Sixteen Horses

by Greg Buchanan

  Kate thought of Cooper, of the way the other vet had looked at her. She opened the bedside drawer and removed some anaesthetic she had taken from the practice several months ago, pretending that the vial had broken. She injected the ketamine into herself.

  That was a ritual, too.

  She switched on the little television at the end of the bed.

  She counted gently in her mind as she rolled back, wondering how long it would take until there was nothing.

  One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

  ‘Once I caught a fish alive,’ she murmured, trying to get comfortable.

  Six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

  ‘Then I let it—’

  Two Years Ago

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The first sick or abandoned lamb, the first creature to be rejected by its mother, he or she had it the hardest. The old stables on the Coles’ farm had eventually been repurposed for the storage of sick sheep. The owners used this space to keep animals isolated. They hand-reared them. Hours in between, left in the cold and in the dark with no noise but the distant bleats of the flock.

  That first lamb, they’d often find it suckling the edges of the old fridge in the corner, cuddling round tools and abandoned troughs.

  The first pet lamb rarely survived. The others, they had a chance.

  Rebecca would heat up some milk for them, even as a child. She would mix up the powder, go out, and she would sit with the newborns for hours, morning and night. She would rear them and they would bleat for her and she would name them many names and most would die. Those who survived eventually went back to their flock, but there were some who remembered her always. There were some who ran over at the sound of the shaking bucket, ahead of the rest, a spring in their steps, a head bent for stroking and a bite of a carrot or two. There were those who were never sent for slaughter, not on purpose.

  There were three overarching barns and a house at Well Farm, a mess of byres and anonymous corridors in between. These halls were full of plastic boxes. Some held objects that could have been memories, had they been protected from the winds that seeped through the old bricks in winter, from the flies that swarmed the living and the dead. There were old journals and diaries, some from when the farmer had been young, when Albert Cole had dreamt of being a fireman, or a doctor, or any number of things. Some belonged to his daughter, a collection of miscellaneous cards representing birthdays, Valentine’s, Christmas as seen through the eyes of Rebecca’s five-year-old self. And some objects, no one would know where they came from.

  These were the things that made land more than just land. There were places that were the only places Rebecca had ever called home.

  There was the ditch she’d played in as a kid, accompanied by the dogs and her toys.

  There was the broken swing in the garden, put up for one glorious summer, out near her mother’s office.

  There was the front garden where she’d tried growing her own plants, until that garden had been destroyed.

  There was the second barn where one day, fourteen years old, she had gone to feed the sheep.

  It had been so cold. It had been March, and it had snowed every day of the month, a full two feet accumulating over the fields just as they’d been preparing for lambing. They had brought as many of the sheep inside as they could, stuffing three barns with the entire flock and allowing the rest to spill over into a run they had set up outside, with temporary steel fences and gates erected to keep them within. At night, all of them were squeezed inside. Snow was not really a problem in the outside run – the heat of the sheep, the small amount of protection provided by the looming barns between them, it stopped much of the snow from settling. But deaths were inevitable in that cold, as were spontaneous abortions. The flock thinned.

  Her mother had never had another child. There was no brother or sister.

  One morning, Rebecca had come outside expecting the outer barn doors to have been opened already. She was going to smash up the buckets full of ice water. She was going to throw down feed into the troughs. She was going to stay outside for a while. She didn’t want to be in the house.

  The barn doors were not open. It was still a little dark. Inside, a small world of annexed structures, of old, collapsing halls, stood housed within a rusted metal shell.

  Her father stood at the edge of the byre within, quietly watching the sheep on the other side of the gate. He turned and put a finger to his lips when Rebecca approached. He looked enchanted.

  She came up beside him and leant on the metal gate. It took her a few moments to see it.

  Between the clustered sheep – a hundred or more squeezed against each other, all hemmed into a pen – there was something else. Just a bit taller.

  The sheep around it kept trying to move away, uncomfortable with its presence. The creature stood frozen, staring right back at the humans all the way across the barn.

  It was a fawn, twin swellings on its head where one day antlers might spring.

  ‘Won’t be more than about six months old,’ her father whispered.

  ‘What . . .’ She paused, her voice kept low. ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘Its mum can’t be far away. If she’s still around.’

  A block of snow slid off a panel near Rebecca’s head. She did not jump, though she did shudder.

  ‘What are we—’

  ‘Already asked that. Don’t repeat yourself, Becca.’

  ‘You . . .’

  ‘What?’ He turned, his eyebrows slightly raised. ‘You what?’

  ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ she mumbled. ‘That’s why I asked it again.’

  He turned back to the deer, grimacing. ‘How’d it get in here, you think?’

  Rebecca paused, looking first at the deer, then the barn door.

  ‘Did we shut it in? Did it get in when we were closing up?’

  Her father shook his head without looking at her.

  ‘Was it already there? Maybe it had hidden round the—’

  ‘No,’ her father said.

