by Manda Scott
‘She needs peace, Kellen,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s all she’s ever needed. I’m not going to be the one to bring her war.’
‘Thank you.’ In that moment, I was grateful.
A trolley clattered on the concrete. Matt levered himself to his feet and helped Steff lift the scanner over the drainage gutter that runs along the doorway.
They were busy, both of them, for a few frantic moments, running the extension lead to the nearest socket, clipping a hand’s span of hair from the colt’s belly and then covering the dark skin with gel. In the space afterwards, the scanner whined, right at the borderline of hearing and fell back into silence.
‘OK.’ Steff. Tight-clipped and tight-jawed. Kneeling in the straw by the foal. ‘Watch the picture. Black is fluid. White is tissue.’ She moved the probe of the scanner across his abdomen with one hand, using the other to move a pointer on the screen. ‘Abdominal wall at the top. Fluid … all the way down here … and right back here … we have this useless blob of tissue floating in the breeze.’
I moved back into the pen for a better view. Lifted the foal’s head and held it on my knee, scratching softly at the place where the moon rose between his eyes. Snow storms raged briefly across the monitor like white noise on the television when the signal goes down. The snow gathered, became a solid white streak that waved in a flowing sigmoid curve at the far right of the screen. ‘That’s the bladder?’
‘I expect it is.’ She looked at Matt, not at me. ‘Got some saline?’
‘Sure.’
‘Shake it up.’ He filled a syringe. Shook it hard, like you would shake a bottle of penicillin to get it mixed. Passed it over. ‘Here.’
Still not looking at me, she fitted the syringe to the urinary catheter and moved the pointer on the screen until the tip lay over the end of the curving white blur. ‘Watch.’
I watched. She pushed the plunger, hard and fast. A blizzard of white snow scattered across the screen and then cleared to nothing. She did it again. Made another, smaller, snow storm.
‘There’s a free connection from the catheter to the fluid in his abdomen. Straight through the bladder wall. Satisfied?’
She was very, very angry.
Or acting very well.
I have been sworn at by worse things than Stephanie Foster.
‘I’m satisfied it’s a ruptured bladder.’ I looked over her head at Matt. ‘Surgery’s the only option?’
‘It is. I’m sorry.’
‘Kellen … what’s your problem? We have to cut. It isn’t ideal but you’ve got two horses dead already. It’ll be three by morning if we do nothing.’ She stood up and pulled a plastic bag from her pocket; a small zip-sealed specimen bag with three glass vials chinking gently in the bottom. It hung two feet from my eyes. Spun everything else out of view. ‘Look, I can premed him with the anti-toxin now. That way the only thing we have to worry about is getting him through the anaesthetic’
Or not. As the case may be.
‘No.’ I stood up. Lifted the bag from unprepared, unresisting fingers. ‘They need this back at the hospital. It’s why I came back.’ There was a short, painful pause. I felt the foal, warm against my shins. Rain’s colt. Breathing in the way she breathed the night he was born, grunting low on the outbreath. Raw, ugly noises.
I watched Matt, watched Steff. Looked for changes. Saw none. ‘I really think there’s no point in operating,’ I said quietly. ‘Without this, he’ll go the same way as Rain did in the end.’
Three people stood quite still in the hush that followed.
One of them understood what was happening. I had no way of telling which.
Steff recovered first. She stood up. Smoothly. Very slowly. All the way up.
Her voice wasn’t quite as smooth. ‘Fine. So we’ve been wasting our time.’ She threw the scan head into the bracket. Jerked the lead from the socket. Reversed the scanner out of the box. Touched Sandy once, on the shoulder on the way past. ‘I’m sorry. You did your best.’ Nodded to Matt. Curt. Functional. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’ No love lost, still, between these two. The scanner clattered back down the corridor. Twice as fast as it came up.
And then there were two.
Sandy Logan stood in the doorway. Desolate. Bereft. Speechless.
Matt Hendon gathered his tray of syringes and slung his jacket over one shoulder. ‘You’re going back to the hospital now?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m going back up to Arisaig tonight. You’ve got the number. Call me, will you?’ He turned, slowly in the doorway. ‘I think if you want someone to euthanase your foal, Steff is probably not the right one to ask.’
