Born in a Stable

The hen had bled its last. She placed its body delicately on the block and took the bucket over to the drain at the foot of the thickest roan pipe, a few feet to the left of the kitchen windows. The grate was discoloured, stained by thousands of such outpourings as she was depositing now, going back at least a hundred years. She would rinse out the bucket and fill it with water, as hot as the kitchen tap could produce, then immerse the chicken for a couple of minutes for ease of plucking. No great sense of timeless ritual about that, though it had been going on for precisely as long. Just mess and tedium.

She hated the plucking far more than gutting the bird, had done ever since the yuck factor had abated through familiarity and repetition. There was a precision to removing the hen’s insides contrasting unfavourably with the sense of chaos she felt tugging the clutches of feathers from its skin. The gutting process she regarded as good practice for when she would be a vet: the controlled incision, the separation of the organs, the delicate touch required in excising the liver and bile duct, the rupture of which could turn the bird an extremely unappetising shade of green.

No, she felt no more squeamish about the prospect of eviscerating a dead chicken than she had about killing it, though it brought a flush to her cheeks to remember the embarrassment it had caused her at school a few weeks back when she made the mistake of mentioning this domestic duty among a group of her classmates. Her words had barely left her lips when she realised they constituted another gift to the cliques who already viewed her with gleeful disdain: an awkward oddity, precipitated upon the perfection of their posh little circles from some stinky rural backwater. A farmer’s daughter, would you believe, a filthy-fingered throwback to a primitive age, presumably existing without running water, television and hairspray.

As she saw the looks, first of revulsion and then of smirking delight, she understood sharply how what she considered mundane to the point of being a mere chore was so removed from the normal lives of her peers as to seem horrific to them, and she some kind of freak or monster. She got the very strong impression that they thought this was something she ought to feel ashamed about, in some cases because it was barbaric and in others because it marked her out as of a very low caste. They might eat chickens, but didn’t generally mix with the kind of people who were paid to kill and prepare them. However, she didn’t feel ashamed and she didn’t feel monstrous. Instead she saw the rest of them as all the more cosseted, all the more bloody useless.

She had moved to the new school start of third year. Coming in two years late it was inevitable that she would find it cliquey, and as a private school it certainly didn’t disappoint her expectation that some of her fellow pupils would be demonstrably snobby. However, she had endured cliqueyness and snobbery at her old school too, the difference being that at Laurel Row the criteria for denigration would not include being a virgin or getting straight As in her exams. The teaching was undeniably better than at Calderburn High, assisted in part by the lessons not being constantly interrupted by attention-seeking headbangers, and for that she would endure any amount of immature bitchiness if it served her academic ambitions.

Not that it didn’t sting to have silly little girls who had never done a hand’s turn think they could look down on her as their socioeconomic inferior because dear daddy was in banking rather than farming. It burned all the more, in fact, given that such snobbery was the very reason she needed to make the switch to Laurel Row if she wanted to get in to vet school.

You needed an A in both Higher physics and Higher biology in order to be accepted for veterinary medicine at Glasgow University, which was an understandable requirement; however, there was a subtle and nasty piece of social filtering at play in the further stipulation that these must be acquired at the same sitting. It looked innocent enough on paper, to anyone who didn’t know that time-tabling commitments across Scottish comprehensives dictated that physics and biology be taught during the same periods. Schools didn’t have the staff to offer all classes at all times, so there were certain standard conflicts and you had to choose: geography or history, French or art, physics or biology. Nor would the Glasgow Vet School accept an A for one in fifth year and the other in sixth: you had to get both at a single shot, and to do that you had to go private – by which means the Glasgow Vet School could keep out the scruff.

She recalled her parents railing against the inherent snobbery of it – an acridity to her dad’s anger fuelled by the money he had paid out to vets over the years – but there was no principled stance from them once they realised how deeply she felt her vocation. The only principle they stood by was of striving to give their daughters the best chance in life that they could afford, and so they dug deep and paid the fees (not to mention bought the books and the jotters and the uniforms and the rail tickets and the bus fares) that allowed her to attend Laurel Row.

So for all their efforts and sacrifices, she was never going to moan about getting sent out to prepare a chicken on a cold Saturday morning while her pampered classmates were no doubt still tucked up in bed, and nor would she nag her sister about shirking her turn, Lisa, who had never made any fuss about the fact that she still went to plain old Calderburn.

She emerged from the kitchen with a bucket of scalding hot water and a thick pair of rubber gloves. It was as she made her way back towards the block, in the centre of her blood-painted rune, that she noticed the bottom half of one of the stable doors to be marginally ajar. It was the leftmost door of the three-stall barn, where her treasured Lysander was stabled. Lisa’s horse Demetrius was in the centre, with the third stall empty since their mother, Hippolyta, had died the preceding November.

It was normal for the top section of a door to be left unlatched overnight, but never the bottom half. She strode to the block and immersed the bird, from which closer perspective she was able to observe that the door was in fact not ajar, but only appeared to be so because it was off its higher hinge and consequently hanging askew, the bottom-right corner resting against the ground an inch or so inside.

She felt something course through her, a wave of deepest dread disproportionate to this small jarring note that had precipitated it. Fear that anything should be wrong with Lysander, perhaps, heightened by a guilty anxiety that any such calamity had in some way been provoked by her occult indulgence over the morning’s kill.

As she unlatched the top half of the door and pulled it out towards herself, she was further disquieted not to see Lysander’s head emerge in typically immediate response. Then she heard a deep, wheezing sound from within, more like a discordant bray than his familiar whinny. She tugged impatiently at the bottom half of the door, feeling its true weight for the first time as it scraped against the ground. The rectangle of solid wood hauled the also-damaged bottom hinge further away from the frame and then collapsed forward, popping a screw and twisting the metalwork like an arm-wrestler in defeat.

The low morning sun penetrated where it could inside the stables. Before she entered, the light picked out debris on the floor: a shattered wooden saddle rack, a bridle hanger mangled like a cheap umbrella in a gale, haynets ripped and scattered, stirrups, bits and girths strewn amid broken fragments of salt lick. And beneath it all a dark glistening, turning from black to the colour of a days-old bruise where the sunlight struck it.

She tried to speak but no words came, only the sound of her heightened, gulping breath.

Lysander’s head now responded to his awareness of her arrival, lifting meekly from where he lay on his side. His hindquarters were towards her, so at first she could see only the back of his head, that familiar silhouette of his ears and the poll between. Then as he turned his neck she saw that there was only a bloodied hole where his right eye should be.

Inside her, the desire to run and the desire to be with him fought a mighty duel. The latter prevailed and she swallowed back her horror, scrambling down to the floor alongside him. The straw-strewn stone was sticky with blood, and she felt herself crumble as she saw its many sources. There were gashes all over his body, one as much as a foot long in his girth, another so deep along his barrel that she could see the white of his ribs.

It was only as she asked herself what kind of beast could have got in and done this that it occurred to her to be scared.