The Good Doctor (21 page)

I said, ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘By when must she...?’

‘Soon. I’m not sure exactly when, but soon. Frank, isn’t it possible...?’

‘What?’

‘Can’t it... can’t you...?’ He shrugged again.

‘You’re not asking me to do it, are you?’

He smiled painfully. ‘I don’t know. It crossed my mind. You... you seem to know her.’

‘But Laurence,’ I said, ‘she came to you.’

And it was true. If he hadn’t held his little clinic, if he hadn’t gone to that particular village, he would never have seen her again. And part of me – a hard, cold place deep inside – felt
satisfaction at his dilemma. He wanted to go out and make grand symbolic gestures for an audience, but the moment reality rose up he didn’t know how to cope.

Of course I wasn’t going to leave it at that. Of course I would find out what had happened, of course I would do something. But for the moment I was not without a certain grim pleasure at the
hole Laurence had dug for himself.

I drove out that night to see her. I went without knowing what I was going to say. The last time I’d been here was before I left for the city, when I told her I’d be back the
following night. But I hadn’t gone back.

There was another roadblock set up on the way. When they asked me where I was going I said, ‘Just for a drive,’ but I could see that this answer perplexed the young soldier who’d pulled me over.
He made me get out and open all the doors, so that he could search everywhere – under and between the seats, in the cubby-hole, in the boot, in the engine. The car was empty and he had to let me
go, but it was with an obscure weight of guilt that I drove on, as if I was actually smuggling something secret and illegal.

And when I got to the shack the white car was parked outside. The white car, that might or might not have been outside the Brigadier’s house. I couldn’t stop. There was no point in waiting, but
I decided to do what I’d said anyway and just go for a drive. I rode on for miles through the dark. Then at some point short of the escarpment I pulled over and got out. The night was warm, the sky
crowded with stars. I sat on the hot bonnet of the car with the hissing wastes of grass around me, staring into the black.

It felt good to be there, away from everything, alone. For a little while my life felt like something separate to me, a hat or a shirt I’d dropped on the floor and could push at, meditatively,
with my foot. And out of this sense of things, a strange dream came to me.

In this dream I went to Maria in her shack. She looked like she normally did, but she was wearing a shiny yellow dress, something I’d never seen. And I went to her and took her hands in a way
I’d never done before. The feeling between us was warm and wordless, pushing action ahead of it like a wave.

I said to her, ‘Maria, come with me.’

She was confused. She didn’t know what I meant.

‘Everything is possible,’ I told her. ‘Come with me.’

‘But I must look after the shop.’

‘No. I mean something different. I don’t mean for a little while. I mean for ever. Come with me, away from here. We’ll leave everything behind. Your job, my job. Your place, my place. We’ll go
to the city and get married and live together and everything will start again. From the beginning.’

She shook her head.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s true. Everything is possible.’ And I saw that it was. I saw how simple such a huge change could be.

But then the dream shifted. She shook her head, and the colour of her dress was different, and the future slid by me in the warm dark and was gone. The wrong feeling, the wrong time: everything
was too late. All the power went out of me and I climbed down from the bonnet and drove back.

The white car was still there.

When I got back to the hospital the world was fixed in its usual place, waiting. The dark buildings, full of disuse and emptiness. The room, with my tiny collection of
possessions. Laurence Waters, asleep, his head flung sideways on the pillow.

I stood there for a long time, looking down at him. In the dim glow from an outside light his face seemed even younger than it was. Not young enough to be innocent, but soft and pale and
vulnerable to violence. And the violence was in me: from nowhere it occurred to me how simple it would be to break a sleeping head like this. One hard, heavy blow with the right object and it would
be done.

Because he was the enemy. I saw it now. The enemy was not outside, at large, in the world; he was within the gates. While I had slept.

Night thoughts; but nothing like this had come to me before. And it was terrible how casual, how very ordinary, the idea of murder could be. I turned away from it, and from myself, and went to
bed.

