Nicola Barker - Wide Open

She barged into Lily’s room. The bed, on top of it, under it. The dresser. The chest of drawers. Underwear, T-shirts, socks, a rabbit pelt, little skulls, feathers, a lipstick, a knife. Her bookshelf. On the shelf? Between the books? Inside them? Nothing, nothing, nothing.

She went downstairs and sat on a small milking stool stationed between the front door and the phone. She struggled to control her breathing. When the phone rang she pounced on it.

“Hello?”

“Hi. It’s me. I’m going to be late back. Tell Mum, will you?”

Lily’s voice. Utterly unrepentant.

Connie exploded.

“You stole my letters, didn’t you? I want them back, Lily. I want them right back.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Lily sounded sincerely confounded.

“It’s theft!” Connie was almost yelling, virtually hysterical. “And they were my father’s letters. They were his letters. They were his .”

“You’re weird. Go fuck yourself.”

Dialling tone.

“Whose letters?”

Connie looked up, startled. Sara was standing in the doorway. She looked pale and her hair was scuffed up wildly, like two rooks fighting over her moon of a face. She turned and slammed the door behind her. There was grass stuck in the knit of her jumper.

Connie still held the receiver in her hand. For some reason she felt guilty. She placed it down, gently, as though it were a string of pearls she’d just considered stealing. “Uh…,” she cleared her throat, “that was Lily. She said she’d be late home…”

“Good,” Sara smiled, somewhat lopsidedly, then she frowned, “or is it good?”

Her speech was slurred. She looked around her, beetle-browed and scowling, then located the light switch on the wall and flicked it up. The hallway was suddenly brightly illuminated. She blinked. “It wasn’t dark yet, was it?” she asked bemusedly, then bent down and peered through the letterbox.

“It’s probably just rain clouds,” Connie said, standing, “making everything seem grey.”

Sara straightened up and then slouched against the wall, letting her one shoulder support her body weight. “You smell of straw,” Connie muttered, trying vainly to establish herself again.

Sara nodded. “Hops. Beer and teacakes. Yeast. I’m allergic so my body tries really hard at first to expel it. I break out in a sweat and then end up stinking like a bale of hay.”

“You’ve been drinking?” Connie asked.

“Stay there,” Sara mumbled, distractedly, not answering Connie’s enquiry, “and don’t move.”

She pushed herself away from the wall and staggered off into the sitting room. She was gone for several minutes. Connie remained where she was, somewhat perplexed, until Sara re-emerged clutching a shotgun and a fistful of bullets. She propped herself up against the door frame while she laboriously loaded one into the other.

Connie watched, impassively. Sara kept the gun pointed at the floor.

“Safety precaution,” she muttered, half to herself.

Connie didn’t like the gun. “What’s this all about?” she asked, and her voice sounded strangely little.

Sara looked up. “Have you been out there lately?” she whispered, inclining her head towards the front door.

“Out where?”

“Out there.”

“Of course. Earlier.”

“And you didn’t notice anything?”

“No. Nothing in particular.”

Sara rubbed her fist against her forehead. “The thing is,” she said, her voice growing louder again, “I was seeing stuff too clearly. I was all smug and contented and hopeful . I mean this morning. Last night. Then everything went downhill, slightly, and I suddenly felt like I didn’t really want to see things clearly any more. So I went to the pub and had a few drinks. Self-pity. But it didn’t work. It never does…”

She inspected the gun. “Uh…” she sniffed.

“So what did you see,” Connie prompted, eventually, “outside?”

She was hoping for clues to her own small mystery, but stupidly.

Sara closed her eyes and spoke slowly. “On the road,” she said quietly, “close to the electric fence. A thing in the road. A little, dark thing…” She shuddered. She opened her eyes again. “Then I blinked and it was gone. But everything was so quiet, suddenly. No sounds. The hen coop was right close to where I was standing. And I’m so familiar with their chatter. But there was none. No chatter. So I went to the hens. I have hens…” she lost her drift and then found it again, “in a pen. That rhymes. And they were all dead. Ten hens. All dead. None were missing. No sign of a forced entry or a struggle. No feathers. But blood. Dark. A little river of it. Like a strange…a very ugly…like a kind of silent rebuke .”

Sara shook her head, rapidly, as though she had water in her ears and longed to expel it. “Afterwards I ran back towards the boar enclosures in a sort of panic. And the fence was down. And the electric wire too, inside it…”

She shuddered. “Oh God! The fence was down. It was down !”

Connie struggled not to be infected by Sara’s mood. “But you knew that already,” she said gently, “didn’t you? You went out to get wire to fix it only yesterday.”

“Nope.” Sara shook her head. “That’s the whole point. I was with Luke yesterday. You saw me there. You did see me?”

“Yes.”

“And there was actually nothing wrong with the fence. I lied.”

Sara finished loading the gun. She took a deep breath. “The big male’s gone,” she said calmly. “He’ll probably be nearby, and he’s dangerous. So we’ll need this.” She held up the firearm.

“What will you do?”

“I’ll find him. I’ll shoot him. He couldn’t get back into the enclosure now even if he wanted to. I’ve had to put the electric wire back up again to stop the rest of them from scarpering.”

“Shall I come with you?”

“Yes. Once we’ve rung the police.”

Connie felt a moment’s unease. “The police?”

“They’ll need to contact the locals and warn them…”

Connie’s mind turned to Jim and to Ronny.

“But he can’t have gone all that far yet, can he?”

“No,” Sara hesitated, “you’re right. When they get out they just tend to panic. They’re actually very homely. Unless…” she paused, “unless he thinks he smells a female in the vicinity, or if he gets a whiff of what he takes to be a rival male…”

Sara walked to the front door and pulled it open. “You’ve got a point though,” she ruminated, “this whole mess does make me look like a total incompetent.”

“An hour,” Connie murmured, “we could give it an hour.”

Sara rolled her shoulders back. “But we’d have to prioritize. We’d need to take some positive action before dark.”

Connie peered over Sara’s shoulder, bleakly. The sky was huge and it was already darkening.

“Was it him, then?” she asked softly. “Who?”

“Was it him that killed the hens, him on the road?” Sara smiled, rubbing the palm of her hand against the butt of her gun with a weirdly regretful luxuriousness. “No,” she said finally. “No. It wasn’t him.”

Luke was pacing. He had a sheet of negatives in his hand which he kept holding up to the electric light on the living room ceiling and inspecting. He could see, uh, Sara’s arse, her elbow, but small and blotchy and muted. Even so, quite well taken. Encapsulated . He threw himself down on to the sofa.

“A real pornographer.”

He spoke out loud, too loudly, like an old-fashioned headmaster during school assembly. What did it mean? She’d said it like she approved of it. Well, almost. What did she mean? His fingers were twitching. He wanted a smoke. A drink. Old vices.