‘Is that an offer?’
‘He’s got a long way downhill to the bottom if you do nothing.’ He smiled thinly. ‘I believe I have a professional obligation to persuade you not to leave him like this.’
‘Fine.’
‘You need to sign a consent form.’
‘Fine.’ I checked my watch. An hour since I left Eric. ‘Make it fast. I have to go.’
‘No.’
He’s not a violent man, Sandy. He didn’t grab, he didn’t shove. He simply thrust his arm out, rigid across the doorway two inches from where Matt Hendon was standing and he said: ‘No. I won’t let you do it.’
He was a farrier once. He still has the power when he needs it.
Matt Hendon had been on his feet for at least as long as I had. He was tired. He was planning a four-hour drive up the side of Loch Lomond and on past Fort William. He was possessed of commendable self-control.
He laid his tray of syringes down on the floor, folded his jacket and laid it squarely on top. Lifted Sandy’s hand, with gentle care, out of the way. ‘The Euthatal’s in the drug store,’ he said. ‘It’ll take me a couple of minutes to draw it up. I will get it and I will bring it back here. I suggest you two get your heads together and sort yourselves out. Let me know what you want to do when I get back.’
We listened to the quiet pad of his handmade shoes receding along the corridor. At the corner, they stopped. His voice carried back to the foal pen. ‘If you want my professional opinion,’ he said, ‘you’ve got nothing to lose by going for surgery.’
The steady tread fell away to nothing.
The foal rocked warmly against my shins, his eyes dull, his breathing painful to hear.
Sandy Logan stood on the other side of the pen door.
Sandy. The man who lives for his horses. Sandy. With the stubble standing out on cheeks so gaunt he might not have eaten for a week. With eyes red at the edges from the pain of it. With hands twisting in ways his hands should not be made to go.
‘Kellen. What’s going on? I’ve never seen you like this. The wee lad … He’s dying, lass. Will you not listen to the man? There’s nothing to lose.’
In two minutes, the man will be back. Possibly less.
I have three hours to get three vials three miles back to Nina.
Three.
‘Sandy, come with me.’
I took him outside, to the car. Through the pool of the external light and into the sodium-darkness of the night. When we stopped, I turned in a circle, listening. The woods spoke. And the river. I could hear no people.
I opened the car door and let the light from inside spill out on to his face. My face leered at me briefly from the wing mirror as I leant back against the unloading ramp. Another one in need of sleep.
I took his hand in mine and squeezed it. To make contact.
‘Sandy, listen to me. Rain didn’t die by accident. She died because someone filled her up to the eyeballs with toxins. Nina Crawford is lying in the Western Infirmary three miles down the road with exactly the same stuff on board.’
He looked at me, fuddled. ‘I don’t understand.’
No. Neither do I. And time is running out.
‘This is not an accident, Sandy. Someone is doing this. They did it to Rain. They did it to Nina. They will do it to the foal if they haven’t done it alread
y. There is no point in drawing it out.’
He is old and he is so very tired.
His fingers cramped in mine. ‘But you’ve got the jags. The lassie told me. You can stop him getting what the mare got.’
‘No. You’re not listening. We need them for Nina. It’s the foal or Nina, Sandy. That’s not a choice I can make. You can’t expect me to make it. I’m taking the drugs back to the hospital. They should never have been taken away.’
‘Then let them operate, woman. Why not? If you’re that worried, you stay and watch. Nothing’ll happen with you here. You owe it to the mare, if you don’t owe it to the wee lad.’
‘No, Sandy.’ I owe that mare all kinds of things. But I owe Nina Crawford more. And with her, I might not be too late.
‘Then do you not think you might owe it to me?’ He spoke more quietly now. As if there was more hope in quiet. ‘I’ve never asked anything of you before, Kellen, but I’m asking this. Will you not do it for me? Please?’
He sagged at the knees and for one ghastly moment, I thought he might be going to kneel. He caught the car door, held himself upright by the handle. The door wavered in his unsteady grip. The interior light flickered, flashing on and off across his face. Even without it, I could still see him clearly. The red of his eyes. And the desperate pleading.
