A Thursday. Before sunrise Sain wrote the four words on the piece of paper she folded up and slipped into the band of her bra, then chivvied along until it was tucked into her right armpit. Then down the lane to meet the Kennick woman, to let the new foal out into the paddock for the first time.
The young Percheron, now it was outside, liked nothing better than rolling; it was mad for rolling. They put it in the far paddock, away from the rest of the horses, safely behind the buzz and ting of the electrified fence. She took the notes the woman handed her and folded them, slipped them into the back pocket of her jeans.
Afterwards, breakfast, a stop to pick a few things out of her trailer, and then to see to Fiance.
On the way down the lane on the bit of waste ground facing the road where their father used to sell some motors she passed where the Kennick woman had put up a mock-up of an old-fashioned vardo, about a ton of gold leaf and bright plastic gleaming in the sunshine, last night’s rain beading all over it. Daffodils flooded the gaps between the wheel spokes and on a whim she grabbed a handful, feeling the cold dew patter off them and onto her hand.
Sain knocked and bustled in straight after knocking, full of spring:
She showed Fiance how she’d stopped off in the lane to gather some daffs—Now sure, didn’t you always love the flappodils?—she’d brought a bright new plastic tablecloth to cheer the place up, she’d brought some stuff in tins, some ready meals. There’s a fresh bottle of Scotch at the bottom of her bag. The usual routine.
Fiance sat and stared into space, wrapped in the foul-smelling, violent pink Lurex dressing gown she’s had since forever. Sain went to wash her hands in the chalet bathroom.
“It makes me sad,” Fiance said from behind her, “knowing that you still work for that bitch.”
Sain said nothing.
“Sad like a lovely donkey, with its head caught in the slats of a fence.”
“I know,” said Sain, without turning round. “But isn’t that life, after all?”
On the way back Sain bumped into the Kennick lady, bobbing about in the lane in front of her massive pristine 4×4, white with shock where she was not purple with high blood pressure.
“Excuse me, Sain, excuse me, I’m terribly sorry but I— I need some help.”
The grai must’ve rolled too near the fence. One front leg had gone under the top strand, at an angle; the Percheron, presumably shocked by the electric that Sain had fixed up the week before, must’ve panicked at this new and horrible sensation. It must’ve tried rolling back in the opposite direction, thrashing to free itself. This, Sain saw, must’ve tightened the grip of the wire, tightened with the weight of quarter of a ton of desperate agonised horse pulling on it. By the time its screams had alerted the farmer passing on his tractor, and he’d rung the Kennick lady and she’d driven out here to find out what the fuck was going on, it had managed to saw through not just the skin, but the meat and the muscle and the tendon beneath; well into the bone.
It had managed to free itself; the fence was a collection of uprooted posts and sagging wire, electrics still humming and clicking in the sharp morning air.
The Percheron hobbled towards them now, shook its head, gave a little snortling whinny, the complicated arrangement of suspensory ligaments at the rear of the cannon gone to a bloody ruin; gore slathered its entire front leg. As she watched the poor fucker’s hoof knuckled over and it gave such a horrifying little cry—almost human, almost exactly human—and it fell down on its face.
“You best get on the blower to the vet,” Sain said, trying to keep the shake out of her voice, and it was then the Kennick lady burst into tears, then she broke down, though Sain thought later:
She must’ve known from the minute she’d found the poor fucking thing, slathered in its own blood, she must’ve known straight away.
“How’s the foal?” said Fiance.
Sain, up to her elbows in the washing up that’d piled all over the side since her last visit, paused mid-scrub, stayed looking out the filthy trailer window at the mud-churned yard. The touch of bleach she’d added to the detergent—out of tradition, if nothing else—came up to her in a gust of steam, stung her eyes.
“Vet came. Had to put it down.”
There was a silence then, broken only by congeries of bubbles exploding softly amongst the washing-up and exhaling their chlorine breath.
