The crow’s body was torn open. Black feathers lay scattered like splashed ink, a calligraphy of broken lines, the blood cartoonishly bright against the snow.
Amy stared down at it. She stood unmoving for so long that Prohern started to tug against his leash, whining in deep, throaty little moans, his breath clouding the frozen air. Amy, who was so attuned to her baby boy’s moods that his slightest cry could cut her straight to the bone, ignored him. This was more important.
She found herself mentally dissecting the carcass, translating the gleaming bulge of exposed innards into liver, lungs, kidneys. The crow’s organs were so small that it would scarcely be worth the trouble cooking them. Ten grams, twenty, maybe, in total? It would take dozens of crows—hundreds—to make up the required weight.
She stamped her cold feet. She was being stupid. This wouldn’t help Prohern any more than her futile trip to the supermarket had earlier. His melting umber eyes burned into hers. He trusted her. He loved her. He was waiting for her to provide. A familiar, yearning pain tugged at the empty hollow of her abdomen.
“Time to go, Prohern,” she said, and they turned away and continued up into the hills.
For the price of their London flat, Amy and Olly had bought a sprawling five-bedroom home with a double garage in the north of Scotland. The house, far too big for one childless couple, stood at the end of a mile-long private lane that branched off the main farm track.
“Ames?” shouted Olly from the kitchen.
Her mouth felt too frozen to respond. She kicked off her boots, dried Prohern’s paws, dropped a kiss on the velvet slope of his muzzle, and padded through to the kitchen in her sweat-damp socks. Olly was making himself a snack between Zoom meetings.
“Any luck at the shops earlier?” he asked.
She shook her head numbly. The way he was eating, with his feet planted apart, transferring the food from the plate to his mouth with quick, unerring fingers, made her sick. She opened the fridge and gazed into the whitish glow.
“What?” Olly said. “None?”
“I got liver, but they didn’t have anything else,” said Amy. Prohern lumbered against her thighs and nudged his dripping nose into her hand.
Olly chewed, swallowed, and blew out his cheeks. “What are we going to do?”
Amy knew that the “we” in his question was intended to be supportive—conciliatory, even—a peace offering across the waste of stagnant, unspoken water that lay between them. She knew that, but she still, somehow, despite her best efforts, heard it as an accusation. When Prohern was a puppy, she and Olly had shared the responsibility of caring for him, cramming in walks and housetraining and puppy classes around both of their full-time jobs. Now, with her days empty, Prohern was no longer a shared responsibility but Amy’s alone.
In a small, measured voice, she said, “I don’t know, babe.”
“He’ll just have to have kibble for a bit,” said Olly, bracingly.
“He won’t eat it.” Amy closed her eyes, facing away from him, pretending to look for something in the depths of the fridge. Her ears were ringing.
“Can’t you try somewhere else tomorrow?”
“There is nowhere else,” she said in a monotone. They had combed the area, every weekend eaten up by long, pointless drives through grey-brown hills, the radio stuttering, Olly’s clutch foot going numb on the bends, in search of that traditional, stone-built, family-owned butcher’s shop that they were convinced lay just around every corner. “They just don’t sell organ meat up here.”
“They did have it in the big Tesco once,” Olly countered. “In Forfar. And there’s that organic butcher’s near Perth. We’ll just have to keep trying. Buy as much as we can when it’s in stock and freeze it.”
“I know that,” said Amy. “I’ll try again tomorrow.”
Her eyes were still closed. She felt tired. The fridge began to beep, a gentle but insistent ding, ding, letting her know that it had stood open for too long.
It snowed again that night. The house acquired a drift all along its front side, as white and comical as a cream pie to the face. When Amy opened the door, the trembling wall of snow stood poised in place, almost the height of her head. Prohern stared into it. His shoulders bunched into hackles and he shouted a single, warning bark, which echoed back off the snow and cowed him.
“Heaviest snow in a decade,” said the man on the news.
