I came back in darkness, late at night. All the lights were out, except for at the front entrance and in the duty room. Framed by the window, I could see Laurence sitting at the desk inside, very upright and alert, his hands clasped in front of him. Wearing his white coat.
There was a lot of wind and he didn’t hear the car. I sat for a long time watching him over the intervening gravel and grass. Neither of us moved. He seemed deep in thought, but I wasn’t thinking anything particularly. I just wanted to see what he would do. But he didn’t do anything.
I didn’t go in to see him. I went straight to the room and got into bed, and my sleep was like a continuation of the numb momentum of the drive: a falling forward into a landscape that rushed perpetually past and into me.
I only woke when it was light and he was sitting on the other bed, looking at me. His face was tired, but his eyes were shining with a peculiar glow.
‘What?’ I said, sitting up. Something about his look alarmed me. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing,’ he said, smiling.
But he went on looking at me in that way.
‘Oh, Frank,’ he said at last. ‘So much has happened since you left.’
‘I’ve only been gone for two days.’
‘Yes. But everything’s different now.’
He was happy when he said this, despite the tiredness. And I will admit that his happiness perturbed me. But when I’d got myself out of bed and splashed some water on my face, the story that came out was not a happy one.
He’d thought a lot, he said, about what I had told him. About Tehogo and the stealing. It wasn’t right that nothing should happen. And in the end he decided to do something.
‘What did you do?’
He went to see Dr Ngema. He approached her in her room on the night that I left. And he told her the story of what had happened to me as if, in fact, it had happened to him. The knock on the open door, going into the room, seeing the bits of metal lying around.
He told me this blandly, with no expression, and I imagined this might have been the way he’d told it to Dr Ngema too. But when he’d finished talking he blushed suddenly, a hot red colour.
‘What did she say?’ I asked.
‘She said, was I sure? How did I know where the metal came from? I said I was sure. She said, why did I go into Tehogo’s room if he wasn’t there?’
‘She said that?’
‘She said something about I had no right.’
‘I didn’t break in,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if I picked the lock. Jesus.’ A hot flush passed across my face too.
But his blush had gone and the happy smile was back. ‘It was terrible, Frank,’ he said. ‘She called Tehogo in.’
‘She called him in?’
‘Well, it was like a farce. I was busy talking to her and there was a knock on the door and it was Tehogo, looking for something. So she said to him, you’d better come in. There’s something serious we have to discuss.’
‘And?’
‘We sat there looking at each other, just like you’re looking at me now. She made me tell the whole story again. He just kept shaking his head, like he knew I was lying. I was lying, Frank – that was the thing. It wasn’t my story, it didn’t happen to me. It felt like they both knew, they were listening to me and nodding and waiting, but they knew.’
‘But they didn’t know, Laurence. Oh, Jesus. What happened then?’
‘Then he said, let’s go and look. He got up, very calm, and we went with him to his room.’
‘And?’
‘And there was nothing there.’
I stared at him.
‘Nothing,’ he repeated sadly, still with that strange smile on his face. ‘The room was a mess and everything, just like you said, but there was no metal or anything like that. I looked everywhere.’
‘They moved it out,’ I said. ‘Tehogo and that friend of his. Whatsisname, Raymond. They took it.’
‘Maybe. But it was terrible, Frank. I just had to stand there and say, but it was here, I promise you, it was here. And they kept looking at me. I was lying, Frank, don’t you see? I knew it myself, so they must’ve known too.’
‘And?’ I said. ‘And?’
‘Well, it was all over by then. Pointless, you know. There was a bit more talk – ’
‘What kind of talk?’
‘We went back to Dr Ngema’s office. There was a bit of discussion, this and that, and then Tehogo asked me why I’d gone to his room. What I wanted him for. And I just didn’t know. I had nothing to say. What did you go there for, Frank?’
‘Tapes.’
‘Tapes?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘Forget about it. Go on.’
‘Well, there was no use pretending. We all just stared at each other. It was so horrible, that silence. I’d been caught out, you see.’ He sat for a while, shaking his head, then went on in a different, lighter tone: ‘So I told them. It was no good pretending any more. They could see.’
‘You told them? Told them what?’
‘That it hadn’t been me who went into the room. That it was you. You saw the stuff, you told me about it … oh, all of it, I told them. I had to.’ His smile was big now. ‘I felt so much better afterwards, Frank. To get it all out in the open. It was the lying I couldn’t take. It’s not in my nature. What’s the matter, Frank, what’s wrong?’
