City Girl, Country Vet

by Cathy Woodman

  Kittens

  I’m always a little on edge when I’m on duty, never sure exactly what I’ll be called upon to do, or when. At Crossways I saw everything from an urban fox cub abandoned by its mum to a very sick marmoset. I also treated a puppy who’d snaffled up his owner’s splifs and a cat who’d been shot with an air gun. However, Emma says it’s pretty quiet here in Talyton St. George. Nothing much happens after nine o’clock at night.

  I settle down in front of the television to catch up with the news, and it can’t be more than ten minutes later when the phone rings. I grab the handset.

  “Hello?” It takes me a moment to remember where I am. “Otter House Vets.”

  “Is that Emma?”

  “It’s Maz, Maz Harwood. Emma’s away. I’m the relief vet.”

  “It’s Cheryl here—I served you a cream tea at the Copper Kettle a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, one of my queens is kittening. She’s in terrible distress—I need someone to look at her straightaway. I can’t get hold of Alex, my usual vet. I’ve phoned several times in the past hour, and driven up to the manor. The dogs are there, but there are no lights on.”

  I recall Emma’s warning about getting involved with Talyton Manor Vets, then dismiss it. This is about the welfare of an animal, not unfair competition.

  “You’d better bring her straight round.”

  “You’re an angel. I’ll be with you in five minutes.”

  I call Izzy to warn her there’s a heavily pregnant cat on the way to the surgery, fling on a grubby T-shirt and jeans (I seem to have mislaid some of my clothes on the way from the car to the flat when moving in), shut Miff in the flat, and head downstairs. I hesitate when I hear noises coming from Reception. I push the door open.

  “Who’s there?” I call sharply.

  “It’s me, Nigel.” A man with a tidy ginger mustache, a waistcoat, and a bow tie looks up from the innards of the computer. “You must be Maz.” He smiles. “I’m sorry if I frightened you. I let myself in.”

  “I’d rather you’d let me know you were here.” I don’t like the idea of people I don’t know creeping around the building while I’m upstairs. So much for Miff being a good watchdog, I think. “Do you think you’ll get that computer back up and running by tomorrow?”

  “I’m pretty sure I know what the problem is.” Nigel taps the box with a miniature screwdriver. “It’s the loose hair—it clogs the hardware.”

  I hope he’s right. I don’t want to deal with a whole day without access to my patients’ case notes.

  “Oh, while I remember, I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve ordered a new trolley,” I say. “The brakes aren’t working on the old one. It isn’t safe.”

  “I’ve canceled the order.” Nigel gazes at me with shifty gray eyes. “Frances contacted me to let me know. It isn’t a case of while the cat’s away, the mice can play. There’s no money in the budget for new equipment.”

  I can’t say I’m entirely happy about Frances going behind my back and Nigel canceling my order.

  “Who’s in charge here?” I say. It’s a rhetorical question, considering Emma’s given me the responsibility for the running of the practice, but Nigel doesn’t see it that way.

  “Me, au naturel. I’m practice manager, in all but title anyway. You’re the locum, temporary staff.”

  How does he justify his naked ambition? I wonder. He seems to have given himself a promotion in Emma’s absence. I don’t think Nigel and I will get on if he’s going to throw his weight around and make a fuss about the cost of a trolley, although—my conscience pricks me like a large-bore hypodermic needle—he does have a point. I haven’t even brought in enough fee income yet to cover it.

  The doorbell rings, cutting my conversation with Nigel short and announcing Cheryl’s arrival. I take her through to the consulting room.

  “This is Saffy, one of our precious babies.” Cheryl lifts a Persian cat out of a carrier and puts her on the table. She has a smoke blue coat, apprehensive amber eyes, and a flat face, which makes her look like a cartoon cat that’s walked into a wall. Cheryl holds her firmly by the shoulders and haunches. “This is her first litter and her last, because I’m not going to let our darling girl go through this again.”

  Saffy—which Cheryl tells me is short for Cheriam Sapphira, Cheriam being the breeders’ prefix, a combination of her own and her sister Miriam’s names—strains feebly, leaking a pool of dark fluid from beneath her tail, suggesting that her kittens are in imminent danger, if they aren’t already dead.

