Marooned in Manhattan (2 page)

Chapter 2

I
missed a few weeks of writing in my
journal. I was a bit overwhelmed by America. Scott lives on West 77
^th
Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West. Manhattan has two names; it’s called Manhattan or New York City. That’s confusing and it took me a while to figure it out. Manhattan is an island but it doesn’t feel like an island at all. It’s important to know on the subway whether you want to go uptown or downtown. Otherwise, you will probably waste a lot of time riding in the wrong direction. That has happened to me several times already, but I’m getting the hang of it now.

Scott’s street is very clean and wide and lined with trees. His side of the street is full of high, posh, apartment buildings with marble lobbies, but you hardly ever see anyone going in or out. The whole block on the other side of the street is taken up with the Museum of Natural History, which has life-sized dinosaur skeletons and lots of other cool stuff, like a butterfly conservatory. I imagined a room full of musty glass cases displaying sad, stiff, dead butterflies. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The butterfly exhibition has
hundreds
,
maybe even a thousand live butterflies flying around. Some of them have wings in colours that I didn’t know even existed, like vermilion and cattleya.

Central Park, which everyone just calls
the Park
, is right at the end of the block. If you walk in the Park entrance at West 77
^th
Street and turn left and walk down a steep hill, you’ll find a fair-sized stream with a wooden plank footbridge. Beyond the bridge is a gigantic, bulky, leafy tree, which has a very wide, low branch that runs along a few centimetres off the ground. It’s a perfect place to hang out. To the left winds a dirt and pebble path lined with old-fashioned lampposts that leads under a stone bridge. When the lights come on as dusk falls, you can very easily fool yourself into believing that you are in Narnia if you have even the tiniest scrap of imagination.

Six doormen work in Scott’s building in shifts. Their job is to open the doors for you and give you your dry-cleaning and any FedEx packages that arrive. It’s gas. Scott says that they also clear out the snow in front of the building in winter. They are very knowledgeable about almost everything and everyone. They phone you when your food is delivered.

They are super friendly. They nicknamed me ‘Irish’ and they call out, ‘How is Irish doing today?’ or ‘Good morning, Beautiful!’ which is a great start to any day. They often slip me candy, which is what they call sweets here. The
Cadbury’s
chocolate bars they sell in New York taste gross, like someone thought it would be a great idea to add gravy mix to them. Frank has a very thick, brown moustache. He is
always joking around so I think he is probably my favourite doorman, but they are all kind and funny, except for Romy who can have a bit of an attitude. He is from Bulgaria and sometimes he pretends he cannot speak English, although his English is almost perfect.

Scott is a vet, which I found intriguing. I have never owned a dog or a cat because we always had landlords who were not pet-friendly. Mum eventually got me a goldfish, but it only lived for a few days so she got me another one and it died after a few weeks and we flushed him down the loo as well. It was not particularly sad; Mum actually had a fit of the giggles at the second send-off, which she tried to disguise as a coughing fit. I don’t know if I could really bond with a fish; a dolphin, definitely, but a fish is not overburdened with personality.

Scott’s practice is called
Upper West Side Veterinary
. He totally knows that is a crap name, not original at all, and he’s thinking about my suggestion of calling it
Scott’s Super Vet: Treating Snakes through Stoats
. But he says that loads of New Yorkers do not know what a stoat is so he would probably get people turning up in the middle of the night looking for a doctor to treat their strep throats.

Scott says that you can tell a lot about the owners and their lives just by what kind of pet they have. For example, if they have a Great Dane or an Irish Wolfhound or some other really large dog, like a Newfoundland, then they probably live in a studio apartment the size of a very large bathroom. On the other hand, if they have a Chihuahua, which is a tiny
toy dog, then they probably live in a four-storey house or a penthouse.

The practice is open from 8am to 7pm on Mondays through Fridays and from 9am to 2pm on Saturdays. Three evenings a week and every other Sunday, Scott is on-call for emergencies. On my second night here, Mrs Rubinstein called him on his cell phone to go around to her apartment because Lulu, her Siamese cat, had diarrhoea.

