Click, Double-Click

by James Calum Campbell

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Who are these people?’

  ‘Benders.’

  ‘Benders?’

  ‘Travelling people.’

  ‘Why are they called benders?’

  ‘Because they bend saplings to make a skeleton for their tents.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Caitlin, I need to take you out of the equation.’

  ‘There’s no such person as Uncle Hector, is there?’

  I didn’t say anything. She started to whimper. In that beautiful and unlikely triangle of wooded landscape between Badicaul and Duirinish and Am Ploc, with its palm trees and its promiscuous crotal splashes of broom, I accomplished my tasks.

  I returned by another route. Never retrace your steps. Never go back. Balmacara, Eilean Donan, Inverinate. I thought I could hear music. Divo Aloysio Sacrum. St Aloysius. The patron saint of youth. St Aloysius pray for us. In my memory it is the setting of MacMillan that I hear, yet how could I play my CD in a 1970s car? All I can say is that the Gàidhealtachd seemed to resonate with it. It seemed to come out of earth and rock. I heard it echo back at me from the Five Sisters of Kintail, Mam Ratagan, and the ancient brochs of Glenelg. The ferryman who took me across the Stygian waters never gave the two big containers on my back seat a second glance. A nervous run back through Broadford, Luib, Sconser. At Sligachan I turned left and started to head west with the great mountain ridge frowning over my left shoulder, and then falling away behind me. Left again. Roads getting quieter but, ahead, a polished black BMW. I stayed well back. It headed for the distillery. I hung another left and commenced the long descent back down to the bay. I remember getting the Hunter back out of sight into its garage and then making two journeys to lug the containers down to the Slingsby. Three hours after I’d started, everything was as it had been.

  Except I was alone.

  Major Forster slipped back into the billiard room and shook his head again. He had drawn another blank. I asked him how he had found me.

  ‘I knew you’d be under one waterfall or another,’ he said vaguely, ‘practising taghairm.’

  ‘And you? What are you doing here?’

  ‘Holed up in the Skeabost, old boy. I’ve taken a salmon beat on the Snizort.’ It always seemed to me that Major Forster had twigged the great cosmic joke. He had moved beyond cynicism, into some quaint fey realm of surrealism I could only guess at.

  ‘You’ve got to tell us where you put her.’

  ‘You’ll never find her.’

  ‘I once told you, Cameron-Strange, that there is a tipping point. Stay this side of it, and the failsafe mechanisms still apply. Cross it, and the past is irrevocable.’

  But I had long since crossed my point of no return.

  XXIII

  Dr Parkinson’s slow eyes rested on the billiard table. ‘Do you play?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Snooker. Do you play?’

  It was such an effort to remember. I practise medicine, I fly aeroplanes, go for a run, solve crosswords … anything else? There are gaps. Yesterday was a gap. This is what it is like when, piecemeal, you begin to lose your memory.

  Then I thought of all these dusty afternoons in the hospital residency. ‘Yes I play. A little.’

  ‘Tell you what. One frame. If you lose, you tell me the whereabouts of Ms Roy. If I lose, I won’t section you under the Mental Health Act. Deal?’

  ‘Deal.’

  We both knew we were each going to dishonour our respective sides of the bargain. I couldn’t have cared less. I’d forgotten what I was trying to achieve. Something about the solution to a crossword puzzle. I had brought it to mind so often that surely, after all, I must have made it up. I was Bletchley. Parkinson had suspected it from the start. It had been a weird night, the night Mr Uprichard and I had repaired a damaged heart. I had consumed a strange cocktail and concocted a conundrum. I am an addict. I am a cruciverbalist.

  We got on with the charade. Forster assumed the role of referee. In my memory he has put on a pair of white gloves, but that is preposterous. Forster walked round the table and salvaged the balls from the pockets, sending the reds up to Parkinson who corralled them within the stout wooden triangle while I placed the colours. I fired the pink up the table and Parkinson balanced it on the apex of the pyramid of reds. Then Forster zeroed the counters on the oak scoreboard on the wall beside the rack of cues. We chose our weapons. There was a drinks cabinet beside the cue rack, empty but for one bottle. Parkinson took it out and frowned at the label.

