Stronger Than Death

by Manda Scott

  I picked a stone from the beach. Round and flat, just big enough for the curve of finger and thumb. The trick to chuckie stones is the flick of the wrist. I remember my grandfather showing me, on another beach on the opposite shore of this loch. I flicked and the stone spun, bouncing as it hit the ruffled surface of the water. Three of us stood and counted until it sank.

  ‘Five. Not bad.’ Dee Fitzpatrick had her own stone and her own theories of skimming. She knelt down beside the child. ‘Your turn now,’ she said.

  He was four, if that. Just old enough to understand the theory of competition, not yet old enough to compete. He wrapped his small child fingers around the pebble she had picked for him and threw it, overarm, at the water. It hit the surface three feet away and sank. ‘One,’ said Dee gravely. ‘That’s not bad either.’ The child stared at the spot where the stone had been. Small spumes of white foam crested the wavelets for a moment and then vanished. His lips quivered. I was six when my stone did that. My grandfather told me parables of physics and falling. A diversion into Newton’s universe, full of apples and inevitability. I don’t remember if I cried. The child was close. He pushed a small, fat hand through damp straggles of mouse-blond hair. His chin wobbled. ‘Pick another stone,’ offered Dee. ‘I didn’t pick a good one. It needs to be round. And very flat.’ Children change so fast. The pout dissolved. All he needed was a reason not to have lost. The game changed to a search for the ultimate chuckie stone.

  I sat on the rock and listened to the loch turning over the pebbles on the beach. Behind me, the whitewashed bulk of the Ben Lomond Lodge hotel sat quiet. Somewhere inside, two hundred delegates of the West of Scotland Medical Association voted new members on to their committees. The few who had sent their apologies ordered short drinks in the bar and kept their conversation quiet. A moorhen muttered low noises, hassling a string of dark-fluffed chicks along the side of the loch. Out across the water, near the far shore, small boats raced for a buoy, a string of white kites tacking into the wind. A container lorry winding silently along the A82 vanished behind the trees and reappeared again as the road snaked up the line of the loch. When I was a child, the journey up Loch Lomondside was a nightmare, something we did only in the wee small hours of the morning, when the traffic was low and the queues for the passing places could be expected to be short. Now you can cruise up to Inverarnan for lunch at the Stagger Inn and be back in time for tea.

  The child found a driftwood log and sat on his haunches right at the water’s edge, floating it out into the water, waiting for the wind to blow it back. Dee settled back on the pebbles above the water-line and let him play. She looked up and caught me looking back.

  ‘OK?’ she asked.

  ‘Not bad. It went better than I thought. They didn’t eat us.’

  ‘Sure, and some of them listened well enough to ask intelligent questions.’ She was relaxed and very Irish. ‘And we had better slides than the rest.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Amazing what you can do with an afternoon on Powerpoint. ‘Did you think Sean McLaren’s lot were on beta blockers?’

  She laughed and tossed a new pebble to the child. He caught it with both hands and a body block. ‘I know Joey Duncan was; I wrote him the prescription. The rest were just stoned.’

  ‘You wrote them the prescription for that too?’

  ‘Hardly … I met round the back of the—’ Feet scuffed on the pebbles. A shadow slid across the rock. Dee turned, shading her eyes, and then stood up, holding out her hand. ‘Professor … the wee lad’s fine. Except I think he might have got his feet wet.’

  The child had inched into the shallows, still crouched on his haunches, absorbed with his boat. His feet were quite definitely wet.

  ‘If that’s all he gets wet, his mother will be delighted.’ Professor Randolph Duncan, FRCS, dropped his tweed jacket on the pebbles beside the rock and lowered himself down on to it with the care of arthritic age. He looked up at me. ‘May I?’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  He leant his back against the rock and looped his long surgeon’s fingers behind his head. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘One of those things one discusses with the patients as a consequence of ageing. Tedious beyond belief to find it happening to oneself. Difficult to explain to the lad. I’m most grateful for the impromptu child-care.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’ I feel slightly surreal. ‘It was Dee did the caring.’

