Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

Metallic, half deflated, rising with a passing breeze, then falling once more.

It was a balloon.

‘Happy 16th Birthday,’ it said.

LOST CAT:

PLEASE HELP US FIND OUR JAKE.

JAKE IS A TABBY CAT.

LAST SEEN BEFORE FIREWORKS NIGHT IN LOWER GRENWOOD, ILMARSH.

HE HAS A RED COLLAR SAYING ‘DO NOT FEED’.

DIABETIC.

PLEASE HELP US FIND HIM.

SMALL REWARD.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

There was a drain at the centre of things. It dipped in the middle of the yellow-painted concrete. There was blood within it, or there had been recently. Most large animal sheds possessed such a drain.

The shed was cold and lonely, even with the other vets standing around outside its open entrance. It was a quality of the place, just as much a part of its existence as the great straw-lined bays that kept animals during the day, or the yellow floor. Cooper had never seen such a yellow floor. One wall was stacked with shelves and containers, rope and suturing material.

There were no windows. There was a single red door for people to enter through, stuck right in the corner near the sink. Next to it stood a rolled-up corrugated metal shutter through which they’d brought in the animals.

The heads were now laid on chrome tables beneath white fluorescent lights, all spaced out in a five-five-six configuration. A trolley held the tails.

The vets took their gloves off and washed their hands. They had cups of tea on the threshold, out in the gentle breeze – the old greying director of the vet practice, Frank, and a younger mousey vet named Kate. No others had stayed late to help her.

‘I like your mug.’ Cooper smiled.

‘Oh!’ Kate looked down at it and then up. Her mug read I’m not sheepish about doing a good job. ‘My friend gave it to me.’ Her cheeks went a little red. ‘It’s just a bit of fun.’

‘My best mug was Crazy for Ewe. E – W – E.’ Cooper shrugged. ‘From an ex.’

‘How’d you let him get away?’

Cooper smiled again but did not answer, and in the silence she asked about her temporary colleagues.

Kate was a relatively recent graduate – two years in practice now. She’d made this surgery her home base during her extra-mural studies; she’d lived nearby as a kid, before her parents had moved away.

Frank had been at the practice for years. He co-owned it and did a lot of the large animal work himself. He’d worked in France and Belgium for a while, as a younger man. He talked about that quite a bit.

‘How about you?’ he asked. ‘How’d you get into your line of work?’

Cooper tried to smile. ‘It’s not that interesting a story, really.’

‘Try us,’ Kate said.

‘Watched too much TV,’ Frank added with a smile.

Steam rose from Cooper’s teacup, bleeding into the air before the yellow floor.

‘It’s a living.’

They talked about the things they had seen.

They told her of the worst.

The history of their community’s infections.

BSE, three decades ago.

Foot and Mouth, closer now.

‘Three farms were culled, movement restrictions placed on the rest.’ Frank grimaced. ‘They got compensation, but . . . some of those cattle, the bloodlines went back decades. How do you make up for all that breeding? I was around during the outbreak, the first time, I mean – when was that? 2000? 2001? You should have seen what it did to this place.’ He put the kettle on again, pausing. ‘You been into town much yet?’

‘I stayed here last night,’ Cooper said.

‘Then you have seen. All we had left was farming, after the fish and the oil and the tourists left. It was all we had. Those farms . . . you think those horses are bad, imagine standing in the middle of dozens dead, a hundred. Imagine watching them all burn, a grown man breaking down in tears right next to you. All that pain.’

‘There was a human death, too,’ Kate said.

‘One of the farmers offed himself,’ Frank said. ‘Shotgun to the mouth. Contagion hit him twice. First 2001, then last year. And there was the business off the coast . . .’

‘What business?’

‘There was a fire at a farm, an island a couple of miles out. No one knew them, not properly, but there were rumours . . . Maybe it wasn’t an accident. Maybe the farmer started it himself. Hard to know the truth of it, though. Hard to know the truth of any of this.’ He shook his head. ‘These are bad times, Miss Allen. Bad times.’

He poured more tea into his cup, offering none for anyone else.

‘What about the Cole farm?’ Cooper glanced at the clock. She needed to get started.

‘What about it?’ Kate asked.

‘Where were they in all this? I saw mainly sheep when I was out there, just wondered if they used to keep any other animals.’

‘As far as I know, yes, just sheep,’ Frank scoffed. ‘And I wouldn’t call it a farm, not a proper one, anyway.’ He seemed annoyed.

‘You had trouble with them before?’

‘Not trouble exactly,’ he said. ‘Not with their livestock, at least. The truth of it is, the man owes us thousands.’

As they spoke, the horse heads watched through the open shutter. The rainwater had spiked their forelocks, their hair in peaks.

Their eyes just stared ahead.

The other vets went home before 10 p.m. Cooper remained, the shed now sealed.

She wiped her eyes clean of sleep.

The overhead lights were in the wrong places for her work. The shed was fluorescent and cold. They’d brought in lamps to help her see better, though there were not enough. She had to unplug them and replug them as she moved along.

She began her work.

It started with cleaning, enough to expose likely evidence without destroying it, which was always a losing battle, especially with bodies buried and left to the elements. It was a trade-off, like most things.

She looked at each of the horse heads in turn to see whether there were any inconsistencies in their degradation, any differences. This might not mean much, ultimately – water may have leaked through in different amounts and locations throughout the various tents