Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

‘Did that man . . . did he do this?’

Cooper did not know.

‘Did he hurt those animals?’

She nodded.

They talked and they talked, the cold day getting colder.

‘I was thinking of leaving, you know.’ He turned back to the water, smoke rising into the guilty air. ‘Everyone’s been leaving my entire life, and I never thought – I never thought I’d want to.’

He dropped ash down onto the sand.

‘This town . . . it was always waiting for someone like this.’ His voice was thinner, now, and he coughed.

‘Someone like what?’

‘No one wants to continue,’ he said, no longer listening. ‘No one’s going to live here, not in ten years, not in five. I wouldn’t be surprised if this . . . if this was all of us. Most of us. Hurting each other. Hurting ourselves.’

There was a long silence.

Queen Bee. Under the tree.

The sound of bingo made him laugh, though Cooper did not smile, did not understand.

‘We’ll disappear. The process . . . the human process . . . it will be over, one day, and we’ll disappear. It will be as if we’d never been here. We’ll be like we were before we were born. And it will be over.’

After a few moments, he got up and went inside his caravan.

Cooper remained on the sea-wall, looking out.

After a few minutes he came out again, his clothes changed, and left down the shore towards the pub. There was no goodbye here, either.

And her phone buzzed once more.

A message from the hospital, wondering why she hadn’t come.

Wondering if she wanted to rearrange for the next day.

Yes, she said, and sent it. Early afternoon.

She went back to her hotel room.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Frank sat in the vet office alone, Halloween decorations taken down, sitting in a box on the far table. Dirty mugs sat around the sink. Crazy for Ewe, drawn in ink on the side of a blank cup.

The police had torn the business apart. Drugs had been confiscated, pending an investigation of Kate’s illegally sourced ketamine, the wires stolen from their shed, sedatives used without oversight or control.

He left and locked the door.

Their customers fled to the next town over. The only work left was emergencies, and even then, numbers had declined.

People he’d known his whole life avoided him in the street.

This had been his father’s business.

He went out to the river.

The director of the vet practice tried to find beauty in the world.

He watched the birds. He loved this spot, had come here when he was young. There were white swans back then, but he had not seen any here for a while. Just ducks.

Everyone and everything that had come to this place, a part of them remained in the water, in the soil. Evidence of life. Whispers of knowledge. Collections of voices, caught at the edge of all meaning, like a machine of people, like history in a jar.

He imagined them all as they must have been.

Warriors step off boats on the beach more than a thousand years ago, their faces full of salt and spray.

The king’s men ride to pillage monasteries, to eradicate European influence, to ensure all loyalty to the crown.

Planes drop bombs for a distant state.

The River Sedge starts eighty miles to the west of Ilmarsh, it runs through the town, and it ends far to the south, spilling out to a different bay despite its proximity to the sea itself. From the hills it flows in three directions, but only one runs to its mouth.

The River Sedge runs through everything.

The Norse called it Garsecg, spear-man. The river itself was shaped like a trident, twin spokes trickling from the hills and going nowhere while the central stream carried on.

The Tudors called it Sedg or Sedge or Sege. They were not particular.

The Luftwaffe, they called it nothing.

The vet sat for a while longer, wondering if what he had thought was worth thinking. He did not know what to do with his thoughts, sometimes. His face grew red with embarrassment.

He threaded along the trail. Light shimmered from a break in the clouds, dancing on a small group of shivering branches.

He thought of phoning her, of going to see her.

He was a man in love.

PART THREE:

A BIRTH OF SMILES

Day Twenty-Seven

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

When Alec dreamt, he dreamt of his boy linking paper clips across their lounge, his wife making spaghetti in the dark.

He dreamt of arguments and fights, of disappointments. He dreamt of picking his son up from his maternal grandmother’s. The first Christmas alone. He’d been lonely. They both had. Out here in the country, you really needed a car. When Simon was old enough, Alec had bought him lessons for Christmas, and the boy never passed, of course he hadn’t, he hadn’t applied himself, had never taken it seriously, perhaps because it had been a gift, because it had been from him. Alec would say he loved him. One day, the boy who’d played with paper clips stopped saying it back.

Alec dreamt of these things. He dreamt of wanting him to go.

When he woke up, Cooper was there.

They said nothing, not at first. Alec stared at her – her red, sleep-deprived eyes, her hand and the cup within. She put it down on the table.

‘They let you bring coffee?’ Alec croaked, his throat dry.

‘It’s not coffee.’ Her voice was soft.

‘Can I have some?’

The air was slightly cold and artificial, pumped by hidden engines.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s mine.’

‘Oh.’

He thought back to walking through those fields, to leaping over the ditch and splattering his legs.

He thought of driving along a road at night.

‘No one’s visited me,’ he said. ‘Just . . . just people asking questions.’ He hesitated. ‘Anyone visit you?’

‘Doctors.’ She didn’t say much more.

‘Doctors aren’t visitors.’

‘I’m a doctor. I’m visiting you.’ She paused. ‘I didn’t get sick. They checked me out, but . . .’

‘That’s good,’ he said, trying to sit up. ‘That’s lucky.’

She said nothing.

He smiled, briefly, and then he remembered. He remembered he had not smiled in weeks. ‘I didn’t—’ Alec’s vision blurred as he shook his head, not quite sure what he