by Manda Scott
In the interests of basic hygiene, I visited the calf pens first.
Calf pens are small. Eight of them fit into a room the size of two full-size loose boxes. The pens curve round three sides of a rectangle, all facing inwards to keep company and to keep in the heat. Radiant lamps hang from the ceiling, throwing red light and heat more or less equally on to the straw and the inmates below. The walls are low and rounded so that a man, a tall man, could step over from one pen to the next but high enough so that a day-old calf could not, for instance, lean over and suck raw the ears of her neighbour.
The foal was there, in the third pen along. Two pens away from a black-and-white calf with ringworm scales round her eyes and next door to a tan-on-white weanling goat with dark eyeliner and the beginnings of a beard. The goat had its forelegs over the wall and was halfway into the next pen, doing its best to wrap its teeth round the hem of Sandy Logan’s jacket.
The foal stood with his back to the door, sucking noisily from the teat, butting the bottle with his muzzle and flagging his tail in frustration at the slow flow of milk. His coat shone the way it did when he was born and his belly was tight with milk.
‘He looks better,’ I said, from the doorway. He wasn’t the only one. Sandy glowed. Unshaven, unwashed and on less sleep than me, he still glowed. Fatherhood would have suited him.
‘He’s a cracker, so he is.’ The old man let his attention wander to the goat. The foal bit the teat. Twisted and pulled, spraying milk at the walls and then choked on the backwash. They squabbled, briefly, for possession. Sandy won. He scratched the child gently on the new moon of his star and then moved them both out of range of the goat. He offered the teat again, changing the angle. The foal curled his tongue round the base of the bottle and settled back into sleepy greed. ‘Aye. Cracker,’ said the old man softly. The foal blinked as if he’d heard it before, often, during the night. ‘Do you not think it suits him?’
‘As a name?’
‘Aye.’ He remembered a propriety that was never there. ‘If you don’t mind?’
‘Sandy, he’s your foal. If he lives, you can call him what you like.’
The foal finished breakfast. Sleek and sated. He lifted his tail, flattened his back and strained to pass a small, round ball of dung. Good, firm, foal dung. Sandy scratched the stubble on his chin, kneading the flesh into new shapes with square-ended fingers. ‘Oh, he’ll live,’ he said. ‘We’re not letting this one go.’
Steff would have said the same about the mare. But Steff would have known she was lying. I stood by the tray of disinfectant and looked over the door. Rain lay flat out in the straw. If you didn’t know her, you might think she was sleeping. New-foaled mares are known to sleep lying down. But her eyes held more pain than they ever had when she was foaling and runnels of black sweat ran free in the shadow of her mane. And there was a catch to each breath as it came. A small catch, not yet a grunt. But it was there if you listened for long enough.
Steff stood just inside the door, her face set in stone. ‘She wasn’t down when I came out to the hospital this morning, Kellen. I would have told you.’
‘I know.’
She knelt down by the mare, a full syringe in her hand, and began to inject into one of the catheters. If it was dark and if it was raining, she would look not unlike Ruaridh Innes. Ruaridh Innes, a man with compassion who knew when to stop. A man who saved his sentiment for children and pocket pets and gave adults the dignity of adults.
I waited until she had finished the injection. It’s not generally a good idea to interrupt a professional in their work. ‘Steff … do you not think we should call it a day?’
She didn’t look up. ‘Not yet.’ She didn’t sound ready to compromise.
‘Steff. How often have you been through this before? We can’t fight it. There’s no point. Not for me. Not for you. Not for the mare.’
This time she looked up. ‘I’m not doing it for you. Or for me. Or the mare,’ she said, shortly. ‘I’m doing it for her.’ She stood up, brushing invisible straw from her hands and turned to face me. ‘We might never find out what kicked her over the edge, Kellen, but I saw her face when they brought in the news about Rain. I don’t know how long we’ve got before she wakes up. But when she does, I want her to hear that your mare is alive and that she’ll stay that way.’
