The Good Doctor (23 page)

It went on through the long, hot afternoon. Laurence was out somewhere and I lay, sweating on my bed, thinking. I felt my guilt towards Maria as a massive neglect and blindness. I was wretched.
And what I’d done, or failed to do, to her, was no different in the end from what I’d done here, closer to home. In the hospital. In this room.

When Laurence came in, it was fully dark. This was hours later, but I hadn’t moved from the bed. He put the light on and stared at me in amazement. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Why was the light off? Were you asleep?’

‘No, I was thinking about things.’

‘About what things?’

It was a huge effort for me to swing my legs over and sit up. Then nothing further would come.

Laurence stared at me. ‘What?’

All of it rose against my teeth, a pressure that couldn’t be released, and so I said nothing. In the silence I shook my head.

He smiled at me, his broad face gleaming like a badge. ‘You shouldn’t sit by yourself so much, Frank, it makes you depressed.’

‘Laurence...’

‘I haven’t got time now. I’ve got to shower quickly, then I’m going out with Jorge and Claudia for a drink. Want to come?’

‘No.’ He was closed to me. I wanted to talk quickly, to say as many words as possible in the hope that one of them would be the right one, the word to absolve me, but he was already moving away,
through the bathroom door. ‘Laurence.’

‘Ja?’ He stopped, looking back, then he shook his head. ‘Hey, relax, Frank, it doesn’t matter.’ He went through the door.

I sat on the bed, hearing the water splash and run. But it didn’t wash anything away.

15

I went to look for her. Or so I told myself, though any noble motives fell quickly away. This particular memory is grainy and formless as a dream. I’m not even sure whether it
was that night, or on one of the nights that followed. But I see myself sitting on the bed, with Laurence still washing himself next door in the bathroom, while my misery plucked me in different
directions, until a sudden clearness came to me.

I see myself driving out of town. But that is a false image, made from all the other nights I drove that road. In fact, I walked. The reason is logical and obvious: a car parked anywhere along
that stretch of road would have drawn undue attention to itself. So I hurried along the gravel verge in the still, warm air, with the forest on both sides and the lights of the town disappearing
quickly behind me.

Real memory only begins when I came to the turn-off on the left. I had passed it a few hundred times: the overgrown dirt track that led through the bush to the old army camp. Though I slowed,
almost as a ritual, every time I came to the place in the road from where that camp was visible, I had never once gone there. I don’t know why. I told myself it was a pointless spot to visit –
abandoned and ugly, why bother? But the real reason was deep in me, and I felt it now, as I started down the track, as a line of fear that I was crossing for the first time.

I wasn’t thinking about Maria any more. I wasn’t thinking about very much at all. My attention, heightened and whetted by alarm, was on the darkness pressing in from all sides. The trees felt
observant and old. Grass was growing through the compacted ground underfoot. The night was like a lens in which my every movement was magnified for the attention of some enormous eye. The track
dipped down to a shallow stream burbling over stones, then climbed towards a ridge. The top of the ridge was a jumble of trees, till at a certain angle the leaves gave way to the outer fence of the
camp. I could see a delicate tracery of wire, repeated and exact, against the sky. Near by was a tall pole that used to support a floodlight. But now the pole leaned companionably against a tree,
its top weighted down with creepers.

I could see the main gate. If there was a sentry anywhere he would be here. I moved to the right, up a steep slope, towards the top of the ridge. This way I would avoid the obvious dangers, but
as I slid and stumbled on stones, with branches grazing my face and hands, I felt how ill-equipped I was for this role of macho hero in the dark. I saw my true self, soft and overweight, in the
light and warmth of Mama’s place, drinking whisky and talking to Laurence, and the distance between that vision and me was the rupture that had torn through the middle of my life. Who was I, what
was I doing here? A strangled sob of exertion came out of me as I clawed over the top of the ridge at last, and found myself just outside the wire, on the edge.

All that was left of the camp was three or four tents, sagging and shapeless, made of shadow more than form. Between them was open ground, with what looked like pieces of disused machinery. But
no movement, no human figures anywhere. I don’t know what I expected – soldiers around a big fire, the white car parked near by. Maria tied to a tree with a gag on her mouth. Though the inky
stillness was perhaps more menacing. For a long time I couldn’t move, pinioned in the cross-hairs of the silence, while my sweat dried to a cold second skin.

