Consent

A medical student meets an older gentlemen who can advance her career prospects. Things become difficult when family becomes involved.

Consent

 

-For the nursing staff at Park Royal-

 

 

Early afternoon finds a bored man confronted with a classroom full of youngsters with too much energy and not nearly enough release. Early spring throws its bright warmth of new year’s sunlight into this dusty old school. Mr. McKenzie is feeling mischievous.

 

‘I have a job for you’.

 

‘Yes sir’ says the small boy meekly.

 

‘You are to find Ms. Jane and give her my compliments. Also, ask her if she cares to join me for an evening stroll after school. That a boy William, off you go’.

 

Off he went. Mr. McKenzie allowed himself a small chuckle as he cast a suspicious eye over the class and undid his flask under the desk. While pretending to look for something in the bottom drawer he took a swig of whiskey.

 

Ha. If I can’t get away with it at my age, he thought, whenever could I?

 

Later on in the nurses office the small boy finds Ms. Jane and delivers his missive.

 

            ‘Oh, and he also sends his compliments’.

 

Jane sniffed the air and sneered.

 

            ‘Is that all?’

 

Bunter nodded. ‘He’s an awfully nice man you know’.

 

            ‘So that wasn’t all then William?’

 

            ‘Umm?’

 

            ‘Go back to class’ suggested Jane.

 

The boy shuffled off, dejectedly dragging his feet all the whole way. On his return he told Mr. McKenzie that Ms. Jane had sent no reply (not that McKenzie had expected one) and got diligently back to his science revision.

 

 

 

Marrows like rugby balls. Peas. Carrots. Apples. All sorts.

 

Reginald McKenzie had been cultivating this piece of land for five years and today finds him tending it. By his calculations, and he was a calculating man, his annual production easily fulfilled his yearly requirement of vegetable nutrients such is the success of his little project. He fondly refers to it as his communist plot.

 

Meanwhile Mrs. McKenzie basted a chicken in the kitchen. Claudia and Susan were expected home tonight. First and third year students at Edinburgh University. One reads psychology while the other is studying accountancy.  They will both pass with a first and enter a high paying job directly after graduating.

 

It would be fun to see one of them fall from grace, impregnated perhaps by some handsome vagabond. But this probably won’t happen.

 

 

 

            ‘Oh and she is such a drag. I can barely make out a word she says’.

 

            ‘Well, I’ve always taught you girls to speak up and be heard’ Mrs. McKenzie reminded her daughters as she doles out spoonfuls of fresh food. ‘Always. Now, who is this girl?’

 

            ‘Jane Flanders. Lives opposite us in halls.’

 

McKenzie’s ears pricked up.

 

            ‘Insufferable’ remarked Claudia.

 

            ‘She’s been moaning to Claudia all day about a bottle of vodka. I mean, it’s only one bottle, and we’d only borrowed it for the night’.

 

            ‘What does she study?’ asked McKenzie.

 

            ‘Medical Sciences’ the sisters said in unison.

 

Well well well thinks McKenzie, who’d have thought that pretty English nightingale had such substance? How on earth did she manage to work alongside a medical degree?

 

Umm.

 

Reginald considered that perhaps a change of strategy was in order.

 

 

 

            Jane would take two years longer than her colleagues to graduate and was also about five years older than them.  This coupled with the repetitive work of being a school nurse gave the impression that everyone else was either getting younger or older while she remained a constant age.  She had been this age now for about three years.

 

But life wasn’t all bad. She had secured decent rooms for herself for the duration of her stay at Edinburgh. A handsome grant attached to the scholarship she'd won helped pay for them. Moreover her work at the prep school supplemented her income and contributed some credit toward her degree.

 

Oh yes. She had it all sown up. Cue the handsome vagabond...

 

 

 

            ‘A little birdy tells me you study medicine’.

 

Jane looked up from the Times Educational Supplement she’d been flicking though.

 

            ‘Claudia and Susan McKenzie are my daughters. I believe they stole a bottle of vodka from you the other night?’

 

            ‘Well yes’ said Jane, slightly taken aback. ‘But I’m really not that bothered about it.’

 

            ‘Girls will be girls’.

 

McKenzie sat opposite Jane and received a mistrustful, sideward glare for his trouble.

 

            ‘I wanted to apologise for my little jokes. Sending the boys round with silly messages.’

 

            ‘Well, I did find it in bad taste’. Jane’s turn to be glared at. ‘But I accept your apology.’

 

            ‘It can get so utterly dull in this place you know? Well, I’m sure you do.’

 

            ‘Be thankful you work with a curriculum. I’m so sick of scrapes and bruises’ confessed Jane.