  I was thinking about St Giles, that early morning family service, the lovely Whangie and the way she charmed the children.

  ‘Talisker. Local brew. Snifter?’ Parkinson poured a couple of generous measures. I noticed he didn’t offer any to the Major. I returned the compliment. ‘Cigarette? I’m down to my last two.’ I proffered the Stuyvesant packet.

  ‘Thanks. I’m trying to give up.’ Parkinson had long ceased to invest this cliché with any sincerity. He rolled his cue on the table to ensure it was true; I stared down the length of mine as if it were a sniper’s rifle.

  She had used The Bottom Line as a prop for her children’s address. Surely that can’t be right. Parkinson juggled the blue chalk like a conjurer and presented me with two closed fists. I chose the left. He opened his hand to reveal the chalk. I had the break. No, it was a piece of origami. The Möbius strip. You take the end, you join it to the beginning like that and hey presto, you have a false bottom. I played with the abandon of the disinterested, smacking the cue ball into the reds with a resounding thwack. The noise of the impact was so loud that it made me jump. Like the one o’clock gun. And it was at that precise moment of contact that – at last, and for the first time – I really did solve The Bottom Line. I felt the colour drain from my face.

  ‘It’s to-day.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘It’s going to happen to-day.’ I wondered if Stobo had also spotted it, that vital piece of information, sitting there, deeply concealed within the solution, smugly taunting us. ‘We need to tell the police.’

  ‘Sure we do, doc.’

  If only I’d seen it earlier, before they’d all dismissed me to the lunatic asylum. Yet why choose today? Term’s finished. The campus will be deserted.

  No it won’t. The Conversazione! What was it to be about? What had Stobo said? Information Technology of all things. What university faculty wouldn’t show an interest in this day and age? The place could be teeming with people!

  ‘They need to get over to Clerk Maxwell now.’

  ‘Yeah yeah yeah.’ He absently chalked his cue.

  ‘No really –’

  ‘Stop changing the subject. It’s the whereabouts of Ms Roy that concerns me.’

  It was no use. I was like a man caught in quicksand; the more he struggles the quicker he sinks. Time might be running out but I was going to have to slow down and play their game. Parkinson was busy studying the white that had wandered back down into baulk. He pulled a face as if I’d committed some unpardonable breach of etiquette teeing off at the Royal and Ancient. It was a terrible break. I was going to live to regret it. Suddenly it had become incredibly important to buy a little time and space. It was absolutely vital that I win this game of snooker.

  Parkinson potted a red in the left middle bag and positioned himself on the black. I could see I was going to be taken apart. One. Eight. Major Forster intoned the litany.

  ‘I’ve been doing a bit of research, doctor.’ It was another Melbourne accent. It isn’t true that Australian accents are classless and regionless. I could see Parkinson, hatless, in his crumpled suit, walking down Punt Road. I could narrow it down. St Kilda, maybe Toorak. He was posh, but deeply under cover.

  ‘I looked you up. Hope you don’t mind. You didn’t make it particularly easy. You’re kind of low key. No Facebook account, that’s for sure. Not your thing. Maybe I can tell you what I came up with and you can fill in the blanks.’


  Nine, sixteen, seventeen.

  ‘Roger Strange, your father, met Susan Cameron, your mother, just along the road at Broadford Hospital where she nursed. He was a Kiwi on the big OE. Back home, an ‘ag’ pilot – a top dresser. Over here, the green keeper at Sconser. They stayed around long enough to have you and your sister. But Kiwis always seem to need to go back. So you lived on Ninety Mile Beach and he flew out of Kaitaia. Only two white kids in the class, you and – is it MacKenzie?’

  Twenty four, twenty five, thirty two, thirty three, forty. He’s a hustler. I watched him lean over the table to readdress the cue ball.

  ‘Your folks retired now?’

  ‘They’re dead.’

  It was impossible to tell whether Parkinson was pausing to absorb this information, or merely taking care over his next shot. Forty one.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Plane crash.’ I really didn’t want to talk about it.

