Twice, a week or so before starting a house-sitting stint, I went to spy out the multiple dogs that would be in my care. Between that reccy and the owners going away, one of the dogs in each of the households died.
I imagined the pitiful horror of (me) having been the one to find the canine corpse.
Running to fetch someone – who, exactly? The canine police and/or canine coroner?
Agonising between contacting the owners and ruining their holiday, or waiting for them to come back and the news immediately jettisoning the effect of any rest and enjoyment.
Lurching about in distress like Lady Macbeth sleep walking.
Or Maria Callas in Tosca, having killed Scarpia, searching for Cavaradossi’s free pardon.
Or – perhaps most dramatically - Hilda Ogden leaving the Street to a chorus in the Rover’s of “Wish me Luck as you Wave me Goodbye”.
Phew, frankly, that Mim and Tonto died pre-me.
The shock would almost certainly have brought on an asthma attack, bells palsy, a phantom miscarriage.
Or, possibly, who knew, death by spontaneous combustion.
Apropos, let’s now recall that Egyptian saying, ‘Never name the well from which you will not drink.’
Tinkie was a fifteen-year-old black and white moggie. Very occasionally she stalked downstairs to keep the five dogs (my other charges) honest, but mainly kept herself to the master bedroom on the first floor of the huge house. I would lie on my stomach upstairs in the winter sun reading while Tinkie sat on my back. She would from time to time let out a yelling mew to let me know I must immediately stroke her. There was a gate at the top of the stairs which Clive and Julie, my house-sittees, assured me was only to stop the dogs getting at Tinkie’s food. 'We often forget and just leave the gate open. But there's no issue ever with the dogs and Tinkie.'
Coming back into the house around the fifth day of a fortnight I immediately sensed an atmosphere. Post-storm electric meets post Satan-encounter Sulphur. No dogs tumbling through from the kitchen. No Tinkie at the top of stairs.
In the master bedroom the iron fireback was turned sideways on. I tried to pull it back into position but it was too heavy. I wondered if Ben would be able to move it, or might he need to call on Barry from over the road. There was something red hooked over the grate.
An occasional table was upturned with a pile of clothes neatly on top. At first I didn't register what was lying on top of the clothes.
Tinkie, stiffly prone, mouth open in a rictus.
'Oh, God, oh God.' I walked compulsively out the room, then back in.
I went in and out, staring down at the cat and intoning the two words 'Oh, God' over and over. I had been out of the house forty minutes tops.
I looked closer. There was blood by Tinkie's mouth, puncture wounds at her throat, her fur was matted with slobber.
Colin and Julie were in California. It would be four am there.
I waited till teatime here then sent Colin a WhatsApp asking him to call.
The red thing hooked over the grate turned out to be a dog collar. Had the dogs chased Tinkie into the fireplace?
Or - I remembered the impression of a Sulphur aftermath - had something come down the chimney?
Back downstairs the dogs placidly watched me, staying in their beds. Scottie dog Simms was missing his collar. I put the red one back on him, checking his muzzle for blood. I couldn’t see any. I checked the others: another Scottie, two Cairn terriers and a chihuahua. Nothing to see there. But they were definitely all being too quiet.
I welled up telling Clive what had happened.
With his voice sounding like it was somehow reversing, he asked, 'Is she...dead?'
Julie (listening in) said, briskly, ‘Tinkie must have had a heart attack - and cats scream horrendously when that happens - which brought the dogs upstairs. They would have been freaking out at the noise and tried to silence her.’
Whatever had happened in reality, I was completely exonerated. 'And what a so, so difficult call this must have been for you to make,’ Clive said.
He asked me to wrap Tinkie in a towel and put her in an outhouse. 'It's cold enough for her to keep till I get back and can bury her.'
I was concerned that one, he might find other wounds on her – I couldn’t bring myself to look - and, two, he might discover that I hadn't been disposing of the dogs' faeces from the garden as he had asked, by putting them in doggy pooh bags and then into the bins around the streets, but had been burying them in the flower beds.
Having moved Tinkie outside I opened all the windows, letting in flat cold air and traffic noise, righted the occasional table and re-stacked the clothes on it.
I later found three separate blood-spatters; two on the carpet by the bathroom door, one on the lino by Tinkie's empty food bowl. I mixed salt and bi-carb in a bowl of cold water and removed the blood.
The first of two times I write about in my new book where I felt I was somehow cleaning up a crime scene.
#housesitting #mytutuwentawol #animals #pets #cats #death #dying
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