Obligation is a strange and very onerous beast.
Like gravity, it has its own laws.
I took his hand and pushed him round the edge of the door. Manoeuvred him gently, unprotesting, until he was sitting in the driving seat of my car. I laid the specimen bag on the passenger seat beside him. Took the phone from my hip pocket and slotted it into the holder on the dashboard.
‘What are you doing, lass?’
‘I am making you an offer, Sandy. I will stay here, and watch them while they operate on the foal. I will do my best to see that he doesn’t die on the table. I will do this if, and only if, you will take these to the Western. Will you do that?’
Hope gave him more than a night’s sleep could ever have done.
‘And you’ll stay here with the foal?’
‘I don’t guarantee it’ll save him, but I’ll do what I can.’
He smiled. The first smile I’d seen all night that I could really believe in. He wrapped one swollen hand around my shoulder. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘Anything you want.’
‘Fine. I’ll hold you to that.’ I found my notepad in the glove compartment and wrote on it two names; Eric Dalziel and Stewart MacDonald. Handed it to the old man and watched his eyes widen slightly as he read the second name.
‘It’s that serious?’
‘It is. I am. Stewart is supposed to be calling me on the mobile. If he hasn’t called by the time you get the drugs to Dr Dalziel, then you call him and you keep calling him until you get hold of him. Then you give the phone to Eric. After that, you do whatever he or Stewart tells you to do. Does that all make sense?’
‘No. Not a bit of it. But I understand what you’re saying if that’s what you mean.’ He turned the keys in the ignition, kicked the gas, played with the lever until he found reverse gear. He did it like he does everything else, slowly and with limitless care. When he was ready, he wound down an inch of window. ‘You’ll see him safe, won’t you, Kellen?’
‘I’ll do my best.’
He didn’t smile. ‘Do better than that.’
He reversed slowly out of the space beside the un-loading bay.
Matt was standing inside the pen when I got back. ‘I’ve paged Steff,’ he said. ‘If you give me a hand to clip the rest of the abdomen, we’ll be ready to go in to theatre by the time she’s scrubbed.’ He had changed into his theatre greens. There was no sign of any Euthatal.
‘Am I that predictable?’
‘No.’ He smiled, a man who knows people. ‘You’re not predictable at all.’ He lifted the clippers from a hook by the door, plugged them into the coiled-up extension lead. ‘Sandy Logan, however, is absolutely one hundred per cent reliable. He wouldn’t have left if he wasn’t absolutely certain we were going to cut his treasure. What did you promise him? Eternal life for all colt foals?’
‘Just this one.’
‘Fine.’ The flex uncoiled at the flick of his arm. ‘So let’s make it happen.’
I sat in the straw with the foal’s head on my knee. Stroked the short, curling strands of his mane. It was straight last time I saw it. He’s curling under the heat of the lamp. I dragged my fingers through and through, straightening it out. Watched it all spring back into waves again. Ran my hand down the side of his face instead. He blinked dreamily under my hand. Lipped at my fingers. Made a pink loop of his tongue and sucked the end of my thumb. Chewed in frustration with the first edges of new-cut teeth and then fell slowly back into a dull, uraemic stupor.
The clippers buzzed. Ran in broad, straight bands, along and along, carving race tracks in the hair of his belly. Underneath the hair, the skin was black. Coal black. The foal lifted his tail to strain. Grunted into the palm of my hand. Four nights ago, his mother did much the same thing. A lifetime ago. Time does odd things sometimes.
‘Why did you send him away?’ It came quietly. A question hidden in the buzz of the clippers. From Matt.
‘Sandy?’
He nodded.
‘I promised I’d give Eric a lift home. He stayed late to be with Nina.’
Thin ice. I am always on thin ice when I’m lying. I never quite had the knack.
‘So Sandy’s gone to take him home?’
‘Right. One of us had to be here with the foal. I doubt if Sandy’s ever been in a theatre. He’d lean over and cough on the sterile field. Steff would kill him.’
He smiled. A wry smile. Like Nina’s. ‘Tonight, she’ll kill anyone who gets in her way.’