The smile had gone. I was up and walking towards him. I think it was actually my intention to commit some action, but when I got close I veered away and stood staring out of the window. The same view, the overgrown yard with its ragged leaves, the peeling, blistered wall. I stared for a while, then I went back to my bed and sat down again, trembling.
‘But it’s sorted out, Frank,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to worry. I explained everything to them.’
‘Explained what exactly?’
‘That it was me, the whole thing. Coming to Dr Ngema, telling the lie about what I’d seen – it was all my idea. I told them that. I told them that you weren’t going to say anything, that you felt sorry for Tehogo. How I was the one who … But it’s sorted out now, you don’t need to worry. We even shook hands.’
‘Who?’
‘Me and Tehogo. I said I was sorry and we made it up. It’s all sorted, Frank. No problem for you.’
Incredibly, his expression of dismay was gone and that smile was back again.
‘What are you smiling about?’ I said.
‘Things are good, Frank. It’s all worked out for the best. It always does, somehow.’
I didn’t know what this meant. My mind was occupied elsewhere. And I was too distracted to focus on what else might have happened while I had been gone. This was big enough for now. But I was soon to find out more about Laurence’s smile.
‘You’d better go and see her,’ he added quickly. ‘She did want to talk to you.’
‘Who?’
‘Dr Ngema. It’s just a formality, Frank, don’t look so worried.’
I went to her office. She was working at her desk, but the moment she saw me she got up and closed the door conspiratorially. We sat in the low chairs, our knees almost touching.
‘It’s been a bit of a mess, Frank,’ she said. ‘But it’s sorted out now, I think.’
Almost the same words he’d used. I didn’t know what sorted out meant in all of this.
‘I’m sorry, Ruth, for the part I played. But I had no idea –’
‘No, of course not. It was his doing, he said so himself. But it almost caused a lot of trouble. It still might. He’s a very impulsive young man.’
‘What can I do to help?’
‘You could keep an eye on him for me. I’ve come to an arrangement with him. But I want to be sure that he sticks to it.’
‘What arrangement?’
‘It’s about his clinic. You know, the field-hospital thing that he did yesterday.’
My mind was scattered between so many points that this was the first time, since I’d left, that I’d thought of it.
‘Yes?’
‘It was very successful, apparently. The Santanders said … They seem very pleased.’
‘And so?’
‘I’ve told him he can have another one. To be honest, I’ve sort of indicated that we might continue with them on an ongoing basis. I don’t think it’ll come to that, of course. But I had to persuade him somehow.’
She was beaming – an unusual display of emotion for her – at her own cleverness.
‘The next one will be in a month,’ she went on. She named a village I’d never heard of. ‘Listen to this, Frank. It all fits together. The local government will be holding a function there that day. It’s a big celebration, because they’re delivering electricity for the first time. So I’ve arranged that we’ll do the clinic the same day. There’ll be lots of media, lots of speeches, lots of political attention … Good for all of us.’
‘Brilliant,’ I said. The word fell out of me dryly. ‘And he accepts this as a … as a …’
‘Trade-off? Yes. I think so. I didn’t put it to him like that, of course. I said that he had to choose. If he wanted to push the case with Tehogo, then I would have to make a case against him. For lying. And that there’d be a whole inquiry, Tehogo might lose his job, Laurence might be suspended … Considering all that, I said I couldn’t see a way for us to go on holding these clinics. On the other hand, I said, there was this opportunity …’
‘And he accepted that,’ I said again, incredulously.
‘He had to. He can’t make a case against Tehogo anyway. Only you can.’
After a short pause, in which I could hear the branches outside her window rubbing together, I said: ‘And what if I do?’
She was astounded. The beaming expression was gone, her eyes and mouth widened into circles. ‘Excuse me?’
‘What if I pressed the case against him? Because I did see the stuff. It was there.’
The silence was long this time. Then she said, ‘I don’t understand. I thought you didn’t want …’
‘I’m not sure I do. But are you just going to leave it at that? He’s stealing from you.’
‘Well, I … yes. But he’s been given a warning. He won’t do it again. It’s only bits of metal anyway. Nobody was using it. No harm done.’
‘No harm done?’ I shook my head. ‘This is your hospital, Ruth. The bits of metal are part of your hospital.’