  There was a long silence then. Frustrated, peering back and forth in every direction around the barn, Rebecca turned away from the metal. She walked back through the byre towards the house, but paused before the exit, looking either side at possible entry points. She turned towards the main outer door – the same one through which she had entered. A flimsy wooden door she had been supposed to lock the night before. Which she was sure she had locked.

  She turned back to her father.

  He was staring at her.

  ‘It came in just like we did?’ She walked back over to the gate. ‘It came in through the door.’

  He nodded.

  ‘But . . . why? It would have had to jump over the gate into the crush. Why squeeze in with all the sheep? Why not just stay in the byre? And why wasn’t it afraid?’

  She looked ahead at the deer. It had calmed down a bit, though it kept staring at them, even so.

  ‘It was cold and lonely,’ her father said. ‘That’s reason enough to do most things.’

  ‘What are you going to do with it?’

  ‘It can’t stay here,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t know what it’s carrying. Wild animals, they will have all sorts.’ He sighed, looking down at her. ‘Come on, let’s get back into the house and have some tea.’

  ‘We haven’t fed the sheep yet . . .’

  ‘They’ll keep.’

  Two days ago, Rebecca’s mother had asked her to strip. Rebecca had forgotten to take the dog in overnight. She kept forgetting things.

  I found him cold, Becca.

  Take off your top, Becca.

  Take off your top.

  ‘Mum, please—’

  Take off your trousers.

  ‘Mum, please don’t—’

  It’s cold, isn’t it? This is how it felt for the dog.

  ‘I’m sorry—’

  You can’t be sorry. You can’t be.

  This is empa
thy.

  Stand here.

  Her mum had left to go into the byre.

  A few moments later, water started spilling from the hose end, the whole thing still coiled on the floor.

  The breeze bit into Rebecca, standing there without her top or her trousers.

  She started to shake, and her mother didn’t come back.

  The water trickled along the ground and began to creep towards her bare toes.

  ‘No no no no no—’ she began to murmur. ‘No no—’

  She shook, her cry a little louder.

  Still, her mother did not come back.

  Across the road, an occasional car passed and did not stop. The fields rolled on and on, the clouds spreading darkness as they drifted, replaced by light just as soon.

  The water touched her feet and she wet herself from the cold and wet, shaking, uncontrollably now.

  Still, no one came to switch the hose off, no one came to point it at her, either. It just lay there, unspooling itself against the stone. Rebecca shivered, clutching her arms to her body, crying, unable to move, and she would think about that in the months to come, why she did not move, what she had allowed.

  They had not spoken about it since. Rebecca didn’t even know if her father knew, if he’d agreed with it, if he’d been part of it.

  Her mother would be nice to her for a while now.

  She was always nice to her, after the worst of it.

  After they found the baby deer in the barn, Rebecca’s mother made tea in the kitchen and they watched some boring Sunday documentary of the kind made solely for boring Sundays. Rebecca’s father told her to stay inside; he’d take care of the sheep today. She should rest. Looked like she was coming down with a cold. Her mother protested that she looked perfectly fine, but that was that. Rebecca stayed inside for a while, even though she didn’t want to.

  Her mother took her own medicine, heart pills.

  She wanted Rebecca to eat better, to exercise better, so she wouldn’t end up like her mum. The girl would later learn her mother’s condition was nothing to do with what she ate. Blood-clotting disorders didn’t work like that.

  Later that day, Rebecca was sent to the byre to get some garden peas from the freezer.

  The sheep were inside and outside, the sky starting to grow darker. There was no sign of the baby deer. The troughs were full of water. Sheep ate what they could as fast as they could, so the empty troughs were not surprising.

  She returned to the freezer and took the peas.

  Halfway back to the house she heard a scratching sound.

  She turned around.

  There was no one there. There was nothing there.

  She kept going, until she heard it again, louder this time. Now she recognized the sound. It was a tool. Her father was in the workshop.

  She went back, walking past plastic and metal. Buckets for making sandcastles. An old lawnmower, collapsed into three pieces. A woman’s suitcase.

  She moved towards the open door.

  Her father had his back to her. He was working at the table with his apron on, the whole surface draped in tarp. He hadn’t heard her arrival, or he didn’t care about her arrival. Either possibility might have been true.

  He put his tool down. There was a body on the table in front of him. Four hoofed legs, two either side of her father, curling round him like a magnet. They dangled off the table, pink and moist.

  Rebecca stepped closer.

  ‘Dad, what—’

  He became very still, very quickly.

  ‘What are you doing?’ She couldn’t tell what it was.

  ‘Why are you out?’ He didn’t turn around.

  ‘Mum told me to get peas.’ She held the peas higher as proof, despite the fact he wasn’t looking. Her cheeks grew slightly red and she lowered the peas to her side.

  Her eyes flicked to the creature on the table. It had been skinned.

  ‘Dad?’

  He turned, and as he did, she saw it.

  The neck of the creature ended in a stump.

  There was nothing beyond that stump.

