Trust Me, I'm a Vet (2 page)

‘Cheryl and her sister, Miriam, breed Persian cats,’ Emma explains when Cheryl drifts away to greet more customers, two young families of tourists, or grockles as they’re known in this part of the world. ‘Cheryl and the Fox-Giffords are welcome to each other.’ I know there’s no love lost between Emma and Talyton Manor Vets, but I’m still surprised at the venom in her voice when she talks about them. The Fox-Giffords were openly hostile when Emma’s practice first opened, but I had the impression things had calmed down since then. Obviously not. ‘I hope they don’t start throwing their weight around again,’ Emma goes on. ‘If they start accusing you of pinching their clients and undercutting their fees, just ignore them. Don’t get involved.’

‘I haven’t said I’ll do it yet,’ I point out gently. Part of me wants to do it for Emma’s sake. Part of me wants to stay well out of it. I have no desire to get involved in some silly feud between competing practices. The job can be stressful enough without that kind of complication.

‘Excuse me.’ Emma pulls a mobile out of her bag – from the ringtone, I’m almost expecting one of those old-fashioned Bakelite telephones, but it’s a blue slimline model – and answers it with, ‘Otter House Veterinary Clinic. Emma speaking. How can I help?’ She listens, chewing one of her fingernails down to the quick, and I think how typical it is of her to be so busy looking after everyone else that she forgets to look after herself.

‘I’ll meet you at the surgery,’ she says, ending the conversation and tucking her mobile back into her bag, along with a packet of aspirin which fell out with it when she took the call. ‘It’s an RTA – I’ve got to go.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘You don’t have to . . .’

I grab my blazer off the back of the chair, a cropped number in citrine which I fling over my tunic and skinny jeans, an outfit that might be considered by the residents of Talyton St George as outlandish rather than the latest trend. Emma never has had much fashion sense – what’s left seems to have become mired in an over-attachment to soft lambswool sweaters and timeless navy skirts. She looks like a county cricketer’s wife on her way to make afternoon tea at the pavilion, not a young and savvy professional. I’m not being mean – she needs help and, if I’m going to be the one to do it, I guess I’d better see what I’d be letting myself in for.

I take out my purse, but Emma gets there first.

‘It’s my treat,’ she says, leaving some cash on the table before we hurry back along Fore Street and turn up the drive alongside a smart three-storey Georgian house which is rendered the same colour as the clotted cream I had with scones.

‘The client – the one whose dog’s been run over – he’s the chap who bought the Talymill Inn a year or so back, an ex-policeman. He was in the Met,’ Emma says, unlocking one of the double glass doors to the modern conservatory-like extension at the side of the building. ‘The patient’s an ex-police dog.’

There’s a sign to the right: Otter House Small Animal Veterinary Clinic, dark blue lettering on white, with a logo of an otter, surgery hours and a telephone number. Beneath that is a brass plaque engraved: Emma Kendall MA Vet MB MRCVS.

I follow her into Reception. It’s a while since I was last here and the whole area has been redecorated. It’s very blue: royal blue chairs; pale blue walls; a blue-grey non-slip, easy-clean floor. And as if there isn’t already enough blue (Emma’s favourite colour, as I now remember), the noticeboard and posters – three seascapes – have navy frames. I barely have time to take in any more because a man in his fifties has come staggering through to join us. He’s well-built with a fair-sized paunch and has gone for the shaved rather than the comb-over look to disguise the fact that he’s bald on top. He carries a big, old dog in his arms.

‘This way.’ Emma shows him straight through to the consulting room. ‘Stick him on the table.’ I follow and close the door behind us. Emma grabs a stethoscope and gives the dog, a German shepherd with a belly to rival any fat fighter’s and the distinctive smell of hot dog, earwax, Lynx and stale beer, a quick once-over. ‘I’m very sorry – Mr Taylor, isn’t it?’

The dog struggles to sit up, panting for air and whimpering in pain.

‘It’s Clive. And this is Robbie. It’s my stupid fault. I wasn’t watching out for him.’ He shudders. ‘One minute he was at my feet, the next he was in the middle of the road underneath a bloody great tractor.’ He has an East London accent. His shirt and jeans are smeared with blood and, like the dog, he appears to be in shock.

