The Good Doctor E-Book

Damon Galgut

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

WINNER OF THE COMMONWEALTH WRITERS' PRIZE & Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize A powerful, taut and intense tale of a friendship overshadowed by betrayal, set against the tawdry hopes and disappointments of a post-apartheid South Africa. When Laurence Waters arrives at his new post at a deserted rural hospital, staff physician Frank Eloff is instantly suspicious. Laurence is everything Frank is not-young, optimistic, and full of big ideas. The whole town is beset with new arrivals and the return of old faces. Frank reestablishes a liaison with a woman, one that will have unexpected consequences. A self-made dictator from apartheid days is rumored to be active in cross-border smuggling, and a group of soldiers has moved in to track him, led by a man from Frank's own dark past. Laurence sees only possibilities-but in a world where the past is demanding restitution from the present, his ill-starred idealism cannot last.

Leseprobe

THE GOOD DOCTOR

DAMON GALGUT Galgut was born in Pretoria in 1963. He wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season, when he was seventeen. His other books include Small Circle of Beings, The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, The Quarry, The Impostor and In a Strange Room, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010. The Good Doctor was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Dublin/IMPAC Award. Damon Galgut lives in Cape Town.

International acclaim for The Good Doctor

‘The Good Doctor is, quite simply, one of the best novels I have read in years, one of the most profound and luminous testimonies to the transition between the old and the new in South Africa... Damon Galgut transcends the familiar territory of South Africa today to grapple with essential human darkness... I have now read Galgut’s novel three times; I can foresee returning to it many more times in the future. It may well turn out to be one of the most shining milestones on our literary, moral and philosophical journey from past to future.’ Andre Brink, Sunday Independent (South Africa)

‘A work of impressive depth and focus... Deservedly shortlisted for the Booker, The Good Doctor is a triumph of understatement, drawing its reader subtly into the political debris which forms the unspoken motivation for its characters’ every move. With his narrator’s sparse and poignant use of language, Galgut brilliantly encapsulates the languor of a society still reeling from the past, not yet confident of its future, and unwilling to confront the hard realities of either.’ Ed Halliwell, Observer

‘The Good Doctor is a sustained meditation upon the unreliability of new dawns... Damon Galgut has written a parable which turns on a question crucial to South African life: who has been lying to whom – about politics, about change, about past and future? Put another way, how much of the uncomfortable truth can people take – and what good will it do? Hanging over this fine novel is an air of angry melancholy... Galgut makes mincemeat of the sustaining hypocrisies, slogans and political pieties of the South African dream. And yet, this is not a bleak book; mostly, I think, because it has the brazen ring of truth.’ Christopher Hope, Guardian

‘Darkly impressive... A latter-day Heart of Darkness, which powerfully depicts the dangers both of and to idealism... It well deserves its places on this year’s Man Booker shortlist.’ Michael Arditti, Daily Mail

A taut exploration of the shifting landscape, cultural and moral, of the new South Africa. In recalling not only a book such as Coetzee’s Disgrace, but also with a strong whiff of Graham Greene about it.’ Erica Wagner, The Times

‘There are echoes of Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer and Joseph Conrad, all of whom have written with an exacting emotional precision about the European’s place in Africa. Galgut’s story of a doctor attempting to carve out his place in a run-down local hospital vibrates with an eerie sense of foreboding... A gripping read, laced throughout with powerful emotional truth and Damon Galgut’s extraordinary vision.’ Julie Wheelwright, Independent

A subtle but tremendously powerful novel... Galgut creates a distinct world with an atmosphere reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s The Castle, where each event has an unpredictable impact.’ Daily Telegraph Summer Reading: Thirty Best Novels

‘Galgut handles the crackling tension between races with subtlety and sympathy... The “hot, dense country” is made palpable, and the density is moral as well as topographical... Galgut’s book is sensory and reflective in equal and impressive measure.’ Sunday Times

‘Genuinely compelling... Damon Galgut evokes a landscape made dangerous and strange by precipitous social changes, with the weight of history as emotional a burden for the individual as it is for the wider society... An eerie, fluently written novel.’ Metro

‘Written with economy and grace... The Good Doctor is a novel about guilty memory and the instability of the past... It is also about how we can never evade the truth of what we have done, especially in a country as tainted as South Africa.’ Jason Cowley, New Statesman

‘Of the six novels shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize for fiction, easily the most subversive is Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor... The passing of apartheid robbed South Africa’s white novelists of a great artistic cause. Some, like Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee and Andre Brink, are trying to reinvent themselves. Of the younger generation, Mr Galgut, with his spare, unhurried sentences, his carefully chosen words, is the most talented.’ Economist

‘Galgut’s book is full of arresting images... and its evocation of the African landscape is superb. Equally good is the treatment of the relationship between the two men, and their gradual realisation of the philosophical gulf which exists between them... [A] fine, disquieting novel.’ Jewish Chronicle

