The Good Doctor (6 page)

‘I suppose it’s not what you expected,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘You don’t have to stay. If you asked for a transfer, I’m sure Dr Ngema —’

‘Oh,’ he said, surprised. ‘But I want to stay.’

I looked at him. With my new eyes I saw him properly for the first time. He was long and tall and thin. Under a fringe of blond hair, his face was flat and open. It was a plain face, ordinary,
except for the quality I had seen in the first glance, laid over it like a second skin. This quality made his face somehow remarkable, but I couldn’t give it a name.

‘Why did you come here?’ I said.

‘But you know why.’

‘I mean, why here? You asked to come to this hospital. You specially requested it. Why?’

He took his spectacles off and rubbed them on his sleeve. His grey eyes blinked dimly as he looked out of the window. ‘I heard it was a tiny place,’ he said. ‘I heard there were a lot of
problems.’

‘I don’t understand. Surely those are logical reasons not to be here. Why would you want to do this to yourself?’

He didn’t want to get into that. He put on his glasses and pointed away, out of the window, above the trees, to the highest hill at the edge of town. ‘Look! What’s that?’

‘That used to be the Brigadier’s house.’

‘Who’s the Brigadier?’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Ja.
Should I know? Did he do something famous?’

‘He overthrew the homeland government in a military coup.’

But the interest had switched off in his face; he was looking around him, frowning again.

‘All this,’ he said. ‘Will it just go to waste? What’s being done with it? Will it just stand here?’

‘It’ll be picked to pieces, if you ask me. It’s being stripped and stolen. Look. You can see.’

‘But that’s terrible. Who’s doing it?’

I shrugged. ‘Anybody can get in. The door’s not locked.’

It didn’t seem that important to me, but he was transfixed by a real dismay. I could see him noticing all the bare, exposed places in the filthy passage: the missing skirting boards, the
ripped-out light fittings, the raw dangling wires. He shook his head. ‘What for? Where does it go?’

‘There are lots of poor people out there. They can use anything.’

‘But it’s for them. The hospital. It’s for them!’

‘You go and tell them that.’

I thought he might burst into tears. His expression was locked on a quandary that he just couldn’t resolve. I put a hand on his shoulder and said: ‘Come on, let’s get out of here. It’s too
depressing.’

‘Why doesn’t anybody do something?’

‘But what should they do?’

We walked back through the strange mausoleum, leaving the prints of our feet in the dust. Pigeons flurried up at our approach. Outside, blinking in the hot sun, I said, ‘That’s it. That’s the
hospital.’

‘There’s nothing more?’

‘Well, what about taking a drive? We could have a look at the town.’

He had a tiny blue Volkswagen Beetle, older and more beaten up than my car. And he didn’t look out of place behind the wheel. Something came over him that was almost careless,
so that he didn’t resemble any more the earnest young doctor in a white coat. ‘Where to, Frank?’ he said. ‘You tell me where to go.’

We went slowly down the main street, which was the one tarred road in town, past empty shops with empty shelves. Here and there a viable business did function: the small supermarket stood idle
and almost deserted in the heat, a single bored cashier at a till. The security guard outside, fanning himself in slow motion with his cap, watched the car go past like a distant event on
television. At the main intersection, presiding over the cracked and crumbling fountain and its oval of brown lawn, the statue held its resolute pose, one hand on a hip and the other pointing
forward, into the future or the bushveld. The legs were turning green.

‘That’s the Brigadier again, if you’re interested.’

‘Where?’

‘I’m talking about the statue.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘I can tell you a story about that.’

But again the interest had faded in his face: the story of the statue belonged to a world he didn’t live in. So I didn’t tell him how, not long after I arrived in the town, I had gone for a walk
into the countryside near by. I was full of directionless fury in those days, which took me on long, demented forays into the bush, carrying a backpack and a tent. I rarely knew where I was going
and, beating my way through an overgrown ravine near the north edge of town one day, I had come upon a huge metal object half swallowed in the sand. It might have fallen from the sky. It was an old
bust the size of a car, and only after I had cleared away a mess of vines and creepers did I recognize the face of the previous chief minister of the homeland. In this bronze version of himself he
was wearing an expression of penetrating piety. That was before the military coup and the twenty-four charges of corruption and fraud that sent him running for his life.

