‘Where did you come from?’ Mark said.
The calf gave a warbling grunt and butted his hand with its small, hard head.
‘Take it easy,’ Mark said, kneading its crown, his eyes searching the darkness behind for its mother.
*
Or he had thought he was laughing. Or he had meant, at least, to laugh. It was only when the child stopped her own crying and changed the way she was looking at him — changed from a screaming fury to a curiosity that caused her to pull herself up on the cot bars and stare — that he realized that he was not laughing; he was crying, and he was crying hard. He was sobbing, and he was shaking, and he was getting snot on himself, and he was covering his face with his hands, and he was trying to get a hold of himself, but it was something outside himself that had the hold on things; it was something outside his power that was pushing up from his gut and his heart and his lungs. He tried to think of what was causing it, and all he could think of were the last words he had said, and then in the same moment he understood it, because they had never been his words. They had been Maura’s. They had been Maura’s way of letting out anger, or frustration, or sometimes a loud, long laugh at the ridiculousness of the day or the night or the world. Jesus tonight. Jesus tonight. Jesus tonight. She had said it to herself. She had said it to Tom or the children. She had said it to the empty air. She had said it while she was cursing whatever it was she was cursing, but at the same time she was always fixing or settling or sorting out the same thing: she was dressing a child, or closing a door, or knowing what to do with a form, or turning to Tom and making him feel less angry or less worried or less frightened about whatever it was he had on his mind. She had said it, and he had never heard anyone else saying it, and she had said it in a tone and a voice that were only her own. And, for a moment, that voice had been with him in the room.
The child let him lift her out of the cot when he calmed himself. He took her downstairs. Mark had left new food in the fridge.
‘Otherwise you’d be eating rashers and sausages,’ he said to the child, but when he looked more closely, nothing seemed like the kind of thing you would give to a child who had woken up crying at midnight: grapes, and a few pots of yoghurt, and a pack full of thick strips of cheese, and two cartons of juice. Surely something warm was better for her, he thought, and so he closed the fridge and opened the cupboard. He opened a can of beans, and he put her down to play on the floor. While she threw her arms around the dog’s neck and tried to get up on its back, he warmed the beans in a saucepan, and all the time he talked to the dog in a friendly tone, sympathizing with her, praising her, in the hope that she would not get impatient and snap at the child.
‘That’s the girl, now,’ he said, and the child looked up as though he had been talking to her.
He fed her with a teaspoon. She frowned, at first, at the taste of the beans, but soon she wanted him to feed her more quickly, to feed her the whole bowl, and she swung her legs and bounced on his lap as though to hurry him along.
‘That’s nice,’ he said to her, and she blinked at him. ‘Isn’t that nice?’
She took a bean from the bowl and offered it, on the palm of her hand, to the dog. The dog tipped the bean with its nose and then took it on its tongue. It looked at her, ready for more, but she offered the next bean to Tom, balancing it between her fingertips and putting it to his lips. When he took it from her she laughed at him and pointed to the dog.
‘The doggie gets her own food,’ Tom said, and offered the child another teaspoon of beans, but she shook her head and once again pointed to the dog.
‘All right, whatever you say,’ Tom said, and he rose with her in his arms and went back to the same cupboard to take down the can of food for the dog. He sat the child on the counter; she reached a hand to the brown mixture he spooned on to a side plate. He lifted it up out of her reach. As he gave the plate to the dog, the child shouted at him; she gave him a name he could not make out.
‘Come on,’ he said, and he took her up again and brought her to the couch. She would not sit with him, but stood beside him, bouncing unsteadily on the cushions, gripping the couch like a drunk holding on to a wall.
*
The calf called out again. From behind Mark, one of the other cattle answered it, or echoed it; several of them had gathered now at the feeding rails, nosing through the scattered hay and tearing clumps away with their teeth. But some were not eating: they were just standing, staring at him, waiting to see what he would do.
Now he could make out the section in the opposite corner of the shed where the calf had come from. It was a small, gated-off rectangle away from the slatted ground. There were other animals in there, he saw, as he moved closer; two cows and another, still smaller calf. He wondered at the calves being born so late in the year, so deep into the winter; he was surprised at Frankie’s carelessness — until he realized it could not have been Frankie’s carelessness. Those cows would have been heavy with calf when Frankie brought them here.
He looked down at the calf. Though it was too young yet to fodder, it was sniffing at the open end of the trough, looking up at the older animals as though to taunt them. They responded with indignant noises as it nudged through the rustling whorls of hay.
‘All right,’ Mark said, and reached for the calf ’s tail, twisting it gently, so that the animal jolted for a moment but then allowed itself to be guided away from the trough.
‘That’s you done now,’ he said, and he moved it slowly back towards its pen. A long, demanding bawl sounded from one of the cows; she was up against the gate, pacing now within the small enclosure, but she could not get out.
Even standing right up against the pen, Mark could not see the gap through which the calf had escaped. It could only have slipped through the lower gate rungs, or slid out between the gate and the wall, but that was impossible; both spaces were too tight. He unlatched the gate quickly and hurried the calf back into the pen, still holding the tail, tapping the toe of his boot gently to the back shins. When he latched the gate again every animal in the place seemed to call out at once, and from somewhere he heard a dog. The calf, ignoring the attempts of its mother to nose it sharply backwards, stuck its head through the bars of the gate and watched him as he moved away. The eyes shone. Mark could not help himself: he raised a hand slowly in some sort of farewell. He felt intensely foolish and intensely calm.
At the back door, a woman with a pregnant belly was shushing the dog. Mark kept to the shadows of the house and walked back along the crisp white lane to the car.
He had been driving only for a couple of seconds when he met headlights coming around the bend. They dimmed. From the number-plate, and from the startled face in the glare of his own lights just before he dimmed them, he saw that the other driver was Frankie. As they passed each other slowly, both squeezed tight to the ditch on the narrow lane, he watched Frankie’s face turn from surprise, through confusion, to suspicion. Mark raised his hand from the wheel and gave him the wave of one driver to another; a quick, light-handed salute. They were past each other before Frankie’s hand could come any distance from his wheel. In the next instant, in his rear-view mirror, Mark watched the tail-lights of the van brighten and dim as Frankie stalled, as he tried to decide whether there was something he needed to do.
‘Go home,’ Mark said quietly, into the mirror, and after a moment, the tail-lights flickered again and the van moved away. Mark waited until the glow of it had gone from his mirror and been replaced by the dark. He drove on.