Chapter 11 #4
In time I got to know the Paddock intimately, as Blue, Yellow and Red (creatively named by Cat for the different colour of their head-harnesses) managed to buck me onto what felt like every square foot of it as Storm tried to teach me how to ride.
I didn’t end up much of a rider, but we did become better friends through doing it together, so it wasn’t wasted time.
Until it was. And for a while, when they weren’t tipping me off, they, or at least Red, was busy trying to bite me with one end or hoof me viciously with the other.
I began to suspect Devil’s bad influence working on her from the next-door field.
She did calm down eventually and we became friends, as much as a person and a horse can, but despite being what I think is a forgiving person, I always remembered the nipping and the kicking and felt the friendship could have come at a less bruising cost. But the learning to ride came later, once Storm and I made our deal, which was the lesser of the two deals we made with the girls.
From the start the horses liked the field and seemed happy there.
They weren’t escape artists like the goats were, and I expect they enjoyed the good grazing, clear water and long periods of not being ridden all over the countryside.
I remember those first often silent – and always uncomfortable – weeks the girls spent with us.
I remember trying to settle them in on that first night really clearly.
They were shocked and scared of everything, including us, it seemed.
None of that was surprising. They ate the hot food I eventually cooked when we gave it to them, but Cat noted they only did that after we had eaten some first. They were warier of me than Cat, but they definitely mistrusted both of us.
I just assumed they were more scared of me because I had killed the man and because of that they misunderstood and didn’t realise that Cat was the much tougher and – if it came to it – dangerous of us.
I’d acted on instinct, which is almost like acting by mistake because it happened without any thought.
Cat would have acted just as quickly if she’d been in my place with an arrow nocked and ready, the difference being she’d have thought fast enough to know it was the right thing to do before she fired.
My mind just ran slower, which of course doesn’t mean wronger: in fact it sometimes means righter.
Anyway, Cat stayed in what had been her corner of the Bunker and found dry clothes for them while I went and got the fire going in the hearth, making sure I kept out of the way because Cat said they were probably going to be shy about taking their clothes off in front of us.
She was right. And even when they did change, they stayed on the far side of the fire from me.
The dog, on the other hand, seemed to like me a lot.
Cat said that was because I bribed it with bits of food as I was cooking and she was probably right about that too, though I didn’t do that on purpose, and whatever the right or the wrong of it, that dog stuck with me until the end.
And the truth is that a part of her’s still with me now, all this time later, far, far away from that bunker that once was our home.
In a funny way I remember thinking that the dog stuck with me because the girls stuck with Cat, as if the dog felt I should have someone too.
Like out of a dog sense of fairness or something.
But now I know dogs better, I think that dog liked us all about the same amount and really did hang around me more because I always did most of the cooking and was likeliest to give it a treat.
At least at first. So I think Cat was right about that, the way that she was right about most things.
Later we were just friends, me and the dog.
She. Because we figured out it was a she even though we hadn’t seen a dog before.
I tried to make things easier for them that first night by bringing their stuff up from where they’d camped. I tentatively held out the yellow dinosaur to Freya, who looked at it, shook her head, took it and tossed it into the fire.
He gave it to her, said Storm.
He was a sick fuck, said Freya, staring at the smouldering toy as the fire caught. I hope he’s burning too.
Freya spoke a little to begin with, less after. She just took to sitting around lifelessly in the big leather coat that hung on her like a tent she hid in, armour against a world she didn’t like much but into which she’d fire little barbs of unpleasantness when she had the energy.
That first night she pointed at the dog and told Cat that naming it was stupid, and Digger was an even stupider name and we should just get rid of it.
She didn’t mean let it go. She meant kill it.
And she looked at me as if I would do it.
But then that’s all she really knew about me then.
That I killed things. And it was true enough I guess.
When I imagine myself back into how I was back then, one time, sometimes, maybe I am a killer.