The Good Doctor (2 page)

‘Oh. Yes. Okay.’ But he still didn’t put down his bag.

I’d only heard two weeks before that I would have to share a room. Dr Ngema had called me in. I wasn’t happy, but I didn’t refuse. And in the days that followed I came around, in spite of
myself, to the idea of sharing. It might not be so bad. We might get on well, it might be good to have company, my life here could be pleasantly different. So in a way I started looking forward
with curiosity to this change. And before he arrived I did a few things to make him welcome. I put the new bed under the window and made it up with fresh linen. I cleared a few shelves in the
cupboard. I swept and cleaned, which is something I don’t do very often.

But now that he was standing here I could see, through his eyes, how invisible that effort was. The room was ugly and bare. And Laurence Waters didn’t look to me like the person I’d pictured in
my head. I don’t know what I’d imagined, but it wasn’t this bland, biscuit-coloured young man, almost a boy still, who was at last putting his suitcase down.

He took his glasses off and rubbed them on his sleeve. He put them on again and said wearily, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘What?’

‘This whole place.’

‘The hospital?’

‘Not just the hospital. I mean...’ He waved a hand to indicate the world out there. He meant the town outside the hospital walls.

‘You asked to come here.’

‘But I didn’t know that it would be like this. Why?’ he said with sudden intensity. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘We can talk about it later. But I’m on duty now, I have to go back to the office.’

‘I must see Dr Ngema,’ he said abruptly. ‘She’s expecting me.’

‘Don’t worry about that now. You can do it in the morning. No hurry.’

‘What should I do now?’

‘Whatever you like. Unpack, settle in. Or come and sit with me. I’ll be finished in a couple of hours.’

I left him alone and went back. He was shocked and depressed. I understood that; I’d felt it myself when I first arrived. You came expecting one thing and were met by something else
completely.

You came expecting a busy modern hospital – rural maybe, and small, but full of activity – in a town where things were happening. This was the capital of what used to be one of the homelands, so
whatever the morality of the politics that gave rise to it, you expected a place full of administration and movement, people coming and going. And when you’d turned off the main route to the border
and were coming in on the one minor road that led here, it might still look – when you saw the place from a distance – like what you’d expected. There was the main street, leading to the centre
where the fountain and the statue stood, the shop-fronts and pavements and streetlights, and all the buildings beyond. It looked neat and calibrated and exact. Not a bad place to be.

And then you arrived and you saw. Maybe the first clue was a disturbing detail; a crack that ran through an otherwise pristine wall, or a set of broken windows in an office you passed. Or the
fact that the fountain was dry and full of old sand at the bottom. And you slowed down, looking around you with vague anxiety, and suddenly it all came into clear focus. The weeds in the joints of
the pavements and bricks, the grass growing at places in the street, the fused lamps and the empty shops behind their blank glass fronts and the mildew and damp and blistered paint and the marks of
rain on every surface and the slow tumbling down of solid structures, sometimes grain by grain, sometimes in pieces. And you were not sure any more of where you were.

And there were no people. That was the last thing you noticed, though you realized then that it was the first thing to give you that uneasy hollow feeling: the place was deserted. There was,
yes, a car cruising slowly down a back road, an official uniform or two ambling along a pavement, and maybe a figure slouching on a footpath through an overgrown plot of land, but mostly the space
was empty. Uninhabited. No human chaos, no movement.

A ghost town.

‘It’s like something terrible happened here,’ Laurence said. ‘That’s how it feels.’

‘Ja,
but the opposite is true. Nothing has ever happened here. Nothing ever will. That’s the problem.’

‘But then how...?’

‘How what?’

‘Nothing. Just how.’

He meant,
how did it come to be here at all?
And that was the real question. This was not a town that had sprung up naturally for the normal human reasons – a river in a dry area, say, or
a discovery of gold, some kind of historical event. It was a town that had been conceived and planned on paper, by evil bureaucrats in a city far away, who had probably never even been here. Here
is our homeland, they said, tracing an outline on a map, now where should its capital be? Why not here, in the middle? They made an ‘X’ with a red pen and all felt very satisfied with themselves,
then sent for the state architects to draw up plans.

