Chapter 5
Chapter Five
T he screaming that was coming from the surgery waiting room was chilling. Like something straight out of a horror film, the sort of noise that raised all the hairs on the back of your neck and sent an involuntary shiver down your spine. And it was loud. Really, really loud.
“Hello, Mrs Ryan. Bentley.” I crouched next to the ginger and white cavalier King Charles spaniel and the screaming stopped instantly, his expression turning ecstatic as he panted and wriggled his way onto my lap with delight. “Let’s get you seen to, shall we?”
I carried his obese little body along the corridor and into my consulting room, his decidedly prim owner following in our wake. I murmured soft words into his floppy ears, rubbing my fingers against the silky fur as he grunted in pleasure, his eyes partially closed.
“I don’t know why he makes such a fuss in the waiting room.” Bustling in and closing the door behind her, Mrs Ryan shifted her designer handbag onto her shoulder and unclipped the lead from Bentley’s collar as he settled onto the table. “He screams when anyone he doesn’t know tries to touch him or if we go anywhere new. It’s rather embarrassing, actually. Is there something physically wrong with him?”
Taking the stethoscope from around my neck, I raised my eyebrows as I looked at her, and was met with a stern and matronly expression, so I continued my examination in silence for a moment, avoiding her gaze while trying to keep my features impassive.
“No, I don’t think he’s got anything physically wrong with him. I think maybe he’s just anxious, Mrs Ryan. Does he have a favourite toy?”
“Yes. A rather tatty tennis ball, but I won’t take it out of the house. It’s disgusting.” She wrinkled her nose, creasing her immaculately made-up face and causing deep lines to form around her pouty pink mouth.
“I see. Why don’t you keep this ball with you, in your handbag, and offer it to him whenever he starts to get worked up.”
“I don’t see what good it will do.” Mrs Ryan eyed me sceptically, patting her obviously expensive handbag protectively, while I administered Bentley’s annual vaccination and gave his portly little frame a quick once-over.
“Anxiety in dogs often comes from the owner.” I couldn’t help but notice her horrified little gasp, but I ploughed on regardless, keen to get her out of the door as fast as possible now. “That’s his vaccination all done for another year, Mrs Ryan, but he is still horribly overweight so we do need to reassess what you’re feeding him.”
The grossly obese dog panted and grinned up at me from the examination table, pushing his head against my hand for more stroking, seemingly very relaxed in my presence.
“But I don’t give him very much as it is, do I, darling?” Mrs Ryan crooned at her dog, her slight side-eye in my direction alerting me to yet more animosity.
I considered the old lady in front of me carefully. It was quite clear that she did give this dog too much food and too little exercise, but how to broach this in a sensitive and tactful way? This was the most difficult thing about my job, and something that I struggled with every day. Plus, I was probably already on the back foot with my anxiety comment, so this might be a case of too little too late.
Shit.
“You must be feeding him the wrong type of food then. Have you been sticking to the prescription diet I ordered for you?”
“Oh, Bentley won’t eat that awful stuff, Dr Havens. It smells like old socks!”
“Right.” I knew I was fighting a losing battle here. “How about we try a bit longer with it, and don’t give him anything else if he doesn’t eat it?”
“Let him starve?”
She was horrified, which suggested to me that she was giving him all sorts of other things rather than the light dog food he was supposed to be eating.
“We could try a different brand.”
“Well…” Her resistance was palpable, her demeanour most definitely a bit put out.
“There are other flavours to try – turkey, perhaps?” I suggested, starting to feel a bit desperate here.
“We could do, I suppose,” Mrs Ryan begrudgingly agreed, and I decided to leap on this small concession.
“Excellent. I’ll look up some alternatives and ask Betsy, our brilliant veterinary nurse, to get some in. You’ll need to bring him to her weigh-in clinic once a month to see how he’s doing. It’s important that you bring him along, Mrs Ryan, no excuses. It’s his health at stake here.” There. A healthy dose of owner guilt should help things along.
Mrs Ryan looked doubtful, but I was already ushering her out of the consulting room. She was my last client in this evening’s surgery and I was ready for my dinner and a sit down after a very busy day.
“Ok. Well, if you’re sure?”
“Yes, totally sure. We’ll be in touch, and make sure you keep his ball with you!” I replied brightly, rearranging my face into what I hoped was a genuine smile, and promptly closed the door behind her.
I typed up Bentley’s notes and shut the computer down, but when the door opened again, my boss and the practice owner, Giles, appeared, standing awkwardly behind the consulting table. A little groan of annoyance accidentally slipped from my mouth and he twitched, looked briefly at me, and then down at the floor, his countenance exhibiting extreme discomfort.