‘I’m sorry,’ Emma says, ‘but I don’t think he’s going to make it. Robbie’s bleeding internally – his gums are very pale.’ She raises the dog’s lip to prove her point.

‘You must be able to do something.’ Clive’s voice tremors. ‘You have to.’

‘He’ll die if I don’t operate.’ The ticking of the clock above the door seems to grow louder, more insistent, as Emma continues, ‘And very likely, he’ll die if I do.’

While Emma’s waiting for Clive to absorb this information, I reach out and stroke Robbie’s head, discovering a crinkled ear and a scar to match a longer one on his chest. He turns his eyes towards me and somewhere behind his glazed grey pupils, I catch sight of the dog he once was and perhaps still is. A fighter.

‘I want you to give it a go.’ Clive twists a worn leather lead tight around his fist. ‘Can I wait?’

‘It could take some time,’ Emma says. ‘A couple of hours, maybe more.’

‘Now I feel really guilty because I’ve got to get back to the pub,’ Clive says.

‘I’ll call you as soon as I have any news,’ Emma promises.

‘Thanks, Emma. Please, do what you can. I don’t care how much it costs. He means everything to me . . .’

‘No pressure then,’ I say once Clive has left, having signed the consent form and given Robbie one last hug in the sorry knowledge that it could be the very last time he sees him.

Emma smiles ruefully.

‘I think Clive’s right though,’ I say. ‘I’d want to give him a chance if he was my dog.’

Within minutes, we’re in theatre. Emma stands opposite me, scrubbed, gowned and gloved. On the operating table between us lies Robbie, belly up and almost completely hidden under blue cotton drapes. His tongue lolls out of his mouth alongside the ET tube, which delivers oxygen and anaesthetic to his lungs. Fluid pours at speed from a bag hanging from the drip-stand, down a tube and into a vein in his front leg.

‘How’s he doing, Maz?’ Emma’s theatre cap is riding up her forehead, exposing the roots of her hair, and her eyes peer out anxiously above her surgical mask.

‘Not great.’ I check and recheck the tension in the dog’s jaw to assess the depth of his anaesthetic-induced slumber. ‘I don’t think he’s going to leap off the table any time soon.’

I watch as Emma picks up a scalpel and uses it to cut a line through the skin over the dog’s belly, then snips right through with forceps and scissors, releasing a gush of blood, a coil of gut and even more blood.

‘I’ll need more swabs,’ she says calmly.

‘How many?’

‘As many as we’ve got.’

I rip open a couple of packets of gauze swabs and tip them out onto the instrument tray on the stand. Emma uses a fistful to dab at the blood. Sweat begins to form in beads across her forehead. I watch her bite her lower lip as she concentrates on finding the source of the bleeding. If anyone can save Robbie, she can.

‘What do you think?’ Emma sticks the end of a suction tube into the dog’s belly. I flick the switch.

‘That it doesn’t look like a good place to lose a contact lens,’ I say lightly, although deep down my confidence is waning the more the scene resembles something from
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

‘Ah, I’ve found it,’ Emma mutters. Her voice cuts through the sound of blood spattering around the inside of the suction bottle. ‘It’s the spleen – it’s ruptured.’

A greasy, metallic scent fills my nostrils and my hands grow hot with panic. I watch the blood from Robbie’s belly trickling down Emma’s plastic apron and into her Crocs, while his pulse fades to a barely perceptible flicker beneath my fingers.

‘Emma, I can’t get a pulse.’ Using a stethoscope, I try for a heartbeat instead. It’s very faint, as if I’m listening to it with cotton wool stuffed in my ears. ‘I think we’re losing him.’

‘No, we aren’t,’ Emma says fiercely, and she’s right, we can’t let him die on us now.

Recalling the look in Robbie’s half-blind eyes, and the sob that rose in Clive’s throat as he held him, I summon all my resources.

‘Come on, old boy, you’ll have to do better than this,’ I mutter as I cut the anaesthetic, leaving Robbie on oxygen alone to support his vital organs, and fix up a second drip to run in more fluid. I guess in an ideal world we’d have plumped for a blood transfusion, but there isn’t time for that. Gradually – it seems like hours, but it’s only minutes – Robbie’s pulse begins to strengthen. It isn’t great, but it’s probably as good as we’re going to get, considering the circumstances.

