16.

She let the horses out and spent the day with them, well, not with them, but getting her shoes wet and the legs of her jeans dirty while they ignored her. But they knew she was there, part of their world. All was easier outside now it was spring, except having a baby or dying, which wouldn’t be easy anywhere any time. When it got dark, she leaned against Red’s chest to hear his big lungs working. “I got a baby,” she told him. “I won’t go home, I’ll never cross that little bridge again, I have quit my family.”

She lay in a nest of blankets on Danny’s cot in a corner of the wind-creaking barn. Ghosts were flopping and bowing and having little fits up there behind the windows of his dead house. She could hear them ranting at each other in the dark.

She slept in her clothes: three baggy shirts, a pair of unbuttoned jeans.

The barn empty of horses. Barn with early sun. Spider webs aglint in a draft. Fuggy smell of feed, hay. Not just a place: her home. By first light, after a long wakeful sleep, she felt like the youngest in a herd, a foal on the straw, brand new.

She would not stay. She would run. She had to stay. She could not run. Danny would not come home and she would have to look after the horses forever. She had not been to school since the end of January. Her parents didn’t care she was living with the horses. She was riding less. She was thin, except for her belly, feeding at Danny’s desk on the soups and casseroles Emma left inside the barn doors. Soon she would run. But the horses.

One night for warmth and to challenge herself she slept in his ghost house, but the fire in the stove smoked and then went out, and she lay shivering on a split couch near the window, pigeons stepping over her. They found roosts on the plate shelf that ran around the room and she dozed off listening to them shuffling and scratching and ruffling their feathers. Something woke her in the dark and she got up and watched the barn, the sky, and a bright star eaten by clouds. A figure, head down, was trudging up the path with a heavy bag. A man slipping through the shadows toward the barn. She imagined James hanging alive, then dead. She did not want to see him, but mostly did not want his ghost to see her. When she looked again he had disappeared. A shiver ran up her spine.

The next day was cold; rainy wind was whistling under the sashes, wetting the sills. She stuffed a tablecloth in the broken window and went into the kitchen. The taps no longer worked. The kitchen was freezing and dim, the floor rough with dirt. Danny’s money had dwindled. She counted the remaining bills, slipped them back into her pocket, the pigeons cooing, then walked the shabby hallway to the front door. Smell of mould. Patterns of green and black around a faint rectangle where a mirror used to hang. Probably no one had ever stood here and studied this little passage. She opened the door and wind sent her hair flying. There was someone on the path. Not James. Harry. His bag looked heavy. She leaned on the wall and stared out. Hadn’t there been a star in the middle of clouds? She shut the door and took quiet steps back into the house. A line of droppings marked the entrance to the front room. Finished with the place, she ducked her head and marched through the kitchen and let herself out the back door and locked it. She went round to the front, pushed the bills deeper into her jeans pocket. Harry was trotting up the path, his bag pitching him to the right.

“Brought you some things.”

“Like what?”

“Sleeping bag. Air mattress. Camping stuff.”

“What for?”

“I know you’re camping out here.” He stood in front of her like a dog, half-faithful, half-stupid. Staring at her, but being nice. Wind whistled in the loose porch railings. The steps were rotted through.

She hated Gee.

She didn’t love Harry.

She’d dreamt she was flying on a beautiful white horse.

“Not here. The barn . . . ”

He trudged back down the path, dropped the bag by the barn door, turned and left.

Saint

The horses welcome her with their noses.
Danny lifted her onto her first horse.
Who bore her through shadows, eyes on the sea.

Each day she rides out, faster and farther.
Let me go blind, she says. Let me go deaf.
The barn safe at night, the horses like silk.

Under her fingers, their manes, their eyelids.
The baby draws blood and breath from her heart.
She feels their captivities align, align.