She went out the back door and struggled around the garden, knee-deep in snow, until Prohern had relieved himself. By that point, her nose was running and her fingers were numb inside her gloves. She hauled Prohern back inside, ignoring his hesitant attempts to roll and dive in the thick snow. The bag of emergency kibble was under the sink. Its stale, cheesy smell rushed out and sickened her when she opened the cupboard door. She weighed out the lumpy biscuits into Prohern’s bowl, soaked them in water, and shut him in the kitchen to eat.
When she came back, twenty minutes later, the kibble was untouched.
She sighed. Then she tried adding yogurt. Then a sprinkling of crumbled-up cheese. She even tried Olly’s ham slices, tearing them into strips and burying them beneath the bloating kibble. Prohern picked the ham out with great patience and left the rest.
“Who’s a big silly boy?” said Olly, wandering through in his dressing-gown after his breakfast meeting. He rubbed Prohern’s ears. “You’re too used to yummy homemade casserole, aren’t you? And now you won’t eat anything else.” Glancing up at Amy, he added, “Couldn’t you try making it without the other organs? Just use liver?”
“That’s not safe for him.” Amy closed her eyes, too tired to explain it yet again, but her mouth delivered the explanation anyway: “He needs the right balance of nutrients. Vegetables to meat to organs. Secreting versus non-secreting organs. There’s too much vitamin A in liver. You have to balance it properly.”
“Well, make it without any organs, then.”
“He’ll develop a nutrient deficiency. And then he’ll get anaemia, and leukopenia, and—”
“Jesus, Amy, it’s just one time.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she fired back, “I didn’t realise you were the expert. My mistake. Obviously, you know better than me. With my medical degree.”
Olly sucked air through his teeth. She could see him struggling with himself, teetering on the divide between saying something bad and saying something worse.
“Do you know what vitamin A poisoning looks like?” she went on, watching Olly closely. “He’ll start vomiting. He’ll have diarrhea. His hair will fall out, and he’ll have muscle spasms. Then, he’ll become dehydrated, he’ll piss himself all over the place, and his skin will start to peel off.”
“Fine,” Olly snapped. “If it’s really better for him to starve, then fine.”
Fiery, helpless tears burned her eyes. On some level, she knew Olly was just trying to help, but that only made it worse. There were things he couldn’t help her with. There were things, internal, invisible things, humiliating and undoing things, that, it turned out, nobody could help her with, not even the medical professionals whose ranks she had once hoped to join. Casserole was her job, her area of expertise.
She refused to speak to Olly again until lunchtime, when he apologized and offered to phone Alan and Muriel at the farm to ask if they could help clear the road. Amy, disinclined to forgive him and irritated that she hadn’t even thought of it—was her brain already disintegrating, out here all alone with nothing but worry to occupy it?—said she would do it herself. That meant she had to climb onto the chest of drawers in the draughty room above the garage, the only place in the house where she got signal, and shift around on the cold wood, shivering, until the call connected.
“Hello?” Alan’s voice sounded as though it were howling down from the moon.
“It’s Amy,” she half-shouted. “At the cottage.”
“Aye,” he said. “Snowed in, are ye?”
She confirmed that this was the case. “Would you be able to come and clear the lane?”
“Tractor’s goosed,” he said. “Needs a new spark plug, I reckon. You’re on your own with the shovels until I can get the auld thing going again.”
She hesitated, not wanting to admit that they didn’t own a shovel.
“Anything else you need in the meantime? Milk, eggs?”
“Do you have—” She chewed her inner lip. “The thing is, well, we need, really, organ meat. It’s for our dog.”
“What?”
She repeated herself. “We cook special food for him, see. Casserole, with meat and vegetables, but you have to add organ meat as well, to get the right vitamins. Any kind of animal would do. Heart, liver, kidney, anything like that.”
Alan breathed into the phone. “Sorry, lass, we’ve nothing like that. They do all that over at the abattoir.”
She could tell what he was thinking. Crazy English yuppies, feeding their dog homemade casserole. She imagined the farm dogs—starving, flea-bitten collies, probably—fighting and climbing over each other for scraps and bones.
