Black Dog Summer (6 page)

On the morning of Bratboy's first meal, Gigi had stood a sensible distance from the fence and watched the snarling cat crouch low, his muscles bunched beneath his caramel coat, and wolf down his living dinner. There was nothing but fascination on her round, recently sun-pinked face.

“You're a smart one, aren't you?” I overheard Johan say to my daughter a few days later at the caracal cage. Johan had that overly tanned, rough-skinned look shared by just about every conservationist I'd recently met, and, beside him, Gigi looked smooth and newly minted. “It's not everyone who understands that ending up as lunch in no way diminishes the little life in question.”

“Huh?” Gigi said, clearly uncertain about
diminishes
.

“That's why I'm not a vegan like everyone else at this place. Some things are lunch for other things, and those things are lunch for even bigger things. It's all just a part of the natural order of life.”

“OK.” Gigi poked a slender piece of straw into the caracal enclosure, and Bratboy flattened his tufted ears back over his head and showed her his impressive collection of pointed teeth. She bared her teeth back at the animal before turning to Johan. “So will I end up as something's lunch one day?”

“Well, that all depends . . .” Johan said with a serious look on his face.

“On what?”

“On whether I've had enough breakfast or not!” Gigi squealed with delight as Johan lifted her up with his scabbed, strong hands and pretended to gobble down her dimpled elbow. Bratboy snarled at them both from behind the wire of his cage.

Two months after that, Johan burst into the kitchen while I was giving Gigi her breakfast.

“You”—he pointed at me—“come.” I stared at him in astonishment. Since my arrival on the farm, Johan had been nothing but shy and painfully polite to me. “Quickly,” he barked, “I've just had a call. There's a young wild dog not far from here. It's eaten from a poisoned carcass. If we move fast, we might be able to save it.”

“But Gigi . . .” Everyone else was out, there was no one I could leave her with.

“Bring her.”

The three of us bounced against each other in the boiling-hot cabin as Johan floored the pickup truck over the rutted dirt roads.
Careful
, I wanted to say, but the determined set of his jaw stopped the word in my throat.

“Wild dogs are pack animals, so there's probably more than one of the poor things dying out there. Bloody farmers, man.” His fingers on the wheel were white. “Lacing carcasses with poison. The wild dogs have almost been totally wiped out because of shit like this.”

I was too busy praying we'd survive the hurtling drive to even think of asking him to watch his language in front of Gigi.

“There.” He pointed to a patch of darkness in amongst the trees. The pickup squealed to a stop. “Stay here, both of you.” He leapt out of the vehicle and ran to the back.

“Are you going to kill it?” Gigi's eyes widened when she saw Johan heft the dart gun onto his shoulder.

“No, lovey, just going to give it a little something to put it to sleep so we can try and make it better.” He rifled in the med pack. “This is a low-dose sedative with muscle relaxants mixed in. Sal, I need you to prep the activated charcoal solution for me. Black powder, lukewarm water. OK?”

I nodded. My hands were shaking. Gigi and I watched Johan march off into the bush.

“Mom?” Gigi shook my shoulder. “Come
on
, you need to mix the charcoal stuff.”

In a daze, I climbed onto the back of the pickup. My fingers slipped on the plastic water bottle. I could see Gigi watching me
through the window, urging me on. The sun hammered at the back of my neck. I wanted to throw up.

Suddenly Johan crashed out from between the trees. “Got her. She's down. Checked and she's bleeding from the nose, pinpricks on her gums. Puking brown stuff. Definitely a blood thinner.” He jumped back into the driver's seat and turned on the ignition. “We need to get the antidote into her. Hold tight, Sally!” I clutched the side of the pickup bin as we went plunging deeper into the bush.

When Johan killed the engine again, an eerie quiet seemed to have descended on the landscape, as if it were holding its breath. Johan kneeled down beside the brindled body in the grass. I could see a dark red patch in the dirt by the animal's black brush of a tail.

“Her bum's bleeding,” Gigi whispered. She jumped down from the pickup and ran to crouch down beside Johan.

“Gigi, get back here!” I yelled.