 

            ‘Well’ said McKenzie, ‘we’ll just have to see about organising you a proper injury.’ And with that he ambled off, leaving a strange little chuckle hanging in the air.

 

 

 

            ‘Yes Ronald, I talked with her this morning. She’s interested.’

 

Ronald made some arrangements. McKenzie thanked him for his help and hung up.         

 

            ‘Who was that?’ called Mrs. McKenzie from the kitchen.

 

            ‘It was Ronald Dewar confirming Jane’s place at Montague. Is she still coming over for dinner?’

 

            ‘Indeed she is Reggie’ replied his wife. ‘And the girls promised to show their faces as well.’

 

McKenzie desperately missed practising medicine and still attended the odd lecture. In fact he had up to the minute knowledge via the internet, when he was sober enough to use the blasted thing.

           

Mrs. McKenzie likes to think of him as a high-functioning alcoholic, especially considering all he had achieved whilst drunk. McKenzie himself drops the word alcoholic. Not many people know about his problem, at that this stage even fewer would care.

 

He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes before closing the medical journal he had been reading. After filing it away in his mahogany bookcase he took himself off to get ready for dinner.

 

 

 

            ‘We don’t say grace in this house darling. Please help yourself.’

 

Jane doles out a helping of vegetable casserole and offered to dish up for the others. Mr. and Mrs. McKenzie gladly accepted, but their daughter were sullen. Understandable really; they were being outshone in their own home.

 

            ‘Have you told her Reggie?’

 

            ‘Told me what?’ asked Jane.

 

            ‘I talked with Mr. Dewer today. He says you can start on the autumn rotation’.

 

She dropped her fork.

 

            ‘But…but…’.

 

            ‘I think he’s telling the truth dear’.

 

            ‘Eat up and then we can go through some of the details’ said McKenzie kindly. 'It wasn’t such a big favour to ask you know, you may have got it without my help.’

 

            ‘F**k the lot of you’ spat Claudia. She stormed out, rattling every pane of glass in the house with the force of the front door slamming shut.

 

 

 

It was not long after that McKenzie finally made his move.

 

The highly prestigious surgical course she’d started meant Jane had had to quit her job at the school.  It was hardly a gut wrenching decision to make but she was now, once again, hard up.

 

One night McKenzie showed up the modest flat she had recently moved into. Not unheard of, but this time he brought a bottle of wine.

 

            ‘Have you given up on whiskey?’

 

He’d laughed, poured wine, and tried to kiss her neck.

 

She’d refused him.

 

            ‘F*****g cutter. English b***h. W***e. Who do you think I am?’

 

            With the speed of a swooping eagle she grabbed the wine bottle and brandished it at him.

           

            'Why don’t you go home and f**k Claudia some more, you horrible c**t.’

 

Perhaps he’d done just that, but in any event he never knocked on Jane’s door again.

 

 

 

It was with some trepidation that Jane contacted Mrs. McKenzie and suggest they meet somewhere neutral without her husband knowing. The older woman had some reservations but agreed on hearing the worry in Jane's usually assured tones.

 

            'I don't know how to tell you this, but your husband tried it on with me.' said Jane once they'd settled on the café's outdoor patio.

 

            'My Reggie? No, I don't think so love. You're confused because this man's given you some attention. Please stop now.' There was a hint of pleading in Mrs. McKenzie's voice as she said this.

 

            'I'm telling you' Jane continues more assured now, 'He was aggressive about it too. I had to fight him off. He's a b*****d.'

 

            'How dare you' said Mrs. McKenzie, and then louder, but not loud enough to make a scene, she let a diatribe loose. 'Get away from me and never contact my family again. He's a fine, upstanding man, a man of means and has respect. And I know he drinks a bit but that doesn't mean he's, whatever it is you're saying he is, he's not that. He took an interest in you because he's got daughters your age, that's all. Imagine, this is how you react to kindness? You're a filthy liar, now leave.'

 

Jane was taken aback. She had been expecting a bit of resistance to her allegations but had no inclination that she'd be faced with such ferocity. She had got the inclination that Mrs. McKenzie had a notion of female solidarity, which had made her brave enough to suggest this meeting and discussion. And then she did something very cruel indeed.

 

            'What about Claudia?' said Jane.

 

Mrs. McKenzie's eye flashed a furnace of pure hated at Jane almost making her flinch. Her eyes creased to two slits, lips pursed and curled up hatefully and she hissed, almost imperceptibly 'f**k off you s**t or we'll ruin you. Remember where the power lays in this city. Never talk my daughter’s name again'. And she got up, threw twenty pounds on the café table and left without a further word.

