15 #3
Essie looks at her, having delivered many lectures about diet culture over the years.
‘Stop with the accusing glances,’ says Janey. ‘You’ll have a fifty-year-old metabolism yourself one day. You’ll need to know these things.’
The noise comes again and Janey heads towards the stairwell. ‘Please not bats, please not bats,’ she says. Essie quickly ties her hair up in a bun. Dwight turns the torch on on his phone. All of them nervous, they advance slowly up the stairs, quietly.
When Essie gets to the top and peers in – there is light streaming in from missing slates on the roof; it is genuinely incredible Mrs MacAleese lived here for so long – she isn’t sure at first what she’s looking at.
Her brain, ludicrously, thinks it is a dragon curled up in a corner, with wings sticking out of it. This makes no sense at all.
‘Oh, my goodness, poor lamb,’ says Janey suddenly, and Essie thinks, that isn’t a lamb! just as her mother bolts forward, across the rickety floors and under the sloping roof.
As her eyes adjust, she realises what it is: a huge dog.
The dog is trembling and groaning, and as they get closer they understand why. Stuck coming out of the dog’s rear end – what Essie had originally thought was a separate appendage – are the closed eyes of a tiny creature.
‘She’s whelping!’ says Janey. ‘Oh, you poor dear. This must be the missing Irish wolfhound! It was on Facebook.’
Dwight pulls out his phone and looks it up.
‘Her name’s . . . Felicity.’ He frowns. ‘That’s a weird name for a dog.’
‘Alright, Dwight, ’ says Essie.
The dog is in distress and wants to twist away but Janey speaks low, comforting words and her tail thumps, just once, on the floor.
‘Mum, you’re an audiologist ; you can’t birth a baby.’
‘Managed two of my own,’ says Janey, still in a sweet, calming singsong voice, moving closer still. ‘Dwight, could you run and see if the vet is about? Essie, feel like giving me a hand?’
‘ No .’
‘Well, is the water still on?’
Dwight nods.
‘Run me some hot.’
‘There’s no hot.’
There is, thankfully, a scrap of pink soap from downstairs, and Janey soaks her hands in the cold water and lathers up as well as she can, before gently getting hold of the tiny creature stuck in the birth canal.
‘Come on, baby,’ she whispers gently, getting as much soap into the canal as possible.
She’s spent enough time with Lish for some of it to rub off, and Al’s birth had been an at-home-at-incredible-speed affair – he’d come careering out like a runaway train and has barely stopped since – so she knows the basics.
Essie can’t help being a bit impressed by her mother’s calmness, as she gently twists the tiny form the right way up and pulls, ever so gently, until with a slither the tiny creature, covered in streaks of blood and goo, finally drops on to the ground.
Essie wouldn’t go near a dog’s vagina in a million years.
Janey is reasonably sure, given she doesn’t know how long it was stuck for, that the puppy will be dead, but Felicity noses round and starts licking the tiny bundle with a sandpapery tongue, great long licks, and to Janey’s surprise and delight, and Essie’s astonishment, the tiny mouth falls open, a little pink tongue appears, and with the tiniest of snorting noises the creature takes its very first breath.
‘No way!’ says Essie, grinning and dashing over. ‘Mum, look!’
And Janey glances at her girl, her darling daughter, delighted and engaged.
‘Watch this,’ she says, moving the bundle down to Felicity’s tummy as, sure enough, the brand-new thing snuffles, eyes tight shuts, its nose in the air, nestling and pushing until it finds and latches on to one of Felicity’s nipples and, after a few moments of snuffling misconnections, finally settles down and starts pulling contentedly, as Felicity continues to lick and lick.
Essie finds she has tears in her eyes.
‘I can’t believe something so disgusting can be so beautiful,’ she says.
Janey smiles. ‘I think you’ve just described womanhood,’ she says, and puts her arm around Essie, squeezing tightly. ‘Now,’ she says to Felicity, who looks tired and unhappy but appears to be heaving again, moving to try to expel something. ‘Dogs don’t have babies in ones, do they?’
By the time Dwight thunders up the stairs with Ahmed the vet, who has been tending to an illegal albino crocodile in Wick and wasn’t best pleased about it, Janey has helped with pup number two, and it looks as if number three is well on its way.
Ahmed smiles.
‘Good midwifery,’ he says, washing his hands. ‘That was a breech. It’s strange such a big dog should have such trouble giving birth. She looks old for a litter.’
He pats her gently, as the last three pups arrive without incident and Felicity keeps up her constant licking routine, despite looking as exhausted as a dog can look, and flopping back on what Janey has finally realised is a mattress.
A mattress that is now good for nothing but being set on fire, but it makes sense that Felicity found her way here.
‘I know this dog,’ says the vet. ‘Mr Meakin looks after her for the big house. He hasn’t been to see me for ante-natal though.’
