I’m not worried about meeting Talyton’s Women’s Institute. It’s everything else which is getting on top of me.
Waiting for the start of afternoon surgery, I type up a brief summary of Cheryl’s notes onto the computer, then add my own code for Cheryl herself: S for Scary. If she ever asks to look at her notes, I’ll tell her it’s S for Special.
What code would I give Alex Fox-Gifford? I muse. How about ‘Handle with Care’?
Chapter Six
Muck Sticks
The kennels are empty, apart from Freddie and a ruffled pigeon which, according to Frances’s note on the card, has been brought in by a member of the public in a dazed and confused state. (Whether it was the pigeon or the member of the public who was dazed and confused isn’t clear.)
Izzy and I stop beside Freddie’s cage – we moved him out of Isolation a couple of days ago, considering him no longer infectious.
‘It’s a miracle, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘Freddie was so sick, I didn’t think he’d make it.’
‘Neither did I. Oh, what’s this?’ Izzy scans the front of his notes across which I’ve scribbled, ‘Freeloader – for rehoming,’ letting him chase her fingers along the bars before she picks up the tin of food I’ve left open on the shelf beside the cage, and turns out a couple of forkfuls onto a dish. She offers it to Freddie, who gulps it down. ‘Can’t you keep him?’ Izzy goes on.
‘If I took on all the animals I meet needing homes, I’d end up like Doctor Dolittle. I like looking after Miff, and I’ll miss Freddie, but I have to think of the future.’ It’s too uncertain. ‘I don’t know where I’ll go or what I’ll do after Emma comes back.’
‘Aren’t you going to stay on?’
‘No, whatever gave you that idea?’
‘I just thought,’ Izzy mumbles. ‘I got the impression . . . something Emma said . . . oh, I don’t know.’
‘Yes, you do.’ I smile. ‘She’s told you, hasn’t she? She’s always wanted us to end up working together.’
I can remember when we first talked about it. It was Emma’s idea, hatched on a snowy winter’s day, the kind of day when it was impossible to ride a bicycle, and believe me I tried. I ended up in a ditch at the side of the Madingley Road on the outskirts of Cambridge, my knees badly scraped, and both my bike’s front wheel and my pride rather dented.
Emma abandoned her bike next to mine and we walked, struggling through the snowdrifts on our way to one of the university farms to take our turn on the student rota for some hands-on experience of lambing.
‘You look as if you’re on your way to a football match, Em.’ I was teasing her, trying to cheer her up. ‘That hat makes you look like a Cambridge United supporter.’
‘Thanks a lot. Some friend you are,’ she grumbled lightly, pulling her bobble hat down over her ears and gazing (enviously, I hoped) at my waxed cap and college scarf on which I’d blown the rest of my budget for the term.
‘At least I’m honest,’ I said, grinning as I gave her a gentle nudge. ‘Is that the barn over there? Beyond the gate.’
‘I guess so.’ Emma sighed. ‘You know, I can think of 101 things I’d rather be doing than practising my midwifery skills on a day like this.’
‘Such as?’
‘Curling up indoors, toasting marshmallows on the fire and watching TV,’ she replied, as we trudged closer to the barn in the cathedral-like silence of the falling snow, and I have to admit as I buried my hands deep into my pockets, it did sound tempting.
It took all our strength combined to slide the door open before we could get inside, where the uproar of bleating and trampling feet assaulted our ears. We slid the door closed behind us, then I found the switch for the strip lights. I bashed the snow off my boots, sending the ewes in the group in the pen nearest us stampeding off to the far corner for safety. One was left behind, a single black-faced Suffolk in a flock of Mules. A translucent green bag dangled from the wet dags at her rear end. She strained a couple of times, but nothing happened.
‘Bagsie not do the Herriot thing,’ Emma said. ‘I’ll hang on to her for you, Maz, while you strip to the waist.’
‘You are joking?’
Emma giggled for the first time that day. ‘Of course.’
I stripped down to three layers, then washed my hands in the soft light in the shepherd’s den, a cubicle divided from the rest of the barn and supplied with hot water. I returned to the pen with lubricant dripping stiffly from the fingers of my plastic gloves, and knelt to examine the ewe.
