by Manda Scott
‘How much of this is the dream and how much is happening in reality?’
‘Most of it’s real. Except the horses don’t scream at me. They just lie there, wanting to die. No one else screams at me either. But they know it’s my fault.’
‘How is it your fault?’
‘I’m the surgeon. If I wasn’t there to cut them, they wouldn’t be in the ward. If they weren’t in the ward, they wouldn’t be dying.’
‘There are other surgeons in the world. If it wasn’t you, it would be someone else.’
‘No one else has their cases dying like flies.’
‘Do you know what it is that’s killing them?’
‘They bleed to death. I told you. Blood. I’m drowning in blood.’
‘But in reality, not in the dreams. What is it kills them for real?’
‘Infection. A simple, straightforward E. coli. Except this one’s vicious and armour-plated. We can’t find anything that kills it and it’s set up home somewhere in the large animal theatre. Our surgical risk statistics have just gone through the roof. That is, my surgical statistics have just gone through the roof. Steff gelded one of the farm ponies last week and it’s bouncing round the paddock, fitter than all the rest put together.’
‘Maybe it’s got local immunity.’
‘Maybe.’
‘So what can you do?’
‘About the rest? Close theatre. Bomb it. Scrub it. Sterilise it. Do whatever it takes to exterminate every bloody microbe in the whole sodding place. I’ll autoclave the straw if I have to. I won’t cut another horse until Bacteriology give me a form signed in blood saying every square inch is sterile.’
‘Will that work?’
‘It’ll have to work, Kellen. There’s nothing else left we can do.’
It was warm, sitting there with the horse. Warm and peaceful. The smell seemed less pungent than when I’d first arrived. More horse-breath and hay and less phenol and flatulence. I settled back against the wall near the door and listened to the gentle flow of breathing. The horse, the student. Steff. Steff sitting half-awake, twisting straw between her fingers, filling in a history I already knew. A tally of deaths that should never have happened. A cleaning-up process that left even the drains coming up sterile on tests. You could have built microchips in the hay barn by the time they’d finished and they would have come out pristine.
‘What are you going to do now?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did Nina call you before she went to bed?’
‘Sure. About five minutes before you turned up. She handed over clinical control. He’s my case now.’ The straw twisted tighter. ‘Yesterday I wanted to shoot him.’
‘And today?’
‘Today I think we might make it if we keep going with the fluids and the parenteral feeding.’ She kept her eyes on the horse, not on me. ‘Interesting, isn’t it, what responsibility does to your sense of perspective?’
Footsteps sounded down the corridor; a long stride with a soft, steady tread.
‘Steff? Is that you …?’ A voice in the dark outside the box. A male voice. Coming closer. Over the box door. ‘Christ, woman. Have you any idea how bad it smells in there?’ A warm, soft-edged voice, leavened with the worn-down remnants of a Morningside accent. A voice run through with the time of night and the day of the week and the clinical wreckage of the box. A voice that held on to the familiar sharp bite of irony. A dark, tousled head framed against the upturned collar of a white clinical coat leaned in over the top of the door. Red gold glimmered on the little finger of the hand laid on the latch. I would know that hand anywhere.
‘Hello, Matt.’
‘Kellen!’ A new thread ran through the voice then. ‘Christ. What in God’s name are you doing here?’
‘Finding out if Steff dreams of dying horses too.’
‘Don’t you start. One of them going over the edge is quite enough.’ He passed the soles of his shoes over the top of the disinfectant, let himself into the box and crouched down to examine the horse. He checked the stomach tube, lifted the eyelid, looked under the lips. He flattened the ears, pressed at the eye to make the third eyelid pop out. He pursed his lips, frowning and stood up to check over the monitors. He used to be an anaesthetist, Matt. Did his PhD and got his exams and then moved, with the zeal of the converted, to surgery. He knows more about the high-technology of intensive care than anyone else in the hospital. When he’s in a good frame of mind, he can lift his students to the stars. When he isn’t, he can cut them to shreds. I gather that much the same applies to the residents.
