Asymmetry, page 2
‘Yes,’ I say. My heart gallops with the primal fear most people feel on confronting a snarling wolf, but this is it. I force myself to smile. This is my moment to show I can do the job.
Scott seizes the dog by the collar, getting it in a headlock while I make my observations. There’s not much use trying to take Storm’s temperature while he’s overexcited. I pull on a glove and squeeze some lubricant onto a finger.
‘You finished yet?’ Scott barks over his shoulder at me.
‘Got to check his prostate,’ I reply, seizing the dog’s tail.
As soon as I insert a finger, Storm goes ballistic. It’s all Scott and Tom can do to keep holding him.
‘That’s it, we’re done,’ the Sergeant says.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I haven’t finished.’
‘You bloody well have.’
‘I’m sorry, but this is an entire male dog and he only gets checked once a year. He could die if he’s got a tumour and it’s been missed this time around.’
There’s laughter in the line behind Scott.
Wolf-whistles.
Bestiality jokes.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ the Sergeant says, bending back down to tackle the dog, whose whites are showing around its crazed eyes.
The new vet’s so green.
Going through the motions like she knows what she’s doing, but would she know an abnormality if she felt one?
Let’s just hope she had good teachers that took her out of the lab and into the world. Because you can’t work out what living tissue feels like if you’ve been taught with textbooks and virtual reality any more than a dog from outside the ADF that’s been taught to retrieve mail packages full of drugs can work out not to bring a land mine back to its handler.
When all the dogs are vaccinated, Bradley claps me on the shoulder.
‘Good job, partner,’ he says. ‘We’ve finished early.’
Sergeant Scott comes up and shakes Bradley’s hand.
‘It wasn’t easy or cheap, but we’ve implemented all your recommendations, Brad.’
‘I can tell. The dogs are in excellent condition.’
‘I’d like you to come out and give another talk on first aid in combat situations. We’ve got some new handlers that missed out on the last one.’
‘I noticed. The woman. Nadia? Pretty good, is she?’
Scott turns immediately sour.
‘Women,’ he says, as though I’m not even there. ‘She’ll be knocked up and out of the squad in no time. There’s no point teaching them anything. They’re gone before you know it.’
I take the return ride to the surgery in Bradley’s car.
‘How was that, then?’ he asks, full of good cheer.
‘I don’t think much of Sergeant Scott,’ I say. ‘Tom’s alright.’
‘Give the Sergeant a break,’ Bradley says. ‘He hasn’t been well.’
‘What’s wrong with him? A carrot up his arse?’
‘You could say that. He’s got cancer. An osteosarcoma arising from the fourth vertebra of his tailbone. They can’t excise the tumour and get clean margins without leaving him with permanent faecal incontinence and a high likelihood of recurrent infections.’
‘Oh,’ I say in a small voice.
‘It was picked up on a yearly prostate check. Apparently his GP, a new graduate, missed it the first time around.’
‘What’s going to happen? Will he try surgery anyway?’
‘No. He said he’d rather die with dignity, though I don’t think it’s going to be dignified either way. They were looking at Tom for his replacement, but the kid keeps getting into drunken brawls at the local and being demoted.’
I think: That explains why he hates me. Also, Nadia should be the one to replace Sergeant Scott, but there’s no point even saying that aloud.
It’s never going to happen.
News Flash: The old bastard’s going to kick the bucket.
But I haven’t finished with him yet.
He thinks he’s keeping me back out of spite, because he’s jealous of what I can do. In fact, he’s still got plenty to teach me. A day’s going to come when I’ll want to teach others to train bomb detection dogs. Problem is, nobody but a werewolf has the skill of being able to put images directly into a dog’s mind, to calm them down or stir them up just by thinking at them.
I need to know all of Michael Scott’s little tricks, his devious ways, the things he feels so deeply in his bones that he’s forgotten he ever had to learn them.
I’ve decided to take the chance. He’s dying anyway, right? And if it doesn’t work, well, I’ll tell the others it was an accident. There’s certainly no love lost between us.