‘I know that, Frank.’ Something in her face was hardening now. ‘Think of the alternative for a second. You’ve been waiting a long time to become head of the hospital. Things are moving now at last, it looks like it’ll happen soon. Do you want to throw that away? If you start an inquiry at the Department of Health, it’ll take months, it’ll exhaust us all. The accusations that’ll fly around, Frank, have you thought about that? The outcome is by no means clear. And at the end of the day it is, yes, it is bits of metal you’re fighting about.’
‘Surely not. Surely it’s a principle that’s at stake.’
‘What principle is that?’
I was speechless. What principle was I fighting for? It seemed too obvious to have a name. But I was getting into something now that was too deep and difficult for me, and I decided to retreat.
‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘This is all theoretical. Because I don’t want to push the point.’
‘I’m relieved to hear it, Frank. There’s too much on the line. For everybody.’
‘Yes. I do see that. So what is it you want me to do?’
I was speaking lightly and quickly now, as if none of the dangerous talk had happened, and she was answering me in the same way.
‘Just make sure, if you can, that Laurence doesn’t change his mind. You’re a good influence on him, Frank. He listens to you.’
‘Sure. I’ll keep an eye on him.’
‘Thanks. It’s for your sake too.’
‘I know that.’
But when I left her office I was full of confusion and contradiction and it was with an ache in my head that I went to sit in the recreation room. Laurence was sleeping, and this was normally a quiet refuge, but today it felt crowded. It was bright and loud in there. A music cassette was blaring and the Santanders were playing table tennis together. Themba and Julius were drinking coffee and talking.
‘You want to play too, Frank?’ Jorge called.
I shook my head. The game went on without me. In my stupor it felt to me that this movement and frivolity were the normal state of things and it was only my mood that excluded me. But at some point Claudia threw down the bat and came and sat next to me, laughing and sweating amiably.
‘You come back today?’ she said.
‘You miss the clinic yesterday. Very good. Oh, very good time.’
‘Yes,’ Jorge said, coming up. ‘We thought of you. We had a lot of fun.’
‘Oh, very good,’ Claudia repeated. ‘So many people! So much talking! Oh, too much.’
‘That’s nice,’ I said. No other words would come.
It was then it began to dawn on me that the light and happy mood in the room was new. The way that Claudia was sprawled there, talking easily to me – as if without rancour and resentment after our affair – was something she’d never have done just a few days before. And this fresh energy, so optimistic, so young, was connected to what had happened yesterday, while I was away.
I remembered the smile on Laurence’s face, incongruous while he was telling his story. I was to see that same smile again a few days later, at the weekly staff meeting. The only item on the agenda was the clinic. And Dr Ngema set aside her caution for the announcement. It had been a resounding success, she said; if anyone doubted it, they had only to look at the new spirit amongst the staff. Although our material resources were thin, we had achieved something significant: we had reached out and touched the community, we had let them know we were here. And she had no doubt that people who’d never heard of the hospital before would be beating a path to our door.
While Laurence sat smiling at his shoes.
‘Of course,’ Dr Ngema said, ‘that was just a try-out. The idea was to go on holding these clinics if the first one was a success. And I’m pleased to be able to tell you that there’ll be a follow-up very soon.’
She looked around at us importantly. But I couldn’t listen while she repeated the details of what she’d told me: the big government function where electricity was going to be delivered to poor people for the first time. The whole event was clear in my mind, as if it had already taken place – the mobs of people gathering, the shining face of Laurence at the centre of the audience. The talk, the long and pointless talk, most of it probably not understood; but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that it happened – the symbolic value of it. What mattered was the spirit amongst the staff.
I stared at the dartboard behind the door, where a single dart, hanging by its tip, took on a luminous significance, and only came back to myself as Dr Ngema was saying, ‘ & I don’t need to tell you how important this is. Outreach work, community work … it’s the kind of thing the previous regime didn’t care about. We must all commit ourselves to the new way …’
Then applause, spontaneous, in which even Dr Ngema joined. The only people who sat watching were Tehogo and myself, silent and apart on opposite sides of the room.
Tehogo had always been silent, but his silence was different now. The anger, the accusation in it were palpable, and I thought they were directed at me.
I’d seen him once already since I got back from the city. But even before that I knew everything had changed. It was one chance encounter, one tiny gesture in the encounter, that showed me where I stood.
