by Ken McClure
‘Then what?’
‘When the trouble up ahead cleared and the traffic started to move again, I followed their directions which took us to a quiet spot by the river where we all got out. They had a brief discussion about my identity and one of them produced a photograph. It was my Lehman Steiner staff photograph.’
‘My God! What possible connection could there be?’
MacLean shook his head and said, ‘I’ve no idea. But with no further doubt remaining about my identity they told me to face the river. I stood there waiting for a bullet to crash into my spine. I remember the smell of the grass and the sound of a seagull crying overhead. I could see every ripple on the water and hear every gurgle by the bank. It was as if all my senses had been heightened. These were the last things I was to see and hear on earth.’
‘But they obviously weren’t.’
‘For some reason, maybe the noise factor, they didn’t shoot me. Instead, they hit me over the head with the gun barrel and pushed me into the water. By rights I should have drowned but I survived. An angler fishing a few hundred yards downstream pulled out my unconscious body and called an ambulance.’
‘You were lucky,’ said Tansy.
MacLean looked at her as if what she had said was debatable. ‘I didn’t come round for four days; I had a fractured skull but I was alive. I was also a nervous wreck. I had cheated death three times, there probably wasn’t going to be a fourth.’
Tansy nodded and touched the backs of MacLean’s hands.
‘When I was well enough to leave hospital I decided to disappear. I changed my name, my address and my job. I became Dan Morrison, itinerant labourer.’
‘A labourer?’
‘There aren’t too many jobs you can get without papers and identity checks but working on a building site is one of them.’
‘That must have been quite a change.’
‘It was,’ agreed MacLean, smiling slightly at the recollection. ‘For the first few weeks I had to go straight to bed when I got in at night; I was so exhausted. When I got up in the morning it seemed as if every muscle in my body was screaming at me. But gradually it got better. I became fitter, leaner, harder. I regained confidence in myself because the intense physical effort was giving me relief from mental anguish. I was always too tired to dwell on the past for very long. I even started to make plans for the future. I would be Dan Morrison for two years. After that time I reckoned that Lehman Steiner would have given up on me and it would be safe for me to go back to medicine as long as I maintained a low profile.’
‘So you stayed on the building site,’ said Tansy.
‘For a while,’ said MacLean. ‘But the talk among the men was of the big money to be made on the North Sea oil platforms. It sounded like something a single man with no ties like Dan Morrison would go for. Apart from that, who would think of looking for a plastic surgeon on an oilrig in the North Sea?’
‘Good point,’ said Tansy.
‘I left the building site one Friday and headed north to Aberdeen. By the following Thursday I was a roustabout on the Celtic Angel rig, two hundred miles north-east of Stonehaven.’
‘Good Lord,’ said Tansy.
‘It was cold, hard and lonely. I didn’t know a soul on the rig and I didn’t have anyone on shore to come home to. The work was heavy and the weather was appalling. The North Sea has a malevolence in winter that words just cannot do justice to. The wind howls down from the Arctic with nothing to get in its way and the sea can look like a mountain range on the move. It got so cold at times that if you touched anything metal on deck without gloves on, your skin stayed there.’
‘It sound awful,’ said Tansy.
‘These chaps earn their money,’ said MacLean. ‘Don’t ever let anyone ever tell you otherwise.’
‘How long did you stick it?’
‘Eighteen months,’ said MacLean.
Tansy was surprised. ‘A long time,’ she said.
‘I know it must sound strange after what I’ve just said but in some ways it was one of the best times of my life. As time went by I made friends, good friends among men I wouldn’t have normally met. There was something very satisfying about living a life completely free from all petty social veneers and pretensions. There’s no room for airs and graces on the drilling platform in a force eight gale. Equally there’s no room for slackers or incompetents. Mutual respect and honest endeavour were the rules of the game.’
‘So you worked hard,’ said Tansy with a question mark in her voice.
