‘Tilting! Tilting!’
Back on the floor, I took part in what risk managers would term a Significant Event, perhaps even a Critical Incident. Stroppy patients are a bit like medical mishaps – they come out of left field; you don’t see them coming. You plan for the last strop but the next one is totally different. He was just another addict with a long convoluted and tiresome saga of lost prescriptions, missed appointments (through no fault of his), needy dependents, and irate probation officers. Basically he was looking for his medication. He told me in very reasonable tones that he was very concerned about my safety, and the integrity of the treatment room we were occupying, because experience had taught him that if he didn’t get his way, an inner demon, over which he had no control, might emerge from deep within his subconscious, and there was no telling what might then happen. Now I can’t stand that. I told him he had better visit his GP and get a referral to an anger management class. Goodbye. As I made my way past him I just caught the glint of the switchblade out of the corner of my eye. It all happened so quickly that I could hardly say my reaction was premeditated. In fact you might say that an inner demon, over which I had no control, emerged from deep within my subconscious, and before I knew it I had picked up a rather cumbersome desk top computer terminal and used it as a battering ram, driving it hard against his right forearm. The knife dropped to the floor and the addict fell backwards beneath the devouring octopus of the visual display unit with its tangled tentacles of wire, mice, mouse pads, memory sticks, extension tables, adaptor plugs, CD ROMS, and other assorted IT accoutrements. It gave me enough time to reach the panic button on the wall. Security were impressively quick, and that was pretty much the end of it. The man went off to x-ray (‘night stick’ fracture of the ulna, big deal) and then away in a stookie (personally I wouldn’t have bothered) in police custody. A manager came round to get some details from me. He surveyed the wreckage of the written-off computer terminal, and asked me if my reaction had not been rather OTT. I very nearly launched another computer at him. Forbes dropped by. He looked a bit harassed, as if I were becoming too high maintenance. I could only shrug. I’m not accident prone. I’m not a walking disaster zone. Nobody seemed much bothered that somebody had attacked me with a knife. It was only later that it crossed my mind that I might have become vulnerable. Was somebody sending a man with a knife and a grudge in my direction, was somebody hurling bits of masonry at me? Paranoiac.
I visited the MP for the Clerk Maxwell constituency. No stone unturned, you see. I have to admit I did so pretty much as a box-ticking exercise. I had stopped believing in the possibility of getting anywhere. I wonder if my motivation hadn’t changed. I believe I had started with a genuine wish to do the right thing as a citizen. Now I felt thoroughly disillusioned. I was going through the motions so that after the balloon went up I’d be able to say to an authoritarian hierarchy I’d grown to despise, ‘I told you so.’ Part of me even wanted to be ignored so that I might relish such a dénouement. Childish I grant.
Westminster or Holyrood? The member at Westminster was currently at his London domicile. I wrote to him at the House of Commons. I will tell you now that by the time I got a very polite reply, well, things had moved on considerably. The Holyrood member was doing constituency work. I was in luck. I booked an appointment at her evening surgery. I had always thought the use of the term ‘surgery’ for the business of constituents consulting their democratically elected representative was a bit of an indulgence. But, sitting in the cramped waiting room of that Dunfermline High Street lock-out, I sensed the word’s appropriateness. I might indeed have been in a GP surgery. I suspected the clientele were probably the same, and the presenting complaints not far removed from one another, certainly manifestations of the same underlying misery. I’ve never much cared for the political class. A bit like lawyers, I suppose. Of course many of them are lawyers. Why do people go into politics? Is it, as they say, ‘to make a difference’, or is it the lure of power? If you want to make a difference, be a nurse, be a home help, mend the roads, sweep the streets. The only honourable reason that I can see for getting elected is to stop the bad guys from getting in. (You can see why Forbes thought I was politically naïve.)
