Sea Change (2 page)

‘What do I do with it?’ Freya asks, lifting her finger to inspect the drop of water.

‘Whatever you like,’ he says.

‘I can’t take it home, can I?’

He smiles. ‘Freya, you’re lovely. I’m afraid not.’

She pretends to put it in the open pocket on the front of her dress, patting the pocket for safekeeping effect, then suddenly lifts it again and peers into it - the droplet almost touching her eyelashes. ‘Daddy, I can’t see the pony in the raindrop.’

‘No?’ he says, imagining the horse suspended upside down in the lens of water and, when he looks beyond at the field, he’s shocked to see the stallion is closer, much closer, as if it indeed has been magnified.

He sees then what he hopes Freya doesn’t see. The stallion has a startled bloodshot eye, and is rocking to and fro in an agitated motion, with an edge of wildness that makes it look untrustworthy. His first unconscious movement is to put an arm round his daughter. He feels the thin bones of her shoulder and realizes he is already starting to stand. She seems a lot smaller then, lower to the ground, closer to the field than him.

‘What’s the matter?’ Freya asks, her face angled up at him. He’s never been able to mask his surprise.

‘Nothing. Nothing’s the matter,’ he says. He glances at the stallion. He can’t gauge it. It’s a mottled grey with long unkempt black hair down the nape of the neck, and has a tail that’s short and flicking as it stands, side-on to them, at the other edge of the marshy area. It watches him wide-eyed, with a look of madness. He sees a quiver develop in the muscle on its flank, rising quickly across its back.

‘Judy,’ he says, in an urgent whisper, ‘
Judy!
’

She deliberately finishes the line she’s reading, then looks up at him, raising her hand to shield her eyes from the glaring sun. He looks at the two blank reflections of her sunglasses, and then sees a sudden and minute tightening of her mouth. The shock of it, seeing what he has only just seen himself. Involuntarily she too begins to stand and he puts out his arm to stop her, stop, movement is a thing to be cautious of. He looks at his fingers and he feels a tension he can almost grasp, in a widely emanating circle around them, centred on his hand as it holds the air still, holds on to nothing.

‘I don’t like that pony,’ Freya says, standing like a little statue by his side. She sounds disappointed - her love of horses is usually so overwhelming. Stop the car, she’ll say, every time they pass a horse field, clucking her cheek even as the car slows down, but here, she’s silent.

Where is he, he thinks, taking in as many details as he can. The field’s an open one, and rises all round them in the shape of a shallow dish. They’re just about in the middle of it. In the middle, at the bottom, it amounts to the same, with a marshy stream running from left to right, dividing the field roughly in two. The stallion’s on the other side of the stream, perhaps fifty feet away, still strangely rocking and lifting a front hoof hesitantly off the ground, looking lonely and deranged. What else - a tree, yes, the ancient oak under which Judy’s sitting, that was the thing they all headed for when they entered the field. It’s close. He keeps an eye on the horse and gathers Freya to him, holds her hand which has suddenly gone compliant and cold in his own.

‘Let’s go to the tree,’ he says, quietly, amazed at how calm his voice sounds. ‘That oak tree.’

‘All right,’ she says. He’s glad to hear her voice, that she’s still talking, glad to hear her voice is as steady as his own.

They walk slowly to the tree, to Judy, who has now risen to her feet as if she’s balancing something on her head, the book of poetry has fallen from her lap on to the soil. They approach her, across the marshy ground, which he notices for the first time is deeply rutted with the hoof marks of horses not in the field any more.

Beyond the stream the stallion does an abrupt theatrical stamp with one of its front hooves. Guy sees the ripple of the shock dart up the cartilage of the leg, so thin at the knee, but solid just above that, and rising into a slab of muscle which curves up to the shoulder like the side of a car. The stamp doesn’t scare him, but it makes him angry, angry that this animal has hijacked the moment, that it might scare Freya more than it needs to, maybe even put her off horses. And with some relief he notices the stallion has continued to face them side-on, and appears reluctant to make any kind of movement whatsoever, apart from the repeated jerks of its head as if it’s wrestling with invisible ropes.

‘What’s it doing?’ Judy says, quietly.

Guy shakes his head slowly. ‘I think it’s just showing off,’ he says, hopefully.

Judy has done a strange thing. She’s stepped the other side of the log, as if it’s a great barrier, and is holding out her hands for Freya to come towards her. Each hand stretches woodenly, pathetically, like she’s sleepwalking.