‘Thanks.’
The buzz of the clippers died into silence. Syringes rattled in the metal tray. A stretcher trolley rolled across the concrete.
‘Want to give me a hand to get him over to theatre?’
‘Sure.’ What else am I here for? I have a promise to keep.
18
I am losing my fear of theatre. When every other sense is stretched to breaking point, the smell of surgical spirit and volatile anaesthetic is perversely comforting.
Matt waited while I changed into the thin, green scrub suit and then, together, we carried the colt into the small animal theatre. The place where, two nights ago, I stood squeezing life into Nina Crawford’s cat.
Sleep comes between breaths to a half-dead foal.
I held his head. Matt Hendon slid a tube up one nostril and down into the windpipe. The air filled with the heady, sweet smell of isoflurane; a glue-sniffer’s paradise. The foal breathed deeper and his head lay heavy on my elbow. The tube was changed for a bigger one, through his mouth and down into his airway. We laid him on his back on the operating table and piled sandbags along his side to keep him straight; a living sculpture in copper and burnished coal stretched out under the white heat of the operating lamp.
Monitors whined through their start-up routine. Tedious now. Background noise. Irrelevant unless the rhythm changes. Drip lines went up and antibiotics went in. Because you need these things in surgery. Any one of them could be lethal and I wouldn’t know.
I have a promise to keep and no way of keeping it.
I sat on a stool, out of the way and thought about what I could tell Sandy Logan if his foal died.
Your horses weren’t infected in theatre, Kellen. It’s probably the safest place in the clinic.
There is always hope.
Steff backed in through the doorway, masked and gloved, her hands in the air, her gown untied. ‘I can’t get hold of Mo.’ She looked at me. ‘Will you do the running?’
‘Sure.’
‘Thanks.’ It came out without warmth. A curt functionality. Yesterday, we were part of a team. This evening, we shared hope. Now, we can’t even share grief at the loss of the mare.
I tied her gown. Watched her l
ay drapes on the shaved belly of the foal, locked in her own world, halfway to the bladder. Like Nina with her cat’s ruptured diaphragm.
‘How’s Killer?’ I asked.
She smiled at that. Even behind the mask you could see it. ‘He’s cool.’
‘He’s the Cat from Hell and Jason is going to find a shotgun and blow his head off.’ Matt smiled too. A different smile. Exasperated. He looked at me for sympathy and support. ‘She has him in the Lodge,’ he said. ‘They won’t have him in the ward in case he eats the nurses. Jason had to sleep on the mattress in the feed-room last night because she had him roaming loose and he wouldn’t let the lad in the door.’
‘He’s a guard cat. It’s his job.’ She looked down the table towards us. There was less ice in her eyes than before. ‘OK to cut?’
‘He’s a monster and he needs shooting for everyone’s safety.’ He laid a finger on a pulse. ‘We’re ready this end. Don’t hang about.’
It was never like this in the Western.
Theatre is hot. Hot and tedious. A foal laparotomy is not a complicated procedure. The running is minimal. Maureen, had she been found, would have wasted her trip. Twice, I changed the suction jars. Switched the end of the hose from the full jar to the stand-by. Emptied a litre of foal urine down the drain. Put the empty jar back on the machine, standing by for the next time. Once, I rifled through the cupboard for a set of retractors. Matt found them in the end, in a drawer in the other theatre.
In between, I sat on the high stool where I had been put and watched the foal breathe. Watched the irritating rhythm of the ECG. Felt the beginnings of greasy sweat trickle down between my shoulder blades. Found a bottle of Nina’s Highland cow water on the anaesthetic machine and drank half of it. Revolting stuff. It wasn’t a patch on coffee but it pushed back the beginnings of a headache.
I watched Stephanie Foster operate with exactly the same degree of care and precision as Nina had done with her cat. Watched the concentration on Matt Hendon’s face as he fine-tuned his patient’s sleep to the rhythm of the monitors. Decided, as Steff found and began to close the defect in the colt’s bladder, that paranoia can only go so far. There are rational reasons for everything. Even E. coli infection. It’s simply a question of attitude. Hospitals breed paranoia.
