5.

Abi threw open the basement door and shook dust from her hair and sneezed. Behind her, Danny was sweeping around the trunks they’d just dragged to the middle of the cement floor, and his house was a mess, falling apart, windows cracked and dusty, and he hadn’t spoken all morning. It was time to let the horses out. She crossed the flagstones and climbed over the low wall onto the dead thatch of summer’s grass and headed down the path worn smooth by his family’s years and years of to and fro. Down the hill to the horses shifting in their fixed-up barn that Danny called foursquare, tiptop, neat as a pin, and she loved because she’d known the place forever.

She paused at the door, listening, shivering. It was cold, below freezing maybe. Back at the house he was likely staring down at her. He knew, but not what he knew. He didn’t know what she knew, but he knew. The horses inside were banging hooves on the ground, sensing her presence. Of course they didn’t want to spend daytime shut in. She needed space to think. They needed morning light. She longed to run and run and run. There was such a difference between inside and outside, Danny’s barn and the pasture, her house and the pass, life and death. Danny had told her about the wild ponies descended from domestic animals who escaped long ago to live in their valley for hundreds of years until recent summers when they’d crossed the plain looking for something. She fingered the barn wall, painted wood, once a tree. Everyone was trapped inside something. James had gone. What could she do? What were her choices? If she did nothing it would happen. What was inside would be outside. Red was in there. She had ridden him to the foothills, told him everything. She peeled a long strip of paint from the wall and took a breath and watched the crystals in the air as she breathed out and cradled her belly. She’d grown up riding her bike in and out the vine rows, the rows like waves interrupted, up and down the hills surrounding the cemetery where James was in the ground. She loved Danny’s land because it resisted the vines; she loved to ride his land; she loved his beautiful barn, but not the ghost-house. Up there he was as restless as his horses down here, pushing furniture around, sorting boxes, throwing his stuff into the yard, piling it on his flatbed.

She followed the track around the worn timbers of the barn, scuffing her feet against clumps of stunted weeds, trying to remember what she’d decided in the night. About leaving, about talking to Danny. He’d do anything for her. If she did nothing, sooner or later her parents would know. Could he help? She blew on her fingers. Her legs were cold through her jeans and her jacket wouldn’t zip up and she had on a thin shirt. Her mother was having a baby. Her sister had just had one. It was like a contagious disease. For fuck’s sake. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She was changing but didn’t know what she was changing into. Her baby was coming like a train.

Half into the short bouncy ride to the dump, she swung to face Danny and said, “I’m pregnant,” and he said nothing.

He swung the truck down the gravel road and parked and they got to work hauling out the boxes and bags, scaring up crows and a pair of ravens.

“Your parents know?”

“No. They don’t even know I’ve had sex.”

“Who else knows?”

“James knew.”

“James.”

“I’m not saying it’s his or yours.”

“It might be James?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

An almost unwitnessed moment: dawn moonrise over the hills — all the vines picked clean leaving only the rows of eiswein grapes for the frost — and my old friend Danny out there riding the edge of the vineyard.

Danny and Abi. He should go back to the sea, west to his drowning.

I am avoiding doing something.

Which is what I have done my whole life — substituted stories, descriptions of the world, and a snail’s eye view at that, for action. Fear, when all is said and done, is only a hand-written ticket, blurred and ratty, handed to the final captain, who has no time to punch it because the tide is turning. What do I do about Danny? Out there all is wonky horizon and a figure on horseback wandering away, irregular slant from the perpendicular, on a moonlit course. A speck in oil under a microscope.

“Abi has a two-inch pussy,” Gee said to Harry.

“Fuck off,” said Abi.

“What?” said Harry.

“You know, a five-centimetre slit. Duh.”

“Shut up,” said Harry.

“Fuck off,” Abi repeated.

“He’s a shy boy,” Gee said, “but you are my fond friend, my best friend.”

“Leave her alone,” said Harry.

They were in a steep lane between frosty hedges, going to the town dump, a place Abi had discovered yesterday with Danny. He called it the nuisance grounds. She’d been amazed it existed. It had been here all her life without her knowledge. It had been here, he said, since the town was founded. No one was supposed to use it any more, but they’d carted boxes of junk in his rusty old flatbed to the swamp anyway.

“It’s true,” said Gee. “Two inches. And she’s scouting around for a boyfriend.”

Abi turned and pushed Gee and Gee gave Harry a shove and he fell and dropped his .22. Gee stood over him, then made a face at Abi. “Such a fond friend you are.”

“You’re an airhead and a nincompoop,” said Abi. “That’s why nobody likes you.”

“Bitch,” said Gee. “Tramp.”

“You are both crazy.” Harry climbed to his feet and shouldered his gun. Mud on his rump and both knees.

“She doesn’t like her pussy. You know why?”

“You are seriously unhinged,” Harry said. “I’m not listening.”

“James did it in there,” said Gee.

They stopped at the gap in the hedge; there was a rough path through the black tree trunks.

“Yeah,” said Harry.

Gee stepped onto the trail. “Let’s go see. Let’s go see the place, hey?” She wrapped her fingers around her own neck and made a throttled sound.

“Stop that,” said Abi.

“Shut your mouth, Gee,” said Harry. “James was our friend.”

“Fire your gun, Mr Harry,” Gee said. “Go on. One gun salute.” She pointed into the trees.

They didn’t go in, but kept on, past the mouth of the trail, down the lane until they could smell skunky water.

“There it is,” said Abi. “There is the old dump.”

Birch trees grew up through the skeletons of cars and trucks. The white trunks rose straight out of frozen pools pierced at intervals by tall spiky dead grass. A shadow from a single cloud drifted over the antiques drowning in iced-over water, the rusting hulks hanging like bones in the mist, while a line of splayed fence posts cut across to a little cliff where a pair of crows shrieked.

“Those are boxes Danny and me left yesterday,” said Abi.

“What’s in them?” said Harry.

“Who cares,” said Gee. “It’s spooky and it’s freezing and it stinks.”

They threw pebbles at the iron protruding from the swamp. Throwing stones to keep warm. Amid the clangs and splashes, they were all out of breath, Harry and Gee waiting for her to tell them why they’d come. The crows cawed from the branch of a ratty fir tree on the cliff.

“You don’t know anything,” Abi said.

“You think?” said Gee. “Think I’m stupid?”

“I know you are.” She flicked the back of Gee’s blonde head. “But I want to tell you. Both of you. You have to promise not to tell anyone else.”

“Okay,” said Harry.

“Gee?”

“If it’s that you screwed James and that’s what messed him up and that’s why he killed himself, don’t bother. I know that shit. Shoot a crow,” she said. “Come on, Harry, shoot a mothershitting crow.”

“Shut up,” Harry said.

“I’m pregnant,” Abi said.

“No way,” said Harry.

“I was right!” said Gee. “I knew it!”

“No way,” said Harry.

“Yes, I am.”

“That fucking asshole,” said Harry.

“It wasn’t James.”

“And then he strung himself up in a tree,” said Gee.

“It wasn’t James.”

“Who then?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“That’s fucked,” said Gee. “You’re a total idiot. That old man?”

“No.”

“Oh fuck,” said Gee. “We’re supposed to be your friends.”

“You know it.”

“What did you tell your parents?” said Harry.