13

But the night thoughts weren’t confined just to the dark any more; they leaked into the normal daylight hours. I went about my usual routine, carrying out my duties and moving
in the well-worn tracks of habit. But behind the visor of my face a stranger – not entirely unfamiliar, a dark brother who’d left home long ago – had moved in.

Of course he was only a temporary resident. I was tolerating his presence, not for long, a day or two, the duration of a rage; then I would evict him and become an honourable person again.

But in that day or two, which became three or four, then five or six, I watched Laurence wrestling with his dilemma. He brooded on it, he languished. And I became fascinated by the complexities
of his agony, like the torments of a man who must solve some impossible equation.

Everything was hanging between two points, waiting. That was how it felt. And not just in our room: in the larger world too. Even the long streets of the town, when I drove or walked through
them, felt charged with some imminent event. And in the little sites and places, too, that were the backdrop to my life, things weren’t quite the same as before.

Mama Mthembu bought her pool table. I was in the supermarket in town one morning when I saw it go past on the back of a truck. By the time I went round for a drink that night it was installed in
the bar. And a bunch of soldiers and strangers was hanging around, playing and watching, getting drunk.

The crowd that came to Mama’s place was different lately. Maybe the soldiers had drawn them. A lot of the solitary figures hanging around were women, made up in tarty bright colours. I don’t
know where they came from – the villages near by, or over the border, maybe – but they were here to do business, and it wasn’t long before truckers who plied the nearby main road were stopping too.
That was new. So amongst the quiet, lost, familiar faces who used to head here for company, coarser faces were springing up. The atmosphere became looser and louder, jollier in a certain way, but
also more violent. I was there on one occasion when a fight blew up out of nowhere – a hectic exchange of fists between a soldier and a trucker – then disappeared again, overtaken by the click of
billiard balls and the jangle of loose change.

Then this strangeness, this violence, spilled over into the streets outside. One night there was a robbery in town. A gang of four armed men wearing balaclavas went into the supermarket. There
were no customers inside at the time, but they beat up the manager and emptied the safe and drove down the main street, firing at the street-lamps. Nothing like this had ever happened before. The
town had always been a place where boredom was a kind of violence, but for days afterwards the only talk was of the robbery, the gang.

The manager came to the hospital. He’d been pistol-whipped around the head, and I had to stitch up a deep cut above his eye. The man was in shock, and he kept telling the story over and over in
broken phrases: how they’d just stepped in out of nowhere, faces blanked out.

‘What kind of car were they driving?’ I asked. ‘Did you see?’

‘I saw it clearly. A white Toyota.’

A white car. Was the one that stood outside Maria’s shack a Toyota? I didn’t know – the makes of cars were a foreign language to me – but the image became a kind of certainty in my head. Of
course it meant nothing; there were thousands of white cars on the road. But for me it did mean something. And when I went out at night I was more watchful, more alert, than I had been before.

I didn’t go back to Maria. I was waiting now to see what Laurence would do. When I went out at night it was down to Mama’s place, and I didn’t leave before I was drunk.

Colonel Moller was often
there too. Like me, he sat on his own, in a shadowed corner somewhere. Like me, he was always watching. You could see the glitter of his eyes in the under-lit gloom, and one night he raised his
glass to me in an ironical greeting.

It took me a while to realize that part of the reason I was going there was to see him. Night after night, usually alone. Not to speak to him, I didn’t want that, but just to see his lean figure
sitting still amongst the smoke and music and voices. Not a comforting sight – the memory he stirred up in me hurt like a broken bone – but one I somehow needed.

He wasn’t always there, of course. On some nights all the soldiers were away. Then I knew that they were setting up their roadblock, searching cars, looking busy. But I wasn’t the only one in
town to wonder whether they ever did anything else. You saw them sometimes, driving up and down the main road in their jeep, very industrious, very fast. So much activity, so calibrated and
intense: it had to mean something. But never once in all that time did I see them arrest anybody.

