by Manda Scott
The cat hissed something evil in feline and slunk, lame-legged to the corner. His left foreleg gave way as he turned to face me, twisting out from the elbow at a painfully improbable angle.
The wavering flame of the lighter showed a hairless burn across his back just behind the ribs and a gleaming white spike where there should not have been white, poking through the skin just below his left elbow. Second-degree burns and a compound radial fracture. At the very least. The cat spat blood at my hand. His teeth shone red. Add mandibular fracture to the list.
I crouched down with the lighter held up high for a better look. ‘Hell, Killer, you need to see someone about that, old son.’
He whispered low-throated threats and pushed himself hard back against the rough wood of the wall.
I advanced on him slowly, the rug held forward like a shield. The cat spat three-fold curses and slashed at my face.
‘Go on, Killer. You love me really.’
I held the lighter just out of his reach, a flickering decoy, and, when he lunged up to destroy it, I dropped the rug on him from above and behind and grabbed through it, in one single movement, for his scruff. The cat screamed the war-scream of the damned and twisted round, fighting through four layers of woollen plaid for the fingers of my left hand. Or my arm. Or my heart. Or anything else he could reach with any one of four sets of claws and his gin-trap teeth. I held on, held him out at arm’s length and prayed to the memory of my grandmother for strength in her rug.
The battle was brief, very vocal and quite bloody.
The rug won.
I carried the bundle back to the car and laid it on the front seat. We had a minor battle of wills and established the fact that he could have his head out to breathe as long as he didn’t try to kill me in the process. The dog was less than impressed. The cat hissed poison every time I moved, but he didn’t fight.
The problem with acting on impulse is that you have to deal with the consequences. I sat in my car in front of Nina Crawford’s cottage with a homicidal cat bundled on the front seat, a dog on the verge of mutiny in the back and a major crisis of conscience.
I prodded the bundle experimentally.
‘OK, Killer, what now?’
The thing writhed and swore ten types of vengeance, none of them helpful.
I pressed my forehead on the steering wheel and stared in darkness at the obvious. ‘You need your mother, cat.’ Which was a pity, really, because I had no intention at all of talking to his mother before I had myself a lot more sorted out.
When you are backed in a corner, there are always other ways out.
I toyed, briefly, with the idea of walking quietly up the path and leaving him wrapped in his rug in the pharmacy. Or in the doorway to the small animal ward. Or somewhere else warm and relatively sheltered that gets regular human traffic throughout the night.
Nice idea. Difficult to justify in reality.
I considered, quite seriously, walking into the local police station and handing him in as a stray. ‘Found him on the switchback, officer. Must have been hit by a car.’ A car with a flame thrower as a bolt-on accessory, but we won’t mention that.
Or I could simply lay him out on the dual carriageway and leave him to go the way of all urban felines. There are those of my acquaintance who would believe I had done the rest of the world a favour. Almost all of them. Everyone except for Nina Crawford, who has just lost her home and is already too close to the edge.
Whatever else is going on, I owe her more than that.
Less than five minutes later, I turned in over the cattle grid and rolled down the hill towards the hospital.
I surprise myself sometimes with my own innate sense of responsibility.
10
She was in the anteroom of the small animal ward, kneeling on the floor by the examination table, doing her best to pass a stomach tube down a struggling wolfhound with only Dominic-the-student to hold it down. Viewed from the doorway, the wolfhound was winning.
The door clicked shut behind me. Dominic and the dog both looked over to check whose side I was joining. Nina kept her eyes on the stomach tube. She hit target and a flood of canine vomit siphoned out into the bucket at her feet.
‘Welcome back,’ she said. ‘You should’ve kept your pager switched off after all.’
‘I dropped my pager in the loch eleven years ago,’ I said.
She didn’t turn around. She clamped the end of the stomach tube and drew it slowly out. The wolfhound, freed from restraint, shook its head and tried to stick its tongue down her ears. Fronds of dog-spit spun round its muzzle and on to the shoulders of her white coat. She moved the bucket carefully from under the trampling feet and nodded to the student.
