‘Yeah, fine. Hot.’ Joe thinks of the hotline text and the fucking cashpoint and wonders how long he’s got. How long until they find him? Will he get a couple more weeks, months? This box of worming medication expires next year. He’s sure he won’t see it.
‘You go to the place I told you about?’ Evan crosses his legs, the toe of his shoe hitting the floor. ‘Where the locals go?’
‘Yes, yes, we went to the restaurant, and we said Evan is so cool and authentic,’ Joe says. ‘He knows only the places off the beaten track where the locals eat.’
‘I’ll take that as a no,’ Evan says, unfazed. ‘I don’t know what to do about my patient,’ he adds, jerking his thumb behind him, indicating the consultation room. ‘And I’m knackered.’
‘You always say that after our holiday,’ Joe says. Evan’s parents are lawyers, and he once joked he’d get them to sue the practice for stress.
‘That’s because it’s always a nightmare,’ Evan remarks mildly. ‘I mean – what do you call a vet who is so busy he just issues prescriptions without thinking?’
‘A doctor,’ Joe deadpans. Evan practically falls over laughing.
Joe double-checks the signed prescription against the cockapoo’s weight and reaches for his coffee. It’s too hot. ‘Well, I can’t help with tiredness,’ he says, quietly relishing this moment of … of what? Of superiority, he supposes. He is the partner and Evan is the employee. God, Joe thinks. He needs to get a life if he gets off on things like this.
‘Yeah.’ Evan rubs at his forehead. ‘Was working last night.’
‘Here?’
‘No – Deliveroo. Absolutely knackering.’
‘I can’t string a sentence together after leaving here,’ Joe says sympathetically.
‘Right,’ Evan says tightly, obviously embarrassed. Evan is a curious combination of wanting to be seen as a big shot and a victim.
‘How bad is it?’ Joe says. ‘Money-wise.’
‘I pay Ali over three grand a month, mate.’
‘Wow. Beans on toast for dinner, then,’ he quips, but, internally, he’s wondering if there’s something they could do. Increase his salary, maybe.
‘Not even that,’ Evan says with a short, sad laugh.
‘Are they in there?’ Joe asks, nodding to the consultation-room door.
‘Yeah. Two-year-old bitch – toy poodle. It has a history of weird test results. Intermittent odd symptoms.’
‘She. Not it,’ Joe says. Evan turns on the charm for patients, but doesn’t ever bother out back. ‘How old, exactly?’ Joe leans back against the counter, more relaxed than he was. Evan’s financial situation has made him feel better about his own crisis. Schadenfreude, is it called? He can’t be that bad if there’s a word for it, Joe hopes.
‘Two and a half next month.’ Evan takes off his round glasses and rubs at his eyes. ‘She’s fine, sort of. Losing weight sometimes. Not always eating meals. Intermittent vomiting but by no means often. Seems a bit stressed. Slightly low glucose. Latest test showed raised renal parameters, but she’s so young … the weird thing is she’s worse after the vets’.’
‘Is the glucose artefactual?’
‘Tested in-house. No.’
‘What else have you tested for?’
‘Parasites. We’ve done a food-allergy trial. We’ve done a faecal parasitology. Checked for UTIs. An abdo X-ray for foreign bodies, a cPLI for pancreatitis. All negative. But that’s how we got the kidney result,’ Evan says. He rubs at his hair with his hand. He has a wrist tattoo which says Love your life on it. Twat, twat, twat.
‘Tricky,’ Joe says. ‘Why is she worse after the vet?’ He hears the skittering of claws against linoleum in Evan’s consultation room and raises his eyebrows.
‘I don’t know. I said I needed to think,’ Evan says, a half-apology on his face. ‘Without them firing questions at me and the fucking dog trying to get into everything. It must be something gastro with that range of responses.’
‘Does she have diarrhoea?’
‘Sometimes. Look.’ He gets out the blood results. Joe instinctively turns away from them. The breakdown of everything contained in the blood: antibodies, plasma, red blood cells. The same as humans. The same as Will. He can smell it.
Joe disguises his reaction by sipping his coffee. It’s still too hot, and burns his lips like an allergic reaction. He stares at the wall in front of him. She’s worse after the vets’. Something is niggling at him. He whirls the coffee around in his mug and takes another burning sip.
