Heavenly Date and Other Flirtations

by Alexander McCall Smith

  He was frowning. “We can’t leave it there,” he said. “It cost twenty four dollars.”

  She shrugged. “I’m sorry, but I’m not going down there to fetch it.”

  He looked down again, and then looked over to the other side of the pen. Old Harry was unmoving, his eyes still firmly closed. He seemed quite unaware of their presence and could, for all intents and purposes, have been dead, and stuffed.

  Bill straightened up. “I’ll go down and get it. That chap over there is fast asleep and has probably already had his tea. I can climb down here quite quickly.”

  “Don’t,” she snapped. “Don’t be so stupid. He could wake up.”

  “If he does, then I’ll just scale right back up,” said Bill, already beginning to clamber over the fence that ran down the side of the walkway.

  She reached out and caught him by the shirt, trying to stop him, but he brushed her off. She reached out again, and grabbed his arm, but once again, he pushed her off, and began to climb down the struts of the walkway.

  “Tell me if you see him moving,” he called up. “Discretion is the better part of valour!”

  He had now reached the bottom. The passport holder was only a short distance away, on the sandbank, and he moved gingerly towards it. She looked over towards Old Harry. He still seemed to be soundly asleep although, for a tense moment, she thought she saw an eyelid flicker. But it was only a fly, she decided.

  Bill reached down to pick up the passport holder. Then he straightened up and waved it up towards her, in triumph. The gold lettering of Citizen of Godsown flashed in the sunlight.

  The muddy water of the pond erupted in a great heave as the great shape of the second crocodile, Old Harry’s companion, launched itself towards its prey. For a moment all she saw was teeth and an expanse of pink-white flesh within the mouth, and then the jaws clamped tight, with a crunch, around Bill’s legs.

  Bill looked up in outrage. She saw the passport holder waving, and she tried to scream, but no sound came. The jaws opened again, and then closed and moved backwards. Bill disappeared under water amidst a turbulence of bubbles and foam. Then the surface of the water settled.

  Old Harry, in the meantime, opened his eyes, looked over at the pond, and then closed his eyes again and went back to sleep.

  For a few moments she was too shocked to move. Then she heard shouting, and a man was running over to the pen. He was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and was carrying something in his hand – a stick, a gun, she could not see.

  “What’s going on?” the man shouted at her. “What’s happening?”

  She opened her mouth, but could not speak. She pointed at the surface of the water and then she screamed.

  The man spun round and peered into the pen.

  “Oh my God!” he muttered. “Is there somebody in there?”

  “I told him not to go …” she began.

  The man had moved away now and was struggling with the lock on a gate. He stopped after a moment, and peered into the enclosure. Then he brought the gun up to his shoulder and there was an explosion.

  Old Harry shot up and slithered down his bank with extraordinary speed. The man swore, loudly, and fired again into the water. There was movement of some sort, and a further commotion. Another shot, and then silence.

  There were others on the walkway now. A man in a green uniform had arrived, and was shouting at people to keep clear. Then somebody took hold of her hand and led her away. She tried to resist, but the man with the gun was gesturing towards a building a little bit away and they took her there. Inside, a woman wearing a small gold crocodile badge sat her down on a chair and held her hand. They brought her tea, but her shaking hands spilt it over her jeans and blouse. They brought a cloth and dabbed at the hot stains.

  “It’s terrible,” said the woman. “Was that your … your husband?”

  She shook her head. “No. Just a friend. Not somebody I knew very well.”

  The woman seemed relieved. “Thank God for that,” she said. “I don’t think they’re going to get him out.”

  It was some time before the man with the gun returned. He looked at the woman, who exchanged a glance with him.

  “It was a friend of hers,” she said. “Not somebody she knew well.”

  The man’s expression lightened.

  “That’s something,” he said. “Well, I’m very sorry to have to tell you that he was taken by that crocodile. Right down the hatch. There was nothing we could do, but I’ve shot it and they’re hauling it out at the moment. Did he climb in?”

  She nodded. “I tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t let me. He didn’t know there was another crocodile under the water.”

  The man grimaced and flung the rifle down on a table.

  “This is the first bloody time it’s happened,” he said. “I knew it would, sooner or later. Some damn joker would take his chances.”

  “Watch it, Pete,” said the woman. “This lady’s upset.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s a terrible thing, I know. I’ve called the police, by the way. They’ll want to know exactly what happened. Can you tell them all right? Make sure that you tell them that it was nothing to do with our fences – that he climbed in. Okay?”

  She felt calmer now, as the first effect of the shock began to wear off. It was overwhelming, terrible, but it wasn’t her fault. She tried to stop him. There was nothing she could have done; she had no need to reproach herself. And yet the memory of her lack of charity came back to her with awful clarity, and she shuddered at the recollection.

  The police arrived shortly afterwards. She became aware of their presence through the sound of the sirens, and then, some twenty minutes later, a sergeant came into the office. He exchanged a few murmured words with the other woman and then drew a chair over to where she was sitting.

  “I’m very sorry about this, Miss,” he began. “But I’m going to have take a statement from you.”

