The Day We Disappeared (18 page)

Dad had a
ladyfriend
!

I smiled all the way back to London.
Maybe things were changing for my family. Maybe we were starting to heal.

Shagged someone else last
night
, Lizzy texted me at Birmingham.
Oops!

Or maybe it'd take a little more
time, I conceded. But progress was being made, I was sure of it.

I went to bed and tried – as I did every
night – to picture Mum's face. I couldn't imagine ever giving up.

A girl sits in the pale gold light of a
summer morning, shards of sunlit dust dancing lazily around her. Apart from the slow
rise and fall of breath, the morning is silent.

It isn't peaceful. It's the
silence of loss, of absence; the kind of silence that is noisy because of its very
existence. She closes her eyes and recalls the sounds that she wants to hear: the
clatter of hoofs, the gentle sounds of eating, the swishing tails and comical snorts
that once filled the many cracks of her life. She adds human sounds: laughter,
banter, water-bucket filling. She feels an old smile inside her, although it
doesn't get as far as her face.

A single dog bark in the yard – in the
real yard, the quiet rectangle of waiting, empty stables – brings her back to today.
To this otherwise silent morning, and to the two tonnes of white-grey miracle with
whom she is sitting on a straw bed.

That bit really
was
like a
film. He'd made it! My beautiful Stumpy had done the near-impossible. Not only
had he survived a fractured pastern bone but he'd done so with courage that
would have brought a tear to Mark's eye, had he been there. ‘I'm
so proud of you,' I told him, as I did every morning.

Slowly, careful not to frighten him, I
stood up to go and
make his morning
feed. ‘You stay there, my man,' I told him.

Stumpy looked at me as if to say,
‘Seriously, will you please stop talking to me? It's six forty-five in
the bloody morning.'

I once used to enjoy making feeds: all
those smells of sweet chaff and nutty competition mix, the buckets of thick gloopy
sugar beet when it was cold, but these days I couldn't stand it. Whatever
jolly spin I put on things there was no denying the sadness of making just two feeds
each morning, rather than thirty. A farmer's pony had been drafted in to live
in the stable next to Stumpy's, so he didn't get lonely, and that was
it. Two horses; two buckets.

Stumpy made some jolly noises as I
returned with his breakfast, although he looked a bit baleful. ‘You miss your
dad, don't you?' I said, giving him his feed.

He was already too busy eating to
reply.

‘I miss him too,' I said,
staring sadly at the huge white bandage on the horse's leg. ‘I miss him
far too much.'

For a moment I allowed myself to close
my eyes and let Mark inhabit my mind. Those dark, secretive eyes that I had been
slowly learning to read; his quiet voice talking to his horses. And, indeed, the
peace I had begun to feel around him; the heart-warming realization that he found me
funny and refreshing, not a thorn in his side at all.

You lost your chance, Kate Brady, I
thought miserably. He liked you. He just didn't know how to say it.

I glanced around furtively in case
someone might be able to see the contents of my head. The man had been married, for
crying out loud!

‘Galway, you old whore,' Joe
shouted, waving at me as
he strode
across the yard. It was going to be a hot day and he looked like something from a
gay disco in jodhpurs, boots and a navy vest. A moustache and whip would have been
ideal but I supposed you couldn't have everything.

‘How're ye, my
princess?'

‘I'm grand,' I told
him, kissing the spot on his cheek he was pointing to. Nowadays Joe and I were like
an old couple: we occasionally cuddled for comfort, kissed each other on the cheek
every morning and drank lots of strong Irish tea on the sofa while watching shit TV.
We even had our own child in the form of Sandra, who had completely fallen apart and
needed watching (not to mention cooking for) every day.

‘Yourself?' I ducked back
into Stumpy's stable to fetch his water bucket.

‘Ah, you know,' Joe said.
‘Tolerable.'

