Pets on Parade (Prospect House 2) (14 page)

I shook my head, then wished I hadn’t as it felt as if my brain was slopping around inside my cranium. If Beryl was then going to suggest my minty breath was from sucking a sweet to disguise the effects of a hangover when it was solely due to my stripy toothpaste, a new tube of which I’d started that morning, then I’d throttle her. That’s if I could summon up the strength. I did feel surprisingly more under the weather than a mere early waking would account for. Perhaps I was going down with something. Lucyitis, perhaps?

Beryl was still looking at me rather strangely, no doubt trying to work out why I looked so haggard, so I decided to explain.

‘It’s Wilfred … he got me out of bed earlier than I needed to.’

You should have seen Beryl’s eye. It nearly popped out of her head while her glass one did a violent jerk upwards. Despite my muzzy head, I flicked a hand through my highlighted hair, gave my left ear stud a tweak, wiggled my hips, and said, ‘He can be quite hard on me sometimes.’ I then minced out of reception, leaving her gawping and plucking furiously at her mole. Tee-hee.

Crystal and Eric were both down in the office, having, it would seem, an animated discussion, from which they immediately broke off as I entered the room. The sight of Crystal – my incarnation of the perfect English rose – positively glowing with health, in sharp contrast to my pallor, went some way to lifting my flagging spirits.

‘Oh, morning, Paul,’ she exclaimed, ‘we were just talking about you.’ She smiled, her cheeks dimpling, her Cupid lips exposing the merest glimpse of her teeth – no nasty Archie-style gnashers there, I thought. She didn’t elaborate on the context in which I’d been discussed. It was as if her smile, in its perfection, said it all – nothing to worry about. It was Eric who charged in, putting his foot firmly in the mire.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you and Lucy. We’ve noticed things seem a bit strained between you.’ He scratched the side of his bald head with one finger. ‘We’re just wondering …’ He tailed off, his gaze sliding from me.

‘You know our views on this, don’t you?’ said Crystal crisply, still smiling, although I now felt it a little forced, her steel-blue eyes hardening. Yes, I knew their views – only too well. Crystal had taken me to one side last year and discussed the implications of Lucy and me hitching up. It wasn’t a problem for her and Eric, so long as it didn’t interfere with the smooth running of the practice and, at the time, it hadn’t been a problem. Once, perhaps, there’d been a minor glitch in the ‘smooth running’ when Eric caught the two of us snogging in the dispensary – he’d rushed in to get some worm tablets and rushed out again muttering about ‘tom cats’ and ‘castration’. Other than that, we’d kept our emotions under control and the day-to-day activities of the practice hadn’t been affected. I still felt that situation hadn’t changed. OK, Lucy and I were having our differences, going through a bad patch, barely speaking to each other, but I trusted the professional commitment to our work would ensure it didn’t interfere with how we carried out our duties. But obviously attitudes had been noticed, things said – Beryl would have been the first to comment – hence the warning finger now being wagged at me by Crystal, albeit a dainty finger with its well-manicured,
pink-lacquered
nail.

Crystal’s voice broke my reverie. ‘Paul, are you listening to me?’

‘Sorry. Yes.’ I went on to reassure both of them that my personal life certainly wouldn’t impinge on the working relationships within the hospital.

‘I’m glad to hear that,’ said Crystal. ‘We all get along here extremely well, don’t we, Eric?’ she added, turning to her husband.

The vexed voice of Beryl ringing out from reception interrupted her. ‘Eric, where are you? Your first appointment’s been here five minutes already.’

Eric grimaced at me, his lips turning down at the corners. ‘We do try to get along, yes,’ he said.

‘
Eric
!’

Eric sighed deeply, crossed the fingers of both his hands and hurried out with a ‘Coming, Beryl.’

My muzziness had cleared by the time I was halfway through my morning consultations, only to be reminded of what had precipitated it in the first place by the sound of screeching that erupted from reception and then continued unabated in the waiting room. It was all too horribly familiar, my eardrums being too well tuned to the discordant notes to be wrong. So there was no
self-congratulation
to be had in knowing what bird I was to be presented with before it appeared; and when the cockatiel was duly proffered for my inspection, my customary line of introduction stuck in my gullet in much the same way I wished something substantial could be rammed down the bird’s.

I did eventually manage a ‘So this is Billy, is it?’ as the cockatiel’s cage was eventually hoisted onto my consulting table, but not before a barrage of squawks from its owner, the competition from which had the effect of shutting the bird up. Temporarily, at least.

