I had these same thoughts when I killed the horse, only it was worse because it took so much longer than with a chook. I didn’t do it right after the sheep, of course. I waited a while, months, until the day of the picnic seemed long gone. On the day I chose, the horse watched me tip his ration of chaff back into the forty-four-gallon drum it had come from, and at the time I half thought that even if I made him hungry he’d still be too clever to start on the sheaves of foliage I’d put in his feed bin instead. But that plant must have tasted good to most animals because he got into it straight away. I watched him as he ate the way he always did, pulling back his lips so that his teeth might nip off those waxy, spear-shaped leaves, those pretty little sunbursts of blossom.
I almost wanted to stop it when the horse began to groan and whinny. It might not have been too late to call the vet. But I didn’t. Nobody was there except myself to make me keep watching from the front veranda when the horse fell to the ground writhing and screaming, nor when he went into convulsions, his legs striking out at nothing, bloodied faeces streaming from his back end. The boys were off at school, their bikes tangled in a pile inside the corrugated iron lean-to that your father built for them down at the road, where the bus used to stop morning and night. And you, you were in my belly still. I don’t know exactly how long it took, but thankfully the horse was still by the time those three bikes came skidding back in to the dust of the yard.
‘The horse is dead,’ I said to Colin when he got home right on dusk.
And all he said was, ‘Where?’
Through the kitchen window I pointed to the place where gravity had been doing its work for the past few hours. All the sagging parts of the horse’s body had been pulled earthwards, and when your father went out and walked a circle around the carcass, it looked hardly any thicker than a pelt rug at his feet. He crouched down beside it for a moment, took off his hat and ruffled the few strands of hair that still lay across the top of his scalp. Then he came back inside and sighed.
A horse is a large thing to bury in a place made of dry, stony earth. But not far from the cottage, just beyond the water tank, was an old, dead gum that needed to come down, so Colin and his father decided on a pyre. It took them half a day to fell the tree and chop it to pieces. Then they scooped up the horse’s body in the bucket of the tractor and doused it in a whole jerry can of diesel. The fire burned all day and all night, and it left behind it a great, black circle on the earth. I wouldn’t have said I was happy, but as I washed the smell of fire and meat from Colin’s clothes and the boys’, I thought that it would be the end of it.
But I was wrong, because now the horse was dust, and now the horse was ash. The horse was underfoot and the horse was in the air. The horse was particles all about me; I had breathed him into my lungs. I hate to think that I breathed him into you. I did what I did because I thought to do away with the horse, but instead I made it so the horse was everywhere, although its voice had now dropped to a whisper. If your mother could see you now . . . I’ve lived with it for all of your life.
You came into the world nearly twenty years ago now, with a full head of hair, a soft little cap of jagged blackness, and your eyes have never changed from that rich, precious blue. I called you Emma, the way I’d known I would, ever since I read that book at school. I wanted nothing ever to vex you.
Two days ago you came home, for a weekend, for a visit, to collect the very last of your things. Your leaving—this long, drawn out leaving—has been, for me, like a death. Although I’ve known of course, from the minute you were born, that it was coming, and even though it’s been all the years of boarding school since you’ve lived with us here every day, there’s still no way that I ever could have prepared myself for this pain that comes, right here, right now, at the end.
You came home this time with your dark hair grown longer still, and that proud flash in your blue eyes stronger than ever, making me want to slap you and kiss you at once. There’s no reason you’d know how I felt in the days leading up to you coming, the little catch every time I walked past your bedroom: exactly the way you’d left it, only tidy. But it was just like you to come a whole day earlier than you said, to turn up when I was out, and when none of what I was doing was important or couldn’t wait. It was only the post and my library books, and when I got back there was Robbie’s car in the driveway and you two in the kitchen helping yourselves to cool drinks and ice. I’d bought Pimm’s—it was in the liquor cabinet—and I wanted to have it all ready in the big green glass jug with fruit slices and tall glasses set out on a tray, and now you’d caught me in my old day dress and my hair not done. I got out of the car and the wind blew, stirring up that damned horse where he lay in the dust. If your mother could see you now . . .
On my way to my bedroom I walked past the open door to your room and there on your bed was your bag, and the arms and legs of your clothes already climbing out through the open zipper, stretching out over the coverlet, making their way back to their home on the floor. And on the foot of the twin bed in your room lay Robbie’s case, neatly closed but just lying there as if he expected to sleep in your room alongside you. A breeze pushed a tasselled branch of tiny gumnuts against the window making a light scratching sound on the glass. If your mother could see you now . . .
I suppose there are modern ways of doing things, words that you can learn out of books to say so that you get it right every time, but I did what my own mother would have done and lifted that case of his off the bed and palmed away every trace of the imprint it had left in the candlewick, tugged at the bedspread edges all around to get it back straight. I carried his case down to the cottage and put it on the bed that I’d made up for him there and I knew that my face had got all tight while I was doing it and that it was still that way when I said to him, ‘Robbie, you’ll find your things at the cottage down the way’. And please don’t think I didn’t see that look that passed between you two, then. Don’t ever think I miss the triumphant shine in your face each time I push you a fraction of an inch in the direction I already know you’re wanting to go.
So now I watch you walk the rusted gravel of the driveway to Robbie’s car sitting there with all its doors open like wings in the heat. I’m at the doorstep waving, and there is something I want to say to you but my tongue is locked, and, anyway, I do not know exactly what it is. I almost say ‘don’t listen to horses, they lie’, but what sense would that make to you? I almost say ‘I love you’, but those are the words that are on all the Hallmark cards and in all the songs and such heavy use has worn away their substance; so light, as easily snapped as paper streamers, they seem to me these days. And although ‘I love you’ its perhaps the biggest part of what I want to say to you, it’s still not even close to all.
You’re walking with the smaller of your suitcases in your hand because your Robbie is gentleman enough to carry the larger one and I cannot see through the leather of either case to know which are the resentments, the injuries, the warnings, that you have packed away in the creases of your blouses, the hollows of your shoes. I do not yet know, and maybe never will, the ways in which I have damaged and disappointed you. I do not know myself what I have buried inside of you that will needle and bite and nag when you turn this way or that, and I cannot be sure that if I heard my own voice inside of you, I would even recognise its sound. But I do know that I’m standing here, that you’re walking away, and that my heart is breaking in two.
acknowledgements
THANK YOU TO all my friends for listening and responding to my infernal yap. Thank you, Joanna Richardson, for being this book’s first, perfect reader. Thank you, Colin Varney, for wielding the picky pen. Thank you, Robyn and Adrian Colman, for finding me the right music, and thank you, Julia Gibson, for letting me sit in on some yoga. Thank you, Nancy and Peter Godfrey, for taking me to 1958, and thanks to you too, Johnny the horse. The wise men to whom I refer on p. 6 might have been John Hurt, or Anthony Minghella, or both of them together. I gratefully acknowledge the l
asting influence of Jim Henson’s The Storyteller. Bless you, Annette Barlow, for your saintly patience, and thank you, Christa Munns, for the final polish. Writing would be so much harder with out your practical help, Mary Mitchell, Peter Wood and Jenny Wood—so, thank you. John Godfrey: someone once told me that you were the best bloke God ever shovelled guts into and I think they were right.
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