‘OK, Dom. He can go back to bed. No food, no water. TPRs every fifteen minutes till he’s stable. See if you can get the drip to run. I’ll be along in a minute.’
Only when the dog had dragged the student out through the swing doors to the kennel area did she turn round. Even then, she didn’t stand up.
‘Kellen …’ She looked me in the eye and I had no idea at all what she was feeling. ‘Why are you here?’
The bundle in my arms moved spasmodically. The cat yarled at the sound of her voice.
Nina Crawford stood up faster than I have ever seen her move and suddenly it was very easy indeed to see what she was feeling.
I stepped forward and laid him with care on the table. ‘He was in the woodshed,’ I said. ‘Fractures to the left foreleg and the mandible. Second-degree burns along his back. And,’ because something else was wrong as I laid him down and I hadn’t stopped to think about it before, ‘he’s not breathing as well as he was.’
‘Jesus Christ Almighty.’ She reached in her hand and drew him out from the cocoon of the blanket. The cat growled engine noises deep in his chest, the kind of noise Rottweilers make before they take out your throat. This cat’s idea of a greeting. He licked her hand and his tongue left a bright trail of blood. He lay on the table while she felt the raw ends of his radial fracture and he panted. Purred and panted simultaneously.
I’ve never seen a cat pant before.
‘He wasn’t breathing like that when I picked him up,’ I said.
She said nothing. She pulled a stethoscope from her pocket and laid it across his chest and listened. Left side. Right side. Chest. Abdomen. She tapped across his rib cage. Down over the heart and back. The noise came back solid, like tapping on wood. The cat opened his mouth wider and mewled. His gums and the back of his palate showed pale violet through the red-stained mesh of his teeth.
‘Nina. I think we need oxygen.’
Oxygen. A drip. And an X-ray.
In that order.
Fast.
There’s something deceptively simple about an X-ray. Everything sketched out in two dimensional black and white. No blood or guts to get in the way. Just infinite shades of grey frozen in a shaved fraction of a second.
I sat on the floor in the dark in the small radiology room next to the main ward. The cat lay beside me in a basket with an oxygen pipe coiled near his nose. A paediatric drip set ran some kind of plasma substitute in small drips into the long vein on his one good foreleg. The other leg lay splinted at his side, the bone ends hidden beneath two layers of loose-weave bandage. He wasn’t purring any more. He wasn’t panting. He was simply trying to stay alive.
A digital clock on the wall advertised the latest brand of X-ray screens in glow-in-the-dark colours. The time glowed less brightly. It clicked just past eight o’clock. I promised Kate I would be home by half seven.
Three radiographs hung on the viewer, shades of black on grey on bright-light white. Two showed his fracture; the nice clean edges of the break, the sharp spike of bone poking white through the almost-black of his skin. And the second, smaller fragment near the carpus that made it a bastard to fix. But bones heal. Bones, in a way, hold the same kind of black and white simplicity as a radiograph. They are either broken, or they aren’t. They either fit togethe
r, or they don’t. Orthopaedic surgery is high-tech carpentry and if the worst comes to the worst, you simply take off the leg. The world is full of three-legged cats. Some of them even manage to kill.
But they don’t manage to kill if they have their liver lodged somewhere up near their heart. Or their small intestine crowding in where their lungs ought to be. Then they go blue and they pant and if you don’t do something very fast to pull their guts out of the chest back to where they belong in the abdomen and close up the gaping hole in the diaphragm, then they die.
I sat on the floor watching Killer Crawford fighting for one dark blue breath after another and thought about what I could do if he stopped.
‘I can’t find her. I’ve tried three different people and they don’t even know if she’s in town.’
‘So then page her again.’
‘There’s no point. I found her pager. It’s in the Lodge.’
Nina Crawford stood in the doorway. The hard light from the viewer pulled out fresh shadows from under her eyes. She held out the offending bit of electronics as if it were evidence. As if, at this stage, I might think she was making it up.
