The Good Doctor (7 page)

Not all of the photographs over the bed were of his girlfriend. One was of an older woman, dark, thin, her hair tied back. She was smile-scowling for the camera.

‘Your mother?’

He shook his head quickly. ‘Sister.’

‘Your sister? But she looks so much...’

‘Older? I know. There’s a big gap between us. In a way she’s really like my mother. She raised me when my parents were killed.’

‘I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.’

‘Oh, that’s okay. It was long ago.’ He told me how his mother and father had died in a car accident twenty-five years before. ‘I was a baby still, I don’t remember them.’ And how his sister, who
was twenty then, had taken him over and brought him up. He’d lived with her in a poor neighbourhood of a depressed coastal town, the name of which I’d never heard before. The first time he’d ever
left home was when he’d won a scholarship to study medicine.

He told me all these details in a light, quick voice, as if none of it was important. But I could see that it did matter very much to him.

I said, ‘I lost my mother too, when I was small.’

‘Really?’

‘I was ten. So I do remember. She died of leukaemia.’

‘That’s why you became a doctor,’ he said.

It was a declaration, not a question; it startled me.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

‘When was the moment when you knew, you really knewj that you wanted to be a doctor?’

‘I don’t think I had a moment like that.’

‘Never?’

‘No.’

‘But why not?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I just didn’t.’

He smiled. ‘I know when mine was. Exactly.’

He was like that. A grand design ran through everything. The moment of his realization was a story he’d told himself over and over.

‘I was twelve years old. My parents were buried in the cemetery near our house and my sister always said that one day she would take me to visit them. But she never took me. So I decided to go
by myself.

‘I used to pass there every day, all those crosses in the ground. So this one day I just turned in at the gate and started looking. I walked and walked. It was a hot day. I’d never seen so many
dead people. Just rows and rows of them. I went up and down, up and down, looking. But I couldn’t find them.

‘I started crying. It was too much. But then this old black guy found me. He was working there, he was wearing a uniform, a sort of white coat, he had a list of the people who were buried there.
He had a map. But he couldn’t find my parents.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know. I told him my father’s name – Richard. But he said there wasn’t a Richard Waters on the map. I just cried and cried.

‘He was very kind to me. He took me to his little office, he gave me tea and bread. He talked to me for a bit. Then I felt better and I went home. My sister was there.’

‘Did you tell her?’

His eyes dropped.
‘Ja.
And that was the moment. I can’t explain. She was also very good, hugging me and everything, telling me that one day we would go to the graves together. But it all
got mixed up in me – her kindness, the old black guy...’

‘His white coat,’ I said. Two could play at this pseudo-psychology of his.

‘The white coat,’ he said musingly. ‘Yes. You may be right about that, Frank. The idea came to me right then.’

‘That you should be a doctor.’

‘Yes. It wasn’t clear like that, you know, but... the seed was there. From that moment.’

‘Because of your parents.’

‘That’s how I knew it must be the same for you. Your mother’s death. Mine was because of my parents too. I think we’re very similar, Frank.’

‘But I never had a moment like that,’ I said.

‘Maybe you don’t remember it,’ he said. ‘But you did.’

He was very insistent about it, but I knew there’d never been a clear moment like that for me. I’d never had a burning sense of vocation – just uneasy ambition and a need to impress my father.
But the question he’d put to me stayed in my mind, bothering me. I felt that I should have had a moment of truth like his. It was only long afterwards that I wondered whether his revelation from
the graveyard had ever actually happened at all.

He never mentioned it again. He was too busy asking other questions. When he wanted to know something, he had no sense of delicacy or restraint. Sometimes he alarmed me, but I also found myself
telling him things I’d never discussed before.

My marriage, for instance. This wasn’t a subject on which I felt inclined to open up to anybody. Not that it was charged with a lot of pain any more – the nerves were dead – but it was still
private and unexposed. But a week or two after he came, Laurence plunged right in.

‘I notice you still wear your wedding ring.’

‘That’s because I’m still married.’

‘Really? But where’s your wife?’

