The Seven Trials of Cameron-Strange

by James Calum Campbell

  ‘You put a crepe bandage on her ankle.’

  ‘Yes. She sprained her ankle.’

  ‘She was injured landing the aircraft.’

  ‘No. The landing was perfect. Well, not perfect. Rough. But good enough. It was afterwards. Just walking over the grass. Inversion sprain.’

  ‘Well you can’t start work in this hospital now. That’s clear.’ The sprained ankle bit was the clincher.

  ‘Morley, give me a break. What’s a sprained ankle? I might just as well have put a sticking plaster on a cut finger.’

  ‘You really don’t get this, do you? At any rate, you’re going to have to lie low for a bit. Pray to God the girl doesn’t make a complaint. Once we’re done here, clear off-site. I’ll tell ED you can’t start on Monday. No doubt it’ll play havoc with the roster. I bent over backwards to get you back in here.’

  ‘I was grateful for that.’

  ‘I cut some corners for you.’

  I’d had enough. I got up to leave. ‘I think Middlemore would have done well by the arrangement.’

  ‘I went out of my way.’

  I left the door open on my way out.

  * * *

  Now that I was persona non grata at Middlemore I found myself at a bit of a loose end. I got off-site and went for an aimless meander around the periphery of Grange Golf Course. In my mind’s eye I went back to Auckland International, reviewing the events subsequent to Nikki’s spectacularly successful landing, wondering if there was any substance at all in Morley’s criticisms.

  After I’d ‘gone round’, and landed the Arrow back on 23, full stop, I’d hoped to taxi over to the array of emergency vehicles on the grass perimeter, but the Tower directed me to exit right and taxi to the Domestic Terminal. I didn’t argue. Their house, their rules. Actually it had even crossed my mind during that last low-level circuit to clear off back down to Ardmore, five minutes away, from whence I’d come. Perhaps I was romantically attracted to the notion of the mysterious aviator coming out of the sky to aid a damsel in distress, then disappearing back out into the sky again. A Good Samaritan not looking to gather any kudos. Indeed, I knew very well not to expect plaudits. It’s something I’ve learned in medicine. Medical professionals tend not to be impressed by Good Samaritans. Sometimes when I’ve stopped to help at a road crash I’ve had the feeling the paramedics think I’m little more than an interfering busybody. If you see you can make a difference, the best thing to do is to make the difference and then clear off. Nikki’s emergency landing had been so good that I suspect the emergency services, including ATC, would have thought little of a competent pilot landing a light aircraft; and they would have thought of me as an ambulance-chaser, an irrelevance and a bloody nuisance.

  But as it turned out, I wasn’t able to disappear. I parked the Arrow outside Domestic, made the plane safe, walked across the apron to the security door, and tapped the big green button that automatically released the door to the terminal, where a small reception party was waiting.

  ‘Dr Cameron-Strange?’ Man with a clipboard. ‘Step this way.’

  They’d cordoned off a segment of a departures lounge and turned it into a temporary operations room. I was led through a partition.

  ‘Take a seat. Do you have your licence and log book?’

  I handed them over. There was a brief delay. I was sitting in a single chair facing a table with, behind it, four further chairs. I became aware of a nagging sense of anxiety. I felt exactly as if I were about to undertake a viva examination for Fellowship of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine. That bad.

  Then the exam board trooped in. Four of them. They were civil enough, in a guarded way. I sensed the anonymous, temporarily non-judgemental atmosphere of a Morbidity and Mortality meeting. There were representatives of the police, the Civil Aviation Authority, the Airports Authority, and an accident inspector. They went over my documentation with a fine-tooth comb.

  ‘PPL … CPL … twin engine instrument rated … instructor’s rating … Current on the PA 28 R200? Uh-huh … Class 1 medical cert in date … The second last page … you haven’t tallied up your hours.’

  Well, that really is nit-picking.

  I was debriefed. I recounted the details of the sortie as succinctly as I could. Most of it would have been recorded on the r/t anyway. I might have been a Battle of Britain pilot back at dispersal. Two probables and one possible. They listened impassively, and made notes. Then they leaned in for a brief tête-à-tête.

