it.' At first, thought Bruce, I wanted to talk also, to try and wash the
pain away with words.
Mike was silent for a few seconds. Below them the singing rose
and fell, and the train ran on through the forest.
'It had taken me ten hard years to get there, but at last I had done it.
A fine practice; doing the work I loved with skill, earning
the rewards I deserved. A wife that any man would have been proud of, a
lovely home, many friends, too many friends perhaps; for success breeds
friends the way a dirty kitchen breeds cockroaches.' Mike pulled out a
handkerchief and dried the back of his neck where the wind could not
reach.
'Those sort of friends mean parties,' he went on. 'Parties when you've
worked all day and you're tired; when you need the lift that you
can get so easily from a bottle. You don't know if you have the
weakness for the stuff until it's too late; until you have a bottle in
the drawer of your desk; until suddenly your practice isn't so good any
more.' Mike twisted the handkerchief around his fingers as he ploughed
doggedly on. 'Then you know it suddenly. You know it when your hands
dance in the morning and all you want for breakfast is that, when you
can't wait until lunchtime because you have to operate and that's the
only way you can keep your hands steady. But you know it finally and
utterly when the knife turns in your hand and the artery starts to spurt
and you watch it paralysed - you watch it hosing red over your gown and
forming pools on the theatre floor.' Mike's voice dried up then and he
tapped a cigarette from his pack and lit it. His shoulders were hunched
forward and his eyes were full of shadows of his guilt.
Then he straightened up and his voice was stronger.
'You must have read about it. I was headlines for a few days, all the
papers But my name wasn' Haig in those days.
I got that name off a label on a bottle in a bar-room.
'Gladys stayed with me, of course, she was that type. We came out to
Africa. I had enough saved from the wreck for a down payment on a
tobacco farm in the Centenary block outside Salisbury. Two good seasons
and I was off the bottle.
Gladys was having our first baby, we had both wanted one so badly.
It was all coming right again.' Mike stuffed the handkerchief back in
his pocket, and his voice lost its strength again, turned dry and husky.
'Then one day I took the truck into the village and on the way home I
stopped at the club. I had been there often before, but this time they
threw me out at closing time and when I got back to the farm
I had a case of Scotch on the seat beside me.' Bruce wanted to stop
him; he knew what was coming and he didn't want to hear it.
'The first rains started that night and the rivers came down in
flood. The telephone lines were knocked out and we were cut off. In the
morning--' Mike stopped again and turned to Bruce.
'I suppose it was the shock of seeing me like that again, but in the
morning Gladys went into labour. It was her first, and she wasn't so
young any more. She was still in labour the
next day, but by then she was too weak to scream. I remember how
