Annan Water (2 page)

Michael tried to turn her back, but she resisted, drawn on by a curiosity that was stronger than his own. He swore at her, but fondly. He had been riding since he could walk. There were times when his parents had twenty-five horses and ponies in the yard, buying and selling two or three every week. Out of all the hundreds he rode, he rarely came across one that wasn’t noticeably happier when its head was turned towards home. He had never before come across one who point-blank refused to turn back.

He let her go on. They passed a small cottage on the left with a battered van parked outside it. Soon afterwards, the road forked. One branch led into a farmyard, presumably belonging to the cottage. The other, to the right, ended at a little wooden landing stage. Beyond it a dark expanse of water stretched away. There was no bridge. The road went no further.

A boat was pulled up against the jetty; not an elegant pleasure boat but a functional working vessel with greasy water in the bottom. A few yards downriver a concrete slipway led gently down to the water’s edge. Beyond that, the bare banks of the river ran into the distance.

The mare stopped dead, her curiosity replaced by a clear anxiety about the dark water ahead. She tried to swing round, but Michael wasn’t ready yet. He turned her firmly back. She shook her head hard, wrestled with the bit for a moment, then consented to stand.

There was something about that river. Michael had never seen it before, but he felt that he knew it. Somehow it had always been with him; in him even; a dark thing waiting, like despair, for him to come to it. Stray words passed through his mind.

Wondrous deep …

Woe betide you …

The mare turned again, but Bandit was pulling in the opposite direction, making for the river; thirsty perhaps. Michael tried to manage the two pairs of reins. It wouldn’t be the first time he had been pulled off a horse by the one he was leading. He managed to turn the mare, and was just hauling Bandit back into her side when she stiffened and jumped, and wheeled round to face the way they had come.

Michael dug his heels into her sides, annoyed by her wilfulness. But it hadn’t been a ploy. She had been startled by something that he hadn’t heard. They weren’t alone.

T
HE GIRL HAD COME
up behind him. It was the rustle of her plastic bags that had spooked the mare. And when Michael got a proper look at her, she spooked him as well. She was like someone who had just beamed in from another world. The horses seemed to think so too. All three of them stared.

Michael had never seen anything quite like her. The clothes she was wearing made no sense in the foul weather. They were all black, and tight; everything short and close-fitting. Her hair was an impossible shade of red and her skin, in stark contrast, was waxy and pale. She looked wet and cold.

She walked on past, interested in the horses, not in him. She had rings and studs and bolts all over her face; through her eyebrows, her lips, her ears, her nose.

‘Did your mother never teach you not to stare,’ she said.

He dropped his gaze.

The mare backed up and began to fidget again. Michael knew he ought to make a start for home, but the girl intrigued him. It was a strange place to encounter someone. There seemed to be nowhere for her to go with all those bags.

He was suddenly aware of how tall he was; how stupid he looked on the little mare. He slipped off.

‘Are they your horses?’ the girl asked him.

‘They are.’

‘Why do you have two of them?’

He shrugged. ‘I have twenty of them at home.’

‘You don’t.’

‘I do.’

She turned away from him dismissively, as though he wasn’t worth talking to. Her arms were stretched by the supermarket bags she was carrying, and where they emerged from her sleeves he could see a number of white scars. He was struck by a vivid image of the girl strengthening herself with steel, then trying to fight her way out of some kind of enclosure. She was battling against razor-wire and carrying the scars.

She walked over to the boat and dropped the bags on to a storage crate.

‘Are you going across the river?’ he said.

She looked back the way she had come. ‘In a wee while. Can I have a ride on your horses?’

‘You can’t ride in that skirt,’ he said. It was so tight that he couldn’t see how she could even walk in it, let alone ride. Beneath it she was wearing black tights and heavy leather boots with big silver buckles.

‘I’ll take it off then.’

He surprised himself by what he said. ‘Go on, then.’

The girl laughed. ‘Horses are cool,’ she said. ‘Will you come another time? I’ll wear jeans.’

Michael was enchanted by her laughter. He would probably have agreed to anything she suggested, but at that moment the horses threw up their heads together and looked along the road. Someone else was coming. A woman in a wheelchair, pushed by a man. The woman’s lap was laden with more supermarket bags.