Giles was stout, about my height, and had a crop of thick, unruly greying hair. He was a particularly rosy-cheeked and cheerful individual, and the older female clients loved him. But right now, he looked like he was about to euthanise his favourite labrador. This was bad.
“I’ve just seen Mrs Ryan outside, Hannah.”
“Yes?”
He shifted uncomfortably on his feet again. “She said that you were a bit dismissive of Bentley’s needs. And, um, well, rude…”
Urgh.
I thought I’d tried really hard this time. “I just suggested that she needs to change his diet because as you can see, he is grossly obese.”
Giles sighed and scratched his head. “I know that, and you know that, but to Mrs Ryan, Bentley is her entire world and she doesn’t want to be made to feel as though she’s not doing her best.”
“Right.”
“Plus, telling her that she makes her dog anxious is a bit insensitive,” he said with a wince.
“Got it.”
“Hannah, you are an extremely well-qualified vet and an exceptional clinician, but if you’re going to stay in first-opinion practice, you need to work on your bedside manner.”
Giles was starting to back away from me ever so slightly.
“I see.”
When I’d left my research position at the referral practice in the vet school at Bristol, I’d thought it would be easy to step into general practice – less pressure, less stress, and the perfect antidote to get over my failed love life and doomed academic aspirations.
Seems I was wrong.
“You’re sometimes a bit, well, prickly. Perhaps you could work on that side of things?” he added, cringing even more.
“Right,” I said again.
Giles scratched his head, his go-to gesture in times of extreme awkwardness, and tapped his fingers on the top of his hair absently. He shot me an uneasy tight-lipped smile. “Excellent. Ok, good to have had such a productive chat. Excellent. Brilliant. Thanks.”
And with that, he practically ran from the consulting room as if being chased by a marauding stampede of bullocks, while I stared after him trying to compute my way through the thinly veiled verbal warning with which I had just been issued.
Betsy came bustling in from the dispensary, wiping down the table and raising her large dark brown eyes to look at me, a mixture of apology and amusement in her expression. I wondered if she’d overheard Giles’s comments.
“Do you think I’m prickly?” I asked her.
“Noooo. No,” she said, not quite meeting my gaze. “Perhaps a bit?”
“Tell me the truth. I can handle it.”
“Truthfully? You’re about as prickly as a hedgehog in a blackberry bush.”
“Oh.”
Dammit.
The best thing about returning to Chipping-on-the-Water had been reconnecting with Betsy Okoro, the only true friend I’d ever had at school. Her personality was the exact opposite of mine. She was always smiling and joking. A force to be reckoned with, a soul so beautiful and vibrant that she immediately swept you up with her zest for life. Growing up in a small Cotswolds town had not been easy for her, and she’d worked hard to overcome the kind of prejudice and difficulties that I would never know, yet she was the most positive person I’d ever met. We’d kept in touch over social media since leaving school, and it was a Facebook post that she’d shared that had alerted me to the position here at the practice, and she’d encouraged me to apply. And, if I’m being honest, probably strong-armed Giles into giving me the job.
Today, her hair was styled in corn rows and bleached at the ends, and her trendy make-up and oversized glasses made her appear effortlessly cool and glamorous, even in her nurse’s tunic and shapeless uniform trousers. Compassionate and excellent with the clients, while clinically capable and caring with the variety of animals we dealt with on a daily basis, she was the best veterinary nurse that I’d ever worked with, and my most loyal and trusted confidante. I knew I could always rely on her in every way, especially her ability to tell me the absolute truth.
“By the way, there’s an emergency in the waiting room and Giles has said you’ll deal with it.” As she went out to call the emergency in, she turned and added, conspiratorially, “And you’ll never believe who it is, Hannah.”
“Who is it?”
“I’ll let it be a little surprise for you.”
“Er, thanks. I hate surprises.”
“I know,” she laughed evilly.
“Are you heading out now?”
“Yes, unless you need anything?”
“No, I’ll manage. See you tomorrow.”
She gave a little wave and headed down the corridor to the waiting room. A few moments later I heard the door open again, just as the computer finished booting back up.
“Ah, thank God you’re here, Hannah.”
Nope, absolutely bloody no. Nope, crapping-well bloody nope.
I didn’t even turn around. It had been almost a week since the bike incident, and I’d only just managed to find my inner equilibrium again.
“Teddy,” I said with a sigh, finally glancing in his direction.
“I just found it like this, stuck in the outside loo.” He sounded breathless and desperate.
Teddy was covered in dust and dirt, only the impression of having worn some goggles leaving any hint of his normal skin colour visible around his panic-stricken eyes. He was wearing a tight grey T-shirt and ripped jeans that were also caked in dust.
In his arms was a wide-eyed and beautiful tortoiseshell cat.
“Like what? Is this your cat?”
