The Good Doctor (22 page)

But many days had gone by and I hadn’t spoken to her, and this day was going by and I didn’t stop him; and I knew now that I would let it be. What I’d said was the truth: she’d spoken to him,
not to me. And the child, after all, was probably not mine; and if it was, this was probably the only answer in any case. There was nothing I could do to change the course of events. So I watched
him and said nothing.

Later that night he collected everything together, moving slowly, like a person in pain. He put on his white coat. Then he walked to the door and stopped.

‘Frank.’

‘Yes?’ I said, speaking too fast and too loud.

‘What are you doing tonight?’

‘I’m not sure. I think I’ll just hang out. I’m tired.’

‘If you feel like it, we could go out later. For a drink or something.’

‘Where? To Mama’s? I was there last night, I don’t know if I can face it again.’

‘Oh. Okay.’

‘And I’m tired. Let’s see how we feel.’

‘Okay.’

I didn’t look up, but I could sense when the doorway was clear. He’d gone. I sat for a little while and then I went to the window to watch his lonely figure cross the car park to his car and
drive out slowly into the dark.

He was gone a long time. Three or four hours at least. I felt nothing, but I could observe from my own behaviour that feeling was loose in me somewhere. I walked up and down
the tiny square of floor like some kind of big, predatory animal in a cage. Later I got into bed and turned off the light, but there was no possibility that I would fall asleep.

I heard his car come back, turn in at the gate and stop. I heard the car door and his footsteps coming, slow and heavy, along the path.

When he opened the door I lay still, but he showed no
interest in me. His bag seemed to be loaded down with stones. And he was like a man who’d carried stones a long way. He bumped into his bed, said something to himself in the dark, went into the
bathroom. I could hear the water running and running, the sound of him washing himself over and over.

I got up and put the light on again. It was a still and airless night, warm with returning summer, and I felt suddenly how hard it was to breathe. I went and opened the window, knelt on his bed
for a while to feel air on my skin.

When he came back in he was naked and still dripping with water. He looked at me and went over and sat on my bed, facing me. Neither of us said anything for a long time. I was in my underwear,
and with both of us so stripped down in the disarray of the room, it was as if we were lost in some labyrinthine intimacy. But his face, which was dark and different, was like the face of a
stranger to me.

It was only afterwards that I realized: the quality, whatever the quality was, that had given his face its distinction, was gone.

He said, ‘Why have you done this?’

It was an odd question.

I said, ‘But I’ve done nothing. I’ve been here the whole time.’

‘Yes.’ He nodded, and it felt that something else would follow, but nothing did.

Then it came. Not from him; from me.

‘If you want to blame somebody,’ I said, ‘blame yourself. We were all okay here. It was all going along fine. Then you came. And you couldn’t leave everything as it was. No, you had to make it
better. You had to sort it out, improve life for everybody. Now see where we are.’

‘Where are we?’

‘Exactly where we were. Except that none of us feels okay any more.’

‘I don’t think we’re where we were. It is better than before. I’m not sorry about that.’

‘Because of one little clinic in the bush.’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘I wasn’t there. But I know. What did you achieve? Nothing. Talk, talk, talk. A lecture about Aids. A lecture on hygiene and health. For God’s sake, Laurence. Those people need drugs and
treatment, but of course they’re not available. All you can give them is talk.’

‘It’s just a beginning. Other things will follow.’

‘What will follow? Another clinic in a few weeks. Along with electricity.’

‘Do you think electricity means nothing? That’s because you’ve never lived a day without it in your life.’

‘I don’t think it means nothing. But the fact that one tiny village is getting it means nothing. It’s a sop, it’s a symbol. It’s like your medicine, Laurence. There are still millions of other
people out there who aren’t being helped. Do you really think talk and a few bright lights will save the world?’

‘How will you change anything by doing nothing?’

‘You can’t change the way things are.’

‘Of course you can!’

We looked at each other with astonishment and loathing.

‘They’re right about you,’ he said slowly. It was a bitter realization. ‘I couldn’t see it before. But now I see.’