‘The novel is structured with... unobtrusive expertise, and expressed in spare, tough prose that can sketch deftly the behaviour of both inanimate things and people... It is the contradictions and strange details of his bleak landscape that lend compulsiveness to The Good Doctor’s serious concerns.’ Times Literary Supplement

A sense of heightened unease runs through the novel, one that seems calculated to reflect not just Frank’s anxious state of mind but also the mood of the country as a whole... Slim, thoughtful and readable, it should bring Damon Galgut the international recognition he deserves.’ Literary Review

‘Damon Galgut has done the most difficult thing possible for any novelist in The Good Doctor, drawing the changing political landscape in post-apartheid South Africa without a hint of polemics. A simple and very intimate story, eddying out into a more powerful exploration of ethnic issues.’ Hugo Hamilton, Books of the Year, Irish Times

‘Absorbing... In spare, declarative prose, Galgut spins a brisk and bracing story; but he’s also in pursuit of something murkier; the double-edged nature of doing good in a land where “the past has only just happened”.’ New Yorker

A sobering story... told in luminous prose... This is a good, provocative and cautionary tale of a good man trying to do good at the wrong time and in the wrong place.’ Washington Times

‘Exquisite... It is a testament to Galgut’s skill that this mostly quiet novel can leave such a lasting sense of urgency. And shame. That, after all, is what great fiction is meant to do.’ Boston Globe

‘Taut and compelling... Galgut’s fine, unsettling novel... feels freighted with mystery and moment, replete with significant incident.’ The Nation

‘Galgut writes conversation that is delicate, compelling and mysterious. His prose... is utterly seductive and suspenseful. Tragic and brilliant... The Good Doctor is informed by the alienation of Albert Camus, and deeply resonant with Thomas Mann’s moral interrogations of politics and society... Remarkable.’ Globe and Mail (Canada)

A wonderful book... Galgut has terrific insight into characters, completely free of cliche.’ Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

‘Damon Galgut is a real find... The Good Doctor is classy from the first page... Because there are subtle ambiguities throughout, different readers will come to different conclusions about Frank – but I don’t think anyone will be unsure about the quality of this writing.’ Courier-Mail (Australia)

First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published by Atlantic Books in 2011

Copyright © Damon Galgut 2003

The moral right of Damon Galgut to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

13579 10 8642

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 085789 172 3 eBook ISBN: 978 085189 172 3

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26-27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Hundreds of miles of desolate, monotonous, burnt-up steppe cannot induce such deep depression as one man when he sits and talks, and one does not know when he will go.

CHEKHOV

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Author’s Note and Acknowledgements

1

The first time I saw him I thought, he won’t last.

I was sitting in the office in the late afternoon and he appeared suddenly in the doorway, carrying a suitcase in one hand and wearing plain clothes – jeans and a brown shirt – with his white coat on top. He looked young and lost and a bit bewildered, but that wasn’t why I thought what I did. It was because of something else, something I could see in his face.

He said, ‘Hello...? Is this the hospital?’

His voice was unexpectedly deep for somebody so tall and thin.

‘Come in,’ I said. ‘Put down your bag.’

He came in, but he didn’t put down the bag. He held it close while he looked around at the pink walls, the empty chairs, the dusty desk in the corner, the frail plants wilting in their pots. I could see that he thought there’d been some kind of mistake. I felt sorry for him.

‘I’m Frank Eloff,’ I said.

‘I’m Laurence Waters.’

‘I know.’

‘You know...?’

He seemed amazed that we should be expecting him, though he’d been sending faxes for days already, announcing his arrival.

‘We’re sharing a room,’ I told him. ‘Let me take you over.’

The room was in a separate wing. We had to cross an open space of ground, close to the parking lot. When he came in he must have walked this way, but now he looked at the path through the long grass, the ragged trees overhead dropping their burden of leaves, as if he’d never seen them before.

We went down the long passage to the room. I’d lived and slept alone in here until today. Two beds, a cupboard, a small carpet, a print on one wall, a mirror, a green sofa, a low coffee table made of synthetic wood, a lamp. It was all basic standard issue. The few occupied rooms all looked the same, as in some featureless bleak hotel. The only trace of individuality was in the configuration of the furniture, but I’d never bothered to shift mine around till two days ago, when an extra bed had been brought in. I also hadn’t added anything. There was no personality in the ugly, austere furniture; against this neutral backdrop, even a piece of cloth would have been revealing.

‘You can take that bed,’ I said. ‘There’s space in the cupboard. The bathroom’s through that door.’

‘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.

Later we went over to the main building together. There was nobody in the office, although Claudia Santander was still officially on duty and Tehogo was supposed to be around. While we waited for Dr Ngema to appear, we sat and drank coffee in silence. Years of my life, sour with caffeine, had been sipped away in this room. A clock on the wall stood silent and broken, the hands fixed for ever at ten to three. The only thing that had changed here since I arrived was the dartboard on the back of the door. I had brought it up from the recreation room one Sunday, hoping to while away some hours. But there are only so many times that you can throw a dart into a board before the idea of an aim and a target begins to lose its point.