It was only a few days afterwards that I realized the bust had used to stand on the plinth at the main intersection where the Brigadier’s statue was now. I could imagine the mob of cheering
soldiers tearing it down with axes and chains and crowbars. I don’t know how they got it out there, into the middle of the gorge, but it resembled nothing so much as a severed iron head, the body
of which must be lying somewhere close by. I didn’t go back there again.

I showed Laurence the absurd dome of the parliament building, nailed shut and disused. I showed him the library, which had never been stocked with books. The school, which had never taught a
lesson. The blocks of flats, government housing for all the workers who were going to come and run the offices and services that had been planned – and some workers did come for a while. But there
was no work. And then the trouble started, and in the end they trickled away again, to the cities or back where they’d come from, except the few who could still be spotted here and there, lost in
their own uniforms and all this useless space.

And then the road came to the other side of town and faded away, in a short distance, into nothing. The buildings suddenly stopped along a line. In front of us the bush took over again: brown
wastes of grass, with anthills and thorn trees rising out of it. In the distance, a dark stripe of forest.

He sat behind the wheel, staring into the simmering heat. His face had some of the same dismay it had worn in the hospital. ‘What shall we do now?’ he said. I thought I could detect a note of
desperation.

‘Would you like a drink?’

‘But where?’

‘There is one place in town.’

‘Really?’

He was glaring at me; perhaps he suspected a joke. But in fact Mama Mthembu’s place was very pleasant, and always incongruously crowded. Every bored civil servant and off-duty worker headed
straight for it. And today, when we were sitting in the little courtyard under the bougainvillaea, with the emptiness and isolation sealed away outside, we could have been anywhere, in any happy
country town. The dirty plastic tables and the sad faces at the bar didn’t matter; we were surrounded by voices and movement, the illusion of community.

Mama Mthembu herself was an enormously fat old lady, always wearing the same floral print dress and slip-slops, and the same gap-toothed smile. She had a lot to smile about: she ran the one
flourishing business in town. When she’d started the place was a hotel, but for obvious reasons this side of things had failed dismally. The two floors of rooms stood as empty as the hospital, and
the focus of activity had moved downstairs and out, to the courtyard and bar.

She came over now, sweating and smiling amiably, to wipe the table with a filthy cloth. ‘How are you today, Mr Doctor?’ In all the time I’d been here, and despite the fact that I’d stayed in her
hotel for two weeks when I’d first arrived, she had never learned my name.

‘I’m good, Mama. How about you?’

‘The same, the same. Who is your friend?’

‘His name is Laurence Waters. He’s a new doctor at the hospital.’

‘Welcome, welcome. I can get you a beer?’

When she’d gone he asked, ‘Why do you call her Mama?’

‘That’s what everybody calls her.’

‘But why?’

‘I don’t know. It’s a term of affection or something. Respect. I don’t know.’

He looked around at the other people in the courtyard and I could see him relax visibly. It was nice here in the half-sun, entwined in other conversations. When Mama had brought our beers and
we’d both taken a long cold drink, he sighed and said: ‘In the hospital, you asked me why I wanted to come here.’

‘Yes.’

‘I want to explain it to you. But I’m not sure if you’ll understand. All the others, the students, I mean, they just wanted the most comfortable posting. None of them wanted to do it anyway,
they were angry. But if they had to go, they wanted it to be convenient, you know, a good hospital, close to home. They didn’t care about it.’

‘And you?’

‘I thought: let me be different to them. Let me find the tiniest place, the furthest away from anything. Let me make it hard on myself.’

‘But why?’

‘I don’t want to be like the rest.’ He studied me uneasily through his spectacles, then dropped his eyes. ‘Why?’ he said. ‘Do you think I’m a fool?’

‘No. But it’s a big symbolic gesture. What do you achieve?’

He said carefully, ‘I want to do work that means something.’

‘But you do want to work/ I said. ‘You’ve come to a place where that doesn’t always happen.’