Scott asked, ‘How long has it been going on?’

Mrs Rubenstein spoke so loudly that I heard her reply.

‘It has not actually started yet, Doctor, but Lulu has that face she gets when she feels a bout of diarrhoea coming on. Could you please come straight away? I am terrified she might die of dehydration.’

Scott did an excellent imitation of Lulu’s ‘possibly getting diarrhoea’ face at me. He told me later that Mrs Rubenstein is a terrific old lady, but she is a hypochondriac when it comes to her cat.

Scott’s apartment is on the ground floor. It has a large combined living room and kitchen with a wide flat screen TV that takes up almost an entire wall. On the opposite wall is a giant photograph of an enormous concrete
swimming
pool without any water in it. A rock concert is taking place in the pool and you could spend hours looking at all the different, interesting-looking people attending the concert. There is an unpainted oak table with benches that look like logs, a long black leather couch and a small, high glass table with three bar stools with a framed painting of a
herd of buffalo behind it.

In the middle of the living room, a spiral, twisty iron staircase leads down to his veterinary practice, which is in the basement and has a separate entrance at the front of the building – a green door at the bottom of nine steps. Beside the spiral staircase is a fireman’s pole so when Scott has an animal emergency he can just slide down it. He told me he was going to get rid of it because it was too dangerous, but I begged him not to because it is my favourite thing in the apartment. He told me not to mention the stairs or the fireman’s pole to anyone because he never got around to getting the permits for building them.

There is a narrow hallway leading from the living room to a big bedroom (Scott’s room), and then there’s a closet-sized middle room (where freakily tidy Scott keeps his clothes, including eight pairs of jeans), a bathroom and, finally, my bedroom, which is pretty small but has a cool slanted roof and a triangular window. The walls are painted light pink and the bedspread is hot pink and there’s a little white desk with a pink and white striped chair and a large cushion/bean bag squashy thing in turquoise with pink roses. I had to bite my lip because I’m not a huge fan of pink of any shade, but it was really nice of Scott to make the effort and so I just said thank you. Now, I wonder if I’m going to be stuck for the whole summer pretending that I like pink.

When I went to bed the first night, Scott stuck his head into my room and said, ‘I think Ben wants to sleep with you, if that’s ok?’ and I said, ‘Sure’.

Ben is Scott’s dog and I thought it would be like
sleeping
with a soft toy, but having a warm, living, breathing dog sleeping with his head on your feet is nothing like going to bed with a stuffed teddy. Ben is a five-year old Sprocker, which is a cross-breed, half English springer spaniel and half cocker spaniel. He is black with a white muzzle with black freckles on it and a very wet, black nose. He has incredibly long, droopy, black ears. They seem to be of very little use as he hardly ever comes when he is called, unless food is involved. He has the softest fur that you can imagine. He weighs about the same as a Monday morning schoolbag so he’s a bit heavy. His favourite toy is a faded bluish/yellowish, fluffy and none-too-clean duck/pheasant/bird thing named Martha. Ben carries Martha around in his mouth a lot, chewing on her in an absentminded way. When he’s not chewing on her, he likes to keep her in his food bowl, although sometimes he forgets and she turns up in the oddest places.

Scott works with another vet called Doctor Barrett, but she told me straight off to call her Joanna. She has long, silky, dark red hair and gorgeous hazel eyes, framed by black rectangular glasses. All of her clothes are black, except once I saw her in a greyish sweater. It is possible that the sweater was black once and had just faded in the wash.

Joanna has read all the
Harry Potter
books and Ron
Weasley
is her favourite character. Her boyfriend’s name is Stefan and he’s from Frankfurt in Germany, but has lived in New York for five years.

On my third night in America, after Joanna had sushi with
me and Scott and they were both impressed by my use of chopsticks (as if we don’t have sushi in Dublin), she tripped on Martha and fell halfway down the spiral staircase with a sickening thud-thudding sound, but no screaming. I really admired Joanna a lot because she picked herself up straight away, with no whining at all, just looking very flustered and pink in the face and said, ‘It’s an unusually light evening on the wine front when I do
not
fall down the stairs.’

