The Blood Spilt

41

Lisa stops the car outside the vet’s. The dogs know exactly where they are. This is not a nice place. They all get up and look out through the car window. Jaws hanging open. Tongues lolling. The German begins to shed dandruff. He always does that when he’s nervous. White scales work their way up through his fur and cover his brown coat like snow. Their tails are plastered to their stomachs.
Lisa goes in. The dogs are left in the car.
Aren’t we coming with you? their eyes ask her. Are we going to get away without any injections, examinations, frightening smells and those humiliating white plastic funnels round our heads?
Annette, the vet, comes to meet her. They sort out the payment, Annette deals with it herself. There’s only the two of them there. No other staff. Nobody in the waiting room. Lisa is moved by her consideration.
The only thing Annette asks is:
“Are you taking them with you?”
Lisa shakes her head. She hasn’t actually thought that far ahead. She’s only just managed to think this far. And now she’s here. They’ll become garbage. She pushes aside the idea of how unworthy that is. That she owes them more than that.
“How shall we do this?” asks Lisa. “Shall I bring them in one at a time, or what?”
Annette looks at her.
“That’ll be too hard for you, I think. Let’s bring them all in, then I can give them something to calm them down first.”
Lisa staggers out.
“Stay!” she warns them as she opens the tailgate.
She puts on their leads. Doesn’t want to risk any of them running away.
Into reception, the dogs around her legs. Through the waiting room, past the office and the treatment room.
Annette opens the door to the operating room.
The panting. The sound of their claws clicking and scrabbling across the floor. They get entangled in each other’s leads. Lisa pulls at them and tries to untangle them as she walks toward that room, just get them in there.
They’ve made it at last. They’re in that ugly room with its ugly red plastic floor and blotchy brown walls. Lisa catches her thigh on the black operating table. All the claws that have scratched the floor have enabled the dirt to work its way down into the plastic matting so that it’s impossible to scrub it clean. It’s turned into a dark red pathway from the door and around the table. On one of the wall cupboards there’s a ghastly poster of a little girl surrounded by a sea of flowers. She’s holding a floppy-eared puppy on her lap. The clock on the wall has a text running across the face from the ten to the two: “The time has come.”
The door glides shut behind Annette.
Lisa unclips their leads.
“We’ll start with Bruno,” says Lisa. “He’s so stubborn, he’ll still be the last to lie down. You know what he’s like.”
Annette nods. While Lisa strokes Bruno’s ears and chest, Annette gives him a sedative injection into the muscle of his foreleg.
“Who’s my best boy?” asks Lisa.
Then he looks at her. Straight in the eye, although that isn’t what dogs do. Then he glances quickly away. Bruno is a dog who maintains the correct etiquette. Looking the leader of the pack in the eye is not allowed, no way.
“You’re a patient boy, aren’t you,” says Annette, giving him a pat when she’s finished.
Soon Lisa is sitting on the floor beneath the window. The radiator is burning into her back. Sicky-Morris, Bruno, Karelin and Majken are lying on the floor around her, half asleep. Majken’s head resting on one thigh. Sicky-Morris on the other. Annette pushes Bruno and Karelin closer to Lisa, so that she has them all with her.
There are no words. Only a terrible ache in her throat. Their warm bodies beneath her hands.
To think you’ve managed to love me, she thinks.
Someone who carries such a hopeless weight inside her. But a dog’s love is simple. You run about in the forest. You’re happy. You lie basking in each other’s warmth. Relax and feel good.
The electric razor buzzes, then Annette inserts a canula into their forelegs.
It happens quickly. All too quickly. Only the last thing is left to do. Where are her farewell thoughts? The ache in her throat swells into an unbearable pain. It hurts so much, everywhere. Lisa is shaking as if she has a fever.
“I’ll do it, then,” says Annette.
And she gives them the injection that puts them to sleep.
It takes half a minute. They are lying there as they were before. Their heads on her lap. Bruno’s back pressed against the bottom of her back. Majken’s tongue is lolling out of her mouth in a way that it doesn’t do when she’s asleep.
Lisa thinks she’ll get up. But she can’t.
The tears are just beneath the skin of her face. Her face is trying to resist. It’s like a tug-of-war. The muscles are fighting against it. Wanting to pull her mouth and eyebrows back into their normal expression, but the tears squeeze their way out. Finally she cracks into a grotesque, sobbing grimace. Tears and snot pour out. To think it can be so unbearably painful. The tears have been waiting behind her eyes, and it’s been like pressing down the lid of a pan. Now they’ve boiled over and are running down her face. Down onto Sicky-Morris.
A cross between a groan and a whimper emerges from her throat. It sounds so ugly. A kind of oohoo, oohoo. She can hear it herself, this dried up condemned old woman moaning. She gets up on all fours. Hugs the dogs. Her movements are violent and reckless. She crawls among them, pushing her arms under their limp bodies. Strokes their eyelids, their noses, their ears, their stomachs. Pushes her face against their heads.
The tears are like a storm. They snatch and tear at her body. She snivels and tries to swallow. But it’s hard to swallow when she’s on all fours with her head down. In the end the snot trickles out of her mouth. She wipes it away with her hand.
At the same time, she can hear a voice. Another Lisa who is standing there watching her. Who says: What kind of a person are you? What about Mimmi?
And she stops crying. Just as she’s thinking it’ll never stop.
It’s remarkable. The whole summer has been a list of things to do. One by one she’s ticked them off. Tears weren’t on the list. They put themselves there. She didn’t want them. She’s afraid of them. Afraid of drowning in them.
And when they came. At first they were horrible, an unbearable torment, darkness. But then. Then the tears became a refuge. A place to rest. A waiting room before the next thing on the list. Then a part of her suddenly wanted to stay there among the tears. Put off the other thing which is going to happen. And then the tears leave her. Say: that’s it, then. And just stop.
She gets up. There’s a hand basin, she grabs the edge and pulls herself to her feet. Annette has obviously left the room.
Her eyes are swollen, they feel like half tennis balls. She presses her icy fingertips against her eyelids. Turns on the tap and splashes her face. There are some rough paper towels beside the basin. She dries her face and blows her nose, avoids looking in the mirror. The paper rasps against her nose.
She looks down at the dogs. She’s so exhausted, worn out with her tears, that she isn’t capable of feeling so strongly any longer. The overwhelming grief is just like a memory. She crouches down and gives each dog a much more thoughtful caress.
Then she leaves the room. Annette is busy at the computer in the office. All Lisa needs to do is mutter a good-bye.
Out into the September sunshine. That stabs and torments her. Sharply defined shadows. The sun is in her eyes, except when a few clouds drift by. She gets in the car and flips down the sun visor. Starts the car and drives through town before driving out onto the road to Norway.
She thinks about precisely nothing during the journey. Except for how the road curves its way forward. How the pictures change. Bright blue sky. White, ragged clouds shredding themselves as they scud along high above the mountains. Sharply defined, rugged ravines. The length of Tornetr?sk, like a shining blue stone with yellow gold spun around it.
When she has passed Katterj?kk it appears. A huge truck. Lisa keeps driving fast. She undoes her seat belt.