Cow Girl

by Kirsty Eyre

  ‘Come along!’ Lorna loosens the reins and cajoles Lightning McQueen into a plod, and I’m reminded of the days she used to come up to the farm on weekends with her dad, and we went through a phase of playing horses. Come along! Giddy up! Walk on! I must have been about nine, which would make her six. One of the lower branches of the weeping willow lent itself to become a horse, saddled with an old blanket from the shed. We made stirrups out of an old piece of rope and reins out of one of dad’s belts. She’d spend hours perfecting her rising trot on it, the tree creaking as it bounced her up and down. Every now and then I’d get on and she’d pretend to be my riding instructor, correcting my posture and critiquing my method of holding the reins. She told me back then she’d marry a rich man, qualify as a vet and ride a horse and trap. I guess some people just know what they want out of life.

  ‘Is he your horse?’ I say as we trundle past the church, a group of lads racing each other on mountain bikes, mounting the kerb as we pull out into the lane.

  Lorna focuses straight ahead. ‘Guy’s.’

  ‘Lorna and Guy are the Posh and Becks of Derbyshire,’ I say to Joely.

  ‘I’m not sure that’s quite how I’d describe us!’ Lorna says.

  I laugh. ‘They’re the agricultural darlings of Derbyshire.’

  Rosebay willowherb bows in the breeze at the roadside. Sunshine pinches at our skin. The sky is vast and blue. Church bells chime. Hooves clip and clop. The brook trickles melodically and I try not to get annoyed that Joely isn’t looking at any of it and is instead checking her phone. I point out a blue tit, a vintage postbox, a wild rabbit darting through a muddy field. Nothing. She still stares at her screen.

  We grind to a halt for our engine to evacuate his bowels over the road.

  ‘How was the ceremony?’ Lorna enquires as fresh dollops of manure thump onto the tarmac.

  ‘Fine,’ I say.

  Lightning McQueen finishes his business and helps himself to a mouthful of roadside grass.

  We plod on in silence until my phone rings, Home flashing up on the screen.

  I pick up. ‘Hi, Dad.’

  ‘I think I’ve stopped being sick now,’ he mumbles.

  ‘Sick?’

  ‘Your grandma’s not answering her phone. Remind me where I’m supposed to be.’

  ‘If you’re being sick, you shouldn’t be going anywhere. Go to bed and we’ll be home in a couple of hours.’

  ‘But I’m supposed to—’

  ‘You’re supposed to rest. You’ve missed the service anyway so go to bed and I’ll come and check on you in a bit.’

  ‘OK,’ he says.

  I slide my phone into my pocket, my head lolling from side to side. Within a few seconds I feel twice, maybe three times heavier than normal.

  Clip, clop. Clip, clop.

  I’m a bit worried about your dad, Billie.

  Clip, clop. Clip, clop.

  He’s getting ever so muddled.

  Clip, clop. Clip, clop.

  He won’t do a jigsaw any more, Billie. You know how he loves his jigsaws.

  Clip, clop. Clip, clop.

  Beatrice thinks he’s got a touch of the dementia.

  Clip, clop. Clip, clop.

  I’ve got a bit of a headache, Bilberry.

  Clip, clop. Clip, clop.

  Ever so muddled.

  Clip, clop. Clip, clop.

  I’ve got a bit of a headache.

  Clip, clop.

  A headache, Bilberry.

  Clip.

  A headache.

  Clop.

  I slam my hands down onto my thighs. ‘I need to get Dad to hospital!’

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHESTERFIELD ROYAL

  Chesterfield Royal is a hospital set on several acres of undulating lawns with ‘everything from cashpoint facilities to a Costa Coffee outlet’, a hospital I wish I was not sitting in now, waiting for my grandma to walk out of that room.

  My pound coin clinks through the slot of a Beverages-on-the-go vending machine. It whirrs and grinds until piping hot, watery coffee spatters against a beige plastic cup. If I hadn’t been tasked with parking the car, I’d know first-hand what’s happening. Instead, my mind races and spirals, lurching between migraines and brain aneurysms.

  A baby animal calendar hangs on the staff noticeboard, featuring snow-fox cubs play-fighting on ice. It suggests we are still in February despite it being May. How come life always stands still at the wrong time?