On the day that I got back, after I’d sat in the recreation room among the happy staff for a while, I went walking through the hospital grounds. Thoughts and impulses were boiling up in me, so that I couldn’t rest. I paced up and down, I stood with my fingers hooked into the bars of the gate, looking out. In the evening I decided to take a longer walk, through the town. And on my way out I passed Raymond, Tehogo’s pretty friend, the young man I’d accused of being an accomplice. He was sitting on the low, crumbling wall at the edge of the parking lot, twitching one dangling foot, waiting. The last time I’d seen him he was at the party. He was well-dressed and neat; even in the dusk he was wearing dark glasses. I nodded to him to say hello, but when I was opposite him he raised one hand and drew a finger smilingly across his throat.
Just that, just the one gesture, but all the way into town I was shaking. Not from fear, or not entirely; something else. It was a gesture Tehogo was sending to me, it was what Dr Ngema hadn’t quite spoken aloud in her office that morning: all the unsaid, undone rage transplanted into the bored hand of this stranger.
When I came back he was gone. The little sagging wall was bare.
I went looking for Tehogo. It was supper-time and I found him in the dining-hall, sitting by himself at one end of the long table. Claudia Santander was also there with Laurence, and some of the electric buzz from that morning still went on between them on the far side of the room. But around Tehogo there was an angry halo. He’d finished eating and was sitting staring at the wall, his empty plate in front of him. When he saw me he seemed to need some activity to distract him and he picked up the salt cellar and started rolling it around in his hand.
I went to sit next to him. Laurence and Claudia glanced over at us, then went on with their intense conversation. I could hear something about Havana, something about a state medical programme.
Tehogo started to toss the salt from one hand to the other. Left, right, left.
‘Tehogo.’
He said nothing. Went on throwing. I pulled my chair a bit closer to him.
‘Can we speak?’ I said. ‘I want to explain what happened.’
Left, right, left.
‘I know you’re very angry. Hurt and angry. But it wasn’t me who did this, Tehogo. If you’d just listen to me.’
He put the salt cellar down firmly and folded his arms, staring in front of him.
‘You are not my enemy, Tehogo.’
Then he turned his head and looked at me. The stare lasted only a moment, before he pulled his chair back and got up. I think I actually clutched at him, to stop him, but he was already striding away. Out of the room, not looking back.
There was a brief pause, in which I could feel Laurence and Claudia watching me across the room. Then their conversation resumed, soft and urgent. I sat with my head in my hands, trying to think through all the words and images. You are not my enemy, Tehogo. Who was my enemy then?
So I had begun to understand what Laurence meant when he told me that everything was different now. In the two days that I’d been gone, my place in the hospital had changed. Nobody was speaking to me in quite the same way any more.
The change was tiny, but huge. It had no centre, no dimensions you could pin down, but it preoccupied and troubled me like a single, definable event.
It was a few days before I found out that something outside the hospital was different too. And this change would affect me more profoundly, maybe, than everything else.
Laurence didn’t tell me at first. He let it all go by – the meeting with Dr Ngema, the talk with Tehogo, the Monday morning staff meeting. It was almost the middle of the week before he brought it up, casually, incidentally, as if it had only just occurred to him. And yet it was obvious, almost from the first syllable, that he’d been waiting to speak to me.
‘Oh, yes … Frank … can I talk to you for a minute?’
We were in the room. It was one of those indeterminate times of day, with the light through the dusty window coming in grey and filtered, without heat.
He sat down on his bed and gazed at me. Then he got up and came over to my side.
‘Is it okay if I sit here?’
‘Go ahead.’
He sat next to me on the bed and I could hear his uneasy breathing for a while.
‘How are you?’ he said at last.
‘I’m fine.’
‘You don’t look fine. Was it hard for you down in Pretoria?’
‘Whatever you want to say,’ I told him irritably, ‘I wish you’d just say it.’
His breathing sounded painful, then he said, ‘It’s about the clinic. Well, no, it isn’t. I mean, not the clinic as such. Connected with the clinic. In a way. But not the clinic itself, no.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
He took a deep breath. ‘All right. That woman.’
‘What woman?’
‘That one. You know. Your friend.’
And then I knew. ‘You mean Maria.’
‘Yes. Her. From the souvenir shop.’ His eyes were on me, but when I looked at him they dropped, slid away.
‘What about her?’
‘After the clinic. When everybody was standing around. She came to talk to me. She said she had a big problem, could I help her.’
In the silence I understood, and the word hung between us in the air, waiting to be spoken.
‘Pregnant.’
He nodded and swallowed; the sound was loud and distinct in the room.
‘She wants you to get rid of it for her.’
He nodded again.
I felt calm. I felt unnaturally calm and still. I said to him, ‘Why are you telling me this?’
