Pets in a Pickle (5 page)

Yes, ma’am, here goes, I thought, my fingers hovering over the tiny pile of instruments. The ugly mass of red tissue took some cutting out. Blood welled up from the wound and soaked into the drapes.

Mandy leaned over and sniffed. ‘It’s bleeding rather a lot.’

I was only too aware of the fact. The haemorrhage did seem rather excessive. If nothing else, I did know birds couldn’t afford to lose too much of their blood volume and here was Cedric’s vital fluids draining into the drapes. Would he survive me poking around like this? Would he survive the shock? I pressed on, beads of sweat coursing down my arms as the circle of blood grew wider.

‘You may find this of help.’ Mandy held up a bottle. ‘It’s dissolvable gauze. Crystal finds it useful. Not that she gets much bleeding.’

Grrrr …

She tipped some out on to the operating trolley.

By now I’d dissected out the preening gland – or at least the blob of tissue that vaguely resembled it. What was left was a ragged hole which rapidly filled with blood every time I swabbed it out. I was grateful for the gauze; and rammed a wodge of it into the crimson crater, pressing it firmly in, before stitching a flap of skin across.

With Cedric returned to his cage to lie on a pad of cotton-wool, Mandy summoned Lucy to take him back to the ward while she, as she put it, ‘cleaned up the mess’. It was said with just the merest flicker of her long eyelashes in my direction.

I helped Lucy manoeuvre the cage on to a table next to a radiator in the ward and then stood back, biting my lower lip, looking at the limp bird stretched out on the pad, waiting for him to come round from the anaesthetic.

‘He’ll be OK,’ said Lucy, trying to sound reassuring. ‘You’ll see.’

And I did see. Within ten minutes, Cedric had started to twist and turn, his wings flapping, his legs waving in the air. Within a further five, he was wobbling about his cage, trying to climb up the bars and falling off at every attempt. After 20 minutes, he had made it to his perch and sat there swaying. He looked at us bleary-eyed and in a croaky voice uttered his first post-operative ‘What’s your name?’

Lucy’s freckled face lit up. ‘There. What did I tell you?’

I still wasn’t convinced. OK, Cedric had got through the operation. But the next 24 hours would be crucial to his survival.

I phoned through to the hospital that evening. Lucy was on duty.

‘Cedric’s fine,’ she informed me. He’s not pecked at his stitches. And there’s been no bleeding.’

As I put the phone down, a voice rang out from down the hallway. ‘Everything all right?’ It was Mrs Paget, my landlady as of last weekend, standing in the doorway of her lounge. The digs were a temporary measure until such time as the practice cottage promised me by the Sharpes became available. It was on Beryl Wagstaff’s recommendation that I took the room at Mrs Paget’s. She assured me I’d get a warm welcome as her friend, Cynthia, a middle-aged divorcee, apparently ‘simply adored animals’ and would be ‘thrilled to the core to have a young vet under her roof’. I wasn’t so thrilled when her chihuahua charged down the hall and gave me a savage nip on my ankle before I’d even stepped across the threshold. But being just a few hundred yards down the road from Prospect House, the lodgings were convenient, even if the pooch was a pain, as the many subsequent bites on my ankles proved.

This evening was no exception. Chico had barged up to the telephone table and was now baring his teeth waiting to pounce on any flesh I chose to expose. But I had got wise to him now and never ventured out of my room unless wearing thick socks and trainers.

It was a shame that I had to run the gauntlet of Chico’s teeth in order to use the phone in the hall; but since my mobile had no signal in the house and the roar of traffic outside made conversation impossible, I found myself with no choice. I had to grit my teeth while Chico bared his.

‘Just checking on one of my patients,’ I explained as Mrs Paget shuffled down the hall, cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth and, with an ineffectual wave, said, ‘Shoo … shoo … ’ to an unresponsive Chico whose sole focus was on what was only two feet away – my two feet.

I retreated to my room to spend a restless night fretting about Cedric.

But all seemed well the next morning. He’d continued to leave the stitches alone and the wound was clean and dry. Miss McEwan was delighted when told she could take Cedric home.

‘I can’t thank you enough,’ she gushed as Lucy and I levered Cedric’s cage into the back of her Mini. ‘Dr Sharpe’s done such a marvellous job. Please pass on my thanks.’

Lucy’s eyes widened with astonishment. ‘But …’

‘I certainly will,’ I interjected, quickly pulling the blanket over Cedric and closing the car door. I turned to Lucy and shook my head.

Miss McEwan squeezed herself in behind the steering wheel, her head just coming level with it, her tartan cape spilling over the edges of the seat. She wound the window down. ‘Now you did say to come back in a week’s time?’

‘A week … yes. Unless Cedric starts pecking at the wound.’

‘Most grateful … most grateful,’ she murmured, switching the engine on.

I leaned down, placing my hand on the window edge. ‘Before you go, there’s one question I’m dying to ask, if you don’t mind.’

Miss McEwan looked up at me. ‘Well?’

‘I was just wondering whether you knew anyone called Dick?’

Two high spots of red instantly appeared on Miss McEwan’s cheeks and her lips rapidly pursed. She revved the car and crashed into gear. I leapt back as the car lurched forward, gravel spitting from under the tyres. As it squealed out of the drive and disappeared, loud wolf-whistles rang out from the back seat.

I gave Lucy a wink as we ran giggling up the steps and into reception. We were instantly sobered by Beryl giving us the eye. Just the one – her good one.

I
t was one morning towards the end of my second week when Beryl asked the question. I’d been scanning my diary, checking for any visits she might have booked in.

‘Are you superstitious?’ she enquired.

