That Night

by Gillian McAllister

‘And done.’ Cathy bags up the prescriptions and puts them into a yellow plastic basket. Tom is so close to her. His clothes smell of the rain outside. His skin of cut grass and chewing gum. ‘Okay?’ she says.

  ‘Joe the brother?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What’s he like?’ Tom says as they walk through to the prep room. He pulls at one of the gas tubes coming from the ceiling. ‘Shit, sorry,’ he says, when it moves more than he expected.

  Cathy laughs as she flicks off the main light. Her entire body feels lighter for Tom’s kiss. All she wants is more. ‘Joe will probably hate you,’ she says. ‘He’s not as amenable as Macca here.’

  ‘One of those.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Over-protective?’

  ‘Sort of. More of Frannie than me,’ she says, and she must say it darkly, because Tom’s eyebrows raise in surprise. ‘He would do absolutely anything for her,’ Cathy explains, and, as she does so, she tastes the truth of the words. He would. He would do anything for Frannie. So where, exactly, does that leave Cathy?

  ‘And for you?’ Tom says incisively.

  ‘Less sure on that,’ Cathy says lightly.

  ‘Ah – odd one out?’ he says, leaning against the doorframe. They’re still in the darkness. Macca sighs and lies at their feet. ‘One of my friends feels that way. He always says that he wouldn’t choose them as friends.’ His words are as light and as powerful as settling snow. Cathy thinks of the various snatched conversations her siblings seem to be having without her, the secrets they might be keeping, and shivers. Would she be friends with Frannie and Joe?

  ‘What about your mum?’ Cathy is glad he’s moved the conversation on.

  Cathy thinks as they stand there in the darkness. ‘She’s a traditional kind of vet. She was lectured at. We learnt through doing. She’s still so theoretical,’ Cathy says, thinking of how her mother is so smart with differentials but misses easy physical tells.

  ‘Amazing that there are types of vet,’ Tom says, and Cathy laughs too. Being a vet is as normal as driving a car in her family, and it’s nice to see his perspective.

  ‘Will Bella be okay?’ Tom says.

  ‘There’s a nurse here to look after her,’ Cathy says.

  ‘Oh, so you were merely occupying me.’

  Cathy laughs. ‘Didn’t you enjoy it? Your task?’

  ‘I did.’

  All she can hear is the stirring of the animals. She can just about make out the X-ray machine attached to the wall, in the dimness. The blink of the lights of the machines. ‘Nothing seems to bother you,’ she says to Tom. ‘You are – like, so light-hearted. It’s so easy. You don’t care that I’m weird.’

  He throws back his head and laughs, no doubt startling the animals. ‘You’re not weird. I’m just really dumb,’ he says to her earnestly. ‘Promise.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I mean, I really do fuck about for a living.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yeah. Today I taught one single guitar lesson. I’m an extremely lazy freelance person,’ he says easily. Just like that. A small self-judgement, laden without any shame whatsoever.

  ‘What else do you do? If you don’t work a lot?’

  ‘Er, well, I am a vets’ assistant on the side.’ He flashes a grin at her.

  ‘I literally never fuck about,’ she says.

  ‘I have noticed. You should try it sometime,’ he says casually. ‘Bunk off. Stuff something up. It feels good.’

  ‘No way,’ Cathy says, and he laughs again.

  ‘Okay,’ he says, the word still imbued with humour. ‘That’s cool too,’ he says happily as they leave the surgery and head out into the rain. He glances over his shoulder at her. ‘We could go get some dinner, if you wanted? Whatever.’

  Internally, Cathy laughs in delight. Whatever.

  43.

  Joe

  It’s seven o’clock in the evening. Joe’s been operating almost all day, his arms aching with the effort of it. He’s in the backroom now, doing post-op admin.

  His mother passes through. ‘All right?’ she says to him. She stops and leans over him in a waft of perfume as she looks at what he is doing. ‘Why is that so cheap?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ Joe sighs. And it is. A fraught negotiation to get the owners to agree to this much. A heavily discounted operation because Joe knows that otherwise it wouldn’t have happened at all.

  ‘It should be twice that,’ she says.

