Pets on Parade (Prospect House 2) (26 page)

So, minutes later, having closed the doors to reception and the waiting room behind us in case the fox tried to do another bunk, it was just the two of us, tiptoeing down the corridor towards my consulting room, me clutching the cat catcher, its handle slippery with the sweat that was oozing from my palms, Jodie close behind, clutching the gauntlets her father had shoved in her hands before his hurried departure.

‘This is rather fun, Paul,’ whispered Jodie. ‘On safari in Prospect House.’

I wasn’t so sure, although the close proximity of Crystal’s daughter and my awareness of how I used to fantasise about her mother did act as a pleasant diversion as images of crisp, white blouses, tight, corduroy safari trousers and long, leather whips cracking against firm thighs slipped through my mind, to be replaced by a fox’s fangs and putrid anal secretions the instant we got to the door of the consulting room. We stopped … and cautiously peered in.

The room was empty … but the fox had been in there. The smell and smear of faeces across the floor meant that it didn’t require Major Fitzherbert’s expertise to realise the creature had come and gone.

‘Must have scarpered down there then,’ said Jodie, turning to point down the back corridor, which crossed behind the waiting room to connect with the other consulting room, and off which was the dispensary, a windowless small room, currently in darkness, its door open, an obvious bolt-hole for a frightened fox. ‘Bet you it’s in there,’ Jodie continued as we reached the dispensary door, her lips slightly open, the pink tip of her tongue delicately tracing the outline of her Cupid’s bow. ‘Are you going to go in?’

The invitation, and her lips, were irresistible.

‘Paul, what are you doing?’

I found my tongue was hanging out, so I quickly retracted it to say I was giving her … it … some thought.

‘Well, it’s obviously been in there,’ said Jodie, turning sideways to reach past me, her T-shirt and the words emblazoned on it – ‘I’m always hungry for more’ – fuelling my appetite as they slid past my chest. She wrinkled her nose over my shoulder, her right earlobe only inches from my tongue. Oh, what a pert little nose, just like her mother’s. Oh, what a dainty earlobe, just like …

‘I’ve a feeling it’s in there,’ she whispered hoarsely, her soft breath caressing my right earlobe. ‘What do you think?’

Oh, how could I possibly tell her what I was thinking when her chest was pressed hard up against me, her thighs practically fused against mine in that doorway. ‘Yes, it could well be in there,’ I murmured, easing my pole away from her.

‘I tell you what,’ declared Jodie, still in a low voice. ‘I could get it out for you.’

‘Sorry?’ I said, my mind boggling.

‘The fox, Paul,’ said Jodie giving me a funny look. ‘The room’s too small for both of us to squeeze in, especially with you swinging that pole of yours around.’

Mmm … if only.

She elaborated: ‘If I go in and flush it out, you could lasso it as it comes through the doorway. And if you don’t get it first time … well, no sweat …’ Jodie shrugged. ‘There’s nowhere else for it to go as the doors down the corridor are closed. So you could have another go.’

Oh yes please, I thought.

‘Don’t worry, Paul. I’m quite used to this sort of thing.’

You are? I thought. Wow.

‘Like a bit of a challenge.’

Oh really? Mmm.

‘Used to go round with Mum and Dad on some of their visits. And helped out in the hospital when they were shortstaffed.’

Ah. Yes. Of course.

‘So let’s get on with it then,’ concluded Jodie, her brisk, Crystal-like tone shaking me out of my reverie. With that, she pushed the dispensary door open even wider, and snapped on the light inside to reveal the interior lined with shelves on three sides, all packed with bottled medicines, cartons of pills, boxes of syringes, needles, cotton wool and bandages, while on the floor, in one corner, stood a fridge, alongside which were three rows of sacks, each row three deep, each a different variety of specialised canine dietary feed, the back sack resting with its top touching the wall, the bottom a few centimetres out, leaving a gap big enough for a young fox to slip into.

‘Bet he’s behind those,’ said Jodie in a loud whisper, pointing at the sacks. ‘If I pull out the three nearest the wall he’d probably bolt out the other end. So be ready at the door.’ With that, Jodie pulled on the gauntlets she’d been carrying, stepped over and dragged the first sack forward. Nothing stirred. Then came the second sack. Still nothing. Then the third.

Whoosh. A streak of brown fur bombed out of the end of the row, turned sharply and zoomed towards me. I blindly swept the pole out with its noose open, and pulled at the end of the cord laced through the pole’s centre; I felt the noose tighten as, more by luck than judgement, I saw I’d caught the fox round its neck. So I continued to pull, pushing the pole down, until the fox was pinned in a squirming, foaming ball on the floor.