I had to go in. The big circle of dead ground was pulling at me. But it was like moving through deep water to force my legs to work. Numbness muffled me, and it was in a slow-motion parody of
stealth that I crept down the fence to a place where it had collapsed. And stepped through. Then I stood still again, listening. But the only sound was the cacophony of my own heart and breath.

I relaxed a little then. If something was going to happen, it would probably have happened by now. The truth of this place was just absence and desertion. And I moved on, feeling lighter and
easier, past one tent, and another, into the empty arena of gravel.

A little breeze had started. The few strands of grass quivered. The nearest tent gave off a sighing sound. But I wasn’t frightened now; these were the normal vibrations of the forest at
night.

And then something moved. Right in front of me, when I’d stopped looking for it. I didn’t see it, I sensed it: a sudden little burst, a flexing of the dark. It had a will and life of its own.
And in a second all my terror was back. Everything I most feared and dreaded, all the phantoms of the mind, had drawn together into a knot – a presence that had risen out of the dark.

I fell backwards on to the ground, but I was already up and outrunning thought before I could think it.

The mirror showed an ashen, frightened man to me. My clothes were filthy, covered in burrs and thorns. My skin was silty with dust and on my forehead a cut gleamed
brightly.

I stood under the shower for a long time. The hot water calmed me and afterwards, as I dried myself and dressed in clean clothes, it was like taking on the normal world again. And as my mind
evened out, it began to question what it had seen. Nothing, really – a sudden flurry in the dark. It could have been a buck or some other night animal, startled by my unexpected approach. Or maybe
just a burst of wind.

These rational possibilities calmed me more. But underneath them, down at the core, the irrational terror remained. If I put my memory to it, I could relive that primitive instant.

I left the light on until I fell asleep. But Laurence was there when I woke up and for the first time his clothes, strewn around untidily on the floor, were a comforting sight to me. And the
daylight, so steady and warm, made the whole expedition feel insane. None of it was substantial any more and the only tangible evidence was that sore place on my forehead.

‘Where did you get that cut?’ Laurence said when he woke up a bit later in the day.

‘I bumped it on the medicine cabinet.’

‘Bad one,’ he said, and that was all.

If it was true, I had just changed the truth. A few words, and the whole thing went away.

But I was troubled the whole day. I was on duty and the vacant corridors were like a screen on which my mind replayed its images. No patients came in that day. Not one. And Tehogo didn’t turn up
for duty either. I was alone, encircled by hours and hours of time. When evening came I was weary, tired out by boredom, and for once it was easy to fall asleep.

In the morning the cut on my forehead had formed a scab. It was starting to heal. And when I went back on duty, I could work up some anger that Tehogo still wasn’t there. I went looking for him
this time, but his room was locked again and my knocking had a hollow sound to it.

He wasn’t there the next day either. Or the next. And soon everybody knew it as an established fact: Tehogo had gone.

At the next staff meeting I tried to bring it up. What was the plan, I wanted to know, with Tehogo? Was he going to be replaced? Would we have to struggle on without
assistance?

Dr Ngema still wasn’t too interested. ‘Um, well, for the time being, yes,’ she said. ‘He may still come back.’

‘Come back?’

‘He’s been unreliable lately. We all know that. He might’ve just gone off by himself for a while.’

‘And you’d take him back after that?’

‘Well, yes. I would. Otherwise... what? You want me to advertise his post? We’d never get a trained nurse.’

‘Tehogo never qualified anyway.’

‘Yes, but he knew his job. A new person would have to learn everything from scratch. And it’s not as if there’s a lot to be done. We’re managing.’

There was a note of irritation in her voice. Dr Ngema and I had never spoken like this to each other before, certainly not in public. I looked around at the other doctors, but they dropped their
eyes. This wasn’t a fight that anyone else felt strongly for.

‘Just on principle,’ I said, trying one last time. ‘Why would you take him back after he’s behaved like this? I mean, he’s let us all down.’