‘Do you think we should call someone?’ Emma asked, as I groped around blindly, finding first a head, then a neck and shoulders, but no legs: a lamb stuck on its way out through the birth canal.
‘By the time anyone gets here, it’ll be too late.’ In spite of the cold, I was beginning to sweat. It was up to me. I closed my eyes, picturing my lecture notes annotated with sketchy cartoons of lambs trapped inside their mother’s wombs with speech bubbles saying, ‘Help me.’ ‘If I push it back, I should be able to catch its feet and bring them through first. What do you think?’
‘Sounds good to me. I’m glad you know what you’re doing – all I know about lambing is written on a couple of sides of A4 paper.’
‘Same here.’ I glanced at the ewe’s face, her expression anxious, waiting for the next contraction, the next wave of pain. I had to do something for her sake.
Act confident, I told myself, and don’t fiddle.
After five minutes, my confidence ebbed and I got fiddling. The ewe bellowed and heaved. The lamb’s head and shoulders, and then the rest of its body, slid out in a rush of fluid, and landed in a bloodstained heap.
Emma and I stared at it.
‘Is it breathing?’ Emma said.
‘I’m not sure . . .’
‘I don’t think it’s breathing,’ Emma said urgently.
I tore the membrane from its nostrils and mouth, picked it up and swung it by the hind legs, then lowered it down again and rubbed its steaming, close-curled coat with a handful of straw. Suddenly, it shook its head and took its first breath, by which time the ewe had given birth to a second lamb. Emma revived that one, and I dealt with a third which arrived shortly afterwards.
‘Poor cow,’ I observed, ‘fancy having to look after this lot.’
‘Call yourself a vet student, Maz.’ Emma grinned. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s a sheep.’
The firstborn lamb made an attempt to struggle to its feet, then nosedived back into the straw. At the second attempt, it sat back on its haunches. At the third, it walked shakily to its mother’s udder, nudged at one of the teats and latched on, sucking and wiggling its tail.
Emma and I watched our babies fondly for a while, sitting on bales of straw and drinking mugs of hot chocolate, the scent of lanolin on our hands.
‘If we ever get out of vet school alive, we’ll set up practice together,’ Emma said.
‘Really?’ I was touched that she included me in her vision for the future.
‘Small animals only. Absolutely no sheep.’
‘We’ll have lots of toys to play with and a coffeemaker,’ I said, fired up by her enthusiasm, and picturing us doing a ward round in our own hospital together, checking up on our patients – lots of them, all with exotic and obscure conditions. (I was a student then, and even though I’d spent plenty of time with Jack Wilson at the Ark, I still thought vet practice would be a series of challenging cases every day, not yet realising that much of the joy of the job comes with seeing the more mundane, routine cases and getting to know the patients.) As far as I could tell, it was the perfect plan and I wished I’d been the one to have thought of it. What could be more fun than working alongside Emma?
‘We’ll have blue uniforms,’ Emma said cheerfully. ‘Green doesn’t suit me at all.’
‘I don’t care as long as we have central heating.’ I couldn’t feel my toes. I slipped my feet out of my wellies and wrapped them around my mug in an attempt to restore the circulation. ‘How long have
we got left?’
‘A couple of hours.’ Emma checked her watch, scuffling under her multiple cuffs to find it. ‘This is a very slow night – the ram must have had an off day. I mean it, Maz, about the practice.’
‘I hadn’t really thought about what happens after vet school.’ I guess I’d been so focused on getting a place and passing exams that I hadn’t made plans for anything beyond my finals. I suppose I’d always seen myself becoming a single-handed vet in a practice just like the Ark. Meeting Emma and Ian had complicated matters and I felt a twinge of regret that soon the excitement and camaraderie of vet school would be over and real life would begin. ‘What about Ian? I’m practically living with him, aren’t I?’
‘I’m not sure I could work with Ian,’ Emma said.
‘You’re right.’ Although I adored him, I wasn’t blind to his failings. ‘He’d want everything his own way.’
‘He’ll go on to do a Ph.D. and become a professor,’ Emma said. ‘I can’t see him doing the routine stuff like vaccinations and clipping claws, can you?’
