The Good Doctor (10 page)

He stood peering into the water. ‘I bet there are fish in here,’ he said. ‘Do you fish, Frank?’

‘I used to. But it got boring.’

‘I bet you need patience to fish. Do you think there are crocodiles?’

‘Too small for that.’

He looked relieved. It was obvious that he was more uneasy than usual out here, in the wild. We set out, up the river, trudging through mud and splashing through the water. I let him go ahead,
the overloaded rucksack labouring through thickets, now and then his anxious face turning back to blink at me. From time to time he stopped to consult the map, though we kept to the water all the
way. I felt happy – happier than I’d been in months. I’d forgotten how good it was to be away from buildings and people and familiar objects. It was cool and lovely under the trees.

In places we had to clamber on rocks and in other places we had to wade. I didn’t mind floundering through the dark water, but his face was lopsided with alarm. ‘Are you sure there aren’t any
crocodiles?’ he said again. ‘Not sure,’ I said, ‘but probably not.’ Of course there were no crocodiles, but I enjoyed his discomfiture. After a while I went ahead to lead the way, hearing the
sucking sound of his feet in the mud, his hands slapping at mosquitoes.

After an hour the water widened into a pool, edged on the far side by cliffs, from which a waterfall came down. It was a beautiful, primitive place. A fine steam of spray drifted over the rocks,
wetting the leaves of ferns that grew out of the cracks.

But we’d disturbed something, a long saurian shape that flung itself into the water.

‘I told you there were crocodiles!’

‘That’s not a crocodile,’ I said, ‘it’s a monitor. Look at it go!’

The huge slithery form swam furiously along the base of the cliff and then hauled itself up into a crack and climbed. It went up a vertical surface and disappeared on to a ledge. The scaly
ancient look of the lizard was disturbing; I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

But I swam in the water. It was the obvious spot to stop and eat lunch; long shafts of sun came through the trees and the rocks were warm and solid. I took off my clothes and swam out to where
the surface boiled and hissed. I felt something of what I used to feel after I’d first come up to the hospital and went on long hikes alone into the bush. But of course I wasn’t alone now; I had
Laurence here. My friend.

He sat on the side, knees up to his chin, watching. He looked disconsolate and perplexed. The chaos of the wilderness seemed to oppress him; I think he would have liked to uproot it all and
plant lawn there. I swam closer and waved. ‘Come on in!’

He shook his head. ‘I’m okay here.’

‘The water’s great.’

‘Do you want a beer?’

‘Well, why don’t we eat?’ I dragged myself out and lay dripping on the rock. ‘How about a sandwich?’

‘Here?’

‘Why not here?’

‘I don’t know, it’s still early. I thought we could eat higher up.’

‘Higher up? What are you talking about?’

‘We’re not there yet, Frank.’

‘Not where yet?’

‘This is an outing, remember.’

Ja?

He took his glasses off and rubbed them. His face, as he turned to me, had a clean, startled look to it. ‘I haven’t been completely truthful, I suppose.’

I waited for it.

‘Well, truthful isn’t the right word.’

‘What is the right word?’

‘I haven’t explained everything. This is a hike, an outing I mean, of course.’

‘But?’

‘But there is somewhere I want to get to.’

‘Where is that, Laurence?’

He put his glasses on and got the map and came to sit on the rock next to me. He’d taken off his shirt and his pale, hairless chest, knobbly with bones, looked artificial. In the room I was the
shy, private one, always changing in the bathroom or under a towel, while he didn’t care how I saw him. But out here our roles had somehow reversed.

‘Here,’ he said. He was pointing to something on the map, but I couldn’t see what. I could make out the blue line of the river, but the rest of it was just altitudes and contours and the
nameless dots of villages. ‘I want to go there.’

‘But where?’

‘Here. Can’t you see?’ He was jabbing with the blunt tip of his finger.

‘That just looks like a village to me.’

‘What do you mean, just a village? It is a village.’

‘But. But.’ I peered into his face for an explanation. In all the short time I’d known him he’d never made a joke, but it felt as if this might be the first. He gazed steadily back at me. ‘I
don’t understand,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Why do you want to go there?’

