“He was a very good man,” said Mma Ramotswe.
Boitelo’s reply came quickly. “Some doctors are good men,” she said.
There was a note in her voice which alerted Mma Ramotswe. And then she thought:Yes, that is it! That is the oldest problem that nurses have. Doctors who make advances to them. This young woman has had a doctor pestering her. That is why she is frightened. It’s simple. There is very little new in the affairs of people. The same things happen again and again.
But then Boitelo continued. “Do you think that a doctor can be a criminal, Mma?” she asked.
Mma Ramotswe remembered the doctors she had met all those years ago—those two doctors, twins, involved in a profitable fraud in which they shared only one medical qualification between them. Yes, doctors could be criminals. Those had been criminal doctors; they had shown no concern for the safety of their patients, just like those doctors one read about who deliberately killed their patients as if out of sheer bravado. Those stories were shocking because they represented the most extreme breach of trust imaginable, but it appeared that they were true. And for a moment Mma Ramotswe considered the terrible possibility that Boitelo had found herself working for one of those homicidal doctors, right here in Gaborone. That would be a powerful cause for fear; indeed, just to think of it made her flesh come up in goose bumps.
“Yes,” she answered. “I do think that. There have been some very wicked doctors who have even killed their patients.” She paused, hardly daring to ask the question. “You haven’t stumbled across something like that, Mma?”
She had hoped that Boitelo’s answer would be a swift denial, but it was not. For a moment the young woman seemed to dwell on the question, and then at last she answered. “Not quite,” she said.
Behind her, Mma Makutsi let out a little gasp. Mma Ramotswe had been to the doctor only a few days earlier and had been given a bottle of small white pills which she had been taking religiously. It would be so easy for a doctor to substitute something fatal, should he wish to do so, in the knowledge that his trusting patient would pop the poison into her mouth. But why would any doctor want to do that? What drove a doctor to kill the very person he was meant to save? Was it a madness of some sort; an urge that people have from time to time to do something utterly bizarre and out of character? She herself had felt that once or twice when she had been suddenly tempted to throw a tea-pot at Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. She had been astonished that such an outrageous thought had even entered her mind, but it had, and she had sat there wondering what would happen if she picked up the tea-pot from the table and threw it across the room at poor Mr J.L.B. Matekoni as he sat drinking his afternoon tea, his head full of thoughts of gearboxes and brakes, or whatever it was that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s head was full of. Of course she had not done it, and never would, but the thought had been there, an unwelcome visitor to her otherwise quite rational mind. Perhaps it was the same with those strange cases of the doctors who deliberately killed their patients. Perhaps …
“Not quite?” asked Mma Ramotswe. “Do you mean …”
Boitelo shook her head. “I mean I don’t think that the doctor I’m talking about would go up to a patient and inject too much morphine. No, I don’t mean that. But I still think that what he is doing is wicked.” She paused. “But I was going to start at the beginning, Mma. Would you like me to do that?”
“Yes,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And I won’t interrupt you again. You just start. But first, Mma Makutsi will give you a cup of tea. It’s red bush tea, Mma. Do you mind?”
“This tea is very good for you,” said Boitelo, taking the cup which Mma Makutsi was handing her. “My aunt, who is late, used to drink it.”
Mma Ramotswe could not help smiling. It seemed strange to say that something was good for one and in the same breath say that one who used it is now late. There need be no connection, of course, but it seemed strange nonetheless. She imagined an advertisement:Red Bush Tea: much appreciated by people who are late. That would not be a good recommendation, she felt, whatever the intention behind it.
Boitelo took a sip of the bush tea and put her cup down on the table in front of her.
“After I qualified, Mma,” Boitelo went on, “I came to work in the Princess Marina. I became a theatre nurse there, and I think that I was good at the job. But then, after a while, I became tired of standing behind the doctors all the time and passing them things. I also didn’t like the bright lights, which I think gave me headaches. And I don’t think that they are good for your eyes, those lights. When I came out of the theatre and closed my eyes I could still see bright circles, as if the lights were still there. So I decided to do something different, and I saw an advertisement for a nurse to work in a general practitioner’s clinic. I was interested in this. The surgery was not too far from where I lived, and I would even be able to walk there in the cooler weather. So I went for an interview.
“My interview was on a Monday afternoon, after the doctor had finished seeing his patients. I was due to work that day, but I was able to change my duties around so that I was free to go. I went along and there was Dr …” She had been on the point of giving the name, but she checked herself.
“You don’t have to tell me,” said Mma Ramotswe, remembering that Boitelo had confessed to feeling frightened.
Boitelo looked relieved. “The doctor was there. He was very kind to me and said that he was very pleased to see that I had been a theatre nurse, as he thought that such people were hard workers, and that I would be a good person to have in his clinic. Then he spoke about what the job would involve. He asked me if I understood about confidentiality and about not talking to people about things that I might see or hear while I was working in the clinic. I said I did.
“Then he said to me, ‘I have a friend who has just had an operation in the Princess Marina. Maybe you can tell me how he is doing.’
“He gave me the name of his friend, who is a well-known person because he plays football very well and is very handsome. I had been on duty for that operation and I was about to say that I thought that it had gone very well. But then I realised that this was a trick and that I should say nothing. So I said, ‘I cannot speak about these things. I’m sorry.’
“He looked at me, and for a little while I thought that he was very cross and would shout at me for not answering his question. But then he smiled and he said, ‘You are very good at keeping confidences. Most people are not. I think that you will be a very good nurse for this clinic.’”
Boitelo took a further sip of her tea. “I had to work out a month’s notice at the Princess Marina, but that was simple enough. Then I started and I found that the work was very enjoyable. I did not have to stand about as I had to do in the theatre, and I was also permitted to do things that nurses sometimes are not allowed to do. He let me do little surgical procedures on people—dealing with an in-growing toe-nail, for example, or freezing off a wart. I liked freezing off warts, as the dry ice made my fingers tingle with the cold.
“I was happy in my work, and I thought that I must have been one of the luckiest nurses in the country, to work for this doctor and to be allowed to do all these things. But then something happened which made me wonder. I was puzzled by something, and I decided to check up on it. And that was when I learned something which made me very worried. I have been worrying about this thing so much that I decided to come and speak to you, Mma Ramotswe, because people say that you are a good woman and that you are very kind to those who come to you with their troubles. That is why I am here.”
Mma Ramotswe, listening intently, had allowed her bush tea to become cooler than she liked it. She preferred to drink bush tea when it was fresh from the pot, piping hot, and this cup, now, was lukewarm. Boitelo’s story was a familiar one, at least in that it followed a pattern which she had come across so often. Things started well for somebody and then, and then … well, then a path was crossed with a person who would change everything. That had happened to her, with her former husband, Note Mokoti, the jazz player and ladies’ man who had, for a brief period, transformed her world from one of happiness and optimism to one of suffering and fear. Such people—men like Note—went through life spreading unhappiness about them like weedkiller, killing the flowers, the things that grew in the lives of others, wilting them with their scorn and spite.