‘That’s my mother,’ said the girl.

Michael was trying to think of something to say when the mare, terrified by the sight of the wheelchair, spun round and tried to take off along the river bank. He held on to her, but had to drop the gelding’s reins to avoid being torn between the two of them. The mare dragged him along for a few metres before she fetched up against a wooden fence and had to stop. She turned and stared at the wheelchair as if she expected it to pounce on her.

‘Fat-head,’ he called her. ‘Idiot.’

He saw the man begin to step away from the wheelchair and then hesitate. He was watching the girl, who was quietly approaching Bandit. His reins were trailing on the ground, but the concept of freedom was beyond him. He stood where he was until the girl reached him. She took hold of the reins, and a smile of pride and relief briefly lit her features.

He led the mare back, skittering and jittering across the grass.

‘A young man and a grey mare,’ said the girl’s mother. ‘Come to woo our Annie, perhaps?’

The boy blushed, not only because of the woman’s suggestion, but because, privately, he had assumed that being in a wheelchair and having a personality were mutually exclusive.

‘Look at your Annie,’ said the man softly.

The girl was stroking Bandit’s nose. The placid cob dropped his head. His eyelids drooped. Annie’s confidence was swelling visibly.

‘Isn’t he gorgeous?’ she said.

‘He’s quiet, anyway,’ said her mother. ‘I’ll say that much for him.’

The boy’s dealer instincts surfaced. ‘He’s for sale,’ he said. ‘A grand cob. Jump over a Land-Rover, that lad.’

Michael thought it sounded good, but the girl’s face clouded over and she glared out at him. The man walked all around Bandit with a very interested sort of look.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Michael Duggan.’

‘I don’t know any Duggans. From where?’

Michael pointed vaguely in the direction from which he had come. ‘We’re new. My mother was born around here. Her name’s McLean.’

‘Ah.’ The man smiled. ‘Now I have you. You came down the old road, then.’

‘A green track.’

‘You must have opened up the gate?’

‘We came over it.’

‘Hmm.’ The man looked more closely at the cob. ‘What’s he worth?’

‘You’re not buying him,’ said Annie. Her voice was taut and angry. ‘You’re not buying him for me.’

‘No, he isn’t,’ said her mother.

‘I won’t be told what I can and can’t buy,’ said the man. But the mood had changed. A tension had arisen. The woman began to wheel herself towards the boat, and the mare started panicking again. Michael jerked on her bridle, and went to reclaim Bandit and get him out of the way.

Annie released the reins reluctantly, and turned away. But the brief glimpse he had taken into her eyes had been enough to inform him that no matter how hard she had battled with that wire, she had not escaped. She was not free. Unaccountably, Michael felt that he had let her down. All the way home, along the green road, he was troubled by a strong sense of guilt.

H
E HAD BEEN OUT
for more than three hours, but no one had even noticed. His mother had gone to get poultices and his father was still where he had been when Michael last saw him: building looseboxes inside the long hay shed.

‘Good lad,’ he said. ‘That pony’s looking well. Get Horrocks ready, will you? There’s someone coming to see him.’

‘I found—’ Michael stopped, ambushed by a sudden possessiveness about his track. He didn’t want his parents riding along there with him. It was his own.

‘What did you find?’

‘A river. What river would it be?’

‘You’d have to ask your mother. But at a guess I’d say it was the Annan Water. That’s the nearest river to here.’

Annan Water. The name sent a cold flush through Michael’s scalp. He had heard it before. Like the river itself, the name seemed always to have been with him, deep in the marrow of his bones.

He didn’t hear the car approaching, but his father did.

‘Horrocks,’ he said. ‘Get the mud knocked off him, quick.’

They badly needed money. The move to Scotland had cleaned them out. But Horrocks behaved like a pig and put Frank Duggan in a foul temper for the rest of the day. Michael kept out of his way. He tried to get some information about the Annan Water from his mother, but she was moving too fast. When she got home from Dumfries she was busy boiling kettles and making the poultice for the bay thoroughbred who had got himself tangled up in the remains of an old tractor, and after that she had to ride two young horses before dark. Michael had to ride again as well, and when he was finished he slipped into the cold house before either of his parents could nab him.

