The Good Doctor Read Online Free PDF

ja, ja, I have.’
    I held the blunt shape of the fish in my lap as we drove out of the bluegums. Against the late light the escarpment was a dark wave, poised to break.
    ‘You’ve been there before,’ he said.
    ‘Yes, I stopped on my first day. On my way to the hospital.’
    ‘But that was years ago.’
    ‘Yes.’
    He rolled down his window and the warm air went over us. We were speeding through the end of the afternoon and it felt as if all the places we’d visited today were strewn haphazardly behind us,
like points on a map that only we could read. It had been a good day, weightless somehow, so it came with the heaviness of a blow when he suddenly asked in a conversational voice, ‘Have you slept
with that woman?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘That woman in the shop. Have you —’
    ‘Yes, I heard you. No. No. What gave you that idea?’
    ‘I don’t know, something in the air.’
    ‘Well, I haven’t.’
    ‘Are you offended?’
    ‘No, I’m just... surprised.’
    ‘Sorry. When I think something I just say it. I can’t help it.’
    We didn’t speak again for the rest of the drive. It was almost twilight by the time we got back – the whole day gone, the end of my shift of duty. I didn’t return to the office, but I didn’t
want to sit in the room either. There was nothing to do and I felt restless, uncontained.
    Laurence didn’t want to go for supper, he said he wasn’t hungry, so I went alone to the dining room. But I wasn’t hungry either, and I found myself sitting in the recreation room in front of the
television, the sound turned off, empty images flickering, throwing a table-tennis ball from hand to hand. A discontent was stirring in me. Old questions I had learned not to ask were back with me
again. Old yearnings and needs. It was hard to sit still and after an hour or two I dropped the ball and let it roll. I went out to the car park. The light in my room was on, but it was turned off
suddenly as I watched.
    I drove slowly at first, but then with gathering speed. It felt as if I had a mission to be discharged with urgency and purpose, when the truth was all aimlessness, unease. I parked in the usual
place and walked back to the shack. She’d heard the car and was waiting for me. She took me by the hand and led me in and turned her back briefly while she latched the door – a lock a child could
break, a piece of string wound on a nail.

3
    I hadn’t lied about everything to Laurence: I did stop at the little shack that first day on my way to the town. I was looking at things; this was one more thing to look at.
And Maria was there. Wearing that same red dress, maybe, her feet bare. She said hello as I cast my dazed eye over the shelves of carved animals.
    ‘You want elephant,’ she said.
    ‘No, no, I’m just looking.’
    ‘Looking is free.’
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    Or maybe none of this was said, maybe her dress was black. I don’t remember any of it. I don’t even have an image of her face from that first day; I only know that I went there and that I
certainly saw her, because the next time I went back some old recognition stirred in me. And she knew me immediately; she smiled and asked me how I was.
    This was almost two years later. I was driving back from taking a patient to that other, better hospital, and I saw the sign tied to a tree next to the road. It was something about the sign –
the pathos of the rough lettering, the misspelling – that made me stop.
    Then her face, the wide smile. ‘How are you today?’ she said. ‘You are not sad?’
    ‘Not sad?’
    ‘Last time you are too much sad.’
    She was wearing a dark blue cotton dress that had been rubbed down almost to transparency in places. Her wrists and ankles were heavy with beads.
    ‘What’s your name?’
    ‘I am Maria.’
    ‘No, what’s your real name? Your African name.’
    But something closed over in her face; she dropped her eyes. ‘Maria,’ she repeated. ‘Maria.’
    I left it like that. The name was