Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee Page A

can leave him with me. I can give him a quiet end. He will let me do that for him. Shall I? Shall I keep him here?’
    The woman wavers, then shakes her head. She begins to tug the goat toward the door.
    â€˜You can have him back afterwards,’ says Bev Shaw. ‘I will help him through, that’s all.’ Though she tries to control her voice, he can hear the accents of defeat. The goat hears them too: he kicks against the strap, bucking and plunging, the obscene bulge quivering behind him. The woman drags the strap loose, casts it aside. Then they are gone.
    â€˜What was that all about?’ he asks.
    Bev Shaw hides her face, blows her nose. ‘It’s nothing. I keep enough lethal for bad cases, but we can’t force the owners. It’s their animal, they like to slaughter in their own way. What a pity! Such a good old fellow, so brave and straight and confident!’
    Lethal : the name of a drug? He would not put it beyond the drug companies. Sudden darkness, from the waters of Lethe.
    â€˜Perhaps he understands more than you guess,’ he says. To his own surprise, he is trying to comfort her. ‘Perhaps he has already been through it. Born with foreknowledge, so to speak. This is Africa, after all. There have been goats here since the beginning of time. They don’t have to be told what steel is for, and fire. They know how death comes to a goat. They are born prepared.’
    â€˜Do you think so?’ she says. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.’
    Things are beginning to fall into place. He has a first inkling of the task this ugly little woman has set herself. This bleak building is a place not of healing – her doctoring is too amateurish for that – but of last resort. He recalls the story of – who was it? St Hubert? – who gave refuge to a deer that clattered into his chapel, panting and distraught, fleeing the huntsmen’s dogs. Bev Shaw, not a veterinarian but a priestess, full of New Age mumbo jumbo, trying, absurdly, to lighten the load of Africa’s suffering beasts. Lucy thought he would find her interesting. But Lucy is wrong. Interesting is not the word.
    He spends all afternoon in the surgery, helping as far as he is able. When the last of the day’s cases has been dealt with, Bev Shaw shows him around the yard. In the avian cage there is only one bird, a young fish-eagle with a splinted wing. For the rest there are dogs: not Lucy’s well-groomed thoroughbreds but a mob of scrawny mongrels filling two pens to bursting point, barking, yapping, whining, leaping with excitement.
    He helps her pour out dry food and fill the water-troughs. They empty two ten-kilogram bags.
    â€˜How do you pay for this stuff?’ he asks.
    â€˜We get it wholesale. We hold public collections. We get donations. We offer a free neutering service, and get a grant for that.’
    â€˜Who does the neutering?
    â€˜Dr Oosthuizen, our vet. But he comes in only one afternoon a week.’
    He is watching the dogs eat. It surprises him how little fighting there is. The small, the weak hold back, accepting their lot, waiting their turn.
    â€˜The trouble is, there are just too many of them,’ says Bev Shaw. ‘They don’t understand it, of course, and we have no way of telling them. Too many by our standards, not by theirs. They would just multiply and multiply if they had their way, until they filled the earth. They don’t think it’s a bad thing to have lots of offspring. The more the jollier. Cats the same.’
    â€˜And rats.’
    â€˜And rats. Which reminds me: check yourself for fleas when you get home.’
    One of the dogs, replete, eyes shining with wellbeing, sniffs his fingers through the mesh, licks them.
    â€˜They are very egalitarian, aren’t they,’ he remarks. ‘No classes. No one too high and mighty to smell another’s