‘All right,’ agreed MacLean, ‘We played hard too if that’s what you mean. But it wasn’t the meaningless waste I’d always assumed that to mean. Drink helped us to relax and we deserved that. In fact it was essential to unwind. The alternative might have meant a real nervous breakdown.’
‘And you were free of Lehman Steiner?’
‘Yes, I was finally free of Lehman Steiner. I reckoned on spending six more months in the North Sea and then returning to medicine. Then came the accident.
We were working on the drilling platform in atrocious conditions. The wind carried away any words almost before they left our lips so we had to communicate by hand signals. There was a misunderstanding and chains started to fly everywhere. Two of the gang were hit and seriously injured. There was no possibility of a helicopter landing on the rig in that weather so I had to do what I could for them. We had a well-equipped sickbay on board but the men needed more than first aid. I took over from the attendant and performed a tracheotomy on one of them to help him breathe.’
‘That must have raised a few eyebrows,’ said Tansy.
‘There was more to come I’m afraid,’ said MacLean. ‘The other man went into cardiac arrest and stopped breathing. Mouth to mouth and cardiac massage failed to re-start his heart. Even the paddles had no effect.’
‘Paddles?’ asked Tansy.
‘For electric shock,’ replied MacLean. In the end I cut open his chest and started his heart with my hand,’ said MacLean.
‘My God,’ said Tansy. ‘What a risk.’
‘Luckily it paid off. Both men recovered when they were eventually flown off but I had blown my cover. The gang worked out that I had something more than a first-aid badge from the boy-scouts. I had to come clean and admit that I was a doctor. I asked them to keep my secret.’
‘And?’
‘They were great. They said that they understood perfectly. To be working on the rig I must have been struck off for taking advantage of my female patients while under the anaesthetic. They would do the same given half a chance.’
Tansy smiled.
MacLean said, ‘I managed to convince them that I hadn’t been struck off but that my life might be in danger if stories of a doctor working as a roustabout on the rigs were to get around. They promised that my secret would be safe with them and I believed them. There were no men on earth I would have trusted more. They also offered their help in solving my “problem”. I declined of course, but then I thought of a way in which a couple of them could help me.’
‘How so?’ asked Tansy.
‘Throughout the whole Lehman Steiner affair I had been plagued by feelings of helplessness. Fear, anger, frustration had all played their part but the feeling of utter helplessness was the worst to bear in the long term. I could get angry, I could get mad, but I couldn’t do anything about it! I’ll never forget the feeling of complete impotence I had on the riverbank while I waited for the National Front yobs to kill me. I just stood there doing nothing, meekly waiting for death.’
‘You couldn’t have done much in the circumstances,’ said Tansy.
MacLean became animated. He said, ‘But don’t you see, Lehman Steiner were sending people to kill me and all I could do was run? Run or hide; these were my only two options.’
‘What else could you do?’ asked Tansy.
‘Fight,’ said MacLean. ‘I could fight back but only if I knew how.’
‘And that’s where your friends came in,’ said Tansy.
‘Go on,’ said Tansy.
‘I knew that a few of the gang had been in the services. One, Mick Doyle, had served with the SAS and another, Nick Leavey had been a sergeant in the Paras.’ I asked them if they would teach me how to look after myself.’
‘And they agreed to teach you the ancient art of knocking nine bells out of somebody else?’ said Tansy.
‘More or less,’ agreed MacLean. ‘Not the Wednesday night at the YMCA stuff, but the real thing, every dirty trick in the book. As it turned out, my own knowledge of human anatomy and physiology helped a great deal. Doyle and Leavey knew what to hit and I knew why.’
‘When you broke the ice with your feet… ‘ began Tansy.
‘La Savate,’ said MacLean. ‘It’s a French martial art, something Nick Leavey taught me.’
‘So you became an expert,’ said Tansy.