Stress.
‘Do a basal cortisol test,’ Joe says. ‘Or, better yet, an ACTH stimulation test. I reckon atypical Addison’s. In toy breeds it’s different. The tell is that she can’t handle stress.’
‘God,’ Evan says. ‘Right. Really?’
‘We’ll see. Try it.’
Satisfied, sort of, Joe goes into the reception to see Frannie. She’s usually a great morale booster. She keeps Chinese waving cats on the reception desk and has treats for the dogs and Dreamies for the cats that she gives to the owners with their receipts. She makes it a nice place to be.
‘All right,’ he says to her, leaning his elbows on the desk. ‘Just had Evan in, whingeing.’
‘Oh, be kind to Evan,’ she says.
‘You sound like Cathy the conscientious objector.’
‘Really not,’ Frannie says, making a face. Joe helps himself to a Twix lying on her desk and she waves him away. ‘Have it, I can’t eat,’ she says.
‘I can’t stop.’
Evan arrives out in reception with the dog and her owners. ‘Thanks, mate,’ he grins, as they pay. ‘Told them it was my idea.’
‘Of course you did,’ Joe says. He finishes the Twix and holds out his hand. Frannie gives him a bag of Quavers.
‘Said I had a brainwave out back,’ Evan says with a laugh. ‘Sorry, not sorry. You eating for two, or what?’
Joe stiffens. ‘You’re a twat,’ he says. Evan thinks he’s joking and laughs loudly. ‘Looking gorgeous as ever,’ he says to Frannie, when he’s seen out his clients. He can never resist flirting with her.
‘Piss off, Evan,’ she says dispassionately.
Joe finishes his crisps, then goes back to his blood-spinning.
As he’s working late, he receives a text from Frannie. His bottle of wine – a Yellow Tail merlot – is sitting there on the checkout next to – he snorts – a packet of cigarettes and a huge cheesecake.
‘Perfect,’ he replies to her, and she sends a smile.
Joe thinks, now, as he works, of all the animals he’s ever treated, and saved. The happiness they bring to their owners. The care and attention he treats them with. Wonders if that will ever outweigh it.
34.
Cathy
Cathy is in a consultation with a woman whose Dobermann is off his food.
‘Try the paste for two days,’ Cathy says, her hand on the Dobermann’s head. He’s fine. Eyes bright. Tail wagging. Stomach feels relaxed and non-tender. ‘Stick to the bland diet, hand-feed him chicken and rice rolled into balls if you need to. Little and often. Come back if that doesn’t work, but he should be fine.’ She meets the owner’s eyes – a woman in her sixties. ‘I’m not worried,’ she says. She always says this, if it’s true. She would want to be told it herself, if it was Macca who was sick.
The woman blinks at her, smiling, a hand going unconsciously to gesture to the dog. People’s pets mean so much to them. Cathy sees the Dobermann and his owner out into the reception. Frannie – a pen holding up her hair, Facebook open on the work computer, her desk littered with chocolate bar and crisp wrappers – quickly task-switches and sorts out the bill. She glances at Cathy. ‘Got time for a quick fashion parade?’
Cathy raises her eyebrows.
‘Look – I shop when I’m stressed,’ Frannie says, getting an ASOS parcel with its distinctive black-and-white packaging out of the top drawer. ‘What do you make of this?’ she says, opening it and pulling out the clothes. She holds up a top
to Cathy. It’s blood-red.
‘Too much,’ Cathy says quietly. ‘Red doesn’t suit you.’
Frannie keeps rooting in the bag, oblivious. Cathy doesn’t say, How can you think of shopping right now? It wouldn’t be fair. They all cope in different ways. Frannie drags Cathy into the prep room, the room with the best lights, where she tries on a floor-length patterned dress which swamps her. As she pulls it off, Cathy can see her ribs.
‘Maybe,’ Cathy says. ‘It’s a possible.’ It’s a phrase she used to say to Frannie all the time when the clothes came to the practice, but she doesn’t mean it this time. Everything’s changed.
‘I’ll ask Deb,’ Frannie says, balling up the dress and putting it back into the clear plastic wrap.
Back in the consultation room, Cathy cleans the table with antiseptic spray and blue roll.