He was kneeling in front of the grate, dropping coals onto a pair of firelighters, when he was haunted again by the river.

Annan Water’s wondrous deep …

It came from nowhere. Words, some vague sense of a tune or a rhythm.

I loathe that she should wet her feet …

He stepped away from the fire and washed his hands in the sink. Then he poured half a stone of potatoes into it and began to scrub them.

I must cross that stream tonight …

The image of the tar-black water was so vivid in his mind that he could barely see the potatoes in his hands. It frightened him. He turned on the radio to drown out the invasion. It didn’t work.

My love Annie is wondrous bonny …

Michael knew about the tricks his mind could play. He had been through all kinds of mental contortions after Joanne died. But it hadn’t happened for a long time now. That girl must have got to him somehow.

He dumped the heavy saucepan of spuds on the stove and turned on the heat, then went back into the living room. The firelighters were guttering pathetically. A single coal was smouldering, and the air was full of thin, fumy smoke, as though it had given up the battle against the heavy downslaught of rain in the chimney and retreated into the room.

In the yard, Jean was pouring bags of feed into the steel bins they had brought with them from Yorkshire. Michael ripped into the work beside her.

‘I rode down to a river today,’ he said. ‘Dad thinks it’s the Annan Water.’

‘Sounds likely,’ said Jean. ‘How did you get there?’

Michael sidestepped the question. ‘Where have I heard of the Annan Water?’

Jean shrugged. ‘Geography maybe. In school.’

Michael shook his head. He didn’t remember what anyone tried to teach him in school. He had missed too much of it. He wasn’t on the right wavelength at all. On the rare occasions that he went, he dreamed the days away. It wasn’t hard to stay invisible, when you knew how.

‘There’s a song or something,’ he said.

Jean hefted a bag and nuts rattled into the bin. ‘You’re right,’ she said, remembering. ‘There is. My mother used to sing it. She used to sing it all the time.’

Michael opened a sack of oats and poured it into another of the bins. ‘How does it go?’

Jean stopped working for a rare moment. She looked at Michael and her lean, weather-tanned face twisted with the effort of dredging her memory. And she was almost there, Michael could tell, when his father’s voice reached them from the yard.

‘Can somebody give me a hand?’

She was gone from him. Michael carried on with the work mechanically, but his spirits were dampened. It was always like that. There was never any peace. There were never any quiet, family moments. They were always working. All of them, all the time. For some reason Michael saw an image of the sitting room at the house in Yorkshire. The TV was on, but there was no one watching it. The terrier was polishing off a plate of dinner that had been abandoned on the arm of the couch. That was the way their lives were. They hadn’t sat down to a meal together once since they arrived in Scotland. They were a dealer’s yard, not a family.

H
E DREAMED ABOUT THE
girl, or about a girl; a face, in a shop like a blacksmiths. A large strong man, whose back was always turned, punched steel rivets and rings into the girl’s skin, using a hammer and a massive stapler. The girl’s features stretched grotesquely. She didn’t seem to feel any pain.

When his mother woke him, he was rigid with fear.

M
ICHAEL WAS USED TO
getting up in the dark. He was used to the pre-dawn struggle out into the yard, the hot tea slopping on to the ground, burning his hands on the way. He was used to tacking up sleepy horses in dimly lit boxes. Sometimes he was on automatic pilot, and found himself riding out of the yard with no idea at all of how he had got there.

The three of them were out on the roads at first light, with flashing red bicycle lamps strapped to their arms. Each of his parents rode one horse and led two others. Michael could ride whatever he wanted. He didn’t enjoy going out on Bandit, but had chosen him for safety’s sake, and he was leading the grey mare. She liked being led. She was quite relaxed when there was no one on top of her.

He had no problems with either of them, but his heart was in his mouth all the same. Both his parents seemed to take a perverse kind of pride in managing the unmanageable. Their horses were all over the road, pulling in different directions, turning the wrong way round, plunging and rearing and dancing, centimetres away from the bumpers of passing lorries. They were like some kind of crazy rodeo act, clattering down the main road, sparks flying from the horses’ shoes. Michael swore to himself, over and over and over, as though his anger, his profanities, could protect him from anxiety.