Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

hollow.

He talks about the world. About everything happening. How could they bring a kid into this?

She talks about all the things their child might do. That who knows? They might help fix the planet. They might be denying a prodigy, or a prime minister, or a scientist discovering a cure for cancer. They might set the world on fire, creating unimaginable art, great works of which others could not even conceive. They might—

He wonders, aloud, if they’d be good parents.

She is silent.

He realizes he has hurt her. He does not know what to say.

He says he will sleep on it.

It is 6 January.

After she leaves for work, Alec finds a pregnancy test in the bathroom bin, partially hidden. It is positive.

He has the day off. He creates an online dating profile. He has never done anything like this before, not during their relationship. He talks to women and men throughout the early afternoon. Three hours before Elizabeth gets home, he deletes the profile.

He wonders what friend he can talk to. He wonders who he has.

He thinks of phoning his own mother. He does not. They have not spoken for months. They will not speak again. She will die of a heart attack four years later. She will never meet her grandchild.

It is evening.

He tells Elizabeth that he has been thinking.

About what he said the night before.

Of course she’d be a good mum, he says. He didn’t mean to ever say she wouldn’t be.

He—

‘You’ll be a great dad,’ she says, quietly, nervous, trying to smile. ‘If you want to be.’

He tells her he doesn’t know.

It is 9 October.

A blade pierces a mother.

A boy is torn from her womb.

Minutes later, a nurse passes him to his father.

He holds his baby’s hand.

Day Thirty-One

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

Partially rotten, heaving with bacteria, found impaled on one of the red spears marking the burial site of the sixteen horses, DNA testing confirmed the flesh to be Simon’s own.

His ring finger from his left hand, it had likely been fractured before the point of its severing, possibly infected, too. It had been taken with a heavy cutting tool, perhaps an axe, in a single fast motion a number of weeks before.

The soft tissue had started falling away.

Days after the car crash, the boy had been alive.

Alec would ask to see the finger, back at the station before nightfall.

He asked to hold his only son.

They told him, again and again, that he could not.

That maybe he needed to take some time.

That he’d been through a lot.

Go home, they told him, again and again.

The mess with the hospital – the discharge – that could all be sorted out.

He needed to get better for his son, they told him.

But Alec – Alec had no idea what that meant, now.

No idea at all.

A patrol car, driven by a man Alec had never met, brought him to his house.

The neighbours had Christmas lights up all around.

He went inside the cold, empty building and took his phone out.

He read the messages of the morning, sent and received within the cab on the way to Well Farm, now held within his shaking hands.

[09:18] Grace: Do you miss your son?

[09:32] Alec: How do you know I have a son?

[09:41] Grace: We’re friends.

[09:42] Alec: You’re friends with my son?

[09:51] Alec: Grace?

[09:53] Grace: Lol no. WE’RE friends. I can see your contacts.

[09:54] Grace: Are you going to keep me on here?

[10:01] Alec: I don’t miss him. He lives with me.

[10:02] Grace: Message me whenever you want.

[10:02] Grace: I’m by myself a lot.

[10:04] Grace: What’s it like there, anyway?

[10:14] Grace: Raining probably.

[10:16] Alec: It snowed.

[10:16] Alec: But the sun is slowing.

[10:17] Alec: Sorry, meant shining, autocorrect.

[10:19] Grace: Take a photo.

There was a knock on his front door. The bell hadn’t been fixed, not for a while.

Alec realized, then, that he’d been crying. He didn’t know for how long he’d been doing it.

Alec wiped his cheeks and got up.

It was snowing, still.

The snow would be gone by midnight. It never lasted.

He pulled the door open.

It was her.

It was Cooper.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

‘What are you doing here?’

She hesitated, looking past him into the house beyond. There was a smell of meat, like pasta and Bolognese, though she would not find any evidence of cooking while she was there.

He hadn’t switched any lights on, even though night had now fallen.

‘I was – I was worried about you. I wanted to see how you were doing.’

He stared at her. He seemed shorter, somehow, standing in that doorway. When they’d met, he’d been tall and stocky. He’d seemed strong, handsome even, his jaw full of stubble and his restless eyes full of questions.

Those first days, he’d soon shown her part of who he was: he’d shown her nervousness, anxiety, a concern over his position, a wish to do right. All these weeks later, the end of the year soon to be upon them, he displayed none of that – all the good and all the bad gone, as if it had never been.

He was just empty now.

He turned and walked back into his home, leaving the door wide open.

Cooper followed, clicking on the light.

She removed her coat, holding it over her arm. She unwound her grey scarf, long and wide. ‘Shoes on or off?’

Alec didn’t answer. He’d disappeared into the kitchen.

A kettle boiled, somewhere beyond.

She took her shoes off and lingered by the sofa, not quite sure whether to sit or stand, follow or wait.

She waited, standing.

Eventually, she heard a croak. ‘Tea?’

‘Coffee,’ she said. ‘I can make it, if you—’

‘No milk, no sugar?’

‘Black is fine.’

Time passed.

He brought the coffees through one at a time, his own with milk and two sugars.

She looked around.

‘You’ve got a, er . . .’ She frowned, smiling just a little, trying to make herself comfortable, not knowing what to say. A lovely home. She’d been here a dozen times without Alec’s permission and still she had no idea how to describe it. ‘I