Vetting them, p.1
Vetting Them, page 1
Vetting Them
Wendy Lewis
© Wendy Lewis 2014
Wendy Lewis has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
This edition published in 2018 by Lume Books.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Extract from Starting Over by Wendy Lewis
Chapter One
“It’s a what?”
“A Portuguese Podengo.”
“Right…” Jackie said slowly into the phone as she pulled up the appointments page on the computer. She was getting a little tired of new clients of the city veterinary practice who invented weird breed names for their dogs in an attempt to make her laugh. It just wasted precious time while she actually found out which kind of animal she was dealing with and the nature of its particular problem.
“From Portugal,” the man said.
Well, it makes a change from ‘darkest Peru’, she thought. Last week someone had made an appointment for ‘Paddington Bear’. He had turned out to be a large German shepherd dog with a very bad attitude towards vets.
“Your name, sir?” she asked.
“Peter Phillips. I don’t usually use your practice, but I’ve come up to Liverpool to visit relatives and I had forgotten that the puppy’s second injections are due. We don’t want him to catch anything while I’m up here.”
“Right; and what is the puppy’s name, sir?”
“Pepe.”
“And he’s a Portuguese Podogo?”
“Podengo,” he corrected. “You may not have come across one; they are quite rare in this country.”
“I’ll look forward to meeting him. Would ten o’clock tomorrow morning suit you?”
“Yes, that’s fine. See you then.”
He hung up as she realised she had no idea what the dog looked like or how large it was. Her eyes went to the chart of pictures of various dog breeds displayed on the wall of the reception and waiting room area… No, no Portuguese Podengo there. She tried Google, with instant success, only to find that the Portuguese Podengo came in three sizes. Small and very cute, medium, and large, and was a genuine breed of hound. In some of the pictures it looked very like a terrier. She hoped it would be more hound-like in temperament; her hands still carried the scars from the last encounter with a belligerent Jack Russell terrier who preferred to demonstrate the health of his teeth, rather than just allow her to inspect them. Returning to the appointments page, she typed in ‘Pepe, Portuguese Podengo belonging to Peter Phillips’.
“All those ‘P’s” she muttered.
Peter Phillips had a rather nice voice, and an accent which came from much further south, nearer to her parents’ farm in Hampshire. It had suddenly made her feel a bit homesick. Not that she disliked Liverpool: in fact she had been made very welcome when she arrived in the city for her first job since qualifying as a vet. Northerners were, on the whole, a very friendly lot and accepted strangers far faster than her home village, where you practically had to be the second generation of a family before you could really feel you belonged.
Jackie had suddenly decided to change careers as she was coming to the end of her course at agricultural college prior to returning home to help run the family farm, and begun to train as a vet at Bristol Veterinary College. Now seven years on, this was her first job as a fully qualified vet.
She brushed a strand of long, dark brown hair away from her forehead and went back to her office mirror, where she had been putting her hair up into a tidy French pleat when the phone rang. She had woken late and nearly missed the bus into the centre of town from her small flat near Sefton Park, and her hair had been hurriedly secured in a ponytail with a handy elastic band.
A mug of strong black coffee later, she was ready to face the day’s customers.
Alan, the senior partner, had arrived and Chrissie, the receptionist, was just taking her coat off. She had the furthest to come from Wallasey, which involved a ferry trip across the Mersey.
Although Jackie now lived on the north side of the river in a small upstairs flat, her attempts to find somewhere to live when she had first arrived the previous year had proved interesting. In the Liverpool Echo she had found a flat advertised in New Brighton. It looked suitable. Then she discovered that New Brighton was the other side of the Mersey. It was a bitterly cold day in November when she set out to view the flat. A bus to Pier Head set her down at the ferry terminal in an icy wind which was slicing up the river from the sea. Apart from herself there was only one other person there, a man in a very sensible, warm seaman’s jersey, leaning on the railing, staring at the water. The Wallasey ferry came in and left again. The Birkenhead ferry arrived and left, and Jackie waited, getting colder and colder. She looked at her watch. At this rate she would miss her appointment with the owner of the flat. Finally, as the Wallasey ferry came in again, she went over to the man at the railings and asked him what time the next ferry from New Brighton was due to arrive.
“April, love,” he said. He did go on to explain that as New Brighton was a bit of a holiday resort, the ferry only ran for the holiday season. He then told her to hurry onto the Wallasey ferry and then she would have to get a bus from Wallasey to New Brighton.
By the time she finally arrived, she had decided that with the added bus journey it would take too long to commute to work. She vaguely considered driving and using the tunnel under the river, but long-standing claustrophobia caused her to reject that idea very quickly.
The next encounter, which still made her smile, had been when she went to view a small flat much nearer the city centre. This one was also advertised in the Liverpool Echo, but no phone number had been given. She turned up at the address and climbed the rather grand steps of the three-storey terraced house, and knocked on the door. It was opened by a very tall, well-built Jamaican man, from his accent.
