An Alligator in the Bathroom...And Other Stories Page 5

  Sometimes Mrs Stokesley would not resist my taking a dog away entirely; sometimes I would have to have it treated but bring it back. I wouldn’t say we had a relationship of sunshine and light but we did get on reasonably well. We were both trying to do the right thing in our different ways.

  For one reason or another I hadn’t been to see Mrs Stokesley for a few months and things had got out of hand. The neighbours were complaining loudly about the smell. One said there was liquid dog sewage seeping through her walls where the floor joists met. The council had served numerous notices on Mrs Stokesley, telling her she must reduce the number of dogs and keep to certain standards, but she ignored them.

  A court order was obtained, with the right to use force to gain entry, and I had phone calls from the council and the police summoning me to the occasion. I was not looking forward to this job at all. Not only would I be in my accustomed role, protecting the thin blue line from a canine savaging, but I knew Mrs Stokesley. She would be very upset and she’d blame me, and I’d be the one to go in first.

  Sure enough, when I arrived there were police and council officers waiting. I was acquainted with them all by now, and they were very happy to give me a cheery welcome and swap some friendly banter, while stepping well out of the way. Mrs Stokesley had been warned, by the established technique of shouting through the letterbox, that she was not to obstruct the officers in the course of their duty or she would be arrested.

  So, when I rang the bell and Mrs Stokesley came to the door, I was The Officers. I was the embodiment of the law and of the forces of evil. Despite the semi-circle of council people and grinning constables behind me, I was it.

  Mrs and Miss Stokesley stood aside to let me in, their eyes emitting a stream of invisible poisoned darts. While they were proving beyond doubt that thought transference is possible, I was also struck by wave after wave of the most appalling, nauseating stench. In the sitting room and kitchen, both bare of furniture, was a collection of a dozen dogs or more, all sorts, some identifiable breeds like Alsatian and basset hound, two lurchers, some mongrel terriers, some Labrador types, some barking at me, some looking hopeful and wagging their tails, all trying to make the best of it in an ocean of dog mess.

  I’d say the average depth of this especially potent quickmud was seven or eight inches. It certainly made me wish I’d put my wellies on as I slipped and slid around, trying to round up these dogs, wishing the RSPCA issued their inspectors with gas masks. Most of the animals were in reasonable shape. Some were showing early signs of mange, some were a little underweight but nothing too serious. What was serious was the constant flow of invective from the women. They’d geared up from silent hatred to all-out verbal warfare. No swear word or combination of swear words, no fatal curse nor hellish imprecation was left to idle in obscurity as they followed me to and from the door.

  There was no room in my van for all of the dogs. I could only take them three or four at a time. Since the police refused to go near and the council people likewise, my only option was to do just that, ferry them in batches to the temporary home I’d lined up at the local boarding kennels. There they would be washed and fed and kept in decent surroundings for a day or two until I could get them to York.

  The round trip took me about half an hour. Each time I returned, the crowd outside the house had increased in size. It was a cold day but that didn’t deter anyone. Kids on bikes sucked sweets and pointed at the funny man in the hat with dog muck all over him. Police officers explained the situation to little old ladies passing by. Council officials poured themselves coffee from their flasks.

  As I waded, literally, through my task, the cursing from Mrs and Miss Stokesley got worse and worse. I was a bit miffed at this. I didn’t deserve it. I was only trying to help the dogs they had been trying to help. Anyway, I dealt with a big white Alsatian and I was down to my last dog, a mixture of small terrier breeds with maybe a touch of border collie. It had been standing against the kitchen door when I last saw it but when I came to fetch it, it was wedged behind the gas cooker.

  There were no tables or chairs in the kitchen, just this cooker, and a sink unit and a couple of cupboards that looked like utility stuff from soon after the war. On the cooker was a pan of water, boiling. I very briefly entertained the notion that Mrs Stokesley had changed personalities and was going to offer us all tea and buns, but I couldn’t see any cups or anywhere to stand any cups. Maybe she was about to boil an egg.