I wondered if MPs regarded this side of their work, their surgeries, as purgatory. I had a hunch it could be the most important thing they did, if they only knew it. I began to formulate an idea, sitting there, that the more exalted we all were in our professions, the more ineffectual we became. Everything that matters to humanity happens at close quarters. The really important transactions are one on one. My MP might sit in the House and draw up grandiose plans, but what did it matter if they weren’t put into effect in the doctor’s surgery, in the classroom, on the beat, in the care home, at the check-out counter. Men would strive for high office, devote a lifetime to struggling up the greasy pole, maybe attain their goal, only to find they were powerless.
I was the last patient, and the Honourable Member was running late. Her name was Angela MacVicar. Mrs MacVicar had a party activist sitting in with her. I had the impression of a capable and driven woman trying to juggle her commitments as wife, mother, MSP, junior minister, and non-executive board member, and nearly succeeding, so long as she didn’t have to spend too much time with needy constituents. The party worker looked like a bouncer. I noticed there was CCTV, a tiny camera at the corner of the ceiling. Only two months before, a member had been attacked by somebody with a mental health issue, and a machete.
Mrs MacVicar stared at me. ‘You’re not a constituent.’
She’d had advanced warning. I had a notion that Horton must have made a few calls.
‘No, but it is a constituency matter.’ I got out The Bottom Line and prepared to launch into my laborious pitch.
‘Yes I already know about this.’
I wasn’t going to be stonewalled. She would hear me out. I trundled through it, the way a cold caller reads an offer of a new kitchen to you over the phone at six in the evening. We are going to be in your area …
She listened with an unmoved expression. I was one of these revolving-door patients who turn up in the waiting room, once, twice a week. It doesn’t matter how comprehensive your last consultation was, there they are again. Before I knew it I was being ushered out. Thank you very much for your concern. Yes, everything that should be done, is being done. Rest assured. Everybody has been briefed, the police, the university authorities, it’s all in hand. Thank you and goodnight. As I left the consulting room I just caught the exchange of glances between the MSP and the party activist and I realised with a flash of insight that now I came with a government health warning; I was one of these heart-sink drug-seeking Munchausensy people on a list, with a personality disorder and a dark hidden agenda, somebody you needed to get out of your department before they made a scene and wrecked the joint.
I even phoned the office of the Ombudsman. Actually the Ombudsman turned out to be an Ombudswoman, Lady Barbara Wylie. I spoke to her secretary who it seemed to me was short with me even before I had started. I had an image of a sharp-featured woman wearing extravagantly rimmed glasses held round her neck by a cord.
‘I should try the Independent Police Complaints Commission. This does not fall within Lady Wylie’s remit.’
‘But surely …’ I persisted doggedly. ‘But surely if I have exhausted all other avenues …’
‘I can tell you quite categorically that this is not germane to Lady Wylie’s ombudswomanship.’
Ombudswomanship!
Was that in the dictionary? I recognised it instantly, in my idiot savant fashion, as a fifteener. It could occupy an entire row of the Herald crossword.
Now I was almost left without recourse. I had one option remaining; I could go public, I could become a whistle blower.
Whistle blowing occupies a special place in the UK and especially in the NHS. It is beyond the last ditch; it’s really an act of self-sacrifice. Even if it’s effective and has the desired result, the establish
ment will never forgive you for showing them up. They will rewrite history to obliterate your part in it. Whistle blowing – it’s kamikaze. You would think I would have thought long and hard before going down this route but by this time I was past caring, maybe because I had a premonition it wasn’t going to work anyway. My ultimate pitch was like something out of Theatre of the Absurd. I called the local rag’s news desk. This time I went for sensation.
‘Yes?’
‘There’s going to be a mass casualty incident at Clerk Maxwell.’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘Twenty, maybe thirty killed.’
‘Putting you on hold.’ They were so blasé about it that I was convinced they, like the MP, had seen me coming, with my ‘special note’ attached. They knew there was a loony doing the rounds.
Pachelbel. The canon.
‘Yes?’
‘As I was saying to your colleague, there is going to be an incident.’
‘Is this a bomb threat?’
‘Not a bomb. A shooting.’
‘How much warning time are you giving?’ I had the impression somebody was filling in a template on a computer screen. They were trudging through a menu. Threat: bomb, firearm, chemical, biological, other. Maybe they were inundated with calls like this every day from a great army of hoaxers.