“No! I don’t have a cat. It’s got a big bloody lump on its head, Hannah. I think it might be dying,” he whispered dramatically.
“Ok, well put her on the table and I’ll have a look,” I replied, barely repressing a tut at his overly theatrical assessment of things.
The cat was surprisingly calm and sat quietly while I performed a quick examination of her vital signs. There was a large sticky, weepy sore behind her ear, and a huge bulbous bubble of infection straining the skin.
“She’s got an abscess, likely from scrapping with another cat. She’s not dying, Teddy.”
“Oh thank God. Can you treat her?”
“Yes, but you’ll have to help me by holding her,” I replied, putting on some gloves and gathering swabs and warm water in a stainless steel kidney-shaped bowl.
Teddy stepped forwards and gingerly put his hands around the cat’s middle.
“She’s probably not going to like this so, you know, hang on, ok?” Our faces were quite close together as we both leant over the examination table and near to the cat.
“Ok,” he whispered.
His blue eyes were stormy with worry, his stance rigid and tense, while my own body was bamboozled, yet again, by his intoxicating maleness and charisma, which was hitting me like a sledgehammer to the chest.
Concentrating all my effort on the cat and blocking Teddy out for a moment, I started to ease the oozing scab from the lump behind the cat’s ear with a dampened swab, unmatting the sticky fur and looking for the entry wound. Suddenly the abscess ruptured like a mini volcano, the pressure of the infection exploding upwards in a thin jet, and I quickly whipped my head away to avoid being hit in the face by this impressive pus fountain.
“Holy-mother-of-all-that-is-shitting-well-holy!” Teddy yelled, leaping backwards and dropping his hold on the cat. “What the actual fuck even is that?!”
His pallor was a little green, even beneath the layer of dust, while the cat decided to make a break for it, yellowy pus and blood oozing like a river down her neck.
“Bloody hell, Teddy! You had one job – hold the cat!” I reached under the table and retrieved the unimpressed feline, placing her back on the rubberised surface.
“What is that smell?” he whispered, his eyes tightly shut, body bent double, leaning against the wall in the corner, hands on his knees. He made a faint gurgling, groaning sound.
“It’s the infection – sometimes they get a bit whiffy. Ted, can you come back over here and help me, please?”
“I’m sorry, but I feel a bit unwell, Hannah.”
“Don’t you chuffing well faint on me. Get over here and hold the sodding cat,” I ordered sternly. I wondered if I should call Betsy and get her to come back in, even though she’d probably already be halfway across town by now.
His eyes snapped open, comically wide, and he shakily walked over to the table again, putting his hands back around the cat but purposefully looking at the ceiling. He was breathing unsteadily, his lips moving silently. Was he counting?
“What are you doing?”
“Calculus in my head. It helps to keep me calm.”
“Who’s the geek now?” I muttered under my breath as I worked quickly to tidy up the wound and extricate as much pus as possible before flushing it with sterile saline and administering some pain relief to make her feel better.
“I’ll grab some antibiotics. You’ll need to give them to her every day and try and keep the wound open and clean so it drains,” I said, typing into the computer and printing out a label.
“I have to do what? Can’t you just keep her here, in the hospital, and do it?” he replied, horrified.
“Not really. It’s not life threatening, Teddy.”
“Can’t you have her? I’m just not great with animals. Or blood. Or large amounts of oozing gunky shit. Or smells.”
I considered him steadily. “Let’s see if she’s got a microchip. We might be able to find her owner and reunite them.”
“Yes! Yes, let’s do that!” Teddy was still gripping the cat quite tightly and she let out a little protesting yowl. But when the microchip reader didn’t pick up anything, we both slumped our shoulders in disappointment.
“Fine, I’ll keep her here in my flat for a couple of days. But you have to try and find her owner, agreed?” He nodded. “If you can’t find anyone, I’ll give the cat shelter a ring and they can rehome her, ok?”
“Ok. They won’t, you know…” He gave the universal sign of death by running his finger across his throat, before giving the cat a concerned look as if she might know what we were talking about. “Will they?”
“They’ll try and find a new home for her first. She’s pretty and fairly friendly, so I’m sure they’ll find someone.”
Teddy was now absently tickling the chin of the cat, a loud rumbling purr building up inside her body while she closed her eyes in total bliss.
“She likes you. You should keep her.”
“Er, no. My place is a building site – no good for a cat,” he protested, before adding softly (as if we were naming our firstborn child), “What should we call her?”
“I’ve logged her as ‘Fraser’ in the system,” I said, cleaning up the consulting table and chucking the used swabs into the clinical waste bin.
“You can’t call a girl cat Fraser,” Teddy admonished, and the tortoiseshell minx purred loudly as he crooned softly down at her.
“What do you suggest?”
