by Manda Scott
‘You guys need to talk,’ she said.
No. Not now.
‘Maybe later,’ I said. ‘Just now I have Sandy waiting to load up the lorry. He’s been here long enough. He’s supposed to be away today. I don’t want to waste any more of his time than we have to.’
‘Oh, right,’ she nodded gravely. ‘And he really believes that sitting out there making love to your colt is a total waste of time.’ She stood up but she leaned back against the wall so that her eyes were more or less level with mine. ‘Sandy’s not the only one with better things to do,’ she said. ‘I haven’t been out of here for the best part of three weeks. The boss just said I could go out for the day and I’m not about to have her ground me just because I’ve let you run off with her star patient. If you want to take your horse, you’ll have to ask her yourself. If you’re in that much of a hurry, she’s in the small animal ward doing morning rounds with Matt and the students. If you want to wait, I guess she’ll be up in the residents’ Lodge for a coffee in about half an hour.’ She blinked. A kind of bilateral wink. Her nasal jewellery flashed. Her smile was nothing but friendly. ‘I’ll be gone by then,’ she said, ‘so you can talk to her in peace. I really do think you need to do that.’
On the whole, if I have to see her today, I think I’d rather do it in public.
I was halfway down the corridor when Steff’s voice caught me up. ‘If you want the ward, it’s down at the end on the right,’ she called. ‘If you want the Lodge, the stairs are on the left. The keys are behind the fire extinguisher across the landing.’
I turned right at the end of the corridor.
She was in the ward. I knew she was in the ward before I ever went to talk to Steff Foster. I could have found her,
I think, anywhere in the hospital, from the time I walked out of the Lodge after coffee. At times like this, I have skin like radar. It aches, as if the top surface cells have been stripped off and the ones underneath seek her out in the way that a compass seeks north.
She was standing to one side of the group. The tidy professional with the freshly laundered white coat and the stethoscope. The surgeon, running a clinical eye over the radiographs of a colleague’s case: the ‘before and after’ shots of a German shepherd with a smashed-up body and a lot of metal-work holding it all together. The morning-after lover with the glow that sets everyone else alight even if they don’t know why. Nina Crawford. The woman who sets the world on fire. Because she can.
The ward is newly built and has doors that glide without noise. Still, she knew when I slid it open two inches and stepped inside. Matt Hendon knew too, from the change in her. And then the students from the change in him. Dominic grinned as if we shared a secret. The rest looked blank. But they looked all the same. And then Nina cleared her throat and they all turned their heads, if not their minds, back to the bank of X-ray viewers in front of them. A ginger-haired lad in a creased white coat who thought he had just been let off the hook went back to explaining the individual pieces of scaffolding bridging the gaps in the iliac crest. He needed an hour or two in the library with a good book on the anatomy of the canine pelvis and some basic revision of orthopaedic surgery. I slid open a second door and walked through to the kennels area to visit the inpatients.
The shepherd was big and long-coated and it lay in one of the larger kennels near the front looking as if someone with a particularly savage sense of humour had mauled it with a razor. A wide swathe of its abdominal wall and most of its hind quarters were clipped so close you could see the clipper-marks on the skin. Two hairless tracks ran down its jugulars and a third ran up the right foreleg. The left foreleg stuck out sideways, encased in a synthetic resin cast. If you were feeling charitable, you could say that it looked like a lion. If you were more inclined to honesty, you would say that it looked like a bad parody of a miniature poodle. It’s difficult to take a dog seriously when it’s got a haircut like a stuffed toy and one leg in a cast. If I was the owner of a new-registration Four Trak, I’m not sure I’d be thrilled with the X-rays if the surgeon who produced them wasn’t about to glue all the hair back on to my big, bold guard dog.
I knelt down on the tiles of the floor and the dog stared out at me through the bars of its kennel like a drunk on a Sunday morning. I didn’t know dogs could look hung-over but this one managed it. All drooping eyelids and red conjunctiva and that for-God’s-sake-don’t-breathe-so-loud pain in his eyes. A sign above his head said: ‘Care. Kennel guards.’ I pushed my hand through the bars anyway and, when he didn’t make an immediate move to eat me, I dipped my fingers in the water bowl and drizzled fresh water into the corner of his mouth. He swallowed it and twitched an eyebrow for more.
