Night Mares

by Manda Scott

  MacDonald handed her a kitten by way of greeting, took off his hat and then settled himself on the bench by the window. Even sitting and without the hat, he looked oddly formal. He always looks that way when he’s in uniform. Which is, no doubt, what it’s for.

  Cats have a limited sense of formality. Kittens have none at all. The remaining red kitten scaled the vertical slope of his arm and set up a belay at his shoulder. He lifted it off and dropped it back to his knee. It dug in its claws and then set off up a different route, using his buttons as footholds. ‘I spoke to Gavin Long before he came off shift this morning,’ he said. ‘Sergeant Gavin Long.’

  Ah. Hence the uniform.

  Is this wise?

  ‘And?’ I asked.

  ‘And I gather there’s a claim been lodged. An investigator will be out to look at the cottage some time in the next day or two.’

  Nina laid her kitten on the counter. It fell on its side and sank milk teeth like sharpened needles into the ball of her thumb. She spun it round on its back and played games with its tail. Her eyes were on me.

  I’m really not sure this is wise.

  ‘I went down to the cottage last night,’ I said. ‘I found Nina’s cat in the woodshed. He had a ruptured diaphragm. From a kick, a human kick. Nina thinks it happened around the time the fire started.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  The tortoiseshell queen walked the tightrope along the back of the bench and settled herself on the windowledge by his shoulder. She pushed her chin against his arm. MacDonald tickled her absently along the line of her back. He watched Nina play with the kitten. Looked to me for permission.

  I don’t think it’s up to me to set the boundaries in this.

  I shrugged. When he did nothing more, I nodded.

  He pulled a piece of baler twine from his jacket pocket and showed the kittens how to tie a bowline and then make the loop dance across the floor. Both of them joined the new game. ‘Was the cat in the cottage when you left it on Saturday morning?’ He asked it circumspectly, as normal Monday morning conversation, the kind you would have in the bread shop while they slice the morning loaf.

  Nina doesn’t buy bread in the mornings. She cuts horses and runs drips into cats. And she spends half her life asking circumspect questions of students. The kind that determine careers. ‘He was asleep on a chair,’ she said evenly. ‘Beside the bed.’

  ‘You’re sure he was still there when you left to see to Dr Stewart’s horse?’

  ‘I’m sure. He woke up when the phone rang. I told him where I was going.’ Like you do. Like she does, anyway. ‘And I left the window open. Like I always do. So he can go out if he wants to.’

  MacDonald nodded as if this was entirely normal behaviour in Greater Glasgow. He looked at Nina. ‘Can anyone else verify the injuries to the cat,’ he asked. ‘A second opinion, so to speak.’

  ‘We have the X-rays,’ she said. ‘You could time it fairly well from that. And I can get dated hard-copy printouts from the ICU monitors.’

  The X-rays may be definitive but the monitor printouts won’t be. It could have been any cat.

  ‘You could get the hospital photographer to take pictures of the lesions as soon as you get in,’ I said. ‘Get him to record the date and time on the prints. Then we can get a third party to estimate the time of injury from the bruising.’ You can do it in people. I don’t see any reason at all why we can’t get it done in a cat.

  Nina thought about it. She found a pen in a pile on the breakfast counter and wrote a note to herself on the back of her hand. ‘I’ll have it all ready for the investigator, shall I?’ she said. Threads of neat acid wound their way through her voice. ‘Do I take it they want to know if I set fire to my own cottage?’

  MacDonald has faced worse threats than acid. ‘That would be the way of it.’ He nodded agreeably. ‘I’m sure they’ll back off once you can prove that you didn’t. In the meantime, they’ll most likely come in and see you at work sometime in the next day or two. If it’s after hours I’ll tell them you’re going to be here, shall I?’

  He has his own way of ripping the floor out from under you. He watched Nina. She said nothing, just leant forward on the breakfast counter and studied something important on the duck pond. Neither of them looked at me.

  Sometimes it’s easier to make decisions without thinking.

  I nodded slowly. ‘For tonight, anyway,’ I said. ‘I expect we’ll both be home by six.’