“I see you have a flat to let,” Jackie said, waving her folded copy of the newspaper.
He looked down at her, standing one step below him, said, “No whites” and shut the door. She went back down the steps thinking that racial discrimination was still alive and well, in spite of all the laws against it. Chrissie had said she should have reported the man to the police, but Jackie couldn’t see the point – it wasn’t as if she wanted to live there after that, anyway.
She had finally found the flat she now occupied, which had quite a nice view over part of Sefton Park and was a short bus ride from the centre of Liverpool. There was the slightly unnerving fact that if she arrived home late at night, she was often followed along the road from the bus stop by ‘kerb crawlers’, but if she ignored them completely, they tended to accelerate away.
She found it was easier to get about by bus in the city, and as there wasn’t really anywhere to park near the flat, she kept her car, a small third-hand Peugeot, in the yard behind the vet’s surgery.
Chrissie, who had now finished untangling her blonde curly hair after a windy crossing on the Mersey, turned on the computer to check the day’s appointments.
“Is this a joke?” she asked Jackie, who peered over her shoulder at the screen.
“No, it’s a real breed. I looked it up.”
“What do they look like?”
“Bring it up on Google; they seem to come in all shapes and sizes.”
“Well, it makes a change from ‘staffies,” said Chrissie. There appeared to be an unnecessarily large population of Staffordshire Bull Terriers in the city, mostly owned by the wrong people who were under the impression that being on the end of a lead attached to these solid, square-headed terriers wearing macho studded collars, made them look ‘hard’ and dangerous. Jackie found this upsetting because, as a breed, these dogs were normally loving, charming and good with children… in the right hands. Most of the ones she treated seemed confused.
Alan called her into his office. She had had to force herself not to join the many female customers who were obviously bowled over by him. He was extremely good-looking: tall, with dark hair slightly greying at the temples, probably around forty years old, with a nice smile and a charming manner. The only drawback, and it was a really big one, was an equally charming wife who, apart from being beautiful, was younger than Jackie’s twenty-nine years. She tried to convince herself that he was almost too perfect. He was also a very good vet and most of the animals loved him, as well.
He grinned at her.
“Mrs Rudge’s Spaniel is supposed to come in this morning to be spayed, but she’s just rung to say she has twisted her ankle and can’t drive, at the moment. Any chance you could pop out to Blundellsands and fetch it? You can take the van.”
“Yes, of course. Would it be alright if I took my car? I’ll take a cage, of course, but the car could do with a run.”
“That’s fine. No problem. The address is on the computer. Tell her we’ll keep the bitch in overnight as I won’t be operating until this afternoon. And if you could run her back tomorrow, I would be grateful.”
“Okay. It’ll make a change to get out of town. I miss the countryside a bit.”
Jackie collected a cage large enough for the dog to travel in and went out to the yard.
“Please be nice. Please start for me and don’t do anything silly, today,” she asked the car, as she settled into the driving seat and pulled on her seat belt. The car didn’t answer, but she knew it had heard her. Since she had bought it, just before her move to Liverpool, it had developed a malicious sense of humour. She should have been warned that this would be no ordinary car at the very beginning, when she had rung the insurance company to register it with them. The insurance company seemed to be run from a base half a world away in Mumbai. She had stated that the car was a Peugeot and John Smith (really?) in Mumbai asked her for the registration number.
“R415 EKP,” she had said, slowly and clearly, like you are supposed to with foreigners.
“Alpha Romeo,” he said.
She had interrupted, “No. It’s a Peugeot.”
“Yes, Alpha Romeo.”
“No! No! Peugeot,” she had interrupted again. It seemed that John Smith couldn’t understand her English accent. She had vaguely wondered what the Punjabi for Peugeot was, before telling herself to concentrate.
“Yes, madam.” Now he was speaking slowly, as if she were the idiot. She hadn’t been called ‘madam’ for years, she thought, not since she had made some acid comment to Henry, the farrier, who had turned from the shoe he was nailing to her horse and said; “You are a bugger, madam.” He was always very polite, was Henry.
“Madam,” John Smith had said again. Then, with long spaces between the words and rolling his ‘R’s, he said: “R for Romeo 415, Echo Kilo Papa.”
She had finally got it, thanks to regularly watching police programmes on TV, and felt rather stupid.
After a couple of weeks in which the car had allowed her to relax and begin to enjoy driving, it suddenly began to refuse her instructions to start the engine, needing four or five battery-draining attempts before it obeyed. She had taken it to the garage where the boss and all the mechanics had spent the day starting it on the ‘first go, every time’. When she turned up to collect it they said that ‘even the girl in the office had managed to start it’. She mentally added this incredibly sexist remark to her box of slights, which already contained the ‘no whites’ comment.