  He grunted a non-committal grunt, the verbal equivalent of a shrug, and turned slightly to look at me. His eyes were a watered brown, the whites yellowing with age. There was the beginning of something that looked like a cataract clouding his left lens. His hair was close to white. ‘You should be at the meeting,’ he said. If you heard him right, you could think it was a question.

  ‘I’m not into politics.’

  He grunted again, a different tone. I have heard that grunt too often in my past. It makes the hair stand on the back of my neck. ‘You should,’ he said, and it wasn’t a question. ‘They need more people like you.’

  He doesn’t know who I am. Not a clue. Dee stuck a twig upright in the log, a mast for a non-existent sail. Today is a day for fantasy. ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘The profession’s changing. Needs new perspectives. You’ve been away and you’ve chosen to come back. Gives you a chance to look at things from both sides of the fence. You should be sharing what you see.’

  So he does know who I am. ‘Maybe next year,’ I said.

  ‘Ever the one for procrastination.’ He closed his eyes and sank back against the rock, settling again. The quiet returned. I sat and watched the moorhen bob beneath the surface for weed. The water rippled where she used to be. Her chicks huddled at the edge, peeping. Across the loch, the lead dinghy passed through the paired buoys marking the winning line. The old man let the sun warm the age-marked paper of his skin. He has mellowed with age. And I have been alive long enough not to crumble at implicit criticism. Twenty years ago, both of these were different.

  Twenty years ago, Randolph Duncan was a consultant surgeon and the Dean of the medical faculty when I was a medical student. His ward rounds were one of the most uniquely unpleasant experiences of my student career. The only good thing that could be said about them was that they didn’t happen often. He taught abdominal surgery by the Inquisition technique long after the time when the educational psychologists proved that negative reinforcement is a spectacularly bad way to learn. In our year, there were folk who would pay a week’s rent to bribe their way off his theatre list. Lee took most of the offers, if not the money, but then Lee would have walked through hell and back if that’s what it took to get her surgery boards. You’ll have noticed that she’s not a surgeon now. Randolph Duncan is part of the reason for that. Quite a large part. It was fortunate, in many ways, that she chose not to come to the conference.

  The child became aware, suddenly, of his new audience. He dragged the log up the beach, passing Dee on the way, and demanded help with the relaunch. His grandfather stood up much more slowly than he had sat down. He scuffed pebbles as he walked across the beach and he stooped as he stood at the water’s edge, watching over the child and the log. If he found more than frustration in the infirmity of age, he bore it well. It occurred to me then that perhaps he was not the man we all thought. The child had no fear of him, certainly. Between them, they sent the log on an epic voyage.

  Dee stepped out of their way and came to sit beside me on the rock. We watched the captain rescue his ship from certain disaster on the shoals. He flashed a grin at Dee. She waved encouragement.

  ‘You’re good with him,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it of you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t, would you?’ She laughed and picked another pebble from the beech. ‘I ran a playgroup for a while. In my previous life.’

  ‘You had kids?’ There is so much about this woman’s past I don’t know.

  ‘No. We were going to. I thought I maybe should get the experience, just in case I didn’t like it.’
/>   ‘And did it put you off for life?’

  ‘Not at all, I loved it. We were all set to go ahead when Beth died. Single motherhood didn’t have quite the same appeal.’ The stone was flat and slightly oval. She spun it, left-handed, across the surface of the water, well away from the child and his grandfather. It bounced six times before it sank. ‘I took up medicine instead,’ she said. ‘It’s all much the same in the end.’ It came out easily and lightly. She was looking at the water. I was looking for a new chuckie stone. I pay so little attention to the things that are really important.

  I never found my new stone. We had barely finished talking when all hell broke loose behind us. Inside the main conference room of the Ben Lomond Lodge, the AGM passed its final resolution of the day and two hundred medical professionals, all used to giving orders and having them obeyed, tried simultaneously to establish precedence at the bar. The afternoon melted into chaos. The noise was unreal. The child looked up at the sound of it, then looked again, beaming. We turned, Dee and I, to see Jessica Duncan finally fight her way through the scrum that had gathered in the hotel doorway and run across the lawn towards us as fast as dress heels and an infant on one hip would allow.