‘They said tonight. That she might wake up tonight.’
‘Right. Then I’ve got the rest of today to turn your mare round.’
She let herself out of the box. Fluid as before, but with the pressure of containment straining at the edges, the way it does in a spring coiled too tight.
I stood back to let her out of the box.
‘How, Steff?’ I asked. ‘How when all the others have gone the same way? What is there left to do that might make a difference?’
She walked past me. I followed her into the drug store and watched from the door as she washed her hands three times in iodophor wash. It stinks and it stains your skin brown. But nothing lives through it to pass on to someone else.
‘I spoke to the microbiologists,’ she said. ‘They’ve got some results back on Branding Iron’s cultures. The ones we took before he died. They got enough of the endotoxin to run some assays. It cross-reacts with one of the human sero-types. We didn’t know that before. There are human drugs we haven’t tried. I’m going into town to the Medical Library and I’m going to go through every reference on Med-Line until I find the right answer.’
‘They don’t all work, Steff, the human drugs. People die, too.’ Everyone else must have said this. Or perhaps they have more tact.
‘Not all of them,’ she said. She pulled a paper towel from a wall-cylinder and scrubbed the water from her hands, screwed the paper up and threw it in the waste bag. I thought she was going to leave. So did she. But she turned, suddenly, and sagged back against the wall. As if the enormity of it had finally hit her.
‘Kellen …’ she let it out like a sigh, ‘… she’s your mare. If you want her dead, I’ll shoot her now. There are a bunch of guys in white coats in the labs over there who would say you were right. But I think there’s a bigger picture than that. And I think we have to try.’
It’s not a very big room, the drug store. More of an oversized broom cupboard with a sink set into one corner and too many shelves for the wall space. We were less than two feet apart and I could see every one of the lines around her eyes. She’s too young, yet, to have lines like that. Or to carry this much weight on her own.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. And I meant it. ‘She’s your case. I’m not going to tell you how to run her. Do whatever you need. If there’s anything I can do, call me at the farm. Otherwise I’ll see you at the hospital at seven.’
‘Thanks, Kellen.’ She smiled and we had a deal, of sorts. Some kind of acknowledgement that we were both on the same side.
If I was Sandy, I would have spat on my hand and shaken on it. If she was Nina, I would have hugged her.
But we are who we are.
I put my hand on her shoulder as I walked out of the door.
15
At home, the kitchen smelled of hot toast and fresh coffee. A plate and the coffee pot stood upside down on the draining board, wet and warm, all of them. The red kittens curled together round a chewed-up straw dolly on one fireside chair. A dark towel lay on the other chair. And one on the window-seat. There were collie hairs and blood stains on both of them. The dog was nowhere in sight. An 8 × 10 close-up of a black greyhound lay on the counter. Long-nosed with rheumy brown eyes and flecks of white growing like mould through the black of his muzzle. Underneath, a photocopied cutting from the Racing Post showed a dog and a man and a trophy, claiming to be Gary Mitchell, Jupiter’s Joy and the Waterloo Cup in more or less that order. The man looked a great deal more impressed than the dog. The pedigree traced back to Ireland on both sides within two generations. I know about greyhounds. Bridget’s father had one. She had nine pups.
I found a pad of Post-it notes in a draw
er, wrote: ‘Who’s going to take the other seven?’ on the top sheet and stuck it across the eyes of the dog. Blinkers improved him no end.
I was asleep within ten minutes of hitting the bed. Sometime later, the dog joined me. Sometime after that, she left. I woke around four, thick-headed from day-time sleep and found that I had, after all, remembered to put a towel on the bed. Some things just happen by instinct.
Downstairs, the prints of the greyhound were still on the counter. A second Post-it lay across the first. It read: ‘Six. You. Me. Duncan. All the rest spoken for. £150 each.’
Are they indeed? Bastard. He’s been planning this for months.
And I already told him I didn’t want another dog.
Underneath, at a different angle, the note said, ‘Taken Tïr to the Forge. 4-ish. Tea?’
