Night Mares

Book by Scott Manda

I counted seven magpies in the morning.

Seven. All brilliant blue on black, sharp-edged against the raw white of the last frost of spring. The first six were spread out down the lane between the barn and the far paddock. One on the gate, one on the fence, one on the hawthorn hedge, three, all in a row on the fallen beech that bridges the stream. For a while, I thought that was the lot and warmed the morning with gentle fantasies of gold.

The seventh hid at the back of the field, digging something bright from beneath a mound of horse dung. He saw me coming and fled to the beech wood, cursing me to a summer full of other people's secrets. Gold, at least, would have had some novelty to it.

I thought of them lazily throughout the day, in between clients. A kind of visual mantra, useful in keeping the tangles of one session from weaving their way into the next.

I thought of them quite pointedly at six o'clock when Nina Crawford was late for her evening appointment without calling to let me know. Some people are late out of habit. Quite a few manage to "forget' whenever they think things are running too close to the bone. Nina misses about one session in five simply because she is still in theatre with an unplanned emergency. But she has never yet forgotten to call. Not once in the last seven and a half years.

Magpies loomed rather larger than I would have liked for the rest of the barren hour. Magpies and the pull of gravity. At half past, I pawned the car out of the car park and headed for home; out along Great Western Road, up through Anniesland Cross and over the switchback towards Milngavie. At the last moment, I turned right, across the dual carriageway and down into the gateway of Garscube Estate.

You can ignore magpies for the rest of your life and get away with it.

I'm not so sure about gravity.
Dr Nina Crawford, senior lecturer in equine surgery at the University of Glasgow Veterinary Teaching Hospital lives on the job, for the job and through the job. When she's not performing acts of veterinary heroism with her scalpel or leading her corps of students through the minefield of surgical anatomy, she lives in an ageing cottage in the grounds of Garscube Estate. The place was originally built for one of the farm workers in the days when the vast majority of farm workers were being piled on to sailing ships bound for Canada and only the lucky few were kept back to herd the sheep. Shepherds were not, I would say, expected to live long nor to enjoy the experience.

It is pleasant to live in a home with a history. It is less amusing when that history prevents any kind of rational redevelopment. They let her put in electricity because the place was deemed uninhabitable without. They didn't go for the double glazing, though, and I have been there on mornings in February when the condensation was frozen to the inside of the window and we had to break the ice in the cistern before it was possible to flush the loo. I have suggested once or twice that she might consider living somewhere with, say, central heating, as an optional extra. She counters with the fact that this is the only place within the boundaries of Greater Glasgow where the trees are thick enough to screen the traffic noise, where she can look out of her back door and see a heron standing on the river in the mornings and where she can listen to the toads mating at night. All of this may be true but it is also entirely spurious and we both know it. The real reason she doesn't move is because the cottage is within a short sprint of the operating theatre and even if something goes into cardiac arrest on the table at two in the morning, she can be there before theattending clinician calls the time of death. This is the kind of drive that has taken her to the top and kept her there when anyone else would have been happy with a steady rung on the ladder.

The back door to the cottage was unlocked when I got there but that in itself is nothing new. For a Glaswegian, Nina Crawford has a shocking disregard for the fundamentals of personal security. There were no letters in the basket beneath the letter box but that meant nothing either. This is a woman who lives on the wrong end of her e-mail account. The only genuine pen-on-paper letters she gets these days are from her mother and that's only twice a year.

I let myself in and did a quick tour of the kitchen. Let me rephrase that. I turned in a circle without moving my feet and was thereby able to investigate every surface. You could swing a cat in Nina's kitchen, but only if it was less than eight weeks old. The door to the oven collides with the one to the fridge and both of them block the way to the sink. The kettle sits, unplugged, on top of the bread bin, which is, in its turn, pushed back into a corner to make way for a basket of crinkle-skinned apples.