The phone wakes me.
It’s 2AM.
The full moon hangs, huge, outside my window. I live in a unit above the veterinary surgery. It makes being on after hours duty that much more bearable. When people’s cats start vomiting in the middle of the night, all I have to do is crawl into my clothes, sink a cup of coffee and stumble down the stairs.
The call centre connects me to the client. It’s the RAAF.
One of the dogs is distressed, restless and panting.
I tell them to bring it straight down.
Fifteen minutes later, Tom lifts Ripper out of the back of the doggies’ truck and sets him down on the paved driveway. He’s unsteady on his feet. Neck extended, he retches uncontrollably.
‘He’s in a bad way,’ Tom says. ‘Nobody knows where Nadia is. Sergeant Scott isn’t answering his phone, either.’
The alert, obedient dog that I vaccinated at the base is gone. Ripper, despite trembling legs that won’t hold him up, growls and lays his ears back as I examine him on the treatment room table. Tom holds the dog’s jaw shut with one hand and hugs his chest with the other. He’s got a weak, thready pulse and pale membranes.
‘It’s serious,’ I say.
‘He got a clean bill of health yesterday.’
I panic, wondering if I missed a life-threatening heart problem in my examination. All the dogs were barking and jumping around. Except Ripper. If any dog had been checked properly, it was Ripper.
‘Put on the lead suit and gloves,’ I say. ‘I’m going to need him lying down on his right side on the x-ray table.’
Radiographs clearly show the displaced, air-filled pylorus.
‘It’s gastric dilatation and volvulus,’ I say. ‘We mostly see it in big, deep-chested dogs like German shepherds and Great Danes. Plenty of room in there to move. The stomach expands and twists. Air can get in but it can’t get out. A bunch of different blood supplies get cut off. I’ve got to get his stomach untwisted or he’ll go into shock and die.’
‘Right now?’
‘Right now. First thing is to see if I can get a tube down his throat and decompress that way. Then I’ll go in and sew his stomach to his abdominal wall so it can’t get twisted again.’
He shuffles around a bit in his combat boots, starts to say something, decides against it, and then says it.
‘You don’t want to call Brad or anything?’
I do, in fact, very much want to call him. But I happen to know he’s interstate.
‘I’ll need a nurse,’ I say, ‘to monitor the anaesthetic. I’ll call Tia. But first I’m going to get Ripper on some IV fluids, get his blood pressure up a bit. You can help me place the catheter. Hold up his front leg.’
‘Brad doesn’t usually shave the leg,’ Tom protests. ‘It takes ages to grow back and the boss doesn’t like them to look sick when they’re on patrol.’
‘Hair removal,’ I explain, mercilessly clipping a long rectangle of fur, ‘gets rid of a lot of dirt and bacteria, decreasing the amount of muck that’s going to get pushed into Ripper’s bloodstream when I stick the needle in. It also increases visibility for finding the vein, which will be flat and almost undetectable because of his shockingly low blood pressure.’
‘Oh, right,’ Tom says, brightening. ‘Just so I can tell that to Sergeant Scott. If he ever answers his phone.’
The phone rings in his office but he doesn’t get up.
He started to bandage the bite, but halfway through he keeled over on the couch in the lunch room, breathing deeply.
I sit back on my haunches in the open doorway. I howl at the painfully beautiful moon.
The dogs go crazy. I’m distantly aware of the danger. If anybody else comes, they’ll be easy prey, unless I’ve got a thing for them, and I haven’t got a thing for anybody, not even Tom. He looks too much like Toby, and he’s done a tour of Afghanistan as well. Every time I look at him, I wonder why Toby got blown to hell and Tom didn’t.
It’s difficult to hold thoughts in my head. I let them drift away before an onslaught of scents and sounds: frogs in far hollows, machine parts being oiled and turned, boots in long grass. The small, sleepy, feathery smell of swallows under the eaves. The musk of the male dogs, their urine, the meat on their breath from the evening meal.