  I bent down to retrieve the little dog from its uncomfortable spot, wondering quite how it had managed to get in there. The daughter shouted something. It sounded like ‘Go on, Mum, now, get the ****ing ****,’ or words to that effect. Almost at the same instant I felt a searing pain down the side of my face and I heard dear mum say, ‘Have that, you bastard.’ I’m not sure what I said, or if I said anything beyond a screaming yell, but I put my hand to where the agony was and took it away again. I looked in horror at what was in my hand. As well as the muck and hairs from picking up filthy dogs, there was a tangled pile of shreds that looked awfully like skin. My skin.

  With a bang and a rattle, Mrs Stokesley dropped the pan on the floor. Well, at least she wasn’t going to whack me with it. I hurried outside with the dog, which fortunately hadn’t taken any of the carefully aimed boiling water, with Mrs Stokesley in hot pursuit telling me she was very sorry – very sorry, that is, that it hadn’t been a full barrel of boiling oil. Sergeant Wainwright, the same old-fashioned copper who had rung me from the station about dead Alf, sprang into action, arresting Mrs Stokesley and daughter and telling the WPC I knew from the Siege of Alf’s Fleas, to get me to the hospital. I put the terrier in my van and jumped into the police car for my blue-light, white-knuckle ride to Scorswick hospital, where they took me in on the instant, stripped me and washed me, and began smearing me with slimy substances.

  WPC Bluelight hared off to pick up Carol but wouldn’t tell her what had happened, presumably because of police procedure, so when my dear wife arrived she was expecting to find me at death’s door or possibly already over the threshold. As she was eight months’ pregnant with our first, there were other possibilities too, so I’m sure her tears were of relief when she found me only parboiled, with fifteen-sixteenths of my surface area still recognisable.

  The doctors wanted me in for two days. I thought one night would be sufficient. Carol pointed out that if I went back to work with my face looking like it did, as if I’d been starring in The Wicker Man but somehow managed to escape halfway through the ceremony, I could be the cause of a sharp rise in the incidence of doorstep heart attacks. This discussion went on for a while and none of us paid much attention to Sergeant Wainwright slipping silently into the room, apologetically, as he might if arriving late for his daughter’s performance in the school nativity play. At an opportune moment, he gave a cough, likewise apologetic.

  ‘Er, if I may have your attention,’ he began, and we all gave him it. ‘It’s the van. The RSPCA van. It’s causing an obstruction.’ The members of the assembly looked at each other. The good sergeant, divining that the message in the air said, ‘So why don’t you move it?’, gave us his reason.

  ‘One of the dogs in the van is an Alsatian, a particularly large Alsatian, and it rather seems to have decided that it has a duty to the van, to, er, protect it.’ He stopped short of asking me directly to leave my deathbed for a short time in order to effect removal of said obstacle, but the implication was clear.

  ‘Huh harjun ih kwy rye,’ I said, speaking through hard-boiled lips. ‘Ih a bih wye woh.’

  Carol, at first unable to believe what she’d been hearing, let rip. She would never use any of the words I’d heard earlier from Mrs Stokesley and her oratory was all the more powerful for that. Could the sergeant not see that her precious husband (me) had been lobsterised? Why couldn’t he, a substantial and healthy police officer, doubtless with a clean driving licence, move the such-and-such, so-and-so of a van his such-and-such, so-and-so self? What was the matter
with the peacekeepers of Scorswick? Couldn’t they reach the pedals with their big flat feet?

  While Sergeant Wainwright reeled back under the onslaught, I tried to explain to Carol about this chink in the otherwise sturdy, reliable and fearless wall that was our police force. Even animal lovers like Sergeant Wainwright would never go near a locked-up dog, and this was an Alsatian. A big white one. Carol would not be mollified.

  ‘Alsatians are what the police have,’ she cried, incredulously. ‘Police dogs are Alsatians. That PC on Z Cars has an Alsatian. What are you talking about?’

  Well, if our fantastic police force wouldn’t shift the van, she, Carol, a feeble and frail member of the weaker sex, moreover great with child, would do it for them.