We were halfway to an empty water bowl and closer than that to a reasonable understanding of life when Matt came in and stood beside me. The dog focused on him, swimmingly. I dipped my hand back in the water. It seemed a safer option than speech.
‘He’s a nice dog when he’s up to his eyes in morphine,’ said Nina’s ex-finance carefully. ‘On a good day, he’d have your hand off.’
‘I thought he might.’ Morphine has its uses. I tipped more water into the waiting maw. The dog swallowed as if its throat hurt. ‘Will he do?’
‘I think so.’ He stood up and lifted the case notes from a rack above the kennel and crouched down beside me. They spend a lot of time crouching, vets. The same way doctors spend a lot of time standing at bedsides.
Matt Hendon can crouch and read and talk and ask oblique questions, all at the same time. ‘We spent most of yesterday piling blood into him,’ he said, ‘while you and Herself were busy sleeping off the effects of the Saturday from hell.’ His eyes were on the notes. His tone never faltered. Either he’s a very good actor or the man knows less than the resident knows. There’s always hope.
He ran his fingers down the most recent page. The one with the overnight clinical record on it. He stopped at a haematology printout. ‘His PCV’s not as good as I’d like it but he’s probably got just about enough oxygen going to his brain to keep him alive.’
His pen is the twin of the fire chief’s except that Matt Hendon has his name inscribed on his. He unclipped it from his top pocket and began to write something lengthy on a fresh page. ‘If we’re lucky, we’ve cooked his brain long enough to make our overnight change in behaviour more permanent.’ He smiled at the dog as if the extra warmth might tip it over the edge into liking people. ‘It might not be the morphine after all.’
‘It might be my winning personality.’
I open my mouth, sometimes, without thinking.
‘It might.’ He stopped writing and looked me straight in the eye. He doesn’t do that often, Matt. Not since she handed his ring back.
With some people I can be fairly sure of what they can read in the lines of my face. Matt Hendon is one of them. He saw only what I was ready for him to see and he broke the contact before I did.
‘Did she get hurt last night?’ he asked, eventually.
‘You’d have to ask Nina that.’ Professional confidentiality. The only shield I’ve got. Transparent.
‘Right.’ He snorted, mocking himself, or mocking me, or both. ‘That would do me a lot of good.’ He closed the notes, stood up and put them back on the shelf. He leant back against the kennel opposite and folded his arms. ‘Shall I tell you what I see, Kellen?’
If you must.
‘Go on.’
‘I see a woman in a white coat who hasn’t worn one since the day she finished her PhD,’ he said. ‘A woman who is keeping both hands in her pockets.’
‘Is she?’ I would have had to stand up to look through the glass in the door to know if he was right. I would have had to look at her. Just at the moment, I’d rather not.
‘She is. She did. Except when she was putting the last of the radiographs up. Then she forgot.’ He let frustration show through the rest. ‘Steff doesn’t do bandages like that and it wasn’t me. It couldn’t have been her, you can’t wind anything like that o
n your own arm.’
He waited for me to say what he wanted to hear. I said nothing.
‘And she has bruises,’ he said, ‘as if someone has been holding her. Hard.’
Silence can bruise if you let it hang heavy enough.
The shepherd had no interest in the water.
Matt Hendon watched me through green-grey eyes and it was more than lack of sleep that drew the lines on his face.
Two nights ago, this man tried to save my foal. Difficult to believe we are in the same world.
I stood up to walk down the ward, found a cocker spaniel further down the line of kennels that had a neat line of blanket stitch down the middle of its spine.
‘Lumbar disc,’ said his voice behind me. ‘We did a hemilaminectomy on it yesterday.’
‘Will it walk again?’
‘I expect so.’ He took hold of my shoulder and turned me to face him. He’s never even shaken my hand before this. ‘Kellen. She can’t go on like this.’
True.
‘I’m not her keeper, Matt.’
