by Kirsty Eyre
Hot tears plopped down my face as she took my chin in her hands. I wiped them away with the heel of my hands.
‘Secondly … Look at me, Billie.’ It’s not that I didn’t want to look at her, I just didn’t want anyone to look at me. Not like that. All damaged and mangled. ‘Secondly, repeat after me, “I am a strong lesbian woman and I refuse to feel devalued by the ignorance of others.”’
I slid down the lockers until I was crouched, head in hands.
‘Come on. We can’t let them win.’ She too slid down to level with me. ‘Repeat after me, “I am a strong lesbian woman and I refuse to feel devalued by the ignorance of others.”’
‘I am a strong …’ The words felt pointless.
She wiped my tears away with the cuff of her fluffy jumper and I remember thinking how nice it smelled and how soft but strong it felt.
‘We’re not going until you say it all the way through,’ she said.
I inhaled deeply. ‘I am a strong lesbian woman.’
‘Again!’
‘I am a strong lesbian woman.’
‘And?’
‘And I refuse to feel devalued by the ignorance of others.’ I smiled involuntarily.
She dragged me to my feet. ‘From the top!’
I stood up, allowing more air into my lungs. ‘I am a strong lesbian woman. And I refuse to feel devalued by the ignorance of others.’
She stood opposite me, taking my hands in hers. ‘One more time.’
This time, we said it together, our voices filling the corridor. Like we meant the words more than anything in the world. Like sisters. Like brothers. Lesbi-friends.
‘We are strong lesbian women, and we refuse to feel devalued by the ignorance of others.’
She smiled at me. ‘You realize these pricks would fold if you confronted them and told them how they make you feel?’
‘You reckon?’
‘Hell, yeah, buddy. They’ll be clueless. Trust me, they’ll walk out feeling worse about this than you will. Bullies always fold if you stand up to them.’
I reached into my locker for my books.
‘What are you doing?’ she said.
‘It may be vandalized but it’s still my stuff.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it isn’t. All of that’s going in the bin, including the locker. This is the first day of your new life as a strong lesbian woman, who refuses to feel devalued by the ignorance of others. And from now on in, you will not be shamed. You will not be sullied. Leave the past behind.’
I looked into her kind eyes and knew that the friend in front of me was going to be a friend for life. ‘You know, I think a Mohican would suit you.’
Now, I take a deep breath, and I look at Nathan. ‘Have you ever stopped to consider that your hatred and judgement might be considered offensive? That your bigoted, homophobic views are hurtful and cruel? That you’re just frightened because it’s something you don’t understand? I’m a person with feelings like every other person, and just because I’m not attracted to men, doesn’t mean I’m a sex pest towards women and girls.’
He pulls a face. ‘Someone’s got her period!’
Rachel looks away, embarrassed.
‘No,’ I say matter-of-factly. ‘I’m just a strong, lesbian woman, who refuses to feel devalued by the ignorance of others. One day, you’ll wake up and realize how unacceptable your behaviour is. Who knows, one day you might even apologize. But in the meantime, you’re fired.’
His face looks a little bit like my childhood hamster did when he ran into the patio window. ‘Come on, Rachel.’ He stretches an arm out to her, which she ignores. ‘You heard them.’ He bundles her out of the door. ‘They’re firing us.’
‘I’m firing you,’ I say.
They walk out, Rachel retaining eye contact with the floor.
I stand at the kitchen window and watch Nathan manhandle Rachel’s mountain bike into the boot of his car. The engine starts up. Rachel holds the palm of her hand up to me apologetically and slips into the passenger seat. The car revs dramatically. As I watch it bounce and jolt down the lane, my fingers trace the indentations of the matchstick mother I carved into the edge of the sink unit when I was ten and Dad wouldn’t let me have the pet rabbit I knew Mum would have authorized had she been around. It makes me wonder how she’d have dealt with all this. Whether she’d have been the sort of mother who would wrap me up in cotton wool to shield me from cruelty and pain, keeping me off school and letting me have too many biscuits. Whether she’d be strong and indestructible, beating her chest with mantras promoting positive self-talk, trailblazing her way through life and forging a road for me and all other warrior women to follow. Or whether she’d be somewhere between the two: a nice mum with a kind heart, who just wanted her daughter to be treated the same as anybody else’s. Although I’ll never know, my gut tells me she’d be a mix of all three.