And in a moment I was telling him all sorts of delicate details – how Karen had run off with Mike, my best friend from army days and one-time partner in practice. How they were living together
now and how my retreat up here had somehow stalled the divorce process so that we were still technically man-and-wife.

‘And when will it all be over?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Some time in the next six months. She’s got the whole divorce process moving along again lately. I think they’re in a hurry to leave the country.’

‘Is she getting married again?’

‘I think that’s the idea.’

‘To this guy? Your friend from the army?’

‘Mike?
J a,
she’s still with him. She says he’s the great love of her life.’

‘He was never your friend, Frank,’ he told me solemnly. ‘No true friend would ever do that to you.’

‘I am aware of that, Laurence.’

‘I would never do that. Never, never, never.’

‘That’s good.’

‘I wouldn’t wear that ring any more,’ he said. ‘Why do you wear it, Frank?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Habit.’ But the golden glint on my finger was more a symbol than a habit. I closed my hand into a fist to hide it.

When he said, ‘I would never do that to you,’ he was telling me that he was a true friend. I think he felt that way almost from the first day. Yet the feeling wasn’t mutual. He was a room-mate
to me, a temporary presence who was disturbing my life.

But I found myself spending a lot of time with Laurence. In some respects I didn’t have a choice: in the room, at work, he’d been assigned to me. Yet outside of that, and almost imperceptibly,
we started to keep each other company. It became something of a ritual, for instance, to play table tennis in the recreation room. I’d never spent much time there before; it was a sad room. But
somehow it was not unpleasant to bat the plastic ball back and forth across the table, talking in a desultory way. Most of our conversations were like that: weightless, aimless, passing the
time.

And we went on a few walks together. It had been years since I’d gone off on those long hikes of mine; now we started again. I don’t remember who first suggested it, him or me, but he’d got hold
of a large map from somewhere of the surrounding countryside. Most of the time he kept it stuck to the wall above his bed, but once a week at least he took it down and planned routes for us to try
on our days off. We packed sandwiches and beer and set off on various trails through the bush. I took him on some of the old walks, too, that I remembered, some of them with spectacular views.
These outings were mostly happy and relaxed, though he was never quite at home out there, in the wild.

We also went down, more and more often, to Mama Mthembu’s place in the evenings. This wasn’t new to me, of course; I had been there many times before. But it had been my habit to drop by in the
late afternoon occasionally; I didn’t enjoy the crowded and smoky atmosphere that took over at night. All the off-duty staff from the hospital were usually there, and the enforced intimacy over
glasses of alcohol could be oppressive. But now, with Laurence in tow, it felt somehow more inviting.

At Mama’s place, after-hours, none of the divisions and hierarchy of the work situation applied. Themba and Julius, the two kitchen workers, were on a level with Jorge and Claudia. Sometimes Dr
Ngema even joined these gatherings as an uneasy equal. And though I never relaxed completely, some of Laurence’s equanimity in these situations transferred itself to me, so that I became less
distant and aloof.

One morning, after one of these late-night sessions, I found myself alone with Jorge at the breakfast table. He sucked benignly on his moustache and said, ‘The young man. Your friend. He is a
good young man.’

‘Who? Laurence? He isn’t my friend.’

‘No? But you are everywhere together.’

‘Dr Ngema put us in the same room. But I don’t know him well.’

‘He is a good young man.’

‘I’m sure he is. But he’s not my friend yet.’

It was strange, but I felt uncomfortable at being linked with Laurence in this way. The word ‘friend’ had associations for me. Mike had been my friend, until he ran off with my wife. Since then
I hadn’t made any friends. I didn’t want anyone getting too close to me.

But the word kept coming up. Your friend did this. Your friend was there. How is your friend? And every time I heard it, the term became a little more worn with use, so that it didn’t have that
sharp edge any more.

‘Did you have your talk with our new friend?’ Dr Ngema asked me one day, as we walked back to the residential block together.

‘What talk?’

It was an indication, perhaps, of how much had changed that I had no idea what she meant.

