‘Forgiveness?’ I shrugged. ‘It is not in my gift.’
I didn’t want Parkinson to ask me any more. I will lose myself to the baize in this absurd endgame, I will deaden my senses. Snooker and crosswords and Talisker and Stuyvesant – narcosis.
Parkinson attempted a three cushion rescue, played with power and force. The white zig-zagged and ricocheted back and forth across the baize, gave the pink a glancing blow and went in off. The pink wandered back down to baulk. I might be able to do it again.
Foul. Alastair Cameron-Strange, forty five. Another gentle tap, another gentle kiss. I’d almost reproduced the same scenario. This time Parkinson attempted a one cushion rescue hoping to nudge the pink on to the top cushion and bring the white back down to baulk. He missed the pink by a hairsbreadth leaving the cue ball with sufficient momentum to come off the top cushion back down to pot the black.
Foul. Fifty two. Forster respotted the black. Wonder of wonders. I was snookered on the pink, sitting up on the top cushion. I could nominate a free ball. Black ball. I played it, dead weight. Too soft! My heart was in my mouth. The cue ball just made it. The kiss was almost inaudible. Forster shaded his eyes beneath the glare of the overhead gantry.
‘Touching ball.’
Nineteen points behind, thirteen on the table. Just one more miracle. Now Parkinson tried to come off the side cushion to catch the pink with a thin enough angle as to keep it on the mid top cushion and bring the cue ball back down the table.
‘Foul, and a miss.’ The rules of snooker, the finer points, are rather subtle. I often wonder why Forster exerted his prerogative to call a miss. Maybe he was curious to know what I would do if I won. Fifty eight points! Thirteen behind, thirteen on the table. We hadn’t made any provision for a draw. I gave a curt nod, and Forster re-sited the balls as they had been before Parkinson’s last shot, like the reconstruction of a crime scene. This time the cue ball struck the pink but the contact was too full and the pink strolled up the baize like a flapper on a village green under a parasol eating an ice cream. Not only that, he had nudged the black a millimetre.
‘Foul. Alastair Cameron-Strange, sixty five.’ And the pink was on, to the left middle. Parkinson seemed to have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
‘Do you forgive yourself?’
That was the crunch question. After the match, I could hardly recall the way in which I had peremptorily and perfunctorily pocketed the last two balls and stolen it, in an attitude of suppressed rage. I told Parkinson that there was no possibility of personal forgiveness or atonement, when I had failed to resuscitate Mary. I had failed to resuscitate her, the night the paramedics had brought her into Little France. And when the futility of resuscitating the victim of blunt trauma arrest became apparent, I had taken a scalpel and gone ahead, perhaps inadvisedly, to deliver my child but not, as with his mother, to resuscitate him. And as I would persist in prolonging the pathetic two finger CPR on the tiny blue sternum, Forbes had gently put an arm round my shoulder and led me out of Resus, past the awed blanched stares of the nurses and the doctors and the paramedics. No. There could be no forgiveness for that.
Parkinson laid his cue down on the deserted baize. ‘I see.’
‘I win. You promised you’d leave me alone.’
‘I promised I wouldn’t section you under the Mental Health Act. But I still expect you to come voluntarily.’
I looked at my watch. It was six thirty in the morning.
‘Can I have half an hour? To collect my thoughts. Please. You can see I’m trapped.’
I watched Parkinson and Forster weigh it up. It was a wonderful choice of hiding place, down here in the bay, always provided you weren’t discovered. Once cornered, there was no way out. A hiding place became a prison. You could fly an aeroplane into a short paddock at night but only a lunatic would attempt to fly it out again.
‘Just half an hour? You needn’t worry. Caitlin’s perfectly safe.’
‘I know, mate. We’ll wait in the car.’
The odd couple moved to the door. Parkinson turned. ‘You know, you should forgive yourself.’
We stared at one another. For a moment I had the absurd notion that these two men were going to become colleagues of mine, even friends. What could I be thinking? I could only shrug at the man from Toorak, and repeat my words.
‘Forgiveness? It is not in my gift.’
