Sixteen Horses

by Greg Buchanan

  ‘We’re here to ask you a few questions about your family.’

  ‘This isn’t—’ Cooper turned, forehead creased. ‘Do you want to talk about this outside?’

  ‘No, no. In here is fine.’ He kept his eyes on the girl. ‘You see, Niamh, something happened to me, too. I got sick. Just like you got sick, just like your dad, your brother, just like everyone. We’ve all been through the same thing.’

  Still, she did not look up. She kept drawing, faster now.

  ‘This isn’t appropriate,’ Cooper said. ‘There’s no sign she even knows anything about this.’ Still he did not move. ‘This – this isn’t fair, come on, Alec, we’re—’

  ‘You can leave if you want,’ he said, still not looking at her.

  She did, after a pause.

  It was just him and the girl, then.

  ‘And I survived, just like you did,’ he said. ‘I survived, but someone’s still missing. My son. My boy. He’s the same age your brother would have been, if he’d lived. And I – I need to know where he is. I need to know who’s doing this.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Did someone – did someone visit you all, before what happened? Did any of your animals get hurt, any letters in the post, any photos?’

  There was noise in the hall.

  ‘Was anyone in your home who shouldn’t have been there?’ he asked.

  Still she drew.

  He reached across the table, hesitating before he did it.

  He snatched the crayon from the little girl’s hand.

  There was no resistance.

  No response.

  Her empty hand just hung loose in the air.

  ‘Why was your house set on fire?’

  The door opened. Two care assistants walked in with Cooper, followed by the director.

  ‘Mr Nichols, you can’t be in—’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Nichols,’ Alec said.

  ‘I have to ask you to leave.’

  He looked up at them. Cooper stood behind the others. He’d never seen her so angry. Had they watched him? Had they been out there?

  ‘Niamh, I—’

  He turned. She had her crayons again.

  She drew a wooden house.

  She drew another, and another.

  They took him from the room. He stared at her, as the security guards’ fingers gripped his arms. He tried to count the houses.

  She stopped at five.

  There was no answer for his own crime, not here.

  Not that he would find. Not that he would know, that he could know.

  The Hail Mary, she was just a ghost.

  She was just a little girl, lost in a life of burning men.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN

  Rebecca walked far from the pier. Her blue-white trainers pattered past the arcades and their screaming noise, a few children inside just watching her, not playing games, just watching: younger, angry eyes. She’d been to the arcade a few times with her boyfriend. They’d played light-gun games, mainly, sticking coins in machines with silly names and pointing her red and black rifle at the faces of velociraptors and zombies. She’d keep looking at him all the while, keep smiling, and he wouldn’t turn to her at all, he’d be so fixated on his task. They’d put as many coins in as they could. Rebecca had barely been able to afford it, but they’d done it anyway. It had made him happy, even if it hadn’t been her kind of game. He’d let them both buy hamburgers as a treat. She hadn’t wanted to – they were so full of fat – but he had told her to eat her burger, so she had eaten it.

  Months after her last birthday, they’d lain in the fields of the farm, far from the house, far from her father, from strangers.

  He’d asked her what she’d wanted, and she’d not known.

  She’d just talked about that carriage ride along the beach.

  She’d talked about happiness, about what it might mean.

  Months later, now, Rebecca sat on the sea-wall and knocked the heels of her trainers back and forth against it.

  She had told no one about the powder.

  Her locker would be opened a day later and the authorities would be called. They would analyse it, and find it was just flour, put there by cruel students playing a careless prank. Rebecca did not know this as she walked.

  Rebecca took out her phone and sent some messages. She had no friends left, not now. Maybe she’d never had them.

  Maybe all this time, all this absence in her life, had just been a dream.

  She did not know what she had breathed. She did not know if it was happening again, she did not know who hated her.

  She got up and went into town. She had brought a coat, a backpack full of her things. She went into the market.

  There, a few people in mobility scooters had crowded near the chip van. Most of the stalls were shutting up for the day. A stern-looking man stood near a rug upon which military memorabilia was laid. Old, impotent guns. Medals. Clothing.

  ‘Is any of that real?’ Rebecca asked.

  ‘Huh?’ The stern man looked up. His face was mottled by acne scars and sixty years of too much sun, but his voice was surprisingly croaky. He did not sound as stern as he looked. ‘What?’

  Rebecca kept walking. She did not answer him, heard him muttering behind her. She went to a pub where once a policeman and his friend had sat, where once that man had wondered if anyone liked him. She knew none of this, but she sat in the same booth. It took on meaning, this place. It woke up. She opened an app on her phone and ordered a drink from the bar. Vodka and Coke.

  It came, half to her surprise. The barman hesitated.

  ‘My mum’s just in the bathroom,’ Rebecca said.

  He nodded and went back to the bar. Rebecca drank it, and hated it, and was surprised by how easy it had been, not the ordering, but the lying. She just said it and he believed her. She ordered dinner: chips, a burger, everything.

  She ate it all and left, a man at the bar winking at her as she got up.