  I flick through a pile of tattered Hello! magazines, their centre-spreads littered with Dutch aristocrats and the latest divorces on the reality TV circuit. Seeing how many words I can make out of the letters spelling Nicole Scherzinger takes only about seven minutes. Dad would find eight times as many as me. Nobody can beat him at Scrabble. He knows every word beginning with Q that doesn’t need a U, and all those ridiculous words that don’t need any vowels. It doesn’t matter that neither of us knows the meaning of any of them, because they’re in the Scrabble dictionary, so ‘sixty-three points, thank you very much, Bilberry.’

  Sun beams through a small window, open as far as the safety lock will allow. When I pause the inner workings of my brain, I can hear birds singing and the click-click-click of a rotating sprinkler. A gentle spray showers the immaculate lawn. It seems wrong that it’s a beautiful, sunny evening. It seems wrong that my uncle is celebrating while my dad awaits his fate. It seems wrong that Joely is on her way home without me. I understand that she has an important work gig first thing tomorrow, and she doesn’t exactly know Dad, but it still feels wrong. Like mislaying a biscuit you’ve only part-eaten.

  I try to anchor myself to something tangible by concentrating on everything I need to know for my KSG meeting tomorrow afternoon, but there are only so many metabolic microseconds of eclampsia I can juggle before my mind short-circuits back to Dad.

  A stash of children’s picture books sits in a toy wheelbarrow under the windowsill. I pick up The Tiger Who Came to Tea and stare at the cover, blocking out the huge orange beast to study the little girl in the purple pinafore and chequered tights. Sophie. Dad used to read this story to me when I was a little girl. I can hear his voice now, interchanging ‘Mummy’ for ‘Grandma’ to protect me, even though I didn’t mind Sophie having a mum. Everyone else had a mum, so why not her? I was more in awe of Sophie having a tiger sitting at her kitchen table, glugging tea directly out of the teapot spout, and I particularly liked the page where Sophie’s dad came home from work carrying a briefcase and wearing a suit. My dad never wore a suit or carried a briefcase, so the concept was fascinating. I leaf through the pages, reliving Dad’s tiger’s voice. He did a brilliant tiger’s voice. And a brilliant Dad’s voice. He’s a brilliant dad.

  The second hand of the big white clock on the wall ticks loudly. I piece together the lyrics of ‘The Lightning Tree’ in my head – a song Grandma used to sing to me whenever I felt like giving up; when I thought I’d never be able to tie my ninja belt, when I couldn’t handspring over the vault in gymnastics, when I couldn’t read music and didn’t fit in with the recorder crowd. And just when I’ve remembered all of the lyrics, Grandma comes out of that room and I know by the look on her face that I’m not going to my KSG funding meeting tomorrow.

  The consultation room is small and garishly illuminated by ceiling panels. The walls look greener than they probably are, and everyone’s skin looks supernaturally white. Dad lies on the sort of half-bed, half-stretcher you have in the first-aid room at school, two nurses conferring over paperwork at the sink behind him. He looks small and bewildered.

  ‘Dad?’

  He balls a tissue in one fist, his eyes all swimmy. ‘Sit down, Bilberry.’

  Everything goes tight across my chest. There’s nowhere for me to sit, even if I wanted to. I don’t know what I want to do, apart from wheel Dad’s bed out of here and pretend none of this is happening.

  ‘It’s a brain tumour.’ The pupils in his eyes are like tiny pinpricks. ‘They don’t know yet whether
it’s malignant or benign.’

  My throat constricts and there isn’t enough oxygen in the room. Dad is my solo parent, my mentor, my friend, my confidant. The axis on which my world spins. If I lose him, I lose part of myself. The skin on my face alternates between feeling too tight and then feeling patchy with numbness. A dichotomy of dread and hope.

  ‘It’ll be OK, Bilberry.’ He takes my hand. My dad: the man who brought me up, changed my nappies, chose my clothes, taught me how to read, combed nits out of my hair, tended to my grazes, got me through school and into college. My dad, who has always believed in me and taught me to be true to myself. My rock. Without him, I wouldn’t know who I was any more. Who would I ask for advice? Who would I go home to? And where would home be? There’d be no farm without Dad. No cows. No nothing.

