by Tom Cox
One day, she arrived home, struggling with two giant polythene bags. ‘Here,’ she said, handing me one. ‘Take this would you, and put it in the living room.’
I picked it up and felt my arms sink. ‘My god. What’s in them? Horse skulls or something?’
‘Yep,’ she said. ‘They’re for Dave.’
From most people’s spouses, this might have seemed quite a disturbing piece of information, but I’d known Dee and her family for long enough not to be surprised. For birthdays, Dee’s dad would send both of us special, surreal and wrongish constructions by a mysterious creature called The Birthday Serpent. Nobody knew where this serpent had originated from, or what it looked like, but one thing was for sure: it was a seriously messed-up snake. For my latest birthday, it had sent me a 1970s WHSmith paperclip holder box with a bar of Pear’s soap inside with a dozen tiny plastic soldiers encased in it. Previous offerings included the cardboard lining to some Marks & Spencer pants, bedecked with an eerie mechanical drawing, a woman’s compact sabotaged and glued with a small woodland vista and a locked wooden cigar box whose contents remained a mystery but almost certainly didn’t include cigars. Dee’s dad’s best friend, an artist called Dave, shared, if not trumped, the serpent’s macabre passions. Last time he’d visited our house, he’d developed an extreme fondness for the wicker man I’d bought from a garden centre in Swaffham, and it didn’t surprise me in the slightest that his latest project would involve drawing a couple of dead horse heads.
‘Won’t they smell?’ I asked Dee.
‘No, no. No chance of that. They’ve been boiled and sterilised. The woman in the Dead Shed promised me.’
‘The Dead Shed?’
‘Yeah, it’s the place where they keep all the dead horses. I virtually had to climb over a couple of dead donkeys to get to these.’
Dee had always been an amazingly unsqueamish person: a sizable fan of forensic documentaries, unflinching hospital-based dramas and serial-killer literature. Nonetheless, I was surprised. If I had been given the chance to walk around a large barn full of dead horses, donkeys and ponies, I feel sure I would have found it hard to resist blabbing about it to the person closest to me at the soonest opportunity in an overexcitable, yelping fashion. Perhaps I would have held back from an actual phone call, but wouldn’t have been able to help at least sending a text message saying, ‘I’m standing in a room full of horse parts!’ or ‘Oh my god! I just almost touched the femur of a Spotted Ass by mistake!’ But for Dee it was all in the course of a day’s work for the new equine-hardened her. Was this, I wondered, simply the sort of thing that happened to you when you spent too much time looking at diseased horse penises?
‘Put the skulls in the cockpit for now if you like,’ she said.
The cockpit was what the previous owners of my house called the glass room on the top floor, and the name has stuck. It’s a room that gets very cold in winter, and very hot in summer, and one of the few rooms that the cats don’t venture into. I didn’t intend to leave the horse skulls in there for any length of time, but it seemed like a convenient and safe place to put them. Perhaps, as Dee said, there was no actual . . . horse left on the horses, but just the previous night Pablo and Janet had had great fun with a chicken carcass I’d been remiss enough to leave on the work surface, evidently taking turns to take it for the ride of its afterlife around the living room, both bathrooms and my study.
The cats were going through a lull in their killing schedule around about this point. It had been at least a month since I’d walked out of the bedroom door and stepped on a shrew’s face, and almost a year since I’d had to chase a petrified moorhen around the kitchen island with a waste paper basket in my hand. So it was a surprise when, around the stairwell area, I began to smell something suspiciously like dead mouse.