  ‘I know.’ He looks up at her. ‘You’re not even working today. Stop – just – stop fussing.’

  Joe is immediately assaulted by a memory of a different Maria entirely. The mother who waited, smiling, for him at the bottom of a slide so hot it burned his thighs in the summer. The mother who – he is sure – used to tell him never to be a vet, that the hours were punishing, the work hard and miserable, sick animal after sick animal. He can’t help but look curiously at her as he remembers, the mother before and the mother after Rosie died.

  ‘Why did you want us to do this job?’ he says, covering the invoice with another piece of paper.

  ‘What?’ Maria says, but it doesn’t sound like a question.

  ‘I just … I’m sure you told me once not to do it,’ he says. ‘When I was little. When I got Peanut.’ He could almost cry, saying Peanut’s name. Jesus, what the fuck is up with him? Crying over a fucking dead cat.

  ‘It was just hard when you were all young,’ Maria says, and Joe guesses it was. A career woman in the eighties, married to a career man too.

  ‘I bet you look back on it fondly,’ he says, trying to invite it into the room. But what, exactly? Rosie, definitely, but also just Maria as she once was. The boy that lives in him is always looking for that, for that glimpse. He can see how badly damaged Cathy was by Rosie’s death, and he supposes he worries he might be similarly affected too.

  His mother looks away from him. ‘Don’t you?’ he presses. Rosie would have been thirty next week. He knows what will happen in a few days’ time: his mother and father won’t answer their phones, will emerge a week later pleading busyness, stomach bugs, a tough DIY project. It’s the same every year. Her birthday goes both unmarked and marked in equal measure.

  When she looks up at him, her eyes are wet. ‘I look back on a lot of things fondly,’ she says, and then she leaves, as though that sentence was a goodbye.

  Joe looks down at some cat prescriptions, trying not to cry himself. God, he wants his mother. That smiling slide mother, as she once was, her arms open to him and all of his hopes and fears and problems.

  The prescriptions. He was only co-signing them to occupy himself, but they’re wrong. He huffs.

  ‘These have the wrong dose on,’ he says, walking into the reception and waving them at Cathy. ‘You signed them yesterday?’

  ‘Do they?’ she says, but she isn’t looking at him.

  ‘Yeah – they’re ten times the dose. Cath?’

  ‘Oh – sorry,’ she says. ‘I must have – I don’t know. Lost my head a bit.’ She flashes a smile at him, just for a split-second. Blink and you’d miss it. Cathy’s way. What is going on with her? She never makes mistakes. And she seems pretty sanguine about it.

  She’s told somebody. The paranoia arrives like a truth in Joe’s brain, the way anxiety always does. His chest constricts. His hands begin sweating.

  ‘Tough on all of us, isn’t it?’ he says, trying to dispel the panic and to open her up.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she says.

  ‘Right, nought point one mill, not one mill,’ Joe says, scribbling out the dose and signing it himself. ‘Okay?’

  ‘Yeah. Sorry.’

  It’s dusk. Frannie left for the day at four, working one of her short days, so it’s just the two of them. The television is tuned to the news, as it always is, but is now, of course, rendered sinister for all of them.

  Evan’s out the back, somewhere, reluctantly finishing t
he stitching. They need to be better with Evan, he is thinking, somewhere in the back of his mind, and stop giving him the shitty post-op tasks to do. Joe saw a coupon on his desk the other day: £2 off in Tesco, carefully clipped and folded. Maria would hate a non-Plant joining the partnership, but maybe Joe could do something for him … something magnanimous. Something good.

  ‘Sorry,’ Cathy says again to Joe.

  ‘Do you need to take some time off?’ Joe says. ‘We can’t be killing cats … or anything.’

  Cathy looks at him. They both hear the unsaid else.

  ‘No. I’m fine. I just wasn’t thinking straight, was rushing yesterday. It’s not because of …’ Cathy turns away from him, straightening some of the prescription food they have out on the shelves. ‘It’s not because of him,’ she says over her shoulder. And then, to change the subject, he assumes, she adds: ‘We need more Hills i/d.’