Jodie whipped round and fell to her knees, grasping the hind-legs together and pushing them out while doing the same with the front ones, stretching the fox’s body.

‘OK, Paul, I’ve got him,’ she said. ‘You can release the noose a touch now. We don’t want to garrotte the little chap.’

I eased the tension on the cord and pulled the cat catcher out of the dispensary, with Jodie, still on her knees, sliding the fox in front of her until she and the fox were both out in the corridor with me.

The young fox lay stretched between her hands, breathing rapidly but otherwise still. Jodie looked up at me. ‘Doesn’t seem to be much wrong with him, if you ask me,’ she said.

I thought the same. Certainly no broken limbs. And when I knelt down beside her and checked him more closely, there didn’t seem to be any superficial injuries either; no open wounds, no abrasions or broken claws. If he had been hit by a car, there was no evidence.

‘Lucky escape then,’ commented Jodie when I finished my examination and sat back resting on my heels. ‘So what now?’

Seeing as the fox hadn’t suffered any obvious injuries, I thought the easiest solution would be to release him.

‘But not around here, surely?’ remarked Jodie when I told her. ‘Might get hit by another car.’

I’d already thought of that and decided the best bet – and here I took a deep breath – would be to re-crate the fox and take it back to Willow Wren; once there, I’d let it go over in the woods. At least then it would have a better chance of survival.

Once I’d re-tensioned the noose, Jodie released her grip on the fox’s legs and I kept the fox pinned to the floor, with one foot firmly on his hindquarters, while she ran down to the ward and quickly returned with the orange box. Gripping the fox’s legs once more, she lifted him into the crate as I let the noose slip off him. Then expertly keeping her right gauntleted hand pressed to his head, she released her grip on his hind-legs and, as I pressed down on the lid, slipped her right hand out before the fox had a chance to escape again. What a performance. It had certainly impressed me. Oh, to be a young fox in her hands. I’d willingly be hounded by her any day.

It meant the fox having to stay cooped up until later that day when I finished early, and could then get back to Willow Wren to release him. Not ideal, but the best I could do under the circumstances.

After the excitement of the chase, it was difficult to switch back into routine appointment mode. I ploughed through the morning’s crop of vaccinations, dirty ears and blocked anal glands in need of expression, followed by the routine spays and castrates, of which there weren’t too many that morning – just as well, as it gave me a chance to catch up with things after the delays caused by the fox’s flying visit.

My mood remained quite buoyant during the afternoon’s session of appointments. If only I’d realised how it was all going to change for the worse that evening. Oh boy.

I was feeling quite happy as I headed over the Downs with the young fox in his crate, stowed in the boot of the car. Mandy had told me she’d fixed a drinking bottle to the side of the crate with its nozzle pushed through one of the slats, and it seemed Foxy had taken a drink from it during the day, so at least he wouldn’t have got too dehydrated prior to me releasing him – something I intended to do as soon as I got home. So, yes, I was feeling happy and even sang along to the car radio, a rare occurrence for me. But that happiness was to be short-lived. Quite brutally snuffed out.

I somehow sensed it was going to happen as soon as I drew up behind Lucy’s car outside the front of Willow Wren. For a start, she was back from her visit to her mother’s earlier than normal. Always a bad omen. She and Margaret didn’t get on too well. And although Lucy went over to Eastbourne at least twice a month, sometimes staying overnight if not on duty, there were often times when she’d return in a foul mood, declaring that her mother was an impossible woman to deal with and she didn’t know why she bothered to put up with her cantankerous ways. ‘Well, she is your mother,’ I’d say. ‘Blood’s thicker than water, and all that …’ And at 52, you’d expect an old person to be set in her ways. But she’s so rude with it, Lucy would fume, vowing not to bother contacting her. ‘Let her phone me,’ she’d say. Then, a few days later, I’d hear her ring through and they’d end up deep in conversation together for hours – usually talking trivia – but Lucy occasionally having to express sympathy for the latest of Margaret’s tales of woe. I had met Margaret once. It was just after Christmas, and Lucy had been made to feel guilty at not having seen her mother over the Christmas period. Margaret had been invited to Christmas lunch at the house of her best friend’s daughter – this was apparently the third year in a row, and it was becoming a bit of a tradition; on Boxing Day, she had gone, with two other long-standing friends, to the sales in Eastbourne and had had a buffet lunch out with them – yet despite that, she managed to convey the feeling to Lucy that she’d been ‘abandoned by her daughter’ over the festive period. Hence the visit over to Westcott two days after Christmas, and I’ve no doubt Margaret saw it as an ideal opportunity to suss me out and see whether I was ‘worthy’ of her daughter.

