Meg let the shower kiss down, ease out the last of the shiver she’d had in her spine since the hospital. ‘My cilia — they don’t worry me.’ Feeling cold wasn’t always about being cold — sometimes it was shock. Meg had never considered that before. Perhaps because she had always been slightly more cold than she ought, always mildly outraged.
I will use her name — she did it to me. There might as well be some type of benefit in being able to actually recall the names of faces I’d like to slap.
‘I worry about other things, Laura, but not my cilia.’
‘You worry?’This was free-range organic meat and antioxidant drink to Laura. ‘Worry’s really bad for the skin. And for your immune system. Poor you.’ Her tone — a blend of aggression and superiority, concealed by a hippy drawl — suggested Meg shouldn’t be out and about without a carer.
And I agree. But only I have the right to think that. She doesn’t.
If I pray for her, this will allegedly remove the burden of picturing her being run over by a van. Or the effort of pushing her under the van. But if I do pray for her, I’d only be able to ask God, or the angels, or whoever’s supposed to be listening, to grant that Laura ends up — who cares how — underneath a fucking van.
This is uncharitable. And counterproductive, surely.
But then Laura had been overwhelmed by a passionate fit of sneezing. And that had given Meg her chance to finish with the water, dry herself, dress as if her day was starting and had not offended and then emerge. Naturally, she was then subjected to the sight of a chubby, squeezable irrigation bottle being snuggled into Laura’s left nostril and compressed until — there was a slight wait, possibly while the solution spurted up and around her brain — more suspicious water flowed forth, this time from Laura’s right nostril.
‘It’s simple as anything,’ Laura told her, still irrigating into the sink.
That had to be excessive — it couldn’t take ten minutes to sluice one nostril. She had to have waited until Meg had come out and could watch …
People have to wash their hands in that sink.
‘I’ll think about it.’ And Meg had returned — perhaps overswiftly — to Hector, who had been pacing, huffing and groaning in a small way, out in the corridor. He’d wanted her to hear him and to be sure he was still there.
Hector was currently a handsome creature: long-waisted, primarily white with dots and patches of black. He had a rather narrow white face with black markings — thumbprints and speckles — and black, bewildered ears. Grooming didn’t calm Hector’s ears. They always made him look as if he’d recently heard dreadful news and still hadn’t adjusted.
Hector had perhaps especially taken to Meg — she liked to think so — but he had also made very sure he was generally loved. He had established himself as a permanent feature in the administration building, where he greeted everyone familiar with a desperate wagging of his lower torso, his tail having been docked almost out of existence by some maniac and therefore giving limited scope for self-expression.
Everyone agreed that Hector’s presence settled other dogs as they passed through to the vet, or stepped out for trial visits with prospective owners. And he was pleasant for the humans to have around, either slumped on his rug — he’d seemed to invite the offer of a rug — and breathing gently, or pottering, nudging, leaning, peering up with a confiding, consoling, beseeching expression.
He’s a smooth operator is Hector. One of us will get him a credit card before the month is out. Probably me. If my credit rating was better, it would be me.
Although Hector did spend his nights in a pen amongst the other rescue dogs, his profile had been quietly removed from the gallery of candidates available for rehoming.
I wouldn’t put it past him to have focused on me, because it’s my job to do that kind of thing.
The other dogs continued to be, ‘Donny: a placid and patient boy, suitable for a family with young children,’ and ‘Tosh: he keeps us all laughing with his antics,’ or ‘Daisy: a loving dog who would need alone time to be introduced slowly at first.’ And so on.
The and so on involved not only dogs, but cats, rabbits, gerbils, goats, even, six battery hens. These were difficult times and difficult times made pets untenable and so GFH — the Gartcosh that wasn’t, the farm that wasn’t, the home that wasn’t; like a riddle or a fairy tale of some kind — was fuller than ever with small lives it had pledged not to destroy (unless they were unhealthy) but which it increasingly feared it could not accommodate.
There’s nowhere to put them. Freddy the goat enjoys having more goats around, but they eat like a herd of goats might be expected to and there’s one donkey and another on the way — there’s not a lot of space for new pens, or new buildings. And even less money to meet more need.
It’s like in World War II, people turned out their animals back then as welclass="underline" they dumped them, or murdered them, and this is that again. There were feral cats in shoals on Clapham Common. Hundreds of thousands of hearts being stopped and trusts broken. This is like that again. It will be like that again.
Meg knew the loss of pets hadn’t been the worst thing about the war, but it was still vile in its own way and shouldn’t be replaying in peacetime. There shouldn’t be families queuing up for clothing handouts and tinned goods, as if they’d been blitzed, and no one should have to abandon or harm any type of domestic friend.
Certain individuals take to it, though — cruelty — and would enjoy it at any time.
Somebody brought in a greyhound last week with both its front legs broken. Ditched by a road, a sandy-coloured greyhound, they’d found it just thrown out like nothing and by a motorway — not a road, somewhere more unsurvivable than a road. The wounds were infected, infested. There was opened bone.
She didn’t, despite working in a shelter, have much to do with the animals’ welfare, other than indirectly. Meg very rarely met them, rarely saw them when they had no future.
But I was there when they delivered the roadside dog. I saw its face. The eyes. It looked so tired. And it was still trying to do what might please us, but it wasn’t managing. It couldn’t move as it intended any more.
Meg was an office person. Insulated. When she’d come in to talk about the job and was all nervous at the interview, she’d nonetheless been insistent about that. It was a risk, getting emphatic, but she’d written a script out for what she should say, if and when she met them at GFH, and she’d semi-learned it so she’d have confidence and that meant she could be calm and straight with them. It turned out they quite understood her reasons for wanting to be boxed away. Honesty could backfire, but in this case it hadn’t. They liked dented creatures at GFH. They’d hired her. Mr Davis had hired her. She was expected to work for twenty hours a week — which was, conveniently, both all GFH could give her and all that she could take.
They put the greyhound down, which it would have understood as going to sleep. The process would have felt like resting and being offered kindness and the end of pain and wouldn’t have troubled it.
I was the one who was troubled: seeing it try to stand. And I was troubled by imagining somebody breaking its legs, either before or after putting it into a car, or into something, putting it into the boot of a car, the back of a Land Rover, a van, crippling it and then chucking it away.