I know the smell of dead mouse rather well now. It’s different from the smell of dead shrew or dead vole: more . . . yellowy. This particular aroma was uncannily similar to a dead mouse I’d found last summer, too late, underneath The Bear’s favourite scratching post. Yet it also had an after-smell that was not dissimilar to that of a headless rabbit (I actually sensed the cats had not killed this themselves, though they may have munched the head, as they’re all big fans of brain food) I’d found on the kitchen floor a month previous to that, and, in haste, wrapped up in a carrier bag and placed in the wheelie bin, before realising my mistake a few hot summer hours later; I’d rushed out to find the bin crawling with maggots, then had to start a complex hosing-down procedure for fear of prompting the local council to come to my house with knives to kill me. Not wishing a repeat performance, nor to gain the neighbourhood nickname ‘Maggot Man’, I made it my mission to find the cause of this latest smell. But having cleared the stairwell, checked under the sofa and even behind the kickboards in the kitchen, I found nothing.
Yet The Smell remained, becoming just that bit more oozingly malevolent by the day. Were it to get any worse, I would soon probably be compelled to hammer an exploratory hole inside the wall in a last, desperate attempt to determine its origin. The Smell watched me as I worked, harrying me like the sound of a thousand evil elves whispering behind my back.
‘Are you absolutely sure it couldn’t be coming from the horse skulls?’ I asked Dee. She was adamant that it wasn’t. Dee is a remarkable font of information: a piece of human Velcro for facts. It’s not just that she knows about all the stuff she needs to know about; she knows about an awful lot of stuff she doesn’t need to know about as well. Want to find out about the latest techniques in DNA analysis? The secrets of maintaining your fishing tackle in a cost-effective way? She’s your woman. Being well aware of this, I certainly had no reason to question her knowledge about dead horses: an area where she was, in my eyes, an acknowledged expert.
I began to smell The Smell now even when I left the house. It seemed to be with me in the car as I drove. How long, I wondered, before it transferred to the car itself, and my passengers? Before long, it could be running rampage across the whole of Norfolk, Britain, the world. How, I wondered, could it ever be eradicated? The only way, perhaps, would be by bringing an even bigger, more putrid smell to suffocate it.
Dave was taking his time coming to collect the horse skulls, and I hadn’t actually had any reason to venture into the cockpit since I’d first put them there. The way I looked at it was that they were horse skulls, and I had no reason to go and check to see that they were still horse skulls. On the day I finally ventured into the room, I was on my way to retrieve a beanbag to provide extra seating for some friends I had staying over that night. This was a beanbag I tended to keep out of the way, as it had a habit of leaking beans, which Janet would then get stuck to his tail, and spread around the house to unexpectedly devastating effect. I did slightly wonder if it was worth retrieving it, as there was always the possibility that, having smelled The Smell, my friends wouldn’t even get to the point of taking a seat. However, this proved to be a moot dilemma, as what hit me when I opened the cockpit door made it impossible to venture to the other side of the room to get the beanbag in question.
An old neighbour of mine, Mary, had an expression that I am rather fond of which she used to describe bad smells. ‘Ooh, it really meets ya!’ she used to say. But the odour in the cockpit didn’t just meet me; it enclosed me in a bear hug like some needy psychopath. Covering my face with a tea towel, I inched across the room, then dragged the thick polythene bags containing the skulls outside onto the balcony. I then ran to the bathroom and washed my hands approximately seven times in a row. I also had a vague, inexplicable instinct to clean my teeth. I wouldn’t be so presumptuous to speculate that this was what it might feel like to be personally violated, but I definitely had never before experienced a sense of invasion: had I been felt up by a member of the undead, I imagined I would have had a similar reaction.
The horse skulls had left a small stain in the cockpit, in the shape of a smaller horse skull. I preferred not to speculate as regards the stain�
��s contents, but whatever it was, it had leaked through a thick bag, and proved largely resistant to my attempts to scrub it out of the parquet flooring. Even with the skulls outside, and the help of a slightly industrial cleaning session, the smell lingered for a few more days. Its dominance had been such that I almost expected it to infiltrate the outside of the house as well, leading to complaints from neighbours, but the skulls became a more benign presence after that. As I passed them on my travels, I began to think of them quite fondly, and named them Ned and Ed. I felt a little sorry for them sitting out there, unloved, although I stopped short of Dee’s suggestion of bringing them back in, putting pot pourri in their brain cavities, and using them as an elaborate pair of bookends.