“Was a pretty, pretty grai, that one,” Fiance said eventually. “Always hardest, losing the pretty ones.”
Sain resumed the washing up.
“When,” she said, a few plates later, “When exactly did you ever see that horse, Fiance?” Behind her, she heard Fiance move at the table, as if rearranging herself, as if she had to bodily prepare to answer this.
“Such a shame,” Fiance said, her voice artificially bright. “Big beautiful expensive horse like that one. They’re so weak, aren’t they? For such a big strong animal. Vulnerable, I mean. One little thing happens to the legs, and they’re fucked.”
She took a sip from her tea, chinking her teeth softly on the mug. Sain set the plastic washing-up brush on the side. She didn’t turn to look at her sister.
“Give the woman my regards,” said Fiance, to Sain’s departing back.
The three mushes waited at the end of the drive where the rutted asphalt opened out on to the gravel forecourt in front of Sain’s trailer. Big lads, Danby gilets and Cordings in rosebud pink and mustard yellow, too-tight shooting-fit “country check” shirts. One of them sat on the bumper of the big 4WD pickup, body forward with elbows propped on his knees; another on the bonnet, leaning back against the windscreen. The other was doing something in the bed of the pickup.
They turned to watch her as she approached. The one on the bonnet leaned down and said something she didn’t catch to the one on the bumper, who gave his head the merest shake.
“Sar-shin,” she called out. The one sitting on the bumper flashed her a quick grin. The other two got out of and off the pickup, went to either flank. They moved in, too close. She stepped back, and they moved behind her.
“Our sister,” called out the one still on the bumper. “You done her a bad turn there.”
Sain licked her lips.
“You know that’s not— it wasn’t me. I mean, she knows that’s not—”
The man on the bumper sniffed, shook his head like an animal bothered by a parasite.
“Blood’s blood. Sins of the one upon the all, like.” He craned his head back, stared up at the flat blue sky. “You still go to see her, for one thing.”
She set her jaw.
“Blood’s blood, like you said.”
He stood up, interlaced his fingers, pushed out an overhead stretch that made his gut strain through the flaps of the gilet. A quick cold shiver, exactly the same feeling contained in that eighth of a second a fresh contact lens takes to slither across and then adhere to your eyeball, except all over Sain’s body.
“Best you think of a way to make it right, girl.”
She felt the paper move against her, in her bra strap; wondered if the same thing that worked against glamour and curses might do the trick when three big lads were smashing your fucking face in.
“I can ask her,” she said. “But you know her. She does what she pleases.”
The talkative one sauntered over to her, hands in the pockets of his ridiculous bodywarmer.
“She lets you stay on. You and—” He glanced quickly at the furze and gorse rioting at the edge of the field, blocking the view further down the lane. “You and her. Gives you work. Don’t she treat you right?”
Sain nodded, slowly.
“Yes,” she said. “She treats me right.”
“We knows you’re useful about the place. We don’t mind that. Don’t mind that.” The big man sighed, thumbs in his belt-loops, and hawked and spat in the churned-up mud. “But best you tell your little sister to leave ours alone.”
He looked up suddenly, over her shoulder.
“Here, Hopey, there’s no need for that, is there?”
Sain turned. The one who had been in the bed of the pickup had made the side of her trailer, he’d got a jerrycan from somewhere and was unscrewing the cap. Sudden panic gripped her. Hopey shrugged, mid-pour, then straightened the can and screwed the top back on. She let out a long, slow breath and started to turn back around.
She didn’t see the punch, so she couldn’t even brace against it. Later, she thought if she had it would have just broken her ribs; but then she probably wouldn’t have vomited the way she did, on her hands and knees in the mud, wouldn’t have given the bastards the satisfaction of it.
“The can’s for next time, Hopey lad,” said the talkative one. He bent down next to her where she sputtered in the mud.
“Best sort out your kin, girl. Best you sort things out right sharpish.”