‘He has,’ she agreed, then looked directly at me. ‘But he’s been having a hard time lately, Frank. You know that.’

You know that.
The accusation silenced me, and I let the whole thing drop. It felt to me that everybody knew why I was trying to push the point: because now, at long last, in the most
offhand of ways, Tehogo’s room had become available.

It wasn’t mentioned again. And in truth, I didn’t think much about Tehogo’s room any more. It had become almost irrelevant, a side issue. There were only a few months more before Laurence’s year
of community service was done, and then he would be gone again, and I would be left. Alone.

Then there was another robbery in town. This time it was the service station at the top of the main street. It was the same scenario as before: the gang of masked men in a
white car, driving off into the dark.

The story was everywhere before the next day had started. But now theories and conjectures had attached themselves. The most compelling one was that the robbers were, in fact, some of the
soldiers who were stationed in town. Somebody had talked to somebody who knew one of them who had told him... By midday this particular version had acquired the solidity of fact.

There had been a change of attitude lately towards the soldiers. When they first arrived their presence seemed like a sign of renewed life for the town. But as time went by, they looked less
like saviours and more like a bunch of loud and arrogant and idle young men. People resented them. There had been a few altercations and incidents with local shopkeepers, and there was the general
roughness in Mama’s place at night. So it was perhaps inevitable that fear would turn inside-out and direct blame on them.

But I knew that it wasn’t the soldiers. And now my own fear was compelling me to action. I went down to Mama’s place on the night following the second robbery. That wasn’t unusual, I was
frequently there, but I confess that I went with an intention that was already half-formed.

I don’t know what would have happened if there hadn’t been an opportunity, a moment. Maybe I wanted the usual chaos and confusion, so that I could continue to dither on the edge of doing
something. But the opportunity did come. When I first arrived there was no sign of Colonel Moller. A few of the soldiers were around, but that was all. Then, after a few hours and drinks had
passed, and the place was a lot fuller than earlier, a break in the crowd showed his long figure to me.

He was sitting in a chair close to the pool table, watching a game. His back was to me. I could see his neck and the straight line of his haircut. He wasn’t in uniform tonight. He was wearing
jeans and a blue T-shirt, with some kind of smiling cartoon face on the back. I watched the blond hairs on his arm change colour in the light as he lifted his drink and set it down, lifted it and
set it down. Otherwise he didn’t move.

It was a while before I talked to him. I was trying to work up the courage. There was a perverse comfort in being so close to him, close enough to study the sunburn on his ears, while he seemed
unaware of me. But then the crowd started to thin out again and I thought he might move away and the moment would be lost.

I went up close and spoke into his ear. ‘I know something,’ I said.

He turned quickly to look at me. ‘What was that?’

‘If you want to find what you’re looking for,’ I told him, ‘go to the old army camp outside town.’

Then I left, walking fast. It was easy, in that crowd, to disappear from view in a moment. And that was what I wanted: a rapid exit, after a mysterious pronouncement.

I thought he wouldn’t know me. Why would he, in a bar full of colourful characters and transients? I thought of myself as invisible, nondescript. But as I turned in through the hospital gates a
pair of headlamps swung in behind me and his jeep slewed to a stop near by.

Now I was embarrassed and afraid. This was the conversation I didn’t want, in the last place I would have chosen. I got out of my car and strode up to him, trying to recover some lost power
through confrontation.

But he only seemed amused. He didn’t climb down from his seat, but sat swaggeringly above me, a faint smile on his lips.

‘What did you say to me, Doctor? I didn’t quite catch it.’

‘How do you know who I am?’

‘I’ve seen you around. Not a lot of whiteys in this place. I asked about you.’

I looked up at him, but I couldn’t hold his stare and dropped my eyes. It was like being transported backwards, to that lost little camp on the border. I was instantly afraid of him, as if all
the intervening years hadn’t happened. He was older and baggier than before; some of the clean, hard lines were blurred. But it was something else in him, something deeper than his face, that
scared me. He was drawn in on a hard, tiny centre of himself, in the way of people who live in devotion to a single idea. In a monk this can be beautiful, but in him it was not.