African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [59]
When I was taken into the X-ray room, I apologized to the young technician for spoiling his Saturday afternoon, but he said, ‘I am on call and I like to help people.’ I found this young man charming; I found the black doctor charming. The Coffee Farmer was being much too polite to be natural; his shoulder had been pronounced not too bad, like my foot, and various other bits of our anatomies.
Meanwhile, the local police had arrived. He was a young black man who, having written down my name, said he had read this and that short story of mine, and he wanted to be a writer himself, for his life had been interesting. Could I tell him how to do it?
There we sat, all bandaged up, and clutching our X-rays, waiting to be collected by the friend from Mutare who was speeding towards us, doubtless cursing us because of the waste of precious petrol. I explained to the young policeman, who had a sweet sensitive face and was quite unlike the conventional idea of a policeman, how to write a novel. He set aside the business of asking questions and filling in forms while he listened and wrote down particularly useful phrases. Every writer has to do this far too often, and it is hard to deliver the lecture as if for the first time. ‘You see, the trouble is that young writers seem to think that talent is enough; but there are plenty of people with talent. What you need is to do a lot of work. Probably because one can write stories and indeed whole novels with no more than an exercise book and a biro, people subconsciously believe that it is easy. But if you want to be a writer then you have to write–and tear up: write–and tear up. Every writer goes through that stage when what you write is almost good but not quite good enough. What takes you from this stage to the point of being good enough is the process of writing and tearing up, writing and tearing up. And, of course–reading. You cannot tell any aspiring writer how to write: only that this writing, and writing, and trying again, does it.’ And so on. This admonition was delivered while the little girls tried hard not to groan, as they lay stretched out on two wooden benches, and while their mother and their uncle, pale as their bandages, sat upright, behaving well, and while blood stained the bandages on my foot. My ribs were beginning to hurt horribly. The young policeman said he would look on me as a mother and he would take my advice.
It goes without saying that this scene outraged what the Coffee Farmer believed was correct for the occasion. He was saying loudly that what mattered was to get all the details of the accident down properly, so that the guilty bus-load of policemen would be brought to justice. He was in the right, a thousand times over. The three black nurses, who now had nothing to do, sat in a row on a bench, hands folded, listening and thinking their own thoughts. The black doctor roared off, and we could hear his car a good mile away.
NERVES
Then came the friend from Mutare. Something began that surprised us; we were all afraid, and reluctant to get into the car. Our nerves jumped and winced because every bend in the road, every bump, announced a new accident. When we saw the corpse of the car we had travelled in lying, as in a hundred other accident scenes, at the side of the road, it all got worse. We felt better when we confessed this weakness to each other. Not, however, our stiff-lipped hero who, even more because now he was sitting in the front seat with another hero from the War, was not going to admit weakness. Not for one second now, nor in