The Writer

A Story by Sharrumkin

Colleen has died of a brain tumour leaving Dan distraught with grief. His old friends Mike and Linda desperate to help, propose that he write about their days in Nigeria.

The Writer

The brain tumor had struck her a month before. Cruel, rapid growing, in only a month it had reduced a vibrant woman, a wife, mother and grandmother into a shrunken shell. Now Colleen, in her sixty-sixth year, lay in a coma, her life sustained by the soft beeping of machines.

Beside her, his right hand resting in hers, sat Dan. He had always felt lost without her. His children and the staff had told him to rest. Rest for what he had asked himself? Besides, since their Kano Days, they had always rested together, holding one another.

“Some said I was a fool to hope for her,” he told Mike and Linda. “Well, all men in love are fools.”

“Thank God for fools.” Mike whispered.

“We saw your Mike in the hall” said Linda.

“My eldest; we named him after you, Mike. One daughter we named after Linda; the other after Elizabeth. I’m glad we were able to see her before she passed.”

“Yes” said Mike. “So were we.”

***

Dan stared past the untouched cup of tea, at a long abandoned office in Kano. He looked up from the guide book he was reading at two ladies entering the office, one middle aged and the other, a red-haired girl in her mid-twenties. She smiled at him. He smiled and returned to his book. A shadow fell across the page he was reading. He looked up. The red haired woman stood in front of him. She smiled and held out her right hand. “Colleen Hogan” she said.

“It’s not right” Dan told her. “You were younger. You always had good health, not like me. I should have been first. I should have been the one.” Hiding his face in his hands, he wept. Mike and Linda sat in silence waiting for the tears to subside.

“We were all fools, weren’t we?” said Dan. “Rushing into a country about which we knew nothing. Tilting at windmills on the African Savannah. Small wonder the project failed.”

“It didn’t fail, not for Linda or I. Not for you or Colleen. It gave us each other. It gave us our children. Thinking back would you rather have not gone?”

Dan thought of Colleen and of his years with her. “No.”

***

That night in the Holiday Inn hotel room as they readied for bed Linda noticed a gray tinge to Mike’s face. “Are you alright?”

“Me?” Mike shrugged. “I’m just feeling my age.”

Just after five that morning the phone beeped. Mike answered it. He listened, spoke a few words in a low tone and hung up.

“Who was it?” asked Linda

“Dan's’ son: young Mike. Colleen passed away a few minutes ago.”

Linda crossed herself.

Mike and she rose and began to dress.

They found Dan and his three children in the hospice waiting room. Young Mike who was approaching fourty, acted as spokesman for the family. “The undertakers have just removed Mom. We’re going to take Dad home and let him get some sleep. These last few weeks he’s been through hell.”

***

Dan sat in his red reading chair. He had moved it into his bedroom beside the window. There removed from the world outside, he would sit and travel the past with Colleen.

Only when Linda and Mike come to visit did he venture as far as the kitchen table.

“There was a time he could throw a few clothes into a bag, grab his passport and cross the world to a teaching job. Africa. Asia. Now he won’t even go out his front door, “said young Mike sitting on the porch with Linda and Mike. “When mother died, his world died.”

***

“Writing?” asked Dan.

“You’ve loved literature and teaching it all your life” said Linda. “Why not write?”

“About what?”

“About what happened to us all those years ago in Nigeria.”

Don shook his head. “No. It’s all gone. No one cares anymore.”

Linda touched his right hand. “We do. We will read what you write. Tell people about Colleen and yourself, about how you met. That’s a start. Make her life mean something to others. Make her live again.” She squeezed his hand. “You know what she liked best about you, Dan? You never gave up. Don’t prove her wrong.”

Slowly, Dan looked up at his two friends. He remembered Linda haggling with a trader in Mallam Maduri, a tiny figure in the vastness of Northern Nigeria, but never afraid. His withered right hand touched her wrinkled face. Physically she had grown even smaller over the years, but only physically.

“I’ll need someone to do the editing” he said. “A writer is always his own worst editor.”

Linda nodded. “Mike and I will be glad to help, won’t we Mike?”

Mike nodded. “Of course we will. Just e-mail us what you’ve written every day. We’ll critique it and send it back”

***

Dan’ favourite picture of Colleen, taken just after their wedding, sat next to his computer screen. He had taken it when they had honeymooned in Cairo. She was looking out the window of their hotel room at the city. Known only to he and Colleen had been the fact that from the waist down, just beyond the picture frame, she had been naked. They had several pictures like that even putting them into an album. While willing to be seen in her bikini, Colleen had always refused to openly pose nude. “What would the children say” she had asked Dan. But memories, known only to the two of them, still remained.

Looking down from the picture, Dan began to type.

It was one of the nicer spots in Kano thought Colleen.

Colleen looked over his shoulder.

“You’re writing about the Zoo?”

“Yes.”

“I liked that place.”

“I know. So did I.”

She vanished leaving him to work in peace.

***

Dan ceased his typing. He had checked and rechecked his work. Now there was nothing more left to do except to send it on to Mike and Linda. Tomorrow he would begin the final chapter. Strapping on his CPAP mask he took a last look at Colleen, turned off his bedside lamp and closed his eyes’ knowing that soon he would see Colleen again.

***

Clad only in her yellow bikini she sat on the edge of the pool. Dan pulled himself up from the water and sat beside her. Smiling she splashed water at him. Laughing he held her right hand and nuzzled her neck. Above them white egrets flew across the Egyptian sky. Colleen and he looked up at the birds. Placing an arm on her back, Dan leaned against her. He had come home.

***

Three days after Dan’s funeral, Mike, Young Mike and Linda, the three editors, met around Dan’s dining room table. Over macaroons and cups of tea they read through the manuscript. Finished, they sipped their tea and waited for someone to speak. That someone was Linda.

“It doesn’t seem . . . finished,” she said. “Dan died too soon.”

“It seems alright to me” said young Mike.

“You weren’t there, said older Mike. “You wouldn’t know.” Taking out his cell phone Mike flipped through his files. “There’s something I wrote. Years ago.” Finding the file he read through it. “Linda, do you remember back in Mallam Maduiri, a girl we met one day while walking to the market."

Linda thought back. From out of the dusty images of the past a figure emerged. “The girl under the baobab tree?” As an afterthought she added. “I wonder if it’s still there.”

Young Mike downloaded the file to his father’s computer. After some cutting and pasting he labeled it Chapter Twenty and sat back. Mike and Linda read the result. Mike summed it up in one word. “Done.”