Ever by My Side (16 page)

It must have been my proximity to greatness that did it because on the drive back to meet up with Mum and Fiona, the fear of failing to make the grade got the better of me.

“What if I don’t get in, Dad? What else am I going to do? Of course I can go and study genetics or animal husbandry but it’s not as though I really want to. And you know, every time I was waiting to go and sit another examination there’d be some smart arse reminding me, ‘Don’t worry, Nick, you only have to get another A on this one.’ ”

My tone had shifted from one of reasonable concern to panic.

Now it should be said that my father tends to be cautiously optimistic, and by this I mean any predictions for some future outcome come prefaced with the phrase “touch wood” or “God willing.” I half expected some watery platitude to tide me over.

“No matter what happens, son, I saw how hard you worked for those exams and there was nothing more to be done. That’s all any parent can ask.”

He was right. I had given it everything. There really was nothing more I could have done. Good answer, Dad, I thought.

“Besides,” he said, “things always work out for the best.”

And there it was, the trusty cliché I had anticipated.

Fortunately Dad didn’t leave things hanging any longer.

“Your mother and I have some news.”

Oh, God, I thought, after all those lectures on safe sex I was about to get a little brother or sister.

“We’ve decided to buy a house up here in the Dales. Actually it’s more of a cottage—small, two bedrooms, one bathroom—but perfect for our needs. It will be a place for us in our retirement.”

He waited a beat, took his eyes off the road, and glanced at me, trying to gauge my response.

To my left there was a field full of sheep. To my right there was a field full of cows. My mind flashed to an image of Bess and wondered where on earth this dog who had an unhealthy obsession with livestock would get some exercise. Then another thought
struck me, one with far greater reach, with ramifications that could last a lifetime. What if this was all a ploy? This vacation, the sites we visited, the trip to see the real James Herriot, the purchase of a property in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales. Mum and Dad would retire in another decade or so and this would be where they would live. If I was lucky I would go to veterinary school, and in another decade or so I might be looking to settle down, to buy a practice of my own. I wondered which geographical location they might suggest. I wondered who might get to play the part of Arthur Stone, the venerated office manager, the man who made it happen, who made sure the “veterinary” fixed your animal up. In that instant I took a disjointed collection of stars and made a constellation. I had been groomed for this opportunity—inspired by James Herriot, with a chance to live the life of James Herriot. As far as my dad was concerned, the stars were beginning to align.

“That sounds great, Dad,” I said, looking back at him, keeping the uncertainty out of my smile.

S
ix years in six minutes. That’s pretty much what it felt like, thanks to time’s knack of flying when you’re having fun. One day I was a boy, rudely awakened by a man smiling into his tears, yanking me upright in my pajamas, hugging me to his chest as he whispered, “You did it, son. You did it.” The next I was a man in a long black gown clutching a piece of paper proclaiming my membership in the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons.

Whiskey and Bess had been co-conspirators on that early-morning reconnaissance mission, visiting the front doors of my high school, where the examination results had been posted. Like most teenage boys, even on this particular morning, I was unlikely to get out of bed much before noon, so, in fairness to my hyperventilating father, I have to admit that his impatience to wake his bleary-eyed son with the good news was perfectly reasonable. Besides, how angry could I possibly be?

The remaining few weeks before I headed off to college marked the end of an era for me with regard to the dogs. Whiskey and Bess were, according to my father, about to transition from mere pets to VIP patients with their own personal physician. I played along as
we bought my first stethoscope, veterinary textbook, and rectal thermometer, excited by this prospect and convinced that by the end of my first term my hands would progress from performing meaningless patting to meaningful palpation through which I would divine life-saving information.

The University of Cambridge was less than a three-hour drive from where I lived, but given my upbringing, it may as well have been another planet. Ask the average English person their thoughts on Cambridge and responses will range from an eight-hundred-year-old bastion of learning that produced such great minds as Darwin, Newton, Wordsworth, and Hugh Laurie to a retreat for overprivileged toffs spending their days punting down the River Cam drinking champagne and reciting Keats. Imagine the backdrop to an episode of
Inspector Morse
, only prettier (sorry, Oxford) and dotted with far fewer fatalities. Then throw in lots of clever people on bicycles wearing Batman capes. You’re taking every big fish from every high school in the country and depositing them all in the same pond—apex predators reduced to chum. It’s an adjustment, but what struck me most was the way my classmates seemed so much more worldly than me. They had passports. They had taken gap years. Boarding school educations made them appear assured, their transition to life away from home painless. They were instantly natives of college life while I was a tourist. And living in a room overlooking a pristine grassy quad and a Georgian Gothic chapel didn’t help matters. Raiding the refrigerator or taking a gamble on my mother’s haute cuisine was replaced with formal dining, too much cutlery, and grace in Latin. I had no gift for small talk, my vocabulary was too provincial. I lacked political inspiration. I was tentative and self-conscious.

After a first week of failed friendships, we started to find kindred spirits. We freshmen began to click. We no longer felt as though
everyone else was having a better time than we were. We relaxed into who we were and not who we thought we should be. After a month, I could confidently say to my professors if they offered a glass of sherry during our afternoon tutorials, “Dry, or sweet, Professor?”

Dessert and fish forks started to look different. Friends came over for coffee. Those blank spaces on my calendar began to disappear and by the end of that first term I left for winter break reluctantly and already eager to return.

“How ’bout giving the dogs a once-over?” asked Dad, almost as soon as my suitcase hit the floor.