And she said with just a hint of sarcasm that she hoped she had not hurt Martha by stepping on her.

Scott was doing that useless guy thing where he kept asking Joanna if she was ok and did she think she should go to the hospital just in case she had broken any bones when it was obvious that she just wanted to forget about the fall because it was so embarrassing. She kept saying she was fine and he said maybe she had a sprain and we should get it checked out. Finally, she yelled, ‘Just shut up about it!’ but she used a curse word as well and then she used it again because she was so upset about saying it in the first place in front of me.

I said it was fine. ‘Janet was always saying
effing
this or that,’ which made Scott laugh and Joanna joined in. I’m glad I helped break the tension.

Not everyone is as cool as Joanna. Scott’s girlfriend, Leela, is beyond painful. She is always moaning about being stressed. She’s a divorce attorney – when marriages break up, she argues in court on behalf of her client about splitting up the money and the kids. The way she talks about it, you would
think she is chopping up the kids like mincemeat with one of Scott’s incredibly sharp Japanese butcher’s knives.

Leela has long, super shiny, straight dark hair and dark eyes with incredibly long eyelashes and she is so beautiful that men in the street stare at her, and if they don’t, she will pause and laugh or speak a little louder or toss her hair until they do. She is short, but looks tall, because she wears skyscraper heels.

During my first week, I got up in the middle of the night for a glass of water and I bumped into her in the hall wearing a flimsy, see-through nightgown and she still had heels on. She screamed so loudly when she saw me that I dropped the glass of water. If anyone had the right to scream, it was me.

I thought at first from the self-important way Leela acted all the time that she might genuinely have some kind of
connection
to Indian royalty, or to a celebrity, but Joanna snorted when I mentioned this and said that she is only a
princess
from New Jersey, whose parents emigrated from Mumbai in India when she was a baby.

The thing that probably bugs me most is that Leela just pretends to like animals when Scott is around. Whenever she drops by, which even Scott thinks is too often, she always makes a big fuss of Ben, but when Scott is on the phone, she totally ignores him. One time when Scott was in the bathroom and Ben put his paws on her knees and dumped Martha in her lap, she screamed like she’d been burned. I’ve never heard anyone scream as much as she does. She was pretty mean to poor Ben, who was only trying to be friendly,
yelling at him to get off her and giving him a little kick with one of her stilettos. Then she washed her hands in a very vigorous way as if he had fleas, sighing melodramatically the whole time. Ben’s got such a good heart, though, because he always forgives her and is nice to her. I try to be nice to her because Scott asked me to, but I don’t have Ben’s
temperament
so it’s not always easy, especially when she calls me ‘sweetie’ and it’s so fake that I feel like screaming myself.

Chapter 3

T
he small waiting room is nearly always
crowded. Some of the patients interact happily, sniffing each other’s butts while their owners exchange details of their pets’ histories. Others are cautious or aloof. Pet owners in New York City usually refer to themselves as ‘
Mommies
’ or ‘
Daddies
’. But I can’t imagine Mr Fannelli ever referring to himself as his dog’s
Daddy
. He has a chocolate-brown
Labrador
called Spike, who frequently suffers from stomach-aches on account of eating loads of crap that he should not be eating. One Monday morning, he chomped down an entire, colossal bag of marshmallows intended for Mr Fannelli’s grandchildren.

‘Mr Fannelli,’ said Scott. ‘Meet my new assistant, my niece, Miss Evangeline Brooks.’

I was wearing the official-looking white coat Joanna had given me, with the sleeves rolled up.

‘Hi, Mr Fannelli!’ I piped up.

‘Ah, from the old country, from Scotland, are you?’ he asked.

‘No, Dublin, Ireland,’ I pointed out.

‘It is a beautiful town, Cork.’