  Joe puts the prescriptions in the drawer, ready for Frannie to hand out tomorrow, and tries not to wonder if there are any others he should double-check. Maybe he should just go through some of the ones in the system, just in case …

  He turns to ask Cathy if he should, and that’s when he sees it.

  Search being narrowed in woods for Verona missing Brit, is flashing up on BBC Breaking News on their reception television. Joe’s stomach is in his feet. His body seems to still, pointing to it in slow motion. Cathy hasn’t seen it yet, is looking at the packets of food and a list she has on a clipboard, and he watches her clock his sudden movement, sees her blink once, twice, everything moving like sand through an egg timer, slow and granular in the detail, and then she sees it too.

  Sweat blooms across her as she reads it. Joe sees it happen, little droplets across her collarbones like she’s exercising. Her cheeks go red in two distinct patches, and then pale immediately, like lovers whose lips never quite meet.

  ‘They know,’ Joe whispers. He wants to cry out, but he can’t. He can’t catch his breath.

  Adrenaline is rushing up and down his arms, making him shivery, like he has the flu.

  ‘Stop that,’ Cathy says gently to him, and he looks down to see he’s rubbing at his arms.

  ‘What the fuck are we going to do?’ he says. ‘It’s a matter of time.’

  She comes closer to him. ‘I don’t know. Nothing,’ she says. ‘We can’t do anything.’

  ‘I’ve done enough of that. Nothing.’

  ‘I know. I know. I know,’ she says, and she reaches for him, and he remembers, he remembers the same gesture when she slapped her palm into his. The day of Rosie’s funeral. They’d both thrown a white rose on to her pale coffin. Cathy’s right hand had held the flower, her left had slapped his, and he’d immediately enfolded it, like a stone being absorbed completely into a still pool, and thrown his flower too. They’d stood there, holding hands, watching the petals float down, saying nothing. He clasps her hand as it lands on his.

  ‘This is fucked,’ he says. ‘This is so fucked.’

  ‘It’s not. It’s not,’ she says. ‘They haven’t swabbed our DNA.’

  ‘So, what – we’ll go on the run if they ask for it?’

  ‘I’m just saying – we might not be suspects,’ she says. ‘We don’t know where.’

  ‘But the cashpoint … I don’t know – Frannie said –’

  ‘Frannie said what?’

  ‘Nothing. Forget it. We had drinks last night and she seems, I don’t know. Worried.’

  ‘You had drinks without me?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ he says. He pauses. ‘I did text that hotline, you know,’ he adds, partly to distract her, partly to confess, and she closes her eyes, just briefly, like an insect flapping its wings.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I did. They might trace the burner phone I used. Find everyone who bought one that day. They might have CCTV of the cashpoint by now. You know? They might know to come to us to swab us, when they find the body.’

  ‘We have to wait, Joe,’ she says. They hear a noise, towards the corner of the room. Cathy crosses the reception and pulls open the far consultation-room door. And there is Evan, standing. Listening to every single word.

  44.

  Cathy

  Cathy jumps as she stares at Evan in horror.

  Her panic is immediately interrupted by three rings of the buzzer outside. She turns and looks out of the window. A soaking-wet man in a navy-blue anorak is holding a French bulldog in his arms. There’s blood everywhere. Cathy is vaguely aware of Joe, who has his hands braced on the reception desk like he is about to be sick, but all she’s doing is moving to the door to let the man in. Not thinking of the search. Not thinking of Evan. Not thinking how everything has fallen apart in a single moment. The day after she got everything she wanted.

  ‘He’s been knocked over,’ the man says. ‘We’re not – this isn’t our vets’ – but please help.’ He’s young, maybe early twenties, blond. Instinct takes over for Cathy. She assesses the dog immediately. They need to operate. That much is clear.

  ‘Bring him in,’ she says.

  The dog is prepped and under, cut open, internal bleeding stemmed, and Cathy is stitching him back up by the time it feels like there’s any space in which to think, and not just do. He’s going to lose a leg.

  They need to speak to Evan, who is monitoring the anaesthesia, as all of the nurses have gone home. To explain.

  ‘What you heard …’ Cathy says, as Evan watches the dog and then adjusts the dial on the anaesthetic machine. His hand is shaking.

