The Good Doctor (13 page)

I carried this with me all day. The headache didn’t lift and my mind felt crazed through with thin lines of unease. I was thinking, not very coherently, about Laurence and his girlfriend and the
party. I knew I had undertaken to spend some time with Zanele tonight, but the reason wasn’t clear to me any more. I was resentful at being entangled in Laurence’s personal affairs and it felt to
me that if I stayed away, on my own, for long enough, my obligation would fade.

But it didn’t fade. When I went back in the late afternoon he was busy cleaning up the room. The first thing he said was, ‘Oh, thank God. I thought you’d run out on me.’

‘Laurence, listen. Let me do your duty for you. Then you can —’

‘No, no, forget it. I told you, it’s a commitment.’

I lay and watched him, toiling on his hands and knees, a wet cloth in his hand. There were stains on the floor that would never come out.

9

I arrived late and she was waiting downstairs for me, wearing another of those West African suits. She had a touch of makeup on and I saw that she’d taken some trouble to look
good. But I was in the same clothes I’d worn all day, with two days’ growth of beard and a dull pain behind my eyes.

We had to eat at Mama’s place; there was nowhere else in town. So I led her through. The bar was full. From the haircuts and attitude I recognized the full contingent of soldiers, a group mixed
in race and age. But there were also more of the other regulars than usual, the scattering of clerks and farmers and workers that were the motley population of the town. There was a table open in
the courtyard, by chance the very same one I’d sat at with Laurence the first day, in the corner under the bougainvillaea. Mama came over to serve us and I ordered whisky.

‘Is that a good idea?’ Zanele said.

‘Hair of the dog. I couldn’t get by without anaesthetic. And there’s nowhere else to find it in this whole godforsaken place.’

She smiled. ‘It is kind of a strange spot. Not what I was expecting, I guess.’

‘What were you expecting?’

‘Well, Laurence didn’t say... in his letters... I had a different idea.’

I don’t know what her different idea was. But I could see that the place made her uneasy: she kept looking around distractedly. I didn’t want to be here myself, but I made an effort to shed my
burden of bad grace. It wasn’t so unpleasant sitting opposite a pretty face, whisky in hand.

Things mellowed once I’d had a bit to drink. We talked about this and that – her background, how she’d landed up out here. She came from middle America somewhere, the daughter and granddaughter
of black Americans. There was nothing African about her, really – not even her name. Zanele was a name she took on when she came out to the Sudan. Her real name, it turned out, was Linda.

‘Linda’s a nice name,’ I said.

But she shook her head. She wanted to leave it all behind, that middle-class childhood of half-privilege and displaced values. She thought she was African now, but she had the manner and
confidence of another continent completely.

Still, there was something about her mission I admired. She was actually out here, slogging in the Sudanese desert, roughing it in the Drakensberg mountains. She told me about her life in
Lesotho, and none of it made me envious. I was on to my third whisky, feeling good now, and I ordered another along with my food. It was easy to listen, while she talked about a library, a creche,
a literacy training programme, even a village bank – all of this started and run by the people of an impoverished community in the high mountains. With the help of overseas funding, which she’d
helped to raise. It sounded Utopian – and of course it was: none of this had really come to pass yet, it was all in the pipeline. Meanwhile she and six other foreign volunteers were sleeping on
mattresses on the floor, while the days passed in grubby work that ranged from inoculating cattle to digging irrigation ditches.

‘And you? What are you doing there?’

‘I’m a teacher. The only one in the village. I teach children of all different ages – six to sixteen.’

‘What do you teach them?’

‘Different subjects. Math, English. Some history.’

‘Can’t be too effective.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, I mean. Different ages all together. Different levels. All those subjects.’

‘It’s not like the schools you probably went to,’ she said, a bit stiffly. ‘But it does have some effect. These are very poor people. Anything is better than nothing.’

‘Is it?’

‘Well, of course. Don’t you think so?’

‘It seems to me,’ I said, ‘that past a certain point, anything is exactly the same as nothing.’

