Click, Double-Click

And all the while the information was available, if only I had known who to ask.

He sat down again and gave me a mischievous smile. ‘You see. You can always get it down to the last two.’

I had to laugh. I suppose in my own undergraduate and postgraduate career I must have trawled my way through tens of thousands of five-stemmed posers. I always thought of MCQ exams as surreal experiences. For a couple of hours you inhabited a world of falsehood. Your mission was to discover the truth by discarding the lie. But the lies outnumbered the truth by four to one. Hence you were in a world of treachery and deceit. It was like being in the hall of mirrors at a fun fair. It was a vertiginous world of altered perspective. After a while your sense of judgment and balance became clouded. Occasionally a question would be thrown in that turned the game on its head. Four truths and one lie. Double negatives. A nightmare for the migraineur. You would forget the nature of your mission. Why am I here? What am I trying to find out?

After I left Med School and embarked on a career I kept thinking a five-stem poser would crop up in reality. But I never found one. Maybe I had an urge for over-simplification. I inhabited a two – or at most a three – dimensional world. Do this. Do that. Do nothing. My world was the world of the Monty Hall problem. Stick with your decision or change your mind. I put it to Stobo that in the real world there was no such thing as – what would you call it? – a ‘quinlemma’.

‘A quincunx.’ It was a strange word. Quincunx. It was the number five as it is depicted on a playing card, with four symbols delineating a rectangle, and a fifth placed at the intersection of the diagonals. It was a beautiful word. It sounded to me like a taboo word, a luscious, fulsomely erotic Elizabethan word denoting the female sexual apparatus. I gathered he had attributed it with a special meaning. I put it to him that The Bottom Line was a kind of quincunx. A. Aramoana B. Hoddle St C. Columbine D. Dunblane E… … .? Did he know of any others?

Somebody had written me a letter. How unusual to see the handwritten name and address on the sealed blue envelope. I opened it with curiosity.

I wish I could tell you that I had some presentiment, but quite honestly the consult was prosaic to the point of dullness, and lasted barely ten minutes.