Lisa Ballantyne - Guilty One

‘There you are, pet. You hungry?’

She was dragging a pail of animal feed into the hall.

‘I’ll make us some porridge and then I’ll show you round. Show you your jobs. We all have jobs to do around here.’

Daniel frowned at her. She talked as if she had a large family, but it was only her and the animals.

Minnie made porridge and cleared a space on the table so they could eat. She made a strange sound when she was eating, as if she was breathing it in. After she swallowed, she would make a tutting sound in appreciation of the taste. The noise distracted Daniel and so she finished first.

‘There’s more if you want it, pet.’

Again, he said that he was full.

‘Fine then. Let’s go to it. You don’t have wellies, do you?’

He shook his head.

‘It’s all right, I have pretty much all sizes. Come on.’

Outside, she opened the shed and he stepped inside. It smelled of damp earth. Along one wall was a row of rubber boots, large and small, just as she had said. There were ten or twelve pairs in all. Some were baby-sized and then there was a pair of giant, man-sized, green wellington boots.

‘Are these all the kids you’ve taken in?’ he asked, as he tried a pair on.

‘And then some,’ she said, bending over to tidy up one or two that had fallen on their sides. When she bent over, her skirt rode up at the back to expose her white calves.

‘How long have you been fostering then?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, love. Must be more than ten years now.’

‘D’you get sad when the kids leave?’

‘Not if they’re going to happy places. One or two’ve got adopted by nice families.’

‘Sometimes you get to go back to yer mam, though …’

‘That’s right. Sometimes, if it’s for the best.’

His boots were a little too big, but they would do. He followed Minnie as she entered the chicken run and then the shed at the top. The inside smelled of pee. Birds clucked at his feet and he thought of kicking them away, as he did with pigeons in the park, but he stopped himself.

‘I look after Hector,’ she said. ‘He’s old and he can be a bit bad-tempered. I do him as soon as I get up. Your job is to feed the chickens and to look for eggs. It’s the most important job here.

Hector’s there just ’cause I love ’im, but I make money from the chickens. I’ll show you how to feed them and then we can look for eggs. It’s easy, you’ll catch on and then you can do that every morning before school. That’ll be your job.’

The run stretched back for fifty yards. Some of it was covered, but then the rest was open. Daniel watched her as she took handfuls of feed and sprinkled it along the run. She told him to try and so he copied her, scattering the feed.

‘That’s corn,’ she said. ‘The farmer two over gives it to me for a box of eggs. Not too much of it, mind. One or two handfuls is enough. They get the kitchen scraps and then there’s the grass and weeds that they like too. How many do we have here, do you think?’

‘ ’Bout forty,’ he said.

She turned and looked at Daniel in a strange way, her mouth open a little.

‘Well done, smarty-pants. We have thirty-nine. How could you tell that?’

‘Looks to be that many.’

‘All right, now while they’re busy eating, we go and look for the eggs. Take this …’ She handed Daniel a cardboard tray. ‘You can see where they’ve been sitting,’ she said. ‘See? Look, I got one here. Lovely big one that is.’

Daniel didn’t like the farm and her house, but he found that he liked this task. He felt a brisk thump of joy as he searched for and found the eggs. They were dirty, splattered with hen shit and stuck with feathers, but he liked the eggs. He didn’t want to break them, as he wanted to break the porcelain butterfly and kick the chickens. He kept one, secreting it inside his pocket. It was a small brown one, and he felt it still warm.

When they were finished, they counted the eggs. There were twenty-six. Minnie started to move about the yard, preparing Hector’s feed and talking to the chickens that clucked around her ankles. There was a fork against the wall and Daniel picked it up. It was almost too heavy for him, but he lifted it above his head like a weightlifter. It fell to the side.

‘Careful, love,’ she said.

Daniel bent and picked it up again. She was bent over, her massive skirted bottom in the air. Holding the fork near his head, he stepped forward and pricked her on the backside with it.

‘Here,’ she said, standing up suddenly. ‘Put-that-down.’ Her accent was funny, especially when she said words like ‘down’.

Daniel grinned back at her and wielded the fork, taking one step towards her and then another, the tip of the fork raised towards her face. Again, she didn’t back away from him.

Daniel felt a sudden jolt as his pelvis was smacked into his spinal column. He dropped the fork and then it came again. The goat rammed him a second time in the lower back and he went forward, falling on top of the fork, face into the mud. He got up right away and spun around, fists tight and ready for a fight. The goat lowered his head, so that Daniel could see the fine brown horns.

‘No, Danny,’ she said, taking him by the elbow and pulling him back. ‘Don’t! He’ll go through you like you wouldn’t believe. The old goat’s got a soft spot for me. He wouldn’t have liked what you did there. Just leave him, now. You get gored with one of those horns and that’ll be the end of you.’

Daniel allowed himself to be pulled away. He walked towards the house, moving sideways so that he was facing the goat. As he reached the doorstep, he stuck his tongue out at Hector. The goat charged again and Daniel ran into the house.

Minnie told Daniel to get washed and get ready to go out. He did as she asked, while she stood in the kitchen, washing the eggs and repacking them.

He washed his face in the bathroom and brushed his teeth, then crept to his bedroom. The egg was still whole in his pocket and he put it in the drawer by his bedside. He sat it on a glove and placed three socks around it, like a nest, to warm it, closed the drawer and was about to start downstairs, when, as an afterthought, he went back into the room and took his mother’s necklace from under his pillow and placed that in the nest too, right beside the egg. He checked his back and buttocks for scratches from the goat’s horns. He had grazes on both palms from when he fell.

Minnie was winding a pink woollen scarf around her neck. She was still wearing the same grey skirt and boots that she had worn the day before. On top of her long cardigan, she put on a green coat. It was too tight for her to button up, and so she went out like that, with it open and the pink scarf swinging.

Minnie said they were going to register Daniel at the local school and then they would buy him some new school clothes.

‘We’ll walk,’ she said, as they passed her car. It was a dark red Renault with spiders’ webs strung across the right-hand wing mirror. ‘Need to show you the way to school anyway, don’t I?’

Daniel shrugged and followed her.

‘I hate school,’ he told her. ‘I’ll only get kicked out. I always get kicked out.’

‘Well, if you have that attitude, I’m not surprised.’

‘You what?’

‘Think positively. If you do, you might just be surprised.’

‘Like think about me mam getting better and then she will?’

Minnie didn’t say anything. He was a pace behind her.

‘I wished that for years anyway and it never ’appened.’

‘Being positive’s different to wishing. What you’re talking about is just wishing.’

It was fifty feet from her house before they reached a proper path. Minnie told him it was a twenty-minute walk to school.