  ‘Let’s just concentrate on this,’ Evan says tightly.

  What are they going to tell him? It’s all Cathy can think, as she stitches and checks, stitches and checks. The room smells of rust and iron. Joe holds her gaze across the table. He looks as lost as her. He isn’t doing anything at all. He’s abdicated. Cathy continues the operation while he watches, uselessly.

  ‘We will talk about it, though,’ Evan says. Cathy accidentally pulls a too-tight stitch across the dog’s abdomen which makes her wince.

  She looks at Joe and he picks up the thread, working quietly alongside her, their hands performing a dance they can remember off by heart, like piano players, like sportsmen.

  She has no idea what Evan will do. She tries to think what she would do if she were him, but she can no longer think that way. She will forever be the Cathy who answered her sister’s call in the middle of the night, however much she’d like not to be.

  And now they’re searching a wider area. They’ve only been home for four weeks. And the crossroads that Cathy has been avoiding is suddenly there, right in front of her. As messy and as sick and as hopeless as the animal she is operating on.

  Afterwards, they’re alone with Evan in the recovery room. The dog is recovering, sedated, the owner still out front. It’s absurd, she finds herself thinking, as Evan places his hands on the table and looks at them. There’s no way they can’t tell him. Is there? They implicated themselves with a conversation that should have taken place somewhere else. Isn’t that always the way? People become more and more complacent, until they slip up.

  But it was their reaction to it too. Like a silent bomb had gone off. They should have shrugged it off. Made something up. The amount of time that’s passed in which no excuse has been provided means they have given too much weight to his eavesdropping.

  Evan is squinting at her and frowning, like she is in bright sun and he in shade. ‘You obviously know something about the missing man on the news. Right? You were in Verona. You were saying … I mean, call me crazy but … I can’t see how this isn’t … that.’

  Joe is unhooking the gas pipes, not looking at either of them.

  It’s the middle of the evening. They would both usually be at home. Her eyes are heavy. ‘Evan …’ she says, with no idea how to end the sentence.

  ‘I mean – am I right, here?’ he says, speaking in that way that he always has. Joe says he talks like he’s watched too many sitcoms.

  ‘I …’ Ca
thy says. She’s had the entire operation to think, except she hasn’t, can’t multitask in that way, not when a life is at stake. Immediately, she thinks of resuscitating Will, of how fucking hard she tried, of the position she’s been put in. And where is fucking Frannie when it all falls apart?

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Cathy says lamely. ‘We were just watching the news.’

  ‘Cathy,’ Evan says. ‘Do you think I am an idiot?’

  Cathy’s eyes fill with tears. She gets angry, trying to blink them away, betrayed by her body and her heart. She can’t do it, can’t deny it. It’s like saying black is white. Evan is too smart for this.

  ‘You were talking about … that man,’ he says. ‘And now you’re crying.’

  Joe turns to face her and gives her a nod, a silent, tiny nod. They’ve got no choice, that nod says. It’s too late. Time has run out. It’s better to switch to damage control than it is to lie and to increase suspicion.

  Cathy breathes in the smell of the antiseptic, looks at the fluorescent lights above and opens her mouth.

  ‘Evan,’ she says, not looking at him.

  ‘You know where he is,’ he says softly, and she cries even more.

  One path leads left, and one right.

  She turns right.

  ‘On holiday,’ she starts. She feels no relief, despite this confession having bubbled inside her for weeks. She doesn’t want to tell just anyone.

  ‘Right …’ Evan says.

  ‘Frannie killed someone,’ Cathy says. Three small words. Three big words. The truth.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Evan says. ‘What the actual fuck?’ His mouth is parted, his eyes round and unblinking. ‘What?’ He takes two steps away from them, like they are monsters.

  But they are not monsters, she thinks sadly, checking on the French bulldog’s breathing. Everything is unreal to Cathy, a poisonous pit of fighting snakes in her stomach. ‘It wasn’t malicious. We did what we had to do,’ she tries to say.

  Evan is still staring at them, his hands in the exact same position they were when the words left her mouth, up by his hair.