  12

  On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, University of Glasgow Counselling Service runs a drop-in clinic from its office on the second floor of an anonymous sandstone terrace hidden in a back street just behind the Queen Margaret Union. On the first, third, and if there is one, fifth Mondays of the month, those who drop in, see me.

  On the first Monday in April, two weeks into the Easter break, undergraduates and staff were both fairly thin on the ground and those who dropped in were mostly highly cerebrated post-graduates crumbling under the pressure of impending thesis deadlines.

  If I have to work for a full day after a night with no sleep, this is the kind of day I would choose. A day divided neatly into fifty-minute slices, each spent listening to the mind-scrambling intricacies of particle physics or high temperature ceramics, trying to garner a sense of perspective from which the world will not necessarily fall apart if the Introductions and Reference Lists are not finished by Friday. It’s the regular pattern for Mondays out of term-time. It’s enlivening. It’s refreshing. It’s a very pleasant contrast to the real world. More importantly, on this particular Monday morning, not one single person, not even Juliette, the post-gothic biker who acts as receptionist, ever got around to asking me what I’d done with my weekend. There are days when that kind of freedom matters more than most.

  There were seven ‘clients’ in all. A pair of MAs and a post-doc in the morning and a triad of PhDs in the afternoon. And then, at the end, Barnaby Thompson; a man who has more degrees than the other six put together and considerably less chance of using them.

  I wasn’t expecting Barnaby. I never do. I was sitting in my office just after five, watching the last of the post-grads book a follow-up appointment and planning a route home that would take in the supermarket and miss the worst of the traffic. I was thinking through an easy dinner and evening treatments for Rain and the foal and a quiet evening putting my life back together. On my desk, lay a printed list of possible psychiatric referrals for Nina, together with a letter addressed to my immediate superior with news of my impending resignation. Both of them waiting for a new day. I wanted a decent meal and a drink and time to think before I did anything else I couldn’t undo. And sleep. Most of all, I wanted sleep.

  Barnaby was waiting outside on the doorstep. He could have knocked. He could have hit the buzzer downstairs and announced his arrival. He could, having made his way into the building, simply have turned the handle and walked into the lobby. Instead, he folded himself, concertina-style into the doorway and waited for Anne-Marie Wallace, a postgraduate botanist of fairly robust constitution, to trip over him on her way out of the door.

  He was drunk, clearly. He was also, just as clearly, flying on injectable pharmaceuticals. He was clothed only in his dressing gown and underpants and he was badly in need of a bath. There were old, clotted bandages wrapped loosely round his wrists. There are often bandages on Barnaby’s wrists. So far, the razor cuts have been shallow and they have followed tracks from the base of his thumb across to the base of his little finger. Scaphoid to pisiform, right across the digital flexor tendons. Colourful but not fatal. Two of Dr Thompson’s degrees are in medical science and he knows the track of his radial artery as well as I do. On the day he cuts up and down, not across, I will know that he really means to die. In the meantime, it would be nice if he still had the use of his fingers in the morning.

  I stood in the doorway to my office and watched him terrorise a perfectly sane academic simply by existing. Anne-Marie inhaled deeply, which was a mistake,
stepped over his knees and ran heavy-footed down the stairs. Barnaby waved her good-bye. Juliette packed her bag and collected her leather jacket and helmet from the rack. She said nothing but she said it with vehemence. Barnaby is not, strictly speaking, entitled to treatment at the clinic. He is currently neither a student nor a member of staff although he has, in his time, been both. Barnaby comes straight from the raw end of the real world and he offends the very foundations of the ivory tower. Even Juliette. Particularly Juliette. She is very particular as to what rules she breaks. Speed limits, for instance, are made to be broken. And the rules regarding recreational pharmaceuticals. Up to a point. If you can eat it, drink it or smoke it, it’s in. But needles are out. Failing to wash is out. Wearing unwashed underclothes in public is out. Barnaby does all three simultaneously and worse besides, and he’s so far out he’s untraceable.