I thought for a moment. No, I didn’t really think so. I’d skirt round a ladder but only if someone was up it with a pot of paint. But that was just common sense. And the sight of three magpies – or was it four? – I didn’t see as an omen of doom. Merely successful breeding on the part of the magpies.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, just wondered.’ Beryl rubbed a wart on her chin. ‘It’s just that I’ve booked you a visit later this morning. It’s a black cat. Just thought … maybe … you know … seeing it could bring you some luck.’

I was instantly suspicious. Luck? Did I need luck? Did she know something I didn’t? I knew she was friendly with Mrs Paget. Perhaps the two of them had been having a chin-wag. Comparing notes. Sizing me up. Maybe Mrs Paget had told her of my run-ins with Chico and all those disturbed nights on duty.

‘I can sympathise with the poor lad,’ I could hear her say, ‘keeps me awake just thinking about him.’

Yes, well, Mrs Paget, keep those thoughts to yourself.

Mind you, she had a point. I did have a lot of night duties – a whole string of them. I’d barely stepped over the threshold of Prospect House when the roster was sorted out with what seemed like unseemly haste. I had assumed it would be shared between the three vets – like one in three. Not a bit of it. It transpired that Crystal and Eric expected me to do alternate nights. I explained this to Mrs Paget whose mascara-laden lashes whipped up and down in a frenzy when I said her nights might be disrupted.

‘I don’t mind a bit,’ she said, stubbing out her cigarette and drawing the lapels of her housecoat across her bosom. ‘It’s all for a good cause … saving our little furry friends. In fact, I wish there was more I could do to help.’

She was to mull over this for a few days as I later found out.

There had been ground rules when I first began lodging with her. My bedsit was the converted lounge at the front of the house. I could use the kitchen from 1.00–2.00pm at lunchtimes, 5.00–7.00pm in the evenings, including weekends. Mornings were just half-an-hour from 7.30am. ‘Otherwise you might bump into me in a state of undress,’ she said.

I was unclear as to who would be the one undressed but, fearing it could be her – naked but for her fluffy pink housecoat – I stuck to the rules rigidly.

Even so, getting back in time to use the kitchen in the evenings proved impossible. People came home from work to find a sick pet and would phone though asking to be seen. So consultations often ran past the allotted close of 6.00pm. I’d stagger back to Mrs Paget’s kitchen with barely time to throw a chilli con carne for one in the microwave.

It clearly concerned Mrs Paget. ‘My dear … I’ve been giving this some thought,’ she declared, wandering into the kitchen, ashtray in one hand, cigarette in the other, to stand watching me bolt down that evening’s ready meal – a fisherman’s pie through which I was trawling to find a flake or two of fish. ‘I can’t bear the thought of you having to rush back every evening. It must be so stressful for you. I’d like to help out.’

Help? That sounded promising. A little home cooking maybe? A nice shepherd’s pie with fresh vegetables from the garden waiting for me when I returned after a long and exhausting surgery?

‘Yes,’ she continued, dragging on her cigarette and exhaling sharply, ‘I’ve decided to extend your permitted time in the kitchen to 7.30pm.’

Oh wow. Lady Luck (Mrs Paget) has smiled (leered wantonly) on me. Perhaps when Beryl had talked about luck she’d sensed I needed more than being offered an extra half hour in a divorcee’s kitchen to give me a boost.

Her idea of getting lucky by having a black cat cross my path was way off course. But then she didn’t know that the path I found myself treading later that morning was going to be such an overgrown one, looping through a tangle of brambles, waist high with nettles.

‘Have you spotted him yet?’ trumpeted Major Fitzherbert from the safety of a much easier path – the paved one bordering his garden.

‘No. Not yet,’ I called back, swearing under my breath as a briar scratched a neat line of blood across the back of my right hand while another snagged my right sock. This can’t be happening, surely? I thought. Me, a professional person, floundering through a sea of thorns. Certainly, Crystal or Eric wouldn’t have allowed themselves to get in such a situation.

‘He’s in there somewhere, the little bounder,’ boomed the Major, his stick pounding defiantly on the paving stones.

I continued to edge my way further into the thicket, my back bending more and more with each step I took.

‘Keep going, there’s a good chap. Flush him out,’ ordered the Major.

I stooped lower, pushed forward a few more inches, arms clawing the brambles apart. This was getting ridiculous. Any minute now I’d be on my hands and knees pleading ‘Puss … Pu-u-uss … ’ which was nonsense when I understood from Major Fitzherbert that the cat in question was a rather large black tom indisposed to human companionship.

‘You mean “wild”,’ I’d said when the Major first informed me.

‘In the true sense of the word,’ he stated, his voice ringing with pride. ‘Fine fellow. Independent sort. Won’t let anyone near him.’

Then why in hell’s name was I attempting to lure the cat out of the wilderness of gorse and brambles that bordered Major Fitzherbert’s garden? But that, it seemed, was the Major for you. From the moment I met him, I felt compelled to obey his command. He was tall, solid and, apart from the white hair that swept back from a high, furrowed forehead, 65 years of living had done little to crumple the firm set of the jaw, the deep authoritative voice and the hooded, almost translucent, light-blue eyes. It was those eyes, with their penetrating, unblinking stare, that dared me to defy his order to drop my black bag and scurry into the thicket like a rabbit bolting down a burrow.

‘I think I saw him then,’ the Major barked again. ‘Over to your left a bit.’

I shuffled round only to be confronted by an impenetrable barrier of gorse, a blanket of yellow blooms producing a warm pungent smell reminiscent of coconuts. ‘No way through,’ I yelled back.

‘Nonsense!’

Over the riot of brambles, I could see the Major’s stick waving backwards and forwards. ‘Go on, man. Push through. Push.’