“It’s going to die this afternoon,” Stacey said, watching me for a reaction. “I heard the farmer. They’re going to put it down.”
“Why?” I stepped closer to the animal. Its ears twitched, but it continued to stare into nothing.
Stacey shrugged. “It’s old.”
“Has it got a name?” I reached my hand out tentatively, touching the donkey’s muzzle. Long gray hairs prickled my hand.
“I think it’s called Billy,” she said, climbing the fence and prodding the donkey’s flank with a stick. His tail swished angrily. He was chewing slowly, his lower lip working up and down, wobbling gently. A fat strip of hay dangled from between his teeth. I touched the edge of it as it trembled in his velvet mouth, and his lips caressed my fingers. How could such an old mouth be so soft?
“Will it...will it hurt him?”
“Nah, it’s quick. One shot to his brain and he’ll be gone, none the wiser.”
“Shot? They...they shoot him?” Putting down suggested a gentle collapsing of limbs. I had imagined the vet’s hand laid on the animal’s side until he bent his aged legs and lay, quietly, asleep. Shooting, on the other hand, was violent and loud: an angry death.
“Can’t they give him some medicine to make him go to sleep instead?”
“Not something this big. They have to get them right here, between the eyes.” She formed her hand into a gun shape and touched her fingertips to Billy’s forehead. He blinked. “Got to get the brain. Don’t worry. He won’t know what’s happening.”
But I will, I thought.
Her warm, slightly sticky hand pushed its way into mine, and I looked up to see her looking into my eyes. “It’s the kindest thing, Romilly,” she said, squeezing my hand. “Are you okay? Mum says sometimes I go a bit far.”
I sniffed, wiping my nose on my sleeve, and nodded.
“Good, ’cause you’re my friend and I don’t ever want to upset you.”
I smiled and squeezed her hand back.
“I’m going to come and watch. If I ask, they might let me hold him while they do it.” Stacey’s eyes glittered. “Do you want to come?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head vehemently as I looked into his huge, treacle eye. The whole of the farmland behind me was reflected in it, stained brown like an underwater world. I could see my own tear-filled eyes reflected there too. Billy had stopped chewing. He was looking at me. Carefully I pulled the blade of hay from his mouth and tucked it into my pocket. His warm, sweet breath lingered with me all the way home, and it wasn’t until I was curled up in bed that I realized Stacey hadn’t told me where she’d been all summer.
* * *
A week later, I opened the back door of Braër House, and even from this far away I could see something had changed down in the meadow. In the gray dusk, a tall pole stretched up to the sky. It was moving slowly, like the pendulum of a clock.
I ran to the meadow. Close-up, the pole was bent slightly like a giant tusk. Dad was standing next to it, gazing upward, his face sweaty and earth covered. I watched for a moment, then backed away, not sure I wanted him to know I had been there.
Over the next few weeks, as the leaves turned yellow and red and began to fall from the trees, more giant metal structures appeared in the meadow: great swinging pieces that whorled and swung above your head in the slightest of breezes. Some resembled animals and birds; others were strange collections of metal that looked lighter than paper when they skimmed the grass.
“What are they, Dad?” I finally asked, staring up at the huge structures apprehensively one evening.
“They’re mobiles,” he said.
“What are they for?”
“They’re not really for anything. They just are. You mustn’t go in there, Romilly, not without me. They’re dangerous. They could flatten you in an instant.”
I nodded, staring in awe at the huge mobiles. I wasn’t sure if they were the sort of thing that could fix the boiler or feed us more than jacket potatoes and beans, but I was happy Dad was busy. I couldn’t wait to show Stacey.
Chapter Six
Dad was watching the weather forecast. A man named Michael Fish was gazing sternly out of the television.
“Earlier today, apparently a woman rang the BBC and said there was a hurricane on the way. Well, if you’re watching, don’t worry, there isn’t.”
“Well that’s good,” said Dad, looking out nervously toward his mobiles. They were whirring noisily, racketing along in the dark. “Should have fitted a braking system,” he mumbled. “Hindsight, hindsight.”
“A girl at school said there’s been a sighting of a panther near the village,” I said, peering out of the window at the dark garden. The nights were closing in earlier now. Soon it would be bonfire night, and then the run up to Christmas would begin.
“I don’t envy it out there tonight,” Dad said, pulling the curtain closed so I was hidden behind it. I leaned my forehead on the glass so I could see through my reflection, expecting to find a huge cat curled up in the grass outside, meek as a domestic tabby.
“She said it escaped from the circus in the summer.”
“That’s odd,” Dad said. “I didn’t see one when we went, did you?”
I shook my head. “Are they dangerous?”
“Could be. Probably not for adults, but maybe little children...”
“I bet it couldn’t eat a whole one.”
“No, but it could split you down the middle with its sharp claws and siphon off your insides.” He picked me up, unraveling me from the curtain and hefting me over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift.
“Now, a boa constrictor—that could swallow you whole. You’d be stuck in his stomach, shouting to get out, his digestive juices working overtime to dissolve your bones.”
We were halfway up to my bedroom now. On the landing, Dad tipped me off his huge shoulders and we climbed up my little staircase.
Up in my bedroom it was even wilder.
“It’s like being at sea, this,” Dad said, nodding appreciatively at the flurry of wind. It felt as if the whole room were rocking gently. The usual chorus of starlings in the eaves was silent, as if they were listening too.
“Batten down the hatches.” He grinned, pulling the curtains together. They lifted gently, the wind forcing its way through the cracks in the frames.
I had a moment of panic. “I will be okay up here, won’t I?”
Dad chuckled, sitting down on the bed next to me and pulling our game of chess toward him. We had been playing the same game for months now. Most nights I came to bed and found Dad had made his move while I’d been away. Dad studied the pieces.