Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

where they came from. Everyone knew but didn’t say. He wondered how much they’d paid the inspector. He wondered if this was it, if he was to take on all the sins of these arcades and empty streets. If he’d be blamed for things he had not done.

It was the problem at the heart of his profession. How to save the animal from the owner.

He remained still for a while sitting at his wheel, staring at the curve of houses opposite. He couldn’t see anything through the windows of the houses, not from this far away. The lights were low inside.

He’d gone to the market that morning. He’d sat amidst the scooters, he’d listened to the cries of the seagulls, he’d seen faces he’d not seen for decades.

An old woman had spoken to him, turning her head, twisting her body in a sharp, dramatic motion.

‘Something is happening.’

CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

Rebecca kept thinking, as the sky grew dark, her legs and feet tired, the hours moving past, about her father and how they had found him, after his death.

He had not had his shoes, apparently.

He’d taken them off; they were lying in the reeds nearby. They’d thought briefly that someone might have taken them from him – Rebecca had asked this, certainly – but no fingerprints, no other evidence was found. Why he had taken his shoes off, then, became the question in her mind.

She walked through alleyways her father would have killed her for walking down, dark, untended. It was night, now.

From one street she heard noises, a cry.

She kept walking.

She came across a car and a mass of people. From what little she could tell, a man had stumbled out into the road and a car had not expected him.

‘Daft fucking sod,’ a voice had said.

The voice, the man’s friend, would tell the ambulance what a character the dead man had been, how he would always do things like that. Others in the road took photos of the man as he bled in the rain. The car and its driver had fled. Rebecca’s hair was getting wet. She walked away.

Nothing in her life was what it could have been. This struck her, as she thought of her father’s shoes, lying there without feet.

Brown leaves scuttled along the pavement.

There was blue light, decorations glinting overhead. Redness coiled around puddles, around building-sides, like pale fire.

Her last memory of the sky that night would be starless, empty, black, for her and her alone. In school as a little girl, she’d always drawn the night as dark blue, not black, and had told her teacher he was wrong for thinking it was so. It was light blue in the morning, dark blue at night. That was how existence should be. That was how cause and effect should operate.

There was still a Rebecca who thought there might be more, after we were all gone, after we’d killed the world. But what if what God had made was not enough? What if her grandfather had been wrong about everything? Her father had thought so. Her father, who stood so tall in her memory, even next to him. Her father, who was mad, yes, who was strange, yes, who had ruined all that was good for him, who had suffered evil, had allowed evil. Her father, who she missed. Her father, who had helped save her from what she had done.

What if we had done too much?

The names we took, the things we called ourselves, the ways we lived our lives, they made the world bearable, didn’t they? It was easier to be a process than a person.

She thought again about what it meant to be good. Surely if you were good, it would be easy to be good. It would be easy to stay that way, to do those things. You would not have to make yourself anew, and damn the old, damn all that you were. You would not have to die.

She passed a bar, and there were men laughing outside, a stag party of some kind. Some of them wore ape masks as they toasted their friend, pints of beer in hand.

She lingered, watching them, and one of the men seemed to spot her. He kept looking at her.

He came over, eventually, and asked if she liked the masks.

She said they were weird.

‘Why aren’t you wearing one?’ the man said, his voice strange through the plastic. He went back to the table and took one for her.

‘Leave her alone,’ one of the men said, watching their friend.

‘What? She wants a mask.’

‘She’s like twelve.’

‘She’s not twelve.’

The other man shrugged.

She left.

She continued down another side street, the sounds of her birthplace like numbness. She was seized by the impulse to laugh, but nothing came out. She walked right out into the road and wondered, briefly, if this might be the moment her body would shatter, that she would be gone before anyone could know about her mother, about the things Grace Cole had done, before anyone could know what she had said before she’d gone, before anyone knew what Rebecca was, really, her heart laid bare.

People kept their selves with them, they never lost what was good about them, but there was more than that, wasn’t there? There was more you could show yourself than what was right.

No cars came. The road was empty, and Rebecca had found herself already on the other side.

She kept walking, all those hours.

She kept walking and passed through the wreck of her old home.

She passed the red spears in the earth.

WARFARIN TABLET(S) 10 MG.

ONE TO BE TAKEN DAILY.

TAKE AT THE SAME TIME.

SWALLOW WITH WATER.

CHAPTER NINETY

The roads were slick with water on the way back, red and white reflections rippling in puddles by the kerb, the signs of the city at night, its shops and chains and crowds and Christmas lights mingling into a blur past the rapid movement of the windscreen wipers, the pooling mass of acid rain ebbing down each window-side. The satnav took