‘Well, Cork is not really near Dublin …’, but I had lost Mr Fannelli’s attention, which was focused on the scales. Scott grunted a little as he lifted Spike onto them. Mr Fannelli looked distinctly guilty. Scott laid a hand on his shoulder.

‘One hundred and forty-two pounds, Mr Fannelli. Spike has been overindulging again. Has he vomited up the
marshmallows
yet?’

‘No, but I gave him a couple of spoons of Pepto-Bismol.’

Scott sighed.

‘Mr Fannelli, we have talked about this before, many, many times. You should not give Pepto-Bismol to dogs on a regular basis. Let’s get Spike up on the examining table.’

But Mr Fannelli held back.

‘I think I will take a seat in the waiting room. The rheumatism in my left knee is acting up again,’ and he shuffled off.

I followed Scott into the examining room and together we managed to haul Spike up onto the table. Joanna was sitting on a stool by the window, peering at some slides under a microscope. She glanced in our direction.

‘Ah, Spike again, looking a bit sorry for himself.’

‘Wow, that’s a very cool dress,’ I said.

She smiled at me, jumped up from the stool and did a sexy twirl, her right hand holding her glasses in place.

‘Stefan is taking me to
Azure
Sea
tonight.’

‘What’s that?’ I wondered.

‘A ridiculously overpriced, purportedly romantic
restaurant
created by the same guy who did the Hallmark app,’ Scott interjected.

Joanna ignored him. Scott gently palpated Spike’s tummy. Just as Joanna came over to give us a hand, Spike opened his mouth and projectile vomited a long stream of gooey,
greyish
whitish stuff that just missed Joanna’s silky black slip dress, with one big gob splattering on my Converse runners. Scott did not even get a dribble.

Joanna squealed.

‘Pity he missed,’ Scott said cheerfully. ‘That should have nicely masked the overpowering aroma of flowers and
seaweed
in
Azure Sea
.’

Joanna shot him one of her best dirty looks. Spike belched loudly. He seemed much better.

‘This dress cost three hundred and seven-five dollars,’ Joanna pointed out. ‘And I don’t suppose Mr Fannelli would have paid for the dry cleaning’.

‘Mr Fannelli, who hasn’t paid a bill since the ark reached dry land?’ Scott replied. ‘Which reminds me, we have to talk to him about that.’

Joanna shot him another dirty look.

‘
We
do not have to do anything.
You
do it. And Spike is your patient. Last week, I had to ring Mrs Sobelsohn about her overdue bills, and she kept me on the phone for half an hour. I ultimately ended up agreeing to spay her new cat for free.’ And she walked out.

Scott watched her go.

‘Joanna is Canadian,’ he said meaningfully, but I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. Scott always says that when he doesn’t know what to say about Joanna. I gave
Spike a pat just as Ben trotted in, his nose sensing that he might be missing an adventure of some kind. And, this is very gross, but we had to clean up the remnants of Spike’s sick very quickly because otherwise Ben would probably try and gobble it up. Since I have witnessed Ben trying to eat his own puke, I can’t imagine he would be overly fussy about eating another dog’s.

Yesterday, I got a new pet, a brown-green turtle named Sam. He just looked like a
Sam
. He is a common snapping turtle who used to live near Turtle Pond in Central Park. I was walking through the Ramble, which is a wild part of the Park little visited by tourists. Rounding a corner with high mulberry bushes, I was shocked when I saw three kids in skateboarding clothes torturing a poor turtle by stretching it between them. One boy and the girl had his front legs and the other boy with greasy blonde hair held both of the back legs. I ran right up to them and tried to grab the turtle out of their hands.

‘What are you creeps doing to that turtle? STOP it right now.’

But they just sniggered at me. The greaseball boy pushed me on my shoulder so hard that I nearly fell over. So I pinched him as hard as I could on his arm and he yelled and grabbed me and forced my hands behind my back. I was too furious to be scared.

‘Let me go, let me go right now or I’m going to call the police.’

The smaller boy with the red t-shirt laughed.

‘Let me go, let me go,’ he chanted, mocking my accent.

