Country Lovers

by Fiona Walker

  Bridge ignored the fantasy, stepping over it to get at the utensils drawer. Most dreams vanished with daylight, but hers was following her around. Just as alarmingly, her husband’s erotic emoji medleys had been lighting up her phone at regular intervals all morning, aubergines and doughnuts lined up colourfully, I’m coming, kochanie! repeated frequently. Fingers flour-covered and timer pinging, she had no time to reply.

  ‘I bet Mary Berry doesn’t get hassled like this,’ she grumbled at the cats.

  Her kołaczci – absurdly easy cream-cheese pastry oozing Aldi jam – were a triumph, although Bridge had sampled so many waiting for Carly that they were demoted to a side plate too. Soon, as well as still feeling hungover, missing her babies and twitchy from horny dreams, she felt fat. When Bridge sensed cellulite forming, she was badass.

  Fantasy Ash was doing burpies in her sitting room as she set down the plates on the leather-trunk coffee table.

  ‘Stop that!’ Bridge shooed him upstairs and checked her reflection in the mirror over the fire. Big blush. Guilty eyes. Biscuit mix on her nose.

  At last Carly arrived, cramming a double buggy into Bridge’s tiny porch and letting loose three rampaging smalls. She looked happy and muddy, ultra-skinny, her hair in a topknot, cheeks flushed, talking in a rush. It seemed hers had been an enviably action-packed morning compared to Bridge lolling in bed, baking and bingeing and fantasising about Carly’s husband.

  ‘He’s a taskmaster, that Lester. No backchat. I can’t believe I mucked out, like, six horses. Did you ride Craic already?’

  ‘Woke up with a bit of a head.’ Bridge felt a cold rash of shame goosebumping her skin as she thought about her forbidden daybreak gym dream.

  ‘You were funny last night. Pick up that biscuit, Ellis!’ Carly’s children, having taken bites out of the little Polish biscuits and rejected them, were desperate for party rings and custard creams. Only baby Jackson, crawling around the low table trailing a soft book and slipping booties, sucked away appreciatively on a rock-hard rogaliki, soothing his aching gums where teeth were breaking through.

  Bridge, feeling uncharacteristically humourless, would have liked to ask in what way she’d come across as funny last night, but Carly was again waxing lyrical about her highly active morning, leaning back against the magnet-studded fridge while Bridge made coffee amid a bomb site of baking sheets and spilled flour. Sleepy eyes wide and bright as silver coins for once, Carly described Lester’s begrudging acceptance of her help, the joy of handling the horses, and the thrill she’d felt when she went back with her kids to find Ronnie full of praise, then greeting the Horsemaker. ‘Like I’m already part of the team. He looks like Jesus or something – all these long golden curls and beard and eyes so green you’d think he was wearing funny lenses.’

  ‘I can’t believe you met the Horsemaker.’

  ‘Put his feet up in the tack room and fell asleep as soon as he got there, can you imagine?’

  ‘Bit of a New Age stoner?’ Bridge suggested hopefully, carrying the coffee across to the sofas. Petra’s disappointment if he was an acid-dropping soap-dodger might teach her to manage her expectations at last.

  ‘Turners hate New Agers,’ Carly flopped down on a cluster of brightly embroidered cushions, ‘the sort that bang on about the simple life and buy old gypsy wagons to run vegan patty stalls at music festivals, which is a load easier when Daddy subs you twenty grand a year.’ She helped herself to biscuits. ‘Luca’s not like that. Scared me a bit, if I’m honest.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘These burned.’ She looked at her hands, a kołaczci in each. ‘They feel it when things are damaged, you know? Animals that are hurt. Diseases that haven’t been diagnosed yet. People with secrets.’ She popped the biscuits in her mouth.

  Thinking guiltily about her Fantasy Ash gym dream, Bridge burned her lips on a gulp of coffee. ‘How do they feel now?’

  ‘Like they want to be near horses.’ She chewed the little biscuits, one in each cheek like a hamster, smile in between, swallowing. ‘You’re right, that spell we did is totally ’mazing, like totally. Are you still feeling it?’

  Bridge didn’t want to think about it. ‘That was just the wine talking, Carly.’

  But Carly shook her head. ‘Something changed last night.’

  ‘The year?’ Bridge flicked a finger back to indicate the calendar on the wall behind them.

  ‘Bridges of Ireland?’ Carly laughed. ‘Nice one.’