XXIV
Back out of the basement window and move away silently into the darkness. Don’t hurry. Count steps and wait for your eyes to adjust. Rods and cones. It’s a clear night and there’s a new moon caressing the afterimage of the old. There’s the dull gleam of the iron gate. Don’t open it! Sounds like a soprano sax. Climb. Just under a kilometre to the beach. Count steps again.
Last bend on the track, strewn with sand. The surging swell of the bay, periodic, like a slumbering animal snoring in its lair. Off-shore breeze, maybe five to ten knots. Here’s the little gully hiding the blessed Slingsby camouflaged under foliage. Cast it all aside. Port wingtip, leading edge, fuselage, dome of the canopy, prop, starboard wing leading edge, wingtip, trailing edge, fuselage, tail fin, fuselage, port wing trailing edge. So much for a pre-flight.
Now jump up on to the port wing root and turn the clasp of the canopy through ninety degrees and pull the canopy back. Release the port joystick where you’d secured it to the rudder pedals with elastic rope – an age ago – to stop the control surfaces from flapping in the wind. Parking brake off. Back down to the nose of the aircraft and grasp the prop in both hands and heave. Not too far. You’ll need every inch.
There are old aviators and there are bold aviators. What would an old aviator do now? Retrieve the aircraft documentation from its pocket behind the pilot’s seat and work out a ‘P’ chart. Take off performance, slope and distance of the strip, nature of the surface, all up weight, wind speed and direction, ambient temperatures and pressures … Forget it. One way or another, I’m leaving.
Now all of a sudden there’s a light drizzle. At least access the oil dipstick under the aperture in the engine cowling. Five litres.
Get into the cockpit and don’t think about it. Just do it. Left seat, hood closed and locked, rudder pedals out to length, five point harness secured low on the midriff. Put the key in the ignition! Start-up checks, hard-wired. Fuel on, brake on, throttle closed, switches off, instruments left to right … flicking on the masters, setting the mags on both, carb air cold, fuel pump on … Prime the engine with fuel using the throttle lever. Give it six strokes and set the throttle open half an inch.
Now to wake people up.
I pressed the starter.
There was a fractional pause, then the prop gave two great scything coughs, and then sprang obediently to life. Automatically I glanced at the oil pressure; it rose immediately. I set 1000 rpm and suppressed the compulsion to get on with it. I needed the engine to warm up to maximum efficiency. Never mind the fact that people would be opening their blinds, coming out to investigate. Get all the temperatures and pressures up. Therefore you have time to check the magnetos, for the pre-take-off checks, the vital actions. Keep the nav lights off. I set 1800 rpm and pulled the carb air intake to warm. The revs dutifully fell off by 100 and returned again to 1800 when I reset cold. Mag 1 – drop off 50. Mag 2 – dropped 200 and the engine started to run rough. I set mags on both and ran the engine up to full power. That would wake up the whole bloody island! I wished now I’d put my headset on. I was deafened. I gave it thirty seconds and then dropped back to 1800 and checked each mag in turn. This time there was a drop of 50 on each mag and the engine note was sweet.
Vital actions … I ran through the mantra automatically. Trim neutral, throttle friction nut finger tight, mixture rich, carb air cold, fuel pump on, instruments set, half a stage of flap … It may have been my imagination but I caught a glimmer of torch light out of the corner of my eye, and how could I have heard a shout above the engine note? But I abandoned the rest of the checks and thrust the throttl
e on to full power with my feet on the toe brakes. The engine roared to 2200 rpm. I glanced ahead. There was very little to see. A rock face ahead, alarmingly close, and a glimmer of light off the ocean on my left. I whispered under my breath, ‘Dear Christ Almighty.’ I do believe it was more of a prayer than a profanity. Then I released the toe brakes.