  ‘Have you got a copy of the Daily Mirror anywhere?’ she asked a nurse. ‘The tabloids are better to roll up than the broadsheets. For tapping badly behaved dogs on the nose. They’re better for that.’

  Sergeant Wainwright harrumphed something about not being able to allow, in the circumstances, RSPCA vehicle, possibly insurance not covering, risk of dog bite, member of the public. Carol, deeply and mightily annoyed at being labelled a member of the public, was again speechless. If there was a moment when she might have gone into premature labour, this was it, and if there had been a surgeon’s scalpel to hand, I feel sure she would have offered to slit the sergeant’s throat with it. I took the opportunity to slide out of bed, put on my hospital slippers, and accompany him to his car.

  All this was a little out of character for my friend Doug Wainwright, not normally one to bother greatly about proper procedure. He was indeed a substantial fellow, well over six feet and a big physical presence in any company. He wouldn’t have needed gloves to be a wicket keeper; his hands were massive. Nowadays he’d be called unreconstructed; he would say that the only thing the initials PC stood for was police constable. Like many of the old-fashioned sort, seemingly bluff, brusque and hard, he had his soft spot, and his particular weakness happened to be animals in trouble, which suited me very well.

  Anyway, after my boiling, here was the sarge giving me another blue-light whizz through the streets of Scorswick, after which I had a quiet word with the white Alsatian, drove my van to the kennels where the other dogs were, unloaded, and allowed myself to be returned to my hospital bed.

  One of things I liked about my job was the complete responsibility. My area and everything in it was down to me, but the other side of that is having no one to turn to when you’re taking time off. The neighbouring inspectors do their best with your diverted calls, as you do with theirs, but we always have our own work full to capacity. Inevitably, the calls pile high. Lying in bed in hospital, I knew this was happening, and it wasn’t only like an in-tray rising: every call represented some form of distress being suffered by an animal. Every delay possibly increased the distress.

  It wasn’t long, about twenty-four hours, before the in-tray defeated the doctors, the nurses, even Carol, and I was out on the streets, knocking on doors and frightening people with my face tartare. Meanwhile Mrs and Miss Stokesley were released on bail. Mrs had been charged with aggravated assault, Miss with aiding and abetting. With no dogs to distract them, maybe they would give their house a bit of a clean.

  Six months later they pleaded not guilty at the Crown Court. I’d had plenty of experience giving evidence to magistrates but this was my first time before the intimidating formality of a judge and jury. Not that Mrs Stokesley was intimidated. She said I’d knocked the pan of boiling water onto my head by accident. In which case, said I when it was my turn, why did she shout ‘Have that, you bastard’, and why did she say something very similar to the council public-health chap when she threw my dog-grasper at him? There were pictures of this last incident too, taken by the local press photographer.

  The trial took four days; the jury took about as many minutes to find the two women guilty. The judge handed down a suspended prison sentence and a community service order, and that was the end of our beautiful friendship. Of course it hit the papers. RSPCA in Hot Water. Woman Boils Man. Dog Woman Turns Poacher. The nationals picked it up and, as they do, gave me plenty of false quotations. ‘I can’t even bear to fill the kettle,’ said Inspector Langdale. ‘And it’s fried eggs only from now on.’

  If it happened today I’d be offered counselling and I could probably sue somebody for giving me an emotionally crippling aversion to hot showers. All I got then was a lot of slather in the pub and, oh dear, a phone call from HQ.

  Calls from headquarters were rarer than cries for help from maltreated brontosauruses, and this wasn’t any old HQ busybody wanting to know why I needed a new windscreen wiper. It was our legal superintendent, the guy who went through our case files and who was our point of reference on all matters to do with the law. He was a man of quiet authority and considerable knowledge, greatly respected by all, and he was very disappointed in me.

  ‘Why is it,’ he wanted to know, ‘that I’ve had to learn about your boiling water assault from the Daily Express? Are you such a brilliant solo operator, Inspector Langdale, the very James Bond of the RSPCA, that you are licensed to do whatever you like without reference to anyone? Or perhaps you are so thick that you can’t see a connection between an assault while at work, a court case, and the RSPCA legal department?’

