Night Mares

by Manda Scott

  ‘Oh. Good.’

  I don’t think so. MRSA is not the kind of thing you would choose to say out loud in a hospital, even as a joke. MRSA. Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus. Staph aureus is ubiquitous. Everyone carries it. You can grow it off your skin if you feel so inclined. Most of the time it’s pretty harmless. It’s only vicious when you take it into a hospital and feed it up on every antibiotic you’ve got until it can eat each and every one of them for breakfast. Then it kills people. Fast. They close down entire hospitals for this sort of thing.

  And this is E. coli. Which is worse.

  ‘What about the staff, Nina? E. coli hits people as hard as it hits horses.’ It’s another ubiquitous one although you’d grow it from a faecal culture rather than from your skin. Most of the time it’s fairly harmless too. But if you get the right strain, it kills people with no effort at all. Even before you’ve beefed up its resistance. I’ve read reports of E. coli deaths. I don’t particularly want to be one of them.

  ‘Not this one, it doesn’t.’ She levered a lobe of lung to the gap in the ribs and drew the knife down one side. Bubbles of blood-pink foam gathered on the cut surface.

  ‘Terminal pulmonary oedema,’ she said. I wrote it down.

  She pushed her knife into the foam. Amusement flickered darkly through the professional shell. ‘It’s species specific, Kellen. If it wasn’t, we’d know about it by now.’

  Curiously, that doesn’t make me feel any better.

  She turned round, a small blob of blancmange-lung balanced on the blade of her knife. ‘Left cranial lobe,’ she said. Swirls of colour and small, red-lined bubbles spun through the formalin as it settled on the base of the specimen jar. I wrote the label and sat the jar in the row with the others. She was still looking at me when I turned back to the horse.

  ‘Kellen, listen to me. We’ve been living with this for six months now. We’ve run every test we know how to run. It affects horses and only horses. And only horses that have been in theatre which means there has to be some kind of haematogenous spread. We didn’t quarantine the first two because we didn’t know what we’d got and there was still no spread to any of the other animals in the ward. We had three sheep, a goat and a half-dead Charolais calf in the ward the week it first hit and it didn’t touch any of them. It didn’t even get the horses in the next box.’

  ‘But you made Steff shower twice before you let her in theatre with the mare. She was washing her hair with Hibiscrub when I was in the changing rooms.’

  ‘I know. And you and I are going to shower before we go and see your mare and foal. For exactly the same reason. I’m not about to take any chances. But you have to believe me, we’ve been through the mill with this one. If nothing else, we have sixty-three final-year students to take care of. Public Health would’ve shut us down by now if there was the slightest risk of zoonosis.’

  She turned back to the horse and lifted a lobe of liver. Whatever it told her triggered another thought. There was a kind of flat ache in her eyes when she looked up. A memory of the week just gone. ‘Your mare’s been under the knife in theatre and she may get it yet,’ she said. ‘You knew the risk when you brought her in. But you and I and the foal are all safe. I promise you that.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I believe you.’ And I did.

  We finished soon after that. Fragments of liver, spleen, pancreas, left and right kidneys and five anatomically distinct sections of gut joined the lung and heart in jars in the sample rack. The spinal cord and the brain, being more difficult to get at, were left to the real professionals. We washed him, inside and out, with the power hose and then slid the hoist and the bulk of his body slowly along the paired ceiling tracks into the vast floor-to-ceiling freezer that takes up the whole of the far end of the room. During term time, the place is a repository for everything that dies—endless fodder for student teaching. On the first Saturday after the end of term, it was well-nigh empty although I still counted the bodies of four different species stacked up against the side wall like so much firewood, awaiting Monday morning’s pathology round with the eternal patience of the dead.

  It took a while to get him where she wanted and to label the tubs of organs. There was frost forming on his eyelids by the time we were ready. Mine felt much the same. Scrub suits, even two of them, are not a match for a freezer set to minus fifteen. Nina, who had the forethought to wear overalls, looked at the white ends to my fingers and grimaced.