He can tell Freya has become scared. She’s gripping on to him and that might not be helpful, he thinks. He’ll have to make all the decisions, he knows that, but she’ll have to go along with them instinctively, without question.

He tells her not to worry. ‘He’s upset by something, that’s all.’ But as he’s saying that he knows the only thing that is possibly upsetting the stallion is the sight of them. The three of them, in this field.

Judy takes hold of his arm, above the elbow, her fingers are sharp and tensed on his muscle. That’s good, he thinks. It feels like an advantage of sorts, although he knows it’s no such thing. She’s strong - small, but with a mother’s strength. With her other hand she has grabbed Freya, on her shoulder. It’s like they’re lashing themselves together.

‘Where did it come from?’ Judy whispers.

Guy doesn’t know. It had been an empty field, like all the fields they’d walked through this morning. He’d been at the horseradish leaves, crouching, close to the ground. She’d been sitting on the fallen branch, reading. Sunglasses, he thinks, remembering how she had looked to him, so absorbed, both of them, and he notices she isn’t wearing them any more. They are lying a few feet away, unfolded on the grass.

‘It’ll move off,’ Judy says. ‘It’s probably just startled to see us here.’ Guy says yes, more to Freya than Judy and, trying not to alarm them, looks about for anything that he might pick up to ward it off. But there are no sticks, no weighty logs, only this knobbled dead branch lopped from the oak - huge and twisted and a perfect reading spot for his wife and her book of poems, but not something you could lift. The oak itself is above them, with a wide span of heavy dark arms, but the closest of the branches is at least twice his height. He notices Judy also looking up at the tree, and even Freya, this small person between them, looking up for heavenly answer, reaching the same conclusion a few seconds behind her parents.

‘We can’t climb it,’ he says, quickly looking for ways up the trunk, and seeing the countless bumps and calluses of the tree’s life but no clear hold.

‘You sure?’ Judy says, feeling the necessity to voice all options. Nothing he can easily scale, let alone with Freya and Judy too. You can cling to an oak but you can’t climb them, he thinks, and it would only make them more vulnerable to attempt it. He doesn’t want to make a wrong decision.

‘What shall we do if it doesn’t go?’ Judy asks, giving him a natural permission to act, to take the lead.

‘Let’s keep still,’ he whispers, ‘really still.’

Freya’s frozen to the spot anyway, but he sees her nod obediently below him, and he hears her swallowing. He has a strange impression of himself, standing with the others in the centre of the field. He must look ridiculous, all angles and vulnerable and out of his depth.

‘We’re here,’ he says, pathetically.

‘Didn’t you see it coming?’ Judy says, unable to mask an accusation.

‘No. No, I didn’t. Did
you
?’

The stallion makes a deep snorting sound and half-turns so its eye is again completely side-on to them. He sees the bend in its body just behind the front legs, where the skin has rippled into long lines that run the height of its flank. The grey hair has mottled patches of dirty brownish-black hair. Its head is a squared-off anvil which starts to dip and swing as he looks at it - as if the effort of keeping it in the air is not easy.

‘Perhaps it’s ill,’ he offers to his wife, worrying that that might be a worse scenario, and he hopes the horse might suddenly kneel down in the dirt. It would be a relieving sight, to see it keel over. He looks again at the stallion’s head: it has a wide brow and a long nose with prominently raised veins running across it, and dark nostrils surrounded by wet purplish skin. He sees a thickly matted scar poking through the whorls of black hair on the top of its head, and a small mean ear which twitches at flies whether they’re there or not.

‘Here’s what we’re going to do,’ he says, calmly. ‘We’re going to stand like this, perfectly still, till that thing moves off, OK?’ Neither Judy nor Freya say anything. ‘OK?’ he repeats.

‘Yes,’ Judy says, formally.

‘Right. Are you scared?’ he asks Freya.

‘No,’ she whispers, lying.

‘Neither am I.’