Not all the change was out there, far away; some of it was closer to home. Tehogo had always been unreliable, but now he started to miss work regularly. Two or three times over the next couple
of weeks I found myself on duty with nobody around to assist me. And I heard the Santanders complaining about it at lunch one day too. But when Tehogo did come sauntering in, hours late, he didn’t
even try to excuse himself. There was just a shrug and, towards me, a surly silence full of words.

Nor did it help to go looking for him. On the third occasion I went to his room and knocked. But the door, this time, was locked, and the air on the other side felt unused and old. Hours later I
saw him come in through the gate. By then I didn’t feel like talking to him, but when he passed me a little later he smelled of sweat and his eyes were bloodshot and tired.

I tried to speak to Dr Ngema about it. But she wasn’t too interested and the ghost of our earlier talk about Tehogo still hovered near by.

‘He’s working impossible hours, Frank,’ she told me. ‘He’s doing the work of three people, remember.’

‘I know that. But he hardly seems to be here any more.’

‘He’s having a hard time at the moment. Be patient, Frank. It’ll all settle down.’

I didn’t push it. Recent events were too close, and there were too many questions around me. I waited for somebody else to notice and complain, but it didn’t happen. People were too distracted,
maybe, caught up in the new buzz and thrill around the hospital.

Because it didn’t go away. The excited feeling that Laurence had conjured up with his clinic seemed to linger long afterwards. I heard people talking at meal-times, or in the recreation room at
night. There was a lot of discussion about the next clinic and what it might lead to.

One night, as we were getting ready for bed, Laurence said, ‘She’s decided to stay, you know. Claudia Santander. She doesn’t want to go back to Cuba any more.’

‘Oh, really. That’s good.’

‘There’s a sort of programme with field clinics in Cuba that she’s been telling me about. It sounds like we may be able to get something similar going here. She says she feels like she’s
discovered her purpose. In being here, I mean.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘It only took her ten years.’

That was the only way I could see it. All this energy and renewal: it had saved the Santanders’ marriage. No matter that the world out there was still full of disease and calamity, as long as
peaceful silence reigned on the other side of the wall.

One day when I was on duty an old man came in. He had a boy with him, a nephew or a grandson, who told me that the old man had been at Laurence’s clinic. That was why, he explained, they’d come
in today. Before that they didn’t even know that the hospital existed.

He was all smiles, this old man, though he didn’t speak a word of English himself. He seemed to have been touched by the same excitement that was running through the hospital corridors. But when
it came down to an examination, it turned out that his complaint – a cataract developing in one eye – was something we weren’t equipped to deal with here. He would have to go to the other hospital,
the real and functioning one, over the escarpment. I wrote out a referral for him, addressing it to the young doctor, du Toit, I usually dealt with there.

The old man’s face fell in confusion when I sent him away. But there it was: all the good feeling that the clinic had generated running out into nothing.

I didn’t tell Laurence about the old man. He might have taken it, in spite of everything, as a victory. But perhaps not. There was, in that waiting, hanging time, a heaviness to Laurence that
hadn’t been there before.

It was because of Maria, I knew that. He was trying to decide what to do. He didn’t mention it to me again, but the question was between us all the time and he kept looking at me, at odd
moments, to see what I thought. But I said nothing. I still had every intention of doing something, taking some action, but I wanted to push things to the point where Laurence’s easy rules would
break.

Then one day he collected a few basic instruments and utensils together. He didn’t make a show of it, but he wanted me to see him. He got a big bowl and a cake of soap from the kitchen. A clean
sheet from the linen cupboard. He laid out a pair of gloves, a speculum, a catheter, a cervical dilator, on his bed, as if he was carrying out an inventory. Then he sat down on the windowsill, his
chin on his knees, and looked out.

I understood that he’d made his choice, and now he was offering one to me. There was still time. I could stop him. Up to the final moment, when he walked out of the door, I could still hold up a
hand and say,
Wait, Laurence. Let me go instead.
Or:
Don’t do it, Laurence. Let me speak to her first.