She hears her mother arrive in the foyer. Cathy has always been tolerant of her mother’s inability to completely relinquish control of the business to her three children, but she can’t see her today. She’ll know.
‘How was the break?’ Maria says, poking her head around the door.
‘Good,’ Cathy says.
‘You look tired. You all do.’
‘We’re fine,’ Cathy says.
‘You eating enough?’
‘Mum,’ Cathy says, a warning signal in her voice. She’s thirty-five. She doesn’t need to be parented. And, if she does, it isn’t this – this anxiety her mother demonstrates. If Maria wants to parent her, then they could at the very least discuss the elephant in the room.
‘I’m just asking,’ Maria says.
‘Are you consulting?’ Cathy says. ‘Today?’
‘No. But Frannie told me there’s a Rottweiler with epistaxis?’
‘Yeah – he’s in the back,’ Cathy says, wondering if, when she’s sixty-five, she won’t be able to resist coming in. God, she hopes not. ‘Joe’s going to CT him.’
‘Really? Already?’
‘It’s not just a bit of sneezing,’ Cathy says, sighing with frustration at having to explain their reasoning, at having to reiterate a conversation they’ve already had. If only their mother would either work full time or not at all …
Maria is already heading out. ‘We’ve got it under control,’ Cathy calls after her.
She checks her phone before her next patient, sitting on the floor next to Macca, her rescue bulldog, brought in three years ago with a broken toe and an owner who didn’t want to pay to have it fixed. ‘To be honest, I wish I’d never got him,’ the man said, and, right that second, Macca’s brown eyes met Cathy’s, and it was love.
‘Sure there’s somebody here who could rescue him,’ she said lightly.
‘Oh, yeah – God. I’d love that. He’s just got too much energy.’
Cathy stared at him, wide-eyed, thinking, How could you? Macca went home with her the week after, heaved himself up on the sofa. His toe hadn’t even needed any treatment except rest.
She browses her phone but there is no news. Her blood turns fizzy in the checking of it. She sits there alone in the backroom, her face flushed, in the premises that she used to be so proud of part-owning but that now feel like a prison. It is no better, being in the UK. It is worse, actually, because they are so far from the body. Cathy has no idea if they’ve found it. At this very moment, as she looks at her holiday manicure resting against Macca’s fur, somebody could be unearthing Will. The stench of him, his rotting skin. What they have done is so wrong, so manifestly wrong. They are monsters. What would their mother think? Their mother would … what? Cathy cannot imagine it. She’d fall apart. That’s what would happen. That is what has already happened once.
She gathers Macca to her. He grunts, and she releases him. Usually, she would work. She would see patient after patient, letting the aftercare stack up and up, she’d order prescription dog food and new oxygen cylinders out back, each task breeding others. She’d get home at ten o’clock, too tired to think. But she doesn’t do that today.
She asks Evan – eating cheese sandwiches alone in his room – to cover her next slot, even though she knows he is knackered and put upon. Nevertheless, she makes an excuse and walks through the reception, Frannie’s huge eyes tracking her. They’re a practice almost in the middle of nowhere, just three shops in a row, flats above them, fields behind. A pharmacy, an independent café and their veterinary practice. The rent was cheap out here in the sticks, and they marketed themselves as a discount vets, much to their mother’s annoyance. The business soon rolled in. People didn’t mind travelling for a bargain and an easy parking space.
It started raining this morning on her way in. Biblical rain, the sort spoken about on the news as well as the weather bulletins. A month’s worth of rain in a morning, and more still coming down. It’s so stormy that the sky is becoming dark and heavy in places, the colour of a black paintbrush dipped in clear water. Outside, it smells of wet grass and hot pavements.
In the café next door, she orders an Americano and adds milk at a small wooden station at the back. She will just take ten minutes, here, alone, to get her head together. Sitting down, she raises the mug to her lips and thinks of Will. Maybe if she thinks of him, pays her respects, perhaps it will help somehow.
As she watches the quiet café gradually fill up with people shaking out their umbrellas, self-consciously pushing their wet hair back from their faces, she sees him. The man from the baggage claim. Cathy blinks, amazed he is out here in the countryside. He has a brown bag with him, a laptop bag. He is wearing glasses today, but it’s definitely him. He has on a parka and dark jeans turned up at the ankles and the hotness is back in her cheeks.
