Free The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut Page B

the main wing. In all the years I’d been there nobody
had ever touched that grass. There was no mower, so he’d got hold of an old rusty scythe from somewhere. He was red in the face and sweating, and the work was slow. On the back step of the
recreation room, Themba and Julius, the kitchen staff, were watching him with baffled amusement.
    ‘Your friend is crazy,’ Julius said to me.
    ‘Well, it’ll look better afterwards,’ I said.
    I supposed that was the point. And when the brown heaps of dense, dead grass had been carried off behind the kitchen to the new compost heap that Laurence had started there, the ground between
the two buildings was bare and clean. It did look good.
    But Laurence only frowned at it and stood, panting.
    ‘What’s the matter? That’s a big job you did.’
    ‘Yes. I know.’
    ‘Aren’t you satisfied with yourself?’
    ‘Yes, I am,’ he said. ‘I am.’
    But he didn’t look satisfied to me.
    And the next day he was up on the roof, pulling out the weeds and grass that were growing there. The sun was hot and in the middle of the day his tall figure waxed and waned in laborious
isolation. I took him a bottle of water and stood up there with him while he drank it.
    ‘Nobody’s going to thank you for this,’ I said.
    ‘Thank me? How do you mean?’
    ‘I don’t understand why you’re bothering.’
    ‘The roof should be clean.’
    ‘Maybe. But it makes no difference. And the stuff will only grow back.’
    ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said stubbornly. ‘It looks better when it’s done.’ And the roof did look clean afterwards, like the ground he’d cleared down below. From where we were standing we had a
view out over the town and the rolling hills near by, and the high expansiveness made me feel satisfied and complete, as if I too had been working the whole day.
    But of course I was right: the weeds and the grass did grow back, and as the slow green millimetres accumulated nobody said a word. And nobody cut them down. Laurence’s attention had moved on to
a new project somewhere else. And when I saw, a month or two later, that somebody had broken the cheap lock on the chain that held the door at the end of the passage, I said nothing about that
either.
    I had my own preoccupations. Not all of my life was centred on Laurence or the hospital: I had other pursuits, further afield, to distract me. I had gone back to visiting Maria at night. Not
every night, not in the same way as before. But once or twice a week a restless impulse came over me and I headed for my car.
    The sex was different now. Something hard and brutal and hungry had come into it. Maybe it was only sex now – the romance of it had gone. I was rough with her. Not violent, but with an
inclination towards it that threw everything off balance. I was always on top, I held her down. And there was an answering passivity, an acquiescence, in her. But we didn’t really touch each other.
We didn’t even try to talk. It was as if I was looking for something I couldn’t get to; the closest I could come was by hammering, hammering, on this heavy wooden door.
    I paid her every time now. And that’s what it was: a payment. Our meetings were transactions, the limits of which were practical. When we did talk it was about arrangements. A couple of times
she warned me not to come on particular nights. I accepted these restrictions without letting them conjure any personal feelings. The other man didn’t exist, except as a prohibition on my time, or
as a symbol in the form of a white car outside the shack.
    Only once did the distance close up; she said, ‘Where is that man – your friend?’
    I took a moment to understand. ‘Laurence? He’s not my friend.’
    ‘No?’
    ‘No. Well, maybe he is.’ I watched her pulling her dress over her head, slipping her arms into the broken sleeves. ‘Why do you want to know about him?’
    She gestured.
    ‘His face...?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘What about his face?’
    She was