Dr Ngema arrived punctually at nine. She was here for ward rounds. This was a daily routine, even on those days – which is to say most of the time – when there were no patients in the hospital. There was always something to discuss, however inconsequential or arbitrary, some point of protocol or procedure. But today, as it happened, there were two patients to attend to.

She stopped in the doorway and her eyes went sideways to the anomalous brightness of Laurence’s white coat. He had stood up and was smiling, holding out his hand.

‘I’m Laurence Waters,’ he said.

She shook his hand in confusion. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘yes. When did you arrive?’

‘Yesterday. Last night. I wanted to come and see you then, but Frank said...’

‘I thought it would be too late,’ I said. ‘I told him to wait till today.’

‘Yes,’ Dr Ngema said. ‘Yes.’ She nodded vigorously.

A silence fell. Laurence was standing there with a broad and expectant smile, eyes shining, and it was obvious that he thought something would finally happen. All the rest – his arrival, waiting, talking to me – was just preparation. He had met the boss now, and a life of duty and meaning would be given to him.

But Dr Ngema was looking around, frowning. ‘Where is Tehogo?’ she said.

‘I don’t know. He hasn’t arrived yet.’

‘Oh. Well. Yes... Shall we go?’

I walked next to her, while Laurence followed behind. Our footsteps echoed importantly in all the emptiness. Both the patients were in the first ward, the only one that was really functioning. This was two doors up the passage from the office. The first room you passed, on the left, was the surgery, where examinations and any kind of operating were done. That door was closed. The next one you came to, on the right, was the ward. It looked like a normal room in a normal hospital. Two rows of beds, curtains, a dim fluorescent glow.

We all congregated around the bed of the first patient, a young man in his early twenties who had come into the country illegally on foot. Because we were close to the border we got a lot of these cases: people who had walked great distances without money or food. The border crossing was dangerous. This young man had made it through, but he was badly sunburned and dehydrated and his feet were raw. He was being intravenously rehydrated, and seemed to be making good progress. He didn’t communicate with us, except by frightened glarings of his eyes.

‘His blood pressure is 130 over 80. When did Tehogo do this chart?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘He must write in the time. He must do it clearly. Will you tell him? Frank, his temperature’s a bit high. But he’s passing urine again. What do you think?’

‘Try him again with solid foods in the morning.’

‘I agree. Will you pass that on to Tehogo as well?’

‘Okay.’

‘When do you think he can be discharged?’

‘He’s making good progress,’ I said. ‘Day after tomorrow.’

Dr Ngema nodded. We weren’t friends; she didn’t have any friends, but she always made a public point of asking my opinion. We had what is known as ‘a good working relationship’.

We crossed over now to the other patient, a woman who’d been brought in by her husband a couple of days before in a lot of pain. It was her appendix, about to burst, and Dr Ngema had operated immediately. Appendicitis was the sort of emergency we liked: recognizable and treatable, within the scope of our resources.

Most surgery in the hospital was carried out by Dr Ngema, though her hand was far from steady, and in my opinion she had an unreliable eye. For personal reasons I was keen to build up some kind of record with surgery, but I was only allowed to do occasional minor procedures. It rankled with me, but I couldn’t afford to let any resentment show. I had swallowed a lot of frustration over the years.

This morning, for example. I could see very quickly that all wasn’t well with this patient – she was weak, and a brief examination showed some distension of her abdomen – but this wasn’t the time or place to be too direct. Dr Ngema was sensitive to criticism, but there was more to it than that. If anything was wrong we would have to send the patient to that big hospital in the nearest town, an hour away, where there were more sophisticated supplies and staff. In extreme cases, where we could do nothing more, we were obliged to pass the patients on, but this was always a last resort, because every failure on our part made it harder to justify the thin funding we still had.

‘Why don’t we keep an eye on her?’ I said. ‘We can monitor it.’

Dr Ngema nodded slowly. ‘All right.’

‘It’s leaking,’ Laurence said.

We both looked at him.

‘The stump is leaking,’ he said. ‘Look. Distended abdomen. Painful to pressure. You can’t leave it too long.’

The silence that followed was filled with the hoarse breathing of the woman in the bed.

‘Laurence,’ I said.

I had spoken sharply, to put him in his place, but there was nothing to follow on his name. He was right: we both knew it, and the simple fact of his statement was obvious enough to shame us.

‘Yes,’ Dr Ngema said. ‘Yes. We can all see that, I think.’

‘What would you like me to do?’ I asked quickly.

‘Take her this morning. I’ll stand by for you, Frank, while you’re gone. It’s better that we... yes. Yes. Let’s do it.’

She was talking calmly and carefully, but it wasn’t a happy moment. When she turned abruptly and walked back to the office I didn’t take up my usual place next to her, but lagged behind, a pace out of step. Laurence jumped in next to her.

‘Dr Ngema,’ he said. ‘Could I talk to you for a moment? I want to know what’s expected of me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What are my duties?’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’m keen to get started, you see.’