I pulled the bike down from the rack in the shed. Spun the chain and sprayed it with lube. Sprayed more on the chainwheel. Made myself a peanut butter and marmalade sandwich and set off down the lane towards the forge. To clear my head.
Duncan MacDonald’s forge lies four miles away, on the far side of the village, a mile past the kirk and another mile down a dead-end lane, which is much like the one to the farm although in rather better repair. It’s a quiet, mellow, understated place built of local stone with walls two feet thick, with windows you could cover entirely with your two palms laid together and with a shallow-pitched roof that was once covered with a thick layer of peat from the moors but has since been reroofed in black Coniston slate on the basis that smiths like to play with fire and that stone is, generally speaking, less combustible than peat. It was built around the same time as Nina’s cottage but by a family who understood the essence of practical aesthetics. The forge and the byre and the home that goes with them are all built as one unit, set into a bend in the river with a stand of alders on the far bank giving cover from the sea-blown westerly winds and a low hill that offers shelter to the north. There are walls of dry stone around the home fields with hand-cut water troughs set into them at right angles so that each trough supplies stock in two fields.
The river itself is broad and fast flowing. It splits in two about five hundred yards upstream from the forge; divided by a dam and a set of man-made sluice gates that control the flow of the water. Except in particularly dry weather, half of it continues down the natural riverbed to feed the trout pools below. The other half is channelled into an artificial tributary, cut deep and lined with massive, moss-covered flags, that runs under the western wall of the forge. The tributary drives a wooden water wheel that is easily twice my height across and the wheel, in turn, drives ox-hide bellows that blast air into the furnace. It’s original hydrothermal power and it’s deeply impressive to watch. If I was a child, this is where I would spend my time. Watching the magic of blue steel turned to white, flowing wax and back to steel again. Because I am not a child, and my free time can be measured in minutes per month, I come here on my rare Sunday afternoon off and I drink Duncan’s tea and watch him mending the water wheel, which is what he does with his free Sunday afternoons. I can’t think of a better way to switch off and forget.
I cycled into the yard and flicked the pedals round so that the bike stood upright against the mounting block. A smooth-coated tan and white collie bitch lay in a patch of sun on the flagged stone outside the forge watching me through eyes made white with cataracts. She’s been blind for as long as I’ve known her. She still recognises the squeak of the bike chain and the sound of my feet on the flags. I knelt down to scratch behind her ears. ‘Hey, Mags. It’s me. Where’s the grandchild?’ The collie pushed her nose, warm and dry, into the palm of my hand. Said nothing useful.
‘She’s away up with Stewart to see The Lad.’ A voice from the gloom of the forge. ‘He thought she could maybe do with a walk.’ He speaks like his brother, Duncan MacDonald, low and soft with rounded vowels and that odd gravity that makes it difficult to tell when he’s being serious and when he’s not. I suspect that the younger MacDonald has an even more warped sense of humour than his law-keeping brother but I’ve rarely seen it in full flight. In most other ways, he’s not like his brother at all. Built more along the lines of Sandy Logan, dense and compact, but taller and with black hair that’s thinning from the front rather than on top. And his eyes are brown. Like Nina’s.
He moved out into the light, rubbing his palms down the sides of his apron. ‘Come on up,’ he said, ‘It’s time we brought him in.’
We walked up to the back fields and found MacDonald sitting on the dry stone of the wall with the dog standing beside him, balancing delicately on the sharp stones of the top like a cat. She wore a broad leather collar and a lead. Both of them a novelty. Anti-insemination insurance.
He moved over to make space in his patch of sunlight and the two of us watched Duncan go out into the field to catch his horse. Or, rather, we watched him go out into the field with a head collar and saw the stallion trot over to his call and follow him back with its nose on his shoulder, or in his pocket, or in the crook of his arm. The head collar, I would say, was more a formality than a necessity.
They were halfway across the field when MacDonald spoke.
