All This by Chance

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  She read and added notes to the card. This is what gave her most satisfaction, the tracking down, the fact that she might be of use to those who trusted her. Why deny the reward of feeling that? But she recalled the South African specialist who once had lectured her on the kind of diseases she now saw almost daily, a clever sensitive man who told his students, almost as a refrain, that it is your intellect that will save the lives of those who come to you, not the nice feelings you may have about them. Although adding what at the time she did not appreciate as now she did, ‘to keep those for when they may be of use, of course’. Meaning at the end, when that was all there was, little else left to offer. But this morning’s patient was nowhere near that. Chloramphenicol. She was pleased she already had guessed what to recommend. Of course the old man would go back to conditions that were prime for contracting the cycle over again. But never think of the big picture, the same teacher had surprised his class by saying, or you will throw up your hands in horror and become a missionary. It was one of his curious attempts at humour. But his message was clear. To take one instance at a time was what you were trained to do. The patient under your hands is not a statistic. Otherwise you despair. That, or fall back on the kind of faith she supposed her colleagues here must be sustained by.

  Lisa placed the textbook back with the other volumes arranged between their metal bookends. In the front was a postcard she had kept with her from Athens, and looked at often in those years as she worked in her room in London, a black-and-white photograph of a young woman’s marble head. Hygeia, explained a note on the other side. Another gesture she supposed to sentimentality. She had bought it that week she decided that yes, this is what she would do, she would leave Fergus and the flat in Ravini Street, she would go back to Dunedin, and after that specialise as she had done. And try to speak the truth, always. How simple and grand it had all been, to think of that as she walked through the museum along from Omonoia Square. She had bought the card as she left the museum. In fact, had bought two of them, and posted one back home, telling them what she had decided to do, telling her parents and David, who was still at school, and Babcia, busy at her baking, at her needlework, although it is the old lady in repose Lisa likes to think of, her sitting in the sun in the conservatory for long hours at a time; or when the sun failed to come out, in the sitting room with the wall heater turned on, her hands resting in the lap of the apron she insisted now on wearing at all times, and watched—or so the others in the family assumed—watched always with a curiously attentive interest the glint and poise and sudden flicker of the goldfish in the tank between the bookshelves, with its constant rise of bubbles from between the miniature rocks. Eva would say she hated the sight of the thing, but smiled as she said it. At times she sat beside her aunt and let her own hand rest on those folded on the apron. All this coming to her as she glances at the photograph of the marvellous stone head.

  Lisa’s mind felt cleared, rested even, by her reading, by her looking last thing over the typed sheet on its clipboard one of the sisters gave her each evening as she left the ‘office’, the spotless room where the medical records were kept, the schedules for the next day prepared. She took the bottle of water from its shelf in the ice cupboard and swallowed the tablets, the last thing she did each night, the capsule for malaria, the mild sedative which she had added only in these past few weeks as the boy came into her mind once the light on her desk was turned off, and she lay beneath the one sheet that covered her. More and more, it seemed his life was for her to decide on. It was a weight she knew was illogical and, more than that, absurd. She had seen a play once with her friend Alex, who liked to talk about choice and other words that he said were the things we must think about, the play would say it so much better than he could put it. She was tired the evening they went, and was irritated by the talk, by how little story there was to what they sat through, but absurd, Alex kept returning to that as he enthused, and she told him could they move on to something else? She had never much enjoyed talk like that for its own sake. She lay in the dark, the fan’s chug so insistent now there was nothing to distract from it. She waited for the sedative to work its course. She heard the movement outside, as she did now each evening. The sound of the chair moved on the veranda where he would have been sitting until he knew she slept, the brush of his opened hand moving across the door, a slow circular sweeping repeated each evening, as if some kind of ritual before the day was truly night. And then his moving away. She lay in the dark and her eyes grew heavy and her friend’s repeated word after the play circling in her mind as well, beating as if an insect that had lain until now to clip monotonously against the walls.

  She quite knew what Declan hinted at. As she knew he did not for a minute give credence to it, yet felt he must raise it with her. What the ageing, compassionate Bernard had heard talk of as well, and also disbelieved. But as her friend had told her, one must never forget we are among remote and tired and anxious people, we missionaries, where goodwill may surprisingly run thin, where rumour easily flares, where local superstitions feed on little enough. We all have our mantras to keep so much at bay.

  The boy, as the Compound said, had come out of the night, where else could he have come from? One day no one has heard of him or seen him, a day later he is standing in the early yellow light, ten yards from the veranda of the clinic, unaware what building it is he waits at. He wears a white shirt, a pair of black trousers folded up at the cuffs, a leather strip for a belt. He is bare-footed, bare-headed. He is neither short nor tall. No one thought of him as a child, no one thought of him as yet a man. His cheeks are smooth, his skin is a little lighter than that of most of those who look at him, but there is disagreement even on that. So much depends on where he stands, on how he looks back at you. He is there facing the building when one of the young sisters first comes down to unlock the theatre, the admin office, the room for patients. The figure is not standing as most strangers do, with a relative or friend who has come with them, but with a solitariness that at once defines him; and even more, the sister will say, not just standing there but giving the impression that he has been set down and placed rather than arrived. As no one quite puts it, but as fact bears out, if nothing is known about a person, then anything is possible. If anything is possible, there is no guessing with substance.