Emma continues to operate, and a while later the dog’s spleen lies on an instrument tray – a dark and swollen mass, like offal on a butcher’s slab – bristling with every pair of artery forceps I could lay my hands on. To our relief, Robbie has come through, and is now snoring in one of the kennels.

‘I’ll make a start on the clearing up,’ I offer as Emma finishes writing up the notes and clips the board to the front of the kennel.

‘Oh no you won’t.’ Emma pulls off her gown. ‘You’ve done more than enough already. When I asked you down for the weekend, I didn’t intend you to end up working.’

‘It’s been a bit of a busman’s holiday,’ I admit, ‘but I don’t mind at all.’ I’m used to it. You never know when you’re going to be called upon – it’s a hazard of the job. I thought Emma was used to it too, but I’m not sure she’s coping with the demands of running her own solo practice and being on call 24/7.

‘I don’t know about you, but I could do with a gin and tonic after that,’ Emma says cheerfully as she grabs the phone. ‘We’ll have one with dinner later.’

I catch sight of my reflection in the silvery-steel lining of the cage above Robbie’s kennel and run my fingers through my blonde hair, half listening as Emma talks through the list of potential post-op complications with Clive.

‘It’s still touch and go though,’ she adds at the end of the conversation. ‘I’ll call you again in an hour or so.’

‘Now, where were we?’ she says, as we settle on the sofa in the staffroom with a welcome cup of tea, leaving the door propped open so we can keep an eye on Robbie. ‘When do you have to leave Crossways?’

‘In a couple of weeks, when I’ve worked out my notice.’ Two weeks? The realisation that I’ll be leaving Crossways so soon, the place I’ve called home for the past five years, hits me in the chest. It’s my own fault though. I went and lost my job – OK, I jumped before I was pushed. I broke one of the cardinal rules of the workplace – never fall for a colleague, especially one who’s recently divorced. When it all went wrong, I decided I wasn’t staying to have my nose rubbed in it.

‘I’m really sorry it didn’t work out, Maz.’ Emma takes off her theatre cap and ruffles her hair. ‘Mike seemed like such a nice guy.’

‘They always do at first,’ I say. Mike owns Crossways Vets in south-west London. Charismatic, successful and good-looking with the most amazing brown eyes. I really thought he was the one. He was clever and dedicated too, managing to mix working in a practice with some research work at the Royal Vet College, which might explain in part why his marriage fell apart.

He’d been divorced for just a few months when I started work there, and I admired him for admitting the almost instant attraction between us, while wanting to hold back for his ex-wife’s sake. Perhaps that’s what made it so exciting, the frisson of Mike’s arm brushing against mine as he showed me the latest techniques for ligament repair in theatre, then the snatched kisses in the consulting room, before he announced to the rest of the staff that we were a couple. Funnily enough, they didn’t seem surprised.

We moved in together and started making plans for me to buy into the partnership with him. We had four and a half blissful years together. Until he realised he was still in love with his ex-wife.

‘I’m going to find the next couple of weeks pretty humiliating, what with the nurses gossiping in the staffroom and Mike going around the practice singing like he’s James Blunt. He always sings when he’s happy . . .’ Robbie lets out a deep and noisy sigh from his kennel, matching my own sigh of regret. I try to shrug it off as I watch Emma top up Robbie’s pain relief with an injection, but I can’t – there’s nothing that can deal with the pain of rejection. ‘I’ll get over it,’ I say, the words rasping out of my throat. ‘My heart isn’t broken this time, just bruised.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ says Emma.

‘Mike wasn’t anything special,’ I reaffirm, but I know I’m lying to myself and Emma can tell too. ‘He had a hairy back – it was like nuzzling a shaggy dog.’ I wrinkle my nose at the thought. ‘And he was a bit of a geek. And he liked playing golf. And he was a faithless piece of sh—’ I stop abruptly. No point in getting wound up all over again. He isn’t worth it. ‘Men, they’re all the same,’ I say.

‘Ben excepted,’ Emma replies, glancing towards her wedding ring, a simple but weighty gold band, which she wears on a chain around her neck.

‘Ben excepted,’ I say contritely.

‘He’s my rock.’ Emma smiles, and I feel a twinge of envy that she’s been so lucky in love and I haven’t. ‘In fact, it’s partly for Ben’s sake that I’m asking this enormous favour of you. We’re planning to take six months out to travel – you know he’s got all those relations in Australia.’