Ever by My Side (2 page)

When I felt it go there was no pain or discomfort, only the rush of fear that I had done something very wrong and, perhaps more important, impossible to justify. I mean you don’t just swallow a spoon by accident. What was I going to tell my mum and dad? I fell on a spoon while my mouth was open! I was so hungry I ate my yogurt, spoon and all!

I waited for a few minutes and nothing happened. I had a drink of milk and nothing happened. I didn’t feel any different. If I jumped up and down nothing rattled inside my body, nothing tickled or poked through my skin. In the end, instead of confessing my sin to my parents, I decided to wait and see what, if anything, happened and besides, I was tired, so I went back to bed.

At this early stage of my life, I’m not entirely sure I could make any connection between what went into my mouth and what came out the other end. All I knew was that by the next morning I still felt fine. No one seemed to have noticed there was anything missing from the cutlery drawer and so I decided to keep my acquisition of a foreign body a secret, comfortable with the notion that the little spoon was lost inside me, hidden somewhere dark and warm and safe, not causing me any harm, inert and happy to simply hang out. It was not until I was thirteen years old, and clearly not much wiser, that I feared my secret would be revealed.

In trying to define my early teenage stature, some might use the word
lean
out of kindness. Truth be told, I was a scrawny whippet
of a boy. I was, however, blessed with a semblance of speed, a characteristic that did not go unnoticed by our school sports teacher, Mr. French.

“All you have to do is catch the ball and run for the line.”

Sounded simple enough, but his synopsis of what would be required of me as a winger on our school rugby team failed to do justice to the rough and tumble of what the game meant to boys with far more muscle, spite, and testosterone.

I like to remember the critical moment in terms of the dying seconds of a crucial game, perhaps a grudge match against local rivals or a match to claim a league championship title, with time running out and one more try needed to win—me making an impossible catch, a shimmy left, a fake right, defenders falling at my feet as I charged for the line, rugby ball tucked tight and safe in my chest as I leapt over giants and landed for my winning points just as the final whistle blew. What actually transpired was that I caught a ball in the middle of the field and hesitated, and in a moment of panic half a dozen boys jumped on top of me, frozen mud on the right side of my body, hundreds of pounds of grunting, writhing, sweaty bodies on my left. Something had to give as a result of this mayhem and unfortunately that something happened to be my breastbone.

I’d be lying if I said there was an enormous crack akin to a shotgun blast. In fact I got up and carried on playing. All I noticed was an increased difficulty in breathing and by the end of the game it was obvious that this was more than a general lack of physical fitness on my part.

And so I found myself in an emergency room hearing a young doctor suggest that I get a chest X-ray and realizing that for the first time since swallowing that fateful spoon, I would be the recipient of a test that would surely unmask my embarrassing silverware secret.

“You know, Dad, I think I’m feeling better. It’s probably nothing,” I said to my father, convinced that after all these years the spoon was somehow still sitting in my stomach or casually leaning into the side of my esophagus, minding its own business.

When the doctor emerged with the images, I braced for the ramifications of their peculiar and unequivocal revelation.

“Well, guess what I found hidden in his chest?”

I knew it. The X-ray machine was just another type of camera and I knew how a camera never lies.

“See this dark line, here. That’s a crack, a fracture. Your son has broken his sternum.”

I looked at the black-and-white film for myself, not at the break, but all over the image, looking for something metallic, white, and vaguely spoon shaped. But there was nothing.

It wasn’t until I studied biology in school and ultimately medicine at college that I realized the stupidity of worrying over a chest X-ray. They would have had to take an X-ray of my lower abdomen. I’m sure this is where that pesky spoon is still lurking to this day.

But let’s get back to Cleo, to the two of us in our backyard, my green universe, playing endless rounds of fetch with her favorite ball.

For a while the game proceeded as expected—slimy ball, painfully short throws from an uncoordinated little pitching arm, patient soft-mouthed dog politely performing retrieval exercises. Then I noticed something long and thin and obviously amiss dangling from the base of Cleo’s tail and trailing behind her. She took a time-out, intermittently squatting, straining, and dancing around as if she had a length of unshakable toilet paper stuck to her foot. She was visibly upset and unable to continue our game. If I had to put an emotional label on her behavior I would say she appeared to be embarrassed.

Concerned and curious, I ran to the house to fetch my father, insisting he come and check out Cleo.

“Look,” I said, all business as I pointed toward the aberration. “There’s something up her bum!”

Dad greeted Cleo with a pat to her head before shuffling around behind her, nodding his agreement.

“It’s okay, son. It’s one of Gran’s old nylon stockings.”

I was puzzled and a little upset.

“Why would Gran stick a stocking up Cleo’s bum?” I asked.

“She didn’t,” said my father.

“Then who did?” I said.

My father hesitated, deliberated, and ultimately opted for a time-honored adult approach to my line of questioning, that is, he ignored it.

“Let’s just give Cleo a few minutes in private. See if she sorts herself out.”

Dad took me by the hand and we backed off, retreating several yards before he squatted down by my side and whispered,

“We’ll watch her from here.”

“But why is it coming out of her bum?” I whispered back.

He considered me with what I would later recognize as a mixture of pride and frustration for being such a relentless little bugger when it came to my wanting to figure out the ways of the world.

“Because she swallowed it,” he said, trying his best to tamp down the curt edge creeping into his voice. “Because Cleo likes to eat things she shouldn’t. Things that aren’t good for her. Things other than dog food. Things like Gran’s underwear. But don’t you worry, no matter what your Cleo eats it always comes out the other end.”

