Keeper

It was Andrea’s final consultation of the day. She was running a little behind, as was not uncommon in her position as a locum vet. Most of her shifts involved getting to grips with a new computer system, different administration and clinical protocols… Even small things like learning where the vaccine fridge was took time.

Her client though, an aging man just as stiff on his legs as his elderly Labrador was, didn’t mind.

“She’s at university now, my granddaughter,” he told her.

Andrea humoured him. “That’s brilliant, Mr Hurley!” Her focus was his dog, but often the owners needed her as much as the patients did. “What’s she studying?”

“Inter- oh, what do they call it?”

“Appetite still good?” She interrupted his train of thought.

“What? Oh yes, yes, still finishes every meal does my Charlie.”

“And his energy levels – does he still get out for his walks?”

“International Politics! Interpol, she calls it. That’s the slang these days.”

The vet vaccinated Charlie and provided some more pain relief for his arthritis, with the agreement hat he return for some blood tests before his next prescription.

When the old pair were, at last, headed home and Andrea had typed up her notes, she emerged from her consult room to find the receptionist preparing to lock up for the night. It was already dark outside at just after six. Winter was taking a long time to lift this year.

“Thanks for your help this week,” said the receptionist, who Andrea thought must have been working here since the day it was built. She was gray-haired and wrinkled but scalpel sharp.

“It’s been a pleasure, and I hope David feels better by next week.” Most of her work was covering sickness – sometimes for a couple of weeks, sometimes for a day here and there. She once did a block of maternity cover but became so restless from being in the same practice for a year that she vowed she never would again.

“I have to cash up and clean the floors,” said the receptionist, “but you can get going if you need to.” Andrea told her she’d rather stay to get some paperwork done, which was a half-truth. As much as she disliked the idea of leaving the older woman alone in the building after dark, she had an ulterior motive for wanting to stay behind. When the reception door closed behind her, she made a detour away from her consult room and went instead to the surgical theatre.

“Hello, Bruno,” she said to the empty room. The anaesthetic machines were turned off and the artificial lights from the corridor gleamed over the steel of the surgical table. Shadows shifted in the corner of the room. They were vaguely dog-shaped if you knew what you were looking for.

“I see you, Bruno.” The shape materialised into that of a cocker spaniel. Adult, but not old. A droopy face and soft ears. The shape approached her, cautiously wagging the air that was its tail.

She knelt to it. “Are you ready to go home? I found your family.”

Sometimes they wore collars with an address, other times if the tag had a full name then she could find them on the computer systems. Bruno had neither but in cases like his, a good place to start was always the caskets. The bodies were sent away for cremation, the ashes returned to the practice in their little wooden caskets with a plaque stating who was inside, and the family would come to  bring them home. Only sometimes, they didn’t come. There was only one casket left behind in the archive room of this little practice. It was Bruno’s.

“We’ve got another friend to take,” she told him, trusting her temporary colleague was still too far away to overhear, “then we’ll go.”

Bruno followed her from the theatre as she made her way to the very back of the practice. It was dark here. She opened a door to a very small room, containing only a big chest freezer on one side and shelves with rolls of different coloured bags on the other. Sat between these rolls was a cat.

“Are you ready?” she asked it. It had been curled up resting but gave a little chirp at her voice and uncoiled itself to stretch. “I’m afraid I couldn’t find where you came from.” It was more common with cats. Killed on the road, brought in by a good Samaritan, their owner never traced. “So you can come home with me.”

With the two in the car, Andrea watched the receptionist lock up, oblivious, and waved her goodnight. She covered a large area in her placements, so commutes were often long, but she still extended this one to take Bruno home. The satnav called out directions. She only hoped his family still lived there.

“Is this it?” The spaniel was at the window, his tail wagging like a puppy. She opened the passenger side door a sliver and he went home. She wouldn’t see him again. The relationships she had with her patients were usually fleeting, be them her working consultations or her other secret project. Except, of course, for the ones that she brought home.

The empty space that was once a cat followed her from the car to her front door. She found that they tended to be much more well behaved in death than they were when alive. They were hungry for rest; less likely to roam.

“Here we are, little friend,” she told the darkened empty street as she opened the door. “I hope you’ll be more comfortable here.”

The home was a modest semi-detached, but someone with Andrea’s sight could be forgiven for considering it full of life. A handful of wagging tails came to meet her. Other paws and whiskers sat on the stairs underneath which she kicked off her shoes, on the bookcase where she hung her stethoscope, on the couch where she laid her aching body. She didn’t name most of them. Some were very affectionate with her and these she treated like true pets, but many simply wanted a warm place to stay. They wanted a home. Occasionally the souls would disappear and never return, but Andrea didn’t ask questions. She would get no answers. Instead, she was satisfied with flicking on her soaps and checking her diary for her next shifts. Monday morning: AniMedics Hospital.

AniMedics was the newest of the three hospitals within her commutable area, at less than a decade standing. It was purpose-built and well invested in. Andrea had never found herself working this practice before. It had always been well staffed, although she heard through the grapevine that they had been having some troubles within the team over the last twelve months.

“This is our X-ray suite.” Andrea was shown around by one of the other vets. The whole building was sage-green and white, and very clean.  “And here is ultrasonography.” The vet opened the door to this room, where the lights were switched off, but it wasn’t empty. A man in green scrubs held down a dog on its side while a woman in blue pushed the transducer into its clipped and jellied abdomen. Her guide apologised for interrupting. “We also have a portable ultrasound scanner in the prep area for quicker assessments. And the CT scanner is down this corridor, but you shouldn’t need to get involved with that today.”