  She arrived out of breath and kissed her father-in-law lightly on one cheek. ‘Dad … Dee … Kellen … I’m sorry … hadn’t expected the sodding thing … to go on this long.’ She stood for a moment with her free hand to her chest, breathing heavily. No one expects to be fit seven months after childbirth. Not many of them expect to be back at the cutting edge of their career, either. She’s an impressive woman, Jessica Duncan. Her paper on paediatric analgesia was one of the better ones of the morning and she presented it, clearly, without the benefit of drugs. I didn’t find out until later that she had two children in the crêche on top of the other, older, who was waiting at home. Anyone who can hold the attention of an entire medical audience for half an hour in between nappy changes has my unqualified respect.

  She pulled herself together and turned round, scanning the bar. ‘Has anyone seen … ? Oh, Daniel, no …’

  The boat had caught a small current and was off on a new adventure. The child was in water up to his knees and wading farther. He looked over his shoulder and grinned his father’s grin. The shoreline gives way very fast on the east side of Loch Lomond. Dee was first to the water’s edge, mother and grandfather not far behind.

  The child grabbed his boat, turned and sat down. The water came up to his chest. ‘Daddy,’ he said. It had the tone of a demand.

  You’ll be lucky, kiddo. Joey Duncan was not one of those who sent his apologies to the meeting, but he was a long way past sober none the less. It would have been surprising, frankly, not to have found Joey Duncan at least half cut at an official occasion, but on that day, of all days, he had at least a reason for topping up. When we all signed our names in the register at nine o’clock this morning, our senior surgeon was plain old Mr J. Duncan, orthopaedic consultant to the masses. Then, at lunchtime, a small bird flitted past from the top table with news of the interview results and Joey became, in the space between courses, Professor J. Duncan, the consummate heir to his father’s throne. He started celebrating round about then, a steady consumption of alcohol on top of whatever beta blockers he’d taken to help the morning’s presentation flow smoothly. The chances of levering him out of the bar before dinner were close to nil and falling.

  ‘No, Daniel, Daddy’s got to …’ This is motherhood, explaining the duties of professional care to a child. Daddy’s got to what? Sober up? Give the after-dinner speech? Present the prize for the best paper of the meeting? All of the above. Does any of that matter to a child in water?

  ‘No he hasn’t. Never fear. Daddy’s here.’ And he was. The new President of the Association, fresh from claiming his chain of office, was there. With his jacket slung over one shoulder and his shirt sleeves rolled up and his Royal College of Surgeons tie leaking loosely from one pocket and a full glass in his free hand, Joey Duncan was there. Big, broad Joey with his thinning mouse-blond hair and the big boy’s grin that keeps his patients from noticing the alcohol. And they don’t. I really believe they don’t. They trust him with their bodies, which is what surgery is all about, and they wouldn’t do that if they had the slightest idea how much damage his liver took between Friday night and Monday morning, or, indeed, any average evening of the week. But they love him, his patients, every one. As do his residents, his nurses, his students. In that respect at least, Joey Duncan is almost entirely unlike his father; the first universally popular Professor the surgery department’s had for years.

  At least he was.

  It didn’t last for long.