  Grandma leans against the door and stares at the ceiling as if she’s pleading with the God she’s not believed in for eight decades. My stomach churns like a diesel engine full of petrol, and all I can think about is Dad leaning over the old stone wall, watching over the herd whilst they graze in silence, Hyacinth plodding over to nuzzle his arm. It’s not just me that can’t live without him.

  ‘Dad,’ I squeak.

  His hand feels dry and scratchy in mine and I don’t know whether my mind’s playing tricks on me because we’re in a hospital, but his face looks slightly lopsided, one eye pulled down slightly and the corner of his mouth a tiny bit droopy. He reminds me of Mr Spud, a King Edward potato that Dad drew facial features on and hid under my bed when I was seven in an attempt to cheer me up when I was lonely. An angled moustache made from a pipe cleaner. One eyeball too low, the other too high. A forerunner to Mr Potato Head. My dad did that for me. Created friends for me when I was lonely, knowing that in spite of the three of us being a self-sufficient ecosystem, it wasn’t always healthy for a young girl to be so cut off.

  Mr Spud even wrote me letters. They’d come hand delivered, but in a fully addressed envelope to ‘Miss B. Oliver’. They made me feel important. Like somebody cared. He wrote to me about school. About choices. About it not mattering if I didn’t want to do ballet. About trusting my gut and doing what my heart tells me. Mr Spud even wrote me a postcard about puberty and a girl’s need for her mother at the time of becoming a woman. It was accompanied by a gift-wrapped ‘first period kit’, comprising sanitary towels, tampons, a discreet pink satin carry pouch, and an NHS pamphlet with a menstruation Q&A. There was nothing Mr Spud hadn’t thought of.

  ‘It’s not supposed to be this way round.’ Grandma dabs at her nose. ‘I’m supposed to go before you are.’

  Dad closes his eyes. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  A nurse in slip-slop Crocs comes in to take his blood pressure, the phut-phut-phut sound of the arm band inflating, followed by the hiss of its release, numbers flickering on the digital reader like those on a roulette wheel. Every step of the way.

  Dad looks at me, his rough thumb skimming the back of my hand reassuringly. ‘Can I ask one thing of you?’

  If he talks about dying, I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ve never for once in my life considered a world without Dad and now here it is, a monster haunting this very room. I look at him through a blurry mess of tears, an invisible fist squeezing at my throat and I can’t speak.

  ‘Would you stay and look after the girls?’ he asks softly. ‘I can get Nathan in from the agency to help, but it needs someone hands-on to run it. You may not have done it for a while, but it’ll all come flooding back.’

  It’s weird, all the things that go through your mind at moments like this. I want to say I haven’t brought enough knickers. That I don’t know how half the milking equipment works. That, although I’d love to help out, I’ve got a KSG meeting tomorrow. I can’t quite catch up with the moment, so I just nod, my face a hot, bloated mess of snot and tears.

  It’s only when Grandma comes over and puts an arm around me, and he, in turn, puts an arm around us both, cradling us to his chest, that I realize how loudly I am crying. A family scrum, the three of us squashed together, like we have been for most of our lives; a small, symbiotic unit of three. A triangle of trust. But a triangle is no longer a triangle with only two sides. With only two sides, there’s no centre, no core, no heart, nowhere for energy to anchor itself. Triangles are rigid. You construct buildings with triangles – roofs, pylons, braces – because they can’t be twisted out of shape. Take one of its sides away and a triangle is useless. We can’t function without Dad.

  ‘Can you do that for me?’ he says.

  My dad. My lovely dad. It’s like the world has slipped off its axis and the universe is spinning out of control.

  ‘Of course.’

  PART TWO

  (WO)MANNING UP

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  DAIRY MILK

  From: Bev

  Hey buddy, hope this message doesn’t wake you up. Just on my way back from Soho. They’ve got this new club called Esteem which does these bloody brilliant cocktails. We’ll go when you’re back x

  From: Bev

  Auakgm;oiuqpyapnb,k aoufpoeiuf90uhirgjoijmfkl

  From: Bev

  Sorry. Butt text! Hammered!

  It’s been nearly two weeks now. The good news is, the tumour is benign. The not-so-great news is that, despite the family moment of crisis, Grandma is having to look after Beatrice at her place since she had a nasty fall the day after Dad’s diagnosis and broke three ribs, so it’s just me and Speedo on the farm.