  She looked up at him. There was something about his tone which left her unsettled, something harsh and unfriendly. She saw too that his expression was one of barely perceptible distaste. Well, it certainly wasn’t a pleasant matter, and these people must become tough in their job.

  She gave an account of what had happened, stressing that she barely knew Bill Jameson.

  “I told him not to climb in,” she said. “In fact, I tried to prevent him, as I told the manager here. But he was determined to fetch that ridiculous piece of crocodile skin.”

  “The passport holder? Can you describe it?”

  She gave him a description, and he noted it down, word for word in his notebook: Inscription: Citizen of Godsown. Then he looked at her expectantly.

  “He climbed down into the pen and picked up the passport holder. Then, I think it was just a second or two later, a crocodile appeared from nowhere. It must have been underwater.”

  The sergeant nodded.

  “How did you try to restrain him? What did you do?”

  She closed her eyes. “I grabbed him by the arm. Then I think I got hold of his shirt.”

  She opened her eyes. The policeman was staring at her, unblinking.

  “You didn’t shout for help?”

  She was puzzled. “When he was trying to climb in, or later when he was in the pen?”

  “When he was climbing in.”

  She paused before answering. Should she have done more than she had? Was this man suggesting that she had failed in some way – that it was her fault? She felt a prickle of irritation within her. This was ridiculous. Bill had brought the whole matter upon himself by his own stupidity. She could hardly have done more to stop him without falling in herself.

  The policeman was drumming his fingers on the table, as if impatient for an answer.

  “No,” she said. “It all happened very quickly. I didn’t have time to think. I just tried to stop him.”

  “Very well,” said the policeman. “So you didn’t shout for help.”

  “No.”

 
“Don’t you think it would have been a good idea? There were people not far away. They might have come and helped you to stop him.”

  Her irritation returned. He was now making the allegation more directly.

  “I’ve just told you,” she said, her voice rising in anger. “It happened very quickly. I didn’t think about shouting – I just thought about stopping him physically. And I couldn’t.”

  The policeman sat back in his chair and toyed with his pen.

  “You didn’t by any chance push him, did you?”

  Push him! For a moment she was too astonished to say anything. Then, when she responded, her voice was tiny, almost inaudible.

  “Do you think I pushed him in? Actually pushed him?”

  The policeman smiled. “It’s a possibility, isn’t it?”

  Now she knew that he was taunting her, and anger replaced irritation.

  “Well, that’s a stupid joke. I’ve just witnessed something pretty terrible and you think you can sit there and joke about it.”

  The policeman stopped smiling. “It’s not a joke, stupid or otherwise. I happen to have grounds for my suggestion, and you’d better take it damn seriously. Understand?”

  She looked over his shoulder to the woman who had given her tea. She looked away, as if to say: leave me out of this. But she could tell that she was enjoying every moment of the drama.

  “You see,” said the sergeant, turning a page in his book, “I’ve just interviewed a child who was a little way along the path, heading towards the pen. He said to me – and I’ll quote you his words if you like – ‘The lady pushed that man into the croc’s place. I saw her do it. She pushed him.’”

  They drove her from the crocodile farm directly to the police station. A policewoman sat beside her in the back of the police car and accompanied her into a small office, where they sat together in silence. A few minutes later the sergeant returned with another policewoman who explained to her that she was going to take her fingerprints and take a further statement from her, if she wished to give one.

  She was too shocked to be anything but compliant. Her hand was limp as they inked each finger and pressed it against the sheet of paper. Then they carefully wiped each finger with a moist tissue, and wrote something on the sheet.

  “You can speak to a lawyer if you like,” said the sergeant. “I’ve got a list of lawyers in the area, and you can telephone one of your choice. Do you understand?”

  He handed her a piece of paper and she pointed to one at random. One of the policewomen offered to dial the number for her and she spoke a few words before handing the receiver over to her. The lawyer sounded friendly, and promised that he would be at the police station within the hour. She put the telephone down. The sergeant was looking at her.

  “Why did you push him? You can tell us the truth, you know. It’s always, always easier that way, I promise you.”

  Later, alone with the lawyer, in a different room, he said to her:

  “The problem as I see it is this. They’ve got a statement from this eight-year-old boy to the effect that he saw you pushing him in. Apparently he’s adamant about it and is sticking to what he said at the beginning. He said that he saw the man hit you and then you pushed him in.”

  He paused, watching her as she drew in a deep breath and shook her head in frustration.

  “I take it that that’s just untrue?”

  “Of course it’s untrue. I’ve told everybody what happened. Why would I push him into a crocodile pen? I hardly knew him.”

  “What was your relationship, may I ask? Did you like him?”

  “No. I did not. He was … a bit of a bore, I’m sorry to say. I wasn’t proposing to go out with him again. It was just a casual date, as I’ve told you.”

  The lawyer pursed his lips. “I wouldn’t say too much about not liking him, if I were you,” he said, his voice lowered. “That could be misunderstood by a jury.”

  She stared at him in disbelief. He really thought that this was all being taken seriously, that the absurd misunderstanding of an eight-year-old was going to result in some sort of trial.