  It was eight o’clock when the department’s new appointee rolled up his trouser legs and waded in to fish his son and heir from the water of the loch. Somewhere after ten, he stood up, toasted the monarch, the coming Republic and the Association in terms that would have had him struck off the register for life if they’d ever made it to print. He presented his wife, in the face of some serious heckling, with the prize for the best paper of the conference and then he launched into the kind of skin-stripping, eye-watering character assassinations for which he has been famous since he organised our first-year student revue. By eleven, those of us with weak livers left to go to our rooms and watch the ceilings revolve. Joey Duncan stayed on in the bar, moved up a gear and kept the Chronic Cirrhosis Club entertained for the rest of the evening and on into the early hours of the following morning. It was light enough to read the labels on the bottle by the time he pocketed the remains of the Lagavulin and headed up for his room. At six, one of the maids spotted him lying in an alcove overlooking the loch, reclining with his head on one of the Ben Lomond’s thick pile cushions, mouth open, eyes shut, the faint smell of vomit clogging the air. The lass says she thinks the doctor was breathing when she passed but she didn’t check for a pulse. Chambermaids don’t do pulses. It was Jessica Duncan, called eventually from her room to minister to her comatose husband, who felt for the pulse and then called, still un-panicked, for a stethoscope. The news of what she found filtered down, grey and quiet, through the hangovers of the morning to the dining room, where Dee was eating breakfast and I was taking water to rinse down the analgesics. Short snatches of it passed unnoticed through the throbbing heat of my skull.

  ‘… Daft bugger …’

  ‘… thought he knew how to hold his drink … ?’

  ‘… forget to roll over. First rule of good drinking, always roll over …’

  ‘.… fast though, very fast …’

  And then finally, in the way of medics who have never quite learned how to pass on the fact of bereavement, Frazer Buchanan, consultant nephrologist, leant over our table, waved his poached eggs and bacon dangerously close to my nose and said, ‘Looks like the Association’s going to have to elect a new president, people. Joey Duncan’s just tied his last knot.’

  ‘Bad head?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘We’ve got some Ponstan in the cupboard.’

  ‘I’ve had as much as my ulcers can stand.’

  ‘I/v drip?’

  ‘Fuck off, Adams. I don’t need your sanctimonious prescribing.’

  ‘Sorry.’ She grinned, a brief spark in the chill of the room, and held out a gloved hand. ‘Pass the suction, can you?’

  I passed the suction. She moved round to the head and tilted back the chin. ‘But was the dinner good?’ she asked.

  ‘As much of it as I remember. The salmon was reasonable.’

  ‘Difficult to mess with salmon.’

  ‘True.’ Difficult to mess with brandy either but I don’t particularly want to think about that at the moment. ‘Joey was good.’

  ‘He always is. It goes in direct proportion to his blood alcohol level. I’ll be able to tell you exactly how good in about twenty minutes. Less if Mike gets his act together.’

  ‘Isn’t it a tad academic?’

  ‘Maybe—can you hit the switch—but we’l
l need it for the report.’

  I hit the switch over the suction pipe on the wall. Lee pulled up her face mask against the splash-back and angled the tip of the suction catheter into Joey Duncan’s open mouth. The mortuary filled with a soft slurping gurgle as of soup through a straw and the stomach-turning stink of stale vomit surged up from the slab and hit the back of my throat. I sat down, suddenly. Lucky I’ve nothing left to throw up, really. Maybe it’s fate. I will always empty my guts before I enter a mortuary; it saves the risk of despoiling their sinks.

  Lee leant over and directed the tip of the suction catheter down the back of the throat, almost the same kind of movement Dee makes when she’s sucking saliva out of her patients after anaesthesia so they don’t drown in their own juices when she pulls out the tube. For Joey, it came eight hours too late. He lay cold on the slab, in the same way Eric lay cold on the slab, except that where Eric was climbing fit, Joey spent his life hunting down brilliant, inspired after-dinner speeches in the bottom of the brandy bottle and his body is a testament to his success: not obese, but bigger all round than it should have been. His liver will sit in a jar in anatomy, preserved for posterity as a warning to other rising stars of the staff-student revue.

  Pieces of part-digested salmon clogged the catheter. Lee nodded and I flipped the switch off and back on again. The sucker cleared and sucked and sucked again in rhythmic, pulsing waves until there was nothing more to suck. I switched it off. Lee sealed the jar and wrote the time and date on the label. The smell subsided, or possibly I simply became less sensitive. The Ponstan finally working, perhaps. I thought of tablets and remembered something of the time before the brandy.

  ‘He was on propranolol,’ I said, ‘did you know?’