Britain is experiencing a heatwave. Flesh is on display on every tiny triangle of grass in London. Even Camberwell Green, a place normally associated with needles and drug addicts, is awash with scantily clad girls frolicking in the sun.
I spot her from afar. She floats through a mass of sunburned bodies, wearing a floppy straw hat, a vintage turquoise dress and heeled strappy sandals. I wave but she doesn’t notice me. A group of teenagers choreograph a street dance routine on the bald, dry grass. The chime of an ice-cream van. The bark of a dog. She sees me, propping her sunglasses on top of her head and smiling. As she gets nearer, she pulls her headphones out of her ears and flicks back her hair, which now sits in a blonde bob. An involuntary chemical reaction stirs in my core. I want her.
‘Bonsoir,’ she says, kissing me fleetingly on each cheek.
When does jour cease and soir begin?
She looks me up and down. ‘Why are you wearing pyjamas? You’ve got a PhD meeting with Christophe in ten minutes.’
‘I …’ I look down to discover I am indeed wearing pyjamas. They’re not even my pyjamas. They’re Dad’s.
Everyone is laughing and pointing, staring and shouting. I’m flanked by cows. Hundreds of them bellowing and stamping. A huge flash of light suggests we’re on a film set and then it starts pouring with rain.
Gasping for air, I sit bolt upright. Awake again. Back on the farm. A flash of lightning illuminates my bedroom for a second or two. It’s 2 a.m. I’m not in Dad’s pyjamas. I’m not trying to hustle for a PhD. And Joely Chevalier is not at my side. Instead, I’m running a dairy farm, solo.
I pluck my sweat-drenched T-shirt away from my chest and take a sip of water. Torrential rain hammers on the conservatory roof below. I want to settle back to sleep, but know I should really bring the cows in, out of the field. Speedo whimpers outside my door. He hates storms so I let him in. He plops down onto the duvet and wedges his nose under my pillow. Once he’s settled, I venture downstairs and grab the cold metal torch from the cupboard under the stairs to assess the damage. Rain drums against the porch glass. Window boxes smash on the ground. A cable from the overhead telegraph pole whips in the wind. I step clumsily onto the bristles of our hedgehog boot brush before finding the left and right of Grandma’s wellingtons – I’m going to have to brave the elements and bring the cows into the barn.
Speedo squeaks and trembles at the top of the stairs, his ears flat against his head. Outside, the storm is raging, an angry sky bubbling with dark cloud. I slip on Dad’s anorak, pull the hood tightly over my head, and step into the yard. The wind forces me back against the porch door and it’s a struggle to stand still, let alone forge forward. Another crack of lightning forks across the sky, irradiating the yard like a television studio set before the farm is suffocated once more by darkness. The rain is deafening, like a military shelling, and the yard a battle zone. Buckets clatter, bamboo canes crack, a wheelbarrow is blown upside down, metal scraping against concrete. Head down, I stagger towards the field, two steps forward, one step back, wrapping Dad’s flapping, billowing waterproofs around me.
Thunder rumbles
around the hillside, a cauldron of fury. I stumble and slide through mud-filled gullies, the grass conspiratorially slippery, the pathways unlit. The gate is reluctant to open, the rain pounding heavier. The wet, wooden frame finally swings over my feet. A blurry mass of darkness moves around the bottom of the field, changing shape before becoming a stampede led by Star, who bolts towards the opening, her knees buckling in deep mud.
‘Come on, girls!’ I yell at the undulating blur of dark bodies, wondering how the fuck I’m going to do this without being able to see properly. Ten, eleven. ‘Inside!’
Their hooves pummel the ground, slipping and sliding through thick sludge. Twenty-nine, thirty. They push and shove at the open gate, three cows wide. Survival of the fittest. Thirty-eight. They stumble and roar, bewildered and drenched. ‘Come on!’ Forty-two, forty-three. I lurch ahead of them to the barn, my pyjama shorts stuck to my skin.