‘What do they say about me?’

‘That you’re not part of... of the new country.’

‘The new country,’ I said. ‘Where is it, this new country?’

‘All around you, Frank. Everything you see. We’re starting again, building it all up from the ground.’

‘Words,’ I said. ‘Words and symbols.’

‘It isn’t. It’s real. It’s happening.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Why? Why are you like you are?’ It was an angry question, but he didn’t sound angry. He sounded curious and sad. ‘You’re not a bad man.’

‘Maybe I am.’

‘You’re not a bad man. But you say no to everything. It’s written on you. I don’t know what’s happened to you. You just don’t believe in anything. I don’t think you even believe what you’re
saying now.’

‘I do believe it.’

‘That’s why you can’t change anything. Because you can’t change the way you are.’

‘Do you think it’s so simple? At the middle of your life there’s just one word, yes or no, and everything follows from that?’

‘Maybe it is like that.’

I looked at him, but I didn’t see him. I was seeing something else. A picture had come to me, and it was of Laurence and me as two strands in a rope. We were twined together in a tension that
united us; we were different to each other, though it was in our nature to be joined and woven in this way. As for the points that we were spanned between – a rope doesn’t know what its own purpose
is.

The image stayed for a moment, then it went again, but we had both fallen quiet by then. All the high emotion was receding; he looked tired and grey. After a minute he rolled over and pulled the
sheet over him. I waited a while, then put off the light and also lay down. We were in the wrong beds, but somehow that didn’t feel so strange.

I was also weary now, my bones full of sand, but sleep took a long time to come. Everything that had just been said was wrong; it was the wrong conversation; it had nothing to do with the real
business of the evening. And yet it was also the only real, the only possible talk.

In the morning it was past. When he got up the weight he’d carried in with him last night was gone. He moved quickly around the room, whistling through his teeth. When I sat up
he grinned at me.

‘Morning, Frank. Sleep okay?’

It was as if last night hadn’t happened for him. I was the heavy one now. The weight had moved from him to me; some subtle exchange had taken place in the night. I was older and bigger and
slower than before.

And I was thinking now, really thinking, about what had happened last night. In my mind I saw him again, crossing the car park in the dark. But my mind went further now: to the long road
unrolling in the headlamps, taking him to the little wooden hovel under the trees... and inside.

It was only now, too late, that I thought about Maria. Somehow the whole thing had been about Laurence until now; she was on the side somewhere, an abstract problem I couldn’t solve. But she
wasn’t abstract today; she was solid and warm and real, a human body I had lain with. And I had done nothing to help her.

I was on duty; I had to get dressed. But Laurence was also dressing, briskly and seriously, as if he had somewhere to go.

‘What are you doing?’

He stopped, his shirt half-buttoned. ‘I’m going out there.’

‘Where?’

‘You know where.’ He wasn’t looking at me now as he finished doing up his shirt. ‘I said I’d check on her today.’

‘You can’t go now. There’ll be people... It’s the daytime.’

‘But I’m on duty tonight.’

‘I’ll do it.’

‘I told her I’d be —’

‘I’ll do it, Laurence.’

The note in my voice froze us both. He stared at me, then shrugged and looked away.

The hours of duty stretched idly away, and I thought only about her. When I came back to the room in the evening it was too early to go to Maria. Instead I did something odd. I cleaned the room.
I went into town and bought detergents and soaps and cloths; then I came back and scrubbed and scoured the floors and walls and windows. Every corner. Afterwards I felt better for a while, as if an
offensive mark somewhere had been erased.

But I couldn’t sit quietly and when I went out in the car it was still early, too early to go to Maria, and so for an hour or two I drove around the town. Empty streets, the dark sockets of the
lamps, the blank blind eyes of windows watching me. Then it was time and I headed out along the road.

When I got to the bluegum trees I turned off and stopped almost exactly where the white car had been parked a few nights ago, my headlamps angled away from the road. But they shone on dust and
bush and empty air; the shack was gone.

