Because Human Friends Have Conditions

You are eighteen. Tipping over into adulthood, testing the ropes, trying to tug free. Except. Here in this room; you, your Mum, your Dad, your three brothers. And your best friend. Your fingers are in her fur, buried in it, right against her skin where it feels like duckling down. You know what comes next. Five years time, it could be you on the other side of the table with the syringe and the speech. Go to sleep just like an anaesthetic; never wake up.

You were six when Tess came to live with you. First time your saw her she was in a rescue kennel, an injured fox in the one next door. The fox came to the front, was interested in you, and you said you wanted to take the fox home. Ridiculous, they said, no one has a fox as a pet, we’re getting a dog, not a fox. So to start with, it wasn’t Tess you wanted, it was that fox with his narrow snout and white tipped tail. So can I name her then? What do you want to name her? Thinking hard, thinking, thinking… Mary! Mary?! That’s not a dog’s name! We’ll call her Tess… how about Mary could be her middle name? And you were kind of OK with that. For a while, you called her Tess-Mary, because double barrelled names were a thing, weren’t they.

She was so scrawny you could see every single one of her ribs. You imagined her catching her own food for six weeks on the moor after running from the farmer that always raised his hand, and not in greeting. Now, instead, she cowered in kitchen corners when she peed on the floor, expecting a whack which never came. Eventually learned none of you would hit her, but freaked out whenever she saw a short guy with a flat cap and stick, so you know what he looked like, the one who caused that fear.

She’s going to do it straight off the needle, and you know that’s not the done thing now, not when it’s so easy to put a catheter in, to have more control, in case you lose IV access.

One time, a power cut that lasted days, snow piled so high you made an igloo from it. No school, and you lay on the floor with a candle doing schoolwork imagining you were in a bygone time, so when Dad fired up a generator, you were annoyed, even though it meant no more cold showers. The electric heater was on, Mum folded in front of it, and Tess brushed by, her windmill tail flicking over the element, and then it was on fire, her tail, an actual flame dripping off it, Mum grabbing it and patting it out, Tess sniffing it as if Mum had done something suspicious.

The liquid’s yellow, has bubbles in, and are any of them big enough to cause an air embolism? And does it matter for euthanasia – would it be horrible, would you know?

A playmate of course, chasing after a football, or fingers vs mouth in a tug of war. But family member definitely, and then friend too, a special blend – to have both in one. Laying at your feet as you studied for exams, draped across your toes. Listening to every problem, eyes connected, offering a lick, a stroke of velvet fur, a nudge with a wet nose. In the morning, over breakfast, you winking at her, unbroken eye contact, and her winking back. You thinking, no, it couldn’t be - but yes, she’d do it again, like she was telling you she knew, she did. And later, after a day institutionalised with hundreds of other teenagers (some of them absolute bampots), you’d clip on her lead, go straight out of the door having barely really even gone into the house. That time, just you and her, away from the roar of the vacuum, the flap flap of feet, the brothers jostling over the TV remote. You climbed the bing behind your house, entered a landscape of grey barrenness that felt the same as inside your head. Thought of the village buried underneath, the tons of coal dust piled on rooves and wondered if there were bones too, if anyone had stayed. Climbed to the very top, to a moonscape complete with crater, and lingered there, sitting on scree and dangling your legs over the side, looking out over the fields at Arthur’s Seat jutting out of the middle of the city. And you would talk, and she would listen, sat there with her tongue hanging out and quivering up and down, and then she’d lick you, this big wet stripe all the way up the side of your face, and you’d feel better. She’d press her body against yours, and you could feel her heart, the thump thump thump of it, the way it just keeps going all day and all night, a miracle in each beat.

You can feel it now, her heart, slowing, and you know it will stop, know the science of it, but still it feels wrong, and you want to cry even though that’s not you, you don’t cry, not in public – but -

Your childhood, your adolescence, sinking away as the blood slows, and you wonder can you navigate adulthood without her, make it through the next five years of vet school, come out the other side. Be the one on the other side of the table, euthanising someone else’s best friend. Human friends come and go, they don’t stay the same like her. They have conditions.

You breathe in the malt of her fur so no one can see your tears. Of course you can, she’s saying, of course you can. Because she’s taught you, hasn’t she. She was a great teacher. And an even better friend.