“I’ll get the tractor down to ye when I can,” Alan said.
She thanked him. She was about to hang up when he suddenly said, “Hang on a sec, lass. Muriel was telling me you used to be a doctor, down in England. Mind if I pick your brains a wee minute? I’ve this bother with ma knee. It’s been sair a week or so now.”
Amy put the phone on speaker mode and balanced it carefully on the chest of drawers. While Alan described his symptoms, she climbed down and dug through the yet-to-be-unpacked boxes that piled the floor. Her old medical textbooks were in there, still carrying the anxious stink of late nights and panicked, coffee-fueled revision sessions. She had finished her junior doctor training, burned-out to within an inch of her life, and turned down the offer of a hospital job out of fear that she wouldn’t handle the stress. Sifting through the books now, she sensed a lingering trace of panic somewhere in her chest, but beneath it was a flicker of excitement, of professional intrigue. Here, perhaps, was a problem she could solve.
“Is there any swelling?” she asked as she clambered back onto the chest of drawers, clinical anatomy textbook in hand. “In or around the joint?”
“Mibbe a wee bit, aye.”
“How about stiffness? In the morning, for example, or after sitting down?”
“I wouldnae say so.”
“Weakness in the thigh muscle?” Amy asked.
“Naw. Just the knee. It feels like it might go, you know, when I’m walking on it.”
“Does it make a noise, when you walk? Clicking, crunching, anything?”
“Naw.”
“Could you have injured it recently? Even a slight twist?”
“Hard to say, lass. I might’ve twisted it getting doon oot the tractor.”
“Well, it doesn’t sound like osteoarthritis,” Amy said. “I know that can be a common problem in farming, from the heavy lifting. I would keep an eye on it. Ice and elevate the leg in the meantime, in case it’s a sprain.”
“Aye,” said Alan. “A sprain, you reckon? So nothing serious?”
“Probably. Rest and ice, and if it doesn’t feel better by next week, get your GP to take a look.”
“Aye, right enough. Thanks, lass.” She could hear his voice lifting, as though she had removed a physical weight from it.
Once Alan had hung up, Amy sat on the chest of drawers a little longer, the chill sinking into her backside, and flicked through the textbook. A little bubble of satisfaction floated up her throat. She had been useful, helpful, if only briefly, and it felt good. As the bubble hit her tongue, however, it disintegrated into a soft puff of jealousy. A sprained knee was so temporary, so curable. If only her own affliction were so easily fixed.
After quitting her job, Amy, with Olly’s support, had come off her contraception. They’d begun to dream of the future. They wanted the outdoors, more space, a more affordable, healthier lifestyle. And so they had moved to Scotland to wait for a baby who never came.
Her chest clenched at the memory of her last appointment at the health center in Kirriemuir. The calm, calming, uncalming expression on the doctor’s face as she delivered the news. The test results that meant there would be no pregnancy, no antenatal classes in the local area, no baby groups where she could meet other new mothers and make friends. Only isolation and unemployment and long walks with Prohern. A homemaker who was incapable of making a home.
She pulled a couple of surgery textbooks out of the cardboard box and took them down to the warmth of the kitchen. Prohern was in his basket, curled up next to the aga. He raised his head and whined. The sound tore holes in her heart. “I know, baby boy,” she said. “We’ll get you something to eat, don’t worry.”
Two days went by, and still the snow fell. Deeper and deeper drifts engulfed the house. Olly tried to dig the car out with the heavy garden spade, breathless and red-faced, while Amy watched expressionlessly from the window. A fresh snowfall an hour later undid all his hard work. They were trapped.
Prohern still refused to eat his kibble. He was surviving on the omelette Amy had cooked him with the last of their eggs, along with the occasional scrap from Olly’s plate. They didn’t have much meat in the house, as Amy was vegetarian. Prohern wouldn’t eat rice, porridge, or any of the meat-substitute foods they tried him with.