  Except that it’s difficult to ignore something in quite that much pain. I walked over and stood by the open door. ‘Come on, Barnaby.’ I held out a hand so that he had to make some effort to stand up. ‘It’s warmer inside.’ He grasped my wrist and pulled himself upright. He weighs less than I do. And stands at least six inches taller. Or, he would if he chose not to stoop. Juliette walked round him and out on to the landing. She made the mistake of looking back. Years of genteel conditioning are so much harder to hide than the colour of your hair. I checked my watch, pointedly. She’s not supposed to leave before half past five. Thirteen minutes to go.

  ‘Could you call the farm and tell them I’ll be late home, please?’ She got as far as the third step down before she stopped. I dropped a business card on the desk, the one with Nina’s extension number on it. ‘And could you call this number and leave a message for Dr Crawford telling her that I’ve been delayed and I’ll call her as soon as I can leave?’ I smiled. The kind of smile that got her back up the stairs faster than she’d gone down. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘You can go after that.’

  It was seventeen minutes past five when Barnaby Thompson followed me into my office. It was almost the same time after seven when he left. He wasn’t what you would call sober by then, but he seemed relatively straight. He had clean bandages on his wrists and he promised me he wasn’t going to play with the razor blades ever again. He promised me also that he was going to go out in the morning and sign on the dole, but I found that one harder to believe. In Barnaby’s case, unemployment would be preferable to some of the things he is doing to make ends meet. Particularly when they create a lifestyle that pushes the ends quite so terrifyingly far apart. I followed him out on to the landing and he promised me he was going to go home and have a bath. Of all that he offered, it seemed the most likely.

  Juliette, predictably, had left. In her place, a message light flashed on the answering machine. Three message lights. Nobody calls for me at the UCC. All my messages go up to the main clinic at Sauciehall Street. I set the alarm and followed Barnaby down the stairs, planning a route up to Garscube that made the most of the time and the relative lack of traffic. I dug in my bag for my mobile and flicked through the address-list for Nina’s number. Her office number. I thought about removing her home number altogether and decided it was too early for that kind of pessimism. The number rang and wasn’t answered. I started hunting through the memory for the university switchboard. I listened to the first ring and hung up. Turned round. Took the stairs three at a time on the way back up. Nobody leaves messages at the UCC after six o’clock, period. It’s all routed through the university switchboard to a call-answering service. Unless it’s personal and they know who’s on duty. Then they forward it through.

  Three messages, timed at half-hour intervals between half five and half six. All from Sandy.

  ‘Kellen? Are you there? It’s Sandy. Rain’s no’ well. I’ll give her the evening jags and call you back.’

  ‘Kellen? She’s not right. I’m calling the hospital’

  ‘Kellen? We’re taking her into the vet school. If you get this, meet us at the ward. I’ll try your mobile when we get there.’

  I broke every limit there is between Hillhead and Garscube. The tail lights of the lorry lit the way ahead of me as I turned in over the cattle grid. I followed them slowly down the hill and round the corner to the ward.

  He was right. She wasn’t well. They stood at the top of the ramp together, all three of them. A soft dun mare with the sweat running dark down her withers and the first folds of a frown crinkling the skin above her eyes. A dull, chestnut colt, all tucked up like a whippet from lack of milk with a smear of mud masking the new moon of his star. A wee gnome of a man holding the lead ropes with cramped, arthritic fingers, his head shining bald in the hard glare of the light, his eyes all red at the edges from the pain of it.

  They were not well, any of them. But of the three, the mare was the worst.

  Steff was there, waiting at the doors to the horse ward, dressed in theatre greens with a white coat pulled over the top. Her surgical mask hung loosely round her neck. Spots of blood ran across it, wet trackways of surgery not long past. She didn’t say much, just nodded to me and grunted to Sandy and as if they’d done all the talking they needed to do on the phone. Like: ‘She’s not well.’ And: ‘Get her in.’

  Together, they walked Rain off the lorry, down the unloading ramp and into the stocks on the left just inside the door. She walked in as if she already knew the way. Or as if she didn’t care. As soon as they stopped, the foal nudged up against her. Pushed his nose round the steel upright of the stocks and shoved urgently at her udder.

