Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

They went up through the dust, the spray-paint on the walls, black bags of rubbish lying openly outside doors.

On the third floor, they came to number thirty-nine, and knocked.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

When Simon was ten, he’d found his mother throwing up in the sink. She’d been so careful about what she ate. She had grown thinner and thinner, until one day she had left him and his father for a couple of weeks.

Alec knew these things not because Elizabeth had told him, but because his wife had left behind diaries after her death.

When his wife came back to the house after her few weeks away, there were no pills or diets. She began to cook more again. She took up meat, though when Simon asked about it she’d go quiet, she’d seem guilty, on-and-off as she had been, and Alec would change the subject.

Alec kept saying how proud he was of his wife.

He’d sit there, making comments about the women on television in turn. He’d talk sometimes about their bodies. He did what anyone did.

She’d been worried, sometimes, that Simon didn’t eat enough. That he was too thin, that he’d leave food on his plate, that he’d refuse cake on birthdays and drink only water. She managed to wean him from some of this behaviour throughout his teens, and in trying to help him be better, she helped herself. The impulse never entirely left him, though, however big and strong he grew, and it haunted his mother, to know she might have sparked it in him. That something he had seen might have damaged him. You didn’t know – you just didn’t know—

Years later, Alec had read Elizabeth’s diaries. All of them had just been lying about for anyone to see, all of them now packed in the many boxes of her things reclaimed from her mother, who had no right to any of it – they were Alec’s, after all. They’d never got divorced. They belonged to him; they were the last things Simon would ever have of his mother. They were part of how he would remember her. Of how he might remember his father in turn.

Alec had read these books, and then he had burned them.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

Four wooden crates lay far along the shore, hidden in a clearing in the trees.

None of them moved any more. Within, animals began to rot. Flies flew nearby in strange arcs.

Rain had begun to seep into the sides.

Along the shore, a house began to shiver.

It shuddered with each wave, its pink pastel shifting, its beams groaning.

The walls fell.

They fell, even though no one was there to hear it.

They fell, crushing a human corpse within, cracking its bones and flesh.

All these things went into the sea.

An empty crate blew against a tree trunk, skipping around in the wind as if it were playing.

The water grew closer and closer.

The rain went on.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

Rebecca looked so different from the girl Alec had met at the farm all those weeks ago – scrawny, emaciated, she’d had a horrified look in her eyes – she’d told Alec all she had seen, how she had found the heads, what she had been doing out so early. She hadn’t been able to sleep. She’d taken her dog for a walk, an animal who was missing, now, who had fled in the confusion of the days that had followed.

Her eyes had been the first to see.

In the White Rooms, she stared at Alec once more. She now wore a school uniform, a white blouse and a blue tie, her cheeks red and her eyes hollow.

There came muffled noises from the floor above. A woman shouting for her keys, hushing a crying baby.

‘Hello, Rebecca,’ Alec said, not knowing what else to say.

Rebecca looked at him, and then Cooper. She was anxious all the while, holding on to the doorway as if it was the only thing keeping her up straight.

They made their introductions.

They walked through. Rebecca brought them plastic cups of water.

Her foster mother sat at her laptop in the corner. She had headphones on. They invited her to sit with them, but she shook her head. It wasn’t her business, she insisted.

The walls were thin. The yellow thatch wallpaper was flaking in the corner of the lounge, children’s toys everywhere on the cheap lino floor. Alec stepped on one of them by mistake on his way in. He swore under his breath, then apologized to the foster mother, then realized she was so engrossed in her spreadsheets that he might as well leave it. They all sat down around the clear-glass coffee table, a remote control, a stack of magazines. It reminded him of a waiting room.

They asked their questions. Rebecca promised to answer what she could.

She confirmed that she’d had a riding lesson. ‘Just one. Months ago. My dad – he doesn’t . . .’

She hesitated.

‘It’s a shame you stopped,’ Cooper said. ‘The other kids spoke highly of you. Said you were really good at it.’

Rebecca blushed. ‘I don’t think I was.’

‘It was your first lesson, though, wasn’t it?’ Cooper asked. ‘You—’

‘Why didn’t you tell us about it?’ Alec rubbed sleep out of one of his eyes.

‘What?’ Rebecca turned, confused.

‘You had a link with horses. You went to one of the places they were taken. Why didn’t you tell us? It’s OK you didn’t. I just wondered why it didn’t come up.’

Rebecca didn’t know. They mentioned names of other kids . . . Maryam . . . Peter . . .

‘It was months ago,’ she said, drinking her water.

Rebecca told them about the farm, about her mum and dad’s separation. The summer before Grace had left them, Rebecca’s paternal grandfather had died. That event had in turn marked a change. They’d flown out to the funeral as a family, but coming back . . . Rebecca didn’t know why, but they all grew more distant. All went about their business and chores and farm work without asking the others for help, without crossing paths, without even sitting together in the evenings sometimes, if