  ‘I get one every Christmas. My brother Brendan never lets me down; he thinks it’s the funniest joke.’

  Eyes now languid and sleepy as they had been last night, Carly yawned and admired January’s Peace Bridge in Derry with its colourful backdrop of fireworks. Checking Ellis and Sienna were distracted cracking through the toy pile Bridge had dug out, she whispered, ‘I’m knackered. Ash had an anaconda in his pants last night. I didn’t sleep a wink.’

  ‘Lucky you.’ Bridge forced a bright smile, reluctant to dwell on the contents of Ash’s pants any more than she already had.

  ‘Only now he’s sour at me for going to the stud first thing. His lot hate Percys even more than New Agers. He went off to the gym this morning with the hump cos I asked him to pick up the kids from his mum’s. I swear, those egg-box abs are on account of his bad temper.’

  Bridge didn’t want to linger on the image that conjured, either. She crammed in a handful of jammy biscuits without thinking, then felt three hundred calories stick to her tongue and the roof of her mouth.

  Carly was looking at her very intently. Chewing like a grumpy camel now, Bridge sensed that if it hadn’t been for her kids the pretty blonde was in the mood to unload a lot more about her marriage today. Thank God for her kids.

  The trio were crashing a lot of plastic Duplo about, buzzcut Ellis ordering his siblings to join in his battle, toddler Sienna mewling a pacifist protest that sounded like ‘dun unto’, baby Jackson banging a red block against his own head whilst still dribbling on an almond biscuit, all three reminding Bridge that other people’s children were never as enchanting as your own and that she still had quite a bad headache.

  ‘Was Ronnie’s daughter at the stud?’ She cast around for a change of subject, remembering the tearful redhead in the car yesterday, an image she’d found hard to shake afterwards. ‘Pax?’

  ‘Snooty cow.’ Carly shrugged. ‘Her type looks straight through our type, don’t they?’

  Affronted to be bracketed in the see-through sector, Bridge felt the extra-sweet calories curdle yet more. ‘She’ll never fecking look through me.’

  ‘Go you!’ Carly grinned. ‘That’s what I like about you. You’re like the sun. Nobody throws shade on you.’

  Bridge conceded the point, gratefully watching Carly demolish the biscuits, and they shared indiscreet witchy truths about the villagers they disliked most, from the earnestly dull parish counsellors to the flakily disloyal weekenders, their wrath deliciously vicious.

  Soon slipper-stamping with delight as Carly described the worst of the yummy mummies on the school run – ‘Don’t you dare let that put you off working there: they need you to take them down a peg or two’ – Bridge vaguely remembered declaring that she was going to apply for a part-time job at the village school. Surely Carly remembered she was talking to a woman who had once run a team of twenty from a fifth-floor triple-aspect mezzanine office before motherhood and mediocracy had stolen her chutzpah? She’d definitely mentioned it last night. A lot.

  ‘What do I want with a lollipop-lady office job?’ she scoffed. ‘I’m aiming for the fecking headship!’

  ‘You’re hilarious.’ Carly gave her a you-wish look.

  Bridge tried not to feel affronted, telling herself she was only posing undercover as a village mum while she plotted world domination.

  They then spent a brief shift on their knees, gathering Duplo, de-snotting and nappy changing before making a second batch of coffees.

  ‘Can’t tell you how glad I am you spared me that la
me party last night,’ Carly confided as they sank back into the sofas, unleashing her sharp tongue with descriptions of Flynn’s posh student girlfriend and her mates and their ABC outfits.

  Chippy, observant and mercilessly critical, she brought out the black-humoured cynic in Bridge. ‘Face it, we’re a lot further through the alphabet than they are. I’m RST – Red Bull, Spanx, Tit-tape.’

  ‘That is so sad!’ Carly’s sleepy eyes radiated sympathy, and Bridge realised she’d dropped her pearls of wisdom down a bottomless well of Smart Water, G-strings and nipple daisies.

  Her phone vibrated on the coffee table with a new message.

  ‘What’s wrong with Spanx?’ she said as she reached for it.

  ‘I blame those ladies you ride with,’ Carly was chiding. ‘They’re well old school, they are.’

  Bridge felt the Saddle Bag bond of allegiance tighten in her sinews. ‘You saying I’m not a laydee?’

  ‘No, not that. It’s just they’re not like you.’