“He’s listless,” Amy said, her voice breathy from the cold, as she dried Prohern’s feet in the porch. “He won’t even play in the snow. See the way his eyes are withdrawing into the sockets?”
Olly gripped Prohern by the ears and gently roughed them while peering into his eyes. Prohern blinked with delight and lolled his tongue out. “Looks normal to me,” Olly said.
The following day, Amy spent hours cuddling Prohern, massaging his stiff joints. Her helplessness gnawed at her insides. She could see Prohern’s bones through his coat. She didn’t point this out to Olly, as he would only deny it. He was good at denial. Or maybe, she reasoned, in the echoey, too-long-alone chamber that had once been her brain, he really just didn’t notice. She was the doctor, after all. She was trained to observe these kinds of minor changes, to pay attention to tiny details. That was what had made her such a good surgeon.
Or would have, anyway.
At night, Prohern’s stomach growled pitifully, hour after hour. The snow continued to fall, suffocating them under its freezing white weight.
On the third day, Amy returned to the medical textbook. The illustrations calmed her: the exaggerated colors, the polished, unreal textures of the organs, the neat striations of muscle. It was all so clear, so ordered. So unlike the messy reality. If you reduced life, with all its problems and complications and inoperable sadnesses, to the bare bones of what mattered, you got a medical textbook. She turned the pages slowly, deliberately, toward the destination that had taken root in some cold and closed-off part of her mind.
The main problem, she knew, would be lack of implements. Sterilization would also be difficult; she would have to use Olly’s expensive vodka from the drinks cabinet, maybe diluted in a spray bottle. He wouldn’t miss it; he usually saved it for visitors, and they weren’t likely to have many of those any time soon. She had plenty of painkillers, bandages, and a well-stocked first aid kit.
She made herself some herbal tea (a pre-pregnancy habit she’d got into and never got out of) and settled down to read through the relevant sections. It was exciting, preparing for surgery again. Almost like being back at work. Olly had an important meeting after lunch, which would keep him occupied for at least three hours. That should be long enough.
She set up the operating theater in the unused dining room next to the kitchen. There was a table in here, a long Scandinavian walnut construction which had been a wedding gift from Olly’s parents, but they always ate at the smaller table in the kitchen. Amy brought the digital radio through and hummed along while cleaning the area and putting down plastic sheets. She dragged through a couple of coffee tables to hold her equipment, as she wouldn’t have anyone to hand her things during the surgery.
At lunch, Amy pretended to pick at her salad but ate nothing. Olly didn’t notice. She tried not to think about the way he used to hover over her meals, anxiously inspecting them for protein content and variety of vegetable, his solicitousness at times cloying, at times irritating, but always deeply, deeply treasured. She loved being seen as the potential vessel for their shared future. Olly’s attentiveness to her health had intensified during those long months of counting and trying and failing, had peaked around the time of their fertility appointments, and then—after Amy’s diagnosis—had dissipated.
She understood, of course. She’d stopped caring about her health at that point as well. And he was hurting too. The doctor had given him a pamphlet – surreptitiously, while Amy was crying in the bathroom – called Men’s Grief Matters: How to Navigate Your Partner’s Infertility. When Amy found it weeks later while tidying Olly’s sock drawer, the resentment had slammed into her like a brick wall. A blistering, cruel, self-loathing resentment: that Olly might need to be comforted for her failure. For her loss of potential. It had made her so furious, with him and with the doctor and with herself, that she’d grabbed a pair of nail scissors off the bedside cabinet and dug them into her thigh until it bled.
She let Prohern out in the garden for another listless pee. Once he was settled in his basket with his favorite toy, Amy emptied her bowels for the third time that day, out of nerves.
“Ols, babe?” she said, popping her head into the office. Olly lifted one ear of his headphones, giving her that expectant, hurry-up look he always adopted when she interrupted him at work. “I’m going to take a nap,” she said in a stage whisper. “Not feeling too well.”
“Okay, babe,” he mouthed. “Love you.”