  “I need your permission to do a cesarean,” I say gently, aware of how worried Cheryl must be.

  “Is that really necessary?” Cheryl’s earrings, black cats dangling from silver chains, tremble just above the neckline of her purple turtleneck. “My vet always tries the injection first.”

  “There’s no time,” I explain, but I’m not sure I’ve really convinced her, although she does sign the consent form.

  “She’s going to be all right, isn’t she?”

  I wish I could, but I can’t and don’t make any promises. Cheryl looks at me pleadingly.

  “Alex always gives me some idea …”

  I stick to my guns. All I’m prepared to guarantee is that every single one of my patients will die—eventually.

  “She wanted to stay,” I tell Izzy, who arrived soon after Cheryl left. We’re now in the operating theater with Saffy between us. “I told her she couldn’t.”

  “I bet she didn’t take that very well,” Izzy says cheerfully, checking the resuscitation kits ready for the imminent arrival of Saffy’s kittens. “What did you say?”

  “I said it was down to health and safety. For my health and her safety. I know she adores her cats, but even so, she’s a bit pushy, isn’t she?”

  “I call her the She-devil,” Izzy says with a wicked glint in her eye. “I can’t believe she had the nerve to bring one of her cats here. She helped Old Fox-Gifford organize the petition to try and stop Emma setting up the practice in Talyton. Emma’s forgiven her—you know what she’s like, a real softy—but I haven’t.”

  “It’s lucky for Cheryl that it didn’t succeed,” I observe. “Where did you used to work?”

  “Talymouth, and before that a practice in Exeter.”

  “So you haven’t moved very far.”

  “I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.” Izzy smiles. “You just wait—when you’ve been here a few months, you’ll find that you’ll never want to leave.”

  “I doubt that very much.” This place is too quiet, too out of the way, and far too muddy for me. “By the way, I brought a couple of bags in from my car when I arrived the other day. Have you seen them? I thought I left them in the staff room.”

  “What kind of bags?”

  “Yellow ones.”

  “The clinical waste went out this morning.” Izzy glances at the watch pinned to her breast. “Eight o’clock on the dot.”

  “All of it?” I say, aghast.

  “Of course.”

  “But that was my stuff—my clothes, some shoes, my iPod. Didn’t you notice the stickers?”

  “RADIATION HAZARD? I thought it was your idea of a joke.”

  “Not mine. The staff from my last practice’s idea of giving me a good send-off.”

  “You should have mentioned it,” Izzy says sheepishly.

  “Don’t worry. It gives me an excuse to go out and buy a whole new wardrobe next time I’m in London.”

  “You don’t have to go all the way to London. You can get some really nice clothes at the garden center.”

  “What, macs and gardening gloves? Not quite my style,” I say, smiling. “Here, have a kitten.”

  Within an hour Saffy has come round from the anesthetic, her days as a breeding queen over. There are three kittens. Only one has survived, and it’s taking milk while Saffy licks frantically at its blue-cream fur, raising it up into tiny spikes.

  It’s adorable. I love kittens.

  I must have been about twelve
years old when I found a litter of them in the stairwell in the block of flats in Battersea where I lived with my parents and younger brother. They looked like the nightmarish Rat King of one of my father’s poems, a mass of tangled tails and tiny bodies, but they weren’t writhing and wriggling about. They weren’t moving at all.

  I never cried, but when thoughts of what they must have gone through, and how much they’d suffered, flashed across my mind, my throat tightened and my eyelids pricked. When I knelt down beside them, a tear dropped onto one of the kittens’ faces and trickled into its ear. It shook its head and opened its mouth, a blink of pink. It was alive, the sole survivor.

  “The kindest thing for it would be to knock it on the head.” My father, who was sitting at the kitchen table in a work jacket that reeked of booze and cigs, hardly looked when I took it out from under my sweater to show him. He topped up his glass from the bottle in front of him. “Put it out of its misery, ’Manda.”

  “You can put me out of mine by going out and looking for a bloody job,” Mum cut in from the sink, where she was in her rubber gloves, up to her elbows in bubbles. She was thirty then—a young mum. Her face was already toughened by frequent trips to the tanning salon, her hair in frizzy blond ringlets, and her bra straps, exposed by her sleeveless blouse, fell in loops down her strong, wiry arms, those of a woman used to manual work.