  ‘Underneath they are.’ She swiped her phone screen to unlock it. ‘They’re just like us, only…’ She faltered, perturbed by another I’m coming! accompanied by more aeroplane emojis and smiley tongue-out faces. Was he holding his own again? Where were the kids? His parents’ house in Poland had just four rooms with curtains for doors.

  ‘You okay, Bridge?’

  ‘Yes, I…’ She read a second message as it chimed through, Aleš declaring I have rogaliki and big boner, kochanie! Lots of tongues and doughnuts followed. ‘You know when your husband wants phone sex at the most inconvenient times?’ she murmured. ‘That.’ While it wasn’t the Anaconda of Orchard Close, it was out there.

  ‘Ash loves all that,’ Carly whispered, checking Ellis wasn’t listening. ‘Do you video call?’

  ‘All the fecking time.’ Overdoing the insouciance, Bridge switched her phone off. ‘Now that’s not something a laydee shares with her riding companions.’ She feigned an upper-class voice. It was intended to draw Carly in, but she took it too literally again.

  ‘Common as muck, me.’ Her sleepy Mexican eyes levelled on the photos on the mantel of Bridge on Craic. ‘Flynn says his posh totty are all sex maniacs.’

  Eager to keep her sweet, Bridge almost found herself indiscreetly breaking the Bags’ golden confidentiality rule and mentioning the Safe Married Crush, ready to confess that hers had long been Flynn. Except suddenly it wasn’t, and that fact made her twitchy again. Having a crush on your new friend’s husband, however safe and married, was a killer. She had to get rid of it – fast.

  Carly was telling her how Flynn’s love life had been complicated by his phone automatically saving all the naked selfies his girlfriend sent on WhatsApp. ‘Every time he tried to show a client an example of remedial farriery, they got an eyeful of Amelia’s snatch in her en-suite mirror.’ She’d gamely polished off almost all the biscuits, even crunching her way through the flint-hard almond ones, claiming they were delicious.

  ‘How do you stay so slim?’ Bridge asked enviously.

  ‘Not having a second car. Ash says we can’t afford one, but I reckon he won’t let me have one in case I start to sag and wobble.’

  It was the prod Bridge needed. Looking down at her thighs on the sofa, each one wider than both Carly’s combined, she knew precisely how to burn off Fantasy Ash.

  As soon as Carly was wheeling the buggy back to the estate, Bridge threw her kitbag in the car and drove to Broadbourne, calling in to give Craic a carrot on the way, safe in the knowledge that the real Ash wouldn’t be at the gym if he’d worked out there that morning.

  Only he was still there, seventy kilos of brooding rock-hard testosterone, sweating on a pec deck, wolf eyes on her as soon as she walked in. She kept her gaze averted, avoiding the bench press and hammering twenty minutes on the treadmill with her earphones in, listening to defiant P!nk power anthems before retreating to the showers, aware that his eyes had stayed on her. At least, it felt as though they had. It still felt as though they were still on her in the shower.

  Wrapped in a towel in the changing rooms afterwards, hair in wet silver and pink rats’ tails, Bridge felt electrified. Perhaps, at last, she was starting to understand the point of this SMC thing.

  I am going to ride my husband like he will not believe when he gets home, she vowed, messaging Aleš with slippery fingers. I am your Pole dancer, baby, and I can’t wait to slide along its length when you get home. She added flames, tongue, doughnut, aubergine, kissing-heart-eyed faces and a horse (for subliminal effect), along with a row of kisses.

  His reply was quick-fire and emoji-free: Take all your clothes off. Be ready. I am coming, stoneczko! Almost there!

  Again? The man was a right handshake hero, a priapic machine gun in his homeland. No wonder he wanted to move back to Krakow.

  My clothes are off, she replied truthfully, closing her eyes and imagining her towel loosening, letting the lust blush steal up her body. Then she shivered with a thrill that caught her like an electric shock. Fantasy Ash had just entered the ladies’ changing room.

  *

  Turning stiffly in his armchair, eyelids briefly at half-mast in the half-awake half-light, Luca felt the warm weight of the deerhound puppy on his lap. He was in a hotel room near the airport waiting for a lift. No, he was in a snowed-in log cabin by a Canadian lake, waiting for a lover. It was cold; the fire had almost gone out. Was he awake?