‘So then try Matt.’
‘I can’t, Kellen.’ She came into the room and knelt by the basket. ‘Matt’s not …’ The cat mewled again. A breathless noise, made without air. She lifted the lid of the basket and put her hand to his head. And then she said simply, ‘Matt wouldn’t come.’
‘He’d come. He still loves you more than he hates your cat.’
‘Not any more.’ She leant across me to change the rate of the drip and the flat planes of her face showed far more than her voice. It always gives her away, her face. If it matters enough.
I felt again the same kind of fear that I felt with Stewart MacDonald sitting on the floor of my kitchen. The sudden vertiginous plunge into panic.
‘He knows,’ I said. It wasn’t a question.
If Matt Hendon knows then by tomorrow the whole world could know.
We don’t need this. We really, really don’t need this.
She nodded, still counting the drips. ‘He knew this morning. As soon as we met in the ward.’ She looked up and there were so many layers of pain in her eyes it was difficult to see what came first. ‘We slept together for four years, Kellen,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t expect him not to.’
I didn’t.
I didn’t expect anything at all.
And the only thing I can do to make things better is get in the car and go home.
She picked up the basket. I picked up the oxygen cylinder and followed her, a foot behind, as she led the way back through to the ward.
‘How is he?’ I asked as we put the basket down. ‘How’s Matt?’
‘He’s coping. What else? But he isn’t happy.’
He always copes. And he is never happy. Not since the holiday in Skye has he been happy. But he has coped. The question was always how he would cope if there was ever anyone else. And whether that was in any way her problem.
We never did sort out an answer.
We lifted the cat out and laid him on a padded bed on the table. He let me hold him and he didn’t notice it was me.
‘Well then, if he’s coping,’ I said, ‘call him. That’s a ruptured diaphragm in there, Nina. You need another surgeon.’
‘No …’ She paused for a moment to calculate the dose of antibiotics going into the line. ‘I can do it alone. All I need is someone to watch the anaesthetic’
‘So the man’s an anaesthetist. Get him in.’
‘No.’ She took some scissors from a drawer and started clipping matted hair away from the burn on the cat’s back. ‘I can’t do that to him. Anyway, he’s not in Glasgow. He’s going up to his parents tonight. He was going tomorrow morning anyway. When we …’ They don’t fight. She’s never acknowledged so much as raised voices between them. ‘… when he left, I told him I’d cover clinics for him this evening so he could set off early. I’m not calling him back.’
‘Well then, call in whoever else is on duty.’
‘There isn’t anyone else on duty, Kellen. It’s Congress week. They’re all in Birmingham getting pissed and putting lines on their CVs. There were three of us left to cover clinics. Me, Steff and Matt …’
‘And Dominic’
‘Quite. Us three and Dominic. I sent Aiden and Lucy home this morning. On any normal Sunday that would be enough. With the equine side shut, it should have been more than enough. Matt and I could have handled anything between us.’
Or not. As the case may be.
A water bowl overturned somewhere down in the kennels. The muffled woof of an enthusiastic wolfhound rode roughshod over the faint appeals of a frustrated student.
‘Well then, get Dominic,’ I said. ‘He’s three months off finals. He can’t be that bad.’
She said nothing.
I stood up. Pulled my car keys from my pockets. ‘I can’t stay, Nina,’ I said. ‘Kate’s still with the foal. I have to go home.’
She lifted a set of clippers from a hook on the wall above the sink and turned them on. They whined, high-pitched, like a hive of wasps. The cat sank back in the basket and hissed. She turned them off. The silence burned. Like acid. ‘If it was the dog,’ she said slowly, ‘or Rain, or the foal, would you leave me here alone with Dominic and go home?’
There’s no answer to that. None I can reasonably give.
I shoved my keys back into my pocket and looked around for the nearest phone.
‘Show me how to get an outside line,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to call Kate and tell her I’m going to be late home.’