  “I’m always working, even when I’m sitting here.” My father, who was ten years older than she with a lean face, bright blue eyes, and crow’s-feet, drained his glass and thumped it back down on the table. “Especially when I’m sitting here.”

  “Can’t Pat give you a couple more shifts down at the Feathers,” Mum said, “and get you out from under my feet?”

  “How do I know?” My father yawned, reinforcing the message that my mother was boring him with her constant nagging, and stretched out his long legs. “I haven’t seen him for weeks.”

  “Go and ask him. No, crawl round on your knees and beg him. Otherwise I’m going to have to sell the kids to pay the electric.”

  I left them to it. (I used to fantasize that my real parents would turn up out of the blue one day and take me away, reclaiming me from this mismatched pair, who were constantly at each other’s throats.) I took the kitten, a tiny scrap of black and white fur with its eyes stuck closed, in a shoe box on the bus as far as the stop outside the parade of shops that I passed every day on my way to school.

  Tucked between Tatchell’s Bespoke Tailors and Gita’s Saris was the Ark. To the right of the entrance was a brass plaque, engraved J. B. WILSON with some letters after it. The sign on the door read CLOSED. With the shoe box tucked under one arm, I reached up and pressed the doorbell. Eventually, a nurse—I guessed that’s what she was from the silver buckle on her belt—opened the door.

  “Can’t you read?” she snapped.

  “This is an emergency,” I stammered, then, realizing that she was about to shut the door on me, I took the lid off the box. “Look.”

  “Oh, it’s just a baby.... You’d better come in,” the nurse said more kindly. “I’ll ask the vet to have a look at him.”

  “I don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl,” I said as I followed her through a door on the other side of the waiting area into a small room where the air smelled fiercely clean and chemical.

  “Don’t touch anything,” she said curtly, and she left me there in the company of the kitten and a poster of a giant flea before returning with a man in gray trousers and a tunic that fastened across one shoulder. He seemed very tall and very old to me, although looking back, I imagine he was probably only just fifty at the time.

  He introduced himself as Jack, the vet, and the nurse as Chrissie.

  “I’m Amanda,” I said as he lifted the kitten out of the box and glanced at its undercarriage.

  “It’s a boy,” he announced. “I’d say he can’t be more than a week old because his eyes haven’t opened yet. What’s his name?”

  I thought of the Rat King and the tangle of tails. “King. He’s called King.”

  “This little chap, as you’ve probably guessed, should still be with his mum, but as he isn’t, he needs to be fed with a special milk substitute every two hours.”

  “I can do it,” I declared immediately. I’d bonded with the kitten as soon as I realized he was alive and depending on me for his survival. I felt responsible. I felt needed.

  “Don’t you have to go to school?”

  “I can skip school for a few days. I don’t mind.”

  “I’m sure you don’t,” Jack said gravely, “but I’d hate for you to get into any trouble, so what I suggest is that I keep King here for a while.”

  I gazed around the room, at the bottles and pots on the shelves, at the reassuringly long names printed on the labels, as if the longer the name, the more effective the medicine. I wasn’t sure about Chrissie, but I liked Jack’s quiet and reassuring manner. I trusted his opinion. King would be safer at the Ark than at home, but my chest ached at the thought of having to leave him behind. For the first time in my life, I was in love.

  “Do you live far away?” Jack asked.

  “I have to catch a bus. Does that count?”

  “Oh, most definitely. Why don’t you drop by after school tomorrow?”

  My heart leapt. “Can I?”

  Jack nodded. “It’s almost time for evening surgery—you can help Chrissie give the kitten his first bottle before you head home.”

  “How much will it all cost?” I was thinking of my bus fare.

  “Don’t worry about it now.” I wonder what Jack thought of me, a skinny blond girl in a grubby blouse with the top button missing and a skirt with a hemline halfway up her thighs. Perhaps he guessed from the state of my shoes that I wasn’t from a particularly well-heeled family. “We’ll see how it goes …”

  I bit my lip. I knew what he meant: King might not make it. I had to be realistic, but whatever happened to him now, the path of my life was set. I was going to be a vet like Jack Wilson, and nothing was going to stop me.

