Thoughts in a Makeshift Mortuary, by Jenny Hobbs

Thoughts in a Makeshift Mortuary, by Jenny Hobbs. Random House Struik Umuzi. Cape Town, South Africa 2014. ISBN 9781415203897 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0389-7

Thoughts in a Makeshift Mortuary, by Jenny Hobbs. Random House Struik Umuzi. Cape Town, South Africa 2014. ISBN 9781415203897 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0389-7

Thought in a Makeshift Mortuary, Jenny Hobbs's rich, powerful first novel, is a story about ordinary living in extraordinary times and a moving tribute to those who worked to raise a South Africa driven to its knees.

Jenny Hobbs  

Her name is Rose. She lies on her back on a woven grass mat, head to one side, mouth open, teeth jutting under lips that seem to have drawn back into themselves like touched sea anemones. Her skin has the grey drained look of meat that has been standing in water. Under swollen lids her dead blue eyes stare at the mud wall of the makeshift mortuary, a thatched hut with a single small glass window through which an extension cord dangles. At the end of the cord is an electric fan which turns its whirring head from side to side, languidly redistributing the stifling air. The blood that has been seeping from her mouth and nose and matting her long blonde hair has congealed and darkened in the heat. There is blood on her T-shirt too, caked in thick craters round the mess of flesh and shattered bone and beige locknit where the bullets hit, their harsh death-spits silencing the room that a minute before had been noisy with reggae and laughter. The T-shirt was wrenched out of her jeans during her death agony on the floor, in the dust and the blood, her choking cries unheard by the husband who now lies next to her writh most of his belly shot away. The already fraying cotton thread that held the metal button of her jeans snapped with the violent jerking of her dying muscles; thread ends stir now every time the fan swivels in her direction. The stained sheet loosely thrown over her legs and his yawning wound is not wide enough to cover her feet. They are dirty underneath, with the fissured heels of one who often went barefoot on concrete floors. Her mother, Sarah, who sits on a wooden chair by the door keeping vigil, remembers when those feet were small and pink and kicked happily in the sunlight under a pram net that kept the flies and the cat off. Sarah grieves and remembers while Rose's father rages through the government office building down the track, demanding the privacy of a coffin - 'Two coffins, for God's sake! You can't just leave them there. It's nearly midday, man!' "We have telephoned twice for the undertaker, sir. Please understand, there are certain procedures to follow, arrangements to be -" - 'What arrangements? They're dead! They've been dead for nine bloody hours already!' Gordon is stocky and red-faced, his checked cotton shirt stained under the arms and down the back with patches of sweat. He wears baggy khaki shorts and long khaki socks, and carries a green felt hat with a guinea fowl feather stuck in the band, to keep the sun off the already dangerously freckled dome of his head. Because of the specialist's warnings about skin cancer, he never goes into the sun now without his hat, and he snatches it off in a reflex action every time he enters one of the offices. "We know they are dead, sir.' The dark brown face behind the desk is also sweating. 'We have telephoned for the undertaker.' - 'Where is he, then?" - 'There are certain arrangements to be made, sir.' The official hand-off, bland expression, clerical fist clutched round office-issue ballpoint pen poised over a form that is being filled out in block capitals. 'Don't you have any ice, then? Ice, man! Ice! That room is like a bloody inferno!' - 'Here, sir?' [...]

This is an excerpt from the novel: Thoughts in a Makeshift Mortuary, by Jenny Hobbs.

Title: Thoughts in a Makeshift Mortuary
Author: Jenny Hobbs
Genre: Novel
Publisher: Random House Struik
Imprint: Umuzi
Cape Town, South Africa 2014
ISBN 9781415203897 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0389-7
Softcover, 15 x 22 cm, 416 pages

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