He thought about this for a long time, biting his lip. ‘Is it always like this?’ he said at last. ‘I mean, it can’t be.’

‘Why not?’

‘Then it can change.’

‘How?’

‘People change things,’ he said. ‘People make things, they can change them.’

‘You’re idealistic,’ I said.

I wanted to say,
you’re very young.
I wanted to tell him,
you won’t last.

‘Yes,’ he said, nodding happily; he didn’t detect any criticism. He sipped his beer and became serious again. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I like you, Frank.’

I didn’t answer, the declaration made me uncomfortable, but the truth was that I liked him too. The feeling wasn’t based on anything except the few hours we’d spent in each other’s company, but
already I was finding it difficult to resent him completely.

Which, in another way, made me resent him more.

5

Right from the beginning, Laurence was like two separate people to me. On the one hand he was my shadow, waiting for me when I opened my eyes, following me to meals and work,
an unwanted usurper crowding me in my own room. And on the other hand he was a companion and confidant, who leavened the flat days with feeling and talk.

So I was also two people in my dealings with him. There was the dark, angry Frank, who felt himself under siege. And there was a softer Frank too, who was grateful not to be alone.

The last time I’d shared a room with anybody was with Karen, my wife – but that wasn’t the same sort of sharing. Male company: two beds in a confined space: it was like the army again. But there
was no code of discipline imposed on us from outside; there weren’t even any rules. It was just two different natures thrown into a box.

He was messy and untidy. His habits from the first day didn’t change – the clothes left lying around, the water on the bathroom floor. I cleaned up behind him, but he didn’t seem to notice. When
I bought an ashtray from the supermarket and left it conspicuously on the table, he went on throwing his cigarettes out of the window. It drove me crazy.

But he was also orderly and controlled, in a different sort of way. He would suddenly take it into his head to sweep some arbitrary corner, or clean some piece of wall. Then he scrubbed and
scoured with peculiar intensity until he was satisfied, and could lean back with a cigarette to relax, dropping ash on the carpet.

One day I came in to find him rearranging the furniture in the room. He’d dragged the coffee table and cupboard and lamp around into new positions. It didn’t matter, it didn’t affect anything,
but I felt a flash of personal outrage, as if he’d violated my home.

‘You mustn’t get too settled in here,’ I told him. ‘This is just temporary.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘You’re not going to be staying here for too long. Dr Ngema’s putting you into the Santanders’ room next door, when they

go-’

‘Oh,’ he said, looking stunned. ‘I didn’t know.’

But the furniture stayed where it was, in the new arrangement, and in a few days it seemed natural and normal to me. Not long after that he replaced the curtains and put up a couple of posters
on the wall. I felt that same flash of outrage again, but more dimly this time, less deep. And when he set up a little shrine to his girlfriend on the windowsill above his bed, I felt almost
nothing at all.

There were a few photographs, showing a small black woman with short hair. Around the photographs he’d arranged a little pile of stones, a dried leaf and a bracelet. These things had some kind
of personal significance for him.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Zanele.’

‘Where did you meet her?’

‘In the Sudan.’

‘The Sudan?’

He was pleased at how amazed I was. ‘Sure. I spent a year after school travelling around Africa. I landed up in Sudan for a while.’

‘And what was she doing there?’

‘Volunteer work. With a famine relief programme. She’s dedicated her life to that sort of work.’

He said all this with an offhand air, but I could see how seriously he took it. He intrigued me at moments like these. He seemed so simple and straightforward, and then he showed you he was
not.

‘And where is she now, your girlfriend?’

‘Lesotho. She came down to South Africa to be closer to me, but then she got involved with this other aid organization, and then...’ He trailed off, looking happy. ‘That’s just how she is.’

He was proud of her, of his relationship with her, but something about it was odd. It was almost as if he was relieved that she was far away and that all their intimacy had to be conducted
ritually, through photographs and letters. They wrote regularly to each other, once a week. I looked at her handwriting on the envelopes that arrived: strong, upright, clear. It didn’t resemble his
spidery uncertain hand. But somehow their whole relationship consisted in this back-and-forth of envelopes, or the formal gesture of the shrine above his bed.