She was watching me warily. ‘Have you ever done it?’

‘What? Gone to do volunteer work with a poor community somewhere? No. Maybe I don’t believe in it. Or maybe this place is it.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘This place isn’t it. What you’re doing here isn’t community work. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

She and Laurence were the same kind of person: blindly and naïvely believing in their own power to change things. It was simple, this belief, and the simplicity was strong and foolish. I could
see how they might have been drawn to each other, up at the camp in Sudan – Laurence the young healer, earnest and passionate, she the lost seeker with her new name. And how South Africa, down at
the bottom end of the continent, with its glorious future just beginning, might have seemed like a backdrop to their belief.

But that was only part of it, of course. Because I could also see how mismatched they were. Behind the brave aspirations, what did these two really have in common? Their relationship was just
another idea – dry and sensible, like everything they did. And they had started to realize it too. Which is why she and I were sitting at this table now, while Laurence was a kilometre away, doing
a shift of duty he didn’t need to do.

Talk turned inevitably to Laurence. She said, ‘I wanted to thank you for looking after him. He’s mentioned you in every single letter. It’s helped him a lot to have you here.’

‘I haven’t helped him.’

‘Well, he thinks you have. Maybe you don’t know this, but Laurence doesn’t have friends. You’re the first friend he’s ever made. It’s important to him.’

‘Why doesn’t Laurence have friends?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe he’s too preoccupied. He is a touch wrapped up in himself. Of course, you know his background.’

‘Some of it. Not too much. I know about his parents being killed.’

‘His parents?’ She stared at me. ‘That’s not right.’

‘Weren’t his mother and father killed in an accident?’

She shook her head and looked at the table. ‘That’s an old story,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why he told you that. I thought he’d got over it.’

‘So what’s the truth?’

‘His parents aren’t dead. He’s an illegitimate child. His father wasn’t ever around. His mother raised him on her own. But she told him that story about his parents dying, and how she’d taken
over —’

‘That she was his sister.’

‘Right. That story.’

I felt somehow betrayed. ‘He told me a long saga about looking for their graves one day...’

‘Well, that part is true. He did go looking for them. That was when his sister – his mother – came out with it and told him the truth. It was a big thing for him. But it’s all history now. I
don’t know why he lied to you.’

‘As dark secrets go,’ I said, ‘that’s pretty disappointing. It’s not the Middle Ages any more.’

She looked troubled; it gave her face an added depth. It was on the tip of my tongue to say something reckless, but at that moment Mama arrived with our food. I transferred my attention
reluctantly. ‘Full house tonight,’ I said.

‘Everybody’s here,’ Mama said. She couldn’t seem to stop smiling, all her good fortune radiating from the gap between her front teeth. Her plump arms, as she set down our plates, gave off a
jangling of bracelets that was like the sound of cash in a drawer.

‘All the soldiers have arrived?’

‘Even the boss. Colonel Moller. He came yesterday.’

‘Who?’ I said.

It was like a hot light growing in my head.

‘Colonel Moller. Ooh, such a nice man. That’s him there inside, by the bar. You want more ice with that drink?’

‘No, thanks.’ I’d started to sweat. It was too much, surely; too much of a coincidence. But I had to see for myself. I went to the bathroom to wash my hands. The figure that Mama had indicated
was at the far end of the bar and it was only on the way back that I could stare into his face for two long seconds. Yes, it was him; not much different, despite the ten intervening years. He was a
little slacker and older; he’d gained one rank and was in charge of a mixed group of soldiers – black and white together, some of them the enemy he’d been trying to kill. His life must feel very
different to him, sent up here on this unlikely posting, but to me he was the same, unchanged. The narrow, fanatical features, the lean body generating a disproportionate power. He stared back at
me with dead eyes, then looked away. He didn’t know who I was.

I found that I was trembling. Zanele looked curiously at me as I settled myself again. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Oh, nothing. I’m all right.’

But I wasn’t all right. My mind was knotted up with what it had seen. I sat and picked at my food, but I wasn’t in the room any more. I was following the brown back of a corporal through the
dark, towards a lighted cell... and then stumbling away again, alone.

