The Good Doctor (8 page)

I put my arms around her to comfort her, while she sobbed like a little child. I knew, I could feel, where this was coming from. Something in this country had gone too far, something had
snapped. It was like a fury so strong that it had come loose from its moorings. I could only hold her to console her, but then consolation turned to something else. It was very powerful – lust
fuelled by grief. We were like animals that first night. But it went on for weeks, meeting each other in deserted wards or the corners of dark passages. It was in the long empty time after I’d
stopped seeing Maria, and it filled up a lack for me. I had nothing to lose. But she had a lot to lose, and the danger of what we were doing was crazy. We could be caught at any time. At least we
never met in my room, because it was only one wall away from her husband.

But I think he knew. Since that time there had always been an uneasy tension between us, which may of course have been merely my guilt. It was only lately, now that Laurence was around, that
some of this tension had eased.

‘But they are leaving,’ I told him now. ‘That’s definite. It’s just a matter of when.’

‘I don’t think so. They’re a lovely, committed couple.’

‘Committed to what?’

‘Well, you know. The country. The future. All that.’

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘They don’t tell anyone, but it’s an open secret. Everyone knows it.’

‘Jorge told me Cuba is a hole.’

‘Ja,
all right,’ I said. ‘It’s complicated. Jorge doesn’t want to go back, but she does. They fight about it all the time.’

‘You assume that she’ll win.’

‘She will win.’

‘Bullshit,’ he said. ‘Anyway, they don’t fight.’

‘Haven’t you heard them through the wall?’

‘No. Definitely not.’

‘Anyway,’ I said irritably, ‘it’s not the Santanders’ room you’ll be moving to. It’s Tehogo’s room.’

‘Tehogo’s room?’

I don’t know where this came from. I just suddenly said it, but the minute the words were out they took on the vehemence of truth.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Tehogo’s room. He’s not supposed to be there in any case. He’ll be moving out soon.’

‘Where’s he going to?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

Tehogo’s room – the last one in our corridor, on the left – was meant to be occupied by a doctor. But Tehogo wasn’t a doctor. He was a nurse. Strictly speaking, in terms of qualifications, he
wasn’t even that. But he did the work at the hospital that a nurse was supposed to do.

He had been here longer than me. When I arrived he was already installed in the room. How he had come to be there was never fully explained to me, but it was all tied up with troubles in the
homeland from years before. What was certain was that his family – mother and father, brother and uncle – had been killed in one or another act of political violence. It seemed there was some kind
of tie by marriage to the Brigadier himself, and the killings were meant as revenge.

All that was murky. The only clear element to emerge was Tehogo himself, orphaned and alone, with nowhere to go. At that time he was working at the hospital as an enrolled nurse, but he kept
failing his exams; he was kept on for want of any other candidates. He’d been living out, staying with his family and coming in each day to work. It was only because he was at the hospital that
he’d escaped being murdered himself. But now he couldn’t go back to his home.

Dr Ngema gave him the room. It seems it was meant as an interim measure, just until he found his feet again. But he had stayed. The other nursing staff had gone and he’d gradually taken over
their work, till now he was the only person left who could or would do the countless little petty labours involved – being a porter, washing and feeding patients, cleaning floors, taking messages.
He was, if not on duty, at least on permanent call, so it made sense for him to be living there, in the grounds. But there may have been more to it than that. This part was also hearsay and rumour,
but there was a story that the Brigadier had made a personal appeal to Dr Ngema to allow his young relative to stay.

This was told to me by the other white doctor who’d worked here until a few years ago. He was bitter and burnt-out, and I didn’t attach too much importance to his gossip. But it was obvious that
Dr Ngema had an interest in Tehogo that went deeper than the professional side of things. She was solicitous and concerned. At staff meetings she went out of her way to draw him into discussions,
she called him into her office for personal chats, and once she’d asked me if I would keep an eye on him.