If Joe hadn't stayed on at the
yard – insisted on staying on, even though there were no horses for him to ride or
pounds with which to pay him – things would have been considerably more grim. Within
a week of the accident everyone had been given their notice by Tiggy, who had
thankfully entered a shell-shocked operations mode, brokering the sale of
Mark's own horses and co-ordinating the return to their owners of the
rest.

Maria had taken hers away first, in
Jochim Furst's lorry. ‘They are moving to Oxfordshire,' she
emailed us. ‘Please don't try to visit.'

One by one the rest of Mark's
owners had driven their lorries sheepishly down the driveway until, one hot, empty
day at the beginning of June, the yard was quite empty. Tiggy had taken a job at
Sarah Hutton's yard in Berkshire
and Becca had been offered one at Caroline's down
the road.

‘I can't leave,'
she'd said, when the offer had come through. Tears had trembled in her eyes.
‘I can't leave, pet, this is my home.' She knew I was staying to
look after Stumpy; understood without asking awkward questions that there was
nowhere else for me to go.

‘You have to,' I'd
said. ‘If you stay here we'll both be really depressed. It sounds fun at
Caroline's yard, Becca. You'll probably have a far better time
there.' I felt a big lump swell in my own throat. ‘And, besides,'
I said, ‘if you turn Caroline's job down the next offer could be five
hours up the motorway, not five minutes down the road.'

She'd known she had to take it.
We'd cleared out her room together, and I'd cried as I'd pushed
her totally un-Becca-like flowery duvet into a black bag.

‘Time for a new start,' she
said, when the car was loaded. Joe, who at that point was staying ‘just for a
week, to look after Sandra', waited patiently in the driver's seat while
we cried and hugged each other.

‘I needed this,' she mumbled
into my shoulder. ‘I feel awful, pet, fuckin' awful right now, but I
needed something like this to happen. Time to move on, you know?'

And then she, too, was gone. There were
no pupils arriving for lessons with Mark any more. No Team GBR coaches, no vets, no
reps from the horse-feed companies, no saddlers, chiropractors or press. No Ana
Luisa running round throwing comical insults at us all, playing in her tree-house or
bossing her friends around when they came to play.

Maria had left for ever, taking her
daughter, and had
finally shacked
herself up with Jochim Furst, who'd won Badminton while Mark had been
airlifted to the Major Trauma Centre at Southmead with bleeding to his brain and a
body crushed like a compacted car.

Some fairly damning articles had been
written about Maria in the eventing press but she really wasn't the sort of
person to give a shit.

What the press didn't know,
however – had I been braver, I might have told them – was that Maria had ordered
that Stumpy be put down, even though he had every chance of surviving. After lying
winded for a few minutes he had managed to haul himself up, holding one of his
forelegs off the ground. The equine hospital had found an incomplete stress fracture
in his pastern bone: nothing to do with his lameness the month before, just a nasty
wearing of his pastern that could have gone at any moment. They told us his chances
of survival would be much higher if they put steel pins into the bone
immediately.

‘I am not willing to pay for
surgery,' Maria had said on the phone, when I called to explain Stumpy's
options. ‘And a horse needing four months' box rest is no use to me.
Tell them to put him to sleep.'

I had begun to get hysterical, which
only seemed to strengthen her resolve. Indeed if it hadn't been for Tiggy, who
had confiscated the phone and reminded Maria that it would cost more to have Stumpy
put down than it would just to sign the horse over to Mark, she would probably have
got her way.

Tiggy had handed me back my phone.
‘I'll stay with Stumpy,' she said. ‘You go to the hospital.
I don't see how
Mark is going to
survive this.' Her voice rose in a desperate sob. ‘But if he does,
he'll need a friendly face when he comes round. I'll send Becca there
too, to help look after Ana Luisa. And Joe to look after Sandra. I'll get
there as soon as I can … Oh, God, Kate.'

Joe leaned over Stumpy's door.
‘You're a handsome bastard, aren't you?' he said, patting
the horse's still-muscled neck. ‘I'm glad you didn't croak
it. Poor thing, cooking that little bastard of a fracture all that time and none of
us any the wiser.'