  ‘You can have a hot shower,’ she said, ‘and a coffee. Then you can either talk to your new arrival or go home to bed. Your choice.’

  ‘I’ll think about it when my brain’s defrosted.’

  ‘OK.’ She held the door while I walked past her into the frosted air of the dawn. ‘You can have the first shower.’

  The door sealed shut behind us with the solid finality of a tomb.

  The staff common room is on the first floor of the old block, lodged between the library and the Dean’s office. It was designed in the days when the university still had money to spare and believed in pandering to the greater dignity of academia. The walls are panelled, the chairs are large and well padded and the carpets have, miraculously, survived several decades of veterinary footwear relatively intact. The crowning glory is a wide bay window with glorious leaded lights that must once have granted the professors and dons of the Faculty an unimpeded view of the vast acreage of Garscube Estate. Now that the various planning deals have rendered the acreage rather less vast, it simply offers a better-than-average view over the eight-foot-high, wire-topped wall on to the manic piece of dual carriageway that links Anniesland to Bearsden, and beyond that, into the rabbit warren of a housing estate that is the focal point for most of the local drugs trade. For all that, it is still a useful vantage point from which to watch the rest of the hospital.

  I was huddled on the floor in front of the night storage heater trying to keep warm when the first of the blue flashing lights blared past. The second, viewed from the window, proved to be a fire engine, as did the third. The officers’ tender screamed past just as Nina came back in. She was damp and scrubbed and her hair was wet again and she looked very much the same as she had done the last time I saw her step out of a shower. The spark of life that held her through the night had snuffed out the moment we closed the door to the freezer room and what replaced it was more exhausted than any human being has any right to be and still stay standing.

  ‘You need a coffee,’ I said. The thought of the acrid muck from the machine made my throat cringe but the principle was sound.

  ‘No. If I drink any more coffee I’ll go into orbit.’ She took a bottle from the fridge, green with a tartan label and a daft cartoon of a Highland cow. ‘I’ve got this. Twice the magnesium and half the nitrates of the stuff that comes out of the tap. Probably has a wider range of oestrogens, too, but they don’t bother to put that on the label.’ She held out the bottle. ‘Want some?’

  You’re joking. ‘I’ll live without.’ Last time I drank plain water I was in a bed with a gunshot wound in my shoulder and two medics, two police officers and an organic chemist all trying to dictate the good of my health. I haven’t drunk it out of choice ever since.

  ‘Thought not.’ She drank, straight from the bottle and then slid quietly down the side of the radiator to sit at my feet with her knees pulled up to her chin and her head on her arms. A wave of lemongrass and ginger washed past me, caught on the up-current of the radiator. Pleasantly peaceful.

  ‘You can sleep at the cottage if you don’t want to drive back.’ Her voice came, muffled, through layers of green cotton scrub suit.

  ‘Mmm. Thank you.’

  A police car burned past in a hurry to be wherever the fire engines had been going. I craned my head round the corner in time to see it indicate right across the dual carriageway and then vanish from sight. A haze of blue smoke hung over the river, right at the edge of my field of view.

  Squeezing in between the heater and the window gave me a w
ider angle of view. I followed the trail of the smoke back and down towards the valley. A flicker of blue showed through the trees, mapping the path of the panda car. I drew a sketch map in my head, trying to work out where the horse ward lay in relation to the library. The blue light stopped somewhere behind a bank of rhododendron near the river, about five hundred yards from the ward. The smoke turned from blue to grey. Black fragments floated clear on the breeze.

  ‘Nina?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Nina. I think …’

  She came slowly to her feet, as if the act of standing required a lot of forward planning. ‘What are you …?’

  I felt the warmth of her behind me, felt her see the smoke, felt the nightmare ignite.

  ‘I think it’s the cottage,’ I said.

  She was out of the room before I finished the sentence.

  ‘I never lock the door.’