She closed the door firmly. The office and the dining room were at opposite ends of the long house; he wouldn’t be able to hear anything, even if she screamed.
She turned the radio up, closed the curtains, and switched on all the lights. She swallowed the painkillers. While waiting for them to take effect, she undressed, leaving only her socks on, in case her feet got cold. The feel of the plastic sheet against her skin made her shudder.
In place of a scalpel, she had selected the extra-sharp Japanese sushi knife: another wedding gift, never used. It glowed silver in the lamplight, freshly sterilized, the point so thin it was almost invisible.
Amy checked she had everything else to hand. Surgical thread, tweezers, improvised clamps. A basin, on the lower of the two coffee tables.
Holding the knife, she took several swift, deep breaths. Then she bit down on one of Olly’s old belts and made the incision.
The painkillers helped, but only a little. She could feel her teeth sinking deep into the leather belt. Her eyes prickled, then watered, then streamed hot, rapid tears down the sides of her face. She kept breathing. Clamps. In the bathroom mirror angled by her left hip, she could see her own blue-gloved hands, the steady hands she’d been praised for during surgical training.
Nephrectomy, the textbook entry had said. Radical or partial. Open (single incision) or laparoscopic.
She breathed in quick pulses. The kidney was higher up than she’d expected. She’d made the incision on her left side, as she was right-handed. She cut the ureter. She was expecting a sharp twinge of pain but felt nothing. Maybe she was going into some kind of shock. She tried to slow her breathing while stitching the tube shut. The kidney came out, slippery, lumps of yellowish fatty tissue falling away from it. Gasping, Amy dropped it into the basin. It landed with a wet, satisfying thunk. Two hundred grams at least, she guessed. Maybe even two hundred and fifty.
Her mind was starting to feel foggy. Patients were always tired after surgery, she remembered that. She tried to think. Was there anything else useful in there? Anything she could live without? Better to get it all out at once. She didn’t want to have to do this again.
She probed inside herself. Stomach, that was stomach; better leave that alone. The pink, flaccid loops of intestine. Why was it all so pink? She’d always thought that was just for the anatomical diagrams. She moaned a little at the pressure of the clamps on her skin. Not much longer now.
She dug downward. Deep inside, behind the intestines. There it was. The surface was hot, squashy, like a tongue. She prodded it with her gloved fingernail. In a sudden fit of pique, she tugged at her womb, the boiling red slab of it, pulling it out whole, with the alien eyes of ovaries bobbing and dangling from their tubes on either side. The attachments were mysterious to her: ligaments and strands and God knew what. She tried to be methodical, severing and stitching, staunching the internal bleeding. She expected to feel some sense of loss, of finality, but in her chemically numbed state there was only dry, practical approval of a job well done. She dropped the organs into the basin. Won’t be needing those anymore.
Over her own shallow panting, she heard the sound of dog breath. Prohern, tongue lolling, approached round the side of the table. He looked like a wolf, a thing of nightmares, just for an instant. Then he was Prohern again, big and lolloping, with his platinum-blonde whiskers and his stupid Germanesque name. The breeder gave him the name; Amy had wanted to change it, but Olly thought it was unique and authentic, though they never did find out what it meant.
Prohern sniffed at her incision from a polite distance. He lowered his nose towards the basin.
“No,” she moaned. She tried to shoo him away, the blade of the Japanese knife whistling very faintly as it whooshed through the air. “Prohern, leave it.”
Miraculously, he did. He backed away, whining, and lay down in the doorway.
“Good dog,” Amy said. “Good guard dog.” She giggled.
She worked on stitching herself up, battling through the exhaustion that was coming over her now in waves. There was a lot of blood, more than she’d expected. She must have not done a good job with the clamps. A trickle of blood pooled on the floor beside the table and rolled away, a thin long arm of it. Prohern licked it idly from where he lay.
Once everything was stitched back together, she wanted nothing more than to let her head fall back against the table and sleep. She couldn’t do that, though. Olly couldn’t find her like this. She had to get up.