‘You could say,’ replied MacLean. ‘I set out to learn everything there was to learn but something else happened too. As I became more competent I also became more confident. I began to resent the fact that Lehman Steiner had taken away so much of my life.’
‘You wanted to get your own back?’ asked Tansy.
MacLean shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’d long given up nurturing notions like that. I simply wanted my life back. I wanted to be back in medicine. I didn’t want to wait any longer. Time had run out for Dan Morrison. Sean MacLean had become restless.’
‘Sean,’ said Tansy. ‘I didn’t know your name was Sean. It suits you.’
MacLean leaned over and kissed her gently. It was a spontaneous gesture of affection that MacLean himself did not really understand. But there was so much about the last two days that he didn’t understand. Tansy didn’t draw back but she didn’t respond. She reached up and touched his cheek gently saying softly, ‘Go on.’
MacLean continued. ‘It was a spur of the moment decision to leave the rig. We had just flown in to Aberdeen at the end of a two-week stint. We hit the pubs as we always did on the first night back on shore and as usual, the men drifted away one by one to return to their girlfriends and families. By eleven o’ clock there were just three of us left, Doyle, Leavey and myself, the three who had nobody to go home to. It was then that I told them I wasn’t going back. I was returning to medicine even if there was a chance that my enemies might still be trying to track me down. They wished me well and as a parting gift Mick Doyle gave me the gun you found in my pocket. The “equaliser” he called it if the odds should ever become too great. He spent most of his leave teaching me how to use it. When he returned to the rig I practised on my own. I had plenty of time because I had to let my hands recover before I could think of applying for a medical job. Two years of hard labour had not been kind to them.’
Tansy looked at MacLean’s hands and saw what the canal ice had done. She lifted one and kissed it. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.
MacLean shook his head almost imperceptibly.
‘Would you like to break for a while?’
MacLean nodded.
‘I’ll have to do some shopping. I’ll take Carrie with me. You will be here when we get back won’t you?’
MacLean nodded but Tansy needed more.
‘Promise?’ she said.
‘Promise,’ said MacLean. He watched the Mini pull away from the drive and smiled at Carrie who was kneeling on the back seat waving to him.
MacLean could almost touch the silence that descended on the house. It had been a living, breathing place when Tansy and Carrie had been there but now it was just a house, an inanimate pile of bricks and mortar. He found that he could think clearly again. His stay there had been, as he had really known all along, a temporary diversion from what he had to do. He started to look for his overcoat. It wasn’t on any of the pegs in the hall where his jacket hung. Tansy had put it away somewhere.
As a last resort, MacLean tried the large wardrobe in Tansy’s room. He found his coat hanging in the left side; it was the only thing there. Was this where Keith had kept his clothes? he wondered. He removed it and replaced the metal hanger, which jangled against the others like Tibetan prayer bells for a very long time. He stared at the emptiness he’d left then closed the door. He put the coat on and turned up the collar.
MacLean paused at the gate and looked back at Carrie’s snowman and the igloo. ‘Good-bye Mr Robbins,’ he whispered and started towards the canal towpath. He would walk back to town the way he had come.
With every step of the way the colours of the last two days faded into the cold grey of reality. The canal was still frozen; the towpath hard as iron and the sky was becoming more leaden by the minute. MacLean was sure it was going to snow again but when it did come it was hail. Icy rivets were driven into his face as he hurried to the shelter of a stone bridge. He waited under the arch, looking down at his feet and listening to his breath coming in uneven pants. He plunged his hands deep into the pockets of his overcoat and came across something that he could not remember being there. It felt like an envelope.
MacLean brought it out and found it was a plain, white envelope, sealed but with no writing on it. He tore it open untidily because of the numbness in his fingers and withdrew a single sheet of paper. On it were the words, ‘You promised!’