So the bewilderment that Laurence Waters felt wasn’t unusual. I’d been through it myself. And so I knew that the feeling would pass. In a week or two the bewilderment would give way to something
else: frustration maybe, or resentment, anger. And then that would turn into resignation. And after a couple of months Laurence would be suffering through his sentence here, like the rest of us, or
else plotting a way to get out.

‘But where are they all?’ he said, talking more to the ceiling than to me.

‘Who?’

‘The people.’

‘Out there,’ I said. ‘Where they live.’

This was hours later in my room – our room – that night. I had just put out the light and was lying there, trying to sleep, when his voice came out of the dark.

‘But why do they live out there? Why aren’t they here?’

‘What’s there for them here?’ I said.

‘Everything. I saw the countryside when I was driving. There’s nothing out there. No hotels, shops, restaurants, cinemas... Nothing.’

‘They don’t need all that.’

‘What about the hospital? Don’t they need that?’

I sat up on one elbow. He was smoking a cigarette and I could see the red glow rising and falling. He was on his back, looking up.

‘Laurence,’ I said. ‘Understand one thing. This isn’t a real hospital. It’s a joke. When you were driving here, do you remember the last town you passed, an hour back? That’s where the real
hospital is. That’s where people go when they’re sick. They don’t come here. There’s nothing here. You’re in the wrong place.’

‘I don’t believe that.’

‘You’d better believe it.’

The red coal hung still for a moment, then rose and fell, rose and fell. ‘But people get injured, people get sick. Don’t they need help?’

‘What do you think this place means to them? It’s where the army came from. It’s where their puppet dictator lived. They hate this place.’

‘You mean politics,’ he said. ‘But that’s all past now. It doesn’t matter any more.’

‘The past has only just happened. It’s not past yet.’

‘I don’t care about that. I’m a doctor.’

I lay and watched him for a while. After a few minutes he stubbed out the cigarette on the windowsill and threw the butt out of the window. Then he said one or two words I couldn’t hear, made a
gesture with his hands and sighed and went to sleep. It was almost instantaneous. He went limp and I could hear the regular sound of his breathing.

But I couldn’t sleep. It had been years and years since I’d had to spend a night in the same room with anybody else. And I remembered then – almost incongruously, because he was nothing to me –
how there had been a time, long before, when the idea of having somebody sleeping close to me in the dark was a consolation and comfort. I couldn’t think of anything better. And now this other
breathing body made me tense and watchful and somehow angry, so that it took hours before I was tired enough to close my eyes.

2

For a long time now there had only been the seven of us: Tehogo and the kitchen staff, Dr Ngema, the Santanders and me. Once upon a time it was different. There had been an
Indian woman doctor when I first arrived, but she was long gone, and a white man from Cape Town who’d got married later and emigrated. There had been four or five nurses too, but they’d been
retrenched or transferred, all except Tehogo. There were too many of us to deal with the tiny trickle of human need. So when somebody went away they were never replaced, the empty space they left
behind immediately sandbagged and fortified as a bastion against final collapse.

So Laurence’s arrival was a mysterious event. It made no sense. When Dr Ngema told me there was a young doctor coming to do a year of community service, I thought at first that she was making a
joke. I had heard about the community service – it was a new government scheme, aimed at staffing and servicing all the hospitals in the country. But we seemed too obscure to qualify.

‘Why?’ I said. ‘We don’t need anybody else.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I didn’t request anybody. He asked to come here.’

‘He asked? But why?’

‘I don’t know.’ She was looking in perplexity at a letter that had been faxed to her. ‘We don’t have a choice, Frank. We have to find a place for him.’

‘Well, all right,’ I said, shrugging. ‘It doesn’t affect me.’

Dr Ngema looked up and sighed. ‘It does affect you, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I have to put him into the room with you.’

‘What?’

Nothing like this had ever happened before. She saw the dismay in my face.

‘It won’t be for long, Frank. When the Santanders go I’ll put him in there.’

‘But... we have a whole passage full of empty rooms. Why can’t he go into one of those?’