She tries to catch his gaze, and she sees out of her peripheral vision that he stops as he recognizes her.
He walks over to her table, bypassing the counter. He brings with him the smell of the countryside in the rain, and, underneath that, that hot summer smell again. She looks up at him as she breathes in.
‘The baggage-claim girl,’ he says, his face easing into a smile. He’s older than she first thought. Maybe early forties. Dark eyes but pale lashes.
‘That’s me,’ she says.
How funny, Cathy thinks. If her bag hadn’t gone missing, she still would have crossed paths with this man here in the café, but she wouldn’t have known him, like two dominos falling over in a row, the first required to tilt the second; something Cathy thinks about a lot when she relives the phone call Frannie made to her.
He turns away from her, an arm raised in a half-wave, and Cathy finds something sweeping across her skin. Disappointment. She wants that hot-cheeked feeling.
‘Was anything broken? In your bag?’ she asks desperately.
He turns back to her, a smile spreading over one half of his mouth and then the other, a lopsided half-knowing grin, and says, ‘Nope. You?’
‘Tom,’ the owner of the café calls out, looking over to Cathy’s table. ‘The usual?’
‘Please. To go,’ Tom says, turning away from her again.
Cathy finds herself downing her Americano faster. She has to get back to work, after all.
She times her stand just as he touches his contactless card to the machine. And then they’re walking out together into the rain. He’s holding a reuseable cup, his weight on one hip again. Her work uniform is getting wet. What is she doing, having rushed her coffee break to walk out with him? She’s always the one doing the chasing. But she can feel the heat off his body, even here, standing outside in the rain together.
‘You work at the vets’?’ he says, gesturing with his coffee to her tunic, pulling up the hood of his parka with the other hand.
‘Yeah.’ Cathy looks past his shoulder, to the vets’. Joe and Frannie emerge together. Cathy absent-mindedly checks her watch. Joe is supposed to be in afternoon surgery. And Frannie is supposed to be on reception. Where are they going? She keeps looking. Something about their body language is self-conscious, sheepish, maybe. They walk down the road together, to wh
ere Cathy can’t imagine.
‘You a vet, or –’ Tom says.
‘Sorry,’ Cathy says. She points to them. ‘That’s my brother and sister.’
‘You work together?’
‘Mmm,’ she says, still looking. Still thinking. Still thinking about Frannie’s lawyer, about Joe’s name on the warrant, at how alone she suddenly feels in the family, as though they’re holding her over a sheer drop, and she has to rely on them not to let go.
‘Pretty rainy for a walk,’ Tom remarks, watching them too.
She turns her gaze back to him. ‘You’re getting so wet.’ She looks at his jeans, already dark in places from the rain.
He shrugs, a big clumsy shrug, like he just doesn’t give a fuck about anything and Cathy, who gives far too many fucks about absolutely everything, moves to him like a flower to the sun.
‘Yes, I’m a vet,’ Cathy says, answering his question with flaming cheeks.
‘Oh, lovely!’ Tom says. The rain is battering both of them, and Tom starts laughing again. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he says. ‘It’s not Verona, is it?’ But he still stands there, smiling down at her.
‘No, it’s not,’ she says.
‘Should we …’ he says. Cathy waits, wondering if he might feel it too. She stands there, hesitating as droplets track down her neck, looking at his take-out coffee. Their eyes meet. ‘You want to – go somewhere less wet?’ Tom says. ‘Share my coffee? Or buy another?’ He shrugs, another big shrug.
Cathy became shy when she was twelve. It started with glandular fever. The day before it, she had played hockey, then gone to a café, then come home and tidied her room. Unlimited energy, which she spent however she wanted. She stayed up late. She kissed boys. She finished essays at the eleventh hour and played sports to destress afterwards.
But then, the illness. She caught it off a classmate at school, who recovered in about a week, no time at all. But it felled Cathy. First, the heat of the fever, the intensity of the fever dreams. Then the fatigue, like her limbs were under water. She doesn’t remember much about the weeks and months that followed it, only little snatches. Reaching up to put her hair in a ponytail, the motion of her arms unexpectedly exhausting her. Falling asleep while cradling a cup of tea, and sleeping so deeply that when she woke up it remained in the exact same position, only cold.
That Night Page 15