I shook my head. Ian had already talked of spending a year as an intern at a vet school abroad, of making a career in academia. Where did that leave me? Us? We’d been together for over four years. Was it love? I plucked at the bale I was sitting on, scattering pieces of straw on the ground. Was it for ever? I hoped so.
Emma returned the mugs to the den and arrived back with the elastrator, the kind of implement a torturer might have designed to extract a confession from the most stubborn prisoner way back in the Middle Ages. She sat down and stretched a thick latex band across its metal teeth.
Something rustled in the corner of the barn, near the door.
‘Did you hear that?’ I slipped my wellies back on and stood up.
Emma scanned the barn. ‘Rats, I expect,’ she said, and a tiny shiver ran down my spine.
‘They must be very big rats,’ I said hesitantly.
Emma tipped her head to one side and grinned. ‘I expect they’ve escaped from one of the labs around here. Come on. Let’s go and castrate some lambs.’
‘If there are any,’ I said, accompanying Emma to where the ewes with lambs at foot were penned. I was right. There were six or seven male lambs, and they had all been thoroughly emasculated before we could get to them.
The sheep bleated and the wind rattled the roof of the barn, ripping at the sheets of corrugated iron above our heads, so we could hardly hear the sound of a big diesel engine rumbling up through the snow outside.
‘Who’s that?’ Emma said.
‘I don’t know. The shepherd? The next shift?’
‘They’re not due to start for another hour.’
‘Emma! Maz!’ Two voices. Ian and Ben appeared, closing the door behind them. Ian was tall and sandy blond; Ben was shorter, chunkier and dark-haired. (I imagine that’s one of the reasons Emma and I never fell out – we had completely different tastes in men.)
Ben came jogging up to us, swinging his arms as if trying to catch hold of any stray warmth in the air. He grabbed Emma and pulled her to him, taking the end of his scarf and wrapping it around her neck. ‘We came to find you,’ he said, turning to me. ‘Ian.’ He waved. ‘They’re over here.’
Ian joined us, clapping his gloved hands together and exhaling lungfuls of mist.
‘Hello there, kitten.’ He leaned down and pressed his face to my cheek, the contact making my heart skip a beat.
‘You have a cold, wet nose,’ I whispered.
‘Means I’m healthy.’ He might have pinched my bum just then, but I was too well-padded to be sure.
‘We found your bikes abandoned in a snowdrift,’ Ben said.
‘Why didn’t you try our mobiles?’
‘We did.’
Emma pulled a mobile from her pocket. ‘I have mine with me, but there’s no signal out here.’
‘I left a message on yours, Maz,’ said Ian.
I patted my pockets. ‘I must have left it back at the house.’
‘Typical,’ Ian sighed.
‘Well,’ I said lightly, a little annoyed by his implied criticism of my forgetfulness, ‘you’re just in time. We were looking for something to practise on.’
Emma held the elastrator above her head. Both Ian and Ben backed off.
‘That looks like a nasty piece of work,’ Ben said.
‘You were on the shift before last, weren’t you, Ian?’ Emma said. ‘Only you didn’t save us any lambs.’
Ian held his hands up. ‘I’m sorry – I’m not great at counting sheep.’
‘You know the rules,’ I said. If there were cows with feet to be trimmed, we did one foot each. When there was a horse to shoot, we drew straws for it.
‘Can we take you home now?’ Ben asked.
‘It’s too early yet,’ said Emma.
‘We’ll wait so we can give you a lift back.’ Ian always joked that he was a man of dependent means, dependent on his businessman father’s generosity. He gave him a monthly allowance, and paid his bar bills at the end of each term. To be fair, Ian was equally generous in his turn.
‘Is there anywhere we can make tea?’ Ian took my hand and lifted the flap on the pocket of his tweed jacket, revealing the silver top of a hip flask. ‘I’ve brought some Earl Grey too.’
‘You think of everything.’ I smiled.
‘Attention to detail,’ he said.
‘Attention to detail’ was one of Ian’s favourite phrases. He carried it through to the tea-making, a bizarre and somewhat unnecessary ritual, I thought, as someone who was used to chucking a teabag in a mug.