“Shame. Poor puppy.” She reached out and touched one of the wild dog's large, rounded ears.

“Seriously, Gigi, now's not the time for your nonsense. I want you back in the car in two seconds, young lady.”

“No. I'm not going to.”

“Gigi—”

“Hush, Sal, we need her.” Johan came over to the pickup and began collecting meds.

“To do what? She's a child, for goodness' sake.”

“I've got to get a drip catheter into this animal, fast.” Johan's brown, sweaty face was inches from my own. His gaze was steady on mine. “She needs fluids. She needs a gastric tube in her gullet, and activated charcoal down her throat. We have to monitor her vitals. We're on our own out here, and, let's face it, you have no experience. This animal needs all available hands.” He handed my daughter the clear bag with the drip solution in it. “You're going to hold this while I put the needle into her hind leg, OK, Gi?”

“You're insane! She's five years old, Johan.”

“Mom!”

“Sal, I'm going to need that charcoal solution.” He bent down to insert the needle into the animal's leg. “You OK with this, soldier?”
he said to Gigi. She nodded her head. Earnest. “Just stay back there away from the toothy end and keep holding that drip up nicely while I inject the antidote, there's a good girl.” Another calm nod.

I collected the gastric tube and the activated charcoal solution with numb fingers and clambered down from the pickup. I tried to relieve Gigi of her drip duty, but she hung on to the little bag with such fierceness that I backed off and crouched down beside Johan instead. I gave the wild dog's flank a tentative pat. Its dusty fur was slightly sticky. Wirier than it looked.

“Is she going to be OK?”

“Here's hoping,” he muttered. I looked up at Gigi, but her eyes were fixed on Johan, trusting, watching his every move as he inserted the gastric tube between the animal's terrifying teeth.

I sat down hard in the grass with my head swimming and blood pounding in my ears. Johan administered the charcoal with Gigi resting her small hand on the wild dog's rump and whispering comforting words in the direction of the round-tipped ears.

“Nice one, girls.” Johan ruffled Gigi's hair and turned to look at me. “What a hotshot ER team you guys have turned out to be, hey?” The warmth of his smile made his eyes crinkle up like crazy in the corners. It was impossible not to smile back.

When Simone returned and heard of all this later that evening, she dropped to her haunches and pulled Gigi into a tight hug. “What a brave girl! Aren't we lucky to have a pro like you helping us out here?” Gigi nodded, pink with pleasure.

“Yeah, I'm so proud of you, love,” I said, but when I placed my hand on her warm head, she pulled away from me, scowling.

“
You
didn't think I could do it.
You
didn't think I was good enough.”

“Oh come now, Gigi, I was just being a worried mom. You might've been hurt, you know. I wanted to spare you from seeing something awful happen to that doggy.”

“Well, I helped save her, so there,” she retorted, and flounced off to follow Simone into the depths of the house.

I blinked, unreasonably hurt and hating to show it.

“Kids can be so harsh,” Johan said. I whirled round. I didn't even
know he'd been in the room. “She shouldn't talk to you like that. She has no idea what a great mom you are.” He leant back against the wall and gave me another of those warm, crinkly smiles.

“Please. I'm hardly a great mom.”

“But you are. You're . . .” His gaze dropped to his feet. His boots were scuffed and stained, and there were burrs clinging to the laces.

“Johan.” It was Seb's voice, calling from outside. Johan hesitated a moment, and then walked out of the kitchen, leaving me alone with prickles of tears in my eyes and a strange, cold pulse in my temples.

IN THE
quiet before dawn, Gigi wakes. I feel her consciousness as a sudden sharpness in the room, as if someone sliced into a fresh lemon. And just like that, she's another way into the story at last.

She blinks at the darkness, disorientated, staring up at the little glowing stars that Liam once glued all over Bryony's ceiling. Slowly, her thoughts gather and congeal into a hard little ball, and when they finally make sense, they erupt into the room on a wave of hoarse sobs.

When her body stops heaving, Gigi lies on her back, stomach aching, and for long, motionless minutes endures the cloying feeling of her hot tears and sweat gluing her hair to the pillow until she can't stand it anymore. She flings off the covers and swings her legs off the bed; it is the fastest she's moved for days, and her head swims. She glares across the room in the direction of Bryony's even breathing and then launches herself upright, wobbling for a moment before heading off to find the bathroom.

