by Damon Galgut
And I was thinking now, really thinking, about what had happened last night. In my mind I saw him again, crossing the car park in the dark. But my mind went further now: to the long road unrolling in the headlamps, taking him to the little wooden hovel under the trees... and inside.
It was only now, too late, that I thought about Maria. Somehow the whole thing had been about Laurence until now; she was on the side somewhere, an abstract problem I couldn’t solve. But she wasn’t abstract today; she was solid and warm and real, a human body I had lain with. And I had done nothing to help her.
I was on duty; I had to get dressed. But Laurence was also dressing, briskly and seriously, as if he had somewhere to go.
‘What are you doing?’
He stopped, his shirt half-buttoned. ‘I’m going out there.’
‘Where?’
‘You know where.’ He wasn’t looking at me now as he finished doing up his shirt. ‘I said I’d check on her today.’
‘You can’t go now. There’ll be people... It’s the daytime.’
‘But I’m on duty tonight.’
‘I’ll do it.’
‘I told her I’d be —’
‘I’ll do it, Laurence.’
The note in my voice froze us both. He stared at me, then shrugged and looked away.
The hours of duty stretched idly away, and I thought only about her. When I came back to the room in the evening it was too early to go to Maria. Instead I did something odd. I cleaned the room. I went into town and bought detergents and soaps and cloths; then I came back and scrubbed and scoured the floors and walls and windows. Every corner. Afterwards I felt better for a while, as if an offensive mark somewhere had been erased.
But I couldn’t sit quietly and when I went out in the car it was still early, too early to go to Maria, and so for an hour or two I drove around the town. Empty streets, the dark sockets of the lamps, the blank blind eyes of windows watching me. Then it was time and I headed out along the road.
When I got to the bluegum trees I turned off and stopped almost exactly where the white car had been parked a few nights ago, my headlamps angled away from the road. But they shone on dust and bush and empty air; the shack was gone.
14
For a few moments it seemed possible that I was in the wrong place. But when I got out of the car the outline of the shack was visible: a square paler than the surrounding soil, like the mark of a plaster on sunburned skin. A few loose planks and bits of plastic lay around.
Everything had happened here. On this little patch of sand. It had felt like a whole world, and now I saw it was just any piece of bush. In two weeks it would be covered again by weeds and thorns and grass.
The dust I’d kicked up drifted like smoke in the headlamps. I walked away from the light, along the little footpath to the village. It was a distance of twenty or thirty steps, but I’d never walked it before. As I got closer a dog barked at me; another took up the sound, and it was accompanied by this angry chorus that I made my entrance into the naked circle of earth at the heart of the village. The little mud houses ringed me around. It was all dust and dung and the ash of old fires; it was what I knew it would be.
Nobody was around. No lights were burning and the only movement was the dogs, skulking closer. I stood there as if somebody was coming to meet me. But I had never been so alone.
I knew then that she could be anywhere. She could be five steps away from me, in one of those houses, or in any one of the countless little villages scattered in the bush. Or she could be under the ground, in a shallow grave. For me, she had fallen off the edge of the world.
The anguish that rolled down then was like the first feeling ever to touch me: its rawness, its power, was almost like love.
The dogs were coming closer. I was an intruder. I didn’t come, like Laurence Waters, in the daytime, with medicine and good advice; I came in out of the dark with the snarling of skeletal dogs for company. And there was nothing to be done except hurry back along the path to my car and drive back to town.
I drove at a wild speed. It was as if I was rushing to keep some assignation, but there was nowhere to get to, no destination at the end of the road.
Unless it was the hospital room, with Laurence sitting up in bed, writing something on a piece of paper.
He glanced up at me. ‘Hello,’ he said, sounding preoccupied. ‘I’m planning.’
‘Planning?’
‘My clinic. Never mind. Oh, wow, I almost forgot!’ He looked sharply up at me. ‘How is she doing?’
‘She’s doing all right,’ I said, turning my face away from him. He must’ve seen how I felt and thought he understood the reason, but he didn’t understand.
In the morning I went back to the village. I parked next to where the shack had been; I walked the little footpath again. And now there were people: children playing, a woman shelling beans in a doorway, two old men deep in conversation. In the mud a fat pig lolled and the same dogs from last night started up out of the shade, barking.
I hoped to see a familiar face, the woman who brought food or water to Maria, somebody I knew. But no. And the man I did speak to, who was the only person I could find who spoke English, didn’t know much about Maria. Yes, the shack had stood there. But now it was taken down. He thought the people had gone there somewhere, over there. He gestured at the blue hills in the distance.
Yes, yes, some of the older women sighed in agreement. They had gone over there.
Did they know Maria, I asked. Was any of them her friend?
But I could see in their puzzled faces that they hadn’t heard the name. It was as I’d thought: her real name was something different, something she hadn’t told me.
I didn’t have much hope, but I made a little speech. If any of them could find Maria, I said, if any of them sent her to me, I would pay a reward. I took my wallet out to show them.
‘Who are you?’ the young man, my translator, asked me.
‘My name is Frank Eloff. I’m a doctor. I work at the hospital in town.’
At this their baffled faces broke into smiles. There was a buzz of talk around me. The hospital! The clinic! And the memory of that recent event set loose a happy spirit amongst them, similar to the new mood amongst the staff at the hospital.
I’d almost forgotten. But of course it had happened here. And I heard one of the old women, who couldn’t otherwise speak a word of English, say ‘doctor Laurence, doctor Laurence’ with a toothless grin of pleasure.
When I got away from them, back to the hospital, the weight in me had altered shape a little. Yes, it was Maria I was looking for, but her absence had spilled over into other, adjoining areas. For the first time the things I had done and said over the last few days began to look like a kind of madness. And the dark stranger in my head, who was so easy to blame for everything, seemed less separate from me than before.
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. W
e’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.