The Real Thing by Doris Lessing Page B

frustration.
    When she came back laden he was smiling. She could hardly walk as she returned to the table. He said, ‘Sit down, finish your sandwiches.’
    She considered this on its merits. She sat. And ate up the sandwiches slowly, methodically, without appetite.
    He watched her. He said, ‘I’ve been driving a minicab for a year now. I don’t earn what I did, but we manage.’
    No response. She had lit another cigarette.
    ‘I’ve got a wife and two kids,’ he said.
    ‘Good for them.’
    ‘If you want to put that stuff in my car I’ll run you home.’
    ‘What sort of a fool do you take me for? For £25 and some coffee and sandwiches you’d know where I live.’
    Now he sat silenced.
    She glanced up because he had not replied, saw his face, and said, ‘No I
don’t
trust anyone. And I never will again.’
    ‘You’re going to stagger home with all that stuff rather than trust me?’
    “That’s right.’ She stood, and hoisted up the bags. One held twenty pounds of potatoes.
    He got up too. ‘If you put that stuff in my car I’ll run you somewhere near where you live. You can tell me where to stop. It’ll cut down the distance a bit.’
    ‘I don’t know why you’re doing this. And I don’t care. I don’t give a fuck.’
    ‘All right,’ he said patiently, though he sounded fed up. ‘1 didn’t ask you to care. I made you an offer. Anyway, don’t be so bloody stupid. If I wanted to find out where you live all I’d have to do is hang around the schools in the area. It’s probably Fortescue, isn’t it?’ He was going on, but stopped, because of her face.
    ‘All right,’ she said, not looking at him.
    He took a couple of the carriers from her, and went across the road in front of her, holding up his hand to slow a car. She followed. She got into the back seat. He put the carriers in beside her. He got into the front seat and said, ‘Where to?’
    ‘Just drive down this street.’
    After about a mile, near Kentish Town, she said, This’ll do.’
    He stopped the car. She got out. He was gazing in front of him, not at her.
    She said, and it killed her to say it, “Thanks.’
    ‘Don’t mention it,’ he said.
    He sat on there, watching her go slowly along thepavement, her shoulders pulled down with the weight of the bags. She turned into a street he knew she did not live in. He was waiting to see if she would turn and wave or smile or even just look at him, but she did not.

C asualty
    All of them looking one way, they sat on metal chairs, the kind that are hard and slippery and stack into each other. They kept their attention on the woman behind the reception desk, who was apparently not interested in them now she had their names, addresses, complaints all tidily written down on forms. She was an ample young woman with the rainy violet eyes that seem designed only for laughing or weeping, but now they were full of the stern impartiality of justice. Her name button said she was Nurse Doolan.
    It was a large room with walls an uninteresting shade of beige, bare except for the notice, ‘If You Have Nothing Urgently Wrong Please Go To Your Own Doctor’. Evidently the twenty or so people here did not believe their own doctors were as good as this hospital casualty department. Only one of them seemed in urgent need, a dishevelled woman of forty or so with dyed orange hair, who was propping her wrapped left hand on her right shoulder. Everyone knew the wrist was broken because the woman with her had nodded commandingly at them, turning round to do it, and mouthed, ‘Her
wrist.
She broke it.’ Satisfied they must all acknowledge precedence, shehad placed her charge in the end of the front row nearest to the door that said ‘No Admittance’. They did not challenge her. The broken-wristed one, exhausted with pain, drowsed in her seat, and her face was bluish white, so that with the brush of orange hair she looked like a clown. But Nurse Doolan did not seem to think she deserved more than the others,