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘It’s just me being … sorry, I mean … been so busy lately, I find I’ve not had …’ That was an error of judgement.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said the legal eagle. ‘I see. Well, what I find is that all the other inspectors of my acquaintance seem able to find time in their busy days to follow basic procedure. I find that they find time for it.’

  ‘Ah, um,’ was all I could manage, or something of the sort.

  ‘Possibly, just possibly,’ he went on, ‘the job is too much for you. Too many things happening at once. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. You should consider something a little less fraught. Have a look in the Yorkshire Post. Do they want a lighthouse keeper on Flamborough Head? Do we have enough lollipop ladies in Scorswick?’

  There was nothing I could do but apologise and promise that it would never happen again. That was my first HQ rollicking and, in all my years with the RSPCA I only ever had one other. Unfortunately for my reputation among those who dwell in marble halls, it came very soon after the first one.

  5

  SEE YOU LATER, ALLIGATOR

  ‘What on earth is that?’ said Carol, as I opened the van doors. The object of her curiosity was a large metal box about a yard square, painted green, with various knobs, switches and dials set into one side of it.

  ‘I got it very cheap,’ I said. ‘Army surplus. This will save us a load of time and effort. I’m collecting the aerial later.’

  ‘Aerial? We already have an aerial. For the television. It gets BBC2 and Channel Four, BBC1 and ITV, and there aren’t any more stations. So we don’t need an aerial.’

  ‘Ah no, you see, this is not so much an aerial, in fact. More of a sort of a mast. It has to be quite high or we won’t get the distance.’

  ‘Distance? How high is quite high?’ Carol enquired. And so it was that we became the operators of Radio Langdale, with an eighteen-foot mast on our bungalow roof, a transmitter/receiver the size of an old radiogram in our sitting room, and the ability to communicate at any time and, regardless of the positioning of telephone boxes, anywhere in a thirty-mile radius. This was a blessing that those of the smartphone generation may not understand – and they probably haven’t seen those black and white war films either. To the sound of machine guns, the wireless operator sits in front of the big box under a camouflage net, adjusting dials but getting nothing in his headphones as the crump of artillery fire sounds, not too far away. ‘Sorry, sir. Can’t raise them.’ ‘Keep trying, corporal.’

  When the first mobile phones came out, our local manager at British Telecom asked me to take one on trial. I gave it him back after a while. I’d rather have my radio, I said. That thi
ng’s so big and heavy, I’m risking pulling a muscle every time I lift it to my ear.

  My old routine had been to call in to Carol on a public telephone every so often to pick up messages. Sod’s Law dictated that should I have spent the last hour or two driving north, the message would be about an urgent matter in the far south. Now, Carol could contact me as soon as anything happened.

  If there’d been nothing urgent that morning, I would call in on Radio Langdale when I stopped to eat my sandwiches. Carol agreed to this provided that no message from her could be so important that sandwich finishing was prevented. Knowing what stress such a regulation could cause, I made a point of finishing the cheese and tomato or Shippam’s shrimp paste before calling her, so that I only had a Waggon Wheel or a Penguin to manage as I drove off to whatever crisis Carol had told me about.

  One that didn’t sound much like a crisis but would very shortly turn that way, was The Case of the Overgrown Alligator. A pet-shop owner I knew well had rung in to say that one of his friends, who had kept an alligator for twenty years, all legal and licensed, was beginning to feel that this wasn’t perhaps the ideal pet after all. The animal, called Samson, had been one of two brought into the country from Florida as youthful livewires about eight inches long. The other had died but Samson had responded well to his new owner’s care and attention, growing into bigger and bigger vivaria until there was no vivarium to be had that was big enough.

  That was the time when the owner should have taken the steps he was now taking. He should have found somewhere to rehouse Samson. However, that’s all very well to say but the chap was fond of Samson and, not having a wife or live-in beloved with whom to discuss the matter – perhaps one who might have made suggestions along the lines of ‘It’s me or that alligator’– he could see no other choice but to convert his bathroom into a reptile house.