‘Because there’s no furniture in those rooms. The only thing I can provide is a bed. But what about tables, chairs . . .? He’s got to sit somewhere. Please, Frank. I know it’s hard. But somebody
has to compromise.’

‘But why me?’

‘Who else, Frank?’

This wasn’t a simple question. But there was one other room, down at the end of the passage, that was under dispute.

‘Tehogo,’ I said.

‘Frank. You know that’s not possible.’

‘Why not?’

She shifted uncomfortably in her chair and her voice rose a note or two in protest. ‘Frank. Frank. What can I do? Please. I will sort something out, I promise you. But I can’t just evict
him.’

‘You don’t have to evict him. Why can’t they share?’

‘Because... Tehogo isn’t a doctor, you are. It makes sense for two doctors to share.’

Behind the words were other words, not spoken. It wasn’t just that Laurence Waters and I were doctors; it was that we were two white men, and we belonged in a room together.

When the alarm woke me in the morning he was already up and dressed, sitting on the edge of his bed, smoking a cigarette.

‘I want to meet Dr Ngema,’ he said immediately.

‘You can. But you’ll have to wait a bit.’

‘I could go over to her office. You don’t have to take me. I could go on my own.’

‘It’s six in the morning, she isn’t there yet. Relax, goddamn it, calm down. Have a shower or something.’

‘I’ve already had one.’

When I went into the bathroom, the floor was swimming with water and he’d slung his damp towel over the door. There were bristles and shaving foam in the basin. My mood dropped as I cleaned up
behind him, and it dropped even more when I came out again into the blue haze of his cigarette smoke. He was walking around aimlessly, puffing and thinking. When I coughed he stubbed the cigarette
out on the windowsill, just as he’d done last night, and threw it away.

‘You can’t keep doing that. You’re making burn marks everywhere.’

‘There isn’t an ashtray. I looked.’

‘I don’t smoke. You’ll have to buy one.’

‘It’s a dirty habit, I know, I must give up.’ He cast around him in a feverish way, then subsided on to the bed. ‘Are you ready to go?’

‘I have to get dressed, Laurence. Why are you in such a hurry? There’s nothing to rush for.’

‘Really?’

I dressed slowly, watching him. His attention settled on me only every few seconds, then flitted off to some arbitrary detail, sometimes outside the window. He seemed pent-up and distracted for
no reason that I could see. It was a quality I would come to know well in him, but on that first day it was peculiar and disturbing.

Finally I was ready. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘We can go. But, Laurence... your white coat. We don’t really wear them here.’

He hesitated for a second, but he didn’t take it off. I locked up and we went along the footpath under the heavy leaves, the light getting stronger all around. I could feel him edging towards
the main block, to the office and officialdom, but I took him on a side path, to where we had breakfast. The dining room was in a third building of the hospital, along with the kitchen and the
quarters for the cooking and cleaning staff, which were almost deserted by now. It was a long hall, half of which was used as a recreation room, the other half taken up by a big rectangular table,
covered with a dirty cloth.

I introduced Laurence to the Santanders, Jorge and Claudia; they looked at him in startled surprise.

‘You are... new?’ Jorge said.

‘Yes, community service. One year.’

‘Excuse,’ Claudia said, ‘what service you say?’

‘It’s a government plan,’ I said. ‘All new doctors have to do it. After they’ve qualified.’

‘Ah. Ah.’ But they looked at him in bemusement. They had seen a few people leave this place, but he was the first one to arrive.

A silence fell. There was always an awkwardness around me and the Santanders, but it was deepened today by Laurence, who fidgeted his way through breakfast, pushing his toast around the plate,
not really eating. He made a few desultory attempts at conversation and then none of us talked any more; there was only the scraping of metal spoons on plates and laughter from the kitchen next
door, before they excused themselves and left.

Then it was just him and me, staring at the other half of the long room, with its clutter of ping-pong table and black-and-white television and old magazines and boxes of games.

I think it had started to dawn on him what sort of a place this was. There was no trace left of the manic urgency from the bedroom. When he’d finished eating he lit another cigarette, but he
hardly puffed at it, just sat gazing into the distance while the smoke unravelled from his fingers.