The aircraft surged forward. I used rudder to stay parallel with the line of the bay. The crosswind whipped at me. More right rudder, more right aileron – keep the wing down. Ignore the great slab of blackness ahead. Just get the nose wheel off the ground. There she goes. That’s all you can do. Just wait for the machine to get airborne. How far ahead was that stream that cut across my runway on its way to the sea? Come on baby lift off … We’re off! Keep the nose down. Get some speed. The pale silver of the stream flashed under me. Now the line of the seashore had vanished from view and the rock face occupied the whole of my existence. It was about to smash into the cockpit. Right aileron, right rudder, as much as you dare … keep the nose down! The stall warning light flashed and the stall warning horn screeched at me. Hold it there … hold it! I was hissing at myself through gritted teeth. Then the blackness of the cliff wall fell away and I could see a horizon ahead at the top of the valley and, above it, a blue black sky. Get the wings level. I had 50 feet and 60 knots. Bring the nose up, very, very gently. The screeching stopped and the stall warning light went out. The big house fell away to my right. There were a few lights burning in the cottages of the tiny hamlet inland. 70 knots. I put the Slingsby Firefly back into a climbing turn to the right, back over the house. Pick up the beach again. I could just make out two figures, one bulky and untidy with hands on hips, staring upwards, the other slim and fit, trying to make a call on his mobile. Would he get a signal down there? He’s probably scrambling a jet to shoot me down. Surely they’d alert the police now! 500 feet. Release the flap. Climbing on full power. Fuel pump off. There’s the beach, the surf. Turn south. You’ve done it. You’ve made it.
All the danger and tension fell away as the bay with its waterfalls and scarred rock basilisks disappeared behind. Prosaically, I retrieved my headphones from the tiny luggage space behind me, put them on, plugged them in, and turned on the radio. Not that I had any intention of talking to anybody. I thought I’d catch the seven o’clock news headlines.
XXV
Barry Trubshaw has tried to take his own life.
There is a terrible simplicity about the pattern of one’s life that only becomes apparent to most people during middle age. Prior to this, even amid the heartbreaking anxieties of one’s youth, there is, if only intermittently, a life-giving sense of omnipotence that, despite everything, one will wake up in the morning full of beans, one will move on to a higher plane, one will live abundantly. With courage and industry, there is no limit to what one might achieve. It is only later that one becomes guarded by a sense of one’s own limitations and the realisation that, after all, all things were not possible.
Such a realisation is not entirely bitter. While it may seem to prescribe the path of one’s future, and proscribe other, heretofore potential futures, at least it absolves you of some of the sense of guilt over the past. You have been blaming yourself for the way in which you played your hand. But how could you play for a Grand Slam when you were dealt a chicane?
Well, perhaps not quite a chicane. It was, after all, a biddable hand, if in a modest way.
Life is a game of contract bridge. Bridge is not like patience. Patience is a procession – like one of these Formula One Grand Prix events in which nobody is overtaken. The outcome is already ordained within the pack. But there remains some room for manoeuvre during a game of bridge. You can influence the future. Yet, most of that influence has to be exerted during the bidding. After that, there is very little opportunity for finesse.
In an interesting hand of bridge, you might bid two or three times. Is this also true of life? Imagine if the sum total of the pattern of your life were determined by two or three critical decisions you made during your youth.
Career. Spouse. Environment. I will be a surgeon. I will marry Veronica. I will live in Edinburgh. Such was the bid of Mr Barry Trubshaw.
Or, to put it another way, I will be a professional fake. I will make a fake match, and sire a fake dynasty. I will move in a fake world.
So it can clearly be seen that Mr Trubshaw’s opening bid, his enrolment at Edinburgh Medical School, had been only a manifestation of an underlying theme. He always made the same bid. Did chance play any part in it? Of course he might not have met Veronica during rehearsals for the medical ball cabaret. But he would have found another Veronica.
Could he have been ploughed, could he conceivably have failed his medical course? Unlikely. He was academically bright and had a fine, retentive memory. Not that it mattered, but he even had an apt degree of motor skill for a surgeon. But his hands were at their best turning wood. Furniture making was his hobby; one could not say it was his passion. But there was exquisite tactile pleasure in the texture and grain of polished wood, just as there was something repellent for him in the handling of diseased or damaged tissue. The look of distaste as the layers of yellow fat spilled out over the incision site could not be seen behind the surgeon’s mask. The examiners of the Royal College of Surgeons are not adept at discriminating between a surgeon and a wood-carver masquerading as a surgeon.
