Now she’s drawing a world of frogs and fairies: fairies underwater (which they can be, she says), and frogs and tadpoles and half-frogs — her word for them. He remembered her making the word.
__ the Frog Prince
They’d taken frog spawn from the pond in April before the ducks got at them. When the house came alive with tortoiseshell butterflies waking up. Two weeks later, more or less, the tadpoles hatched in the old glass tank; but it was three months or so before they grew their legs. Emmy watched them every day, from the moment they collected the frogspawn in a jar. They were constantly incredible to her. The black dots turning to the shape of fish inside the funny jelly, then the tadpoles hatching; and when the legs grew she pretended to believe that they were little people trapped inside fish. Gareth hadn’t told her what they were.
The big ones ate some of the small ones, which horrified her, and she watched them change. It seemed a long time, to her, before they started to look like frogs and she guessed that’s what they were, though they still had little tails.
They let them go in June. There was one though which had hardly changed yet from a tadpole, and which had not been eaten by the others. They thought it was simply a bad tadpole. But in June, perhaps July, it too began to change, but differently from the frogs, and when it took on the shape of a lizard Emmy was amazed. She thought it was a frog trying to become a prince.
Gareth remembers too the time he tried to explain to her about dandelions, which she loved — perhaps because of the magic of their changing too. Her love for things which weren’t what you thought they were. She loved to play with dandelion clocks ever since his mother had shown her how to tell the time with them, this spurious decision as to time complying with Emmy’s way of seeing the world.
She had spent a long time picking dandelion flowers one day and they were proudly laid out on her bedroom floor. When they hadn’t changed to clocks by the next morning she thought perhaps it was because she kept peeking and magic only happed when you didn’t look. Gareth tried to explain that they had to be alive to turn to clocks. ‘But they are dead when they are clocks,’ she said. ‘Well, they’ve changed’ he tried to say. ‘They have to be alive to change.
The flower has to die to change into seed. They die to make more dandelions.’ One dandelion dying makes a thousand new flowers. ‘People don’t do that, do they?’ she said. ‘No,’ said Gareth. ‘People don’t do that.’
__ the Twin
Emmy had helped him with the cow — with bringing out the second calf which was a healthy brown calf. She had come back stumbling across the grass with a heavy mop bucket full of soapy water and a towel over her shoulder which kept slipping so she had to set down the bucket and pick it up. Then she’d heave up the bucket again with two hands and start again with the bucket knocking and spilling off her legs and over her wellies as she walked. She absolutely loved her wellies, even in this weather. She’d had the long important talk of children with her zebra and left him by the gate.
‘Mummy’s got a headache so I’m being her,’ she said.
He’d heard himself think ‘don’t ever be her’ and he knew underneath then that he would have to be careful now because the residue of his anger was still there and he didn’t want it to come out. If it came out it would be very bad.
He made the rubbing sound with his finger and tried to read the paper but just thought. He had thought that the other twin would be dead too but it wasn’t. While he was feeling inside the cow he was almost begging for it to be alive, to bring something good from this, and if it was good he wanted Kate to be there to see it turn good. Emmy was bending over the mother cow, patting the rolled knots of hair above her eyes and copying her father, saying, ‘easy girl, okay girl.’ From far away they heard another farmer calling to his sheep — every farmer calls a different way and if you are not a farmer you cannot call to animals without thinking you are stupid.
The calf came out and it was big and strong and healthy and it lay out panting and full with breath as he brought it round to its mother’s snout so she could know it and clean her calf. Emmy still patted the cow’s soft head saying ‘good girl, good girl’ and looking strangely at the new calf. He thinks of her doing this now as he sits at the table with the paper in his hands, and he thinks of her running to get the warm water.
Chapter Six
It feels like everything in my head is going to explode. If I move at all. Like if anything touches me I’ll smash up. There’s a sharp point of light coming in through a hole — a loose thread — in the curtain. It’s like that sharp point of light, this pain; all of me crowds in on it, as if my whole life is just what is around it, a dark curtain. I shouldn’t have shouted at Emmy.
I wish he would come up. I can hear him downstairs, laughing with Emmy. I wish he would come. I shouldn’t get so angry, but he should have been there, he dreams too much. I know he is angry with me, but I wish he would come.
__
the Land Above the Road
She cares. She worries. She worries about him getting the land, and about her son in his car, and Emmy playing outside. She worries about Bill going mad and the gas bottle being too close to the cooker, and the calves that will die anyway and the sheep that fall sick.
She worries that one day they’ll be too old to farm and he knows she thinks sometimes of a bungalow, but it would break him, her husband, and she knows that too.
He wants the land because he knows this, and he knows his children will not take on the farm; but he cannot bear to leave the place. If they have the land and put houses there, then they can rent out some of the fields and stay in the farmhouse on the money they make and maybe just farm a few things. But Kate worries about this. And she worries about all the things she has no say over, and he knows it’s just her way of trying to feel that it isn’t just random, that she has some control. But some things you just don’t have any control of.
__ the Sedge
The cow went for a walk. She got up in the night and just walked and she was tired and slow by the time the sun came up, but a long way from the farm, for a cow. She just didn’t want to be in the barn.
When she came to something, she put her great weight against it, and just leant, and let her big body crush the thing down, or break or snap it. If it was a hedge, she went into the gap she could find and let her weight smash through the small sticks and thorns and the dead, dry trees; and if it was a gate she’d just lean and push, so the thing gave, because many of the gates were not hung properly, and hung off their loose posts with pink string. She didn’t do a lot of damage, as she didn’t have horns. They cut off the horns at birth. When things gave way under her she just felt droll and programmed and just bewildered like cows are, and she just kept on walking, getting tired and hot in the sun.
She was heavy with calf. This was not her first year, so she knew what was becoming of her and understood the calf, but she didn’t like the heat, or something, so she walked out of the barn. Her udder, gorgeous with milk, was scratched by thorns and the flies that followed her were landing on her warm hide and around her eyes, so she had to shake her head to move them.
For a while she stopped to eat, as cows do, just curling the long grass of a hedge into her mouth with her tongue. Her tongue was as big and pink as a baby’s leg. The grass here was more lush than the hay and the short grass of the fields. By then, the cow had no idea where she was.
The sun had kept coming up and got hotter and the heat even came out of the ground, which had been under the sun for so long. The cow got down on a bank and scratched herself in the dust and lay down for a while and, what seemed like miles away, was the sound of duck going into the pond. The cow was grey and covered with dust now and warm in the sun by the bank. The birds played around her.