Here was my first lesson in basic gastrointestinal physiology, that according to my father, what goes in, must come out. Of course I was potty-trained and more than capable of taking myself off to our
bathroom alone, but this was the first time I recall a clarification of the cause-and-effect relationship between ingestion and elimination. What I really needed to know was whether, during inappropriate dining, Cleo had ever swallowed a spoon. If her current discomfort was anything to go by, surely I would have noticed when a firm metallic object found its way out?

My father must have misread the confusion and anxiety playing across my face and tried to placate me by adding the word “Eventually.”

It didn’t work.

We waited for what felt like three hours but was probably more like three minutes and watched as Cleo spun around and around, scooting her rear along the grass in vain, clearly becoming more and more frustrated.

“I’ve got an idea,” my father said, standing up and heading back toward Cleo. “Go grab her ball.”

I did as I was told and reported for duty.

“Now, when I’m ready, I want you to throw Cleo’s ball as far away as possible.”

I didn’t understand.

“Why?”

“You’ll see,” he said.

Another adult response all inquisitive children despise because obviously I didn’t see and that was why I was asking the question in the first place.

“But I can’t throw very far.”

My father insisted that this wouldn’t matter (alternatively, he may have said, “Just shut up and do as you’re told”) and stood a short distance behind Cleo after placing me and the ball in my hand at her head.

“Hold on a moment, son,” he said, watching and waiting as
Cleo forgot about her troubles, focused on the ball, and tried to anticipate which way it would go.

At the time I never noticed how my father was placing the sole of his shoe firmly down to the ground, pinning the trailing end of the wayward hosiery in place.

“Now,” he shouted, and with concentration and enough fierce determination to produce a little grunt as I bit down on the tip of my tongue, I released the airy plastic ball from my hand like a shot put, and it landed about three feet away.

Not far but far enough for Cleo to pounce forward, retrieve the ball, and leave the stocking behind, lying on the ground.

Cleo acted as if nothing had happened and plunged right back into our game, dropping the ball at my feet, ready to go again. Just once, she glanced over her shoulder at my father and the stringy, discolored length of nylon before focusing on me, as if she seemed disturbed by what he was doing, as if she would rather he pick up whatever it was that had become stuck to his foot because it was disgusting.

Although I like to chalk this up as my first, if indirect, canine medical intervention, I should point out that this approach to treating Cleo’s protruding foreign body may have seemed rational but was totally inappropriate. My father should have left well alone and sought veterinary advice. What if the stocking had been lodged in Cleo’s small intestines? What if the nylon had cheese-wired through her guts? Fortunately, as it turned out she was lucky, perfectly fine, ready to graze her way through my grandmother’s lingerie once again. It would be decades before I saw the error in our approach to her predicament.

All three of us walked away from the incident as though nothing much had happened. At no time did my father and I dwell on what we had done, on how our ploy had brought about Cleo’s
transition from anxious and uncomfortable to oblivious and happy to play. He never paused to ruminate on the moment when the seed of possibility was firmly planted, to recognize the first inkling of his son’s interest in helping sick animals. Within seconds Cleo and I had returned to the carefree rhythm of fetch and my fickle attention had moved on, my pitching arm quick to tire, boredom setting in, and a more pressing question racing to the forefront of my mind.

“Mum,” I shouted, “when will dinner be ready?”

Being around Cleo was great. She was the perfect playmate. I think the best way to describe our relationship would be to say that I was like a smitten grandparent with my first grandchild—I got to enjoy all the fun stuff, but at the end of the day I could walk away. And when I did tire of canine company, searching out other kids in the neighborhood, Cleo never complained or bore a grudge, happy to pick up wherever we left off on my timetable and not hers.

I should mention that this was England in the 1960s, an era when children led “under-scheduled” lives, kicked out of the house at eight o’clock in the morning, only allowed back in if there was no more daylight, you were suffering from clinical dehydration, or you had sustained an injury requiring nothing less than a blood transfusion or surgical removal of an appendage. Exiled kids, forced to use their imagination, tended to gravitate toward one another, mergers leading to friendships and the emergence of something we were all proud to be a part of—a gang.

Across our street and a few houses down lived Timmy and Keith Toenail. Timmy was a terrier of a boy: squat, scrappy, and determined, cursed with disobedient locks of tightly curled platinum blond hair, making him look a bit like Shirley Temple in
Heidi
. He
and his older brother, Keith, demonstrated all the physical similarities of brothers like Prince Harry and Prince William, that is to say they were both male and that was about it. Keith’s hair was jet black, overly conditioned to a greasy shine, and meticulously maintained in the style of a German World War II infantryman’s helmet by his doting mother. Unlike his younger brother, Keith was prone to tears and a trembling lower lip, a feature accentuated by an overbite that would forever vex his orthodontist.

Across the street and one house up lived a girl several years my senior. Her name was Amanda Ravenscroft and she was my first crush (after the cartoon character of Daphne on
Scooby-Doo
, of course). Amanda was tall, blond, and muscular. She favored braided pigtails that made her look as though she had just stepped off a conquering Viking ship.

For the most part our playtime together was predictable, rotating between cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians (the term “PC” had yet to be coined), and, of course, “war” (we always fought “the Germans,” not “the Nazis,” since England lacked a significant Germanic component to its general population). Amanda’s maturity made her leadership material and on the whole the rest of us were putty in her hands, as easy for her to manipulate as a group of dolls at a tea party. Strangely, every plot she concocted seemed to include a damsel in distress, Amanda happy to step into the role, living a little fantasy, no doubt enjoying the fierce competition among the three of us boys trying to come to her rescue.