The doctor said I was very ill. He said I depicted a grotesque behaviour—he justified his postulation by stating such unique things I had started to do, like: conversing with creatures; known and unknown, near and far—and I did laugh suddenly when such conversions permitted me to; making perplexing faces, and walking backwards, to mention what was prominent—and was this bizarre enough for the police to arrest me, NO! In fact, if the police were enthusiastic enough to arrest someone, the man at the very entrance to the dispensary was very ill; he was psychotic. I was not told he was but he had schizophrenia written all over his face! His eyes were inked, they were exceptionally red; he was actually living in an imaginary world. He was reading too much and therefore dangerous —‘he is a professor’, a woman whispered to friend just in front of me and it fascinated me enough to ponder about what one gets from books: the absurdity of a man drenched in numerous volumes of encyclopaedias! Surely I would prefer appreciating the ingenuity of a monger parading through the streets of Blantyre with curios.
The professor had been, for precisely ten minutes I had been on the queue leading to the dispensary, scratching his pale skin, with occasional sputtering; and he had a short lady by his side with a bottle guiding the spittle. She had taken off her shoes; they could not bear the wrath of the shiny and slippery hospital floor.
The queue run to the left of the entrance and to its immediate left was a bench placed such that a security guard sitting on it was promptly leaning against a careful arrangement of dim bricks, that apart from making the dispensary non-existent to patients, gave it a dark and surreal look.
Well, it is not the professor’s spitting that I was infuriated with much then; it was this security guard in a tight-fitting pair of green trousers and a short-sleeved white shirt, with a single pocket just below the collar bone, sitting on the bench placed just to the left of the line. One thing I like about guards is their immobility; their unusual disposition, characterised by smiling at every man passing by, if need arises, and immediately changing their expression once the man has passed. Ah! Here was a perfect individual that would maybe understand me, hence rescuing from these bandits, disguised as nurses and doctors.
“Guard! Guard…here!”
The guard began walking briskly towards me with a baton in her left hand, taking a hat from his pocket and putting it on. There was a sudden change in my breathing, I felt like I was about to meet someone I had for so long longed to come across and have a worthwhile chat with, the feeling you get when you want to propose; yes that feeling, when your heartbeat becomes prominent as you are standing with intent directly in front of her and you are contemplating over whether to say those magical words, yet a certain part of your heart tells you ‘don’t tell her how you feel! She is probably with some other well-to-do folk already’ and the other part says ‘don’t you want to know how it feels like to have two hearts destined for each other walk along the shore while holding hands?’ and you, with either the stubbornness of the infamous Pharaoh or the gullibility of the Biblical Eve, you propose: yes that very feeling, a feeling that I came to understand when I met one a woman I thought loved me, a woman of such beauty and great manners I presumed, I felt it then with the exception that this was not the case.
I pushed aside my bag, consisting of priceless paintings, yes my paintings of course. But I hadn’t moved, not a bit since I got into this line… there was a gap between myself and the person in front of me, yet I didn’t intend to move up front anytime soon. All I saw scattered in front of me were huge fathomless pits: traps to render me dead, hence rob me of my hard-earned kingship—and before I got into this line I had been trying to convince the doctor that it would be utterly unheard of for a King’s words to go unattended to. I was trying to tell the doctor that this guard coming towards me should have been dispatched to another location for she would not know how to handle a crisis. The doctor stood up and put on her prejudiced glasses, only to brand me mad, insane, ridiculous, crazy strange fellow after I had showed him the numerous paintings that people had to queue for days and nights to get only a minute glimpse of!