Next Thursday. Sain got up, wrote the words on a piece of paper, slid it safely into place, then went to see to the horses. She waited around the stables until mid-morning, but the Kennick woman never showed, so she went to see Fiance.
She checked the crottled hawthorn stems woven into an arch around the outside of the trailer door, the bundles of rowan twigs wrapped in a single thread of red cotton hanging from crooked nails driven in just above the windowframes. She stalked around the perimeter of the lot, stopping here and there to hack with her heel down through the gravel, to see if the jam-jars were still where she’d buried them, if the hair was still in them. The hair and the other things.
Everything was where it should’ve been, the way she’d been taught.
Maybe the horse was just unlucky, one of those poor animals God decides have to die early, die early in a horrible, agonising way. The brothers were just a bit over-protective. She’d have to watch that. She set her face, opened the trailer door.
Fiance was in a mood: mulish, sour. She kept wincing away when Sain tried to wash her hair. Sain went to lean over, felt the pull against her still-sore abdominals, winced.
“Devil got in your guts, sis?”
“Hurt myself with the horses,” said Sain. “Stallion’s fiery this time of year.”
“Oh.”
Fiance turned her face to the wall. Sain finished up, then cooked up enough Joey Grey to last the week, doled it out into tubs and old fast food containers. Then she pulled the uneaten remnants of last week’s cooking out of the fridge, stuffed it into a black bin bag and carried it outside.
She turned around. In the trailer doorway Fiance stood, looking sideways along the outer wall to eyeball the bundles of hawthorn forming the arch outside. She noticed Sain watching her, made a little appreciative moue.
Sain tried to fight down the sudden fluttery feeling in her stomach.
“Why don’t you step over here,” she said, careful to keep her voice level. “I could use a hand moving the bins down the end of the drive for the dustman.”
Fiance grinned back at her.
“But sis, what about the terrible curse you’ve taken so much care to nail all around the outside of me door? Wouldn’t I burn up to a cinder were I to even attempt such a thing?”
Sain resisted the urge to reach out and touch felt the paper in the band of her bra. Sweat stuck it to her skin.
“You wouldn’t have to step outside though, would you?”
Fiance shook her head, a touch sadly.
“Go on with you now,” she said.
Sain grabbed the bin and wheeled it down to where the dustman would pick it up, out on the road. All the way there she felt Fiance’s eyes on her back, but when she turned to come back, the doorway was empty. Something dropped inside Sain’s stomach. She walked back to the trailer, eyes fixed on the vacant doorway, but she found Fiance inside on the sofa, twirling a strand of her hair around her finger.
“The world is a beautiful, bleak and terrifying place, my dear sister,” said Fiance, as Sain left.
Later a storm came up out of nowhere, rain driving in diagonally across the fields, hammering against the corrugated roof of the stable. Sain worked away inside, enjoying the smell of the rain on the concrete floor, the sharp tang of horse piss, the warmth of straw and big equine bodies and horseshit.
It abated by early afternoon; the sky filled with a filmy wet light more suited to October than May. The big shiny 4×4 pulled smartly up outside.
The Kennick woman had a scarf tied up around the lower part of her face, a bright silk slash across the dimness of the day.
“I wonder if I might have a moment of your time, if you’re not too busy?” she said, voice muffled slightly by the scarf.
“What d’you need help with?”
“I know you and your sister have argued in the past,” she began, her voice even more careful and artificially plummy than usual. “I know this, and I sympathise. I myself have argued with my siblings, and it can become so cruel, so quickly.”
When she breathed the scarf billowed out from her cheeks like a sail.
“I am truly, honestly sorry about my brothers. They can be . . . hot-headed. But you know the way we raise our boys, Sain.”
Sain nodded, then shook her head.
“What they did was wrong. I know . . . I know none of this is your fault. I know you’ve tried your best. But if your sister keeps on with this, I don’t know if I can stay their hands.”
