Cull Read online




  Special thanks to Susan Erb, Ruth Hartley, Polly Loxton and Green Park Dentist for their support of this book

  For Maggie, Tim and Grace, my partners in crime

  Contents

  Dedication

  The Dog’s Prologue

  Clearance

  The Extraction of Mrs Tunny

  Blind Woman’s Buff

  Andre’s Conversion

  A Rumour of Promotion

  Job Central: Alex Asks for Help and Is Punished

  Introducing The Good Doctor Binding

  An Invisible Committee

  Switch Gets Fed, and Alex Gets Suspicious

  Homeless Action!

  Alex Looks for Snakes to Poke

  A Bouquet for Dr Binding

  Alex Joins the Dots

  Disinfection

  Mrs Honey Gets a New Cleaning Job

  Dr Binding Does a Ward Round

  Alex Follows the Flyer

  Alex and Kitty

  Alex Goes Back for More

  Alex Takes the Grassybanks Tour

  Chris Leads Mr Parnell into Trouble

  The Mini Adventures of Priya

  Binding’s Bad Temper

  A Stupid Mistake

  Chris and the Storm Crow

  The Riggings of the Wheelchair

  And It Is

  That Living Stone Café Date

  Night of the Drunken Poet

  Static Clouds and Sore Hearts

  Andre Watches Alex in a Creepy Manner

  Dog!

  The Lull

  Chris Comes Back

  Alex Plays Pinball

  Back from Black

  Disposal

  Mrs Honey Cleans Early

  Haughty Couture

  Incoming!

  Tricky Technicians and Evaporating Staff

  A Technical Hitch

  Dr Binding Gets Diverted

  Arrival

  Andre in the Doghouse

  A Circus of Clowns

  The Box Speaks

  In Which Alex Hosts the Show

  Robin Less Cock

  The Storm

  Back at the Movies

  The Good Doctor Takes His Own Medicine

  The Wheels on the Bus

  In Which Mayor Pearson Stands Tall

  The Crow at the Crossroads

  Behind the Masks

  Andre Is Unleashed

  The Good Doctor Saves the Day

  5,000 Miles as the Crow Flies

  The Dog’s Epilogue

  Afterword

  A Note on the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Supporters

  Copyright

  The Dog’s Prologue

  Chris has a few free minutes while his human, Alex, is talking on her phone. He is off his lead and therefore allowed to sniff dog-proper and he does. It is a much-needed relief from the work of guiding; all those straight lines and non-sniffable kerb stops. It’s wonderfully stinky here too. They are close enough to the river to smell the mud and duck poo and just at the edge of the new Grassybanks building development with its harsher aromas of tar and fresh cement, diesel and spiced wooden planks. His nose is joyful in the shimmer of stink, but as he mooches sniff sniff sniffing to the nearby culvert, he hears a scuffling, squeaking noise coming from the grate.

  Chris lowers his snout and scents rotting leaf mould, cigarette butts and the less subtle smells of shitty water and rat piss. The rats are freaking out about something … something floating in the sewer beneath the pavement. He can sense their excitement; their eager little bellies growling with anticipation. They are holding a sort of ‘rat forum’ or what Chris’s human Alex would call ‘a mischief of rats’. She prides herself on her knowledge of the weirder names of animal groups. Chris’s favourite is a ‘nuisance of cats’. He shakes his head to focus and lowers his nose again.

  The rats are getting more obstreperous. They only ever get this excited over food or flooding. Chris hasn’t smelt rain for several days so he is guessing it’s the former.

  He whimpers down to the rats but they are too agitated to respond. Rats and dogs can speak to each other, although not as humans do. Animals use sound and stink but mostly life fuzz, the electricity that holds all component atoms together. It is a kind of vibration, more than anything else.

  ‘What is it?’ Chris, insistent, asks the rats.

  ‘Scrumptious plenty of! More food, more sex, more babies, more rats! Scrumptious plenty!’

  Chris is happy for them but he is a dog and so there is also a part of him anxious to know what food exactly and if he can get his chops around it too. He sniffs and the rats tear through plastic, unleashing the distinct ammonia-putrid pong of rotting meat. Yet there is another underlying stink too, which Chris inhales into his wonderful nose. Immediately his hackles rise and his ears flatten.