He spent a good five minutes flicking through the channels on the machines, reading trends and patterns from the past day and beyond. Then he turned his back to the screens and he looked down at Steff as she sat curled in the warm curve of the horse’s side.
The atmosphere prickled. He is leader of the group that wants her to take the first plane back to where she came from. She knows it. They don’t get on.
There was a sharp, static moment when he thought of commenting on the read-out from the monitors and she thought of telling him where to go and then both of them looked at me and thought better of it.
The moment passed.
Matt found a clean section of wall and leant back, hands in pockets. ‘Where’s Herself?’ he asked quietly.
‘Kellen made her go to bed.’
‘Did she, by God?’ He thought that was funny. ‘Well, I’m glad someone has what it takes. Just a pity it wasn’t one of us. Next thing you know she’ll be going part time and the world will be perfect for all of us.’ He turned to me, smiling the kind of smile that has had over a year to get used to not being the Betrothed but still hasn’t quite made it. ‘What about Steff?’ he asked. ‘Can you do the same for her?’
When she’s just found out what it is to have sole responsibility? I doubt it.
‘Who’s going to look after the horse if I go?’ Steff rolled the whites of her eyes at the figure on the floor. ‘Dominic?’
‘Shouldn’t think so.’ Matt shook his head. ‘Dominic’s coming with me. We’ve got a German shepherd coming in from Maryhill. Road traffic accident. Major haemorrhage. Comminuted forelimb fracture. Possible ruptured spleen. Probable fractured pelvis. Sorry.’ And that, after all, was why he’d come. To pick up his student and drop his piece of news.
Steff isn’t the kind to leap for the chance of late-night heroism if it isn’t strictly necessary. She counted to ten as the news sank in and then nodded, took a deep breath and pushed herself up to her feet. For the first time, the lack of sleep showed in her voice as much as her eyes. ‘Do you need a hand?’ she asked.
‘No.’ He shook his head. He is not, whatever else, without compassion. ‘Nice idea but I think you need to cover for Nina till this is over and then you need to get to bed. All I want is one of the duty students to scrub in for the surgery. Lucy’s still sitting with the wolfhound from this afternoon and Aiden’s stuck with an oncology disaster that will apparently fall apart if he moves from its side. That leaves Mr Motivation down there.’ He looked down at the body curled up in the straw. ‘Is he with us?’
‘As much as he ever is.’ She leaned over and prodded the white coat somewhere around chest level. ‘Come on, get up. Spring is here. You can go back into hibernation after the finals.’
It took them a long time to wake him up and longer than that to get him on his feet and walking. Steff got him a black coffee from the machine outside the drug store and made him drink half of it before he left. It smelt foul. Acidic and meaty. As if the Bovril in the next compartment had leaked across to mingle with the hot water. Still, it got him moving and more or less capable of speech. I sat with Steff in the doorway to the box and together we watched him trudge off down the corridor in the wake of his surgeon.
‘The boy’s got narcolepsy at the very least.’ She sounded way past caring. ‘He’s failed every exam he’s ever sat. It took him three tries to get through Pathology. If he bombs this time round, t
hey’ll throw him out for good. You’d think he’d have learned not to wind up the surgeons by now.’
There are things in life that I worry about. The pass rate of final year veterinary students is not one of them.
The failing health of my client’s main source of support, however, could worry me quite a lot.
‘When were you planning to get some sleep?’ I asked.
‘Whenever there’s not someone here to keep me awake.’ She settled back, pointedly, into the curved space of the horse’s side.
Branding Iron closed his eyes and the wrinkles above them smoothed out. Like that, he looked a great deal less as if he wanted to die. Very peaceful, the two of them.
‘OK.’ I stood up. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ I pulled off the overshoes and dropped them in the yellow waste bag to the side. A quick search of my pockets turned up an old till receipt. I scribbled my home number on it and clipped it to the case notes before I hung them back on the wall. ‘If there’s anything I can do, you give me a ring, huh?’