  He heard a stallion call, that distinctive wild shout. He’d recognise this one anywhere. Long gone now. Cold air conditioning. Staff apartments like igloos, a wall of heat outside by day, but cooler at night. That awful night. Running along the fire escapes at the back of the staff flats, the metal grating booming and rattling like gunfire, the screams ahead both horse and human.

  He’d dreamed this scene many, many times since, revisited the great hanger of a barn, the furthest stable isolated, neon lit, sweat-hot, blood spots like scattered rubies on shavings. Each time he returned the angle skewed more, the original cast replaced with newer faces, their behaviour erratic. A redhead shouted at him to go away, barring the stable, telling him he wasn’t needed.

  The horse never changed: grey coat sweated to gunmetal, dark eyes white-rimmed, nostrils trumpet-flared, cornered and terrified. The bravest, boldest of horses brutalised beyond trust. He called again, ribcage lifting and shuddering.

  Luca jerked awake. He had absolutely no idea where he was, just that he was parched. There was a mug of cold tea beside him which he drank gratefully, closing his eyes, lead weights in their lids, mind hollow with exhaustion, trying to get back to his dream. He had to get back to save the horse. Sleep’s black blanket cloaked him obligingly. But he was in the wrong place. He was in a hotel room, watching a woman sleep, her skin marble pale in the faintest light. Immune to other people’s pain, he had to get out, get back to the horse.

  Corridor. Fire doors. Stairs. He was in the bar, surrounded by laughter and drunkenness and flirtation. Smiley Luca, the incorrigible flirt.

  The horse whinnied.

  ‘Horse walks into bar,’ he heard himself telling a pretty blonde perched on a stool. ‘“Hey!” says the barman; horse says “Yes please”.’

  The blonde turned. Ronnie, laughter in her eyes, telling him he’s incorrigible and it’s a terrible joke, that he can do better.

  The horse whinnied.

  He jolted up again, awake now, looking around him. A single high, barred window, thick with dust one side and rain-pitted the other, let in thin light. The shapes of saddles on racks and bridles snake-coiled. The familiar smells of leather and oil.

  The horse whinnied. He’d know that call anywhere.

  *

  Arriving back from the hospital to find the yards deserted, Ronnie tracked Pax down in the stables cottage. She was folding crocheted counterpanes back into the tallboy in the tiny second bedroom, its walls matrixed with faded hunting prints, the brass bed freshly made up.

  ‘Can you believe Lester still uses sheets and blankets? T
here’s not a duvet in the house.’

  She’d changed into her own clothes, a dowdy black jumper and jeans at least a size too big. Red hair scraped into a bun and wearing her glasses for once, she looked much younger than her thirty-one years, hers that edge of thinness that all too quickly tipped to fragility. As she led the way next door to gather up Lester’s overnight bags from his bedroom, Ronnie could see the bones protruding from her neckline at the top of her spine like little stepping stones.

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Reliving the accident repeatedly in minute detail.’ Ronnie looked round. ‘Gosh, I always forget how pretty this room is. I’m glad you’re in here.’ Triple aspect, its casement windows looked across the driveway paddocks to the south, the stable-yard towers east and the little walled garden west. It streamed with light.

  ‘It’s Lester’s room,’ Pax said firmly. ‘I’ll be next door with Kes.’

  ‘You can’t both go in there.’

  ‘It’s not for long.’ Pax led the way downstairs.

  Ronnie said nothing, grabbing the rail to steady herself at the steep oak steps, suspecting it would be many months before the old stallion man made it up here again.

  ‘How’s Luca settling in?’

  Pax put the bag down and took off her glasses to rub her eyes with the balls of her hands, her lids red from all the crying. ‘He’s probably still asleep in the tack room.’

  ‘You mean the poor man’s flown in early to find us all at such sixes and sevens we’ve not even shown him to a bed?’

  ‘Next time I’ll hire a welcome banner and a brass band.’

  Ronnie checked herself, remembering she’d no idea what had occurred between them beyond the obvious clothes-swapping and antagonisation. Fierce mother love flared. Luca could be a terrible chancer. ‘You shouldn’t have been expected to pick him up, given everything you’re going through.’

  ‘Nobody else around to do it.’

  ‘I’m entirely to blame. I’m so sorry I wasn’t here.’

  ‘Are we talking about last night?’ Pax was a ninja at veiled sarcasm, the deep, kind voice softening the blow. ‘Or the thirty years before that?’ She was equally adept at blocking the comeback. ‘Sorry. Uncalled for.’