Beauty and Terror at 11:30am

Beauty and Terror at 11:30am

‘Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.’ - Rainer Maria Rilke.

Part One: Beauty

February 7th

11:30am

I have my favourites. Your breeder has sent pictures, for which I wait with impatient elation, of you and your littermates. None of you are named, and so we call you, ‘black puppy, blue puppy, green puppy, red’. Your blue-collared brother is beautiful, he will go first - no chance we’ll end up with him- black is huge (even for a Bernese) and red is chipper and cheeky. And then there’s green, who is perpetually grumpy, grimy and altogether glum. I want black, I decide; black or red, but not green - gawky green, gloomy green; I would like a puppy with a wagging tail and a fluttering heart, one that seems happy and healthy and ready to live.

I watch you, squirming and biting and trying to wrench yourself free. Your brothers nibble, take a hesitant lick, but you fight to get onto my lap and when you manage it you are frantic, wiggling and clawing and flapping like a fish on land.

Perhaps its fiction, the things that make us feel often are, but its rumoured that a passenger aboard the doomed titanic - Ann Elisabeth Isham - was found cradling her great dane in the icy waters amongst the wreckage, having refused to leave the lump of dog behind. It’s funny, great dane's are, well, great, and as such, notoriously prone to all manner of health conditions; they’re one of those breeds that are lucky to see in a decade.

You can understand a woman staying for her husband, or running into flames for her children; not only are they human, but they will miss more. Your son may have lived eighty years, you might have had to mourn him for another 40, but Miss Isham must have known when she plucked that gawky, uncoordinated puppy from the litter of its equally unfortunate siblings with equally unfortunate life expectancies, that she would have to grieve him someday soon. She would have been expecting it, perfectly capable of living a life without him, understanding of the fact that residual love would linger for a lifetime longer than he could fathom and that she could not freeze up when the grief hit her, that life would continue its steady march and that she must be ready to match its pace.

And yet she stayed.

We do not get to pick, fourth in line for a puppy, we will take whoever is left. Before the breeder ushers us out I hold you to my chest, cradling the thump, thump, thump-thump of your little chest as I press a kiss to your cheek and cradle your green collar between my thumb and forefinger, whispering, ‘this one’, whispering; ‘please, if you hear me, if you’re listening’.

March 6th

11:30am

You are a little circle, zapping around on the ground as if a football on the pitch at the European finals, zipping between my feet and your breeders, panting and pawing and desperate to play. I can barely hear her as she walks us through the basics; kennel club registrations and vaccine appointments and all manner of monotonous check-listings that I’m far too elated to appreciate the importance of.

We got our last dog, Kipper, when I was just shy of seven, and I adored him. He was like you, endlessly energetic and easily entertained, and his tapping feet on linoleum floor were the soundtrack of my childhood. He was beautiful, brilliant, one of a kind, but he wasn’t mine.

I’ve never really been responsible for anything. Not anything so vulnerable, anyway. Kipper was his own keeper, so independent, and like siblings we would lounge on the sofa and share snacks and rile one another up, and he was, to me, my baby brother. My mother was his own, I called my grandma ‘ours’. We got annoyed at one another, he stole my clothes and I ruffled his hair and he was vulnerable, sure, but not entirely mine to protect.

You are something else, inquisitive and bounding, but so small at my feet, so susceptible so the wild wavering world.

I will keep you from all of it, I think, bringing you against my chest and kissing your cheek, the whole world, it is for you, not the other way around. Never the other way around.

I carry you to the car, my arms encasing your tiny beating body, watching the winding walkway with paranoid precision, careful not to stumble or to scare; cradling you like a newborn babe with bones of glass and skin of paper.

You watch the sun, and I think of Alexander the great. So many stories, so many tales, known in every corner of every little pocket of our world. Legend has it that he rode a horse who could be tamed by no other, that Alexander did not wrangle him into submission, but simply took his maw and brought his face to the light. His own shadow - which had been causing him such stress - forgotten behind him.

I do not know what scares you, but I have heard that slow, gentle strokes soothe on long rides, and so I spend the entirety of the next four hours in constant motion, only taking my hands off of you to change your puppy pads and fill your water bowl. By the time we get home my right palm is red and tingling and I know now that you are not my baby brother, but my baby boy.

