Best Australian Yarn 2023: The Expert by Rachel Van Nierop

Cara is ready.

She sits like a queen, poised on an ergonomic swivel chair as the ultrasound machine hums obsequiously next to her.The dog lies in front of her, a chocolate Labrador, belly-up and tranquil with opioids. Its skin is slick and shiny with gel and startling in its bareness. There is an unnatural rectangle carved in the fur that marks where the clippers have been before. A nurse cradles the dog’s head between her forearms and in doing so its ears have draped over her wrists like soft dark cuffs.

Cara dims the lights and the cursor on the screen blinks expectantly at everyone.

She remembers Paula’s voice in the waiting room – cloying in its neediness.

Please help her. She means everything to me. She’s my baby.

It’s not your baby. It’s a dog. Cara didn’t say.

These people. Cara thinks.

She lifts the probe like a triumphant sword and lets the beam of sound carve into the abdomen like a knife. The image sails across the screen, gently bobbing up and down as the dog breathes. It is all kinds of greyness but Cara has never seen anything more beautiful. She makes a few adjustments on the machine and finds her target immediately – stomach with white glints of gas shining off it like a beacon. She rolls over the top of it and finds the liver with its herringbone flecks. The hepatic veins form a repeating design of black dots chequering through the image. She imagines getting some material printed in this pattern and wearing a coat made out of it. She would like that – a coat made out of the echoes of the sounds inside dog liver. Why not? You could call it fashion.

She swings through the abdomen like she is driving down familiar streets. Stomach, liver, diaphragm, turn left to duodenum. The organs can be reluctant, like celebrities out in public – but she is a relentless paparazzo and will capture them all in her grainy photographs. Not now spleen, she jokes, jostling the plump organ to the side to continue to trace the intestine underneath.

She’s glad of the dimness of the room, and of the hushed reverential silence. It’s a relief to not hear the yammer of people. She’s getting into the zone now, the place she likes. Her awareness is focused on the screen and her hand and its tiny movements. She watches the screen and feels with her hand, feeling along the organs as if she holds them in her fingers.

She is deep in the belly of the dog now, tracing the outline of the left kidney. She carefully rotates the probe to cut a longitudinal slice so she can see the scalloped medulla inside. She feels satisfaction every time she does this - in her mastery of this – she can see what is there under the skin, hidden inside the dog. She can record the images and place neat labels on them. She can measure each structure, putting her little calipers on and determining the depth and height in precise millimeters.

She can remember the time, early in her career, where uncertainty gnawed at her and wedged uncomfortably inside her, like poorly fitting underwear. The holes in her knowledge gaped and poked at her so unbearably that she decided she must learn everything she could. She has spent twenty years building up her bank of knowledge in the world’s best Universities and specialist referral centres. Now the holes have closed and she is the person who has all the answers.

Facts come tumbling out of her effortlessly, one after the other like the bodies of commuters pouring out of a packed train. She finds the facts reassuring and solid. This organ has a lesion. Your pet has cancer. She can’t help it if her facts bring people to their knees. That’s what the truth offers – certainty over comfort.

She likes to watch their faces. She likes to see the moment where they understand. She offers her facts one at a time. She builds them together with evidence from examinations and test results and statistics from scientific literature. She builds and builds until all the indisputable truths sink in.

There is a hinge point in time where people realise what all the facts mean. She waits and watches for it. There is something that flashes through people just before their hope deflates and their faces break open. Something pure. Afterwards their cheeks may blotch and their eyes may swell and flush. Sometimes there’s snot and spit. But before all that, there’s that moment in time when the truth nestles in. Right before their world hinges and turns Cara can see straight into the centre of the universe.

Paula is twisting a tissue in her hands. She forms it into a tight coil that lies rigid in her fingers. She can’t stop thinking of Grace’s brown eyes looking reproachfully at her as they put the needle under her skin. Her tail, a barometer of her happiness, slung low as they led her away. Just from thinking and remembering, Paula can feel the warmth of Grace, the purity of her. Her fingers recall the softness of her fur, the gentle curl of her chocolate coat. She can’t imagine going back to that big empty house alone. She just couldn’t bear it. The house without Grace is impassive and grey.

The only motivation she has to get out of bed in the morning is Grace with her insistent snout. For the dog alone she puts on her walking shoes. She doesn’t care about exercise for her own sake. She long ago lost interest in her own body- she ignores its lumpy folds and sagging skin. Paula’s daughter, Linda, is always encouraging her to exercise. Linda begs her to go to aqua aerobics or Tai Chi or Pilates.

Please Mum, it’ll do you good. You need to get out of the house.

Linda would thrust a pamphlet into Paula’s hand, usually with a picture of an impossibly thin young person on the front, twisted into an improbable pose, eyes closed, face serene. Later, Paula would put the pamphlet in the drawer with the others. Then find a pack of chocolate biscuits to mull it over with.

But Grace loves to walk, so that’s what they do. Every morning they amble to the park or the beach. Usually in the afternoons they do a quick loop around the block. The ache in her joints fades as she watches Grace joyfully sniffing in the dirt or chewing on a stick.

A Labrador puppy. When she first mentions it, Linda peppers her with questions and quotes statistics about the breed. She thinks Grace will be too big, too energetic, too much for her. Paula agrees, but still. She has seen the photo of the puppies on social media, and something has been jolted in her. All the carefully placed layers over her heart – the thick insulation she has wrapped it in – shifts and she feels something. Her shriveled, worn down, squashed and tempered heart splutters and coughs.