  ‘What the hell … ?’ he whines. Under the thick waves of rot is a shuddering ribbon of chemicals. ‘What am I smelling in that? Unripe red smell … splintering smell … not earth …’

  He knows rats have even better stench scenters than dogs. Surely they can smell it.

  ‘It smells like … like the vet’s!’ It has the spiral high notes of the stuff they put in him when he was made ‘less’. Chris is horrified. He hates going anywhere near the vet’s.

  The rats sneer. ‘It’s still meat not that long dead,’ they sing. ‘It bleeds so tasty still. The medicine’s not Warfarin, so rats it cannot kill!’

  ‘What’s—?’

  Chris’s human, Alex, has finished talking on her mobile phone and strides towards him on her long legs. Chris and Alex are very close although they can’t communicate as easily as Chris does with other animals. Humans have mostly forgotten the art of vibration, but Alex does her best.

  She uses air, vocal folds, her larynx and her pharynx and spurts sound waves. It’s a slow process. ‘What is it, Chris?’ she asks. Then, ‘Yuk, what’s that smell?’

  Chris tries to explain. Alex hears him whine and feels him back away from the culvert and into her knees. He is a handsome dog, a mash-up of golden retriever and black Labrador, sporting a glossy black coat with gold highlights around his muzzle and over his eyes, and a white star on his chest. The thick ruff around his neck gives him a slightly lion-like look but in truth he prefers Alex to deal with the scary stuff.

  ‘Something nasty in the gutter, darling dog? OK, leave it.’ She reaches out and rubs his head. Her fingers are strong and gentle. It comforts Chris although he can still smell the poisoned meat and hear the cries of delight from the rats.

  Alex puts Chris’s harness over his head and picks up the handle with its yellow sign reading, ‘Please don’t distract me – I’m a working guide dog.’ ‘Forward!’ she commands and Chris sighs and steps up. He likes his work, and the pay, an exceptional kibble, is good. After a moment, his tail flares up high and he begins singing to himself as he trots along. The rotten meat floats away on its raft of rapacious rats but there is nothing to be done about that.

  *

  TRANSCRIPTION: LOWDOWN RADIO THE DAY PROGRAMME

  The government has today responded to the Malick Report into the Care and Supervision of Elderly Deaf/Disabled and Vulnerable People. The report – which highlighted key issues arising directly from the current cuts to the independent living allowances, social care provision, home care, nursing and home adaptations – recommended immediate action at every level, citing appalling care standards and shameful negligence. Baroness Malick said earlier today that she was saddened and shocked by the report’s findings, especially in the light of recent claims by the government that the cost-cutting measures would not impact on the most vulnerable.

  BARONESS MALICK: ‘It is apparent to me that there is a cataclysmic failure on the part of the government to respond
to the needs of the most vulnerable in our communities. Austerity cannot be a byword for abuse.’

  In the light of this damning report, the government intends to implement the Care and Protect Act drawn up by the Tory minister John Thorpe-Sinclair. The Act is intended to ease the burden on home carers and social workers. The Care and Protect Act will ensure that all vulnerable groups, including elderly or severely disabled, will be offered places in high-care facilities with excellent twenty-four-hour nursing and medical support.

  The government intends to reach out in the first instance to those people trapped in their homes by impairment or illness.

  THORPE-SINCLAIR: ‘The key aim of our response is to do the right thing by the elderly and vulnerable in our communities while also to ease the burden on the hardworking British taxpayer who has, up to this point, had to cover the costs of home adaptations and social care to all and sundry.’

  The first relocations of volunteers to the new residential homes will begin in the next month. Already thousands have been signed up in the hope that this will ensure better care of elderly or severely disabled relatives. This will, at the same time, cut costs previously being spent on inadequate home care, too-short nursing visits and home adaptations. This will also allow those previously locked into caring for their relatives to return to the work environment, putting once economically unviable families back on their feet.