The bags containing the skulls were tied now, as a feline-related precaution, but, because the bags were transparent, I could see their faces. Ned was an easygoing type, pretty much happy with his lot in life as long as he maintained his lake view and continued to be able to feel the morning sun on his bones, but Ed had just a slight sarcastic smirk about him with which I wasn’t quite comfortable. As I watered the plants or put fresh nuts out for visiting birdlife, I could feel his look. ‘So,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘When’s it going to happen? You’ve been wriggling out of it for a while now, haven’t you, but you can’t put it off forever.’
It was true: it had been a long time since I’d ridden a horse, and there was nobody to blame for this but me. The one time I’d finally looked like committing to my first ride off the rope, with Karl, Naomi, Steve, Sue and Dee, when I’d first met the recalcitrant Boris, Leo had been my saviour. But I could only go on promising and not delivering for so long, and one day, in the autumn of 2007, a few days before Dave collected Ned and Ed, I ventured out onto the balcony, saw both of them looking a little forlorn, and made a decision.
‘Okay,’ I told Ned. ‘You’ve convinced me.’
‘I’m glad you’ve seen sense,’ said Ed. ‘I mean: look at the two of us. Do you really think we could do much to harm you?’
‘So,’ I said to Dee that night. ‘Fancy a ride this weekend?’
We chose the same stable, near the village of Wilsham, where I’d been granted a get out of jail card before. We knew the route was a beautiful one, passing commons, heath land, and a succession of pretty Georgian houses and walled gardens, all of which were that much easier to admire from an elevated position. We also knew that the stables were overseen by a riding instructor called Carol, who Dee assured me was a calming person to be riding with. We chose the same time of day as the last ride: about an hour and a half before dusk, when the falling sun would render the fields crisp and golden.
On the afternoon we arrived, I was feeling queasy. My stomach was bad, and an old back problem had recurred, sending my lower vertebrae into minor spasms. But when I alluded to this to Dee, I could see the disappointment in her eyes, and I knew that I had already used up my wimping out credits. Also, if I went for the cowardly option, I would be wasting the thirty-pounds fee for the second time in a row. I resolved to stay committed to the day’s mission, and somehow kept this resolve when a never-more obstinate Boris was brought out and placed in front of me like some blackly comic offering from the Dark Gods of Hoof. The resolve also stayed when I realised we would be supervised on the ride not by Carol, but by two stable hands: a dark-haired, sullen girl of about fourteen, and a lanky, blond, constantly chewing boy of about sixteen, or what I might have described behind their backs as ‘two tiny children’.
It would be easy to compare riding a horse for the first time off the rope to riding a bike for the first time without stabilisers. It would also be inaccurate. A bike does not like to munch leaves, nor is it capable of freaking out and crushing your brain, rendering you a vegetable who needs to spend the rest of his life being transported around in a wheelbarrow by a benevolent friend. Boris was actually quite well behaved for the first half mile, but I could tell he could sense my physical discomfort and the extra position of weakness this would put me in. I remembered seeing the difficulty Steve had had riding him all those months ago: the way he chuntered and scraped his foot and refused to stay with the main party.
I looked to the teenagers for reassurance, but they were off in their own world, discussing their friends’ recent Facebook status updates. Apparently, Sadie had been vague-booking5 again, only saying that she was well pissed off with someone but not who it was but everyone knew it was Mark, because he’d been cheating on her with that slag from Somerfield again, even though she had her tongue pierced and only, like, last week he was sitting in Starbucks in front of everyone going ‘I would, like, never do it with a girl with any piercings apart from in her ear’. This revelation was far more interesting than the safety concerns of two thirty-something horse tourists, and I have to confess I was slightly disappointed not to catch the end of the story myself, as Boris and I dropped behind the other three horses, Boris finding a selection of fascinating grasses, leaves and branches to busy himself with.
‘Are you okay back there, Tom?’ asked Dee.