‘It’s not me. And I don’t know the time frame.’ The person at the other end of the line took a deep breath and gave out a sigh.
‘D’you want to run it by one of our reporters? Let’s see who’s available. Hang on a sec. Where are you? Do you know the Dog’s Bollux on Rose Street? Ask for a Mr McAveety.’
Mr McAveety was drunk. He couldn’t take in the detail of The Bottom Line. He listened to my blurb with a low chuckle full of cynicism. ‘I thought I’d heard everything …’ Then he gave me an indulgent clap on the shoulder and wobbled out of the pub. I sat on, staring into my pint, reminiscing on the day, my thoughts darting about chaotically in disjointed jack-in-the-box jerks.
That morning, Caitlin had taken her usual picky breakfast and scanned The Herald.
‘Some doc’s been done for downloading child porn off the internet. It’s all over the front page. Works in Fife. Trubshaw’s his name.’
So. The last piece of that particular jigsaw.
‘He’s been told to expect a substantial custodial sentence. Do you know him?’
‘I’ve met him. Once. He was very courteous to me.’
And meanwhile, tucked away at the back of the international section was the briefest report, barely a column inch, of an incident in an already forgotten war that had occurred somewhere on the Pakistan–Afghanistan border. The Americans had received intelligence that a high profile Taliban militant was to be present at a wedding ceremony, and had sent in a remote-controlled drone with a payload. Thirty people had been killed, including the bride. It turned out that the target, the Taliban militant, wasn’t actually there.
After the pissed hack had meandered out of the Dog’s Bollux, I became lugubrious. I sat staring into my beer glass. I was entering un vin triste. Une bière morose, peut-être. All these people I’ve pestered – maybe they’re right. Maybe I’ve lost the plot. There’s only a certain amount of ‘contumely’ a man can sustain before he assumes that he must after all be contemptible. I really am like Hamlet. Was Hamlet crazy or was he just putting it on? Is the distinction worth making? You know, I learned Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy at school, verbatim, without actually realising it was a suicide note. None of Hamlet’s ‘fardels’ much bothered me. I was yet to experience the pangs of disprized love. It’s only later on that you gradually begin to piece it all together.
I had been so precious about my Hippocratic Oath, the vow of silence, the secrecy of the confessional. It seemed rather quaint now to think that when I went to the police I imagined I was crossing a line. I could have put up a soap box on Princes Street and bawled at passers-by with a megaphone and nobody would have paid the slightest attention. The fact is that I was inherently not newsworthy. The thesis that I was peddling was geekish, nerdy. I was a dweeb, born into the wrong century. If I had set up my stall to broadcast, people would have given me barely a moment before turning away to get on with their lives. I was a deserted freak show on the fringes of a tatty, down-at-heel funfair. It was just as well that I had gone into medicine. I was harmless there. Medicine doesn’t need attitude. People rather resent it if their doctors are flamboyant. They want them to be low key, entirely lacking in chutzpah, invisible. At least I had something to fall back on. The fact is, in the lights of the modern world, I am a complete nonentity.
I began to appreciate what it must be like to feel that you are disenfranchised. You have a corner to fight, and nobody will take up the cudgels for you. What do you do?
I swallowed my drink. The dregs tasted bitter. I could feel that familiar quiet fury settling again in the pit of my stomach. Settling down for the long haul. Well, I tell you what. I’m not going to go quietly. I’m not going to take this lying down. Quite the contrary. I’m going to create the hell of a stink. Just you wait.
XV
Then my sister MacKenzie breezed into town and presented me with a fait accompli. She’d tried to track me down at Little France and had got through to Forbes, and the upshot was that she had left four tickets for Forbes and Dorothy Pearson, Caitlin and me at the box office at the Queen’s Hall. The Arnold Bax Quartet was playing.