  Nina sat beside me on the stone trough by the garden wall. Her gaze flickered back and forth across the smouldering hulk of her home. Whatever she was watching wasn’t in any reality I recognised. Her pupils were wide. Very wide and very dark and she made no effort at all to hide them. She shook all over in a steady, fine tremor.

  ‘Never,’ she said. ‘Any time, any day. Unless I go away for longer than a weekend. I never lock the back door.’

  She delivered it slowly, one syllable at a time, the way you might lecture the first-year students when they’re right on the verge of failing exams and need the basics spelled out in black and white.

  Or the way you might speak when the nightmares are all spilling over into reality and your hold on language is slipping.

  You would have to have known her a long time to tell the difference.

  Neither of the officers of the law towering over us had known Nina for any length of time. They had, in fact, made no effort at all to move beyond the basic facts of her gender and marital status. Single woman. Midthirties. Lives alone. What else could you possibly need to know?

  The younger of the two, the one with the modified East End accent, slipped off his jacket and slid it on to Nina’s shoulders. She continued to shake, but less visibly.

  He crouched down at the side of the trough, his hands folded loosely across his chest. Soft, pen-pusher’s hands with bitten nails. ‘That’s not very safe, miss,’ he said. East End Glaswegian sounds very odd if you try to make it easy on the ear. Like a duck with blocked sinuses. ‘There’s lads across the road there you wouldn’t want in your home at any time of the day or night.’ He favoured her with a twinkle from a pair of baby-blue eyes. The knowing, streetwise twinkle he saves for the girls in the typing pool, the ones who were still young enough to be impressed by a hard East Ender in uniform. ‘What about the window?’ he asked. ‘I suppose you didn’t close the window either?’

  She shook her head. ‘I left the cottage at two-thirty this morning to attend to a case.’ She said it in the same steady monotone. ‘I did not close the window.’ Beside me, her nails fractured on the edge of the trough.

  Baby-Blue made a note and then tapped the tip of his pen to his lips, thinking it through. ‘And there’s nothing missing inside?’ His jacket hung warmly around Nina’s shoulders.

  ‘Not that I can see.’

  ‘But a lot of stuff damaged,’ he twinkled again, more gently, ‘which is a pity, you see, because this is going to cost the insurance people a lot of money.’ His hand shifted on to her knee. ‘It really would have been a good idea to lock the doors when you left, Dr Crawford.’

  Oh, please.

  ‘I hardly think the state of her doors is your problem,’ I said.

  He stared at me blankly. I don’t think he had even noticed I was there. The smile hung on his face. His colleague coughed discreetly and took a step backwards, distancing himself from the field of conflict. Directly behind him, the back door to the cottage stood open. In the background, the crews of three fire engines directed their hoses on the window at the back where her office had been. Twenty years of back copies of the Veterinary Record clearly burn better than five-hundred-year-old oak.

  I turned back to Blue. The smile hadn’t changed but his hand was no longer on her knee.

  ‘Arson,’ I said, ‘is a crime. Leaving one’s back door unlocked is a mode of free speech. Only one of these is your problem.’

  His face changed shape. Synapses fired at the back of his eyes. He lifted his jacket, with care, from Nina’s shoulders.

  ‘Falsifying an insurance claim is also a crime,’ he said softly, and left.

  The fire chief was a balding man in his late forties with a wife and three kids and two decades’ experience of hosing people’s homes. He knew the fine line between condescension and pathos and he trod it with care. He stood over us and did his best not to abuse the advantage of height.

  ‘Can I ask a few questions?’ he asked.

  Nina nodded. Her gaze followed shadows from another dimension that moved from the doorway to the top window and back again.

  He lifted a bucket from the side of the compost heap, knocked the worst of the mud off, turned it over and sat down in front of us. I developed an uncommon interest in the lads jogging in and out of Nina’s kitchen and willed myself invisible. He pulled out a notebook, small and black with a corrugated elastic band holding it shut and a gold-nibbed pen tied to the binding.

  A very careful man.