‘Just to see it.’

I looked at the map. It was inexplicable to me. The whole terrain was peppered with the little marks of human settlement, some big enough for names, others not. But he had ringed one, just one.
I stared at it and after a while the undulating contour lines resolved themselves into a sort of picture for me. I could make out the cliffs at the point where we were sitting. Up at the top and
maybe two or three kilometres north, a little way west of the river, was his particular dot.

But of course it was nonsense; we hadn’t come all this way ‘just to see it’. He was after something he didn’t want to talk about, and I’d sensed it from the beginning. It was curiosity that had
brought me on this outing.

‘You couldn’t have chosen one more difficult to get to, could you?’ There was no road, no path even, and the ground looked hilly and uneven.

‘That’s it, do you see it, that’s the whole point!’ He was very excited. The lenses of his glasses had picked up drops of water, so that he seemed suddenly to be weeping.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Laurence, what is the point?’

‘I wanted the most inaccessible one. I wanted one that wasn’t easy to get to.’

For the first time he seemed slightly mad to me; maybe he saw this in my face, because he dropped his eyes and started toying with the corner of the map. He looked crestfallen.

‘You don’t want to do this, do you?’

‘I don’t understand what this is. What are we doing?’

‘I told you,’ he said stubbornly. ‘I just want to see.’

‘Why?’

‘Just because.’

‘No.’

‘We don’t have to climb the cliff,’ he said. ‘There’s a way up. I can show you on the map.’

‘No.’

‘Come on.’

‘My hike is over,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait here. You go on alone.’

It was like a door slamming between us. I had never spoken to him in this way before, or if I had it was only as a joke. I wasn’t joking now. A cold anger had come up in me against him. Who was
he, this overheated boy, just out of his internship, with his forced friendship and his secret plans and schemes? I didn’t like him any more and I wasn’t going to follow him any further.

He could see it in my face. He was astounded. His eyes went very round and his mouth trembled, but he didn’t cry. After he’d sat staring at his feet for a while he got up and started putting his
shirt on, very deliberately, button by button. Then he said in a casual voice, ‘All right.’

‘What?’

‘You stay here. I’ll leave the food with you. I don’t think I’ll be too long. A couple of hours. See you later.’

He was already moving away. I wanted to say something, but what? In every sense he was leaving me behind. I looked into the trees and when I turned around again he’d disappeared.

I was defiant for a while. I took out the sandwiches and drank a beer. But my little moment was fading already and I was sorry for what I’d done. How bad could it be, getting to the top of the
cliffs? And he’d only meant well. I had an impulse to pack up and follow him, but I didn’t even know which direction he’d gone in.

Now a shadow had come over the day. And down here in the little hollow the sun had gone too. The pool was a dark mirror, its surface cracked and broken by the force of the water. The spray was
cold and the outline of the cliffs crept steadily over the forest. High up there it was a hot day, but I felt chilly and alone. I remembered the monstrous lizard shape struggling in the water.

Now I felt watched. The trees were a dark cryptic presence all around me, the rocks bulged with hard inner life. It had been years since the world observed me like this; it made me a child
again. I had a memory of the bottom of our garden and how huge and complex it was on the day that my mother had died.

When I set out walking it wasn’t to follow him. I was still naked; I was just walking into the trees. I don’t know what I was looking for. Just to move, to move. The leaves were densely packed,
but there was an opening that might’ve been a path. An animal track down to the water. Quite quickly, the river was only a noise behind me, fading away. The dank bush thinned out into undergrowth
and air, still edged with a filigree of branches, through which I was trying to find a way.

And then it was there. The house. Or rather – my first sight of it – a diamond-shaped grid of wire, overgrown with creeper and half rusted away. A fence. And beyond it, sinking into the leaves,
a glimpse of a gable and a broken front door.

A house. Here. Why? I took a full step back, not to touch.

But nobody lived here. You could see that right away. Nobody had lived here for a long time. There was no trace of a garden; it was all wild and rank. The windows were glassless and black. And
the fence – which was once formidable – was folding and falling in on itself.