  She left, wondering if the man would follow her.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

  Each day, another person left.

  Within three years, the train station itself would be gone. The rails themselves would be torn up for scrap.

  The vet surgery was never sold. The people there, they found jobs in other practices. Their customers – few as they were, the population dwindling by the day – travelled to adjacent towns to get help.

  Frank thought of all the things he had done for them. All the things he had done to them. Standing in fields, telling men their livelihoods were going to be destroyed. Telling them of infection, of Foot and Mouth, of fire and captive bolts. Telling them what had to be done.

  His girlfriend hadn’t wanted to speak to him any more. He should never have dated someone younger. He’d been flattered at the interest. He’d lost himself.

  Everyone had been on edge for so long. Everyone was afraid.

  ‘I’ll talk to you soon,’ she’d said, but she hadn’t meant it.

  People thought he was arrogant, he knew, they thought he was rude, but if you didn’t pretend to be confident – if you didn’t make yourself into what the world wanted of you – what kind of man were you?

  He’d gone round to the American diner late at night to surprise her, one last attempt to win the woman’s heart, but using his key in the pitch black had upset her, had frightened her, and the true end had come.

  He passed the alleys of a thousand years, the narrow streets, the land forever remembering what it was, what it might be again. The pattern had been there always, for those who looked, for the worst of us.

  He passed the carriage driver, leaning against a caravan, his face shaved, his eyes clear. The man nodded at him, and the look made Frank feel sad, though he did not know why.

  The vet went to his car, a few of his possessions in the back.

  The police had come again, this time with sniffer dogs. They kept thinking he had drugs, wouldn’t leave him alone about it.

  Eve
ryone knew where they came from. Everyone knew but didn’t say. He wondered how much they’d paid the inspector. He wondered if this was it, if he was to take on all the sins of these arcades and empty streets. If he’d be blamed for things he had not done.

  It was the problem at the heart of his profession. How to save the animal from the owner.

  He remained still for a while sitting at his wheel, staring at the curve of houses opposite. He couldn’t see anything through the windows of the houses, not from this far away. The lights were low inside.

  He’d gone to the market that morning. He’d sat amidst the scooters, he’d listened to the cries of the seagulls, he’d seen faces he’d not seen for decades.

  An old woman had spoken to him, turning her head, twisting her body in a sharp, dramatic motion.

  ‘Something is happening.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

  Rebecca kept thinking, as the sky grew dark, her legs and feet tired, the hours moving past, about her father and how they had found him, after his death.

  He had not had his shoes, apparently.

  He’d taken them off; they were lying in the reeds nearby. They’d thought briefly that someone might have taken them from him – Rebecca had asked this, certainly – but no fingerprints, no other evidence was found. Why he had taken his shoes off, then, became the question in her mind.

  She walked through alleyways her father would have killed her for walking down, dark, untended. It was night, now.

  From one street she heard noises, a cry.

  She kept walking.

  She came across a car and a mass of people. From what little she could tell, a man had stumbled out into the road and a car had not expected him.

  ‘Daft fucking sod,’ a voice had said.

  The voice, the man’s friend, would tell the ambulance what a character the dead man had been, how he would always do things like that. Others in the road took photos of the man as he bled in the rain. The car and its driver had fled. Rebecca’s hair was getting wet. She walked away.

  Nothing in her life was what it could have been. This struck her, as she thought of her father’s shoes, lying there without feet.

  Brown leaves scuttled along the pavement.

  There was blue light, decorations glinting overhead. Redness coiled around puddles, around building-sides, like pale fire.

  Her last memory of the sky that night would be starless, empty, black, for her and her alone. In school as a little girl, she’d always drawn the night as dark blue, not black, and had told her teacher he was wrong for thinking it was so. It was light blue in the morning, dark blue at night. That was how existence should be. That was how cause and effect should operate.

  There was still a Rebecca who thought there might be more, after we were all gone, after we’d killed the world. But what if what God had made was not enough? What if her grandfather had been wrong about everything? Her father had thought so. Her father, who stood so tall in her memory, even next to him. Her father, who was mad, yes, who was strange, yes, who had ruined all that was good for him, who had suffered evil, had allowed evil. Her father, who she missed. Her father, who had helped save her from what she had done.

  What if we had done too much?

  The names we took, the things we called ourselves, the ways we lived our lives, they made the world bearable, didn’t they? It was easier to be a process than a person.

  She thought again about what it meant to be good. Surely if you were good, it would be easy to be good. It would be easy to stay that way, to do those things. You would not have to make yourself anew, and damn the old, damn all that you were. You would not have to die.

  She passed a bar, and there were men laughing outside, a stag party of some kind. Some of them wore ape masks as they toasted their friend, pints of beer in hand.

  She lingered, watching them, and one of the men seemed to spot her. He kept looking at her.

  He came over, eventually, and asked if she liked the masks.

  She said they were weird.