‘Maybe he didn’t know,’ says Janey. She knows Jack Meakin, a tough, solitary outdoors type. She tries not to think about his dating profile.
‘How could he not know?’ says Essie, who is already, unavoidably, down among the puppies.
Ahmed had warned her to be careful, that mum might be defensive, but in fact Felicity’s tail is beating lazily; she seems very happy to be showing off her new babies.
Ahmed handles them quite casually, stuffing them on to Felicity’s nipples; they form a double decker layer of pups, half grey, half white, all falling all over each other, each one blind to anything but the need to suck.
‘Two boys, four girls,’ says Ahmed. Then he looks at Janey again. ‘You know, if you hadn’t been here and the first had got stuck for much longer, all of these dogs might have died. Felicity included.’
Janey beams with pride. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘And look at them!’
Dwight has found a number for someone to go and knock up Jack Meakin, who, when he arrives, lets out a mighty sigh, after complaining vigorously about how dusty the stairwell is all the way up. Janey thinks he will be thrilled they’ve found his dog, plus VAT. She is completely incorrect about this.
‘Felicity!’ he hollers, even as the dog wags even more to see him. ‘Oh, my God, you absolute slut !’
‘All those years of dog church, completely wasted,’ Janey whispers to Essie, who giggles.
‘You terrible girl,’ Mr Meakin is saying now, shaking his head at the dog, who is desperately excited to see him, but unable to get up, held down by six very busy puppies. ‘I can’t believe you let those dogs do things to you. I guess we’ll never know who the father is.’
Dwight grins. ‘By the colouring, I’d say you want to have a word with some of the Westies.’
As they are just north of the West Highlands, the little West Highland terriers are extremely common around town, mostly called Jock, with the occasional Hamish thrown in for good measure.
‘How?’ says Essie. ‘How does a West Highland terrier have sex with that . . . pit pony... ?’
‘Excuse me?’ says Mr Meakin, whirling round.
The room goes quiet and undoubtedly, everyone is currently completely unable to prevent themselves from picturing it. Essie suddenly thinks she might have hysterics.
‘Aye, there’s a chest of drawers left over there,’ points out Dwight, and at that point it’s too much. All three of them explode laughing.
‘I’m so glad you find it funny,’ says Mr Meakin fiercely. ‘Now I’ve got these puppies to deal with and she’s not even my bloody dog.’ He turns to Ahmed. ‘I mean, what’s the usual procedure.’
Ahmed looks at him with thinly disguised disapproval. ‘The usual procedure,’ he says carefully, ‘is that if you don’t want your bitch to have puppies, you have her safely neutered.’
‘It’s not my dog,’ Jack Meakin says instantly. ‘I’m just minding it.’
‘Well, then, I believe we should probably inform whoever’s dog it is.’
‘Isn’t there a way we could just make this . . . go away?’ he says.
‘No way,’ says Dwight. He had left the room, but reappears, with the bowl filled up with fresh clean water. Felicity laps at it gratefully and Janey feels bad for not remembering how incredibly thirsty breastfeeding makes you.
‘Well, she can’t come home with me, not like this,’ says Mr Meakin.
‘Did you not even notice she was pregnant?’ asks Ahmed, genuinely astonished.
‘She’s a very hairy dog,’ says Mr Meakin ferociously.
There’s a silence, apart from the tiny pants and squeaks of the brand-new babies, and nobody feels like laughing any more.
‘There’s a pound,’ says Ahmed, reluctantly. ‘But they only hold on to them for . . . ’
Janey can’t bear to think of it. ‘Whose dog is this?’ she says.
‘The Thomases’,’ says Mr Meakin. ‘I’m his gardener. I took their dog in when she left.’
‘Well, I think this makes it his problem,’ she says mildly, keen to stop Jack Meakin picking up tiny puppies and drowning them, or whatever it is he has in mind. ‘Can you call them?’
Jack tries, on his aged phone – which, oh, Christ, has Tinder on it, Janey notices in horror. He hadn’t put ‘possible puppy-drowner’ on his profile, that was for sure. But there’s nobody picking up.
‘We’ll go to the house,’ offers Essie, out of the blue. Janey looks at her, and is surprised to see how affected her daughter is. She looks genuinely frantic, terrified that something bad is going to happen to the puppies, and suddenly very young.
Meanwhile Dwight has usefully dug up some old blankets from a back room somewhere, and is tucking Felicity in.
She looks up at him gratefully, tail still thumping.
The puppies have stopped mewling and are either still sucking, blissed out, or fast asleep, making a pile.
Nobody needs to say what’s on everyone’s mind.
‘We’ll go and find the owner,’ says Janey. ‘I’m sure they can sort this out.’
Nobody mentions what happens if they don’t want to sort it out.