He tried to speak, but no sound would come; and I saw in that moment he wasn’t able to speak the truth. Instead he whispered, ‘I want your … your advice.’
‘Abortion isn’t a crime any more, Laurence. You’re allowed to help her.’
‘She … she doesn’t want it done here.’
‘Out there. In the shack.’
‘But that’s crazy.’
‘I know. But she’s terrified of something. Or somebody. She wants me to come there late at night. It has to be a secret.’
‘Why?’
He shrugged, and all his desperation was there in the gesture. And none of his pride and confidence was left from the staff meeting a few days ago; he was just a confused young man, in need of help.
I said, ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘By when must she …?’
‘Soon. I’m not sure exactly when, but soon. Frank, isn’t it possible …?’
‘What?’
‘Can’t it … can’t you …?’ He shrugged again.
‘You’re not asking me to do it, are you?’
He smiled painfully. ‘I don’t know. It crossed my mind. You … you seem to know her.’
‘But Laurence,’ I said, ‘she came to you.’
And it was true. If he hadn’t held his little clinic, if he hadn’t gone to that particular village, he would never have seen her again. And part of me – a hard, cold place deep inside – felt satisfaction at his dilemma. He wanted to go out and make grand symbolic gestures for an audience, but the moment reality rose up he didn’t know how to cope.
Of course I wasn’t going to leave it at that. Of course I would find out what had happened, of course I would do something. But for the moment I was not without a certain grim pleasure at the hole Laurence had dug for himself.
I drove out that night to see her. I went without knowing what I was going to say. The last time I’d been here was before I left for the city, when I told her I’d be back the following night. But I hadn’t gone back.
There was another roadblock set up on the way. When they asked me where I was going I said, ‘Just for a drive,’ but I could see that this answer perplexed the young soldier who’d pulled me over. He made me get out and open all the doors, so that he could search everywhere – under and between the seats, in the cubby-hole, in the boot, in the engine. The car was empty and he had to let me go, but it was with an obscure weight of guilt that I drove on, as if I was actually smuggling something secret and illegal.
And when I got to the shack the white car was parked outside. The white car, that might or might not have been outside the Brigadier’s house. I couldn’t stop. There was no point in waiting, but I decided to do what I’d said anyway and just go for a drive. I rode on for miles through the dark. Then at some point short of the escarpment I pulled over and got out. The night was warm, the sky crowded with stars. I sat on the hot bonnet of the car with the hissing wastes of grass around me, staring into the black.
It felt good to be there, away from everything, alone. For a little while my life felt like something separate to me, a hat or a shirt I’d dropped on the floor and could push at, meditatively, with my foot. And out of this sense of things, a strange dream came to me.
In this dream I went to Maria in her shack. She looked like she normally did, but she was wearing a shiny yellow dress, something I’d never seen. And I went to her and took her hands in a way I’d never done before. The feeling between us was warm and wordless, pushing action ahead of it like a wave.
I said to her, ‘Maria, come with me.’
She was confused. She didn’t know what I meant.
‘Everything is possible,’ I told her. ‘Come with me.’
‘But I must look after the shop.’
‘No. I mean something different. I don’t mean for a little while. I mean for ever. Come with me, away from here. We’ll leave everything behind. Your job, my job. Your place, my place. We’ll go to the city and get married and live together and everything will start again. From the beginning.’
She shook her head.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s true. Everything is possible.’ And I saw that it was. I saw how simple such a huge change could be.
But then the dream shifted. She shook her head, and the colour of her dress was different, and the future slid by me in the warm dark and was gone. The wrong feeling, the wrong time: everything was too late. All the power went out of me and I climbed down from the bonnet and drove back.
The white car was still there.
When I got back to the hospital the world was fixed in its usual place, waiting. The dark buildings, full of disuse and emptiness. The room, with my tiny collection of possessions. Laurence Waters, asleep, his head flung sideways on the pillow.
I stood there for a long time, looking down at him. In the dim glow from an outside light his face seemed even younger than it was. Not young enough to be innocent, but soft and pale and vulnerable to violence. And the violence was in me: from nowhere it occurred to me how simple it would be to break a sleeping head like this. One hard, heavy blow with the right object and it would be done.
Because he was the enemy. I saw it now. The enemy was not outside, at large, in the world; he was within the gates. While I had slept.
Night thoughts; but nothing like this had come to me before. And it was terrible how casual, how very ordinary, the idea of murder could be. I turned away from it, and from myself, and went to bed.