The herd batters and barges against the barn door. Fifty, fifty-one, heavily pregnant Parsnip. I squeeze my way through them, shifting them into pens, ten at a time. Sixty, seventy. Sally, Antonia. Ninety, one hundred. Loretta, Thea. One hundred and twenty. They buck with anguish in the yard until they can find a way in. One hundred and forty. One hundred and forty-five, or was it four? I don’t know why I’m counting. I could count them a million times over and get a different total every time. I grab Dad’s old hay-splintered jumper from a hook next to the pitchforks and shove it on under his anorak. Teeth chattering, heart pounding, I head back out to the field.
‘Come on, girls!’ I trip over a fallen branch, dropping my torch in the cold mud and crawling into the hedge to avoid being stampeded.
‘Inside!’ I shout from the scratchy claws of the hawthorn bush, peeling my hair off my face and wiping the torch down with my sleeve. The field empties, mud sloshing, hooves thumping. I can do this. I can do this. I can do this. Nearly there. ‘Hello?’ I manage to pull myself up, the wind forcing me back into the hedge, hawthorn tearing my face. A second attempt and I’m up and staggering around the perimeter of the field, shining the torch inwards at head height. ‘Anyone left?’
Thankfully, I’ve got them all.
I did it. The warm glow of satisfaction pinches at my cheeks and swells in my core. I take a shower and sit in bed drinking tea with Speedo’s nose in my lap. I’m too wired to go back to sleep, and it feels good to be tucked up safe and warm, knowing that the cows are too, the storm raging outside. Listening to the rain pounding on the conservatory roof below, my thoughts return to Joely.
The Pelican Pharmaceutical Market Excellence Awards are splashed all over the internet. Four clicks in and there’s a photo of Christophe Concordel holding a crystal star trophy, all bleached white teeth and glowing tan. The lapel of his tuxedo puckers over his pectorals. Two more clicks and his tuxedo has been removed in favour of a wing-collared pleated-front shirt. Another click, and he’s centre stage, his arm around Joely, who poses like a Hollywood A-lister in the duck-egg-blue dress I bought her for her birthday. They look like a couple, award-winning smiles and eyes dazzling with pharmaceutical stardom. Another photo and he’s pulled her into his chest, her hand spread over his washboard stomach. There is no sign of the ‘entire KSG team behind him’. Or his girlfriend, for that matter.
A few hours later, and it’s the sort of summer’s day you dream of mid-winter. Sunshine floods the land, the sky an eternal blanket of blue. Goldfinches tweet. Crickets tick. A blackbird hops onto the top branch of a silver birch, his yellow beak opening to let out flute-like song. A cowslip bends with the weight of a bumblebee and I can even hear the sound of frogs croaking down on Baslow pond.
I’m two hours late milking, having fallen asleep with Speedo. The cows let me know it, their chorus of grunts reverberating across the barn. Bodies writhe and squirm against each other, their hot wet coats steaming. They heave and harrumph, restless and uneasy, a haunting anxiety to their groans. Creatures of routine, they’re thrown out of whack. I’ve seen them late for milking before, both when Dad was too busy rescuing a goldcrest that had flown into the shed window and when Grandma broke her collarbone falling out of the tractor, but I don’t remember them kicking off like this.
They barge through the gate when I open it, udders swollen like balloons, jostling for position to relieve the discomfort. Despite being on my own, milking goes like clockwork. I juggle seventeen cows simultaneously: an average of five minutes thirty seconds per cow. Cleaning teats, checking milk quality, attaching milkers, assessing pedometer readings. I’m a couple of readings short and about to double-check, but first need to sort out Speedo, who’s going bat-shit crazy at the gate to the field, barking and growling. My fingers fumble for the latch to let the cows back in, but Speedo snaps at me, and then at the cows.
‘Cool it, Speed!’ I open the gate, expecting the herd to bustle in, but they stand motionless in the yard. Parsnip makes a strange bleating noise, craning her neck to the sky. I try to lead her into the field, but she refuses to budge, hooves anchored to the ground. Willow and Cobweb join her, aping the noise she’s making, which is somewhere between a whimper and a bellow; an eerie, guttural bleat.
‘Come on, ladies.’ I shout. ‘We need to get a moooove on!’
