Gliff

The back garden lawn was a steep slant of grass tipped up on its side like a sinking ship.

There were stone slabs, then at the end of them this wedge of grass so steep it was like the world had upended.

At the top of it was an overgrown hedge and a lot of ivy.

But there was a gap in this hedge and footholds in the grassy slant that led to the gap so I worked my way up it and bent myself low enough to squeeze through, out on to the surprise of a public footpath. It was the paved kind with a line of grass running up the middle of it. Across this, across a busy traffic road and across another scrubland, my sister in the distance, I knew her by her clothes, was perched up on one of the struts of a wooden fence and leaning over its top.

When I got there she turned to me and her face was full of happiness.

Look at what there is so close to where we live! she said.

I climbed up on to the fence too.

Seven horses, small and large, all the colours of horse, beautiful and mangy, were drifting their noses across grass and ripping it with their teeth from the ground making a sound I’d never heard before.

Can we go and get some of our food and give them it? she said.

Horses don’t eat food that comes in tins, I said. What do they eat? she said.

Grass, I said, and other stuff. Not tinned stuff.

She jumped back down off the fence and scrambled about pulling handfuls of the longer grass on our side of it. She got back up on the fence and held it out with both her hands.

Two of the horses lifted their heads, a broad dark brown one with a white stripe down its nose and a smaller grey-coloured one. She waved the grass at them. The grey one came over. Its head moved up and down as it walked and I realized that though we’d seen horses in books and on TV and passed quite close to them abroad, blinkered and sweating and pulling decorated carriages carrying tourists through traffic, I’d truly never been this near a freed-up horse. 

I’d never smelled one either. The smell was deep and hearty and unlike anything I knew.

The grey horse’s bones were close to its skin all over it and it seemed huge even though it was quite a small horse, the smallest one in this field. It moved with laidback strength and with a real weightiness though it wasn’t weighty at all, it was as spare as a bare tree. It stopped close to my sister leaning towards it over the fence. Flies hung around its head, landed on its forehead, a strangely flattened place, the horsehair on it under its forelock going in a whorl like it was marking an important place on a horse.

It had a line of lighter grey jagged like lightning down its nose and the flies round its head kept landing near its eye, maybe for a drink because the eye shone like a liquid source.

The eye was shocking.

It was really beautiful.

You could see light in its dark, and it also had in it, both at once, two things I had never seen together in one place, gentleness, and – what?

Politeness? Indifference? Distance?

I won’t know the word for it till now, years after, right this minute, walking to wherever in the dark and permitting myself to think back to the moment I first ever saw, so close to my own eyes, any horse’s, this horse’s, eye.

The word is equanimity.

My sister was holding the grass out in her two clenched fists. The horse stood. It waited. Then it nudged one of her arms with its long face and nosed the back of her hand round and down.

Oh, she said. Oh. Right.

She opened her hand and it took the grass, the horse took it!

She did the same with her other hand open even flatter. It took it. It watched us while it ate it with its big loose jaw moving.

The smell of the grass getting eaten filled the air round us with a strange sweetness.

*

We had an argument back at the house about whether or not giving a horse in a field some grass to eat for the first time made this the kind of day we could open one of the creamed rice tins for breakfast.

I can’t believe you’re saying no when we can do what we like, there is nobody here to stop us and it’s what I want and choose to eat, my sister said.

Her happiness had started to annoy me. So I said, I can’t believe you’re being so profligate already. Being so what? she said.

Profligate, I said.

You are bullying me with words longer than the length of my life, she said.

It’s not my problem if you don’t know what words mean, I said.

What I know is we just had the best thing happen to us that we’ve had happen to us for weeks, she said, probably one of the best things that will happen for ages.

There are only four tins of creamed rice, I said. So? she said.

So we have to ration them, I said. Why? she said.

Because we agreed that we’d keep them for the best days, I said.

Yeah and this is one of the best mornings in my whole life! she said.

But not simultaneously one of mine, I said and felt churlish and superior as I said it.

I simultaneously hate you, she said.

And I find you unsupportive and insupportable, I said.

You are so up yourself, she said.

You don’t know what that phrase really means, I said.

Yes I do, she said.

And you always have to have the last word, I said. No I don’t, she said.

Any other time she’d have realized that what she was doing, saying that, was having the last word and she’d have burst out laughing and so would I and something would have given way between us.

Today for some reason that didn’t happen. What did happen was that neither of us ate anything at all that morning for breakfast. She went upstairs. 

I thought she was making for the rice tins so I followed her but she didn’t even look at them, went straight to our duffelcoats instead and sat on both of them mounded up, pulling the legs out of her doll and marching the legless torso up and down the mounds of duffel singing something to herself or to it.

I stood in the doorway with my face solemn.

I’m going out, I said. There’s several important things I have to do. I’m delegating the looking-after of this house to you till I get back and I need you to be responsible. Do you hear me?

She carried on singing as if I wasn’t there.

Right, I said. I’m going now. I’m going to lock the doors. You are now solely responsible till I get back.

She carried on singing.

Be quiet. Be quieter, I said.

She stopped for a moment and looked right at me. All her ways of listening to music were lost now back in our old house. I felt bad. But I went downstairs anyway. As I went, her singing started up again and got louder and angrier and by the time I pulled the front door towards me to double lock it I could hear her charging about in the upstairs front room sing-shouting and dancing a thumping dance on the bare boards.

I went the same way round the corner that Leif had gone and walked down one of the roads we’d taken yesterday.

I was hungry. But there was no way I was going to break into our cash for something as dilettante as breakfast for myself when we had tins we were meant to eat from that I could open when I got home.

Whenever we were hungry our mother’d say ah but wait and I’ll make us all something very grand.

You took two slices of bread and you buttered them. You took two spring onions and you removed the sprout ends and the very ends of the green bits. If the onion wasn’t clean you could also slit into it and slip off its top coat. Then you chopped the rest up quite fine. You sprinkled the chopped onions on one of the slices of bread and added salt and pepper then put the other slice on top and cut the whole thing into four.

Now I was thinking about what a spring onion sandwich tasted like, tangy and buttery at once.

We can’t solve it. But we can still salve it.

That was something else our mother’d say.

When I got back to our old house I’d look for and bring my sister her earbuds and the old player she played her music with.

If they were still there.

If whoever was in there now, if anyone was, hadn’t sold them or wasn’t using them in their own ears.