Pets on Parade (Prospect House 2) (17 page)

‘Paul,’ Eric called out. ‘Did you touch the device?’

It was Beryl who answered. ‘Yes, he did. And he was about to peel it open, when I reminded him about the man who got blown to smithereens by that London letter bomb.’

There, what did I tell you?

‘Mmm,’ said Eric. ‘In which case, it could now be unstable. Liable to go off at any minute.’ It was a statement which hung in the air for a few seconds – enough time for the five figures to vanish from the archway, Crystal being pulled out of sight by Eric. Sounds of a heated discussion followed.

‘We can’t be too careful,’ I heard Eric saying. ‘Remember that vet friend of ours who worked at Porton Down?’

‘So? What of it?’ That was Crystal, her tone irritated. ‘And do let go of me Eric, for heaven’s sake.’

‘Sorry, love, but I don’t want you taking any chances. And there was that vet who had one under her car. She scrabbled out just in time before it blew up.’

‘Really?’ That was Beryl. ‘Well, I’ll be blowed.’ An unfortunate choice of verb, I thought, considering current circumstances.

‘It’s like those thingies in Iraq,’ Mandy had chipped in.

‘You mean IEDs.’ Lucy this time.

‘Step on one of those, you’d know it.’ Mandy again.

‘We’d better watch our step then.’ Beryl once more.

‘Er, excuse me,’ I called out, a hand raised.

Beryl’s head popped round the corner. ‘What is it, Paul?’

‘Er … well …’ I pointed down at the package. ‘Are we going to … er … do something about this?’

‘We most certainly are,’ said Crystal, appearing in the archway, smoothing out the creases on the jacket sleeve to which Eric had been clinging. She stepped forward with a determined look on her face, while the other four members of her bomb disposal unit jostled for best viewing position behind her, ready to scarper if she gave the word.

She reached the counter and, with her forefinger, eased the package round to face her and read the label. ‘It’s addressed to you,’ she said, looking up at me. ‘It’s nothing you were expecting?’

I shook my head.

With finger and thumb, she lifted the package and turned it over – an action which evoked an admiring gasp from her onlookers, apart from me. I was in the front line, hardly daring to breathe. She prodded the bag gently, evoking another admiring gasp. ‘Can’t see this being a bomb,’ she continued. ‘Let’s see what’s inside.’

Her admirers gave a final gasp and vanished. Crystal carefully eased one of her dainty fingernails under the flap and slid it along until the seal loosened and she was able to lift it up and peer inside. ‘There seems to be another package in here,’ she said, tilting the Jiffy bag to allow its contents to slip onto the counter. Between us now lay a cylindrical parcel about the length of a biro, heavily encased in bubble wrap. As on the outside of the Jiffy bag, this had a label, although smaller, but with what appeared to be similar-styled handwriting on it, although I couldn’t read what it said as it was facing away from me. Crystal did the honours. ‘It says “Billy Tidy”.’ She looked across at me. ‘Billy Tidy …’ she repeated. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’

I nodded glumly. It seems we didn’t have a bomb here; nevertheless, those two words detonated an explosion of emotions in my mind as I acknowledged that the words did, indeed, mean something to me. ‘It’s a patient of mine,’ I said.

‘Ex-patient now by the looks of things,’ I heard Beryl mutter.

Thank you, Beryl.

I had reached my metaphorical Downside Close – a dead end – a cockatiel’s corpse buried beneath layers of bubble wrap. I picked up the packet, peeled off the sticky tape and slowly began to unravel the body. But Mrs Tidy, in true belt-and-braces mode, hadn’t simply been satisfied with one layer of mummification. I discovered that when the last of the bubble wrap had been removed, I was left with an opaque, cigar-shaped, plastic tube with a plastic screw cap, secured in place with more sticky tape. The tape I removed, to unscrew the lid, which I began to do very slowly and with a very heavy heart, until reminded by Crystal that the reception counter was not quite the right place to unwrap a dead bird.

Her comment was apt as, at that moment, the first of the morning’s appointments walked in through the front door – a gentleman carrying a budgerigar cage with a chirping occupant. ‘My Billy’s come in to have his beak and nails trimmed,’ he said brightly. ‘I’ve told him it’s nothing to worry about.’ His cheery countenance dissolved into bewilderment as he watched the assembled staff of Prospect House disperse rapidly. Only Beryl was brave enough to confront him, but even she was not quite able to rid herself of her brick-bashed-owl look, saying, ‘Somebody will be with you soon,’ as I snatched up Billy’s body and dodged out, while his namesake in the gentleman’s cage gave an optimistic chirrup.

