The Good Doctor Read Online Free PDF Page B

wrong on her, it didn’t fit into her mouth, but I liked the demure determination with which she’d set up this little barrier. She seemed suddenly mysterious to
me.
    I sat on a wooden crate in the corner for maybe two hours, talking to her. It wasn’t a conversation; I was asking her questions and she answered. Who are you? Where do you come from? How old
are you? I wanted to know everything.
    She’d been working there for three years. She did everything in the tiny shack – ate, slept, washed. When I asked her where all her things were she pointed to a battered suitcase of clothes
under one of the shelves. She showed me her bed: a ragged blanket, folded up neatly into a square. A rusty bucket in the corner was her bath. She got water, she said, from the village just behind.
Somebody there also came to bring food for her.
    Was it her village? No, it wasn’t. Her place was far from here. Why did she live here? Because of the shop. But why was the shop here? Because her husband built it here. It was his idea, he had
brought her to work. It was he who got all the curios and carvings from the other villages and brought them here for her to sell. Did he stay with her in the shop? No, somewhere else. In the
village at the back? No, in some other place, she was not sure where. He came sometimes, sometimes. When did she last see him? She held up six fingers. Hours, days, weeks?
    She talked in half-words and mime, smiling the whole time. Once or twice she laughed at herself. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I was fascinated by this language of signals and signs, with its
obscure calligraphy of gestures, that seemed to have been invented by us alone. I had never been anywhere before that was like this tiny square of sand with its shelves of wooden animals. Long
before it got too dark in there to see properly I had the impulse to do what I eventually did: lean over and touch my fingers to her neck. She went very still.
    ‘Come with me,’ I said. ‘Let’s go somewhere.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘My room.’ I felt reckless.
    She shook her head and pulled away from my hand.
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Not possible,’ she said. ‘Not possible.’
    I had gone too far; she was tense and distant with me now; I had read the whole situation wrongly. But when I had gathered myself together and stood up to leave, she said suddenly:
    ‘Later.’
    ‘Later?’
    ‘You come after. After, when the shop is...’ She gestured to indicate closed, shut down.
    ‘What time?’
    ‘Eight. When it is dark.’
    ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll come back later.’
    I went back to the hospital and showered and shaved and changed my clothes. I was charged with a voltage of yearning and dread. The assignation seemed to have arisen from a place in me I’d never
known till then. What did I want? Why was I doing this? It occurred to me that the whole thing could be a set-up; other people could be lying in wait; murder, abduction, blackmail ringed me round.
I knew clearly that I should not go back.
    But I went back. I was very afraid. She was waiting for me. She told me to move the car away from the shack, further down, behind a line of bushes. I walked back through darkness, my heart
tolling like a bell. She was also frightened, looking around her, holding her breath. The lamp was out. She led me in by the hand, to a space of dead time in which memory has no hold.
    It was always the same. The pattern that we laid down that first night was repeated, over and over, on the nights that followed – the furtive parking of the car, the walk back to the door where
she was waiting. Then she tied the door closed behind us and we lay down on the ragged blanket on the ground.
    The sex was quick and urgent, half-clothed, always with an element of fear. I didn’t know what we were afraid of, till one night she gave it a name: I mustn’t come tomorrow, she said.
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Danger, danger.’
    ‘What danger?’
    ‘My husband.’
    Obviously I had to