The hospital also had several species-specific wards and a number of surgical theatres. The vet showed Andrea which consult room she could use and lastly – most importantly – the break room.

Her guide spoke over the sound of the kettle boiling. “Myself and Hannah will be caring for the inpatients, so we’ll be available if you need anything. You’ll be on consults – that’s the normal list of booked appointments, but also any walk-in emergencies that come through. Your first one isn’t until 9am.”

Alone to finish making her milky-tea-and-two, she went over what she had been shown in her head. Largely the names of staff, the location of the medicine cupboards, the layout of the big place. But she was also distracted by the nagging feeling that something was different about AniMedics. She expected such a sprawling building to be full of lost souls, like other hospitals were. The others she had worked in had been so full of death, with a large caseload and much of that being out-of-hours emergencies and critical cases. It was unavoidable that a high number of souls would be trapped there. But AniMedics wasn’t as full as that. She had spotted a handful of post-animals on her tour, but the few that she had seen were themselves odd. They weren’t hiding. They weren’t lost. They were happy.

The full mug warming her hands, Andrea went to her consult room and set herself up on the computer systems using the login she had been provided with. It was a full list of appointments. First up was a Ridgeback puppy’s first health check and vaccinations. Andrea smiled to herself and forgot about the ghosts.

Part way through the morning, she was in consult with a chronic diarrhoea case when there was a knock on the  door and a nurse popped a concerned head in. “Can we borrow you for an emergency that’s just come through?” The woman spoke swiftly but politely in the manner that Andrea knew was for her client’s benefit. She excused herself.

“This is Roxie, 8-year-old neutered bitch, collapsed suddenly this morning,” someone in burgundy addressed her as she approached. A German Shepherd was on the table with a stretcher underneath having been carried in on it. A team of nurses in green were already taking vitals and prepping to place and intravenous line. “No known health issues, no meds, consent for stabilisation. Insured but only up to two thousand pounds.”

Andrea didn’t do a lot of emergency cases but the team here were obviously well-versed. The dog was already hooked up to an electrocardiogram, the trace bleeping its green line on the monitor. One of the nurses had taken a blood pressure reading and was prepping for fluid therapy which Andrea promptly prescribed. Another asked permission to take blood samples, syringe already in hand. They were all calm and confident, evidently dealing with cases like this regularly. If this hospital saw cases this critical so often, where were all the souls?

The scene ended in a difficult conversation with the owners. Roxie’s family opted to say goodbye to her. Andrea injected their pet with the drug that would send her to sleep forever. The family cried to their dog, telling her how much they loved her and that she was a good girl. The vet’s throat tightened, her eyesight blurring a little. But she knew it wouldn’t be the end.

When Roxie had stilled, she put her stethoscope to the dog’s still-warm chest.

“She’s gone.” She told the family. But Andrea knew that that wasn’t strictly true. When the family left, grieving, Andrea watched a version of their dog follow them home.

The rest of her day was largely uneventful. An elderly terrier arrived seizing but was stabilised and sent to the intensive care unit for monitoring, and she was about to admit a cat which had consumed lily pollen and required forty-eight hours of fluids and observations. She was attempting to print off the consent forms for admittance when the printer showed an error message. She looked in the paper tray – it was, indeed, empty. She looked in the drawers in the cabinet it sat on but found nothing except bin bags and lint rollers.

“Where can I find more printer paper?” she asked a passing member of support staff.

“It’s on the mezzanine. Through that door, up the stairs and it’s your first left.”

Andrea hadn’t even realised this place had an upstairs but climbed to the first floor to see a row of offices, sleep rooms, and a meeting room. She followed the instructions and went through the big grey door to step up into a large open storage area. Shelves along two walls were covered in boxes and baskets full of pill bottles, feed brochures – and printer paper. A large part of the area was taken up with more standing shelving, all full of files dated on the front, presumably as far back as the founding of the practice. It was cool up here, smelling of new stationary and old books.

But it wasn’t the archives here that held Andrea’s attention. In this huge, forgotten space, were spirits. Dozens of them; all resting and playing and happy. This wasn’t like any other practice she had been to – this was like her own house. These souls were home. And strangest of all, in the middle of all of them, was a person. Or, the shadow of what was once a person. Andrea could see her clear as day – a young woman, in scrubs emblazoned with the AniMedics logo. She was momentarily frozen, looking right into this soul’s very human face. The spirit was looking back at her, making eye contact, then seemed to shudder a little and took a step backwards as though frightened.

Andrea broke herself out of the stare and turned to face the shelving. She reached for a big box of printer paper and fished in her scrubs for scissors with which to cut the plastic ties, her hand shaking in her pocket. She had never seen the spirit of a human before, but here was a nurse looking after these souls, just as she must have looked after living animals when she herself was one. Andrea opened the box and picked out a package of the printer paper. There was nothing left to do. She had to go back downstairs, she had to admit this cat, she had to finish her shift.

But she couldn’t help it – Andrea turned back to face the woman. She was still watching her and their eyes met again. It occurred to her that this woman had probably never been seen before. That none of her colleagues, her friends, downstairs knew that she was still here.

“Thank you,” she said. The nurse nodded in recognition.

Andrea left the mezzanine to finish her shift.