And Edinburgh? Well, it’s such an incestuous place. And once the career and the dynasty were in place … Veronica takes tea in Jenners. Max and Carolyn are down for the Academy and St George’s. Edinburgh was inevitable.
Freud teaches us that, beneath the superimposition of the rationality of intellect, all human motivation is ultimately child-like. Love, hate, greed, pride, humility. Why did Mr Trubshaw choose to lead the life of a dissembler? To attain wealth? Prestige, the respect of colleagues, power, a position in the community, security for his family? No.
To placate his father.
So it is that you make your life decisions, dimly aware of the way in which their resonances will reverberate down the years. You made your own bed – now lie in it! And you grow seasoned to the rigours of the life you have constructed for yourself. And after a time you become resigned to the impossibility of re-inventing yourself.
Yet, you realise, change is still possible – change for the worse. When you professed a predilection for hepatobiliary surgery you could have had no idea of the revolution in laparoscopic techniques which would radically alter your chosen sub-specialty. Then, after two decades, the need to reascend ‘the steep part of the learning curve’ had returned, and how much more difficult, this time, seemed the ascent, and how much less accessible the plateau of competence.
Perhaps if he had taken advice then, sought counselling for what he admitted to himself was his ‘predicament’, things might have turned out differently. But the self-reporting of inadequacy has never featured prominently in the medical curriculum; actually it did not feature at all in Mr Trubshaw’s formative years as an undergraduate. The ethos of ‘soldiering on’, on the other hand, still has credentials. Thus it was that Barry Trubshaw found himself on that fateful afternoon, in the Grange, ‘soldiering on’, wielding the ungainly laparoscopic tongs and incinerating not the cystic duct, as his anaesthetist was so sharply subsequently to remind him, but the common bile duct, thereby bringing to an end with one swift stroke the burgeoning career of one of Edinburgh’s more dynamic young entrepreneurs.
He had been philosophically aware that this simple and devastating act would usher in the twilight of his career in Edinburgh, but he had not been prepared for the brutality of his peers, and the collegiate ferocity which was turned upon him.
He was closed down. Anaesthetists with unpronounceable names from dubious schools in outlandish provinces might gas for him, but the stream of referrals from local general practitioners dwindled to a trickle and then dried up altogether. His operating privileges within the NHS were gradually withdrawn. After a time he was crede
ntialed to perform only a handful of simple elective procedures such as the repair of an inguinal hernia – but not by laparoscope. His need for beds on the wards diminished and management apologetically but firmly farmed them out to the hard-pressed physicians and geriatricians. His university commitments were curtailed and, in any case, as word got round, the medical students had stopped attending his rounds.
It never rains but it pours. Just as the work was drying up, his investment portfolio began to perform less well. But the shopping bills and the school fees kept going up and up! That was the final nail in the coffin. But for ever pressing financial commitments he might have been able to sweat it out. As it was, his erstwhile colleagues took pity on him.
There was, they said, a ‘Cas’ across in the dark kingdom. A big shambling run down Victorian hospital. Very busy. Disadvantaged community. Low socio-economic status. High infant mortality. High unemployment. Drugs. Crime. Trauma. 90,000 patients per annum, 35% of them children. High service commitment. No medical students. Young nursing staff with a high turnover. Medical staff? Either foreign graduates or post graduate year 2. Six of them. Well, five really. There’s a rotation for a month through neurosurgery. The present chairman, a retired orthopod with a predilection for the bottle, has just resigned, burnt out. Care to take it on?
Knowing full well that this was the final humiliation, that it solved little for him, nothing for the ‘Cas’, and that far from being an act of kindness this was a supremely cynical act on the part of the surgeons, whereby they could wash their hands of him, he accepted. His parlous financial state drove him to it. He accepted, knowing full well that he knew nothing of, say, asthma, croup, the anticholinergic toxidrome, acute dystonic reactions, occult bacteraemia, febrile convulsions, parasuicide, and the million and one other slings and arrows he would be bound to come across. He knew nothing of them and, worse still, the hospital management, who also knew he knew nothing of them, took him on.
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