“What is it, boy?” Angus asked.
Cyril looked up at his master. Then he twisted his neck round
and smelled the air again. He had to go where his nose took him; he simply had to.
“What’s troubling you, old chap?” asked Angus. “Are you hungry?”
Cyril tugged at his lead. It was an insistent tug, an urgent one, and Angus decided to let him go where he wanted to go.
So, with Cyril pulling at the leash, Angus followed him across the road, to the gardens in the centre of Drummond Place.
“So you want a run round?” asked Angus, when they reached the half-open gate of the gardens. “All right. But make it brief.
I’m hungry.”
He bent down to take the leash off Cyril’s collar. The moment he did this, Cyril tore towards the centre of the gardens. Angus, bemused at Cyril’s sudden, but totally understandable desire for a bit of freedom, followed behind his dog.
It was one of those generous summer evenings when the light persists, and it was quite bright enough for him to see exactly what was happening. A woman had been walking her dog, a large terrier of some sort, in the gardens, and now, to Angus Lordie’s horror, Cyril rushed over to this dog and began what could only be interpreted as amatory advances. The woman shouted loudly and threw something at Cyril, missing him by some margin. Angus dashed forward, shouting his apologies as he did so. Cyril and the female dog were now in full embrace.
“Stop him!” shouted the woman. “Stop him!”
Angus struck at Cyril with his leash, using it as a whip, but he missed. He raised his arm again and struck once more. This time, the lead connected with Cyril, but the amorous dog seemed to be impervious to his master’s displeasure. There was a growling sound, a warning.
Angus turned to the woman. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “It appears that . . .”
The woman glared at him.
“Listen,” said Angus testily. “You shouldn’t take a dog out in that condition.”
“How dare you!” snapped the woman.
258
Bertie remembered with a shudder the moment when Olive had cornered him in his room and insisted on plunging the needle of her syringe into his upper arm. It had hurt, even if not quite as much as he had feared, but what had terrified him was the sight of his blood rising so very easily in the barrel of the syringe. Olive herself had seemed to be slightly surprised at this and remarked, with some satisfaction: “I seem to have found a vein first time, Bertie! And look at all that blood. Look at it!”
That had been some days ago, and Bertie hoped that Olive had forgotten all about the test, whatever it was, that she was proposing to conduct. He wondered if he could ask for his blood back, and if it could be injected back into him – by a proper nurse this time.
But he thought that it was probably too late for that, and this was confirmed when Olive eventually trapped him in the playground.
“No, don’t go away, Bertie,” she said. “I need to talk to you.”
Bertie looked about him desperately. At the other side of the playground, Tofu and several other boys were engaged in some game; they had not noticed Bertie, and so no help would come from that quarter. Bertie decided to go on the attack.
“I want my blood back,” he said.
Olive laughed. “Why? Why do you want it back?”
“I want it injected back in,” said Bertie. “You didn’t ask me properly before you took it.”
Olive laughed, screwing up her eyes in amusement. “Oh, Bertie,” she crowed, “you’re so silly! Everybody knows that blood goes dry and hard after a while, especially your yucky sort of blood. You can’t put it back in.”
Bertie frowned. Every day on the bus he went past the Blood Transfusion Service in Lauriston Place. He had asked his mother about this, and it had been explained to him that blood was taken there and stored until needed for transfusion. Olive, he thought, was clearly lying.
“What about blood transfusions, then?” he challenged. “Don’t you know about those?”
Olive, who could not bear to be bettered in any discussion, took a moment or two to compose herself. “Those are different,”
she said. “I would have thought that you would have known how they do that.”
Bertie waited for her to continue, but she did not.
“Well?” he said. “How are they different?”
Olive waved a hand airily. “I haven’t got time to go into all that,” she said. “I need to talk to you about the tests I did. I did some tests, you see, then I threw your blood away. Into the rubbish bin, in fact.”