‘You know. You were going to show him around... discuss the possibility of transferring him somewhere else.’

‘Oh, yes. Yes, I did. But he’s happy here. He doesn’t want to

go-’

‘Well, that’s a first,’ she said. Our feet crunched companion-ably through the gravel together. ‘Maybe,’ she said after a while, ‘you could pressure him a bit.’

‘Actually, I don’t mind having him around.’

‘Yes? So can I take it that you’re happy to share your room?’

This was a different question, separate to what had gone before.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Ruth, if anything comes up... The Santanders’ room, any other room, I’d appreciate it.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ she told me.

But I knew from that moment that nothing was going to change: Laurence would stay in my room.

‘They’re not going,’ he announced one day, while we sat on duty together.

‘Who?’

‘The Santanders. You told me they were leaving and I was moving to their room. But I was talking to them yesterday and they said they’re staying here.’

As it happened, I had overheard part of the same conversation, so I knew that he didn’t have the whole picture. I was sitting at the table when he was in the recreation room with them, locked in
earnest debate, and I hung back to listen.

‘But why South Africa?’ Laurence was saying.

‘Opportunity,’ Jorge said.

‘Exactly. Opportunity. The chance to make a difference. There can’t be a lot of places in the world where that’s possible right now.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Jorge intoned solemnly.

‘Better money,’ Claudia said. ‘Good house.’

‘Yes, well, that too. But I’m talking about something different.’

‘You are talking about what?’

‘I believe it’s only the beginning. Of this country. The old history doesn’t count. It’s all starting now. From the bottom up. So I want to be here. I don’t want to be anywhere else in the
world, where it doesn’t matter if I’m there or not. It matters that I’m here.’

The Santanders were a middle-aged couple from Havana. They’d been sent out a couple of years before as part of a large group of doctors imported by the Health Department to help with the
staffing crisis. He was a plump, affable man with a big moustache and a genial intelligence. His wife was slightly hysterical, a good-looking older woman with not much English. My brief affair with
Claudia a year before had left her permanently embittered towards me. They had the room next door to mine and there had been many nights, more and more of them lately, when their voices carried in
strident Spanish argument through the wall. It was an open secret that she wanted to go home, she didn’t want to stay, while he wanted to make a future here. Their marriage was cracked down the
middle.

‘This country depends,’ Laurence said fervently, ‘on people like you. Committed people, who want to make a difference.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Jorge said.

‘They tell us, good house, good car,’ Claudia said. ‘But they don’t tell us, Soweto. Ooh, Soweto!’ I could picture her shudder.

‘I wouldn’t mind being in Soweto,’ Laurence said. ‘But this is better. This is really nowhere.’

I knew a little bit about how the Santanders felt towards Soweto. Claudia had told me during the throes of our affair. It was their first posting in the country, the place they wanted to go to.
Maybe, like Laurence, they wanted to make a difference. But they couldn’t handle the cases that came in all the time. The violence, the extremity of it, was something they’d never seen. On Saturday
nights in the emergency room it was knife-wounds and shotgun blasts and maimings and gougings with broken bottles. ‘Like war,’ Claudia wailed, ‘like big war outside all the time!’ And this was on
top of the usual load of illnesses and accidents that the hospital could barely deal with. After six months or so they asked for a transfer and landed up here.

In a certain sense it was her time in Soweto that led to my affair with Claudia. In the first few weeks after she’d arrived here a woman was rushed in one night. She’d been attacked by a lynch
mob in her village that had stabbed and beaten her and tried to burn her to death for being a witch. Her condition was critical. It was clear that she would die, but we all ran around madly, trying
to do what we could. In the end she did die. An ambulance came from the nearest hospital to take the body away and then afterwards, in the empty anticlimax of the small hours of the night, Claudia
and I were left alone in the office. And suddenly her neutral mask cracked and fell. She started to cry and shake uncontrollably and what was present in the room was all the pent-up months of
horror at what she’d seen in this country for the first time in her life. ‘How can people do like this?’ she cried, ‘how, how?’