‘Who is waiting for her to return home?’, is the question he’s stuck with. Jeremy can’t move his legs. It’s only his third week following the staff on their rounds. They’re trying to resucitate a black girl. There is the smell of burned flesh. He gags when he thinks the young woman smells like a Sunday barbecue. There is no way to tell who she is. There are almost no black people in Jeremy’s country. Even know, with half of her face horrifically scarred and her hair matted, you can tell she is beautiful, gorgeous in fact.
She’s so burned her flesh falls off in strips when they try to hook her up to an IV. Jeremy sees her tattoos comes off. One is of a lion. One Chinese looking symbol. One are the silhouettes of a mother and a small girl watching a sunrise. Others are too scorched. She was picked up around 3 pm. Probably passed out in the morning and was cooking in the broiling sun till someone finally stopped and took a look at her. What made her pass out is hard to determine.
There are no belongings apart from a glittery silverish dress and a pair of high heeled shoes. Yellow ones. Jeremy is no fashion expert, but he assumes it’s quite a bold choice. One heel is broken off. He wonders if she was an escort. She can’t be revived. He hears an older physician say: ‘This is one for the freezer.’ All the embassies in the capital are contacted. This leads to nothing of course. They can’t even spread her picture because half of her face had to be scraped off the sticky asphalt. She will be buried in an unmarked grave. Her death is a tragedy, the way she died was a long protracted ordeal.
For how long was she conscious? How many footsteps did she hear pass her by while the sun was melting her skin into the asphalt? What fills Jeremy with even more pain is the thought of parents somewhere, perhaps the mum in the tattoo, wondering where she is, when she will be back. Maybe some place in Africa, though she could be from anywhere.
Nobody contacts the hospital asking about her. What dreams did she have? What was her last night like? The understaffed hospital doesn’t do a full autopsy. Was she raped? Did a client chuck her out of a driving car? Did she take some drug? Did she have some genetic heart defect? Was she just too dehydrated and too tired? Someone knew her. Someone was with her in the days leading up to her death. Why does nobody even bother to call the hospital? Will someone wait three, four decades for a sign of her? Waking up every morning checking a phone for a text that never comes? Though far, far less important he also thinks of potential instagram followers who will wonder for a week or so why she’s no longer posting.
Someone stopping and checking on her this morning could have saved her. According to one of the surgeons he follows around every day she had a bit of life in her when they had her in the ambulance. He also added: ‘Good that she didn’t make it in the end. Her brain was fried.’
Jeremy says: ‘Somebody nurtured her for the first three years of her life, probably rocked her to sleep, dead tired, had all kinds of hopes for her, and then as a twenty something she is dumped by the way side and grilled to a crisp.’ The surgeon looked at him very sternly: ‘Don’t think like that or you won’t last two years in this field.’ This surgeon has dubbed the deceased lady ‘caramel’, because she was like ‘molten brown sugar.’
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The Confessor 