  CLEARANCE

  The Extraction of Mrs Tunny

  Inside it is still an ambulance, but with the new paint job it looks more like a shortened grey bus, with ‘TOSA Community Transport Ltd’ emblazoned in bright orange along its sides. It is currently parked up at the Willowside Estate; badly parked, its back wheels sticking out over the white lines as if abandoned in a fit of pique. The May afternoon is grey and murky, and Andre, the new trainee driver, can smell the sweet dung of overfull bins at the bottom of the stairwell. He is trailing up the stairs after his paramedic colleague Mosh, feeling sour inside, pissed off, muttering to himself. It was just a bit of banter. Fuck knows why Mosh has got the hump.

  ‘Yo bruv,’ he calls up at his colleague. ‘If it was something I said, you gotta get over it, man. I was joshing. I just don’t see what the big-ass deal is, right?’

  He stops talking when he realises Mosh has stopped moving. Standing above him on the stairs, his bearlike girth blocking the light, Mosh turns slowly until he is towering over Andre, looking down from the landing above.

  ‘Andre,’ says Mosh a little too quietly. ‘When you look at me what do you see?’

  ‘Err … I see, you know … I see … a big man.’

  ‘A big black man.’

  ‘Well, obviously, yeah bruv, a big black man so … ?’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘What are you?’

  ‘Umm …’

  ‘You, Andre, are a small, spotty white boy from East Cambright.’

  ‘Hey …’

  ‘And so, Andre, as regards our last conversation, and in a nutshell, I am your supervisor. In no situation, even when having a bit of a laugh, am I your “nigger”. I am not anyone’s “nigger”, and if you ever use that word around me, or any black person again, in my hearing, I will have you up on a disciplinary charge. You get me, “bruv”?’

  ‘Yeah, OK, OK … calm it down. No need to get vex.’ Andre tries to make a ‘tchaa’ sound like his favourite comedian, who is black, incidentally, thinks Andre sulkily, but Mosh has already turned around and is climbing slowly to the second balcony. He’s fuckin’ up himself, Andre whines inside his own head. Thinks he’s posh and that, just ’cos he went to unifuckingversity. Well, I am University of Life, man. And I call you nigger if I want to. But of course he won’t.

  ‘You sure she’s a wheeler?’ Andre asks Mosh at the top of the stairs. ‘I don’t want to have to go back down for the stretcher.’

  Mosh consults his clipboard again.

  ‘Mrs Dorcas Grace Tunny: severe dementia, paranoia, partial hearing loss, macular degeneration, osteoporosis, but she’s not bed-bound. Her husband says she has her own wheelchair.’

  ‘It’s just, after this morning, bruv …’

  Mosh looks at Andre, eyebrow raised, and Andre blinks.

  ‘I just mean … well … I still don’t understand why we were supposed to extract that kid … he looked perfectly sound to me … OK, maybe a bit spazzy, but he wasn’t buggin’ or nothing …’

  Mosh wishes Andre would stop quizzing him on things he should have already picked up in the training.

  ‘I have told you several times, Andre. When the client isn’t able to communicate coherently, or know exactly what is in their best interests, then we are reliant on the request coming from the relative, the person paying the bills.’

  ‘But the kid was all like, “Waaa, I don’t want to go!” It was nasty.’

  ‘The kid was epileptic and refusing treatment, Andre. His dad was scared he would fit and hurt himself but the dad couldn’t get time off work to look after him. He didn’t qualify for the Chronic Carer Component so no nurse, and with no other family to help, the dad needed a break.’ Mosh chews his lip, remembering the relief on the man’s face when they had finally got his son into the back of the ambulance. He can’t imagine growing so tired of his own kid. He is a new dad and at any given moment can smell the creamy goat-milk smell of his baby daughter, Serena.

  ‘What you smiling at?’ Andre is querulous. His face wrinkles in places it shouldn’t on a twenty-year-old. In that moment Mosh can see the fifty-year-old Andre and it’s not a particularly pretty sight.

  ‘It’s a beautiful world, Andre. That is why I am smiling.’

  Andre looks down at the stained concrete underfoot. There is a puddle of something nasty and a cigarette butt to step over. He opens his mouth and shuts it again. He can’t afford to put Mosh’s back up too much. He’s a W4B, a Work-For-Benefits recruit. He cannot lose this placement. He follows Mosh along the balcony, swallowing down his irritation.