I shook my head to rid it of the memory. But though the room came back to me, with all its new chatter and activity, something was different now. Something in me, perhaps, but it found its way
into the silence at our table.

Eventually I put my fork down. I said, ‘That man in there, by the bar. He was someone I worked under in the army.’

But she didn’t even look into the bar. She stared at me and said, ‘You were in the army?’

And I could see what this meant to her. The army, the bad old days: she was having dinner with an enemy.

I said defensively, ‘Laurence told me he was sorry he’d missed the army. He said he thought it was a formative experience.’

‘Laurence says silly things sometimes. He doesn’t know how the world works.’

‘But he’s got a point. A year of community service up here isn’t going to teach him much. He might’ve been better off in a shit-hole in the bush. Let him kill people, let people try to kill him.
Then we’d see. He wouldn’t talk about country clinics and helping the human race any more.’

I was surprised at my own anger, the coldness and clearness of it – though I wasn’t sure who it was directed at. We were in a world without nuances now, in which all the subtle gradations of
colour had turned into black and white.

She pushed her chair back from the table. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t talk like that.’

But I was unstoppable by now. ‘Why? Is that too real for you? Ideas are always better than reality, of course. But sooner or later the real world always wins. Laurence will find that out. So
will you, when you go back to America and lose your African outfits and your fake name.’

‘Fuck you, mister.’

‘The feeling is mutual,’ I said, as she stood up and stalked out. I sat crunching an ice-cube, reflecting on how quickly it had all gone off the rails. My cold anger went on burning for a while.
But it wasn’t her I was thinking about; it was Laurence. And I remember that his name, Laurence Waters, seemed suddenly like a combination of blandness and intrigue, banality and piety, that
offended me.

It didn’t take long for me to calm down. And then I wasn’t so proud of myself any more. I got a tray from Mama, set our plates and glasses on it and climbed the stairs. But she
wouldn’t answer when I knocked, though the silence behind the door was charged.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘I was totally out of line. I’m really sorry. I’m drunk. I had no right.’

‘Fuck off,’ she eventually told me.

‘I can’t. I can’t go back and tell Laurence I insulted you.’

‘I don’t care. I don’t care about you or Laurence. The two of you are obviously in love with each other, so why don’t both of you just fuck off.’

It was maybe the first time in years that I was speechless. Something of my amazement must have carried through the door, because in the ensuing silence I heard the bolt slide back.

It took me a moment to get myself together. I picked up the tray from the floor where I’d put it and went in. The room was in darkness, the only light from the courtyard outside. I remembered at
a glance, from when I’d stayed here, the frugal furnishings: the narrow single bed, the table with two chairs, the sink in the corner. She was sitting at the table, by the window, looking curiously
set and formal. I went over and put the tray down.

‘Well,’ I said at last.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Aren’t we two having a fine time.’

‘I’m very mixed up,’ she said. ‘Confused and angry. It’s all over, isn’t it – me and Laurence. If it ever really happened.’

I sat down opposite her. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. The whole evening was just a jumbled mess of emotions with no clear focus in the middle. The sound of voices and laughter
carried up from outside. On the table was the photograph of her and Laurence in the desert, both smiling into the camera. I picked it up and tilted it towards the dim light coming in through the
window.

‘You guys look happy here,’ I said.

‘That’s because we were working. He’s happy when he’s working. But I don’t make him happy.’

‘Does he make you happy?’

‘I don’t know. I guess not. I can’t remember.’

‘Why don’t you eat your food,’ I said, like a mother.

‘I’m not hungry. I’m fucked-up. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s all right. I’m sorry too. We’re all sorry.’

She was bitter, but all the fight had gone out of her. She was slumped and sad in the chair, like a windless sail. In the silence I could hear her breathing. Suddenly, on a fresh impulse, she
said, ‘Let’s get out of here. It’s so... stuffy.’

‘But where will we go?’

‘I don’t know. There must be somewhere.’