  The English doctor had beckoned him to come across. The boy watched her, allowed her first to touch his hand and then his arms, to place her stethoscope on his chest and on his back, to tap his knees for reflexes, to shine a light in his eyes, and then to touch the scar from a long time ago that ran from the hairline at the back of his neck across his shoulder and sloped towards his chest, like a piece of pale twisted cord. His eyes followed her quiet speaking to him; his head turned sharply when Luke revved the engine of his jeep outside the hospital, waiting to drive a patient and her child out to her village. He can hear all right, the young sister said, but is silent as a lizard.

  When Lisa coaxed him to the office and sat him at the desk with a piece of paper in front of him, and gave him a pencil to hold, he turned the pencil between his fingers but that was all, although she showed him how to mark with it. It was also clear that apart from the doctor he did not like people coming close to him. He ate food that was left on a bench for him outside the kitchen where meals were made for the school. He would not go inside a classroom, or into the chapel. A workman set a thin mattress for him in a lean-to behind the shed where the jeep and a tractor and several mopeds were kept. The Mission quickly became used to him. But as Bernard was the one to say, he was on the other side of the Compound, even when you were standing beside him.

  And as everyone saw, he followed the doctor at a distance, and liked to stand where he might see her, even from a long way off. Yet Lisa no more than the others truly knew how much he comprehended, apart from his trust in her. He was given the name Francis, although she thought, That is not his name, that is nothing like whatever name he has, and referred to him only as the boy, as if t
here were no other he might be confused with. He walked the Compound and watched and took things in. If the workmen were not close to him, he shifted timber and sand for them, moved buckets of water to where he knew they were needed. He carried plastic baskets of laundry for the sisters. But he was quick to move should they seem too close, and when Father Ambrose called to him he did not approach, as though he felt the suspicion the tall man held for him. The boy’s strange self-possession even as he withdrew seemed to irk him. As Declan repeated, if we don’t know the truth of something, there’s no shortage of something else to fill the gap.

  Lisa watched the women who were her colleagues, the local women who cleaned and helped in the wards, the kitchens, the school. There was nothing in their way of relating to her that seemed different, and yet she felt some change in the currents of the air, in the glances she was alert to. Even when Sister Bernard joked to her, ‘He is like a carving, that boy who follows you like a dog,’ it was said lightly, as if the older woman was amused by it, and yet hinting, was it, at something left unsaid? This boy who had come from nowhere and could tell them nothing of himself, neither a child nor a man, but drawing attention by his sense of mystery that shaded towards something inexplicable, even sinister, as others observed the grace of his movements, the silence that surrounded him almost as if a physical barrier, his following the frizzy-haired doctor with her paleness that sometimes startled those who saw her for the first time.

  The boy who now each evening leaned against a tree trunk twenty yards from the Residency, waiting on Lisa’s return from her last tasks at the hospital, or from the evening meal. Sometimes she left the outer door open, in front of the wire screen the curious might look through into the room where she sat late and worked until the door was closed and the lights turned off, the boy’s white shirt showing out in the night against the tree he leaned against in the clicking, busy darkness. Of course it is innocent, Bernard said with her humorous directness to the younger sisters, no woman she had ever heard of needed to travel to a place like this if behaviour of that kind was what she had in mind! Yet her wisely knowing too, and hinting as much to ‘the girls’ as she thought of them, that once a story was given a bone to feed on, rumour ran loose like fire in the scrub at the edge of a village. Hadn’t Father Declan told her how the boys in the senior classes already joked about it? And the workmen. ‘The ghost,’ they called him, never Francis. The ghost who haunts the doctor.

  There was little that was vicious in their chatter, but their ribald amusement at the boy’s dogged attendance carried the suspicion that was always there of a foreign woman who had no husband, even one whose paleness was unattractive, whose figure was meagre, one a speechless teenage boy, perhaps under an enchantment of some kind, might become obsessed with? Bernard was alert to the hurt that lay behind such talk, running her hand along her friend’s arm, but laughing with her too, advising how for a woman not given to prayer, surely mocking nonsense was the best defence? But alone, Lisa more convinced it was for her to protect him. The thought coming to preoccupy her, her writing to Murray in the library in Keppel Street, asking that he send her, urgently, anything he might have on autism, on related conditions, on trauma, whatever might give her some insight to a mind beyond her comprehending. In a rare flare of bitterness, she said during one of her evenings talking with Declan, ‘I do everything I can to help him, and what comes across most is that I’m somehow unnatural. Resented.’

  ‘Few enough think that,’ Declan said. ‘Very few.’