  ‘Could you present yourself to us again in an hour?’

  It was even more like an exam viva. What would be the verdict? Outright pass? Outright fail? Invitation back for a Distinction oral? Or – by far most likely – recall for a Pass-Fail oral.

  I told the man with the clipboard I was going out for a breath of fresh air, and he told me not to go too far away. I took the one-kilometre stroll across from Domestic to International and paused on the walkway to observe the landing of an Airbus A380 whose livery I didn’t recognise. Green and gold – very striking. The beautiful big bird hung poised for a moment over the runway 23 threshold and then gently settled with the puff of dust of undercarriage wheels hitting asphalt. The A380 decelerated slowly to a halt at the west end of the runway, turned, and taxied towards International. A single word in huge dark green letters was emblazoned across the double-decker fuselage: FOX.

  I carried on with my aimless walk that took me into International Arrivals on the ground floor at the west end of the terminal. A small and expectant crowd had gathered; youngish set – they reminded me of the sort of people who camp out by the red carpet when the movie stars attend their own premiere. I gathered that a VIP was about to make a grand entrance. Whoever it was, they were preceded by their minder, a well-dressed, very tall, and powerful-looking Aryan with cropped blond hair on a bullet-shaped head, who conducted a quick survey of the scene and signalled the all-clear to those behind him. Bodyguard.

  The grand entrance was choreographed. A party of about a dozen men and women walked purposefully and rapidly out of Immigration and entered New Zealand. They reminded me of a kind of cliché advert for an American airline company, in which a senior captain strides across a concourse with a chevron of glamorous cabin crew in Vic formation symmetrically behind him, arms linked and with huge smiles and big hair. But nobody smiled. The bodyguard had disappeared into the background. Up front in the role of captain was a squat, powerful-looking man in his mid-fifties. He wore a beautiful dark blue suit that might have been Armani, and he had a camel coat with an astrakhan collar draped across his shoulders, as if he had just arrived from a colder climate. His watchful eyes stared straight ahead and ignored a small press gallery hastening to get his picture. He had a thin-lipped pout of fixed disdain that was threatening to turn from a sneer into a snarl. He seemed to be dictating rapid instructions to a secretary scampering beside him and struggling to keep up.

  Though powerful- and fit-looking, he was a little below average height. I could imagine him wandering around his ranch down in Texas in company with two snarling Alsatians held on a tight leash, a loaded Glock stuck in his waistband. He’d go to the gym for a workout and be one of these noisy self-advertisers pumping iron, howling with agony, hurling out expletives and throwing huge dumbbells to the floor with a deafening crash, then driving himself on the rowing machine to a kind of orgasm of exhaustion in a puddle of lactic acid.

  His entourage closed around him in a dense phalanx. They marched rapidly past me. The man at the centre might only have been in my visual field for ten seconds, and it could have been my imagination, but our eyes met for an instant. He clocked me. He looked absolutely furious. I developed the absurd notion that he was furious specifically with me because I had held up his A380 in a holding pattern for an hour somewhere out over the Tasman.

  Something else. There was something unusual about his gait. Under the draped camel coat he held his left arm rigidly to his side with his left hand in his jacket pocket. His right leg ha
d a rather exaggerated uplift of the knee as if it were constantly trying to clear an obstacle. I found myself studying his gait from a medical point of view. What did that gait betray? He and the entourage stepped out into the blazing morning sun. Limousines were sighing up to the kerbside with perfect synchrony. I took it the man with the sneer had come off the aircraft dubbed FOX. So this was Phineas. Foxtrot Oscar X-ray must be his Air Force One. Owning a Lear jet is one thing, but what do you have to be worth before you start flying around in your own Airbus? Must be the hell of a big-business tycoon.

  Back at Domestic I got coffee and a sandwich. I phoned the aero club at Ardmore and of course they already knew all about it. There were even some jokes in poor taste already circulating at my expense. How many doctors does it take to land a Cessna? One, but he’s got to be psychotic. ‘Out to lunch’, they said. Would they mind if I left the Arrow at Auckland and brought it over tomorrow? That’s if I wasn’t grounded. I really didn’t want to fly any more that day.

