And so I walked back across the metal bridge with the map folded in my pocket and the fluffed-out Pomeranian in my arms. She whined with each step I took. Buskers looked at me and grinned. Young girls stopped to stroke her fur. The large stone angels that sat above, beside the suspension cables, seemed to have turned their heads away in silent contempt. I had a better job, I remembered again, a more urgent profession, a function even. It was to do with weaponry and rough interrogation, but that was in the old days and that war continued without me in it. I was married now, in a different city, with a daughter I loved and with a business partner who wore cufflinks.
The water below the bridge flowed with its brown lazy patterns and I suddenly remembered the colour blue. I was from a seaside home, near Penzance, where the pirates came from, and the colour blue reminded me of happiness. Blue skies, blue seas, white foam. I remembered the house, the promenade, the pier around the back of it where the swans pick their way through the mud of low tide. They looked better when the sea came in, the harbour was full, blue or fresh seagreen and glistening with reflections, each swan like a large pregnant letter S with their reflected S beneath them. I had sisters who had married, brothers who had wandered and the last of them all was my sister Dympna whose beauty was marred by a harelip that made her kind, to me in particular, and we had shared a bubble of kindness through our early days until the surgical techniques were developed that allowed her to be rid of it, so that her beauty became a fact that was acknowledged by everybody, where previously I seemed to have been its sole witness. So I had been tutored in jealousy from an early age. It was odd, to resent a vanished harelip. But it meant she was pursued then, by boyfriends, some of them even friends of mine, and our tiny shared chrysalis of emotions was shattered, though for a time neither of us could bring each other to acknowledge it. Until one day I found her in the garden shed with an older friend of mine, Peter, and got a glimpse of her beautiful thigh as his hand drew her dress above it. I’m looking for the fork, I said, since my father had asked me to dig lugworms for a night’s fishing. OK, she said, and shifted her body and I could see the fork on the ground beneath the bench she was lying on. Work away, I said stupidly, as I reached for the fork, knowing I would hate Peter with a vengeance now and regretting the absence of that slash on her upper lip which had been, to me, quite beautiful. He never found her beautiful before, I remember thinking. But now that others did, he did too. And I wondered, would beauty always confuse me, in its confounding, beautiful way?
My father played the accordion with the oompah-oompah bands that drew crowds on the holidays on the bandstand on the promenade. He mended them too, which seemed to be his real job, so there were always tiny reeds laid out on the brown paper on his workbench. His workroom was off-limits to everyone but me, who liked to blow the reeds and identify their pitch and it gave him particular pleasure when I got the note right. C sharp, I would say, with the reed in my mouth, listening to the sound that was already dying, and he would say, got it in one, sailor, perfect pitch. Sailor was his word for me, and he had been a sailor once. But he belonged now to that meeting between land and sea, the eroded shore, and his house behind the harbour was right on the edge of it. He was a widower, and my mother had been for some time a dim memory. But the accordion sometimes brought her back, the wheeze and flap of it and the ripples of melody he would draw from it, the hornpipes, the polkas and the marching tunes. And occasionally one of those old laments that came from the instrument’s bellows like the memory of a once beloved, exhausted breath. He grew tired in the end, my father, tired of memory, tired of life, tired of everything but me. Whatever you be, be a man, he would tell me. Because he had been a man in his time.
The memory of blue and fresh breezes. There were neither of them here, in this landlocked city, on this moulting continent, in this hot summer. And the dog in my arms was whining again, so I stroked its damaged kneecap as I walked. I left the metal bridge, passed through the stalled traffic on the other side and made my way to the address she had given me.
West or east always confused me here since I gauged them by the sea as a child and here there was only the river to divide things. West was on the right side, east on the left, facing the grotesque pile of marble that was the parliament, downriver. And I found the veterinarian’s eventually, in one of those nineteenth-century courtyards on the left-hand side of things.
I had to climb a staircase to get there and found the waiting room thankfully empty, with the vet in his chamber adjacent.
Why do I know this animal? he asked.
Phoebe, I said, belongs to Gertrude.
Ah, Gertrude, he repeated. And how is she doing with the smoking?
Badly, I told him.
I cannot help her there, he murmured.
Maybe nobody can.
But to little Phoebe I can perhaps be of help.
It’s her patella, I said. It is – what is the word again?
Luxating, he said and seemed to relish the vowels.
And he took the dog from my arms, to my immense relief. I felt somewhat renewed by its absence. Perhaps the rest of the day would not be so bad, perhaps all of those things I had forgotten were not of any real importance. And perhaps I might be relieved of little Phoebe and her patella problems indefinitely.
There are four grades of luxation in the patella, he told me. Grade one can be treated manually and can be popped right back in.
And he fondled the kneecap that was hidden by the mounds of fluffy hair.
Grades two to four need surgical treatment.
His fingers moved through the hair, as if testing a damaged screw.
And Phoebe, I’m saddened to tell you, is a grade four. She must rest here overnight.
I was learning more about miniature dogs and kneecaps and luxating joints than I had ever imagined. But I had other concerns. Not least the burnt hole in that map. So I thanked the veterinarian, asked him to call the clairvoyant Gertrude and explain the admittedly tragic circumstances to her.
And break the news gently, I added.
Then I went on my way.