I tried to do what she asked. But it was hard to get near to Tehogo. He was sullen and sour, continually drawn in on some dark core in himself. He seemed to have no friends, except for one young
man from outside the hospital who was frequently hanging around. I tried not to blame him; of course he must be embattled with the terrible loss of his family. But the truth was that he didn’t look
like much of a victim. He was young and good-looking, and he was always dressed in natty new clothes. He had an earring in one ear and a silver chain around his neck. There was money coming to him
from somewhere, but this was never mentioned by anybody. We had to treat him as poor Tehogo, dispossessed and damaged, and it was curious how powerful his powerlessness could be. He wouldn’t talk,
except in grudging syllables, and even those were always given in reply to something he’d been asked. He never showed any interest in my life, and so it was difficult to be interested in his. For a
long time now he had been a silent presence at the dark end of the passage, or sitting at the edge of staff meetings, saying nothing. I hardly noticed him.

But now Laurence Waters had come, and I had to notice Tehogo. I noticed him because he was in the doctor’s room where Laurence should be. But what I’d said to Laurence was untrue: Tehogo wasn’t
moving anywhere. There was no space and nowhere for him to go.

‘Oh. Well,’ Laurence said. ‘He’s a strange person, Tehogo. I try to talk to him, but he’s very...’

‘I know what you mean.’

After a pause he said forlornly, ‘I like sharing with you, Frank.’

‘Do you?’ I felt bad now, for my irritation as well as the lie. ‘Maybe it won’t happen.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘It’s possible,’ I said. ‘It’s possible we’ll all just stay where we are.’

6

Laurence couldn’t sit still in one place for very long. He had a restless, angular energy that burned him up. If he wasn’t pacing and smoking, he was stalking around the
grounds, looking at things, asking questions. Why are the walls painted pink? Why is the food so bad? Why hasn’t all this wasted space been used? Why, why, why – there was something childlike about
it. But he also had an adult resourcefulness that wanted things to be different.

One afternoon I came back to the room to find him struggling with the door at the end of the passage.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Come and give me a hand.’

He was trying to put a chain and padlock around the handle of the door. There was no bolt in the wall, so he had to loop one end around a metal bracket for a fire extinguisher, which had either
been stolen or had never been supplied.

‘It would be much easier just to get a key for the door,’ I told him.

‘There isn’t one. I’ve been looking. Dr Ngema let me search through all the spares.’

‘What do you want to lock it for anyway?’

He blinked in surprise. ‘You should know. You saw what’s going on in there.’

I had to think about it before I realized that he was talking about all the stripping and stealing that had taken place in the deserted wing.

‘But that’s old. And what difference does it make anyway?’

‘What difference?’ He smiled uncertainly. ‘Are you being serious? It shouldn’t happen.’

‘Laurence, Laurence.’

‘What?’

I helped him fasten the chain around the wall bracket and lock it. But you could see at a glance that the padlock was cheap and weak. You could break it with a blow.

That was the sort of thing he did. On one of the days that followed I found him cutting the grass in the open plot between our bedroom and the main wing. In all the years I’d been there nobody
had ever touched that grass. There was no mower, so he’d got hold of an old rusty scythe from somewhere. He was red in the face and sweating, and the work was slow. On the back step of the
recreation room, Themba and Julius, the kitchen staff, were watching him with baffled amusement.

‘Your friend is crazy,’ Julius said to me.

‘Well, it’ll look better afterwards,’ I said.

I supposed that was the point. And when the brown heaps of dense, dead grass had been carried off behind the kitchen to the new compost heap that Laurence had started there, the ground between
the two buildings was bare and clean. It did look good.

But Laurence only frowned at it and stood, panting.

‘What’s the matter? That’s a big job you did.’

‘Yes. I know.’

‘Aren’t you satisfied with yourself?’

‘Yes, I am,’ he said. ‘I am.’

But he didn’t look satisfied to me.

And the next day he was up on the roof, pulling out the weeds and grass that were growing there. The sun was hot and in the middle of the day his tall figure waxed and waned in laborious
isolation. I took him a bottle of water and stood up there with him while he drank it.