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Eleven.’

  Forty eight.

  We got adopted by a Maori family. I stopped speaking Gaelic and I started speaking Maori. The whanau would laugh when I got my languages mixed up. Tha mi às an Eilean Sgitheanach. He iwi kotahi tatou. Then I went down to King’s College in Auckland. Then I went up to Auckland Medical School. How quickly you could romp through the scant details of a life. It was just a montage of a few pictures. The lake at Ngatu, the pseudo-English playing fields at Kings beside the swanky golf course in the improbable surroundings of Otahuhu and Papatoetoe. The big hospital up on the Domain.

  Forty nine.

  Parkinson finally miscued and the pink rattled on the lips of the top right pocket and slunk off down the table as if trying to take shelter on the cushion, blushing like a child who has just wet his trousers in class.

  ‘Wiped its feet.’

  Ralph Parkinson, forty nine.

  I got up and surveyed the devastation of the balls scattered across the battlefield. I got down to it and began laboriously to construct a break.

  One. Three. Four. Seven. Eight. I was pleased to make Major Forster scurry about. But I was stuck down at low echelon baulk.

  ‘Is that why you got a transfer to Edinburgh halfway through your medical course? Keeping in touch with the ancestors?’

  Twelve, thirteen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty five. Better. Much better. Twenty six. I’d got on the black at last.

  ‘Then you met Ms Roy.’

  Thirty three. Thirty four. But I’d overcued. Not the end of the world. I had a nice angle on the blue and could still get back on the black. Thirty nine.

  ‘What was she like?’

  He’s taking a psychiatric history. And why not? I probably am mad. But not completely; I still have a flicker of insight. I had become the monosyllabic patient behind the plate glass window in the Gloom Room.

  ‘Well. Give me a clue. Short, tall? Fat, thin? Blonde, redhead?’

  ‘Tall. Long red hair.’

  ‘With the temperament to match? I mean what was she like?’

  ‘I told you.’ Why’s he doing this?

  ‘Good doctor?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘General Practice, or a specialty?’

  ‘Paeds.’

  ‘It suited her?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ It was perfectly true. Mary had an uncanny ability to soothe frightened children.

  ‘What was it about her that attracted you?’

  What is this? Why is Parkinson twisting the knife? And besides, there’s no answer to that question. It might be the look, the smile, the zest for life, the common interests, the sense of humour, it might be any or all of these things, but in truth it is none of them. Love is not the sum of its parts. Love is not an epiphenomenon. Love is a phenomenon. Inexplicable.

  For about six weeks after Mary died she used to speak to me. I don’t mean that in any paranormal or quasi-religious sense. I recognised her utterances as the hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations that can occur on the cusp of sleep or wakefulness. Yet her young voice was extraordinarily real to me. She wouldn’t say much. Maybe she would just say my name. It wasn’t my imagination – at least, not in the usual sense of that term. I really did hear her voice. It wasn’t a spooky experience. In fact it was balsam. Her voice filled me, if only briefly, with a sense of calm.

  Then she stopped visiting.

  Of course I took it very badly. I said to her, ‘All right, Roy, if you’re going to slope off with your fancy man with the white face in the black cape, don’t expect me to come running after you.’ And I forced myself to stop thinking about her. It’s survival.

  ‘Did she like sex?’

  For pity’s sake.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Were you good together?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you fight?’

  ‘Once.’

  ‘What was it about?’

  ‘Something trivial. Can’t remember.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. Not if you only fought once.’

  But it was true. The apparent cause of the spat was lost to me and besides it had only been a kind of code for an underlying tension. I think we both panicked because events at the time seemed to assume a momentum of their own. Caitlin told Mary she approved, and MacKenzie told me she approved, and then Caitlin and MacKenzie together told us both they approved … It was all too sudden. We took a break. At least we didn’t have one of these ghastly ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ conversations. Mary was not short of admirers and I had the sense to leave her to get on with it.