 

Jane was shocked, but she had a surgery at twelve, so she gathered her things and thoughts together and went off to take up the scalpel.

 

 

 

Walking home after surgery Jane noticed a familiar car outside the hospital. She thought no more about until awakening the next morning and seeing this same car parked outside her house. This sky blue estate belonged to Mr. McKenzie, and once Jane worked this out she became quite panicked. She had decided after the encounter with his wife that she'd let the situation with McKenzie go, but now she found herself worried again for her personal safety.

 

At the police station she was told that despite her allegation of stalking that 'no actual offence had occurred'. She was wholly dismayed and decided that on leaving she would buy herself a baseball bat to keep by the front door. She was just about to leave the station when a middle-aged female officer pulled her into a side room for a confidential talk.

 

            'I shouldn't tell you this because we've decided to take no action and it could be construed as slanderous, especially against those of the McKenzie's standing, but you know he used to be a practising doctor?' Jane nodded. 'Well he was struck off for interfering with one of his patients, a young lady in fact. There was a criminal case to be had but it was got brushed under the carpet. You keep that to yourself.'

 

Jane had been wondering for a while why McKenzie worked at a school when he had the medical degree, but he was helping her and she didn't like to pry. Now she knew why, because otherwise he'd have a criminal record.

 

 

 

 

Dear Claudia,

 

I know we never got on, and that I'm not very popular at your house at the moment but I feel I have to write to someone and I've decided you might understand my plight (for want of a better word) more than most right now. Your father tried to sexually assault me, and I think you have something of that experience also. I might be wrong, but I don't think I am, and I think that makes us comrades.

 

I've been to the police, and for several reasons they won't help me. I'm not writing to you for help so much as to offer it. I have a friend now within the police force that might be able to bring a case against this man for what he's done to you, that is if you step forward. I'll back you up 100 percent, because I think you've been terribly wronged, and I see this man for what he is.

 

Please accept my apologies for talking so bluntly here, but I don't see any other way of approaching the issue. We would be stronger together here, and your father might be highly intelligent and very clever but we could see justice still. Please give my suggestion some good consideration, and you can write back to me or call me or we can meet.

 

I hope you are well.

 

Sincerely yours

Jane Flanders

 

 

 

Jane Flanders was thinking over, as you do, the contents of the letter she had sent the youngest McKenzie girl the next day when she picked up a newspaper, the Edinburgh Gazette, and flicked though it. Jane was aghast at reaching page four, half way down the page, ‘Promising young psychology student found hanged in halls of residence’ it read, suicide in the early hours of the morning as the preliminary findings.

 

Jane's breath was caught in her chest. She couldn't breathe. The fresh morning's usually beauty took on an overly bright and harsh aspect. Dizziness and shame brought about a swaying which invited the people about her to offer support. A full on panic attack brought the ambulance and she was transported to the hospital she worked at.

 

In the accident and emergency department she was being talked down by a nurse she was friendly with. The nurse, once Jane had stopped insisting that she's killed a young woman, told her that McKenzie had been round to Ronald Dewer's office and tried to get Jane removed from her post at the hospital. Mr. Dewer had invited McKenzie to leave. Now Jane was back to her old self, she was livid with a sense of righteous indignation but which dissipated when she remembered she's penned the letter which had seen a young women take her life. How could she have been so insensitive?

 

 

 

In no state to work that day she went home and concentrated on formulating a plan to see her nemesis, this evil man, brought low. She found she was by turns invigorated by the prospect of finding justice for Claudia and herself, and dismayed at the impossibility of it. She was otherworldly today, and mainly pottered about to no great end.

 

Waking the next morning she went downstairs, was she habitually did, to collect the post. There she found a hand written letter, postage stamed the previous day.

              

Dear Jane

 

This is an incredibly hard letter to write. I love my dad, and I don't know how to tell you that he loves me. I know he drinks too much, and I know that I am an attractive young lady, but I also know, as a psychology student, that incest is the most universal human taboo. I don't feel good about it, and I feel terrible that you know now. So terrible in fact that this is the last letter I'll ever write.

 

I can't continue with someone out there with the knowledge that you seem to have intuitively grasped, and you blame yourself if you like, or the situation, but I don't want to continue and I believe I have the right to self-destruct. I would ask this, leave my family to grieve, and especially Susan, who you should know is safe from him and his dark logic.

 

Leave us alone now Jane,

 

Claudia

 

 

 

And so our Jane is met with an immediate and most unusual dilemma. She had the evidence, here, now, which might very well see the man who had tried to molest her tried and convicted. On the other hand she had the last testament of his ultimate victim willing her not to take this course of action. Every fibre of her physical being implored her to take vengeance, to make this hand-written document known to the courts, yet her cerebral self said no. It said you must respect a dead young woman's wishes, and not do what you so adamantly sought to.