Suddenly there was a gust of wind, a burst of hail and the lights in the barn went out, and we had to make our way outside to Ian’s Land Rover, following the feeble beam of his torch. I didn’t mind – at the time, I think I’d have followed him anywhere.
Ian? Why is it I always go for confident, charismatic and charming men? A small voice inside me tells me it’s because I wouldn’t be happy if they were otherwise. What it can’t tell me is why they love me and leave me. I don’t feel like a victim, although I do wonder whether I don’t fight hard enough to keep them, whether I give up too soon.
‘I should have given up on men after Ian,’ I tell Izzy. ‘I did for a long time . . . Well, I did go out on a few dates now and then before Mike, but nothing serious.’
Izzy stares at me.
‘You were a bit of a goer then,’ she says.
I don’t take offence. I’m beginning to get used to Izzy’s straight-talking.
‘What about you?’ I ask, knowing from Emma that Izzy lives alone but in hope of meeting that someone special.
‘There aren’t that many eligible bachelors in Talyton.’ Before I can mention the name of the obviously single man attached to Otter House, she rushes on, ‘Nigel was keen on me at one point, but I made it clear that wasn’t on. I couldn’t stand his fussiness.’ Izzy puts a bowl of food down for Miff and another into Freddie’s cage. ‘If you didn’t marry Ian, what stopped you from going into partnership with Emma?’
‘It’s a long story. Emma and Ben got married and settled in Southampton – Ben was working at the hospital. I ended up working in various practices in London. It wasn’t until I came down for Celia’s funeral . . .’ My voice falters as I remember Emma’s mum, who showed me so much kindness when I was a student, offering me a place to stay during the holidays and bailing me out when I was on the verge of quitting vet school because I’d got myself into financial difficulties.
Even holding down two part-time jobs and living on lentils and economy cornflakes I couldn’t pay my credit card bills or put a deposit down on accommodation for the following term. It was my fault. The dress which I bought for the May Ball, for example, was an extravagance, but how could I have let Ian down by turning up in front of his friends in jeans and a calving gown?
I paid Celia back though, every penny.
‘You were saying . . .’ Izzy prompts.
‘It was just after the funer
al when Emma suggested I joined her as a partner in Otter House.’
‘So why didn’t you? I know,’ Izzy goes on, excitedly, ‘there was a man. There’s always a man.’
‘Mike, my boss at Crossways. It was very early days back then, but I always hoped things would go further, and they did . . .’ I’m not sure who sighs the deepest, me or Freddie. Each time I think of Mike, the wound I thought was healing weeps a little. I change the subject. ‘Isn’t there a local rescue centre who’ll take Freddie? What about the RSPCA?’
‘No way,’ Izzy says. ‘I can’t bear the thought of him being dragged from pillar to post, not after what he’s been through. Give me time – a week, maybe two – and I’ll find him a good home.’
‘Maz, you have one waiting,’ Frances calls through.
Consulting room, here I come . . .
Pippin. Shitzu. Grey and white. 4 years old. Neutered male. Problem: has the runs something chronic.
‘So,’ says the client, Mr Brown, ‘Alex suggested we come to see you.’
‘I thought you’d asked to swap practices.’ I’m confused. Alex seemed so genuine, leading me to believe it was Mr Brown’s idea to change from the Talyton Manor Vets to Otter House.
‘Oh no, not at all. In fact, it’s much easier to park up at the Manor than here.’ Mr Brown fidgets on the opposite side of the table. His shirt crackles with static, his trousers rustle and his shoes break wind. ‘Listen to me rambling on. You must have Pippin’s personal information already.’
It’s true. Every detail, apart from some attempts to blot out the most disrespectful comments in Talyton Manor Vets’ notes with Tippex: ‘Motionless for 24 hours. Hoorah! Much wind. Diarrhoea – esp. verbal.’
Where are Pippin’s test results? A plan of action for making a better diagnosis than ‘dodgy tummy’? I realise I’m sounding a bit prissy here, but if Alex couldn’t handle the case, he should have done a basic work-up, then sent it to one of the referral centres. I don’t think Alex’s motives for handing this case over to me were entirely altruistic.
Trust Me, I'm a Vet: The Otter House Vets Series Page 8