It’s ridiculous, to be standing like this, like scalded children, while this animal makes a blustery show of strength. Or territory, who knows. Keep your sodding field, he thinks, glad to discover some anger, but knowing also the world has reduced effortlessly in a matter of minutes to a few simple truths, just this field, and around him the intricate details of things that are no use - the grass and twigs under the oak tree - the dried tops of last year’s acorns, the patches of bare soil. A busy sense of nature which is indifferent and safe and nothing to do with him any more. Beyond that, the field itself, curving up a small rise towards a thin and distant hedgerow. It’s not a large field, but they’re a good three minutes run from any edge of it, slower if he’s carrying Freya, and there could easily be boggy patches that might be disastrous. The field’s like a desert, he thinks, an open space, exposed and dangerous, and the hedgerows around it are the borders to another country entirely - a country where he can make a thousand decisions and has all the time in the world to make them. He lets his thoughts run, hoping they might quarry a solution, then consciously he forces himself to think calmly, without panic. How did the horse get in here, he wonders, how did it just manage to appear like that on the small patch of dirt, and he has an unsettling vision of how it must have been, a few minutes ago, the stallion trotting noisily across the field, its hair shaking with the movement, while they’d been looking at the droplet of water, while Judy had been reading her poem. And while he’s imagining this he spots a five-bar gate on the brow of the field which is clearly half-open and leaning as if it’s come off its hinges.
The gate’s open
, he mouths to himself.

‘Daddy,’ Freya says, a little too loudly, ‘is it a pony or a horse?’

‘It’s a stallion.’

Perhaps there’s a mare and foal beyond that gate, on the other side of the hedge - it’s possible. Maybe the mare is afraid of them approaching the foal and the stallion is trying to warn them off? Who knows? It feels plausible, in a moment full of uncertainties. He doesn’t even know how long they’ve been standing here. Probably just a minute or two. But Judy’s reached her limit.

‘Let’s go,’ she says.

‘Judy,’ he answers, ‘it’s going to move off, you know, it’s going to get bored. We’re doing nothing to bother it.’

But at that moment the horse seems to drop a shoulder and lurch forward, stumbling into movement in fast trotting steps, beginning a steady jog which runs alongside the brook and turns into a wide curve towards them. Judy pulls at his arm, fixing herself to him, and Freya twists behind them, hiding, almost tripping him up as he takes a step back. It’s moving too quickly. His mind freezes, staring at the ridge of coarse hair, shaking with each step along its spine. At the random pattern of splattered mud across its back, at the heavy sense of muscle bending along its side, details, he’s trying to take it in, trying to work it out, when suddenly it stops, as abruptly as it started, mistrust in its every move, on the edge of the marshy grass, its stilt-like hooves sinking, readjusting, making puncture holes in the ground that fill immediately with dirty water.

Judy swears, pulling him and Freya back as she does so, towards the oak tree.

‘Let’s get behind that trunk,’ she says, practically, and he knows that’s what they have to do and he has the unsettling image of the three of them, trying to skirt the big tree while that horse comes at them, and all three of them tripping up on each other and tripping up on those big roots he can see sticking out along the ground. It’s full of its own perils.

‘I’m not sure,’ he says. He takes a quick look at her expression, gauging it, and sees how dark and intense her eyes have become, her face is as sharp as an axe head. She’s not to be disagreed with. But just as they have started to move they all immediately stop, reacting on instinct to a new series of actions from the horse. A tossing and throwing of its head, its lips pulled back to reveal a dirty set of wide flat teeth. He sees strands of saliva falling from the mouth, the bumps of skin above, around the nostrils. Nostrils flaring in dark holes like the barrels of a gun, and he realizes he’s seeing these things in more detail now, because the animal is closer, much closer.

Freya is twisting in his grip, doing the wrong thing, he looks at her shoes so clumsily placed in the soil, oddly turned. He imagines her running, how ineffective it would be, and he hopes the horse might tire or trip off to another edge of the field. Just a show of strength. Protecting its foal and family. A show of strength. And at that moment the stallion decides to come at them, dropping its shoulder like it did before but this time directed towards them, head on, in a stamping, bucking trot which shakes the horse as it gathers pace. It slews one way and for a second moves sideways at them, as if approaching a fence, its dark brittle hooves rising in uncertain steps - but still closing the distance, the horse snorting loudly and Guy sees its lips peeled back once more as it swings its head and neck from side to side. One crazed eye looks at him, then the other, afraid, but compelled to act. The head lowers in three sudden movements and he hears Freya scream and knows she’s frozen. They all have. But with the scream he knows this is really happening - this is the beginning of a chain of events. They hear the hooves punching the wet mud and then the eerily hollow sound as it gallops across the dried earth under the tree, beneath the tree which until that point had been their tree, their protected patch of earth.