Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

end. They are just things that happen to you.

They are just like everything else, like weather, like the sun, like frost.

He was crying, now. He accelerated along the road.

He was going to go to his fields.

He was going to be alone, now, too.

He wondered if he might see his wife again, somehow, some day.

She had been Grace, in her name, in meaning, in smiles and in tears.

He wondered if they would forgive all they had done to each other.

He wandered, walking out into the reeds, into the awful dark.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The sun had set on Ilmarsh, the sky a faint red. On earth as flat as this, there was nothing to stop the spread of light along the horizon, not the low buildings, not the hedges, not the abandoned tractors, not people. The light changed the world, if light was all you could see.

The radio played in the car. It was dark, now.

‘Can you turn it off?’ Simon asked.

Alec began to sing along, exaggerating each syllable.

‘Dad . . .’

‘Fine, fine.’ He turned it off. They drove in silence for a while, but for the rumble of wheels on the road. Simon’s rucksack sat on the seat next to him in the back. He’d gone to a friend’s house after school, a hamlet far from the centre.

‘You hungry yet?’ Alec asked.

‘A bit.’

‘We’ll get something on the way back, yeah?’

His son didn’t say anything.

‘Something on your mind?’

The boy was eighteen. Everything was strange with him, like it is with everyone’s teenaged child. He was sort of almost an adult but he wasn’t. Simon was his boy, but he was a man, too, old enough and big enough to have a life his father didn’t know.

Alec didn’t know how to talk to him. The boy had been asking questions, and Alec had no idea how to answer, no idea what he thought himself.

‘I had a dream last night,’ Simon finally said.

‘You have dreams every night. We all do. It’s how the brain works.’ Alec grinned at his son in the rear-view mirror, but the boy wasn’t smiling.

‘I don’t,’ he said.

‘You do. You just don’t remember them.’

‘Can I say what my dream was?’ There was something in Simon’s voice.

‘Sure.’ Alec looked in the mirror again. ‘I was just saying you have more dreams than you think. It’s interesting, we don’t actually know what—’

‘Dad.’

‘Sorry. Go on.’

‘No.’

‘You’re going to sulk?’

Simon looked away.

‘Come on, tell me about your dream. I was just having fun.’

‘No. It was stupid, anyway.’

ILMARSH, 25 MILES, the sign read. Everything was so spread out here, so isolated, even this thirty-minute drive felt like a quick journey. It was nothing like London.

They soon passed back by Well Farm itself, the white tents fluttering in the slight breeze, reflecting the headlights. They were going to take them down in a couple of days, once they were certain there was nothing else in the soil.

‘How was school?’ Alec asked.

‘Can we turn the radio on again?’

He did so.

Silence, but for low voices talking about traffic in a distant town. Outside, the view seemed to remain the same no matter how far they travelled.

‘Simon?’

‘Yeah?’

Are you sure you’re OK?

I’m sorry if I’ve been distant.

‘What do you want for dinner?’

His son was staring out of the window, lost in some thought. After a pause, after Alec repeated the question: ‘Sorry?’

‘We could get fish and chips, a kebab, anything you want . . .’

‘Chips would be good.’

The road was rougher here, potholes that had not been repaired for over a year.

‘I know what’s wrong,’ Alec said suddenly, trying to be cheerful. ‘It’s a girl, isn’t it?’

‘Dad . . .’

‘Hah, I knew it was a girl. What’s her name?’

‘There’s no girl.’

‘Of course there isn’t.’ He looked in the mirror. His son’s cheeks had grown red, if he wasn’t mistaken. ‘Was she . . . was she on your trip?’ He paused. His son said nothing. ‘Well, I hope I get to meet her sometime.’

If there’s anything you want to talk about, just let me know, OK? I’m here. I’ll always be here.

‘My dream . . . it was about Mum. Mum was in it.’

Alec dreamt about her too, sometimes. And he thought about that a lot. He had ideas about it.

It’s what people don’t tell you, when you lose someone. Your dreams don’t know. They’ll appear just like they always were, as if they’d never gone. But some part of you knows it, and seeing them, it . . . it doesn’t know what it’s doing to you, your brain. It’s showing you the part of that person who lives inside your mind.

That’s all people are to each other in the end, Alec thought. All our experiences, the good times and the bad, everything we’ve ever done or had done to us by a person, it forms an impression in our heads. It takes much longer for that to die than any body.

He stared ahead at the road.

‘I dream about her too.’ That was all he said.

‘I know.’

There had been silence after that. They kept on.

Ten miles to town, now.

‘You know, I used to have this one really bad dream when I was a kid,’ Alec said.

‘A nightmare?’

‘Kind of. I don’t know.’

‘What happened in it?’

‘It was one of the only ones I had more than once, that I remember at least. It’s funny, isn’t it? That we have all these things happen to us and we don’t know half of them . . .’

He took the exit, turning left.

‘I didn’t know what it was at the time, not at first.’

He felt down for his water bottle, and took a sip.

‘The way this thing looked, in my dream I mean . . . it was this place, this black building on a hill, it was dirty. I think I had a thing about that . . . I still do, kind of, though it’s better . . . like I always washed my hands too much. You ever notice that?’

Simon didn’t say anything.

‘I used to be worse. As a kid I’d wash my hands for two minutes – for three, even – just scrubbing till I was sure, digging under my nails, sometimes. I grew out of it, but I still don’t