“How about Hannah?”
“Hannah Fraser?”
“It has a ring to it, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, like a death knell, Ted,” I muttered, and he laughed, the deep luxuriant sound causing a ripple in my mind. I smiled in return. We stared at each other until I dropped my head away to look in the cupboard for a plastic collar to stop the cat scratching at her wound.
“It’s nice when you smile, Hannah,” Teddy murmured, almost tenderly, from somewhere above my head.
I’d lost count of the number of times I’d been told to smile more, or how much better I’d look if I just smiled. And when the universally awful phrase of “Smile – it might never happen” , was uttered in my presence, I could feel myself getting more than a little bit murdery.
“Do not come up with some ill-thought-out simile, Teddy, whatever you do.”
“Would I?”
“Yes, you really would.” Straightening, I gave him a pointed look. “We’re not calling her Hannah. How about Tramp, as she has no fixed abode?”
“No!” He looked aghast.
“Lady?”
“Fine.”
“Right, I’m starving and I should get her ladyship upstairs. You can pay your bill with Jenny on reception.”
“Ok, I can do that. But why don’t I help you get her settled and then buy you dinner in the pub?”
I stared blankly at him for a moment.
“As a thank-you for dealing with my first highly traumatic veterinary emergency, and to apologise for being a crap cat wrangler,” Teddy added. His smile was coy, seductive, enticing. Dangerous.
“You don’t have to do that,” I responded uncomfortably, twitching. I was itching to run away.
“I know, but I’d like to. Plus, I’m really hoping that I’ll be able to bribe you into not telling anyone that I nearly passed out in your consulting room.”
It was tempting. I had a frozen macaroni cheese ready meal waiting for me, but an awkward, intimate dinner with Teddy Fraser was most definitely the last thing I needed right now.
“Come on, Hannah. I’m not that bad. I can be charming, and I’m pretty funny,” he coaxed. “I promise not to liken you to any dubious professions and I’ll be on my best behaviour, Scout’s honour.”
He did the Scout Association salute. I remained mute.
“I’ll pay. You can have whatever you want…” he added in a persuasive whisper.
“Ok, fine, but I’m on call tonight so I may have to dash off if I get called out,” I replied, my resolve weakening at his genuine smile, and the promise of something other than a tasteless pasta dinner for one.
“Great. Let’s get Lady Fraser into your flat then.” He grinned and scooped the cat off the table, being careful to keep his face away from her still slightly oozy ear.
Teddy followed me through the surgery and into the back hallway, past the operating theatre, and outside to the entrance and stairs that led to my private flat. It was small and poky, and it looked out over the surgery car park and to the orchard of The Old Rectory that was nestled just in view from my windows.
“Ah, now I know why you want to know what I’m doing with my place. You overlook it. I can probably wave to you from my bedroom window,” Teddy said, putting the cat on the floor.
I fitted the cone of shame around Lady’s neck to stop her scratching and placed food, water, and a litter tray in the kitchen area, draping a couple of old towels on the two armchairs that furnished my sparse living space.
“It’s a beautiful old house, Teddy. I hope you’re not going to do anything hideous to it.”
“I do have some taste, Hannah, so, no, I’m not going to do anything hideous to it,” he said grumpily. “I’m just trying to live in it as I do it, but it’s a bit of a wreck. I don’t even have consistent hot running water yet.” He paused and gave me a sly glance. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance I could shower here? I could nip home and get a change of clothes and pop back? Please?” he begged, dropping to one knee in front of me and clasping my hands. “Otherwise, I have to wash in an old tin bath tub in the garden with cold water from the hosepipe.”
A frown wrinkled down my forehead, encompassing my whole face, like a disapproving, cutaneous Mexican wave.
“In fact,” he said standing up and ushering me to the window, “if you look over there, you can see my temporary bathroom from here.” He winked. “You don’t want to have to witness me getting naked and freezing my balls off right in front of you now, do you?”
He was like some romance novel anti-hero. An actual real-life dastardly duke or villainous viscount, teasing and charming his way through life. But I wouldn’t fall for this. He could take a running jump if he thought I was going to let him use my shower…
“All right, fine, help yourself.” My mouth formed the words without permission from my brain. Which really was rather excellent.
“Great, I’ll just be a couple of minutes. You’re the best!” Jumping up he kissed me gently, his beard grazing my cheek before he rubbed his nose over my skin. “Oh, sorry, you’ve got a little something on your face.”
Then he winked (again) and raced out of my front door, leaving me and Lady Fraser staring at each other. Curiously, I reached up and ran my fingertips over my face, looking at the plaster dust that he had just marked me with.
“This is such a bad idea, isn’t it?”
And with a gentle chirrup, the dainty little cat disappeared off to make herself comfy in my bedroom.