Kids' Book Club

Chapter One

Rattling Chickens

Lack of sleep makes everything slow, it makes clocks and brains and bodies sluggish, and it makes it nigh on impossible to find anything good on television. In my years as an out-of-hours vet I found only one cure for sleepiness, the ringing telephone.

‘Good evening, surgery.’

I rolled the last ‘r’ in ‘surgery’ unintentionally. After weeks of business plans and paperwork, meetings with the practice’s partners, and meetings about more meetings, Ruth, my nurse, and I had finally established the emergency vet service that Brighton had so desperately needed. We had been up and running for ten or so days and we were still feeling our way along.

‘Oh dear,’ said a husky woman’s voice on the end of the line.

Of all the possible greetings, that isn’t one you want to hear.

‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ she repeated.

‘It’s OK,’ I said, ‘take a minute, you’re speaking to the vet.’

She told me her name was Helen.

As she went into what was wrong, my eyes did a tour of the room. Any item of furniture that was flat enough was topped with greetings cards. ‘Good Luck on your new job’, read one, sitting high on the filing cabinet. ‘Don’t muck it up’, read its neighbour. Our futuristic new LCD television blared unfuturistic eighties music videos. I gestured to Ruth, the practice’s nurse, who was standing by, to turn the volume down. The caller was noticeably agitated. She huffed and puffed into the phone as she spoke. Her words came out chopped up.

‘I’m in ever such a flap,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what’s happened to chickens.’

I paused and took a breath.

‘To who?’

‘To chickens,’ she said.

‘Chickens?’ I asked, making triply sure I’d heard her right.

I waved at Ruth.

The television went off.

Over the next few minutes I asked Helen the best questions I could think of and listened in hard to her answers. I pressed the receiver into my ear to help suck some clarity out of what she was saying. I flapped at Ruth for a scrap of paper, and fished in my pockets for a ballpoint pen. I had a crib sheet on the desk with some instructions. Take their name. I jotted down Helen. Who’s the patient? Chickens, question mark, exclamation mark. It all went down. The next prompt was to ask what the problem was. Everything to date had been reasonably routine, and in most cases you can triage easily over the phone. Not this one.

‘He what when he walks? Rattles?’

I stared at the A4 print-out that was Blu-tacked to the wall – An emergency to you is an emergency to us. I suppose you could call it our ethos. It was also the first thing I’d ever laminated. There was a wrinkle right through the middle.

‘Why don’t you pop down,’ I said, ‘and we’ll take a look.’

I stood at the window and watched for Helen through the slats of the blind. It was February and the rain had set in, and not a little drizzle either. It was the sort of weather you see in commercials for hug-in-a-mug soups and hot chocolates; theatrical flashes of lightning, rumbles of thunder and a downpour that stuck fringes onto foreheads. I swilled a mouthful of bitter instant coffee. I had nightmarish visions of Helen pulling up in a van or a lorry, stacked from the floor to the ceiling with hundreds of cages, each occupied by a flapping bird. In my ten professional years as a vet so far I hadn’t come across a single chicken, then ten days into my own surgery and – bam!

A pair of headlights bumped into the car park. The headlights didn’t belong to a chicken lorry but to an old, blue Volvo. The front door swung open and into a puddle stepped a tatty pair of sports shoes. The woman who climbed out of the car had brown curly hair that was drenched by the rain. She quickly hopped out of the puddle and stepped in front of the headlights, turning her body into a silhouette. I opened the back door and called to her as the rain drummed on the flat roof.

‘Do you want a hand bringing them in?’ I shouted across the car park.

‘Them?’ she said.

There was a bark from the boot of her car.

‘The birds?’

Helen fell quiet.

We swapped confused expressions for a moment.

‘Birds?’ she said. She made her way towards me. ‘Birds?’ she said again, with an almost laugh. ‘Do you mean Chickens?’

‘Chickens’ was a golden retriever.