  The lawyer continued. “The child’s statement is inherently unreliable, of course. Children misunderstand things, and I’ve already established that the child was some way away at the time. He could easily have interpreted your attempts to keep Bill from climbing in as attempts to push him over the edge. But there’s another problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “This passport holder. The thing that he went into the pen for. They can’t find it. They’ve opened up the croc that took him, of course, and the stomach contents have been listed. No passport holder. They’ve also drained the pond, and it’s not in the mud. So where is it?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I haven’t a clue. Anyway, why does that matter?”

  The lawyer sighed. “It matters, I’m afraid, because if there’s no passport holder, then a valuable element in the corroboration of your story is missing. Do you see that?”

  She looked down at the floor. She could not quite decide whether the lawyer believed her or whether he was on the sergeant’s side. If he didn’t believe her, then she wondered whether she could convince anybody. She imagined the jury, twelve solid citizens of Godsown, staring at her in disbelief as she explained about a vanished crocodile skin passport holder. She remembered the dingo case. They hadn’t believed her either.

  The lawyer left just after seven in the evening, promising to return the next morning. A different policewoman had appeared now, and told her that she was being held without charge, pending a police decision as to proceedings. There was nothing she could do about this, she said, and she might as well settle down for the night. She would have to share a cell with another female prisoner, and they would provide her with night clothes and a reasonable “quantity of toiletries”. She could make another phone call if she wished, to notify anybody of her “continued presence in the police station”. That was all.

  She went mutely to the cell, where she saw another woman lying on a bed, reading a magazine. The woman did not acknowledge her presence until the door was closed again and the policewoman had gone. Then she laid down her magazine and smiled at her. She saw a thin woman in her late thirties, with a pinched, trouble-lined face.

  “What they got you in here for?” asked her cell-mate.

  “Pushing a man into a crocodile pen,” she said. “What about you?”

  “Shot me old man,” she said cheerfully. “Just once. Didn’t finish him off, and he’s back in the pub by now I expect.”

  “Shot him? Why?”

  The other sat up on her bed and reached for a packet of cigarettes from her bedside table.

  “He bloody asked for it, he bloody did.” She lit a cigarette and exhaled a cloud of acrid smoke. “He clouted me regular. He clouted the kids too. He’s bad news.”

  She took another drag of her cigarette. “And another thing. Pretty funny, come to think of it. I shot him in the stomach with my son’s .22 rifle and made a neat little hole. And do you know, beer poured out of it, I swear to God it did! He was full of beer and it came straight out in a little jet, just like he was a barrel with the bung taken out!”

  She slept well, in spite of everything, after chatting with her new-found friend until late at night. Then, shortly after eleven in the morning, the lawyer arrived. She was taken to the interview room to await him and he came in smiling.

  “Good news,” he said. “Old Harry died.”

  She looked at him in astonishment.

  “Old Harry, the other crocodile in the pen. It seems that he died of a broken heart. That was his mate they shot, you see. Apparently Old Harry just turned up his toes and snuffed it.”

  She began to wonder whether she had made a mistake in her choice of lawyers, but he continued. “The vet opened Old Harry up this morning, just to be on the safe side. And they found that he was a citizen of Godsown, believe it or not.”

  She allowed herself to laugh, cautio
usly at first, but with an overwhelming feeling of relief as the lawyer went on.

  “There must have been some sort of general commotion under water and Old Harry ended up swallowing the passport holder. He must have been after a bit of Mr Jameson. Anyway, the police are satisfied that this corroborates your story, and the young boy apparently seems less than one hundred per cent certain this morning that you actually pushed Mr Jameson in. In fact, he said this morning that he thought Mr Jameson may have been trying to push you in, but slipped in the process!”

  She looked at the lawyer, seeing him for the first time as a man.

  “I’ll drive you back to Cairns if you like,” he said. “I’ve got business to do there so it won’t be any trouble.”

  They drove back slowly, even stopping to admire the view at one point. The sea was calm, and a small fishing boat was ploughing its way across the field of blue.

  “You know,” she said to him. “I don’t really like fishing. I really don’t. What about you?”

  He looked at her, and smiled, knowing that his answer would be extremely important.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t either.”

  Intimate Accounts

  I am not at all sure whether I should be telling you this. My difficulty is that this is a grey area of professional ethics, and, quite frankly, no definitive guidance is available. Of course every doctor is subject to the usual rules of confidentiality – which are exceptionally strict – and this means that one should say nothing about what passes between psychiatrist and patient. So one simply could not telephone a patient’s wife, say, and tell her what her husband had just revealed on the couch, tempting though that may sometimes be. That would be a clear breach of professional ethics and the medical authorities would raise a song and dance. And rightly so.

  But it’s by no means clear what the rules are when it comes to writing in a general way about what has happened in the consulting room, especially when there is no mention of names – or when false names are used. If one doesn’t say anything that gives away the actual identity of a patient, then has any confidence been breached? The answer to this must be that if there is good reason to reveal – in this anonymous way – what has passed between analyst and patient, then one is doing nothing unethical.