Though I returned home for the holidays with little more than some basic physiology, some esoteric biochemistry, and some rudimentary anatomy, I gave it a shot, Bess as generous and tolerant as I would have expected, happy to lie on her side as I slowly worked my way through the muscles of the forelimb. I had discovered something soothing and wonderfully finite about anatomy, the way it was laid out before you, the answer in plain sight. You either knew it or you didn’t, the ultimate proof of knowledge equating to power.

“This is the region of the omotransversarius muscle, which acts to bring the leg forward, arising from the distal portion of the scapular spine and extending all the way to the wing of the atlas.”

Dad tried to be impressed, but it was obvious he was hoping for something more practical.

“You know,” I said, “cats have a clavicle, a collar bone, but dogs don’t. Whereas dogs have a bone in their penis and cats don’t.”

“Really?” said Dad, his face a parody of edification. “But are you finding anything amiss?”

Though Bess may have resembled our formalin-infused greyhound cadavers in terms of her temperament—she was completely malleable, savoring this newfangled Reiki spa treatment—her layer
of seal-like insulation made it difficult to define the details in her structure.

“Not really,” I said. “But it’s going to be a few years before I get to all the relevant clinical stuff.”

“Of course it is. Of course it is. Need to get the basics down first.” And then, as if unable to help himself, “But what about our Whiskey?”

He was watching me, maybe testing me, waiting to see if I would try to excuse myself. I didn’t hesitate. Crouching down, I beckoned to the big golden to come. Whiskey bounced over, incredulous that he had had to wait for his moment in the spotlight, loving to be roughed up, to shake and tousle his lion’s mane before I spun him around and started scratching around his back and butt. Then, as he settled in, helpfully backing toward me, my hands began to change, fingers flexing, flat palms drifting away from his fur. My playful stroke became a clinical touch, probing, defining, and interpreting. I got a little more than five seconds before the smile vanished from his face and he shot around, snapping and growling in my direction.

“Hey, hey, we’ll have none of that,” I said, bouncing to my feet, taking Whiskey’s head in my hands, and angling his skull to align our eyes and to let him see my disapproval. It was my turn to growl—a stern “no.” But he was already back—Whiskey the pet, no longer Whiskey the patient—staring up at me with a “Lighten up, I’m just kidding. I save the serious stuff for the real vet, and let me tell you, you ain’t no real vet.”

Over the next six years I would continue to attempt a “once-over” with Whiskey, seeing how far I might get before he lost it, learning to sense that moment of hesitation when pleasure morphed into suspicion for a few seconds, and then he finally realized he was being played. To be fair to him, I was getting to listen to a few
heartbeats, caressing a little spleen before he called time-out, and he never progressed to anything more than a growl or a bristle and quick about-face. I began to liken my once-over sessions with Whiskey to the pebble test performed by the late David Carradine on the TV show
Kung Fu
. Studying to be a vet might be a little different from studying to be a Shaolin monk, but “Grasshopper” would only have completed his mental and spiritual training when he could snatch the pebble from Master Po’s hand. Maybe Whiskey was my Master Po, the pebble my full physical examination. Either I would get it done without his objection or he would try mauling me in the manner of a starving wolf. This would be my crowning achievement, my ultimate recognition as a professional and, clearly, “time for me to leave.”

Inadvertently, visits home were honing my education. The dogs were proving to be an immutable reminder of the family life I used to know—and an era that had passed. Returning home can be awkward for any college-age kid. We spend our teenage years learning to be obnoxious and short with our parents. We prefer to confide in friends. We connive, we become reclusive, we strive to become remote. We may still have a little voice somewhere deep inside pleading, “Just keep loving me, I’ll come back,” but for the most part, coming home from college is like reaching for the end of an umbilical cord we worked so hard to cut. We enjoy the security, the lazy familiarity, but we have left the nest, proven our capacity for independence, and now demand the respect afforded adults. Whiskey and Bess had no interest in this petty convention and all its theatrics. One minute you were gone and the next you were back. They didn’t mourn my departure, miss me, or anticipate my return. Enthusiastic or indifferent, they were a wonderfully reassuring constant, the perfect reminder that I was home, particularly as I clawed my way back from detached offspring and reprised the role of son.
Besides, Dad made sure the dogs were never far from my thoughts. He refused to stop acting like a father, knowing that if you hold your hand out long enough, eventually your kids will try to grab it again. While I was at college he wrote to me every week, prattling on about the monotony of his life, about Mum’s schoolwork and Fiona’s desire to become a nurse, but there was always something about the dogs. It might be a minor health issue for me to research, but more often than not it was something trivial they had done, something they had encountered on their walks. Without fail, he always signed off on these letters with love and he always included Whiskey and Bess in the list of individuals sending this love my way. At the time it made me laugh, it made me embarrassed, but as soon as I softened, as soon I matured back into his son, I came to appreciate what he was saying—an endearing and magnanimous reminder of how family will always be the sum of its individual members, be they human or animal.

For me, becoming a veterinarian would take six years—three years of basic medical sciences with a hint of clinical relevance, two years of clinically relevant material with a hint of hands-on experience, and a final year of masquerading as a real doctor. Through all those hours of study, the necessary mistakes, repetition, and academic information soaking into my brain, the process of veterinary education successfully transfers essential skills and core knowledge to a receptive audience of animal lovers. However, when you think about it, all academic osmosis really does is create the possibility for higher learning, for experiences that resonate in a distinct voice rather than get lost in the murmur of background noise. During vacations, not only was I required to gain skills in all manner of animal
handling—grooming horses, feeding pigs, herding sheep, and milking cows—but more important, I had to spend twenty-six weeks visiting veterinary practices around the country and trying to apply my book smarts to practical matters.