Evie Wyld - All the Birds, Singing

Lloyd’s leg peeped out of its towel again, flexing. He leant his head on his arm so that I saw his armpit. I went to the cupboard and found a dressing gown Don had also left behind. I put it on the side of the sofa.

‘You can wear this,’ I said and went back to the stove.

‘Lovely,’ he said and when I turned around he was tying it up, his wet hair now done up with the towel in a turban. The dressing gown had belonged to Don’s wife, I assumed. It had a trail of daisies down both lapels and a trim of cartoon mice. Lloyd sat down a little more carefully and he said, ‘Very nice,’ quietly to himself.

The time passed slowly.

‘Would you like a drink?’ I blinked at myself.

‘If it’s not too much of an imposition,’ he said, ‘that would be so lovely.’

I poured him some whisky and he held his glass with both hands as he lifted it to his mouth.

I sat at the kitchen table and he sat on the sofa and every now and then he sighed in a way that was supposed to seem like the start of a conversation. We drank our whisky; I drank mine quickly because every time the silence became uncomfortable, I took another sip.

‘So,’ he said eventually, ‘I suppose you’re wondering what I’m doing up here?’

I didn’t reply, just watched him. He shuffled forward and put his glass down on the floor next to his foot. ‘Look,’ he said in a tone that was too warm and comforting for my liking, ‘I just thought it might make you feel a little odd that I just turned up.’ His voice went up at the end, like he had an accent I hadn’t noticed before. I sat up straight.

‘Where are you from?’ I said, with more aggression than the question needed. He frowned.

‘Originally?’

‘Are you from Australia?’

‘Barnsley. My mother’s from Stockton, my father from Leeds. I grew up in Barnsley. I live in London.’ And the accent was gone, just a trick of my ear. I settled back down in my chair. There was a silence. ‘And you — obviously — are from Australia.’ And then it came: ‘What brought you to the island?’

‘Sheep.’

‘Oh?’ he said in a way that meant I was supposed to carry on talking. Instead I got up and poured another drink. After a second’s thought I decided it was more out of the ordinary and awkward not to pour him one too, so I refilled his glass. He looked up and smiled. Drink made men dark but it also made them sloppy. I added water to mine.

The stew had cooked too long and stuck to the pot. I put two bowlfuls out on the table with the bread.

Lloyd took the towel off his head and shook out his hair, which dried into waves, grey around his ears.

I searched for a moment for a bread knife and remembered it was still upstairs.

‘I’m out of knives for the time being,’ I said, ‘so you’ll have to tear the bread, and spread butter with the back of a spoon.’ Lloyd nodded like this was not unusual.

It’s so hot I feel as though I’ll bloat up and explode like a dead possum, and after checking the sheep, I find myself on my bike, with wind through my hair. The feeling that Otto won’t know exactly where to find me takes hold and I keep going. I cycle into the mirage, can feel the sun flaying my back and shoulders, the lids of my eyes, but it’s worth it to feel like I’m en route to something. I imagine finding a waterhole that’s not dried up in the drought; I think over and over, I’ll just ride to the end of this mirage, but there’s nothing here. I don’t know how long I’ve been gone, but I become aware of the heat in a new way. Thirst comes and then goes again. The mirage is replaced by black and red stars. All I want to do is keep going, if it takes a week of riding, if the sun kills me, I want to be at the coast, I want to open my eyes in the water to see the deep cool nothing below the surface and to let the tide take me where it likes. Away.

I come off the bike when I hit a rock, and it throws me over the handlebars. Apart from skin off my knees and hands, I’m fine, but it’s hard to get up. There’s a shrub that casts a small shadow and I wheel myself over to it, and slump there. There is salt on my lips, I am thirsty and burnt, but not unhappy. I lie there and watch a whistler high up, riding the hot air, and I imagine it is a seagull and I am in the bottom of a boat, jumping with sea lice. Karen is with me, we’re drinking Cokes and she’s got her fingers laced through mine. I will stay here, I think, I will pull up the anchor and lie in the hull of the boat and let it take me to wherever the centre is.

I walk down the corridor of my brain and don’t even look at the doors either side.

When I wake up, Otto is standing over me, his face a rage. He picks me up, puts me over his shoulder, and the feeling is of my sunburnt skin being pulled off. A taste of what it is like to be burnt, properly.

When I wake a second time, I am in my bed and Otto is feeding water into my mouth, and then he rubs cream into my back and over my face. ‘Bloody disgrace,’ I hear him say.

The next morning I have a fever and the room spins. Otto isn’t talking to me, just comes in with a sandwich now and again, stands over me till I eat it, until I am well again. When I feel well again, I come out of my bedroom in a towel and Otto is there in the living room watching the soaps. He doesn’t look at me.

‘Well,’ he says to the TV, ‘the princess awakes.’

‘I got lost,’ I say.

‘Got lost in a straight line? That’d take some doing.’

‘I was looking for a waterhole,’ but while I’m trying to think up a story, my eyes catch on something out the front of the house, and I trail off. My bike is lying on its side, wrecked. It has been driven over repeatedly, squashed flat into the ground.

‘My bike,’ is all I can say.

Otto looks at me. ‘I didn’t see it,’ he says, and he doesn’t even try to make me believe him.

Later that night, I am in my room and he unlocks my door, lies down next to me and wants sex, but I don’t want anything to do with him. I am angry and I push him away.

‘What’s this?’ he asks.

‘I don’t want to.’

‘You sulking?’ I don’t reply. ‘You’re lucky I don’t beat the hell out of you with the back of a brush, girly,’ he says and stands up. From the doorway he says, ‘You don’t fool me.’ And then he slams the door and makes a point of locking it noisily. I hear him go to the living room and put the TV on. The fridge door closes and shakes the house.

In the morning, he greets me with a grim look in his eye.

‘Low on meat,’ is all he says and takes me by the wrist to the truck, where Kelly is already waiting, panting with excitement. We drive out to the sheep and from the back of the truck he brings a heavy black canvas bag. I think about the shoe under the house. The earring in the woolshed. The things Kelly finds to eat in the tall dry grass.

Otto grips a ewe with a dreadful kind of strength I haven’t seen before — like he’s been keeping his muscles in hibernation until this point. It is different from the strength he uses when he is shearing — it’s cruel, like he wants her to know what’s coming. He swings her up the ramp in front of him, and she gives out a terrible sound, and I stand there outside the woolshed, mute. Kelly is also silent; she crouches low to the ground by Otto’s side, slinking here and there with those cloudy eyes and a look of a snake about her. The rest of the sheep have their ears forward and are backed into the far corner of the pen. One by one , they must be thinking, and I tackle the urge to kick down the fence and tell them to flee. They will only stand there. From where I am, I can see into the woolshed, the hook with its dark stain beneath it.