‘Sure.’ She was already half asleep.
I pulled the door closed and swung the latch over as quietly as it would go.
3
Outside, it was raining. Slow, heavy drops spattered from a heavy cloud layer that promised real rain later. The bright white of the security lights reflected down off the sky and my shadow skipped over the embryonic puddles that formed on the Tarmac ahead of me as I crossed the car park. Behind me, Matt Hendon and his spaced-out assistant unloaded something large and unwieldy from the back of a mud-spattered Four Trak. The night’s surgery. Rather them than me.
Out on the switchback, the mid-evening traffic had all but disappeared and the journey home took half the time it would have done if I hadn’t called in to see Nina. Still, it was close to nine o’clock by the time I drove through the village and turned down the lane to the farm. I steered round the potholes by sheer force of habit, with my brain in late-evening neutral, pondering magpies and gravity and dying horses and wondering, not for the first time, just how far Nina Crawford could push herself before she went right out over the edge. At the end of the lane, the gate had been left open for me and I coasted to a halt in the yard, secure in the knowledge that the ponies had been fed and that there was a fair chance Sandy might have brought them in when he realised I was going to be late home. He’s like that, Sandy. He thinks ahead, he has the initiative to act on the results and he is one of the best business partners you could ever hope to have.
He is, in fact, one of the few reliable features of my life. One of those gifts the gods produce every once in a while to remind me that life is not all bad.
He turned up the spring after Bridget died, on a wild, wet Saturday morning, a week or two before the trekking season was due to start. I was mucking out the ponies, all eight of them, on my own. Immersing myself in work as the best way to avoid having to think. Not that there was a great deal to think about. The when and the how of selling them, possibly, rather than the if or the why.
The rain drove in from the north east. Long horizontal sheets of it that seemed to curl over the brow of the hill and angle up under the pantiles on the barn roof, lifting them up, and driving in through the half-dozen sizeable gaps that I had successfully spent all winter ignoring. Rainwater ran in rivers down the walls and splashed from the beams on to the concrete of the passage and the bedding of the loose boxes. The noise of it would have driven me mad if I could have heard it over the thrumming howl of the wind. The entire barn smelt of wet wood and soaked straw.
The ponies muttered comments to each other and shoved against me as I entered the boxes. They could find better shelter outside in the field. And then wouldn’t be standing in on wet straw. Fresh hay and a quick brush-over is not fair exchange for fresh air and daylight. And they knew I was going to send them away. I could feel it.
Even the dog was on their side. Normally she would have followed me from box to box, standing guard in the doorway in case I might need her for something urgent. A stowaway mouse in a hay-net perhaps, or an unexpected insurgence of rabbits breaking in through tunnels in the floor. Anything to make the day worthwhile for a hard-bred hunting collie. Except this morning, of all mornings, when she chose to keep her own counsel. Found herself a dry space on the bottom layer of straw bales and curled up, a white-with-tan mass of hairy judgement watching me through odd-caste eyes that said with certainty that the ponies were in the right, that I was the under-scum of Hades and that the rain, which was ruining the hunting, was, indeed, my fault.
Only Rain, the dun Connemara filly in the end box, seemed happy to see me. But then I had spent the best part of the winter in a carefully planned friendship campaign, trying to persuade her that people, if not necessarily her first choice of company, were none the less an extraordinarily reliable source of Polo mints. As long as you made the effort to walk across the box. Or to trot across the field. Or to canter all the way down from the hill when you heard the right whistle. By late March, she wasn’t about to miss the chance to frisk my pockets for the sake of a bit of damp bedding. And besides, her box wasn’t under any of the drips.
I was grovelling in the straw, picking the packed faeces from her feet, when the gods’ gift turned up.
‘It’s not the best of weather,’ observed a voice outside the door. ‘Were you wanting a hand to finish the feeding?’