I went over. There was a place a little way along where the fence was completely flat and you could step in. Now there was the ghost of what had long ago been a path. A few smooth stones, the
faintest trace of a verge. But the flowerbeds had erased themselves, leaking and overflowing in a mess of weeds and leaves until no shape was left. I went up the front steps on to the porch. Cracks
and cobwebs and watermarks. The front door was burst on its hinges. I stepped through. Why did I want to go in?
Just to see it.

I went down a long passage with doors leading off into empty rooms, no furniture, no pictures, no objects. The place had been cleaned out, and maybe not by the owners. Other people had been here
since: there were the remains of a fire, not too recent, in the corner of one room. And a scattering of cigarette butts that had paled with time. Down the long wall of the passage somebody had
scratched a huge word, BEASTIE, in big drawling letters that collapsed towards each other. But in the little dunes of sand that had collected on the floor, the only footprints were mine.

It was hard to know what the rooms had been for. In one of them, the last, a cracked sink and linoleum floor gave some clue. But the others were vacant shells, with all the life hollowed out of
them. In places, weeds were pushing up through the boards and in the plaster cracks were spreading like veins. From outside, the presence of the trees leaned inward on the house.

And I was afraid here. Not in the same way that the pool at the waterfall made me afraid. No, that was aloneness, and this was something else: the very opposite of being alone. There was nobody
with me, but it felt as if somebody was there, just at the edge of my sight, moving around the corners before I got there. It was a faceless figure, on the verge of being human, not a personality
so much as a force. Malevolent but amused. Something that this country had thrown up between me and it, conjured out of ruin and wilderness and not belonging completely to either, a shape, an
outline, a threat. It meant me harm.

I left by the back door. I couldn’t bring myself to walk through the house again, and it was a relief to be outside, under the sky. There was another gate at the back and a dirt road that was
disappearing under grass. There was nothing to explain the house, the road, out here, or why they weren’t a house and a road any more.

When I got back to the pool he was waiting.

‘Where were you?’

‘Over there,’ I said.

‘Doing what?’

‘Just walking.’ After a moment I added: ‘There’s a house in there.’

‘A house? Whose house?’

‘Nobody’s. It’s abandoned. I don’t know.’

‘Let’s go and look.’

‘No,’ I said, and something in the way the word came out made his face fall. I felt suddenly self-conscious and turned away to dress as I went on: ‘I think it was probably owned by a white
family. They abandoned it when the area was made a homeland.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, I don’t know that. It’s a guess.’

‘Maybe I’ll go and have a look,’ he said, but his tone was half-hearted.

‘How was your village?’

‘I didn’t get there.’ He cast a frustrated glance up the cliff.

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know, the map... Something was wrong. Maybe it isn’t there any more.’ There were thorns and blackjacks stuck to his clothes and he was pent-up, hands knotting and unknotting at his
sides. He waited until I was fully dressed. ‘Frank, I’m sorry about earlier.’

‘It’s all right.’

‘No, I should’ve told you. It wasn’t fair to spring it on you like that. But I thought you might enjoy the excursion.’

‘I have enjoyed it.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’ The dark feeling was lifting and it was pleasant to be out here again. But something was still unexpressed and the weight of it made us silent as we went back down the river.

We might never have talked about it at all. But late that night we were woken up by a crash against the wall, then volleys of screaming in Spanish. The Santanders were having a
terrible argument next door. There was no hint as to what might’ve started it, especially as one of them was meant to be on duty in the office at the time.

Laurence shot up out of bed in a panic. His white underpants and T-shirt hovered uneasily in the middle of the floor.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘What is that?’

‘The lovely committed couple. They’re murdering each other.’

‘What do you mean? Are they having a fight?’

I said, ‘I told you.’

He listened to them. ‘Jesus Christ.’

There was another bang on the wall. It was strange, but the schism in the Santanders’ marriage, across which they were always pulling and screaming at each other, was also between Laurence and
me now, in the room. I got out of bed and went into the passage to knock on their door. They didn’t open, but the shouting stopped immediately. Then there was a dim sound of crying that eventually
tapered away.