Sain’s bewilderment curdled to anger.
“You can go and chib mandy’s jeer if you think those three dickless cunts—”
The Kennick woman reached up and pulled off the scarf. Sain’s anger snuffed out like a candle. The bottom half of the woman’s face looked like it had been boiled a violent garnet, whorled and puckered, the top layers of dermis already sloughing off: blisters, huge and pendulous, clear fluid weeping from raw-looking cracks.
“What the fuck have you done to yourself,” Sain whispered.
The Kennick woman smiled, an action that looked like it caused great pain.
“I woke up like it.” She tied the scarf back up over her face, and Sain winced at the whisper of the silk across the seeping tissue. “So this is why I come to you now. This is why. I am begging you, before my brothers see it, I am begging you.”
“Begging me? For what?”
“You go to see her. You must have . . . You must have something that will . . . That can stop her. Stop her, stop her reaching out and—”
Sain almost stamped. Horses whinnied and shied in their stalls.
“She can’t get out! She can’t get out! You know she can’t get out! When we sold you the land, we made sure . . . ” Sain got hold of herself, fighting to keep the anger down.
“She can’t get out,” she said again.
The Kennick woman’s eyes became hard above her violently-printed scarf.
“I see.”
She turned and walked slowly back to the big 4×4.
“I promise you! I . . . I fucking promise you she can’t get out. I’m . . . I’m so sorry about . . . about your horse, and— and your face, but . . . ”
The Kennick woman slammed the driver’s door and gave it far too much welly to pull away smoothly, leaving the better part of its clutch behind. Sain ran after it, her reflection wild in the tinted windows.
“She wouldn’t come after you, would she?” she shouted.
“I’m the fucking one who put her in there, why would she come after you?”
The 4×4 churned up the lane, and there was no way of telling if the Kennick woman heard at all.
Sain bustled through the trailer door without bothering to knock. This time she had brought no Scotch, no carefully prepared or hastily-chosen food. She called out Fiance’s name, waited for her to come out of the toilet. When, after three or four tries, there was no response, she tried hammering at the door. Doubts assailed her, then: would the worst thing, the really worst thing, be to open the door and find her sister on the linoleum, an empty bottle of paracetamol in her hand or a home-made shiv protruding from a jagged tear in her neck?
No, she thought, and that’s the worst thing, the utterly worst thing, the one thing she’s never admitted to herself, because, in so many ways finding that would be the best thing, after all.
“Fucking open up,” she snarled, angry with Fiance, angry with her parents for birthing such a creature into the world, angry with herself, angry with the Kennick woman and her three dinlo brothers.
She wrenched open the door, feeling the paper move in the soft warm hidden place in her armpit, safe in her bra. There was nothing in the sink. There was no-one standing under the little shower or perched atop the chemical toilet.
She stalked round the rest of the trailer, sneaked open the door of the bedroom, stared for a while at Fiance’s unmade bed, smelled the faint smell of witch hazel and her sister’s body.
She walked back into the trailer’s living room, opened the front door.
Fiance sat on the lid of a bin at the end of the lane where the dustman left them, beanpole shins poking out the top of their father’s old Wellingtons, still wrapped in her filthy pink dressing gown. Something enormous trod on Sain’s heart, and Fiance smiled at her, almost kindly, and waggled her fingers in a silly little wave.
Sain went to go down the steps but as she stepped into the doorway she was thrown backwards into the lounge, rag-dolling against the sofa with such force it knocked the wind from her; she felt something important give in her spine, the treacherous lurch of long-term skeletal damage, just before the pain started.
She lay on the floor, watching Fiance get up and amble up the lane towards the road, hands in the pockets of her dressing gown. Sain lay on the floor and waited; she hoped that someone might come, and then she could tell them how to remove the wards, how to let her out; but for now she lay on the floor and watched her sister disappear into the world, and she waited for the screaming to start.