They say ‘like mother, like daughter’, so I, too, was intrigued to meet this woman and see how Lucy might turn out in 33 years or so – whether I would still be with her or not didn’t come into it. I was just curious. Hmmm. They say curiosity kills the cat; in that case, after my meeting with Margaret, I was dead meat.

I hadn’t been too sure how to approach her. It wasn’t as if I needed to ingratiate myself with her, and rush up like some floppy puppy, hoping to be patted. Did I play it cool? Saunter up to her, stretch out my hand to shake hers, look her directly in the eye and say, ‘Hi. I’m Paul. The guy who’s been doing your daughter these past three months.’ No, of course not. But nevertheless, the inference would be there.

In the event, it was a rather formal introduction, and I shook hands with a lady, somewhat shorter than my girlfriend and certainly broader, with a plumpness that was not soft and natural, but very solid and unwelcoming, encased as it was in a Crimplene, sky-blue trouser suit which hugged and rucked up between the many lumpy folds of her body, and exaggerated a stiff-legged gait, reminiscent of the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. As our palms touched, I felt and smelt the faint odour of perspiration overlaid with cheap talcum powder.

The day was not a success, in part due to Margaret’s decision, conscious or otherwise, to play the lady dowager and make us feel how lucky we were to have her there; it was underlined with a certain cynicism and several cutting remarks about how she’d always been made to feel the underdog by her husband, from whom she was now thankfully divorced, and who had never respected her many virtues, which, during her visit to us, I had difficulty identifying.

So it was with relief I uttered my goodbyes to Margaret with the wish that I hoped to see her again soon – said with fingers crossed behind my back. I mused on whether the traits exhibited during her short time with us were those that could develop in Lucy; and indeed wondered whether I was already witness to the germination of that cutting cynicism in Lucy’s behaviour of late. The events of that evening, when I came home with Foxy, suggested they had indeed developed.

I sat in the car, pondering my next move. The intention had been to leave the crate in the boot while I went in, asked after Lucy’s day, and then request that she helped me carry the crate over the fields to the woods, and release the young fox there. But she’d been so grumpy these past few days, I wondered whether she’d be willing to help. ‘You can but ask, Paul,’ I said to myself, as I climbed out of the car. ‘Can but ask …’ I repeated, as I walked into the hall. ‘Can but …’ The words faded as I was greeted by a very, very long face. Obviously, the visit to Margaret’s had not been one of the better ones.

‘So how was your Mum?’ I ventured to say, watching Lucy noisily emptying the dish-washer I’d loaded and switched on before leaving for work that morning. Crash … a pile of dinner plates slid into a cupboard. Side plates followed in equally noisy fashion. As did the knives and forks tossed into the cutlery drawer. She didn’t have to speak to convey her mood. Oh, no. But when she did, it just verified it. Foul.

After Lucy’s visits to her mother, I always asked out of politeness rather than actual interest, as the only concern I had for Margaret’s wellbeing was the extent to which it affected Lucy’s mood. I’d get a range of replies from a ‘Not too bad’ (Margaret was having one of her good spells) to ‘Bloody awful’ (no elaboration needed). But this evening there was a twist to her response, since, in answer to my enquiry, she retorted grimly, ‘What’s it to you?’

Ouch. Well … it caught me on the hop. What, indeed, was it to me? I decided to ignore the remark and attempt a bit of sympathy – this was necessary, as it was Lucy’s turn to cook supper. ‘I guess Margaret’s been having one of her off days. That’s always difficult for you.’

She saw through that straight away and fired off another salvo: ‘Don’t be so bloody patronising, Paul.’

No. That approach certainly hadn’t worked. Although, fortunately, it didn’t stop her from starting supper. She yanked a ready-meal out of a carrier bag on the counter, slid off its sleeve, briefly glanced at the instructions, picked a knife out of the drawer and then proceeded to stab the plastic cover viciously more than the three to four times I knew was required – I wasn’t a cordon bleu chef of ready-meal microwave cooking for nothing. I watched as she slid the tray into the microwave and slammed the door shut, picking up the sleeve to peer at the instructions again. ‘Five minutes, peel back the plastic, stir, and reheat for a further minute,’ I said quietly. The look she threw my way could have microwaved me to a frazzle in less than 30 seconds.