  The panel of judges reconvened, and I went back in to hear the verdict. It was the same scenario. I sat alone before the four empty chairs for a few minutes, and then they filed in and sat down. They had only one further question.

  ‘On approach, you were requested to divert to Ardmore. You chose to disregard this instruction. Why was that?’

  ‘Because, frankly, it was a terrible piece of advice.’

  I didn’t elaborate. The panel stared across at me impassively for a few seconds, and remained inscrutable.

  ‘Thank you, doctor.’

  We had adjourned.

  Johnnie Dempster came down briefly from the tower and I was grateful to him because he greeted me like an old pal, shaking my hand warmly, and chatted for a bit; all of this was not lost on what remained of the reception party. I was able to glean from him most of the information I wanted – that Nikki was fine (apart from tripping up walking away from the aircraft) and that her instructor, a 59-year-old man named Flanagan, 15 stones heavy and with a smoking history of 50 pack years, was stone-dead. I was also able to glean from Johnnie the main reason for all this brouhaha, namely that an Aerolineas Argentinas flight from Buenos Aires diverted to Christchurch, a Singapore Airlines flight from Singapore diverted to Sydney, and a Qantas flight from Brisbane was put into the purgatory of a holding pattern somewhere over Northland for an hour or so. Must have cost everybody a packet. Anyway, Johnnie shook hands again, gave me a wink, and went back up to the tower. The man with the clipboard asked me to hang on for a few minutes more, as Nikki apparently wanted to express her thanks.

  They must have been debriefing her in another part of the building. When I came back through the partition of the makeshift operations room I caught sight of her, walking with a slight limp across the domestic terminal concourse. She was taller than I’d expected, erect and straight-backed despite the limp. I’d already seen the lovely long light brown hair in the 172 cockpit under the headphones. She was very simply dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a light cream singlet that accentuated her figure. You’ll never believe this, but I swear as soon as I saw her coming I knew we were going to have some sort of thing together. And I also had a strange and irrational premonition that it would last about four months and come to an abrupt end. I knew all this as soon as I saw her and I had that split second in which to make a decision to pass it up or to run with it. If I passed it up it would be nothing. It would just vanish. If I ran with it, it would be a wealth of riches but it would have a strict time limit, and there was always the possibility I would be hurt.

  I got up and gave her a broad grin and reached out my right hand. She ignored it, walked right into my personal space and wrapped her arms around my neck and gave me a prolonged, tight hug. Five foot ten. Close up, I noticed the long hair was streaked with every variety of subtle shades of red. When she finally let go and drew away, I could see her eyes were moist. They were very pale blue, wide set, and I noticed within a minute that she had a habit of averting her gaze and even lowering her head whenever our eyes were in danger of meeting. She was frightened of the consequences of our eyes meeting. And I had a bad habit of staring people out. Her nose was short and her mouth wide, with a ready smile, her teeth white and even. That combination gave her a feline, even feral, look.

  I said, ‘You’ve hurt yourself.’

  ‘It’s nothing. Tripped up getting out of the Cessna. The paramedics wanted to take me to hospital. I said no. I thought it was just a sprain, but it’s getting a bit sore. They say there’s a hospital just down the road. Do you know it?’

  That extraordinary sense of having known somebody before. Well, of course, we had already met, and in a very intense way. You start a conversation and it’s like taking up one that got interrupted in the past.

  ‘Grab a chair for a sec.’ We sat down.

  ‘After you fell, could you get up and walk?’

  ‘Hobble.’

  ‘I see you can still weight-bear. Excuse me.’ I leaned forward and located the lateral malleolus of her right ankle and pushed it from the back. ‘Is that sore?’

  ‘Not really. It’s more towards the front.’

  ‘You don’t need an x-ray.’

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘Ottawa Rules.’

  She frowned. ‘Are you a doctor?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  She raised her eyes to the ceiling. Maybe there was some history there. Then she said, ‘Fancy a pint?’

  See. It was her idea, not mine.