Entry into my consulting room had been dramatic. Having called out for a Mrs Tidy, a gargantuan lady had risen from a seat in the waiting room, beckoning to a spindly little man next to her, on whose lap was an enormous cage. Well, at least I guessed it was a cage – its occupant was emitting screeches but couldn’t be seen – since the entire container was covered in a close-fitting, zipped, white plastic coat, vented with high windows of fine mesh on two sides, below each of which was a yellow label with a black and yellow biohazard warning symbol on it.

‘Come on, George, it’s our turn,’ she said above the racket emanating from the covered cage. The little man struggled to his feet; the woman, whom I assumed to be his wife, offered him no assistance as she rummaged in the large, plastic shopping bag she was holding and eventually pulled out a bottle with a trigger-spray top containing bright-green liquid. Holding this in front of her like some sort of gun, she advanced towards me, her husband following behind, dwarfed by the cage he was carrying, only the top of his thinning, mousy hair visible.

I took a step back, half turned and attempted to smile and say, ‘Do come through,’ but my words were drowned by the bird’s screeches; so I feebly waved my arm up the passageway, indicating the door opposite.

‘You first,’ boomed the woman, waving her gun at me. I felt that if I turned away from her she’d prod me in the back and tell me to raise my arms. So I sort of slid away from her, feeling the wall behind me, and edged back into the consulting room where I turned and scooted to the other side of the consulting table, fighting the urge to scream, ‘I surrender.’

Mrs Tidy, like some automaton, ground to a halt in the doorway, almost filling its frame, while her husband was left standing out in the passage, still holding the cage. She certainly was a large lady. Her shoulders, even though hidden in the confines of a military-style, navy jacket, were broad, and I could picture them heaving up
hod-loads
of bricks on a building site with little effort; and her hips and thighs, encased in a tight, navy skirt, could have graced the haunches of a hippo. All of this was topped by a head, square in its proportions, bleached breadboard in its complexion, with a severe cut of platinum-blonde hair swept up like a bottle brush, and eyes that at this moment were scanning the room from behind severe,
black-framed
glasses.

‘You
can
come in,’ I ventured to say.

Mrs Tidy took two steps forward which, being giant steps, were enough for her to draw level with the consulting table, at which she directed her spray and with a loud ‘pssss … pssss’ engulfed it in a mist of disinfectant.

The tic in my temple began to throb ominously. Cool it, Paul, I thought, and said, ‘I do wipe the table down with antiseptic between clients.’

There was another ‘pssss … pssss’.

‘Ah, but you can’t be too careful,’ replied Mrs Tidy. ‘You might not be using the right concentration to kill off all those …’ She paused and looked furtively round her before continuing ‘… those nasty bugs.’ She paused again and then, taking a deep breath, spat out the word ‘germs’, her face filling with loathing as she said it. It was followed by another jerky squeeze of her disinfectant spray. ‘They lurk everywhere you know.’ Pssss. ‘So you can’t be too careful.’ Pssss … pssss. ‘OK, George, you can bring Billy in now.’

Her half-hidden husband shunted into the room, engulfed by the cage in front of him, and levered it onto the consulting table before standing back to smile nervously at me, his wife towering over him. She, with her hefty limbs, was the epitome of a Mrs Muscle; he, by contrast, lacked any components worth being called ‘meaty’, his clothes hanging off a spindly frame, his face thin and gaunt, eyes deeply recessed in their sockets – a Yorick in the making.

Mrs Tidy unzipped the pristine plastic cover and handed it over to Mr Tidy to hold. The cage revealed was spotless … its metal bars gleamed … its stainless steel feed and water pots glowed. Not one dropping blemished the sand sheet covering the base, above which, on a polished wooden cross perch, sat the occupant – Billy, the cockatiel. Even he was not your normal, common-or-garden variety of cockatiel. No dusty grey plumage for him. He was a Lutino, with pure-white plumage, unmarked save for the yellow head and crest and the characteristic seen in all cockatiels – the orange cheek feathers; though no doubt Mrs Tidy might have had a strong desire to eliminate them by bleaching or plucking, should it have been possible, if she thought it spoilt the hygienic, sterile image she was trying to manufacture within that cage.