Just when he thought he had broken the spell and escaped, Tansy had reached out and touched him. MacLean rested his forehead against the cold stone of the bridge and tried to find his resolve. No good could come of any further delay he told himself. He would only bring hurt to innocent people and yet… he started back along the towpath towards the bungalow. The wind was now behind him. He was uneasy about his decision but he had made it.
When he reached the house MacLean could see that Tansy and Carrie had returned. Carrie was standing in the garden looking lost. She looked up when she heard MacLean reach the head of the path. ‘You’re back!’ she cried and then to her mother, ‘He’s back! He’s back!’
Tansy came out into the garden and looked at MacLean standing there. Her eyes told him that she knew what he’d intended.
‘I thought I would get some fresh air,’ he lied.
Tansy nodded without taking her eyes from his. ‘Come inside. I’ll make coffee.’
FIVE
Did you get back into medicine?’ asked Tansy as they sat down by the fire.
‘Yes,’ replied MacLean, holding his hands out to the flames and rubbing them to restore circulation. ‘I moved to Glasgow, rented a flat in my own name and re-established contact with the BMA. I told them I had been abroad for some time and apologised for losing touch. I had three missing years to catch up on so I spent my mornings in the university medical library going through the journals and my evenings with the latest text books.’
‘What about the afternoons?’ asked Tansy with a smile.
MacLean took the question seriously. ‘The afternoons were for keeping fit. I would either run or swim.’
‘Not much social life,’ said Tansy.
‘It wasn’t all work,’ said MacLean. ‘I joined a couple of societies, mainly for conversation. It had been a long time since I’d been in company that spoke about anything other than money or women.’
‘What kind of societies?’
‘Conversational French,’ said MacLean.
‘You wanted French conversation?’ asked a surprised Tansy.
‘I pretended to myself that the language didn’t matter it was the subjects that were important and I could speak French well.’
‘But there was an ulterior motive?’ said Tansy.
MacLean admitted, ‘I needed to remember what it was like to be with Jutte. In the beginning she was always with me; I could remember every single thing about her but gradually the memories started to fade; I felt guilty. It had been nearly three years since I had heard or spoken French. I wanted to hear it again… us
e it as a trigger, make it re-kindle old memories, keep Jutte alive in my mind.’
‘Did it work?’
‘In a way,’ smiled MacLean. ‘But no matter what you do or how hard you try to cling to old memories they start to fade and drift out of reach.’
‘It’s part of the healing process,’ said Tansy. ‘If it didn’t happen, none of us would ever get over anything.’
MacLean nodded.
‘What about the other society?’
‘English literature. I wanted to come out of the closet.’
‘What?’ exclaimed Tansy.
MacLean smiled and said, ‘When I first went to work on the rigs I had three books of English poetry in my bag. I kept them hidden. They kept me sane in a world of bulging biceps and monosyllabic grunts. My bunk was where I escaped to read them. My secret world.’
‘I can understand why you kept it a secret,’ smiled Tansy.
‘I was wrong about that,’ said MacLean.
‘In what way wrong?’ asked Tansy.
‘Wrong to judge by appearances. When I got to know them, one of the men turned out to be lifelong student of Greek mythology, another did the most beautiful water-colours of sea birds.’
‘It’s amazing what people do when their heart is in it,’ said Tansy.
‘Absolutely,’ agreed MacLean.
‘So you joined the English lit club. You took tea with the ladies of Kelvinside, ate home-baked scones and discussed the relative merits of Byron and Keats. You politely applauded Mrs Williams’ offering on the lark,’ said Tansy.
‘It was a bit like that,’ MacLean conceded. I didn’t stick it very long. I decided that it had better remain a personal thing after all. How did you know?’
‘I tried it too and came to the same conclusion,’ said Tansy. ‘Not in Glasgow of course, but here in Edinburgh. It was after Keith died when I was being encouraged to go out and “join things”. I joined a poetry society.’
‘You like poetry?’
‘Very much.’
‘Favourites?’
‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning when I’m in love, Phillip Larkin when I’m in pain.’