  ‘She’s drying up,’ said Sandy. ‘There’s not enough milk. We’ll have to feed the wee lad.’ His voice had odd inflections. Foreign, somehow, to the ear. Pinched in, like the lines around his eyes.

  I was wrong. In the brighter light of the ward, Sandy Logan was worse than the mare.

  Steff was in overdrive. She had a pulse rate, a respiratory rate and a capillary refill time all noted down on the chart before we’d closed the stocks. She drew blood and took nasal swabs into bacterial and viral transport media. She picked up a phone, let it ring and dropped it again without comment. A stocky lad with oil-dark hair and the beginnings of a beard appeared in a different doorway, panting from the run. Another one in theatre greens. Without a white coat. ‘This is Jason,’ she said. ‘He’ll help while we’re waiting for Nina.’

  Jason ran the bloods and swabs to the lab. Steff rolled up her sleeve, rolled on a glove and performed one of the fastest rectal examinations I’ve ever seen. She oiled a stomach tube and slid it, with fluid care, up one nostril and down into the stomach, blowing into the end and watching the side of the neck for the air bulge to make sure it didn’t slip straight down the trachea and into the lungs. She blew again and sniffed at the gas that refluxed back. Made a face and jerked away from the smell. Stuck the end of the tube into a bucket of water and watched a chain of gas bubbles roll up to the surface. No fluid. No gastric contents. Just gas. She kinked over the end of the tube and drew it out again with just as much care. She said nothing to anyone, but the glint at her nose flashed semaphore signals of things held so tight that I thought she would crack.

  Jason ran back, breathing whistles through lungs not meant for running. Between them, they clipped and cleaned a small patch on her belly alongside the line of her stitches. They stuck a needle up into her abdomen and held a blood tube underneath for the drips of peritoneal fluid. Few and far apart. But clear. Which was good. Peritoneal fluid should be clear.

  The phone rang. Jason took it and wrote numbers on a chart. Showed them to Steff. Then to me. They meant nothing. I looked carefully at Steff, not wanting to interrupt.

  ‘PCV’s up. Plasma proteins are up. Urea’s up. White cells are through the floor,’ she said shortly. ‘Huge left shift.’ And then, because I didn’t make the right noises, ‘She’s septicaemic. And she’s dehydrating. She hasn’t twisted a gut. Her uterus feels fine. There’s no haemorrhage in there from the surgery. There are no bacilli on the smear but I don’t think t
hat counts for anything right now. We can wait till tomorrow for the results of the endotoxin assay or we can assume she’s starting what all the others had and treat her with everything we’ve got.’ She unhooked the front gate to the stocks. ‘I wasn’t planning to wait,’ she said.

  We let Rain out of the stocks. Sandy walked her with the foal up the barn to the box at the far end. The one with ‘ICU’ etched on the copper plaque on the door. The one that housed Branding Iron before he died. The inside had been steam-cleaned. It smelled of Dettol and other, less fragrant, disinfectants. I am prepared to believe you could have taken a swab to the floor and it would have come up sterile. We waited outside while Steff and Jason wheeled bales of straw down from the hay-store. I found a pitchfork and made up the bed. It was good straw; bright and fresh from the barn with no dust. You could smell the fields and the east wind and the August sunlight as I forked it out. Rain noticed it when she hadn’t noticed anything else. She breathed in deeply and snored out gently. I piled it high up against the walls, just like her bed at home. Sandy stood outside the box and held them while the foal tried to drink from the mare for the third time in as many minutes.

  ‘We’ll have to teach him how to suck from a bottle,’ he said, ‘for now. Till her milk comes back.’ He waited for someone to correct him. Nobody did. There seemed no point.

  ‘We’ll have to move him to one of the calf pens,’ said Steff. ‘I don’t think we can risk cross-infection.’

  I didn’t look at Sandy. I just heard him breathe. A long, sore breath in. ‘Leave him with Rain for now,’ I said. ‘Until we’ve got the bed sorted out and found him a bottle.’ And then, because it had been a long day after all and I hadn’t been thinking: ‘Where’s Nina? She was going to call me with blood results. To see if the wee one could come off the antibiotics.’