Even with Linda’s stern warnings she is unprepared for Grace’s relentless enthusiasm. The constant energy, tail ecstatically beating when she sees Paula. It is contagious; this doggy buzz, this joy. A wellspring of love, from a place she rarely accesses, bubbles up and overflows out of her.

She finds herself in pet stores, buying squeaking toys and dog coats and memory foam dog beds. She buys hot roast chicken and carefully separates the meat from the bone. Each night she mixes through broccoli and carrot and peas, for fibre. She adds in a fish oil capsule, as Linda suggests, for a shiny coat. Grace sits on the floor, watching intently, two streams of dribble running from either side of her mouth. When the bowl is placed in front of her she devours it in hungry gulps, licks the bowl clean, then licks the grease from Paula’s fingers.

Until one night she had put the bowl down and Grace had walked away, eating nothing. The dog flopped on the kitchen floor, chest heaving. Paula had felt for her soft ears. They were hot to the touch.

Grace?

The dog had raised one chocolate eyebrow but her tail lay still. She panted as if it were mid-summer, while Paula wore layers of winter fleece.

Paula had counted the days that had passed since she had seen Grace play with her toys. She had reached for her phone and dialed the animal hospital.

Now she looks down at the tissue in her hands – shriveled and soggy.A kindly receptionist asks if she would like anything. A cup of tea perhaps?Paula shakes her head no. She just wants Grace.

A nurse appears.

Paula? Would you like to follow me? I’ll take you to see Dr Cara. She will talk to you about Grace.

They travel down a maze of lime green corridors that smell like disinfectant. The fluorescent lighting makes the nurse’s face seem waxy and fake. Or perhaps, thinks Paula, she just wears a lot of makeup. Behind a closed door Paula can hear a high pitched whine, like the wailing of an ambulance.

That one’s just waking up from anaesthetic. Explains the nurse. He’s not in pain, just confused and scared. The staff are with him.

She is led into a small room where Cara, the specialist vet who came highly recommended, is sitting on a swivel chair with ergonomic curves. The ultrasound machine next to her looks complicated, all dials and buttons. Paula takes a seat opposite on a softly padded chair that makes her awkwardly recline backwards.

She can’t stop herself from saying. How is my baby girl?

We’ve had some results back. Grace’s white cell count is high and she has a fever. The scan shows she has a serious infection in her gall bladder. Her liver function is affected. If we don’t control the infection Grace could die. We can try to treat it with antibiotics, but the chance of a cure is low. We recommend immediate surgery to remove her gall bladder.

Paula can hear the words vibrating in her ears. Grace could die. Grace might live, with surgery. The surgery is complicated. Grace could still die. Grace could bleed and die. Grace could get septic and die. Grace could live, after surgery, and a long time recovering, with drains and tubes and needles and catheters and medication and monitoring.

Paula asks. What if we don’t get the surgery?

Cara offers fulminant infection, liver failure and death as the expected progression of outcomes. She might survive, with a long course of antibiotics, but it is unlikely.

Paula waits for a third option to be offered.

She is still waiting when she realises the pause is for her to make her choice between the two equally unappealing choices.Possible death now versus probable death a little later. Pain and trauma versus sickness and misery.

What would you do? She asks Cara. If it was your dog?

I’d get the surgery. The statistics show survival rates are much better.

So this is what Grace is here. A datum on a graph. A cell on a spreadsheet.

She pictures Grace in surgery, cut open with organs glistening under the surgery lights. Human hands delving deep inside, reaching and wringing, cutting and stitching. She thinks of Grace waking up, confused and scared and whining in pain.

Paula sits forward in her chair and says I’d like to take Grace home.

On the screen of the ultrasound machine she sees a reflection of her own face, stretched and tired and all kinds of grey.

These people. Cara thinks.

She has seen this before. Sometimes a person will stubbornly refuse to accept the truth. A tenacious hope persists, metastasizing and incurable. There will be no enlightenment here, no ascension will follow her bestowment of the facts. She would like to shake Paula awake, shake the sense into her.

Do you know what you are doing? She wants to ask.

Instead, she writes a prescription for antibiotics, and hands over the boxes like she is granting penance.

They bring Grace out and hand Paula her lead, the purple one with the red love hearts. The dog is drowsy from the medication, but she strains against the leash and seems in a hurry to leave the building. She jumps into the car resolutely, ignoring Paula’s attempts at lifting her. Her leash tangles and snares against the seat belts, red hearts twisting around the black straps, and Paula has to spend time unravelling the mess. She pats Grace apologetically on the head.

I’m sorry Grace. I’m so sorry.

Six weeks later, Paula sets a hot roast chicken on the bench and begins to separate the meat from the bone. She makes little balls of chicken meat and pokes the last of capsules inside. Grace sits on the floor, watching intently, two streams of dribble running out of either side of her mouth. Her hair is rapidly growing back on her abdomen and the flesh is filling out again over her once-boney ribs.

Paula puts the bowl down and Grace sets upon the food, sending the bowl scraping across the floor as she chases the strands of chicken. She laps messily from her water bowl, long pink tongue sending droplets flying, then moves back to her food bowl, chicken juice and water mixing and Grace diligently and enthusiastically working her tongue through it all until it is completely dry and empty.

Paula and Linda laugh as they watch the dog. They sit at the kitchen table, two steaming mugs and an open pack of chocolate biscuits in front of them. Linda says nothing as her mother eats three biscuits in rapid succession. Grace, having finally lost interest in her food bowl, finds a warm place to curl up on the floor, making a heart shape with her body inside a golden rectangle of sunlight on the wooden floorboards.

Paula feels the chocolate melting on her tongue, the sweetness against her teeth.