‘Shut up, Carlos’ said the girl, who was stocky and had red sunglasses, and for an instant I thought I had an ally.

‘We were wondering’ she said slowly, ‘how long it would take for the snapping turtle to snap, but now that you are here, let’s try stretching you instead.’

She and Carlos tried to pick up my legs as the greaseball kept a tight hold on my arms. I kicked out as hard as I could, managing to connect with Carlos’s face. He swore and wiped his bleeding lip. As I continued to struggle, they hoisted me up in the air and the indignity was worse than the pain.

Then the greaseball yelled in pain and shock as a tall boy, wearing a Rangers cap, grabbed him from behind, pulled him off me and knocked him to the ground. He staggered quickly to his feet and then the horrible coward ran off, without even waiting to see what happened to his friends, who had dropped my legs, so that I crashed to the ground with such force that I struggled to breathe.

‘Get out of here, freaks!’ the Rangers boy commanded in a quiet but scary voice and they left, the girl turning around and flipping her finger at us.

‘Are you ok?’ the Rangers boy asked me.

I nodded and started to struggle to my feet.

‘Whoa,’ he said, and bent down, locked his arms around me and pulled me gently to my feet. ‘Anything broken?’

I shook my head again.

‘Do you speak?’ he asked.

I nodded and he grinned, a lopsided grin.

‘I’m fine,’ I said, gasping a little, ‘the turtle.’

The Rangers boy bent down to examine the tortured turtle that had tried to crawl away from the scene but didn’t get far with one very limp back leg.

‘I think this little guy needs a vet. There’s a good one right near here, Dr Brooks. He’ll help.’

I felt so proud.

‘He’s my uncle. He’s cool, he has a Harley but he can’t ride it just now because it needs work.’

‘Ok,’ the boy muttered and he pulled his ringing cell phone out of his pocket.

‘What’s up?’ and he waved distractedly at me.

‘Bye kid, go back to your mommy and get her to take you and your turtle to your uncle. You shouldn’t be wandering around in the Ramble by yourself,’ and he casually walked away, still talking on his cell phone.

I didn’t even get the chance to say thank you or find out his name.

‘Bye
kid
’, like I was six years old or something. Who did he think he was, striding around the Park like he was
Spiderman
or something, rescuing people who didn’t need his help and then calling them ‘
kid
’ and telling them to go back to their mommies?

I should have said, ‘Oh sure, oops! I can’t because she’s DEAD.’

To be fair, I hadn’t had the situation totally under control.

‘He’s cool, he has a Harley.’

I bit my bottom lip as I remembered my blabbing. The
Rangers guy must think I am a total weirdo, a baby and a weirdo. I picked up the turtle gently. The fight seemed to have gone out of him because he didn’t try to bite me, or maybe he sensed I was trying to help him. I wrapped him in the bottom of my t-shirt and headed home.

Scott did an x-ray, which confirmed that Sam had a broken leg. He sedated him and pulled the leg back in place and bandaged it.

‘Right, there’s not much more we can do. It’s not like when a human breaks a leg, we can’t put a cast on it. We can just make him comfortable and, in six to eight weeks, he can go back to his merry life in Turtle Pond.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

I had told Scott that I just happened to come across Sam in the Park, which was trueish. I left out the part about the skateboarder bullies and the Rangers boy. Scott might try to baby me and stop me from going around by myself during the day. Besides, sometimes it’s nice to have a secret that belongs to nobody but you; you can lie on your bed and take it out and think about it whenever you like.

I did ask Scott, ‘Are the Rangers a basketball or a baseball team?’

‘Sacrilege!’ he exclaimed. ‘They are the greatest
professional
ice hockey team in the world. They’re
our
team, from New York. They play at Madison Square Garden. I’ll take you to a game in the fall when the season starts.’

‘Thanks very much, but I won’t be here then,’ I reminded him.

‘Oh yeah, I forgot, too bad!’ said Scott and he started to wipe down the examining table with disinfectant, whistling in an irritating manner a catchy tune I did not recognise.