Never have I had motivation not to sleep and still lose the battle than when I met Aggie. She was my night nurse. Well, almost mine. She was Lameck’s. And other patients’. But she came to our room more often, or so I think.
I heard her before I saw her. The click clock of the high heels hitting the floor. Click, clock. Click, clock. And the door swung open. And there she was. In tight, black trousers, blue top and a white lab coat. A novel in the right side pocket of the white coat, her light face lined with a smile.
“How is my favourite patient doing?” she asked.
I badly wanted to be Lameck. He was the patient. But that didn’t matter. It made him her favourite. And if it took being a patient to be one of her favourite things, heck, I would make “sick” my middle name..
“He’s fine.” I responded.
Lameck was asleep. Thank heavens. The pain and the drugs left him little space to recognize beauty. That was left to me. To recognize and appreciate. And I guess she knew I was awed. She constantly smiled. She focused on Lameck, to up my desire for her attention. Even when he was asleep, the questions were all about him. She didn’t even ask me what my name was. But she asked me a few questions, and a gave little attention to feed the admiration of a boarding school teenager.
“Is Lameck your brother?”
“No, he is actually an acquaintance.”
Well, Lameck was, maybe, more than an acquaintance. We were more familiar to each other. Both of us were members of the scouts club in our school. And that is how I had ended up in hospital will him.
It was three days after we’d opened school. Ours was a boys only boarding school, and life was not easy. We called it prison, and we actually had a song for closing day. We made calendars at the beginning of the term for all the days of the term, and at the beginning of each day, we would cancel out that day from the calendar and count the number of days remaining to the end of the term. So, you could imagine how we felt when we opened school.
Eleven year olds still homesick, trying to adjust to school food. Thirteen year olds, now adept at flipping that switch between home and school. And the in-betweeners and, others still coming, of course for a reason. Lameck belonged to the last group, he had just come in that day because he was sick.
He got worse. He was walking to the dorms when his neck started turning to one side. The muscles turned, his neck continued bending till his head was steeped to one side,like someone looking for a nicer angle to look at something. He tried to push back. It refused to move. He panicked. He screamed. He bawled. People ran to him. I found him still bawling, trying to pull his head back, a look of panic on his face. His cousin was holding onto him, bewildered. We swung into action. We were the ones trained to respond to emergencies. We, the scouts. And here was one of us. And we didn’t know what to do. But we had to do something.
An urgent word from us to the administration got us the school van and soon, we were on our way to hospital. It came to be that Lameck had not been bewitched(you know, the school being in Kisii and all that). His neck could return to its previous position. He had reacted to some syrup he was taking because of his earlier sickness. He was allergic to it. But he had to stay overnight.
It was decided that I was the one to stay with him because we were almost of the same age. For me, it was an opportunity to skip school, and eat nice fancy foods. And now, there was Aggie.
“Wow, so you decided to stick with him, eh?” she asked, impressed.
I smiled. No I blushed. Finally, she was pleased with me. She had actually said wow. Wow! That was a plus, a big plus. I was already thinking of the greatly exaggerated version of this story I was going to narrate once back in school. I would be the hero. The GUY. Not even a holiday trip to Zanzibar could beat a nurse hitting on me, at night!
Do you like Yoghurt? I have some in my office.
What! In your office.
….Okay, she likes me. Maybe she wants to kiss me. No, she wants me to touch her nice yellow boobs and look onto her eyes, nicely, deeply….
we walked to her office, which was quite bare. My head was reeling.
..And then she whispered into my ear..do you want to come into my office, and winked at me….I could imagine how my friends would react after I delivered those lines to their eager ears. I could imagine the look on their faces. I could imagine how I could feel, seeing them swallow my lies.
I sat on the opposite side of the office. She brought out a packet of yoghurt, poured some into a glass, and pushed it towards me. She took hers directly from the packet. I kept staring at her chest, at the cleavage that kept staring back, seducing me, or so I thought.
“So what do you want to be after school?” She asked.
“A surgeon.” Who didn’t want to be a surgeon after reading Ben Carson’s Think Big.
“Wow. That’s great. It would take a long time. You know I have been studying medicine for seven years now, and I am not yet done.”
So she was a doctor. But I didn’t want to accept that. I liked the image of her I had cultivated in my head. In it, she was this light skin nurse, in a short white nurse’s dress that showed her light thighs. On her head, she wore a cap. She also smiled and giggled a lot. Especially, when I looked at her.
“Ah, Okay. Then I will be a lawyer.” I responded.
“Wow, that’s good too.”
And a nurse in a blue uniform had called her. She told me to go back to my room, she will come see me after she was done.
I tried to stay awake. I counted from one to a thousand and started over again and again. I tapped my fingers. I closed and opened my eyes in fits. But the inevitable results of my overfeeding were at the peak now. I couldn’t win this fight.
I woke up with a start. It was a daylight. Lameck was already awake. He passed me a note. Get well Lameck. All the best in your studies Lawyer.
“What. Is she gone?” I asked, disbelieving.
“Probably. I was examined by another doctor.” Replied Lameck.
Native Essays 