You don’t Change for a while, you forget the clean, cutting enhancement of your senses. The joy of being alive. But the price tag is too high. I feel the thrill but then I remember that boy who followed me out of the club. All he wanted was my phone number. He was too shy to ask for it in front of my friends. The dancing had been frantic; I’d sweated most of my SPF 30+ away and forgotten to reapply.
That boy was the same age as Toby when he died. When they both died. Maybe he had a sister, too, who loved him. Maybe she’s hollow inside, like me.
The moon sets and I’m naked in the dark.
It’s cold.
Nadia arrives first thing in the morning.
Sweeping past the staff only sign, she goes unerringly to the cage where Ripper is sleeping.
I follow her, bleary-eyed.
‘What have you done to him?’ Nadia asks.
‘Surgical rotation and permanent gastropexy,’ I say.
At least, I hope that’s what I’ve done. It was my first one and I’m not sure I’ve stuck the stomach on well enough. But I did my best.
Ripper wakes and whines and thumps his tail at the sight of his handler.
‘Good,’ Nadia says. ‘That’s good.’
I’m startled by the praise. For a moment I wonder if she’s talking to Ripper and not me.
‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here,’ she says.
‘Tom was good with him. He should be able to go back to the base after he’s finished that bag of fluids. I’ll get the invoice printed out and give you a copy of the treatment record for Sergeant Scott.’
‘Sergeant Scott isn’t well. I took him to hospital earlier this morning. I’ll be looking after things until he gets out.’
‘Oh,’ I say uncomfortably. ‘I hope he’s better soon.’
‘He won’t be. You know a new grad missed his tumour the first time around?’
‘Bradley told me,’ I say. ‘I suppose everybody makes mistakes.’
It was a mistake. An accident.
When I came home from school, the big brick house was empty. Our parents were doctors. We didn’t see much of them. Toby was six years older than me. He looked out for me. Cooked a mean mushroom omelette.
Wednesday nights were footy practice, though. He wasn’t home. I got my bike out and went riding in the cul-de-sac with the other kids from the street. We rode on all the front lawns except for Mr Heery’s, because he put a rope around it and put mean letters in our letterboxes if we went under it.
When we got bored we started daring each other to go under the rope. I went the furthest. All the way to Mr Heery’s front door. It crashed open and he stared down at me, peeled-grape eyes in a pickled face with crazy white hair everywhere.
‘Nadia Lucas,’ he said. ‘As loved and wanted as bird shit on a barbecue.’
I ran away from him instinctively, springing over that rope like a gazelle while the others laughed and melted away to their houses.
My house was still dark. The street lights came on. I could smell onions cooking in the house next door. The full moon came up and I didn’t go inside. I sat on the doorstep, holding the handlebars of my bike, getting angrier and angrier. I was loved and wanted. It was just that my parents were busy and important and Toby had footy practice.
I got so worked up that I decided to put bird shit on Mr Heery’s barbecue. I scraped some off the top of our front fence with a steel kebab skewer, climbed under Mr Heery’s rope, advanced up his manicured lawn and sneaked down the side of his house.
The tall side gate had a bolt that only opened from the inside, but my hand was small enough to fit through the wire.
When I opened it, a huge white dog knocked me down. It went for my throat. I stuck the skewer into its open mouth.
Mr Heery was brain damaged. His family waited two years before they pulled the plug and he died.
I should have died, too. Toby stayed in hospital with me for a week.
‘You’re strong,’ he said to me. ‘You’ll make it.’
And I did. In a manner of speaking.
It seems like déjà vu.
The shrill phone at 2AM. The RAAF base on the other end. I think: It must be Ripper. He’s got another GDV. I did something wrong and now, a month later, the adhesion has failed.
‘Which dog?’ I ask huskily, pulling on my clothes with the phone jammed between shoulder and ear.
‘Oh, it’s not one of the working dogs,’ Nadia Lucas says. ‘It’s my dog. Mike. He’s got a lump I’d like you to look at.’
‘What sort of lump? Is it painful?’