  ‘Your superior,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘Ambrose has a natural calling as a vigilante.’

  For the only time, Lisa was angered by her friend’s knack for deflecting, his deference to some code he adjusted to that was beyond her. ‘You joke about it, Declan, but you are subservient too.’

  His looking at her frankly, his admitting, ‘As if, my dear friend, I’m not aware of that,’ and her quick regret that she may have hurt him. But ‘Don’t,’ he anticipated her. ‘Don’t regret your saying what you think to be the case.’

  They sat on, contented enough with the long silence between them. Her briefly touching his warm, plump hand. And her not being sure that she understood him, as he stood a few minutes later, screwing the top down on the thermos, the warmth and distance in his voice that moved and saddened her as he said, ‘So much for all of us. To keep at bay.’

  At the moment of his saying it, the realisation not so much coming in on her as seeming to arise from what was deepest in her, the fact of quite how intense it was, her dislike of the tall dark cleric who so resented the boy’s presence in the Compound, and yet held back from compelling him to leave. There would be too much feeling against his doing that. Declan’s now saying as he stood, replacing his chair against the small table there between them, speaking as if from the blue and yet how pertinent to what she thought, ‘They may think they prevail, men like that. And we say to ourselves, “They don’t, they don’t,” we say that, even as they do.’

  Then how quickly matters changed. ‘A few problems sorted out,’ as she wrote the next week, imagining her father as he read her pages, lifting his head to catch his reflection in the expanse of plate glass in the house out on the coast. Across to the big lift of the rock with its own distant clinging history. To the sea whose breaking he seemed never to weary of looking out to. It was comforting to think of him like that. His hair of course much greyer, thinner, she knew that, than it was as she liked to imagine him. The man in the dispensary at the back of the shop. The man happy enough to be bewildered, a little, by what he loved, and what love had brought with it.

  These last few evenings Lisa had stayed on in the clinic and the admin room and sent her assistant off early, to her prayers, her reading, whatever it was they did in those last hours before bedtime in their quarters up on the rise beside the chapel. Not even Eugene, the twenty-year-old who looked five years younger, could have brought more sparkle to the chromium surfaces, more neatness to the theatre she would be back in the following morning, for the hernia she saw at the top of the schedule’s typed list. A blue vase of flowers placed there on the desk. Not even that, she thought, I have been here nine months, and not even knowing the name of the spiky blooms in front of her. Flowers. People. How much we cram into simple elusive words.

  She ran boiling water across the teabag in the mug she held beneath it. The quick tang of the cinnamon rising to her above the pervading disinfectant. ‘What a sensualist I’ve become,’ she said to the empty office, the delight she found in so simple a thing as this. She read over the details for the next day, the timetable as familiar to her as her own pulse. The mornings in theatre, the clinics in the afternoon, occasionally with Luke, and one of the sisters as translator, driving into the open country that was still startling to her, to follow up on some request, some report, of a person too ill to make the journey by foot to the promise of whatever ‘the Mission’ must mean to them. The infections, the diseases, that could still surprise her, the shock that never left her, of how little it might take to save a life, or lose one.

  There was an asterisk beside one of the names on the list, which told her the patient had been treated before. The writing on the card was in a hand she did not recognise, which told her, surely, the patient by now must be older than most. The neat fountain-penned script she assumed from a sister now beneath one of the wooden crosses on the further side of the church. She had walked up there soon after she arrived, when she sought out details to tell her something of the community she would work with. She disliked the too easy melancholy of standing before the graves of strangers, the limiting clichés of what might come to mind. Even at home, on the trip back the year after Babcia’s death, in the section of cemetery where the old lady lay among her own people. She had gone because of David’s insistence—chilled, if she was honest, by the headstones, the lettering she could not read, as well as the words there in English, the conventional comforting scraps imploring God to keep in mind h
is daughter, his faithful ones. The strangeness of her relative’s name, spelled out there in full, as she realised she had never until then seen it. As she thought again now, this trying to make a person out of the scraps we’re given to put together!

  She returned the card to its file, and carried the narrow drawer across to its cabinet. She came back to sit with her head leaned against the wall, her chair tilted back, her eyes closed, her hands circling the mug she had taken up again from the table. The luxury of simply this. She opened her eyes to Ambrose standing at the doorway, watching her.

  ‘You should have spoken,’ she said to him. But she smiled, telling him, ‘You surprised me avoiding work!’

  ‘I know how tired the doctor gets.’ His stillness part of what unsettled her. Whenever he stood and spoke, not only to her but to the sisters, to his fellow teachers, to the students who were in awe of him and feared not any punishment he might inflict but simply his presence, there was this sense Lisa experienced now, his looking not directly at but above her. As though this was not the talking of one person with another, but an announcement that went beyond. The fall of his robe from his shoulders to his sandals, the neatness of its folds, the immobility of his features—as if everything about him, all that one saw, was an act of will. He made her think of a man who was carved. Who had carved himself. As she looked up to him now, determining not to stand although he had entered the room.