Evie Wyld: All the Birds, Singing

‘There’s something in here,’ I whisper, though whispering is pointless against Greg’s noise.

‘What something?’ He examines his palm for blood from his nose and then feels for the spot I ripped his hair from. ‘Fuckin’ needed that,’ he says.

‘Under the workbench, something big.’ He looks up at me, his expression changes.

‘How big?’

I’m feeling under the bed for the hammer. I can’t find it in the dark. Greg lifts himself off the bed and gives his head a small shake to clear it. He goes lightly over to the switch and turns it on. The strobing of the strip light does nothing but throw shadows.

‘Like a big dog.’

The strobe settles, but there are still shadows and places to hide. The workbench is covered by a blue oilcloth which hangs down and hides the space under it. Greg picks up the metal pipe that leans against the wall. I’m glad that he kept his underwear on — I think, This would be so much worse if he was naked. I have made his nose bleed, but he ignores it, lets it flow down on to his lip, while he holds the pole with both hands like a cricket bat. He treads carefully and slowly towards the workbench, his eyes dart around finding new shadows. The hair on the back of my neck prickles. I try not to think of Kelly, or picture Otto outside holding a gun, watching. Holding his cut-throat. He will shoot Greg then he will do me slowly; Kelly will snap at the air by my face as she watches me die. He will cut off my hand and give it to her as a prize. Kelly is dead , I think, but the thought is not a comfort.

I take the corner of the oilskin in my fingers, look to Greg who raises his arms, ready to strike if something runs out. He tells me with a nod of three to lift it, and I make my own countdown and jerk the cover up. Under the workbench, there is nothing. Greg lets his arms fall at his sides and the metal pipe clangs on the floor.

‘Jesus,’ he says, ‘if you weren’t in the mood you just had to say.’

I look at him to see if this is a joke, but I can’t tell.

Later, when he sleeps next to me, I get up out of bed and, careful not to wake him, I pull on a shirt and some shorts, and leave the shed. It is cooler out; I concentrate on breathing, sucking the cool air in, blowing the hot air out. The night sky is crisp with stars and I sit on the fence, listening to the cicadas and the night birds, the bandicoots and rats and all the live things that are out there, breathing with me. Not far away, the sheep are a dense and silent cluster. I feel the pull of being alone, of answering to no one, the safety of being unknown and far away. I sense a small movement behind me and turn just in time to see a shadow in the doorway of the shed. But it’s Greg, I know his shape, and he doesn’t want me to have seen him, and I don’t want him to have seen me, and when I get back to bed an hour later, he feigns sleep and I feign sleep too and soon we are both asleep. In the morning he looks closely at my face.

‘Jesus,’ he says, ‘you look like you’ve been plugged in both eyes.’

Inside, the police station smelled of tomato soup. A ponytailed policewoman stood behind the reception desk beaming.

‘Hello and how may I help you today, madam?’ she said, and then flushed a bit. I’d parked opposite the police station, thinking I’d sit for a while and figure out what I was going to say, but once I’d put the handbrake on, faces appeared at the window of the station. I tried not to look at them, tried to move in the same way and at the same speed I would have if no one was watching, but I’d forgotten how. My arms felt overly long, and as I crossed the empty road, my bum had more control over my legs than it normally did, and I sashayed stupidly up the steps to the entrance.

I thought about the evidence I had. I would be calm and clear. I reran the day before in my head looking for things to report when I was asked, Had you noticed anything unusual?

It had been forecast to snow by the early evening, but my sheep had been unmoved by the news, standing against each other, eyeing me as I moved between them and sprayed their feet for rot. By the time I’d finished, say 3.30, Dog had rolled in goose shit and the wind had picked up, throwing pebbles of water at my face. I walked down the hill into the sea wind, due south. It was cold, a few dead leaves clung to the beech trees. Dog barrelled ahead of me at the perimeter of the woods, black even against the matt darkness of the trees, his ears pricked; he was swallowed by it, sending up a fire of blackbirds, who called loudly and then resettled in other trees, ruffling their feathers and shaking their heads. It would be an early hare, and Dog would have no chance at catching it, would appear back in ten minutes pink-tongued and tired, with a mudded undercarriage.

I looked for strange prints and droppings or hair caught on fences, but all I found was a collection of buzzard pellets. I put my hands in my pockets and felt the grit of them, like compact animals themselves, their leg bones folded into their grey feathery bodies, and my fingers worried them to dust as I walked.

I had stopped at the stile that led onto the bridleway, in the shelter of the hawthorn shrubs that separated the top field from the bottom, and which stretched all the way down to the coastal path. If you stood on the stile you could see the woods in the bottom field, and my cottage, its two storeys looking squat against the slope of the downs. I smoked a cigarette. Down in the bottom field, one of the ewes ate from where the grass was still darkened from the dead sheep. They didn’t hold a grudge, sheep.

On the ground at the foot of the stile was a scattering of cigarette butts. Not the kind I smoked — these ones were filterless and the ends had been chewed until they were flat and mulched. I counted seven of them at my feet.

‘Bastard kids,’ I’d said to Dog. I smoked to the end of my cigarette and ground it out on the stile where there was a black mark that the other smoker had made with theirs. I collected the stubs and tucked them all into the empty end of my matchbox. We headed down the bridleway and onto the beach as the sun was starting to go down behind the clouds.

There was a rumble that could have been thunder, and Dog lowered to the ground and then stood up again and looked at me. ‘It’s not my fault,’ I had told him. He accepted this and carried on fossicking in the razor grass where he usually found something that had dragged itself there to die. There was no way of knowing how long my sheep had lived for, how far she had dragged herself before she died, what she saw.

We’d walked the length of the little bay quickly, and I emptied my pockets of the dust of bones and hair. In the last of the light we went back up the hill with the wind behind us.

The crows roosted in the trees like unopened buds. My stomach growled and I thought of the chicken I’d bought at the weekend. I should stew it, but that would take time; more likely I’d flatten it with a fist and put it in the oven and eat it with bread as soon as it was done.

I rounded the bend of the pathway and stopped dead. A man stood in the shelter of the hedge with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, staring straight ahead. He had a silk scarf wrapped around the bottom half of his face, and wore a suit. His hair was plastered to his head and he had a polythene bag hanging around his wrist. I kept walking as if I hadn’t seen him, but clenched my fists until my knuckles clicked. I could smell him, like old vegetables. We walked home quickly, the thought of the chicken gone. Dog let out a low growl, but kept close to me.

‘Fucking kids,’ I said again, to myself, just to have something to say. I’d tried not to run. I went home and loaded my gun. I looked at the phone and bolted the door.