The Final Charge by Dawood Ali McCallum

Author:Dawood Ali McCallum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sandstone Press Ltd
Published: 2014-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I hear from my family every day. We have e-mail and Skype and Leo Kane has arranged for his chambers to receive everyone’s messages and for them to be passed on to me. Val doesn’t write of course: it’s been a long time since she touched a keyboard or even held a pen. No, one of her carers, Claire, I think, talks to her and jots down notes and thoughts.

It’s not a formal arrangement. I don’t think the High Commission is even aware of it, but it’s one of the numerous minor breaches of the rules in which both my old and new jailers happily conspire to thank me for what little advice I can give them on their medical problems, and those of their kith and kin.

There have been two telephone conversations as well since Val and David went back home. These were official, above board. Organised on my behalf by the High Commission.

They were terrible. There were so many people sitting around at each end, listening and watching, that both Val and I were completely tongue-tied. We mouthed platitudes about health, and even, believe it or not, the weather. But they were distressing. Horribly upsetting. Val became very agitated, and I simply couldn’t hack it. David said something infuriating about praying I find my way which, as his pious platitudes always do, infuriated me. It all left me massively depressed. It was as though they were an opportunity that had been missed to say something profound. Something as grave and important as the events in which we now find ourselves entangled.

Val is, as anyone who knows her would expect, passionately loyal. She hasn’t said a word about how all this is affecting her. Not a complaint, not a grumble. Yet I know, from the sad, tiny messages that pass subliminally between a long married couple, that she is angry. With me.

Not so much, I suspect, because I now find myself in this situation, but because, back when it might have made a difference, I never confided to her that there had been anything in the least significant about my time in Kenya.

After all, it was long over before I even met her. Yet maybe it’s here that I have done all my real living, and maybe Val has every right to be angry and hurt, because all we shared turns out to be but a shadow existence, a sedately paced, two-dimensional approximation of a life played out in sepia tones. Whilst out here, in fast bursts of livid Technicolor, I have fought, and faced death, and truly lived, and really killed.

How could I even think such nonsense? How can I deny those most important relationships, all that’s really mattered, all that’s really important? My wife, my home, my family.

My ex-colleagues in the practice have been good, too. Although it can’t have been easy. I still cover for holidays and do a clinic every Thursday morning. Or did. So they are still meeting my part-time salary and having to find the cost of a locum.

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