 

In the final equation she, through a torn conscious and without any solace, decided to respect Claudia's decision to consent. She knew full well the chances of her getting justice at the hands of Scottish law were slim, and meaner still would be the knowledge that she'd outted a dead woman in the most atrocious sense of the term.

 

Let him live with this guilt. The guilt that he, not her, had caused Claudia's suicide. Let him live with it until his ninetieth birthday. Let him live with that fact that he was the architect of his loved one’s death. That he was the b*****d, and not them.

 

 

It goes against the natural order of things for a child to die before her mother, and as such Mrs. McKenzie was left with a gut-wrenching sense of guilt which the manner of her daughters passing did nothing to dispel. At times the guilt threatened to overwhelm her so much so that she gave consideration to leaving Susan along with her father.

But this is not the way of staunch, upstanding, Protestant women. Instead she initiated divorce proceedings against her husband. It wasn't a difficult piece of legalese to negotiate, and barely a year later they were no longer husband and wife.

Claudia’s suicide had taken a toll on Reginald McKenzie also. No longer was he high-functioning with his alcoholism, but slurred his words in class and became almost unbearable in the staff-room such was his verbosity. The head-teacher was on the verge of dismissing him from his post when something very dramatic indeed happened.

Front page of the Edinburgh Gazette-

'Leading Local Teacher Outted as Child Molester'.

McKenzie was summarily dismissed from his job. No notice. No redundancy. Out.

 

 

 

Mrs. McKenzie was heartbroken that her beloved daughter’s intimate relationship with her father had come out. She was furious with the Gazette for their treatment of her daughter but this fury projected itself onto her ex-husband. So much so, in fact, that she sought out Jane Flanders.

 

Dear Jane,

We've got to get him.

He killed my daughter and he's got to pay.

Will you help me? I've written my mobile number in this letter.

Sincerely yours,

Gabriella McKenzie

 

It was with some shock that Jane received Mrs. McKenzie's letter. She'd been getting on with her life as a surgeon and gaining respect in her field. But on reading his compact letter she knew what she must do immediately and placed two phone calls. One to Mrs. McKenzie to tell her she was on side and a second to her police woman friend to tell her Reginald McKenzie could now be got at.

 

 

 

Get McKenzie they did not. They, the new team of Mrs. McKenzie, Jane Flanders, the prosecutor and the Edinburgh Gazette, failed to see him convicted of child abuse. It was considered by the courts that the last testament, that is the suicide letter to Jane, of a clearly unstable young women, was not grounds enough on which to convict a previously upstanding 'pillar of the community'.

You might feel from this that McKenzie for away with it. In one sense he did, get away from the traditional law of the land that is, but in another, possibly greater sense, he did not. One by one the pubs he frequented found some reason to bar him, Ronald Deaer gave an exposé to the local paper. Human excrement was smeared over his letter box and pushed through his door. No one in the street would, as they had previously, ask his opinion on some passing matter.

In short, Reginald McKenzie had come from a 'pillar of the community' into a social pariah. They hated him and he felt it, felt it all too keenly.

 

 

Jane was walking down the halls of her hospital one day after a successful surgery when a coroner she was friends with approached her.

'You'll never guess who I’ve just had on the slab?'.

Jane wondered with worry who on earth she could have been talking about.

'It's that prick that tried to rape you, McKenzie’.

'Oh s**t' said Jane, she was so taken aback. 'What killed him?'

'You want to have seen him. Eyes yellow, skin waxen and a liver looked like it'd been put through the blender. Guy found him said he was stinking covered in piss and vomit. Some state.'

Jane thanked her friend for telling her this grim information then went off to deal with the panic attack with threatened to overwhelm her.

 

 

 

'Even though I walk through the darkest valley I fear no evil...'

So went so went the service for Reginald McKenzie. And around his gravesite, in a separate part of the cemetery from Claudia as she had taken her own life, was a soul mourner. It was with some awkwardness she spoke with the minister afterwards.

'So, did you know the deceased well?'

'We were friends for a period, but no, we never parted on good terms' said Jane.

'What was the problem?'

'Personality clash' said Jane.

She regretted these words as she walked away from the grave-side. She felt, on the one hand, that she should have called this man by his rightful name, a sexual predator, but on the other she felt an echo of what she had felt for Claudia. She felt you must respect the dead. Maybe that's why so much of our personal memories are overcome with inaccuracies, why grief acts as a shroud over clarity, she mused, but more than anything she felt this; a terrible man is dead and I’m happy to see the back of him.

 

ends