down last year. Such a pity. What was going to happen to it now? She took her phone out and zoomed to take a picture. She felt an urgent need to take the photo as if the wheel was crumbling before her eyes, atom by atom, and all she could think of doing was frame it in pixels.
After her friend died, for weeks Bronte kicked herself up for not taking a photo or a video in all those preceding meetings. When she received the call, it was another friend telling Bronte what had happened. It was the tone of that phone call that Bronte took issue with — it was as if she was told ‘Oh! By the way your friend died.’ In her head there was a roar like water falling down a cliff. She counted to, was it ten, twenty, a hundred…? — first forwards and then backwards. The phone rang again, removing her from the orbit of the deafening roar. This time it was another friend, between uncontrollable sobs, she told Bronte what happened. And now it was Bronte’s turn to console her friend. Just like that she had put it behind her, the roar, that is.
“I had not told anyone this, but my friend died last week. I don’t want you to overthink this. I am just saying I was so caught up at the time that it seemed like another thing, like her death was just another phone call. I could not go see her, I could not go see her body, or pay respects as they say. I could not do any of those things.”
Bronte peeled herself from the window and came to sit across the table.
“I am sorry to hear that” Jahan managed.
“My friends called me on my phone. They said they were going to meet the family. They went to the funeral without me.”
She paused and looked at her splayed hands as if summoning courage from them.
“I could not be bothered. she was dead already. what was there for me to do except meeting a bunch of people who I did not want to meet. It was all too much. Why do we care how the body is dispatched? the person is gone alright. I was angry with everyone who called me on the phone. They were just driving me mad.”
Having nothing more to say he simply nodded hoping to put as much weight in that movement of his head as he could.”
“Does it matter, do you think?”
She swung her head sideways and glared at him. The nod had run its course already, so he chose to speak instead. But he was at a loss for words. He wanted to agree with her since it looked like the path of least resistance, but she was at his heels now, taking his shoes off.
“That won’t be necessary…” he protested.
But if she heard him, she chose to ignore him. He could see her head now, hair falling freely over her shoulders. Once the socks were peeled, he worried that his feet may be stinking and retracted them under the chair.
“Put your feet up” she commanded, and he obliged not for the first time wondering where this was heading.
“And then one day when I was coming back from college, I thought I saw him.” Bronte continued, “she was walking her dog and had just crouched to pick up the poo, making a glove out of the green plastic bag. I must have fainted because the next thing I remember was heads looming above me, five to six of them, all of them women who had been running on the track that evening. Someone fetched a bottle of water, and I drank some before I asked what happened. They looked from one to another as if they could not believe it — I had robbed them off that query which they thought they ought to ask of me, not I of them.”
When she paused Jahan barely said a word, his head in her lap, her fingers running through his greying hair. The woman with the register returned, pulled a chair closer to Jahan, got him to sit straight and peered into his eyes, felt his pulse and in the end said it was okay to leave now. She thanked him for the donation, handing him the brochure.
Outside, he squinted before slipping on his sunglasses, turning around to find Bronte was waving him goodbye.
“Bye.” he said but remembered his manners. “ I am sorry about your friend,” he added.
But now he went a bit further, “I am heading to McD to grab a bite…” He let the silence form the proposition. She smiled.
Jahan sank his teeth into a palatable McD spicy burger. A homeless guy was hassling the woman at the register who plainly denied humouring him. If it was up to him, Jahan thought, he would have given the homeless guy his burger. But it wasn’t up to him. It never was.
He could have admitted it to that woman with the register that the only reason Jahan kept going to the red cross was to see Bronte.
“Who is Bronte?” that woman would have asked, and Jahan feared it wouldn’t matter what he said -no one would understand it.
If only Bronte had a blood donor, she would have lived…