  I wake with the taste of Dad’s baking-soda toothpaste on my lips. The room smells of lemon and it takes me a few seconds to associate it with the citrus pet-odour-exterminator that Grandma’s insisted on ever since Speedo rolled in badger faeces and pressed it into the upstairs carpet. My phone is vibrating on the bedside table. Five a.m. Through bleary eyes, I piece together the Darth Vader duvet and matching beanbag.

  The wooden slats of our staircase feel smooth against my toes. Speedo whines to be let out. I put on the kettle while he does his stuff, daydreaming of Joely fast asleep under her goose-feather duvet, making that contented snuffling noise that isn’t quite a snore. My tea is several shades darker than usual and now contains a teaspoon of sugar. I stare into space, waiting for my body to start functioning. Twilight is a creature I associate with red-eye flights and changing time zones, and now here it is, oozing through the windows, a sepia hue pushing its way into my daily routine.

  Ten minutes later, I’m in leggings and the ZSL T-shirt that Bev gave me at a Pygmy Hippo sponsorship event, stepping over my Converse and into Grandma’s wellies. The yard is a patchwork of cowpats, hen droppings, mud and brick ends. My commute is all of fifty metres, past three wheelie bins, an old wishing well and a small herb garden, which used to be an enclosure for a Gloucester Old Spot that my dad looked after for his retired pig-farming friend. It now smells of rosemary and thyme.

  I wander into the cowshed. Nathan, the Neanderthal dairy operations manager from the agency, stands in one of the pens, his wellingtons lost in deep straw. He’s actually a lot more sociable than I gave him credit for and hasn’t been loitering behind any bushes of late. He pours hot tea from a Thermos flask into a plastic cup and balances it on the breeze-block wall. ‘Morning! Any news on your dad?’

  ‘He’s still waiting for the operation. It could be another week yet,’ I say.

  He nods, running his hands over the stomach of a pretty cow with long eyelashes, huge eyes and symmetrical markings; either Parsnip or Sally. He pats her lower right flank and thrusts his fist upwards against her abdomen in short, sharp bursts. Her ears flicker. She turns her head round to check me out and I know instantly it’s Parsnip. She’s always been curious, just like her mother, Jupiter – I remember going with Dad to pick up five cows from a smallholding in Whirlowdale. While the other cows were easily bribed into the back of the trailer with a rolled barley ration, Jupiter was far more interested in who we were, and where we were taking her to, staring us down with curious eyes.

 
‘Ringworm.’ Nathan gestures to the coin-sized bald patches around her eyes and lower legs. ‘We thought it were lice at first, but three lots of Closamectin and not the blindest bit of difference.’

  Heavy boots scrape across concrete and a skinny girl drifts into the cowshed, shoulders sagging with world-weariness. She wears black jodhpurs, a Nike hoody and a sloppy expression, somewhere between boredom and resentment. Her hair is shaven on one side and flops over to her shoulder on the other.

  Nathan dips his hands into a bucket of water and wipes them down his thighs. ‘This is my daughter, Rachel.’

  Rachel looks at the ground and twiddles with the silver ring in her left eyebrow, all teenage embarrassment and awkwardness.

  ‘Hi.’ I go to shake her hand, but she plants it firmly in her sweatshirt pouch.

  ‘Rachel’s agreed to help out every other weekend,’ Nathan says, taking a vape pen out of his pocket. ‘Under my supervision, of course.’

  It’s only now I realize it’s a Saturday, what with the days blending into each other and no clear definition of where one week ends and another one starts.

  ‘Great.’ I turn my attention to the cow. ‘Is Parsnip OK?’ I inject her name into conversation like I’m on first-name terms with the whole herd.

  ‘We’re just checking on the foetus.’

  ‘She’s pregnant?!’

  ‘Five months.’

  ‘But she’s hardly showing!’

  He looks at me and then at Rachel in a way that suggests they’ve already agreed I’m a moron. ‘They quite often don’t. You realize you’ve got seven that are expecting?’

  ‘Right,’ I say, inwardly hailing Mary.

  ‘Your dad was experimenting with selling off calves, so you’ll have a steady stream of births over the winter.’ He lets go of Parsnip. ‘Seems all right.’