Pets in a Pickle by Malcolm D Welshman Read Free Book Online Page A

hurled himself over my shoulder, his claws slicing through my jacket as he scrabbled past my head. I swung round, the cat catcher veering in a wide circle, the noose slicing across an adjacent potting bench, scooping out a tray of fuchsia cuttings, sending them spinning into the air and pattering on to the wall of the greenhouse like a hail of bullets.
    There was another rap on the glass. ‘What the hell’s going on in there?’
    ‘It’s just Leo. He’s proving a bit difficult to catch.’
    There was a chuckle. ‘That sounds like my Leo. Bit of a tearaway if ever there was.’
    I couldn’t agree more. My torn jacket was testimony to that.
    Two crushed cinerarias, a squashed begonia and three severed azaleas later, I managed to snare Leo amid a torrent of hisses and spits.
    Only then did the Major venture in brandishing his stick triumphantly. ‘Jolly good show,’ he bellowed. ‘Reminds me of when I bagged my first lion.’ He placed a restraining foot on Leo’s squirming back as instructed, while I pumped in the anaesthetic injection I’d already drawn up. I breathed a sigh of relief as Leo’s writhings slowly subsided and he slumped into unconsciousness.
    The Major didn’t comment on the piles of uprooted seedlings on the potting bench; he merely swept them to one side to clear a space.
    ‘So let’s have him up,’ he declared enthusiastically, seeming to be energised by the heat while I felt more and more like a limp lettuce.
    Freeing Leo’s inert body from the noose, I pulled him up on to the bench top. The Major pushed me aside in his eagerness to look at the wound. ‘Ah … ah ha … just as I thought. It’s fly-blown. See?’ He poked a finger and thumb in the wound and held up a wriggling white maggot. ‘Saw it once in a leopard I shot. It ruined the pelt.’
    I fetched my black bag and began cleaning up the torn skin, snipping back the matted hair, wiping away the yellow ooze and dipping a pair of tweezers into the seething mass of grubs, to pick them out one by one.
    ‘Drop them in there,’ instructed the Major, pointing to an empty seed tray. ‘Twenty four,’ he said when I’d finished. ‘Pity I don’t still fish.’ He shuffled the tray from side to side watching the maggots roll round and round. ‘Just think,’ he mused. ‘Poor old Leo walking round with that little lot squirming around under his skin. Just proves what a tough little blighter he is.’ As he spoke, he lifted up the cat’s tail and peered between his legs. ‘By Jove. What whoppers. Bet he’s the talk of the town amongst the ladies round here.’
    I paused midway through dusting the wound with anti-parasitic powder. ‘Do you want me to castrate him while he’s under?’
    ‘What … and turn him into a poofter? No way.’
    With the wound cleaned and powdered, I gave Leo a shot of long-acting penicillin. ‘I’m afraid the area’s too large to stitch. We’ll just have to leave it to granulate over.’
    ‘Then I’ll keep him confined to barracks,’ declared the Major. ‘He’ll stay in the greenhouse.’
    Throughout the following week, Beryl was inundated with progress reports on Leo: the times he was fed; the state of the wound; his daily movements within the greenhouse. Lucy came back from the local delicatessen to inform me a special order had been placed by Major Fitzherbert for daily supplies of tuna, smoked salmon and herring mops. I also heard that his friends were being coerced into coming round to see the invalid and watch the Major stalk in to feed him. ‘Leo’s the talk of the town,’ said Lucy. ‘Well, at least of Gainsborough Drive. And apparently they’re doing a feature on him in the Westcott Gazette .’
    What next I wondered – Southern TV? National coverage? Then suddenly all went quiet. No further news.
    ‘No, he hasn’t phoned for the last couple of days,’ Beryl told me.
    So I assumed all was well and that the wound had healed. No doubt Leo was back in the wild stalking the Downs.