Part Two: Terror

April 5th

11:30am

Something is wrong. You cough and splutter, wheezing. It isn’t the first time I’ve noticed it, but I’ve always attributed the occasional hacking to the speed at which you gulp down water. You have perpetual hiccups at this point, and you get so worked up, zapping around the living room and bounding about under my feet, and I assumed it was simple over-excitement. It probably is, I assure myself, pulling up alongside mum’s car and wandering numbly around pets at home.

I weave between aisles, cooing cooly at a dachshund pup and plucking a little toy rat from the shelf, squeezing it once, twice, three times - four, fluttering like your heart in the room above me. Rat paid for, I stand at the bottom of the stairs like a boy about to be stood up on prom night, and wile away the next few minutes.

It’s fine; you’re fine.

But you’ve been in there a while, and it is just a little terrifying, the way you sound when it hits you. Kip died of cancer, we took him into the vets one morning assuming an infection, and an hour later I was in a tiny steel room, watching his chest rise and fall and rise and fall and then, eventually, fail to rise again. Watching him go from being here, now, to not being anywhere ever again. Watching him die. Tumour on the lung, hence the coughing.

But you’re a puppy. A big puppy, sure, prone to health conditions - I get that, but you're 87 days old according to the counter on my phone. You haven't seen in a Christmas. Hell, you haven’t lived through Easter. Kipper wasn’t old, but he was older. It made sense. This wouldn’t.

You’re fine.

It becomes agonising, though, the wait, and so I walk upstairs and take a seat outside, watching both doors, not knowing which ones holds you, flicking through a pamphlet; ‘doggie dental essentials’, and then looking at the clock. Ten minutes since I got here, which means you’ve been in there for twenty. What checkup takes twenty minutes? It’s only a cough, I mean, seriously, I convinced myself it was kennel cough; they made mum wait outside with you in case it was. What else could it be? You’re fine, you’re fine, your heart is beating, you’re energetic, you’re playful, you have a good appetite and you’re perky and perfect and fine, totally, totally fine.

The toy rat is scorching hot and slightly damp in my hands, it’s body trembling in my iron grip. I think of mum emerging, eyes red and cheeks stained with mascara-riddled tears; a black, brown, and white mess cradled in her arms.

The toy crinkles, I set it down beside me and wring my hands.

It is another ten minutes by the time you emerge. My mum is cradling you and by the grace of god there is light in your eyes and air in your lungs. You are tired, but fine; I knew it.

It’s nothing.

Our vet whispers something to the receptionist and then places a little sign on her desk, ‘ we are currently dealing with an emergency, if you have any enquiries please contact us via email’.

“He has a heart murmur.” Mum says softly. It’s something.

“Right... Right, well, what happens now? Is he… will he be okay?”

She scratches your chin, I think of my lips on your cheek that day in Birmingham, ‘please, please, if you’re listening, if you’re there’.

The drive up to the cardiologist takes the better part of an hour, and you sit beside me on the seat, shaking, small. I have one hand on the wheel and the other on your chest, and I bite back tears when I feel that flutter against my palm.

We leave you with the vet and at a garden centre two minutes down the road I tear apart a sausage roll with shaking fingers, gnawing at it like a malnourished great white, frozen, frozen, frozen. I eat when I am stressed and right now I could just about polish off the entire cafe. We have been told to give it an hour, maybe two, and then to make our way back. The cardiologist has to do an ultrasound, and then figure out just how bad it is. I google ‘PDA in puppies’ on my phone and then slather a scone with cream and jam as I read the first article; ‘PDA resulting in heart failure’.

6th April

11:30am

It has been a month since I carried you, squirming, to the car. Burying my nose in your fur in the back seat as my friend drove up front, I breathed in that unmistakable puppy smell and listened to you grumble sleepily; ‘that’s the whole world Teddy’, I said as you peered up at the open window, ‘that’s the whole wide world, and I’m gonna give you every inch of it’.

Now, reading through your official diagnosis: ‘PDA’, ‘Heart failure - liquid on the lungs’, I think about how even then, from that first picture, that first meeting, through praying on the premier inn bathroom floor and crying with happiness when your breeder sent us the simple message ‘green = yours’, through every moment of it you have been suffering.

The Egyptians used to shave their eyebrows when their cats died and it was said that the grief should subside by the time the hair grew back. I wonder if my hair would refuse to grow, whether the follicles of my own self would rebel against the idea of ever being cured of this, if this were to happen.