14

For a few moments it seemed possible that I was in the wrong place. But when I got out of the car the outline of the shack was visible: a square paler than the surrounding
soil, like the mark of a plaster on sunburned skin. A few loose planks and bits of plastic lay around.

Everything had happened here. On this little patch of sand. It had felt like a whole world, and now I saw it was just any piece of bush. In two weeks it would be covered again by weeds and
thorns and grass.

The dust I’d kicked up drifted like smoke in the headlamps. I walked away from the light, along the little footpath to the village. It was a distance of twenty or thirty steps, but I’d never
walked it before. As I got closer a dog barked at me; another took up the sound, and it was accompanied by this angry chorus that I made my entrance into the naked circle of earth at the heart of
the village. The little mud houses ringed me around. It was all dust and dung and the ash of old fires; it was what I knew it would be.

Nobody was around. No lights were burning and the only movement was the dogs, skulking closer. I stood there as if somebody was coming to meet me. But I had never been so alone.

I knew then that she could be anywhere. She could be five steps away from me, in one of those houses, or in any one of the countless little villages scattered in the bush. Or she could be under
the ground, in a shallow grave. For me, she had fallen off the edge of the world.

The anguish that rolled down then was like the first feeling ever to touch me: its rawness, its power, was almost like love.

The dogs were coming closer. I was an intruder. I didn’t come, like Laurence Waters, in the daytime, with medicine and good advice; I came in out of the dark with the snarling of skeletal dogs
for company. And there was nothing to be done except hurry back along the path to my car and drive back to town.

I drove at a wild speed. It was as if I was rushing to keep some assignation, but there was nowhere to get to, no destination at the end of the road.

Unless it was the hospital room, with Laurence sitting up in bed, writing something on a piece of paper.

He glanced up at me. ‘Hello,’ he said, sounding preoccupied. ‘I’m planning.’

‘Planning?’

‘My clinic. Never mind. Oh, wow, I almost forgot!’ He looked sharply up at me. ‘How is she doing?’

‘She’s doing all right,’ I said, turning my face away from him. He must’ve seen how I felt and thought he understood the reason, but he didn’t understand.

In the morning I went back to the village. I parked next to where the shack had been; I walked the little footpath again. And now there were people: children playing, a woman
shelling beans in a doorway, two old men deep in conversation. In the mud a fat pig lolled and the same dogs from last night started up out of the shade, barking.

I hoped to see a familiar face, the woman who brought food or water to Maria, somebody I knew. But no. And the man I did speak to, who was the only person I could find who spoke English, didn’t
know much about Maria. Yes, the shack had stood there. But now it was taken down. He thought the people had gone there somewhere, over there. He gestured at the blue hills in the distance.

Yes, yes, some of the older women sighed in agreement. They had gone over there.

Did they know Maria, I asked. Was any of them her friend?

But I could see in their puzzled faces that they hadn’t heard the name. It was as I’d thought: her real name was something different, something she hadn’t told me.

I didn’t have much hope, but I made a little speech. If any of them could find Maria, I said, if any of them sent her to me, I would pay a reward. I took my wallet out to show them.

‘Who are you?’ the young man, my translator, asked me.

‘My name is Frank Eloff. I’m a doctor. I work at the hospital in town.’

At this their baffled faces broke into smiles. There was a buzz of talk around me. The hospital! The clinic! And the memory of that recent event set loose a happy spirit amongst them, similar to
the new mood amongst the staff at the hospital.

I’d almost forgotten. But of course it had happened here. And I heard one of the old women, who couldn’t otherwise speak a word of English, say ‘doctor Laurence, doctor Laurence’ with a
toothless grin of pleasure.

When I got away from them, back to the hospital, the weight in me had altered shape a little. Yes, it was Maria I was looking for, but her absence had spilled over into other, adjoining areas.
For the first time the things I had done and said over the last few days began to look like a kind of madness. And the dark stranger in my head, who was so easy to blame for everything, seemed less
separate from me than before.