My heart sank. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see my twin sister. It’s just that, if I have to work on Saturday, I never schedule anything social for the evening. It’s a sure fire recipe for disaster. Every time I do it, my Saturday afternoons go pear-shaped. Suddenly everybody wants to crash their car, take an overdose, have a heart attack, chop a few fingers off. Somebody would come in at five to six on the brink of doing themselves in. I would have to spend an hour persuading them that life was after all worth the candle, all the time with my eye on the clock wondering if I am going to make it for the overture. There is no more uncomfortable experience in medicine.
As it turned out, it wasn’t the clientele that conspired against me, it was the IT. The computers went on a go-slow. Zareba-abattis is conducting a background task. All of a sudden I was trying to crawl through sludge, like a channel swimmer who has encountered an oil slick. Zareba-abattis firewall is dealing with an incoming threat. I suppose I just had to take Zareba-abattis’ word for it. Sometimes I suspected Zareba-abattis of manufacturing the viruses it purported to protect us from. They were in fact a bunch of protection racketeers. Windows has encountered a problem and needs to shut down. Oh for God’s sake!
I rebooted. It took forever. Endless menus, endless requests for user names and passwords. God I hate these bloody contraptions. Click bloody click.
And we were going paper light. In a few months all the A4 folders sitting behind the reception area would be scanned and then incinerated. I had no faith in the robustness of the systems. If nerdy teenagers could hack into the Pentagon they would have no difficulty with the NHS. All that confidential information would leak out of the flimsy porous envelope of security. A virus, a helical strand of RNA would slither through a crack under the firewall, insinuate itself into a deep recess of the system’s nuclear bunker, and reproduce itself with promiscuous abandon. Next step, lysis. The tenuous membrane of defence would be breached from within, and billions of little replicas, clones of nasty information, would spill out into the world, searching for other tiny defects in other systems.
I didn’t really want to go to the Queen’s Hall, and it occurred to me to succumb to the turgid recalcitrance of the cyber systems, and stay on late. But in the end I cut myself loose. I could hardly whinge about my failure to entertain Caitlin and then turn the invitation down. Even supposing I had stopped listening to music. I don’t think Caitlin was any more enthusiastic than me but at any rate we fronted up. Nothing could have been more redolent of our shared plight than the sense of detachment, distraction, and sheer ali
enation we both experienced, and surely made evident, as we arrived at the door. The usher visibly started. She clearly thought we’d come to the wrong venue. Should she ring for security? Caitlin was all in black, and pallid, like a punk Goth. I must have had a wild, frazzled, dishevelled look. I actually had to blag our way in. Yes we did have friends waiting in the foyer with our tickets. There were Forbes and Dorothy. Forbes was looking at his watch. We only just made it, to take our seats in a packed hall.
The Baxes. Rafael Preller, Dominique Moulin, Anne Strange (she used her viola name), Malcolm Broadsword. It was a programme with an American theme. They started with the Samuel Barber quartet. Its adagio is, of course, the Adagio. The five star crit that appeared in The Scotsman the following Monday spoke of the sustained intensity of each line, and of the unity and power as a whole of this, a quartet emerging as one of the great chamber music voices of the modern world. I was entirely unmoved. I sat and solved The Bottom Line again in my head.
Next, the three Pieces for String Quartet by Stravinsky. There was still an albeit tenuous American theme. Igor was to relocate to Beverly Hills. MacKenzie held a sustained minor ninth, sul ponticello, while the first violin iterated a coarse and hypnotic gypsy song against the cellist’s pizzicato ostinato, and a kind of guerrilla attack, in chopping down bows, from the second violin. It petered out, to leave MacKenzie holding her dissonant double-stop. The second movement was funny and zany and weird. I had the conviction that if I had been at all receptive that night I would have liked it. It seemed a suitable accompaniment to my preoccupation with The Bottom Line and its rubric. Under the censor’s pencil, something had been concealed from me. Cruciverbalists are economic with their guidance; whatever was concealed could not be redundant; yet I had succeeded in filling in the grid. What was I missing?
The last movement reminded me of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. It seemed to me to be music of planet Earth millions of years ago, cold, disinterested, devoid of humanity. And yet, and yet, what was the meaning of that intense unresolved Stravinskian chord, leaving behind it only the faint echo of MacKenzie’s last, barely audible cadence?
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