‘What's happening
today?' I asked, trying not to giggle at his outfit. Joe, knowing full well
what I was thinking, flexed his muscles and did a few squats. ‘Well,
Galway,' he said, ‘I've thirty more companies to call and then a
meeting with Terri James.' He smirked. ‘I reckon by the time I've
finished with her, she'll promise us that three-year-old mare.'

‘You are the worst of all
whores,' I said to him. ‘You put our country to shame.'

Joe shrugged. ‘Mark Waverley
didn't die,' he said simply. ‘He made it, Galway. Feck knows how
but he did. One day he's going to be ready to get on a horse again and when
that happens, Galway, I swear I'll have the best feckin' horses in the
land, all up and running so he can just hop on and go.' His eyes filled
suddenly and he turned away from me. ‘And if I've to make tender love to
Terri feckin' James, Galway, then that's a duty I'm ready to take
on.'

‘I love you, Joe,' I said
tenderly. ‘You might be a whore but you're a very, very good
one.'

His
determination to keep Mark's career alive was, I'd come to understand,
simply Joe's way of dealing with what had happened. He'd been there
through those agonizing hours outside the operating theatre, holding Sandra firmly
in his arms as if she might leak in all directions, like sand out of a broken
egg-timer. He had looked after us – the whole team of us – when one of the surgeons
finally emerged after fifteen hours to tell us that Mark had survived and we all
broke down. And that night Joe had made Sandra her dinner, then put her to bed and
sat on a chair in her room all night so that she wouldn't be alone.

Stepping into a head-of-the-family role
was not what I'd ever have expected of Joe Keenan but, then, surviving a
devastating trauma was not what I'd expected of Mark, and nursing a horse back
to health was not what I'd expected of myself.

We were limping on.

‘Right, Galway,' Joe said,
wiping his face on the back of his hand. ‘Feck off up to Bristol and see your
man, now.'

‘He's not my man!'

Joe looked puzzled. ‘As in, Mark,
Galway. Your man. Like we say in Ireland?'

I blushed, swiping at my still-watery
eyes. ‘Sorry. I just wouldn't want you to think I thought he was
my
man. Because he's not, never has been and never will be.
I'm really not interested in him. At all. Never have been, Joe.'

Joe stared at me. ‘Okay,
Galway,' he said. ‘Thanks for gettin' me up to speed,
princess.'

‘How's he doing?' I
asked one of the nurses on Mark's ward. His bed was rumpled and empty, which
meant he
must be at physiotherapy,
although my heart still stopped every time I found his bed without him in it. I
wouldn't admit it to anyone but I lay awake most nights, blind with panic that
he could be dying right now. That his heart might have stopped beating, or that the
chest infection had come back. When I wasn't lying awake panicking about Mark,
I would be asleep having nightmares about my past. Nightmares in which the police
knocked on Sandra's door, asking if I was there. Nightmares in which my family
found out what I'd done and told me they would never talk to me again.

Sometimes I'd have to go out in
the middle of the night to sit with Stumpy, and only then would I calm down.

‘Mark's doing well,'
the nurse said carefully, ‘but it's a tough journey that he's
on.'

He's still immobile and extremely
depressed, was what she meant. ‘Do you think he's at least where
you'd expect him to be, given the scope of his injuries?'

She frowned. ‘To be honest,
I've never seen trauma injuries as bad as his,' she admitted. ‘So
I've no informed idea of where he should be at. But that's because
I've spent a lot of my career in oncology,' she added, as my face
crumpled. ‘I'm still new to this unit, love. I think that, given the
number of fractures he sustained, he's probably doing brilliantly. Chat to the
consultant, okay?'

‘Thank you,' I said.
‘I will.'

Up the corridor a trolley emerged from
the lift. Was it him? Was it Mark? My stomach fluttered nervously. ‘Thank you
for all you're doing for him,' I added. ‘You guys have been quite
wonderful. I'm sure he's not an easy patient.'