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The heavy brown cow was lying awkwardly back up against the bank. He ran to the shed to get the ropes and wished he had the bike to make things faster and to not hurt his ankle more and he knew she would be angry at him for not bringing the bike.
‘Where the hell have you been. I thought you were coming straight back,’ she was saying. He had the ropes now and was running over to the cow, wincing at the pain in his ankle. She stopped at the gate and did not come with him to help and he did not know why and he kept thinking about the blood running down her arm and the time she cut herself in the shower. She was still shouting.
The cow was a mess. The wet rod of the calf was half out, with one of its front legs twisted awkwardly still inside the cow. The calf seemed dead, but they often did and then they were alive when you got them out. He put his hand into the cow and tried to find the leg but it was all wrong and he knew the hoof had already cut the cow inside.
He had his eyes open but he was staring nowhere, trying to visualise from what he could feel, the shape of the calf inside the cow. Kate was still screaming at him from the gate and he was trying to think. ‘Where the bloody hell were you, you said you’d check the damn cows an hour ago so that’s why I didn’t check them. You should have bloody told me you weren’t going to check the cows.’ He looked briefly at her and she scared him; she was coming apart. He felt his patience snap in his stomach, the adrenaline of it go through him. ‘Just go,’ he shouted. ‘Christ. Just go.’
The cow tried to lift herself as it sensed the things around her and he put his hand gently on the cow.
‘Easy, easy, easy,’ he was saying to her, his other arm on her haunch. ‘Easy, girl.’
He brought the leg round and laid it along the calf’s body inside its mother but he couldn’t get it round enough to bring it out. He looked up again and Kate was gone from the gate but Emmy stood there scared and bravely watching.
He took the pulling ropes and closed the noose around the one free leg then tried to fix the rest of the rope behind the other shoulder blade. The calf was limp and its tongue now was flopping from its mouth. He sat back and braced his feet and pulled on the ropes, trying to gauge his weight in time with the contractions of the cow. He missed the extra traction of his little finger. Sometimes, it’s the smallest things you lack. He could feel things give very slightly, a half inch won but brought back inside by the cow’s big body. Then it came all at once, and the long black calf came out with the speed and sound of liquid. It was dead. He smacked it a few times but he knew that it was dead. Blood leaked thickly from the cow’s gaping uterus. She panted slowly with the shock of birth. From the mark they’d made on her back, he knew she carried twins. The other calf inside her might be already dead. Emmy was by him now, looking at the dead black calf. It looked to her like a patch of wet tarmac on a new road.
‘Mummy says she wasn’t strong enough to pull the calf out by herself and that’s why it died,’ she said. He looked at her. ‘No, love. This one wasn’t made properly — look, can you see? It hadn’t grown properly. It was dead already love, it just had to come out.’ It played on him that this was the second death like this today and he knew now that throwing the other calf down the well was a problem. A fault in the stock? He thought of his wife. She was still shouting, he could hear her. Inside he wondered if it was his fault — if he had been too long. She came from a rural town and she was used to farms but she was not born to be on a farm as he was. He felt his anger go, this time; it had died down and receded.
‘Go and tell Mum I need some soap and water and she might have to help me pull now. This one is a twin.’ Emmy ran off up the field. She ran very importantly.
He ate alone. Kate had not helped him with the cow. He was sad that he had hurt her by shouting at her; but not sad because the thing was bad, more sad in the way we are sad when we hurt a weaker animal. He was sad about having more strength than her.
Dylan was supposed to have taken the bread crates back but he hadn’t, so Gareth took the bread crates out of the van and hosed them down and enjoyed the cool water and left them against the wall to dry in the sun.
He came inside and soaped down his arm and the warm soft water felt good on him. He’d meant to get a gas bottle changed that week and there was a note on the cooker saying ‘no gas’ so he had bread and cheese. He’d tried to phone his son to ask him to collect more gas, but his mobile was switched off. So he left a message but knew he wouldn’t collect the gas. He should ask the vet about the two dead calves, because there might be a big problem.
His wife was upstairs with a headache. He didn’t know anymore whether he believed in these headaches or not. It was like she could switch them on and off, but he hated thinking this. He also thought that the violence of her anger nowadays could bring on these headaches. He thought: she is angry first, and it comes up as a headache, because there is nowhere for so much anger to go.
He tried to sip his coffee but it was filthy. Without the gas he couldn’t warm the pan so he’d tried to heat it up by adding hot water from the kettle but it made it thin and weak and it tasted wrong.
He threw the coffee in the sink. It’s not the headache making her angry, it’s her. Her emotions are triggers, they trigger chemicals and she gets ill. It could just be her eyes, he thinks. He knows bad eyes can lead to headaches. But she won’t have them checked. It could just be this constant heat. Her fair skin in the sun. He wondered whether he should go and see her but he knows it is better not to. She was like a grenade when she was like this. Simply going to her could be like putting back the pin, would diffuse her anger. Or she might just explode. In the rare times she was angry, Emmy was like this too; but she was so scowling and tiny and compact that she even looked like a grenade and they joked about it. When she was angry she was very furious which made them love her very much.
She sits at the table, drawing in her sketchbook now. Zebra watches her, and she talks while she draws. When she draws it is not with the excessive gestures of a child her age but it is small; as if everything on the paper is vital. The drawing overflows with details, so much so that she always must explain things to people when she shows them; the different instruments and inhabitants of the worlds she creates, which are always progressing somewhere, always in story, never strange, isolated still lives. If you asked her about her picture she always answered in colour: ‘that’s a red mushroom, a bright green dress’; but she never coloured in. ‘I know what colours that they are,’ she would say. She draws only from memory, she won’t look and draw, as if the realness of a thing will destroy its place in her picture for it. She says she doesn’t have the right pencils for the colours she sees.
Once, Gareth asked her about the tiniest cloud of almost unseeable dots. ‘They’re a cloud of lacewings that we saw today’ she said, ‘only they’re so small you cannot see they’re lacewings.’ She always made distinctions between lacewings and fairies. There was no fooling her. When they had seen them that day, Gareth had said ‘look, fairies.’ ‘No, they’re insects,’ she said, ‘but I can see why a grown up thinks they are fairies.’ To her, lacewings were just as magical as fairies anyway.
The first time they knew about her strangeness was when she came into their room one night and said, without being frightened, ‘Mummy there’s a man on the stairs.’ ‘You were dreaming,’ they said, and asked her into their bed. After a while, she said perfectly sensibly ‘there was a man, but he wasn’t nasty. I was playing with my dolls and he talked to me through the door. I think he knows the little boy I see.’ Since then they have learned to let her speak with these people. There is always a strange calmness to her, a sureness, as if she is listening always to an invisible music.