The Long Dry by Cynan Jones Page B

by herself and that’s why it died,’ she said. He looked at her. ‘No, love. This one wasn’t made properly – look, can you see? It hadn’t grown properly. It was dead already love, it just had to come out.’ It played on him that this was the second death like this today and he knew now that throwing the other calf down the well was a problem. A fault in the stock? He thought of his wife. She was still shouting, he could hear her. Inside he wondered if it was his fault – if he had been too long. She came from a rural town and she was used to farms but she was not born to be on a farm as he was. He felt his anger go, this time; it had died down and receded.
    ‘Go and tell Mum I need some soap and water and she might have to help me pull now. This one is a twin.’ Emmy ran off up the field. She ran very importantly.
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    He ate alone. Kate had not helped him with the cow. He was sad that he had hurt her by shouting at her; but not sad because the thing was bad, more sad in the way we are sad when we hurt a weaker animal. He was sad about having more strength than her.
    Dylan was supposed to have taken the bread crates back but he hadn’t, so Gareth took the bread crates out of the van and hosed them down and enjoyed the cool water and left them against the wall to dry in the sun.
    He came inside and soaped down his arm and the warm soft water felt good on him. He’d meant to get a gas bottle changed that week and there was a note on the cooker saying ‘no gas’ so he had bread and cheese. He’d tried to phone his son to ask him to collect more gas, but his mobile was switched off. So he left a message but knew he wouldn’t collect the gas. He should ask the vet about the two dead calves, because there might be a big problem.
    His wife was upstairs with a headache. He didn’t know anymore whether he believed in these headaches or not. It was like she could switch them on and off, but he hated thinking this. He also thought that the violence of her anger nowadays could bring on these headaches. He thought: she is angry first, and it comes up as a headache, because there is nowhere for so much anger to go.
    He tried to sip his coffee but it was filthy. Without the gas he couldn’t warm the pan so he’d tried to heat it up by adding hot water from the kettle but it made it thin and weak and it tasted wrong.
    He threw the coffee in the sink. It’s not the headache making her angry, it’s her. Her emotions are triggers, they trigger chemicals and she gets ill. It could just be her eyes, he thinks. He knows bad eyes can lead to headaches. But she won’t have them checked. It could just be this constant heat. Her fair skin in the sun. He wondered whether heshould go and see her but he knows it is better not to. She was like a grenade when she was like this. Simply going to her could be like putting back the pin, would diffuse her anger. Or she might just explode. In the rare times she was angry, Emmy was like this too; but she was so scowling and tiny and compact that she even looked like a grenade and they joked about it. When she was angry she was very furious which made them love her very much.
    She sits at the table, drawing in her sketchbook now. Zebra watches her, and she talks while she draws. When she draws it is not with the excessive gestures of a child her age but it is small; as if everything on the paper is vital. The drawing overflows with details, so much so that she always must explain things to people when she shows them; the different instruments and inhabitants of the worlds she creates, which are always progressing somewhere, always in story, never strange, isolated still lives. If you asked her about her picture she always answered in colour: ‘that’s a red mushroom, a bright green dress’; but she never coloured in. ‘I know what colours that they are,’ she would say. She draws only from memory, she won’t look and draw, as if the realness of a thing will destroy its place in her