But underneath he understands that if he thinks these things, it means there’s no strength there. And only if a tragedy occurred would he know if there was any left at all. How can one wish for cancer? In the coming weeks, it will all haunt him. A voice in him says: this is the simple cowardice that breaks us all eventually; a breaking of the surface strength. When you run out of the things that make you want. When you think of everything, of every other way to change a thing other than taking it head on. He just wishes Kate was better. That she would laugh, or walk unnecessarily in the sun, or simply love him back — which in the end amounts to tolerating what he feels for her. The idea of thirty more years with her… we live too long, he thinks. We’re expected to love too much and too long. He mustn’t be like this, he thinks, he mustn’t let this dark thing take him: this ever-hungry, very close big cloud of not caring anymore, and of not wanting. This is the enemy which must be fought until the end.
__ the Vet
The vet came down the lane in his old van. It always amazed Gareth how such a quiet man could bear the rattling of that van; but then he understood the old vet had a tremendous respect for age. It was as if his still using it, and driving it, kept the van alive. He would not trade it in, and he would mend it when he could. Only when something massive went wrong with it would he give the van away completely. It gave Gareth a great faith in the quiet old vet.
The vet knew what he was like and accepted it. He would have been a doctor, but he knew that eventually the constant questions of people, their need for reasons, would wear him down; he would have to articulate things and explain the things he did, where in reality most of what he did he did from instinct, and animals just accepted this. He blew two short blasts on his horn.
Gwalch, the younger dog, barked and hopped at the vet when he got out of his van. Curly lifted himself heavily onto his feet and his tail wagged passively. A big, loud bee went around. The vet’s eyes settled on the old dog and he smiled at him sadly and fondly and said ‘hey, boy’ very quietly.
The bee went around, and when it went close to the ground it drew up tiny little curls of dust. It was buzzing gently. ‘They think now that bumblebees tread air, like we tread water,’ thought the vet. It went round and round the small place by the door and if you could draw a line out behind it, it would look like a snake, with the same purposeful pattern of moving. ‘They look curious, but they are careful finders of things,’ he thought.
He felt the smallest tickle of something on his skin and had a fleeting smell of soap. Emmy giggled and another roll of bubbles floated out from her wand and over to the old vet. Curly wagged his tail more when he saw Emmy, and started to walk to the vet.
When Emmy heard the van coming down the lane she knew it was him and she had just put her head round the door and seen that her mother was asleep. So she went quietly back out.
‘Mummy is with her headache in bed,’ Emmy said. ‘Dad’s lost a cow.’
‘So you must be in charge,’ he said. And she gave a delighted nod. She thinks the bee looks like a helicopter.
There was more to what she said than beautifully bad grammar. It belied her logic. Since she was very tiny she’d always thought the best thing to do with any pain or worry was to go to bed. Because the thing that hurt you had to go to sleep as well. Then all you had to do was wake up very quietly, so you didn’t wake the bad thing up. Then you got out of bed and left it sleeping, so it didn’t hurt you anymore. Her parents had no choice but to accept it often worked for her, so they didn’t question it too much, but they wished they could believe it too. One thing that had always fascinated Gareth was the way his children came up with things completely by themselves.
‘Have you come to mend Curly?’ she asked.
This hurt the vet a bit and he stumbled for a moment around the different things he should say. Then looking at the girl he just knew he had to be brave with her.
‘I don’t think we can mend him now,’ he said. ‘I think he’s very old.’
‘We should give him a good clean,’ she said.
The dog was by the vet and he stank very badly. The vet could see the wet and shallow bite of the rat on the dog’s foot, pussing and oily. It reminded him of the underneath of a tongue. The stink of the dog was bad. Because he was too weak to hold himself properly he’d messed on himself, and it hung in thick cords from his long fur.
‘We keep giving him a bath with the hose but he just gets dirty again,’ explained Emmy. ‘I think he needs a haircut.’
The dog looked benignly up at the vet, panting happily. Killing the dog would be more difficult for him to do because the dog had not accepted it was time now. He wished that Gareth was there. He respected these people. He respected that they had not asked him to come and kill the dog as soon as it begun to smell; as soon as the grotesque tumour had started to make them feel nauseous each time they saw the dog.
The vet looked down at the bee, which had settled on a dandelion. It had a bright, golden collar and yellow and white patches at the end of its body so it looked proud on the dandelion. If the vet looked more closely he would see it had more body than usual, seemed more armoured, had less of the thick soft fur. He knew they lived in colonies much smaller than honey bees, of around one-hundred and fifty. Drones and workers looked after the solitary queen in a nest under the ground in an old mouse hole, or something like it. They take moss and grass inside it, and build wax cells for the honey and eggs.
If the vet looked more closely at the bee he’d notice it was un-busy, not collecting the bright pollen from the flower into sacks on its legs. It was a cuckoo bee. They look like another bee but they aren’t, and they go into the colony of the bee they look like and kill their queen. Emmy watches the bee a minute. When they lay their own eggs, the host workers look after the cuckoo bee, and because they all die in the winter it is futile. Only the cuckoo bees survive, hibernating through the winter and waking later than the bumblebee queens to give them time to make their nests. But the vet doesn’t notice so much, because he is thinking about the old dog.
‘I’m going to give Curly an injection that will make him sleep,’ he said.
‘Will he wake up?’ asked Emmy, already understanding.
‘No. He won’t wake up,’ said the vet. ‘Do you want to help?’ Curly huffed and snapped his mouth at the bee. When he was younger he used to love to chase bees.
They took the dog to the place where he normally slept in a part of the old milking parlour and lay him down. Curly had followed them and they walked slowly for him. It was excruciating, how full of hope he was. The dog had the look of a thing which loved things utterly and would be forever pleased. He settled down in the hay to sleep.