  III

  I tried to call my lawyer, David Walkerburn, at Cardwell Walkerburn, Writers to the Signet, 48 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, but it turned out he’d taken himself off to Cape Town for a winter break. Who would blame him? Could Hester Cardwell help? Would 9am on Tuesday suit? So I arranged to Skype, 10pm Auckland time.

  Something odd about the positioning of the camera gave me the impression that I was looking upwards towards a severe head-and-shoulders portrait of a grey-haired lady behind a bench. She was wearing a white blouse with an elaborate collar in lace that made me think of the poet John Milton. To her right, and just within shot, a very young woman with short fair hair, in formal court garb, was sitting as an observer. It crossed my mind she would be off to court after the Skype meeting. She had good even features, clear skin, and she wore a pair of rimless spectacles. She reminded me of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, or perhaps Nerissa, her waiting gentlewoman, who both go undercover and come to court in drag. It was as if I was up before the Court of Appeal. Indeed, I recalled David Walkerburn telling me that Hester Cardwell was shortly to be elevated to the bench. But when Ms Cardwell smiled she looked beneficent enough. She took the history from me. I stated it as briefly as I could. She didn’t interrupt my exposition. Actually she busied herself taking notes. For a moment I had the impression she was recording my entire testimony, verbatim, longhand. Even when I had rested my case, she continued to write. Then she sat and examined her record.

  ‘How is Ms Hodgson?’ It was a precise, cultivated, Edinburgh voice.

  ‘She’s good, thanks. Apart from the sprained ankle.’

  She made a note. ‘Ah yes. Good, good. How do you view Professor Girdwood’s reaction?’

  Why is it, that when you ask lawyers a question, they just fire the question right back at you?

  ‘Well, it’s way over the top. Completely out of order. I wasn’t acting in a professional capacity. This has nothing to do with medicine.’

  ‘You were a Good Samaritan.’

  ‘Maybe, but not in any medical sense. I was one aviator helping out another. Imagine if I’d chosen not to answer her distress call. Where would she be now?’ I admitted to myself that the fact that my contribution to her landing safely had barely been acknowledged, rankled.

  ‘That is a question we cannot answer,’ replied Hester Cardwell, analytically. ‘Subsequently, however, you did form a doctor–patient relationship.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Albeit briefly, you took
a medical history, conducted a physical examination, made a diagnosis, and offered a treatment.’

  ‘I would argue that we already had a relationship. A pilot–pilot relationship if you like. Suppose, for the sake of argument, I have a girlfriend. We’ve been going out for three months. We go out for a hill walk. She trips and sprains her ankle. I take a look at it and put on a crepe bandage. Does that suddenly make the previous three months unethical? Or do I now need abruptly to terminate the relationship? It’s absurd.’

  ‘That is absurd, I agree. On the other hand, if your girlfriend of three months’ standing approaches you and requests a medical consultation, would it not be more ethical to advise she visit her GP? Doctors are advised not to treat relatives and loved ones where possible.’

  ‘But this was a question of necessary and immediate care!’

  ‘Was it? As Ms Hodgson said herself, Middlemore Hospital was only five minutes down the road.’

  ‘That’s pedantic. Look – I wouldn’t dream of going out with one of my patients. I fully understand it’s unethical.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ (I wondered if Ms Cardwell had a professional compulsion to play devil’s advocate. Maybe that was the sine qua non of being a lawyer.) ‘Imagine you are a single-handed GP working on a remote island with a population of say one thousand seven-hundred souls. Not only your professional life, but also your social, your private life has to be conducted on the island. You could make a case that establishing a sexual relationship with one of the islanders was acceptable. It is not the establishment of the relationship itself which is unethical. Rather, it is the possibility that you abuse your status as a physician and establish an empowerment and an influence in an inappropriate way.’

  She paused and made another note. It was the first time during our conversation that sex had been mentioned. It had occurred to her she had better get the whole picture. She was considering how to word it politely.

  ‘With respect to the rest of the evening you spent in Ms Hodgson’s company, I take it you … did indeed … as it were … have relations?’