  ‘Why aren’t you wearing one?’ the man said, his voice strange through the plastic. He went back to the table and took one for her.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ one of the men said, watching their friend.

  ‘What? She wants a mask.’

  ‘She’s like twelve.’

  ‘She’s not twelve.’

  The other man shrugged.

  She left.

  She continued down another side street, the sounds of her birthplace like numbness. She was seized by the impulse to laugh, but nothing came out. She walked right out into the road and wondered, briefly, if this might be the moment her body would shatter, that she would be gone before anyone could know about her mother, about the things Grace Cole had done, before anyone could know what she had said before she’d gone, before anyone knew what Rebecca was, really, her heart laid bare.

  People kept their selves with them, they never lost what was good about them, but there was more than that, wasn’t there? There was more you could show yourself than what was right.

  No cars came. The road was empty, and Rebecca had found herself already on the other side.

  She kept walking, all those hours.

  She kept walking and passed through the wreck of her old home.

  She passed the red spears in the earth.

  WARFARIN TABLET(S) 10 MG.

  ONE TO BE TAKEN DAILY.

  TAKE AT THE SAME TIME.

  SWALLOW WITH WATER.

  CHAPTER NINETY

  The roads were slick with water on the way back, red and white reflections rippling in puddles by the kerb, the signs of the city at night, its shops and chains and crowds and Christmas lights mingling into a blur past the rapid movement of the windscreen wipers, the pooling mass of acid rain ebbing down each window-side. The satnav took them through it all – all Cooper had left behind, all Alec had abandoned forever. No one knew anyone in the city, wasn’t that what people said? But Alec had known no one in his small town, far away.

  He drove on. He’d wanted to drive, had pushed for it on the way back. There was more stopping and starting than he’d thought there might be.

  Cooper didn’t say much. She just looked out of the window to their left.

  They reached the open road. One straight line, breaking out into the flat plains, and then Ilmarsh. They were going to book a couple of rooms in a bed and breakfast on the outskirts of town. Neither felt safe sleeping in Ilmarsh itself.

  He turned his head to her. Her lips were curled. She stared at nothing.

  ‘You all right?’ he asked.

  ‘. . . Yeah.’

  He did not like her when she was like this.

  There was not much out here. Office parks, occasionally, close enough to the city to commute. A mile out, they passed a partially constructed power plant, its three towers sitting dormant after its funding deal had been blocked by the government. Foreign interference was now feared.

  He wondered what went on in those halls. If anyone still guarded the building, if it would be dismantled for parts, if they were just waiting for the baton to be passed again, for power to be needed, for the atom to be split at long last.

  ‘Sorry about back there,’ he said, his mouth dry. ‘Sometimes you just, you know—’

  She shook her head, gently, still not looking at him, still saying nothing. The motion interrupted.

  ‘What?’

  She was silent.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘What was what?’

  ‘You shook your head.’

  ‘OK,’ she said.

  They kept on. He felt hot in the car, but he couldn’t turn down the fans or it’d mist up.

  ‘You were going absolutely nowhere,’ he said. ‘All you were doing was drawing. You barely asked a single question about the case, and—’

  ‘The girl hasn’t spoken to anyone, maybe ever. We were told men made her nervous. What did you think was going to happen, Alec?’

  ‘I get
that. I get it. I do. But we only had a few hours. You aren’t a therapist. You were wasting time.’

  She didn’t answer. She was just leaning back, now. She moved away slightly as he shifted the gear stick.

  ‘There’s no need to be emotional,’ he said. ‘You’re sulking because I had to take over. That’s all this is.’

  ‘Fuck you.’ Cooper’s face twisted. ‘“Emotional”,’ she scoffed, rolling her eyes. Still she did not look at him.

  He turned.

  He kept his own eyes on the road from then on. His stomach in knots, his legs, his ankles, his feet aching with the dull pressure, he tried to concentrate on everything that was outside himself, and nothing that was within.

  They drove past hamlets full of Christmas lights, trees displayed in the windows of cosy homes. Was there a connection between the place ‘hamlet’ and the play Hamlet? Between small groups of houses and princes avenging their fathers by killing their uncles? He didn’t know. English was a strange language. ‘Pepper’, for example, referred to vegetables, seasoning, the action of scattering, chillies, and far more – all unrelated, all disparate. He thought about Christmas.

  He had not got Simon much, yet. He was last-minute, every year.

  He wondered if Simon had got him anything, before his disappearance.

  Maybe he was like his father. Maybe he had left it late, also.

  He gripped the wheel tighter. The rain fell lighter and lighter.

  He ticked the wipers onto a lower setting and switched on the radio. Cooper used to fight over it, those early days, used to debate what station, what songs to listen to. Alec liked the news, talk shows, that kind of thing. They helped quiet his thoughts.

  She did not touch it now.

  An unseen voice talked about the ethics of artificial meat.

  ‘Look, I’m . . .’ he began, and hesitated.

  Twenty seconds passed.

  ‘What? You’re what?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You’re not yourself,’ she said.

  How would she know?

  How would anyone know?