In the following extract from a short story, the narrator describes going to an appointment at a lawyer's office in South Africa. Take it to a lawyer. That's what my friend told me to do. Now, I had never had occasion to have anything to do with lawyers. Mention of lawyers always brought to my mind pictures of courts, police: terrifying pictures. Although I was in trouble, I wondered why it should be a lawyer who would help me. However, my friend gave me the address. And from that moment my problem loomed larger. It turned in my mind. On the night before my visit to the solicitor, my heart was full of feelings of hurt. My soul fed on fire and scalding water. I’d tell the lawyer; I’d tell him everything that had gnawed inside me for several days. I went up the stairs of the high building. Whenever I met a man I imagined that he was the lawyer and all but started to pour out my trouble. On the landing I met a boy with a man’s head and face and rather large ears and lips. I told him I had come to see Mr. B, the lawyer. Very gently, he told me to go into the waiting room and wait my turn with the others. I was disappointed. I had wanted to see Mr. B, tell him everything and get the lawyer’s cure for it. To be told to wait ... They were sitting in the waiting room, the clients, ranged round the walls – about twenty of them, like those dolls waiting to be bowled over at a merry go round fair. It didn’t seem that I’d get enough time to recite the whole thing – how it all started, grew into something big and was threatening to crush me – with so many people waiting. The boy with the man’s head and face and large ears came in at intervals to call the next person. I knew what I’d do: I’d go over the whole problem in my mind, so that I could even say it backwards. The lawyer must miss nothing, nothing whatever. But in the course of it all my eyes wandered about the room: the people, the walls, the ceiling, the furniture. A bare, unattractive room: the arms of the chairs had scratches on them that might have been made with a pin by someone who was tired of waiting. Against the only stretch of wall that was free of chairs for clients, a man of about fifty sat at a table, sealing envelopes. ‘The big man is very busy today, eh?’ observed the man at the table. ‘Yes,’ I said mechanically. My attention was drawn to the whole setting once more: a plain unpretentious room with oldish chairs; the pile of letters and envelopes; the man; and the picture of the cat. An envelope fell to the floor. He bent down to take it up. I watched his large hands feel about for it, fumbling. Then the hand came upon the object, but with much more weight than a piece of paper warranted. Even before he came up straight on his chair I saw it clearly. The man at the table was blind, stone blind. As my eyes were getting used to the details, after my mind had thus been jolted into confused activity, I understood. Here was a man sealing envelopes, looking like a drawing on a flat surface. Perhaps he was flat and without depth, like a gramophone disc; too flat even to be hindered by the heat, the boredom of sitting for hours doing the same work; by too many or too few people coming. An invincible pair, he and the cat glowering at him, scorning our shames and hurts and the heat, seeming to hold the key to the immediate imperceptible and the most remote unforeseeable. I went in to see Mr B. A small man (as I had imagined) with tired eyes but an undaunted face. I told him everything from beginning to end.