Down in the prep room I continued where I’d left off, under the watchful eye of Mandy, who had supplied a kidney dish into which I was instructed to deposit the corpse. Having unscrewed the cap, I tipped up the container expecting Billy the stiff to slip out. Only Billy didn’t slip out, due to the fact that he wasn’t the prize in this particularly macabre game of pass-the-parcel. What emerged was a neatly cut out, long, rectangular section of sand sheet, in the middle of which was a solid dropping – green-grey with streaks of white. The perfect poo. Elation shot through me. ‘Whoopee,’ I cried, realising that Billy’s bowels must have returned to normal.

Mandy gave me a withering look which clearly stated, ‘What a sad git you are to get so excited over bird shit.’

But I didn’t care. I was delighted since I now knew that in any future dealings with Mrs Tidy, my advice wouldn’t be pooh-poohed.

I
might have told Crystal and Eric that things weren’t too bad between Lucy and me – certainly nothing that would affect our working relationship in Prospect House – but outside the practice it was a different story. I just felt we’d reached a stalemate and that things weren’t going anywhere. But then did I want them to go anywhere? Was I looking for a long-term relationship – the type of commitment that would end up with a mortgage and 2.1 children?

Perhaps it was just the mood I was in. It wasn’t helped by an article I’d read recently in one of the Sunday papers, about when married couples are at their happiest. According to a poll of 4,000 couples conducted by a wedding website, they reach the ‘zenith of their contentment after 2 years, 11 months and 8 days together’. Hmm … Lucy and I reached ours within 20 minutes of tumbling into bed. No – only joking. But this poll stated that at that point in time, the couples were happy with each other’s bad habits.

As for my bad habits … well, I’m not sure I had any. I didn’t leave underpants lying around on the floor – only in the early, eager days of our relationship when they were left under the bed for the duration of activities going on above them. Now, my pants were neatly piled with socks and T-shirts, prior to being placed in our wicker laundry basket – what could one read into that, I wondered? And I didn’t leave the toilet seat up after use. The poll also stated that ‘three years after walking down the aisle, everything seems to come together – making each other laugh and cuddling up in front of the TV … and making gestures like offering to cook dinner and help with the washing up.’ Oh dear. We were already doing that – out of necessity, really. We were both stretched with our jobs, and so domestic duties had to be shared, including the cooking. A top-notch supermarket had recently opened on the outskirts of Westcott, on my route home to Ashton, and they did such a marvellous selection of à la carte
ready-meals
that it seemed a shame not to sample them. It was just a coincidence that we usually sampled them on those days when I was due to cook.

That report made me think that Lucy and I, although not married, may have peaked 2 years, 11 months and 8 days too early in our relationship, and that a stalemate had now been reached.

I realised I should have been discussing it with Lucy but somehow there never seemed to be the right time. OK, I admit it … that was more likely just an excuse. If the truth be known, I was probably just ducking out of the issue. For her part, Lucy seemed to be on autopilot, ticking over … getting through the daily routines. Her night duties were spent at Prospect House, using the spare room in the nurses’ flat above the practice where currently only Mandy lived, although there was enough space for three people to live quite comfortably together.

At the start of our affair, Lucy didn’t relish those nights – not so much the fact of having to be ready to take any calls, but more the fact she was away from me. Ah, what passion. The full moon of love. But, like the moon, passion can wane and it seemed this was happening – I sensed those nights away were almost welcomed by Lucy now. At least, that’s the impression I was getting of late. I half expected her to move out of Willow Wren and return to Prospect House on a permanent basis, except for one thing – her animals. Or, more accurately,
our
animals, since apart from Queenie, acquired by Lucy at Prospect House, and a couple of guinea pigs and a rabbit which she’d kept in a hutch out in the back garden of the practice – and which had been a constant source of interest to the dogs being exercised out there – the menagerie at Willow Wren was one collected over the five months or so we’d been together. And although I felt she could cope with a split from me, her attachment to our pets was too strong to make that break … up until now.