I am struck by how the familiarity of my daughter has been altered into strangeness by the new sadness she carries inside her. She must be the same Gigi that used to sit in the gazelle enclosure with a book and polish off a whole bag of litchis, letting the spiky little skins and shiny pips build up into a pile on the ground beside her, but she is wearing my death like a dark shawl around her shoulders that makes her hard to look at and impossible to know. Again, I wait for that old stab-in-the-guts agony that used to come when I saw her hurt. But nothing. No guts to stab. Not anymore.

Gigi stands at the small bathroom window. The night air is a relief on her sweaty neck, and, for a moment, she lets her forehead drop against the cold glass. She can just make out the cement courtyard at the back of the house, and the skeletal metal tree of the washing line
one story down.
If I fell, how many bones would I break?
She scowls and turns from the window.
Not enough.

She digs trembling fingers into the ragged pocket of the dressing gown and pulls out the plastic vial of pills with its printed hospital label. She gives it a small shake, frowning at the sparse rattle. She should save the remaining tablets and ration them out slowly, but carrying this dark, aching thing inside her for even one moment longer is unthinkable. She uncaps the bottle and tips two little discs into her palm before popping them into her mouth. She's only supposed to take one, but one doesn't stop the dreams.

She drinks long and deep from the basin tap before tiptoeing back to bed.

“Elbows off the table, darling.” Adele has not made much of a dent in her “Saturday Special” fried eggs and bacon breakfast, but this only means that she has more time to look around and nitpick over Bryony's manners. Bryony removes her elbows from the yellowed pine with a sigh and glances at her brother, hoping to share a furtive eye roll. Tyler doesn't notice; he's too busy shoveling forkfuls of food into his face as if he's in some kind of breakfast race. “Don't gobble, Ty. Anyone would think I hadn't taught you any manners at all.”

“Jesus, Addy. It's Saturday; take a break, for heaven's sake,” Liam snaps, and Bryony looks up to see him give his own, barely touched Saturday Special a vicious stab with his fork. Her father loves bacon and eggs and weekend morning breakfasts, or at least he always did. Bryony glances at the empty chair and a hopeful-looking set of cutlery and an empty juice glass placed before it. No Gigi. Her absence at this table is so pronounced now that it is starting to become a solid entity, more real, in fact, than the sleeping girl in her bedroom upstairs.

“It's ridiculous, is all I'm saying,” Adele says.

“Addy.” The warning note in Liam's voice makes Tyler look up from his plate at last. Bryony takes a big mouthful of her toast in order to swallow down the flutter in the back of her throat. It won't go down.

“No, honestly, Liam. The child just cannot go on sleeping indefinitely. It's not healthy.”

“Healthy?” Bryony starts as her father rises to his feet. A smear of vivid orange free-range egg yolk slimes across the tabletop behind his dropped knife and fork. “She was practically catatonic when they found her, Addy. She'd been hunched over her dead mother for who knows how long. The blood had dried on the both of them, for Christ's sake.”

The unmanageable chunk of soggy marmalade toast still squatting in Bryony's mouth suddenly tastes like rusted metal.

“Liam, not in front of—”

“What do you want from the child? She's taking the time she needs to recover. Who are we to tell her when she's ready to get up and face it all?”

“Well, it won't be much longer,” Bryony says, and everyone turns to stare at her. “I looked in the bottle of pills that I found on the floor by her bed. There's only about four left.”

“Right then, there you have it,” Liam snarls into the heavy silence. “She'll be up and about in no time, Adele.”

“I'm not being insensitive to what she's gone through, for God's sake. I just worry about her lying there like that, stoned out of her mind.”

“Like a zombie.”

“That's enough, Bryony,” Adele snaps. “Eat your breakfast.”

You eat your breakfast.
Bryony glares meaningfully at her mother's full plate, but the grilled tomato makes her think of a scab and she looks away fast.
What must it feel like to be covered all over in dried blood?