Today, in spite of having had a quiet week in which to plan something nasty for her, Romeo had decided to behave and took Jackie to fetch Sadie, the Spaniel, with no problems. She enjoyed the drive and the lungs full of fresh air out by the sea in Blundellsands. She then spent the afternoon assisting Alan with his operations, admiring the speed at which he carried out two spays and the removal of a tumour from a rather poorly Siamese cat. Alan operated very fast, and very efficiently, saying that he didn’t like the animals to be under anaesthetic any longer than was absolutely necessary.
Chapter Two
The following morning she was once more in her car on her way back to the surgery after delivering Sadie home again to a very grateful Mrs Rudge. Sadie had been delighted to be back and blundered around in the house, catching the plastic hood she was wearing, designed to stop her removing her stitches, on the door frame and the kitchen cupboards.
“She’ll get used to it in a while,” said Jackie. ‘she was showing a bit too much interest in her scar. Just keep it on until it has healed a bit. The stitches will dissolve as the wound heals. If you have any problems, give us a ring, otherwise pop her in next week, just for a final check. Will you be driving again by then?”
“Oh, I’m sure I will. Say ‘bye bye’ to Jackie, Sadie.” Sadie was more interested in seeing if anyone had left some food in her bowl in the kitchen.
“Bye bye, Sadie,” Jackie said, as she left the house.
As she drove along the coast road, she gave Romeo a pat on its dashboard and thanked him for getting her there and back with no problem. At that moment, a small dog ran across the road in front of her. She stood on the brakes and brought the car to a halt, half on and half off the verge. She got out. There didn’t appear to be anyone with the dog, which on closer inspection turned out to be a Sealyham terrier. Hearing the squeal of her tyres on the road, it had stopped, turned, and was now trotting up to her, wagging its tail.
Jackie leaned into the car for the rope lead, which she kept in the glove compartment for emergencies such as this. There was actually no need for the lead, because as she backed out of the car again, the Sealyham jumped in and established himself on the passenger seat. She shut the door and looked around for a possible owner, but there didn’t seem to be anyone else about.
She got back into the car and checked, but he wasn’t wearing a collar. “Right, mate. You’d better come back with me,” she told him. He wagged his tail and seemed delighted at the prospect.
She pulled on her seat belt, then remembered she still had a cage in the car which would fit her current passenger. She looked at him sitting happily relaxed beside her and decided not to disturb him.
She depressed the clutch, turned the car key and… Nothing happened. She tried again: nothing. “Not now, you sodding thing,” she wailed. “I’ve got to start surgery at ten o’clock.” The Sealyham stood up, gave her a kiss, and sat down again, looking expectantly through the windscreen.
She tried once more; then began to get her phone out of her handbag, braced for another embarrassing session with the garage. A white van drew up alongside her and the driver leaned across and spoke to her through his passenger window. “Have you seen… Oh! Is that Gregory?”
“What?” she said, as she scrolled through her phone for the RAC rescue number.
“I said, is that Gregory you’ve got there?”
“Are you Gregory?” she asked the dog, who wagged his tail again.
“I know you, don’t I?” said the chap in the van. You’re the new vet at Alan’s practice. I’m Ross Morgan – the Dog Warden, and that looks remarkably like the dog I am searching for.”
She now noticed the sign-writing on his van “Liverpool City Council – Dog Warden.”
“Oh! Good. Well that’s one problem dealt with. I’m Jackie Taylor, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you. What’s the other one?”
“What?”
“The other problem.”
“This damn car won’t start. I was just about to ring the RAC, but at least you can take – Gregory, was it? – off my hands. I found him in the road just here.”
“He does that… Loves riding in cars. He’s good at getting people to pick him up. He actually lives just down the road, but can end up in police stations miles away as people pick him up and deliver him to the next ‘nick’ on their journey. Now that Gregory is ‘known to the police’, they have his owner’s phone number. The poor man is getting really sick of having to traipse all over the county to retrieve his dog.”
Ross Morgan was rather attractive, thought Jackie, looking into smiling dark brown eyes as she enjoyed his strong Welsh accent. He drove past her and pulled up on the verge ahead and got out.
“Well, let’s have this bad boy, then,” he said.
They swapped Gregory into a cage in the back of the van, where he sat, looking rather forlorn. “Want me to have a go at starting your car?” asked Ross.
“Well… Yes please,” she said.
Ross got into Romeo while Jackie watched. He pushed the seat back to accommodate his legs, wiggled the gear lever and turned the key. The engine sprang into life.
“The girl in the office and the dog warden,” she muttered. Then shrieked, “Don’t turn it off!”
“I wasn’t going to,” he got out, grinning. “Want me to follow you back, in case it happens again?”
“No. It should be alright as long as I don’t turn it off. Thank you so much.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to rush. I’ve got surgery in twenty minutes.” She leant into his van. “Bye Gregory,” she said, and got a rather forlorn tail-wag.
“I’m sure we’ll meet again,” said Ross.
“I hope so,” she said. He was the most attractive man she had met so far since coming to Liverpool, apart from Alan. Don’t go there, she thought.