  Her father had cut off the head. Of course he’d cut off the head.

  It’s what you do when you kill a deer.

  Day Three

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  It was night. The door to the mud room was open when Rebecca got back. The police had left the farm. The horse heads were gone at last.

  There were muddy boots, wax jackets, half-finished cat litter bags and hamster feed, and boxes for things broken or forgotten years ago. A leaflet from the council, a few unopened letters.

  ‘You left the front door open!’ she shouted, but her father did not answer.

  She pulled her wellingtons off, hopping one leg onto the straw thatch mat as she did so. Through the dirty window she saw a truck zoom past. There were no street lights to mark its path.

  Pulling off her outdoor fleece, the movement caused her pain. There was a rash all along her right arm, down to the back of her hand. It was a nasty thing, black scabs over portions of welted skin. She’d put cream on it earlier. She got inflammation sometimes, from lambing and milk-replacement powder. She once had a great big brown tick attach itself to her eyelid. A rash was nothing.

  She walked straight to the bathroom and locked the door. She peeled off her dirty clothes and finally, stepping into the plastic tub, showered. Her whole body ached. She felt light-headed, too, but the water helped with that at least.

  She looked in the mirror when she was done. She was sweating from the cold. She could see her ribs just a little. She’d first seen them a few days ago, and it was so strange each time. She’d felt overweight for so long – she’d been told she wasn’t, of course, but telling never helped, not when you didn’t feel it, not when you didn’t see the evidence with your own eyes. And now a miracle was here – skin stretched over bone. She’d been dieting for months, the only exception being her birthday. But the ribs were still there.

  She’d forgotten her clean clothes. Shit. She peeked out into the hallway and, seeing a clear coast but for their stupid cat Toby, ran across to her bedroom and locked the door again. She dried her mouse-brown hair and wondered how it might look if she dyed it sometime. She thought about the new vet’s hair colour – a kind of dark chestnut, maybe, almost black. Or something different, she didn’t know. She worried she might look weird. As if she didn’t already.

  As she pulled her clothes on, she thought about the snake she’d seen earlier.

  She thought about the noise of the cars throughout the day. The wheels, turning and turning against the soil.

  She sat down at her computer – an old and slow device, even by the outmoded standards of her family – and played a game for a while. She tried to settle herself.

  In the game her character fell in love. She’d made all the correct choices, following a guide on another website. It was her tenth time playing it. Peter said he’d played it, once at least. But Peter mostly watched recordings of games, he didn’t actually buy them or play them himself. So did a lot of people. Rebecca hadn’t seen her friend for months, now, not face to face. If they’d ever even earned that term, if he and the others had ever even cared about her. She didn’t know.

  You didn’t have to be yourself. You didn’t have to hold close all the things you had suffered and still suffered, all the things you had done to others and that were still done to you. You could just pretend or forget. You could think however you wanted to; they were just thoughts, weren’t they, and what were thoughts but made up? What was consciousness but a form of fiction? You could make your life a life of stories. This was her mother’s gift to her.

  Her life as it was now, in these games without people, in messages without faces – Rebecca lost her head in machines. She lost her body in thoughts.

  She’d felt overweight for so long. Like there was too much of her. Others had said so. She’d asked Peter what he thought, once, trying to seek another opinion, some kind of escape. He’d just l
ooked embarrassed. He’d just said he didn’t know.

  There was a knock on the door. It was time for dinner.

  The hall was empty again, but for the white ball of cat, licking the fluff off its own belly. Rebecca walked towards the lounge, and the cat leapt round and ran away down the hall. She pushed the door open.

  They ate venison steak for dinner, blood practically seeping from the barely cooked cuts. Her father liked to claim he was a vegetarian, sometimes; he said it to strangers, he told it to friends, then ate meat all the same. He thought it was funny, this secret violence, though the joke was never clear to her.

  She didn’t eat much of anything.

  Her father wiped bloody gravy from his moustache with a flick of his tongue. Half-forgotten greens lay steaming to the side. They watched the news in silence but for the scrapes of knives against plates. A politician was being interviewed.

  ‘Should this just be a case of “put up, shut up”?’

  ‘Well, first of all, I’d say it’s rather oxymoronic, even dangerous to throw around phrases like “put up, shut up” when we’re talking about the expression of democratic values – the casting of a vote doesn’t have to mean the end of a debate. Laws change, governments lie, and sometimes people don’t know what they want, or worse – groups pervert our institutions to oppress others for their own gain. The history of democracy is littered with tyrants and demagogues who gained power through perfectly legitimate means, and we shouldn’t forget this—’

  Her father abruptly changed the channel. He always did it without asking, even when her mother had still lived here.

  This flu was something else. She was still sweating from the shower. The meat hadn’t helped.

  She tried to forget about it, sipping her water.

  On the TV screen, a man in a black suit sat across a table from a dishevelled wreck of a human being. The room was dark. It looked like a detective drama, but it wasn’t, not really. Something was off.

  ‘I need to get home.’