‘It’s not painful.’
‘Maybe you could bring Mike in first thing tomorrow.’
Nadia’s voice turns cold.
‘No. He needs to be seen right now.’
I hesitate. I recall what Bradley said about bending over backwards for the Air Force, even if this isn’t a military working dog.
‘I’ll see you soon,’ I say.
I shuffle down the stairs and unlock the clinic, flicking on a few lights and eliciting a few plaintive whuffs and miaows from hospitalised snail-bait-guzzling puppies and overnight boarding cats. I check their drip lines and litter trays and pet them as I pass. One of the computers has to be booted up to give me access to the file.
Mike doesn’t have one. Nadia’s never brought him to us before.
I line a few things up in the consulting room. Clippers, for shaving the lump. Cotton balls soaked in alcohol, for swabbing it. A needle and syringe for aspirating some cells and microscope slides on which to spray them. A cigarette lighter to fix the cells onto the slides. Stains for giving them colour. Maybe I’ll see bacteria. Maybe fat. Maybe cancerous white cells, the blood of a hematoma or the clear fluid of a cyst. I figure any dog of Nadia’s will sit quietly while I take all the samples I need.
He explodes through the front door, heavy head fringed with brown and grey fur, yellow eyes gleaming. Nadia follows with the leash wrapped around her forearm, red-faced and thin-lipped.
I open my mouth to speak, but Mike launches himself at me. The leash snaps taut. His back arches. He lands on his side and immediately starts to roll, front paws scrabbling at his muzzle.
‘He’s going to get that off,’ I observe.
‘Sit!’ Nadia shouts, hauling on the leash. Mike’s the size of an Alaskan malamute, but the stick-thin limbs, straight tail and long muzzle are all wrong. If I didn’t know it was impossible, I’d swear he was a timber wolf.
‘One moment,’ I say. I go to the surgery, where a thick, goose-feather quilt has been spread lovingly over the heating pads on the table, ready for a new patient.
When I get back to reception, Mike is still rolling and clawing at his face.
I throw the quilt over him and lie on the thrashing shape. Nadia gets the idea and joins me on the floor. I ease the edge of the quilt back so that his nose is poking out.
‘Where’s the lump?’ I ask.
‘On his tail,’ Nadia replies.
We switch places.
The lump is hard and immobile. That’s not good.
‘Can we carry him into the consulting room?’
‘You’ll have to sedate him.’
‘I don’t know if a sedative will touch the sides, frankly.’
‘Then knock him out.’
‘I need his weight and his vital signs.’
He is forty-three kilos with a heart like a horse. I give him an intravenous anaesthetic and between us we shift him to the consulting room table.
Nadia’s phone rings.
‘I have to take this outside,’ she says, taking her sunglasses out of her pocket, leaving me alone with the anaesthetised dog.
I shave the lump on his tail. I swab it and let it dry. When I insert the needle, the lump feels crunchy inside, like bone or calcium deposits.
The dog’s head whips around. Its teeth graze my hand as I jerk back. The snap of his jaw still resounds in the room as the shaggy muzzle lowers itself back to the table, succumbing to the drug, eyes closing.
I stare at the shallow laceration across the back of my knuckles. I scrub the injury with iodine, thinking of Hurricane and Bradley’s twenty-eight stitches. I’ve gotten off lightly and should have been more careful.
Still, I don’t like to muzzle a dog while he’s under. Gingerly, I replace the pulse oximeter probe on his tongue, waiting for it to read his heart rate and oxygen saturation levels before turning to the microscope slides.
I hang up the phone.
The night air has a tang. The temptress moon hangs in cloud-pillows. I go to the car to check the weather forecast. We’ve still got an hour. I slap more sunscreen onto the places where Mike’s fur has rubbed it thin.
What could have been my biggest mistake ever has turned out just as I planned. Even if it was a bit tough to catch him and bring him in before the Council caught wind of him. I’ll explain to him later what’s happened and why.
There’s no time for that now. I march back towards the clinic.
No mistakes tonight.