I suddenly became acutely conscious of the splattered brown stain on the breast pocket of my lab coat, where my previous client’s dog had jettisoned the contents of his anal glands, having missed the cotton wool into which I had been attempting to express them. The way Mrs Tidy was staring at the stain, I felt sure she longed to rip the coat from me and plunge it into biological detergent with me closely following behind – although the thought of her riding rough shod over me with a loofah was more intimidating than intimate. I scrabbled to extract one of the phrases from my mental list, narrowly avoiding saying, ‘What can I do for you?’ in favour of, ‘What a splendid cockatiel you have here,’ which I didn’t have to shout out since Billy had rapidly gone quiet once the cover had been removed. Perhaps it was the sight of me peering in that did it? Or maybe it was the sickly-sweet tone of my voice, which, frankly, was enough to make any self-respecting pet puke. Anyway, he remained silent. But not still. He suddenly wagged his tail, brought it up and evacuated his bowels onto the unblemished sand sheet beneath him.

Mrs Tidy gave a snort of disgust. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said.

‘No problem,’ I replied. ‘It’s just the call of nature.’ I was beginning to wonder why Mrs Tidy owned the bird if she was so neurotic about hygiene. She provided the answer by explaining that Billy actually belonged to her sister who was over in Dubai on a two-year teaching contract and who, before leaving, had extracted a promise from her sister to look after Billy until she returned.

‘I do worry about germs, though,’ she went on, her fingers playing on the trigger of the disinfectant. ‘Don’t I, George?’ she added, turning to her husband. ‘You never know what diseases you might pick up these days. And from whom.’ She waved the sprayer matter-of-factly at him. Perhaps she was inferring that her husband was more of a bug in her life than the love of it. He merely gave a nervous nod of his cadaverous head.

She swung back to me and directed a puff at my anal gland stain.

‘Germs,’ she reiterated. ‘They could be the death of us.’

I coughed as the mist of disinfectant got up my nose – much like Mrs Tidy’s manner. And still she hadn’t finished. ‘They’re everywhere,’ she went on in a conspiratorial whisper, leaning forward, looking from left to right as if afraid of being overheard. Maybe she thought the room was bugged. Whatever, she was certainly bugging me.

‘They are?’

‘Oh, yes. You’d be surprised.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘And they’re liable to strike at any time.’ Mrs Tidy drew herself up to her full height and with her spare hand executed a karate chop through the air. ‘You could be cut down before you knew it. Salmonella … E. coli … the MRSA bug. Nasty bit of work that one.’ The word provoked another ‘pssss’ of her sprayer. ‘Not to mention the likes of swine ‘flu.’ More ‘pssss … pssssings’.

‘Yes, I quite understand your concerns,’ I interjected, ‘but what have you actually brought Billy in for?’

‘I want you to give him the full works.’

‘Sorry. I’m not sure I understand. The full works?’

‘That’s what I said, yes. I want you to carry out a full screening to check he’s not carrying any nasty bugs. I read on the Internet that birds can carry salmonella and something called …’ She paused. ‘What was it called, George?’ she went on, turning to her husband.

‘Chlamydia, dear,’ he murmured.

‘Yes, that’s the one.’ She turned back to me. ‘Charmid ear. You must have heard of it, you being a vet.’

‘Chlamydia. It’s a condition birds can get, yes.’

‘And we can catch it too, so I understand.’

‘There is a possibility, if the bird is carrying it.’

‘Well, there you are then,’ exclaimed Mrs Tidy with another ‘pssss’. ‘That’s why I want Billy to have the full works, in case he’s carrying one of those nasty bugs.’ Mrs Tidy had obviously done her homework since she went on to explain that she required a ‘charmid ear’ screen and a culture of the throat and vent.

I gulped.

Billy scuttled to the other end of his perch and raised his crest, emitting a muted squawk – no doubt alarmed at the prospect of having a swab rammed up his cloaca.

‘Right,’ I said, a little peeved that Mrs Tidy was taking charge of proceedings. But if that’s what she wanted … ‘I’ll get Billy booked in then,’ I continued.

‘We’d rather we had it done now,’ declared Mrs Tidy emphatically. ‘Wouldn’t we, George?’

‘Yes, dear.’

‘See? My husband thinks it would be best done now.’

‘Well, it’s just that we have got our morning’s ops lined up to do.’ And, I thought, Mandy lined up to make sure I did them to order. I didn’t fancy crossing her, but then, gazing up into the ever-hardening features of Mrs Tidy, her eyes glinting menacingly, I wondered which would be the lesser of the two evils. ‘I’ll get the swabs,’ I said.