‘She tried to cut the scar out, once,’ he said, and the words came only with effort. ‘With a scalpel. Did she tell you?’
‘No.’
There was a time when I thought there wasn’t anything she hadn’t told me.
He watched through the door as she pointed out details of pelvic anatomy to the ginger-haired student. Watched her do his job so that he could come and talk to me. ‘It was the holiday on Skye,’ he said. ‘The second one. I got some Vicryl from the local small-animal practice and stitched it up.’ He shrugged. A good piece of surgery. ‘Nobody else ever counts the suture scars,’ he said. Except her. And him. ‘So nobody knew.’
Including me.
They had two holidays on Skye. On the first one, he gave her a ring. On the second, she gave him it back. They each drove home alone after that one. I believed I had heard every moment of that fortnight in endless, repeating detail. But there are things she forgets.
‘Was she seeing things when she did it?’
The X-ray viewers were visible from where we both stood. The ginger-haired student picked up a shoulder-bag from the floor and left. Heading for the library. The other students dispersed. Nina began taking down radiographs. With her right hand. The cuff of her shirt stayed close to the base of her thumb.
‘She was having nightmares,’ he said, his eyes on the back of her head. ‘Vicious, savage, self-destructive nightmares. I suppose you could say she was seeing things.’
She put the X-rays in an envelope and turned. Saw us both through the glass of the door. Smiled. You could transform a hundred personalities with that.
‘She’s cracking up, Kellen,’ said the man who thought he had reason to know. ‘She won’t listen to me. She won’t even listen to Steff any more.’ He turned, just before the door opened and he said, with the honesty of total desperation, ‘All she has left is you. You can’t let her down.’
Two hours later, Sandy Logan and I took Rain and her colt home with us. It took most of that time to load them up on to the lorry. Sandy won’t have a box-shy horse in the yard and he was hardly about to make his new stallion’s first introduction to transport anything other than a truly inspiring occasion. In the time it took him to get everything exactly as he wanted it, Matt and Steff between them managed to find me a spare treatment box and fill it with everything I could possibly need for emergency care of the mare and foal. Steff made up a bag of heparinised saline and showed me, in case I had somehow forgotten, how to flush an intravenous catheter and keep it sterile for the next time. Matt gathered together an array of syringes from 1 ml to 20 ml sizes, and needles for all occasions. He signed out all the necessary bottles of antibiotics and antiinflammatories and wrote on each the dose, volume and times of injection for mother and son. As a parting shot, he produced a record chart with the names of each horse (Rain and Son of Rain) and filled in the times of the next four injections with boxes for me to tick when they were done. Down at the bottom he wrote three numbers. The first was the emergency number for the Lodge, which meant, effectively, a hot line to Steff. The second was Nina’s mobile number, because she had asked and I had promised. The third was the number of his own mobile phone.
‘If something goes wrong,’ he said, ‘call me. I won’t be far.’
It was the only comment he ever made on the whole crazy deal.
8
With a particularly poor sense of timing, the horses and I hit the yard right at the height of Sunday lunchtime chaos.
Two separate rides were scheduled to set off at one thirty; the first took a party of Canadians out over the ben to circle the loch and back. The second was a random assortment of Sunday riders going out by the lower route, following the shoulder of the ben round beyond the village and coming out in a patch of native Caledonian forest that sits on the outskirts of Galbraith’s farm. Three-hour treks, both of them.
I drove the lorry down the lane just as both strings were mounting up, ready to file out of the yard. Sandy was in there ahead of me, tightening girths, checking stirrups, finding hard hats and sticks of appropriate size for horse and rider from the collection in the barn. My car sat just outside the gate, neatly sandwiched between a yellow hire car and Kate Swan’s rusting blue Beetle. Last time I saw Kate, the lass had her left ankle in a fibreglass cast and was doing her best to persuade Sandy that you don’t need to be able to walk to muck out stables and lead rides. I was under the impression that Sandy had won that particular battle. I leaned out of the cab in time to see her mount Balder at the head of the second ride. Kate saw me and waved and then spun him in a circle, showing a length of leg encased in a riding boot and no cast. I waved back and she sidled him sideways across the yard to see me. She’s very proud of that manoeuvre. When Caroline left, the horse would barely go in a straight line without complaining about it. Since Kate came, he has won two local three-day events and he sweats up with anticipation as soon as he hears her car in the yard.