‘Er, yep! Fine,’ I lied, pulling on Boris’s reins to little effect.
We’d come off the bridleway and onto a road, but Boris insisted on walking at the top of the steep grass verge, making for a bouncy ride. I was already sizing up my leap into the abyss, making little practice movements with my legs, wondering how easy it would be to prevent getting one of them caught in the stirrups and get dragged along behind Boris, upside down, like some slightly less masculine version of Calamity Jane. I would have voiced my worries to the teenagers, but I could already hear in my head how pathetic it would sound: the pleading of a child to other children.
Hundreds of years ago, men of my age and physique were supposed to ride horses as a matter of routine. The only time they would have had a genuine concern about falling off was when somebody was shooting bullets or arrows at them. Weren’t these brave, unreconstructed males the kind I aspired to be, deep down? I needed to take control – that was what I’d been told to do, wasn’t it? But the funny thing was, when Boris bolted, he did so at the exact point I’d made the decision to man up and take control of the situation. I have no idea what caused it – perhaps he’d eaten a bad leaf, or suddenly felt insecure about being away from the gelding that Dee was riding – but I took it as a direct, stubborn response to what I was thinking.
In times to come, I’ll probably remember Boris’s run as being considerably longer. Time will no doubt colour and exaggerate it. Maybe I’ll add a couple of jumped hedges and some nightmare whinnying, a flashing vision of my own corpse, a startled farmer opening his mouth and dropping the piece of straw he’d been chewing as we flew past him. In truth, it probably lasted about forty seconds, but that was long enough for Boris to go up and down the bank at the side of the road, and charge past his fellow horses.
I’m not certain where the dividing line is drawn between jumping from a horse and being thrown, but I sense I was only just one side of it, though I’m not quite sure which side. In future, I imagine it will depend on my mood: if I’m with someone I want to impress, I’ll say I was thrown. If I’m feeling humble, I’ll probably say I jumped. Whatever the case, and whoever instigated it, my parting of ways from Boris was well timed. I came easily out of the stirrups, and I landed on my side, not my aching back. The one drawback was that the surface I landed on happened to be tarmac, not grass.
‘It was pretty amazing,’ Dee would later remember. ‘You did a sort of commando roll.’
She was probably being generous, but I’d certainly contorted my body in some impact-softening manner. Picking myself up, I realised I was reasonably unhurt. My hip ached, and, rolling up my trouser leg, I saw that I’d scraped a lengthy strip of skin off my shin, but I could walk. For a seventeenth-century cavalier, this was the equivalent of a paper cut. At the same time, though, I didn’t much feel like falling off Boris again, and expressed as much to the other three riders.
‘Oh, he won’t do it again,’ said t
he boy teenager, who seemed rather frustrated with my antics. ‘He’ll be fine.’ But how, I wondered, could he be so sure? Did Boris have a special reputation for throwing his riders off once as a ‘test’ then warming to them? I doubted it.
‘It’s entirely up to you,’ said Dee.
I could see from her look – slightly more gentle than the one she usually used when we were discussing horses – that she knew I was at a crossroads. I loved golf as much as she loved horses. She’d given the sport a go at the local driving range, and decided it wasn’t for her, and that was fine. But there’d never been a make or break moment there, not like this.
They say that the only thing to do when you fall off a horse is to get straight back on. If I didn’t, I might never ride again. I could live with that, if Dee could too.
As I announced my decision, the natural world seemed to rise up around me. Everyone in the vicinity was looking down at me. Dee. The sulky teenager. The chewing teenager. The three teenagers they were on top of. And the most teenage teenager of all: Boris. The blond stable hand had caught up with him and got him on the rope again now, and, suitably chastised, he looked happier. As he and the others trotted away without me, I was surprised not to feel like a failure. Instead, I just felt a sensation of overwhelming, peaceful smallness: a pleasant one that would stay with me for the duration of the long, lonely walk back to the stable, and was not undermined by the realisation that, during my decision-making process, I’d been standing in some of Boris’s freshly deposited manure.