Groaning, gritting her aching teeth, she inched her legs off the table. She didn’t think she’d be able to stand. More painkillers. She swallowed them dry, her lips trembling.
The worst bit was getting to her feet. Once she was up, she was able to hobble without too much difficulty through to the kitchen. She kicked the basin along the floor in front of her. The organs sloshed and slurped against the red plastic. She had to plant one hand against the kitchen countertop and lean down, bit by bit, to pick up the basin.
She put the food processor on the scales, zeroed the screen, and tipped in her kidney. The screen said: 150g. That couldn’t be right. She lifted it out, floppy and cooling and wet, zeroed the scales, and tried again. One hundred and fifty grams. That was all.
That wasn’t enough.
Amy leaned over the scales, paralyzed. How could it not be enough?
Tears leaked down her nose. She was so tired. She tried to think. There was a difference, she knew, between secreting and non-secreting organs, in terms of dog nutrition. The non-secreting ones counted as part of the meat ratio. Was the uterus a secreting organ? The ovaries? She didn’t know. She couldn’t face walking across the room to get her phone and check.
She tipped the rest of the organs into the food processor. That increased the weight to two hundred and twenty grams.
Amy wanted to cry. How could her organs weigh so little? It hadn’t been worth it, and now she couldn’t put them back in. She thought of the crow, its tiny, bleeding body exposing tiny organs. How many Amys would it take to make one casserole?
Prohern had followed her into the kitchen. From his basket he gazed at her with soft, loving eyes and gave a quiet whine.
“It’s okay, baby boy,” Amy said automatically. “Okay.”
After all, wasn’t that what a mother did? Sacrificed her body, her organs, for her baby?
Before she could change her mind, she put the food processor back on its stand and hit the power button. The blades whirred through her flesh, throwing a dark spattering of blood around the inside of the plastic.
She got the big saucepan out and tipped in the turkey mince she’d been saving. The liver was in a deli bag in the fridge. She weighed out two-thirds of it, hoping she’d got the calculations right; she was too exhausted to concentrate properly. She blitzed the liver in the food processor, added everything to the pot, and began to weigh out the vegetables.
A week later, Alan’s tractor rumbled up the lane from the from track. He’d brought milk, eggs, potatoes, and a chicken-and-leek pie baked specially by Muriel. Olly answered the door in his dressing gown. They spoke, their voices drifting in a comforting murmur through the snow-stilled air.
Olly brought two of the eggs, soft-boiled, and some toast cut into soldiers. He had made herbal tea in her favorite brown ceramic mug. With everything balanced carefully on a tray, he tapped at the bedroom door and peered inside.
“Ames, babe? You awake?”
Amy gazed at him from the pillow. She was propped up in bed, her cheeks flushed, her eyes swimming with sleep. Prohern lay like a giant hairy rug across the bed at her feet.
“Here we go,” Olly said softly. His face had gained new lines, worry lines, that made him look older, careworn, more parent-like. “Breakfast.”
“Thanks, babe,” she said.
She molded her face, slowly and with difficulty, into a smile. Her voice sounded tired, she thought, but firm. Prohern nuzzled her leg, and she curled one hand protectively into his glossy fur. His stomach had settled, and he had regained a little weight. She was so proud of him, proud of herself, proud of what she had survived.
There was a roaring sound outside. Amy glanced toward the window. The sill was littered with empty boxes of paracetamol and stray ends of surgical tape. At one end stood Olly’s expensive vodka, which he had been using, hesitantly and under Amy’s close direction, to clean the row of wobbly stitches that still leaked and oozed beneath the bandage on her left side. The dregs were almost gone now, the glass catching the light like snow in the sun.
“Alan’s here,” Olly said. “He’s clearing the road. We’ll be able to go into town soon and see the doctor.”
“I’m okay,” Amy said. “I’m not sick.”
“I know, babe.”
He sat on the bed and held her close, helping her knock the tops off the eggs. At her feet, Prohern sighed and settled himself into the blankets, happy, healthy, part of the family.
***
Artwork by Getty Images