It was a low, melodious voice, with the rounded vowels and soft, chopped consonants of the West High-lands. A voice that could ooze patience and serenity, even on the wrong end of a handgun; one of the few voices whose arrival in the yard didn’t, at that point, signal any kind of crisis or catastrophe. Inspector Stewart MacDonald, senior officer of the Strathclyde Central Constabulary. If I’d been half switched on, I would have known he was around the moment the dog abandoned her seat of judgement on the bales and took herself out for a run in the rain.
I didn’t bother to stand up. ‘You can tie up the hay-nets on the far side if you like. The one soaking in the water tub’s for Balder. His breathing’s gone bad again.’ I shouted it above the hammering of the gale, saw him nod and listened to the solid tread of size twelve Doc Martens receding down the corridor.
‘You should get them turned out if you want to stop his cough,’ said another, altogether different, voice. ‘You’ll not do anything with soaking the hay, just.’
I jerked upright and spun round.
Nobody.
‘Stewart?’
A figure stepped out from behind the half-door of the loose box. ‘No, no. He’s away off down to see to the hay. The name’s Sandy. Sandy Logan.’ It held out a hand. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
It was a gnome. I swear it was a gnome. A wee, scrunched-up gnome, with a head that didn’t quite reach to the top of the half-door, a face like a crinkled prune and a fuzzed halo of white hair that poked out from under a flat oilskin cap. It grinned a broad grin that flashed no teeth at all in the top row of incisors and it proffered a hand so twisted that it could have been carved from old hawthorn roots.
‘You’ll be the Dr Stewart,’ it said. The grip was warm and dry and solid and did nothing whatsoever to invoke any sense of reality.
‘Ahhh … Yes … I expect I will.’ There was a blank pause where my brain failed utterly to deal with the unexpected. ‘And this is Rain,’ I said, to fill the gap. ‘Named for her predecessor, not the weather.’ And then, because he seemed to see it as an invitation: ‘But she’s not that keen on people.’
‘Aye?’ He didn’t believe me. He just nodded and stepped past me into the box with the pony. And she, having spent the winter swearing to me that she loathed the entire human race, nuzzled his shoulder and tried to edge off his cap with her teeth.
Definitely a gnome.
He ran his cramped, arthritic fingers across her withers and down her back. She stood still, like the granite out on the hill, and arced her neck like a show pony. ‘Aye, she’s fine, the wee filly,’ he said, as he reached her tail. ‘What makes you think
she’s no’ friendly?’
‘Someone fired a gun by her ear a month or two back,’ said Inspector MacDonald from the doorway. ‘Now she thinks every man and his wife carries a Colt 45 in their armpit.’
‘No. She just knows that you do.’ I turned back from the pony. MacDonald was leaning against the door. He smiled and it told me nothing. With MacDonald, it never does.
I returned the favour.
‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on or do I have to guess?’
‘Nothing’s going on,’ he said, and the top edge of both his salted grey eyebrows blended with the flop of whiter hair falling down from his brow, as if a tall frown somehow added plausibility. ‘It’s a filthy wet day and I thought you’d be here on your own with the ponies. I just thought me and Sandy here could give you a hand for a while and then you could make us a coffee and a quick bite to eat.’
Really?
MacDonald never ‘just’ did anything in his life. He doesn’t even go out for a walk with the dog without an ulterior motive.
‘That’s very kind,’ I said, ‘but I started early. There’s only the hay-nets left to do. Unless you wanted to have a go at mending the roof?’
He considered it briefly and the gnome Sandy stopped fussing my favourite pony long enough to cast an appraising eye at the drips raining down into the next box. Their eyes met and the gnome sucked the air through the gap in his teeth in the way of a mechanic who has just viewed the steaming engine of my car. Just for a moment I thought he was going to say something smart. Just for a moment, so did he. MacDonald’s eyes widened ever so slightly and his head twitched a faint half-inch to the left. So the silence stretched a little longer and the gnome swallowed whatever it was that was about to come out and, instead, he just kept on sucking in and sucking in until he’d grown at least an inch taller and then he let it all out again in one big, untoothed grin. ‘Maybe no’ just now,’ he said. And he was thereby not ejected from the barn.