  One night in the Potterrow Bar opposite McEwan Hall some slightly inebriated guy was making a nuisance of himself and I could see she was being harassed. I went over and got him to stop. I don’t mean I exercised any kind of machismo. I think I tried to crack a few jokes. At any rate it seemed to work. Later that night I got the shortest of texts from her.

  ‘Look after me, Ally?’

  The rest is history.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Car crash. Drunk driver.’

  I swiped at the cue ball. There was a puff of blue chalk and the white wobbled uncertainly into the last red which ambled off into the cushion. A kick.

  Alastair Cameron-Strange, thirty nine. I had it all, and I let it slip away. I was playing catch-up snooker. One red left on the table.

  ‘Where was the crash?’

  ‘Haddington.’

  ‘What took her over there?’

  ‘Her sister was playing her oboe at a Watch Night Service.’

  ‘This is a poignant date for you.’

  ‘I’ve never been one for anniversaries.’

  He sank the last red and got on the black again. Fifty. Fifty seven.

  Only the colours now. Eighteen points behind, twenty seven points on the table.

  Fifty nine. Twenty points behind, twenty five points on the table. The game was running away from me. We both stared at the table and we both did the same piece of mental arithmetic. He only needed the green. Slam dunk. Sixty two. Thwack. I didn’t want to look, but I heard the brown drop into the left middle bag. Sixty six.

  ‘What was the last thing she said to you?’

  That was an inspired question. I don’t know what it was – probably a ‘catch you later!’ accompanied by a swift hug as she and Caitlin got into the car. But I do know the last time I heard her voice, one morning in the half world between sleep and wakefulness, and I know what she said.

  ‘Look after me, Ally?’

  The remaining colours were shimmering in a heat haze on the baize. I sat down and took a gulp of Talisker and put my head in my hands.

  ‘There’s something you’re not telling me.’ He was an excellent interviewer. I could see why he had been seconded as a negotiator. Always probing. Always looking for the deeper level, questing. What’s the diagnosis? What is it you seek? What makes you tick? He played the blue with some finesse. The blue sauntered to the edge of the pocket with the insouciance of a French aristocrat on a tum
bril, paused, and flopped in like a guillotined head into a basket. Seventy one. I had all the trouble in the world.

  ‘Did they get the guy? Was he banged up?’

  ‘No. There was a problem with the processing of the blood sample. A lab error. He had a very clever lawyer.’

  ‘You mean he walked?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He got the angle wrong on an easy shot on the pink and missed by a mile. He didn’t seem the sort of man to be easily distracted. Ralph Parkinson, seventy one.

  Bit of a formality now. I would steal a quick glance at the position, concede, and put on the straitjacket. There were only three balls left on the table. They had all meandered down to baulk like three companionable drunks who had lost their way coming home from the pub. It was an unlikely scenario, but there was the possibility of a snooker. I was thirty two points behind with thirteen on the table, a lost cause. Yet somehow I had to win this game. Just had to. A million years ago, when I lived a life, I had been sentimentally fond of telling patients who had reached the end of the line, that no matter the mess they had got themselves into, there was always a way out. But was it true?

  I stubbed out my cigarette. I sent the pink up towards the top cushion and the cue ball gently kissed the black and nestled behind it on the lip of the bottom left pocket. Parkinson gently tapped the shaft of his cue on the edge of the table.

  ‘Do you know who he is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know where he is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you had contact?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you forgive him?’

  What a question. Forgiveness. It was a word we bandied around. And we thought we knew what we meant by it. I never wanted to see the man who had killed my wife after I had left the court room. I never wanted to know of his whereabouts and of his progress through life and if I had been able to obliterate his name from my memory I would have done so. I had no plan to harm him just as I had no particular wish that he prosper. If he had tried to make contact with me to express his remorse I am not sure that I would have welcomed it. Insofar as I had not appealed the court decision, and I had not attempted to track him down and murder him, it might be said that I had forgiven him. But my sense of charity was not really being put to the test. If a Sharia court had sentenced him to be beheaded, and I had had the power to pardon him, there would have been a test of my forgiveness. What would I have done? I would never know. So how could I possibly answer Parkinson’s question?