So, you may remember that Mum and I were not on speaking terms. This was because she hacked off my bloomers and left them all over the lawn. That night I confess I went to bed with vengeance in my heart.
I slept fitfully, plagued by dreams of a giant ape wielding a lawnmower, and it may be in the course of all the tossing and turning that I sustained my injury – I’m not pointing the paw, okay, I’m just saying that it’s not completely impossible that the attack on my bloomers and the injury that followed the very next morning are in some way related. Not impossible, that is all I’m saying.
What is certain is that when I woke at last to find that it was morning, I performed my usual stretching routine (a Megastar needs to keep flexible) and all of a sudden, I felt something go in my shoulder. The next thing I knew I had tumbled over and was lying on my side on the floor.
Now I’m not a dog to panic. I’m not. I knew perfectly well I’d strained a muscle. It was nothing a little rest and massage, perhaps a touch of laser, wouldn’t fix. I knew that perfectly well, but the thing is Mum didn’t. She was seriously stressing. ‘Meg!’ she said. ‘What’s the matter, baby?’ Like really concerned, really properly concerned, and I’m lying there on the floor and I can’t help thinking, well this is all very nice and stuff, her coming over all devoted Momma, but what about yesterday? What about the nightmare with the scissors? She needs to be taught a lesson, I thought, And that’s when I hatched my plan.
It wasn’t hard. Mum is gullible, with a great big capital G. Each time, I stood up, I’d give her this look, like just to make sure she was watching and then I’d let myself fall over. After five falls, she was beside herself. ‘Oh, Meg!’ she said. ‘Meg!’ It was all I could do not to wag my tail.
‘We’re going to see Philippa,’ she says. Philippa calls herself a rehab vet, but really she is my personal trainer, masseuse and physio rolled into one. She’s a three hour drive away, but that’s okay. We’ve got the Mega-Wagon.
We stopped at my favourite service station, the one where I jumped in the lake and stuff, like three weeks after my amputation, and rolled on a dead fish while everyone watched. I LOVE that place. I’m like, ‘Come on Mum! Let’s go down to the lake!’ (in truth, I’d forgotten my shoulder for a moment) and she gave me this look, like really stern, like seriously no messing. ‘Meg!’ she said. ‘I’m on a deadline today. This is a three hundred mile round trip. Philippa has gone out of her way to fit us in. You had better not be shamming, okay?’ So then I fell over, just to show her I wasn’t. ‘Alright,’ she said. ‘Come on.’
Mum had been stressing about my elbow, but Philippa said my elbow was fine. She checked me all over, while I lay there on the mat and Mum fed me chunks of flame roast chicken. She checked all down my spine, my back, my hips, my feet, even in between my toes. ‘Ah!’ she said, when she got to my shoulder. ‘She’s pulled a muscle behind the blade.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, could of told you that!’ Except I didn’t say anything of course, I just kept eating my chicken. So then she did laser all round my shoulder and down my back and my paw as well. And after that acupuncture too and I could feel my eyelids starting to droop and I almost went right off to sleep. Philippa said I need to rest to give my shoulder a chance to heal, just short lead walks on flat surfaces, with no sharp turns, which is a bit of a bore but I s’pose I’ll have to do it. ‘The most important thing,’ she said, ‘is to let Meg eat whatever she wants while she’s healing, and even after she’s better, to be honest, you must let her eat anything she wants: game pie, roast chicken, sausages. Whatever she wants, whenever she wants.’ Mum says Philippa never said that, but she definitely did; I heard her clearly.
Mum was so happy I was alright she sang the whole way home, and the whole car felt lighter like it was flying and that’s when I realised how worried she’d been, and I felt a bit bad to be honest.
This started as a story of vengeance, but in the end it turns out it’s a story of love, cos life’s too short to bear grudges. Mum and I are friends again and anyway I noticed this morning my bloomers are already starting to grow back.