I checked them all out. The kettle was almost empty and the water covering the element was cold. The bread in the bin was hard. The grapes in the bowl on the hob had a two-day coating of grey mould. A rim of congealed bacon fat lined the washing-up bowl and a single plate lay untouched beneath a layer of scummy water. Nobody home. Nobody, at least, with any interest in cleaning up.

Ominous.

Nina is ordered by habit. It goes with the territory.

There isn't really any division between the rooms on the ground floor of the cottage. The kitchen area is bounded by a half-height barrier and leads into a kind of open-plan lounge/dining room, which I know from experience has sufficient floor space for one tallish woman with a sleeping bag--provided you move one of the halogen uprights away from the corner opposite the television and shove a pine blanket box out of the way into the space under the stairs. The rest of the furniture stays where it is and gathers dust. Only visitors use the lounge in this place--the ones who watch television and need to sit at a table to eat their dinner. Nina sits on the staircase to drink her coffee and the rest of us tend to eat our breakfast sitting on the low stone wall of the garden on the grounds that it's warmer than staying inside. All of which means that I would be hard pushed to say if there was anything seriously out of place in the living room, but there were magazines where you would expect to find magazines and no one had taken the flex from the standard lamp to string themselves up from the ceiling, which was good enough to be going on with.

I took a minute or two for a full look round and then elbowed my way past a pile of unironed laundry and scrambled up the near-vertical flight of stairs. I made that journey downwards once while drunk and nearly died in the process. In daylight, sober, it was easier.I counted seven magpies in the morning.

Seven. All brilliant blue on black, sharp-edged against the raw white of the last frost of spring. The first six were spread out down the lane between the barn and the far paddock. One on the gate, one on the fence, one on the hawthorn hedge, three, all in a row on the fallen beech that bridges the stream. For a while, I thought that was the lot and warmed the morning with gentle fantasies of gold.

The seventh hid at the back of the field, digging something bright from beneath a mound of horse dung. He saw me coming and fled to the beech wood, cursing me to a summer full of other people's secrets. Gold, at least, would have had some novelty to it.

I thought of them lazily throughout the day, in between clients. A kind of visual mantra, useful in keeping the tangles of one session from weaving their way into the next.

I thought of them quite pointedly at six o'clock when Nina Crawford was late for her evening appointment without calling to let me know. Some people are late out of habit. Quite a few manage to "forget' whenever they think things are running too close to the bone. Nina misses about one session in five simply because she is still in theatre with an unplanned emergency. But she has never yet forgotten to call. Not once in the last seven and a half years.

Magpies loomed rather larger than I would have liked for the rest of the barren hour. Magpies and the pull of gravity. At half past, I pawned the car out of the car park and headed for home; out along Great Western Road, up through Anniesland Cross and over the switchback towards Milngavie. At the last moment, I turned right, across the dual carriageway and down into the gateway of Garscube Estate.

You can ignore magpies for the rest of your life and get away with it.

I'm not so sure about gravity.

Dr Nina Crawford, senior lecturer in equine surgery at the University of Glasgow Veterinary Teaching Hospital lives on the job, for the job and through the job. When she's not performing acts of veterinary heroism with her scalpel or leading her corps of students through the minefield of surgical anatomy, she lives in an ageing cottage in the grounds of Garscube Estate. The place was originally built for one of the farm workers in the days when the vast majority of farm workers were being piled on to sailing ships bound for Canada and only the lucky few were kept back to herd the sheep. Shepherds were not, I would say, expected to live long nor to enjoy the experience.

It is pleasant to live in a home with a history. It is less amusing when that history prevents any kind of rational redevelopment. They let her put in electricity because the place was deemed uninhabitable without. They didn't go for the double glazing, though, and I have been there on mornings in February when the condensation was frozen to the inside of the window and we had to break the ice in the cistern before it was possible to flush the loo. I have suggested once or twice that she might consider living somewhere with, say, central heating, as an optional extra. She counters with the fact that this is the only place within the boundaries of Greater Glasgow where the trees are thick enough to screen the traffic noise, where she can look out of her back door and see a heron standing on the river in the mornin...