‘Nobody’s going to thank you for this,’ I said.

‘Thank me? How do you mean?’

‘I don’t understand why you’re bothering.’

‘The roof should be clean.’

‘Maybe. But it makes no difference. And the stuff will only grow back.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said stubbornly. ‘It looks better when it’s done.’ And the roof did look clean afterwards, like the ground he’d cleared down below. From where we were standing we had a
view out over the town and the rolling hills near by, and the high expansiveness made me feel satisfied and complete, as if I too had been working the whole day.

But of course I was right: the weeds and the grass did grow back, and as the slow green millimetres accumulated nobody said a word. And nobody cut them down. Laurence’s attention had moved on to
a new project somewhere else. And when I saw, a month or two later, that somebody had broken the cheap lock on the chain that held the door at the end of the passage, I said nothing about that
either.

I had my own preoccupations. Not all of my life was centred on Laurence or the hospital: I had other pursuits, further afield, to distract me. I had gone back to visiting Maria at night. Not
every night, not in the same way as before. But once or twice a week a restless impulse came over me and I headed for my car.

The sex was different now. Something hard and brutal and hungry had come into it. Maybe it was only sex now – the romance of it had gone. I was rough with her. Not violent, but with an
inclination towards it that threw everything off balance. I was always on top, I held her down. And there was an answering passivity, an acquiescence, in her. But we didn’t really touch each other.
We didn’t even try to talk. It was as if I was looking for something I couldn’t get to; the closest I could come was by hammering, hammering, on this heavy wooden door.

I paid her every time now. And that’s what it was: a payment. Our meetings were transactions, the limits of which were practical. When we did talk it was about arrangements. A couple of times
she warned me not to come on particular nights. I accepted these restrictions without letting them conjure any personal feelings. The other man didn’t exist, except as a prohibition on my time, or
as a symbol in the form of a white car outside the shack.

Only once did the distance close up; she said, ‘Where is that man – your friend?’

I took a moment to understand. ‘Laurence? He’s not my friend.’

‘No?’

‘No. Well, maybe he is.’ I watched her pulling her dress over her head, slipping her arms into the broken sleeves. ‘Why do you want to know about him?’

She gestured.

‘His face...?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about his face?’

She was about to answer, but then shook her head. A glance went between us and then it was back: the enormous distance, the wall. ‘You come Friday?’ she said.

So he was here too, a manic disconcerting figure, flickering for an instant on the wooden side of the shack. It was hard to imagine that my life had been entirely free of Laurence Waters just
two months before.

I didn’t tell him about Maria, I don’t know why. Everything had been set in that first alarming instant when he asked me, ‘Have you slept with that woman?’ My answer was instantaneous and a lie;
there was no strategy behind it. My instinct saw his intuition as a threat; I lied to defend myself. And then I had to go on lying.

I lied even though he knew exactly where I was going. The fact that he never asked made it clear that he knew. He watched me shower and change my clothes and drive off into the dark without
saying anything to me. Sometimes he was still awake when I got back. The others in the hospital had seen my late comings and goings for a long time too, and none of them said anything either. But
they could only guess; he knew.

So that even this little part of my life – paid for with cash, to keep it separate from the rest – became connected to Laurence. As the weeks went past and we became more accustomed – or
resigned – to each other, my mind kept going back to that question he’d asked when he first arrived.
When was the moment when you knew that you wanted to be a doctor?
I watched Laurence when
he attended to the one or two patients who drifted through. It didn’t matter how old or young they were, how arbitrary or critical their condition; he was the same with every one of them: serious,
concerned, committed. They all seemed to matter to him.

This bothered me. It bothered me because, really, I didn’t care too much. I don’t mean that I didn’t try. I gave my detached, professional best to each of them, but when nothing more was
possible I didn’t think about it again. And Laurence’s involvement and effort showed up a lack in me.