  ‘Here we are,’ says Mosh, and rings a bell.

  The men stand side by side, heads slightly lowered, doing the foot-to-foot shuffle of people waiting for a response to a doorbell. The door is a scuffed light blue with the number 46a hanging precariously from a couple of nails next to the letter box. Someone has sprayed ‘Crazy Crip Bitch’ in red across the lower half of the door. It has been partially washed off, taking some of the blue paint off, too, but it is still readable.

  ‘Aw, come on,’ breathes Mosh and plonks his finger on the button again.

  Briiiiing!

  The sound shakes the dirty concrete under their feet.

  ‘If they didn’t hear that they must be dead already,’ says Andre.

  Mosh rolls his wide shoulders, head still down, listening.

  ‘I hear something.’

  They wait.

  They listen.

  A plane drones high in the greasy grey sky overhead. It is muggy, and Mosh can feel sweat bubbling up from his crevices and dripping down his back into the crack of his arse. Jeez, I haven’t time for this, he thinks, homesick for his little family, and squats down, knees cracking, so that his mouth lines up with the letter box. He prises up the metal lid to peer inside and gets a light waft of stale piss laced with a ghastly apple room freshener, but his view is blocked by the stiff plastic fringe on the inside.

  ‘Mr Tunny!’ he hollers. ‘Are you in there?’

  ‘Go away!’ The voice is thin and warbling. ‘I know what you are up to!’

  A woman’s voice, thinks Mosh and calls, ‘Mrs Tunny?’

  Andre’s eyebrows go up. ‘Is she on her own? Where’s the fucking husband?’

  Mosh ignores him.

  ‘Mrs Tunny? Can you hear us? Your husband has asked us to come by to help you.’

  ‘You shit fucks!’ the woman screams. And then she is laughing. ‘Shitfuckshitfuckshit!’

  ‘Good morning.’

  Mosh and Andre look around to find a tiny old man in a b
utton-down shirt, waistcoat and linen trousers. His face is coffee- coloured and his scrawny beard is yellow with nicotine but his eyes are bright, green as seaweed behind his glasses.

  ‘Mr Tunny?’

  ‘That’s me. Apologies for not being here. You are earlier than I thought you would be. You said end of the afternoon, and so I just nipped out to the shop.’ He squeezes between them, key in hand. ‘You might want to let me go in alone first. She is probably a bit unsettled now.’

  Mosh and Andre look at each other, unsure, and Mr Tunny’s eyes sparkle as he watches them. ‘Just five minutes, lads. Remember it was me that called you, after all.’

  ‘Yeah, after twenty-five complaints from your neighbour, old man,’ mutters Andre under his breath.

  Mosh ignores Andre and nods, stepping back to let Mr Tunny open up. The little man opens the door just a crack, steps in and quickly closes the door behind him.

  The demented laughter and shitfuckshits peter out and instead there comes a low moaning sound. They can hear Mr Tunny soothing his wife, and although they cannot make out what he is saying, it seems to do the trick. Gradually the moans and wails fade further into the flat and then die away altogether.

  Mosh and Andre sigh and wait. The radio crackles on Mosh’s shoulder. ‘Five five oh, report.’

  ‘Awaiting extraction. Will advise when clear. Out.’

  A door a little further along the balcony opens and a bedraggled young Asian woman with a pushchair emerges.

  ‘Awright darling,’ says Andre all bantam-rooster-breasted, but his smile flickers off as she keeps her head firmly turned away from the men, locks up and pushes her squalling infant towards the stairs.

  ‘Lezzer,’ says Andre to her back. ‘God, this place is depressing.’ He stretches. ‘Should we go in, do you think? It’s been five minutes.’

  ‘Something’s up,’ says Mosh, and as he says it Andre senses it too.

  Mosh shoulders the door but it remains shut. He bangs, huge fist heavy against the blue door.

  ‘Mr Tunny! Open up!’

  ‘Why do the old fucks have to make it so difficult?’ Andre bellyaches. ‘We’re doing them a bloody favour.’