Speedo shoots past me, making a beeline for the oak tree at the top of the field. The grassy bank is slippery from last night’s mud-slide. He doubles back to get my attention, leading me towards the circular bail feeder surrounding the old oak, and there, in broad daylight, the brutal reality of last night hits in high definition. Three great slabs of beast, black and white, silent and stiff, lie flat on their backs on a plush carpet of luscious green grass, their hooves pointing up at the heaven that killed them. Stacked like fallen dominos, legs outstretched like the plastic cows I had on my farm playset as a child, glossy coats gleaming in the sun.
My ears go hot, and high-pitched ringing fills my head. They bear no marks, no whiplash wounds, no visible sign of death; nothing. Had I found them in the midst of the apocalyptic storm, it would have looked like what it is: mass murder under angry skies. Now, it just looks plain wrong; the countryside too idyllic, the peace and quiet too comforting. Like murder in a cake shop. Speedo trots between the bodies and sniffs each one. The leaves of the old oak tree rustle in the breeze, its branches snapped, its bark savaged. I crouch down next to the largest one. She’s predominantly black with what looks like the outline of a planet in blurred, white fur on her neck: Jupiter. I look away, bile rising in my throat. Jupiter, the gentle, doting mother. The giver of life and protector of children, who would always go the extra mile for her girls: jumping walls for fresher dandelion; knocking down fences for melancholy thistle leaves. Only the best for her girls. Steering them out of danger. Away from machinery. Away from humans. Finding them shelter, away from the storm.
I force myself to face her, my stomach sliding over itself as my eyes travel to Lady Love and Lady Lovely, who lie next to her; sisters in synch as they were in the womb, their lives starting together and ending together. Heart-shaped white blotches of fur on their foreheads blow in the breeze. I reach out to touch Lady Lovely’s neck. Her skin is warm and wet. Hope is merciless. It has me holding my hand under her nostrils, waiting to feel her hot breath.
I cup my hand around my mouth and retch. I can’t look at them any more, but I can’t leave them either. How the fuck can this have happened? It’s not until I hear hooves slopping through mud and feel hot breath on the back of my neck that I realize I’m not alone. Parsnip is at my side. She cranes her neck towards the sky and lets out a guttural groan, which reverberates through the ground. Her head swings around; huge black eyes ask why I’m not doing anything about it, why I’m not helping up her mother and twin sisters. Her ears flicker. Her tail swishes. The whites of her eyes show.
I wrap my arms around her neck. ‘Here, here.’ I stroke her cheek.
She lets out another haunting groan.
‘Come here.’ I snivel.
She rests her chin on my shoulder and lets
me stroke her face. It feels like tattered silk. We stay huddled together for a while – I need her as much as she needs me – until Fizz calls her and the cow-hug is over. I watch her slowly walk away, head bowed, like someone leaving a grave.
The cows understand what’s happened; witnesses to the whole cruel affair. They watched the lightning strike and know who’s missing. Parsnip was obviously trying to tell me earlier. My stomach heaves. I’ve lost Parsnip her mother and her two little sisters. I’ve lost Parsnip’s unborn calf her rock-steady, wise grandma. Matilda and Dalia have lost an auntie and two cousins. All of them have lost lifelong friends. Part of the sisterhood has died, and things will never be the same again.
I slide down onto the ground and pound my fist into the mud again and again, and still wretchedness curdles in my gut. Cold mud seeps through my running tights. I can’t do this any more. I slam my heels into the ground and fling mud as far as I can, cold grit cathartic between my fingers. I want to fling it to Seoul. I want to throw it at Christophe Cocking Concordel and soil his gleaming white teeth. Fuck. This. Shit.
I’m done. I didn’t choose to be here. I didn’t choose any of it. My life belongs in London, curled up in bed with Joely Chevalier, choosing aspirational wallpaper and daydreaming about living together. If I hadn’t had to take on the farm, none of this would have happened. The cows wouldn’t have died and, who knows, Joely and I might have been living together by now. Shared bedroom. Shared toothbrush holder. Shared dreams. Free from the crushing misery of dairy life. Free from the bone-stinging nausea of fatigue and hopelessness. Free from this hellhole.
It feels like every single cell in my body has had the oxygen sucked out of it. What’s the point any more? To think that I actually thought I could do this. To think that I actually thought I could help. It’s nonsensical. I don’t have a clue what I’m doing. I don’t have the experience, the knowledge or the desire. And now I’ve let down Dad.