You hear of couples staying together for the sake of the children. Replace them with pets, and you had our situation in a nutshell. Someone or something would have to give. But then perhaps things would turn around and we’d be back where we started, love blossoming again like the emerging buds of spring. In the event, it was Nelson who precipitated events and in a catastrophic way.

I have to blame Mildred Millichip for introducing the little Jack Russell into our lives in the first place. She was what I termed the ‘would-be-vet’ I’d encountered during my first six months at Prospect House. From the word go, I’d had constant battles with her over the treatment of her collection of dogs and cats; she was always trying medications gleaned from a very ancient and very out-
of-date
veterinary dictionary, with me having to insist that most of her treatments were doing more harm than good. She had quite a commanding presence, in the sense that she had the build of a Sherman tank, topped by a gun turret of wiry, grey hair, wisps of which blew round her face, escaping the clutch of elastic bands and broken-toothed combs which secured the rest of it. Many’s the time I heard her say, ‘Always wanted to be a vet, ever since I was a mere slip of a girl.’

Er … that must have been many years ago. Mildred Millichip’s now generous proportions had long since engulfed the shadow of her former self.

Mildred’s centre of operations was the kitchen of her bungalow – her ‘brain centre’. Here her strategies, battle plans and their execution were carried out amidst what, to the uninitiated eye, could only be described as a war zone – a battlefield of growth charts; peeling, out-of-date veterinary drug company calendars; shelves sagging under the weight of faded ‘How to’ books on animal husbandry. In the middle of this ramshackle miscellany stood her main weapon of war – her kitchen table, a substantial pine affair with chunky legs and wide boarded top; although not antique, the table was sufficiently aged to have warped and split, so there were gaps between the boards into which, over the years, the detritus – hair, nail clippings, dandruff, flea dirt – of countless animals had settled and impacted. Although Mildred Millichip still ate off the table, its foremost use was for the examination and treatment of her cats and dogs. It was on that table I first met Nelson.

I’d just had a preliminary skirmish with her over a cat with a sore mouth. ‘Teeth, I reckon,’ she declared, having hoisted the cat onto the pine table, where it sat cowering and dribbling under her massive hands, while she ran a finger and thumb under the upper lip on one side of its mouth, peeling it back to reveal molars covered in tartar, gums that were bleeding and the reek of bad breath. She picked at a tooth and dislodged a lump of yellow deposit which dropped from the cat’s mouth and disappeared down a crack in the table top. ‘Guess Monica needs a dental, eh?’ she said. I agreed and a date was fixed for her to bring Monica in for descaling. ‘Now,’ she went on, wiping her fingers along the edge of the table, ‘would you like a cup of tea before you go?’

I declined.

‘In that case could I just get you to check over a terrier that’s just been brought in? He’s a real sweetie but he’s got a thing about cats. And as you know I’ve loads here.’ Indeed, I did know. Usually her kitchen was full of them, sitting on and along the top of the sofa, curled up in front of the range, peeking down from the tops of the shelves and stalking round the kitchen table, tails raised in expectation of dinner being served. But today there were no felines on the prowl – in fact, no animals other than Monica and an
elderly-looking
dog, stretched out on the hearth, gently snoring. ‘They’re all keeping their distance,’ Miss Millichip went on, pointing to the window where a row of cats sat, peering in, ‘because of him.’ She gestured at the sleeping dog and then walked over to him. ‘Come on, Nelson. Wakey wakey.’

She knelt down and gently prodded him. ‘Oi, wake up.’

The dog opened an eye and raised his head.

‘Yes, you,’ she said and turned to me. ‘He’s a bit deaf. And his eyesight’s not so good either.’ She slid her arm under his chest and lifted him up. ‘Come on, you daft old thing, let’s get you checked over.’

Once on the kitchen table, I was presented with a terrier whom I suppose you could have called a Jack Russell. But only just. He was small, short-haired, with a solid, stocky body, stumpy, bowed legs, one ear that flopped over, one that stood up, and a tail a foot high that stuck up ramrod straight. There was a large patch of black over his left eye, echoed by one over his left hip; otherwise he was white – which made the black pigmentation encircling each eye like a thick layer of eyeliner all the more startling. The little chap yawned and sat down, turning to blink at me, his eyes milky.