Sleep comes very gently to a cat with no lung space. A sighing transition from gasping air-hunger to the rhythmic puffs of the oxygen bag with only the barest of stops while the tube goes down the trachea. The monitors don’t like it. They have alarms set to scream when the arterial oxygen levels are this bad. They scream without remission unless you silence them with the flick switch at the back. Then they blink in silent, pulsing resentment. Electronic malevolence with ‘I-told-you-so’ ready scripted for the post-mortem printout.
If you ventilate carefully by hand, squeeze over and over on the small latex bag, push oxygen down into overcrowded lung space, then the monitors stop blinking. Then they sit in technological anticipation of the moment when you forget to breathe. Waiting to record the moment when you forget to squeeze the bag. Waiting to scream.
I squeezed the bag, gently, the way I’d been shown. I watched the monitor silently register in-breaths and out-breaths, flickering up the kind of numbers that haven’t made sense since third-year Physiology. Not even then.
Sweat trickled in slow trails down my nose. Greasy sweat, not the healthy sweat of a run, or even the washed sweat of fear. The nasty, sticky sweat that comes from a breath half held for too long. From the dead tension hanging heavy in the air. From the baking glare of the operating lights.
I watched Nina Crawford lay the green cotton drapes in a rectangle across her cat. Watched her lift a scalpel, a swab, a pair of rat-toothed forceps. I saw her run her thumb experimentally along the line of the cut and I tasted something hot and acid in the back of my throat.
‘Nina. I don’t think I can do this.’
She looked up slowly. All I could see, between the hat and the mask, were her eyes, miles away eyes, already halfway to his diaphragm.
‘Kellen, you can do better than Dominic, believe me.’
I doubt it.
‘Nina. It’s ten years since I did anything more than feel a pulse. I’ve never given an anaesthetic in my life.’
‘It’s OK. You’re not giving it. I am. You’re just a spare pair of hands, that’s all. You don’t need to know what you’re doing. You just have to have the sense to do what you’re told, when you’re told. That’s all I need. You can do it.’
‘If he dies, you’ll never forgive me.’
She smiled, the quirked, half-smile that shows even under the theatre mask. ‘Now you know how I feel
about Rain.’
I knew that already. I didn’t need this to drive it home.
She looked once at the figures on the monitors and the oxygen regulator. At the spiked waves of the ECG. And she said; ‘He’s fine, Kellen. Seriously. He could tick over for hours like he is now. The hard part was knocking him out. That’s when they go. If they live through induction then the rest is plain sailing.’
‘You didn’t tell me.’ I thought it was so peaceful.
I saw her shrug beneath the theatre gown. Somewhere, underneath the mask, she was laughing, caught between the tension and the absurdity of it.
‘I thought it was better if only one of us was panicking,’ she said quietly. ‘Now can I get on with the surgery? Please?’
Sleep comes very gently to a cat with no lung space.
Life on the other side of surgery is less gentle.
It was half-past ten at night when we lifted the half-shaved mass of black and white and bruised tissue and wrapped him in a prewarmed blanket and carried him out of the theatre.
Night life hummed through the ward. The sleepy mutterings of the well and the unwell and the occasional keening cry from the genuinely sick. In a human hospital there would be night nurses and porters, interns and junior SHOs all running backwards and forwards trying to cover three times the ward space of their senior consultants in half the time. In here, there was Dominic, cocooned in a white coat and sleeping bag on an air bed in the far end of the kennels area. We walked past him quietly. He sighed and turned over in his sleep. The wolfhound grinned and flicked spirals of dog-spit at us as we passed.
I sat on a high stool with the sleeping cat on my knees, ventilating still, the way I’d been taught, while Nina set up an ex-human neonatal incubator with an oxygen in-flow line and a humidifier and an ambient temperature only slightly less than the Saharan heat of the theatre. We laid him on his good side, injured leg uppermost and ran lines in through the ports in the clear plastic of the incubator hood. The fluid line. An ECG. A digital thermometer. Only three lines. By all reasonable standards of ICU, he should be coming out alive.