‘Sandy called Duncan at lunchtime,’ he said. ‘Told him about the mare and the foal.’
‘I know.’ He said he would.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Sure. Thanks for taking care of the dog.’
‘A pleasure.’
They reached the gate. The stallion spun on the end of the rope and danced in the sunlight. The image of the colt. Except that this one’s star is less of a new moon and more of a comet trail, flaring up from his left nostril to explode in a great scatter of white between his eyes.
MacDonald opened the gate to let him out. We followed the two of them, man and horse, down towards the forge.
‘I gather the insurance people were looking for your friend this morning,’ he said. ‘The vet school wouldn’t say where she was. I wondered if you ought to go and check she’s all right.’
And so it’s not a good idea, after all, to go out in the fresh air and forget for a while.
And maybe I don’t, after all, have what it takes to see this through to the end.
We stopped outside the forge. Duncan opened the door to the stable and let his horse put himself to bed. He bolted the door. MacDonald handed me the dog’s lead and tugged at the sleeve of my fleece. ‘Maybe Duncan would lend us the van and we’ll pop the bike in the back and take you home,’ he said.
The ward was different. Even from the corridor, it was different. Quieter somehow. The air-conditioned violets had gone. Instead, the air was light with peppermint. Sharp. Fresh. Scented with toothpaste and early mornings and all the hope for the day ahead. The technology ranged around her bed seemed pleasantly less intrusive.
There was a woman sitting by the bed, holding her hand, talking to Eric.
Her mother. Clearly her mother. There is a way of sitting, a way of holding a hand, that speaks of ownership.
It’s a long time since this woman had ownership of her daughter.
I stopped in the doorway. We’ve never met, her mother and I. Before this morning, I had never heard her voice. In many ways, it would be easier to keep it that way.
The young house officer paused on the way out of the door. All the better for half a night’s sleep. She smiled at me brightly. In the face of strangers, those who spent the night together become part of a team. She tilted her head back, nodding towards the bed. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘She’s not a bad old stick.’
‘I’m sure she’s not.’
I am sure she’s not. She is sixty-seven years old and she has lost a husband at fifty-two of prostatic carcinoma, a son at twenty-eight in a midair collision on a training flight and three times already, she has come close to losing her daughter. The world is not a gentle place and Marjorie Crawford has learned the hard way that only the ungentle survive. But there is more to life than simple survival and one could choose,
now and then, to be gentle with one’s only remaining child. It is not a gentle act to threaten legal action against one’s daughter for breach of contract on the termination of her engagement. Nor is it an act of simple survival. There is a lot under the surface of Marjorie Crawford and there is very little of it I would choose to meet.
Eric saw me coming before she did and reached out a hand, smiling, to draw me closer to the bed. ‘Mrs Crawford, this is Dr Stewart, Dr Kellen Stewart. If you remember? It was Dr Stewart who found your daughter.’
Eric. Eric who can read people from three beds away and who thinks he can keep peace at the bedside. Perhaps he can.
‘Dr Stewart.’ Her hand was dry, like chromed leather. The grip was solid, practised, firm. Flawless, vermilion nail polish shone on flawless, tailored nails. Matched exactly her lipstick and the scarf at her neck. And her voice. A flawless, vermilion voice. Resplendent colour and no warmth at all. ‘We are in your debt,’ she said.
‘It’s all right. I did it for Nina.’ This may not have been the right thing to say. Almost certainly not. But I wasn’t thinking of Marjorie Crawford. In that moment, I couldn’t think of anything but her daughter.
‘Eric! She’s off the ventilator.’
And this is why it was quiet from the doorway, why the technology seemed less invasive. The twelve-second hiss of the ventilator has gone. She is breathing on her own. And there is colour in her face and her skin is warm to the touch and when I pick up her hand and feel her wrist, a pulse bounds; regular and rhythmic and healthy. And Eric is standing there beside me with a big bear-grin stretched wide across his face as if he has made miracles all on his own. Which he has, more or less.