  “I can’t believe the Fox-Giffords would leave their practice unmanned without good reason,” says Cheryl when she turns up to collect Saffy and the new arrival later the same night. (I like to send new mums home as soon as they’re round from the anesthetic so they can feed their babies in peace.)

  “I’m sure there’s a good reason Alex wasn’t answering the phone.” I don’t want to bad-mouth Emma’s rivals—I don’t want to stoop to their level, for a start. “Perhaps he was called out to another emergency.” I change the subject. “Look, I’ll e-mail all the details of the surgery to Talyton Manor Vets tomorrow, and you can arrange to see them for aftercare.”

  “And that’s a checkup in ten days’ time, you say?”

  “Maz! Phone!” Izzy calls out.

  “Oh, listen to me going on,” says Cheryl.

  “I have to go. Good night, and good luck to Saffy and her baby.” I push the door closed and turn the key in the lock before I go and find Izzy. Nigel is long gone.

  “Who’s on the phone now?”

  “Oh, nobody.” Izzy grins. “I thought I’d provide you with a means of escape from the She-devil.” She looks down at my feet. “Did you know you’re still wearing your slippers?”

  “Am I?” I glance down at the pair of fluffy dogs with lewd pink tongues. The nurses at Crossways gave them to me last Christmas. I’m not sure I’ve done my image any good by having them on down here, but at least I won’t be seeing Cheryl in a professional capacity again. She isn’t Otter House’s client.

  Izzy continues to stare at me.

  “Is there something else?”

  “You know, in my twenty years of nursing, I’ve never met a vet who kisses their patients.”

  I’d given the newborn kitten a little cuddle before handing her over to Cheryl.

  “Only the cute ones that don’t bite. I do draw the line at kissing snakes, though I have kissed a lot of other reptiles in my lifetime.” Well, not that
many, I think. There have been two significant reptiles in my life: Mike, and my first boyfriend from my student days, Ian Michelson.

  “I’m going home, if you’re all right here,” Izzy says. She lives alone, I know that much from Emma. She owns one of the tiny terraced houses on the road out to Talymouth, sharing it with two rabbits, eight guinea pigs, three tortoises, and a corn snake, which someone found under the hood of their car. I guess it must be pretty daunting for a man to share Izzy with all that lot.

  “I’m fine, thanks,” I say, although I’m feeling pretty shattered from having been on my feet for most of the day. “I’m off to bed.” I wish Izzy good night, and on my way back to the flat I check on Freddie. He’s lying very still at the front of the cage, his head tipped back and his body pressed up against the bars. Is he sleeping? His eyes are open and staring. I tiptoe forward, looking anxiously for the telltale rise and fall of his chest. Nothing.

  In a blur of tears, I go out to fetch a bag so I can put him in the freezer. Poor little guy. A life over almost before it began.

  When I return, I slide the catch on the door, at which Freddie’s body twitches, making me leap out of my skin.

  “Freddie?” I lean over him, holding my breath. One of his eyes swivels in its socket. “You nearly gave me a heart attack,” I chide him softly. “That’s a very risky game to play.” I restart his drip and cover him with a blanket, feeling very alone in the harsh glare of the light in Isolation. Only five months and twenty-eight days to go.

  CHAPTER 5

  Handle with Care

  There’s a push-button bell at reception for clients to use if there’s no one behind the desk. Some give it the slightest touch, so all you hear is a faint ting if you’re out the back. Others are less restrained.

  Izzy rolls her eyes at me as the bell rings out loud and clear, and keeps on ringing.

  “We’ve got our hands full here,” she grumbles as Freddie makes an attempt to leap out of her arms while I untangle his drip. “Where’s Frances?”

  “Perhaps it’s the Mosses.” We haven’t been able to contact Freddie’s owners since they left him with us three days ago, and they haven’t contacted us. The phone numbers they left turned out to be false, and the address they gave was for a plot on the new housing estate on the edge of Talyton St. George, as yet unsold. I reckon they’ve dumped him on us. Let’s face it, his chances aren’t great, and who wants to pay for a dead dog when they could put the money toward a new one? All right, call me a cynic, but I’ve learned that people aren’t always what they seem.