  ‘It’s very mild for April, Dr Crawford,’ he said. ‘Do you usually sleep with the electric heater full on?’

  Nina stared at him, her mind elsewhere. ‘Killer,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Twenty years of fire work doesn’t necessarily prepare you for someone else’s hell.

  ‘Killer. My cat. He was on the bed when I left.’ She sounded remarkably lucid.

  ‘The window was open,’ he said. And then: ‘I’ll get one of the lads to check.’

  She nodded again and I followed her gaze to the bedroom window. Shattered remnants of glass clung to the frame in a square-edged shark’s maw. From that distance, there was no sign of cat hair. Or of blood.

  The fireman tried again. ‘The heater was on,’ he said, ‘all three bars. It seems odd for the time of year.’

  ‘I never use the heater.’

  He closed the notebook and looped the elastic carefully over the end. A signal brought one of his lads at a trot. ‘The heater,’ he said. The lad nodded. You don’t need a wide vocabulary in a fire.

  They brought the heater. A simple, three-bar, 2 kW electric heater, melted into a Dali watch with springs for the hands and a misshapen rhomboid for the case. The flex had fractured where the heat and the electric current met and fused; internal and external fire. A lethal combination.

  ‘The heater,’ said the chief. ‘It was beside your bed. The duvet caught in the coils. The fire spread through the gable loft to the office across the landing where a large amount of stationery and other paper sustained the heat. A down draught spread the flames to the living room. We caught it before the damage spread any further.’

  Which means that the kitchen and the bathroom are intact. Except for the back door, of course, which won’t keep out the lads from across the road now, with or without a lock.

  If this was the farm, I would be in pieces. Some things I could cope with. The loss of my home is not one of them.

  Nina spent a while admiring the Dali heater before she looked up. ‘I keep it in the shed,’ she said equably. ‘It was there when I left here earlier this morning.’

  He studied her for a while, chewing the edge of his thumb. Then he made a single-line note in the small black book and stood up to leave.

  Nina dropped her face to her hands as he stood and for a moment he and I were alone in the garden together.

  ‘We’ll come back later,’ he said. ‘When the shock’s had time to settle.’

  He smiled. He could have been amused. He could have been furious. He could simply have been tired. You would have had to have known him a lot longer than five minutes to
tell the difference. A very professional man.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  We shook hands. He had a line of sharp-edged calluses along the palm, the after-scars of a lifetime spent axing doors and directing fire hoses. Pushing pens came late in life for this one. He laid his other hand on my shoulder. Heavy but not unduly hard.

  ‘Winding up the officer-on-scene doesn’t help,’ he said.

  Probably not. It’s a hard habit to break. ‘Should I apologise?’

  He smiled, a little sadly and shook his head. His eyes held something that might well have been reproof. ‘I think it may be a mite too late for that.’

  6

  The residents’ Lodge is on the top floor at the far corner of the building, almost directly above the small animal ward but two floors up. It has the feeling of a hurried conversion, as if, having created the position of underling, the hierarchy suddenly realised that the appointees might conceivably require somewhere to sleep between nightshifts and someone with rudimentary carpentry skills was sent upstairs to spend the afternoon knocking together a string of spare broom cupboards to make something inhabitable. Which they did. After a fashion. Two broom-cupboard bedrooms sit on either side of a broom-cupboard living room that doubles as kitchen-diner and emergency dog-kennel. The toilets and showers are at the far end of the corridor, presumably because that was the only other spare storeroom available at the time of conversion.

  The middle room still shows its heritage. The floors are unsanded wood covered haphazardly with a scattering of rugs and Vet-Beds. The walls are plaster-board partitions painted in industry-standard magnolia. Marks on the boarding show where generations of residents have plastered posters in an attempt to instil a sense of personality. If you walked into this one, you would know that one of the two occupants collects past advertising hoardings from the Citizens’ Theatre while the other has a taste for Stubbs’ sketches of equine anatomy. Either one of them could have invested in the 21-inch television that dwarfs the rest of the furnishings.