‘Hi.’ She stretched across from the saddle and leant an arm on the cab window. ‘Heard we got a real cracker of a foal from Rain.’
‘So I gather,’ I said drily. ‘How’s the leg?’
‘Mended.’ Said with the conviction of one who has never seen a radiograph of an eight-week-old lateral malleolar fracture. ‘Doctor said I could ride.’
Doctor must have been on something colourful at the time.
‘Have you got it strapped up?’ I asked.
‘Sure.’
Sure. I looked at her boot, hanging close to the stirrup leather. If there was strapping in there, it was extraordinarily thin.
The first string left the yard a bare five minutes late. Someone else took control of Kate’s ride, got them lined up into some kind of order and heading out past the duckpond towards the moor. The girl looked up anxiously and Balder stepped sideways towards the gate. I eased the lorry into gear and followed her forwards. ‘I was going to put these two in the Hawthorn field,’ I said. ‘Can you manage not to bring the ride past that way when you come home? I’d rather not have fifteen foreigners feeding them plastic bags unless we absolutely have to.’
‘No problem.’ She smiled, the kind of relief-ridden smile of the newly released. As if there was any way I might have had the power to stop her riding. We reached the gate together. She leant down from the horse and pushed it open for me to drive the lorry through.
‘If you need someone to keep an eye on the pair of them later on,’ she said, ‘I’ve got nothing planned for after the ride.’
I stuck up a thumb to let her know I had heard and got an answering wave as she took Balder back at a neat hand canter to catch up with the ride just as it reached the far gate leading out of the farm on to the moorland beyond.
I was twenty-one once. I just didn’t have quite the same sense of freedom.
The yard slipped back into peace. I backed the lorry past the house and up through the orchard to the gate at the foot of the Hawthorn paddock. Sand
y followed me up and waited as I stopped, ready to hop in through the jockey door and check his new charges.
‘Travel all right?’
‘Travelled fine.’ I moved round to the back to unhook the catches. The dog arrived, called by my voice, and sniffed around as I lowered the ramp on to the grass by the gate. She caught foal-scent and backed off to a safe distance. She gets on well with Rain these days but she’s tried herding foals once before and found that maiden mares are less tolerant than they might once have been to the ministrations of a horse-herding collie. Twenty-four hours and a wash of reproductive hormones do odd things to your sense of perspective.
Sandy came slowly forward with the mare and foal in hand. They paused, all three of them, at the top of the ramp to survey the new domain. An old man with cramped, arthritic fingers; a soft dun mare with dark eyes and an eel stripe down her back; a shining chestnut foal with three white socks and a new moon bright on his forehead. The colt, with the inborn star’s sense of timing, snuffed the air and whinnied. The same kind of call he made in theatre the night his sister died. A greeting. And defiance.
A magpie, caught by the spark of bright metal on the mare’s headcollar, hopped on to the roof of the box and cawed its own welcome. The foal rolled his eyes, showing pink at the edges of the white but he didn’t retreat and after a moment, when the bird didn’t move, he took a step forward, inquisitive and stretched out his neck to explore the world.
Sandy Logan stood holding the foal slip with the world alive in his eyes and for the first time in nearly thirty-six hours I felt the weight of the filly’s death lift from the dark holes in my heart.
If all the rest were to lift as lightly, the world would be a happy place.
I stepped forward and shoved open the gate to let them into the paddock. Sandy walked them carefully down the ridged wood of the ramp and out into the field, turning them round to face me before he unclipped the lead rope from the mare and let go of the foal slip. They both stood for a moment, sniffing the damp April air, reading the stories through it of the bracken from the side of the ben and the heather from across the moor and the sharp, wet smell of sphagnum moss from the bog on the far side of the hill. Then, with perfect horse-on-horse communication, they spun round together and trotted up the hill towards the stand of hawthorns at the top that gives the field its name.