I haven’t had a chance to give you the world, only red Leicester cheese and too many toys to count, but no, not the world, not yet.

‘Not yet’, I whisper, my head pressed to my hands, knees aching, eyes wet, ‘not yet’.

April 8th

11:30am

Mum

11:30

Not yet. Reckon she’ll call around 2. Xx

I wipe a hand down my face and bury my phone in my bag. I’ve agreed to do the morning shift, I’m far too terrified to sleep, and I reason that you’ll need plenty of blankets and treats for when you get home after the procedure. £12.00 an hour won't get you the world, but it’s a start.

I woke at 4am, the house silent in the absence of your desperate attempts to scale the puppy gate or rip the upholstery from our sofa. Early morning drives have always felt otherworldly, like the universe exists only in my witness, but today those fifteen minutes were especially devoid of life.

I’ve always thought of the world as existing in a pocket of sorts. For me, it feels about as big as the radius in which my family and friends live. The world is Birmingham and Lichfield - perhaps a little bit of Coventry depending entirely on whether I’m getting along with my aunt.

This morning, in the cold dead of night, the universe was a single veterinary hospital in Worcester. If the universe is finite, what is outside of it? Me, my little car, and the misery of not quite yet.

Beauty (Again)

April 9th

11:30am

I’ve had OCD for as long as I can remember. It’s stained some of my earliest memories; counting the stairs in my childhood home so my grandmother didn't crack her neck going down them, burying my head in my hands and pulling my hair from the seams - hidden in the corner of my Year 1 bathroom and desperately playing it out in my head - was grandad breathing this morning, was he really, was he really, was he really? Counting in one, two, three as I skip, skip, skip back home over panelled flooring thinking, ‘step on a crack, break your mum’s back’.

I press my face to yours and breathe, the tiny wound on your leg from where they inserted the catheter painting my forearm in diluted pink as you lick at my face, lap at my mouth, press your paws into my white, white shirt - paws stained with yellow and a vaguely concerning brown. Paws that are warm, that are moving. Love doesn’t make OCD go away, but it does mean worrying about the damn shirt later.

‘Beauty and terror’, I think, tracing the line of faded ink on my arm as we drive home with you alive in the back. I turn to the sun, not sure if anyone's listening, if anyone's 'out there', but thankful all the same.

April 11th

23:30pm

Your breathing isn't entirely back to normal, which worries me, but I can live with worrying, I just can't handle grieving. Not yet.

I have had dogs before. Dogs I’d die in frozen depths with, dogs I’d burn alive for. I don't quite know why you’re different. The sacrifices I would make are all the same, and yet there’s something stunningly singular about you. Perhaps I was too young the last couple times. I was a child for the entirety of our first girl's life, and only just reaching adulthood when our last boy passed. I was 20 when we got you, and I'm 20 now. I’m an adult. I’m no longer the person who needs to be saved from burning buildings or rescued from iced over lakes, I’m the one who should be heading back in for you.

Perhaps that’s it. Or maybe not. Maybe I don't know anything right now, other than relief and the universe beating around a little pen stuffed full of toys and treats and a beating heart.

Lady Isham was, supposedly, found with her arms entwined around her great dane, frozen in unyielding love. I don't know if that’s true, but I think it could be. What is loss if not life on pause, frozen in time, arms entwined and freezing, freezing, freezing.

I think of the Egyptians, how many of them must have been buried with eyebrows shaved, having never recovered. How many of their men and women must have stood, plucking the hairs from their face and thinking, ‘not yet, not yet, not yet’.

I think of Bucephalus turning to the sun and seeing that bright, brilliant world stretch before him. Alexander at his side, taming and loving what could not be calmed or cared for. I think of you, shivering on that drive home but looking out of that window into a world which has always been for you, for me, for everyone with lungs to breathe it in and a heart to beat against its beauty.

I cannot say many things with certainty, but I know this; icy depths or empty skies, a world of wonder or the infinite cruelty of existence, I’ll be there. Eyebrows shaved, elated, broken hearted or heaving with hope, I’ll be there.

I don't know how long you’ll have with us, but as I watch you doze on your little rat, belly full and heart beating, I know that it’ll be both more than I deserve and far less than could ever suffice.

The rise and fall of your chest, the beating patch on your shaved belly - your heart, your breath, your life. You’re breathing, yes you are, yes you are, yes you are. It’s beautiful, it’s terrifying.

It’s okay.

You’re here.