Clothes You Can Be Bitten In

I dress for the job in the order that matters: closed shoes, sleeves I can push up, hair tied back twice, nothing loose at the wrist. The denim jacket by the door is not a fashion decision, whatever the photograph suggests. It has survived four years of disinfectant and one very determined cat, and it is the only thing I own that improves with damage.

The clinic is small. Two consulting rooms, a kennel room, a back table where the sterilising happens. I am the one who keeps the blue bath filled and the autoclave cycle logged, which sounds like nothing and is the reason nobody has picked up an infection here. Nobody thanks you for the thing that did not happen. That is fine. It is not why you do it.

Clean is a procedure

The instruments come out hot and I lay them on the cloth in the same order every time, because in a hurry the order is the only thing that saves you. There is a particular quiet in that back room at four in the afternoon: the autoclave ticking down, a dog sighing in the kennel, somebody's radio in the yard next door. I like it more than any louder hour.

You cannot be careful only when someone is watching.

Owners are the other half of the work. Some come in ashamed because they waited; some come in angry because they are frightened. Both need the same thing, which is to be told plainly what is happening and what it will cost. I have learned to say the numbers out loud without softening them. Softening them only moves the disappointment to later.

I remember the ones I could not hold. A large dog with a torn ear who had been tied his whole life and did not know how to stand in a room where people were at his level. We fixed the ear. He went home on the same chain. I still think about him on the drive in, at the same stretch of road, which is not useful and happens anyway.

The ones I keep

The two at my house are easy by comparison: one who sleeps against the door, one who steals shoes and hides them badly, both waiting at the gate from six onwards because they hear the car before it turns in. There is nothing complicated about being met like that. It is the simplest thing in my life, and I would arrange whole days around it.

Most of the dogs who bite are not angry, only out of ways to say that it hurts.

There is a small tear in the left cuff of the denim jacket, from a cat who did not want her temperature taken, and I have never mended it. In the afternoon light it looks like a mark on a map. I wear it home over a clean shirt, drive with the window down, and at the gate the barking starts before I have even stopped the engine.