After the first day at my new school, I ran down to the meadow to find Dad. The huge beech tree in the garden was beginning to shed its leaves, and they were scattered across the grass like a discarded silk petticoat. I laughed at the tree’s nakedness, shaking off the cardigan from my new uniform. The fallen leaves flew up all around me in a cloud of gold, and I pretended I was commanding them, waving my hands about my head like a witch casting a spell.
Dad was sitting on an upended wheelbarrow in the meadow, his sketchbook in hand, his great bushy eyebrows furrowed in concentration. His face was still nut-brown from the summer, and I could see little stripes of white all over his forehead where the skin between his wrinkles remained untanned. He looked like a tiger.
I came to a stop near Dad, and he snapped his sketchbook shut as soon as he saw me.
“Young Romilly!” he roared, and I jumped, wondering if he was losing his hearing.
I offered him a bit of the tangerine I had saved from my school dinner, and which tasted of wet toilet paper, and he took it gratefully, munching it, pips and all, the bristles around his mouth frothing juice.
“Rumor has it that this little meadow was an overflow for the churchyard.” He nodded toward the church’s high tower, peeping over the hedge.
I looked around the meadow. It was a triangular field bordered on all sides by high yew hedges. “But there’s no gravestones,” I said, feeling a little disappointed. It would be nice to find some human bones.
“Well, that’s what rumors are. No one knows if they’re the truth.”
I scanned the field again. There was nothing exciting here, unless you counted a huge heap of metal rods and discs piled up by the hedge that hadn’t been there the day before.
“Do I have to go to school?” I asked, changing the subject and biting hard on a piece of tangerine. Stacey had not been in my new class. At break time I had searched the playground, but it was only a small school and none of the children milling around on the tarmac were her.
Dad placed the sketchbook on the ground. “School is important, Romilly,” he said with a sigh, “and besides, people would berate me for taking you out.” He got up from the wheelbarrow and stretched, his joints cracking noisily. “Even if I was able to just whisk you out, I really can’t have you at home right now. My mind is bursting with ideas on how to make money out of this old place, and you’d be too much of a distraction.”
I looked down, digging my toe into the mound of grass beneath my feet. When I looked up, he had crouched down in front of me so that his eyes were level with mine.
“Just because I can’t give you what you want, doesn’t mean I don’t love you.” His eyes were shiny, as if he had been caught unexpectedly in a ferocious gale.
I nodded.
“And I’m sorry if I’m not always here for you at the moment. It’s just, I have so many things to think about right now. Tell you what, when everything in here has calmed down somewhat—” he indicated his head, and I imagined cogs whirring and little hammers tapping “—I’ll be able to focus much more on you, and then we can formulate a plan. Deal?”
“Okay,” I said, swallowing my tangerine wedge painfully. “What are you doing down here, anyway?”
“Attempting to pay the mortgage,” he replied with a chuckle, glancing over at the rods and pipes in the corner.
I looked around, but I couldn’t see any money anywhere.
“Is it a project?” I said, running my eyes over the metal rods. We had started a project at school today, making buildings out of spaghetti and balls of Plasticine. Maybe Dad was going to do the same on a bigger scale.
“I suppose it is. But it’s stuck right here.” He grabbed forcefully at the top of his forehead, as if he could pull the project right out. He smiled and turned back to his sketchbook, becoming still as a statue as if a light had gone out in him. I stepped forward and waved a hand in front of his face, but his batteries were well and truly dead, and I left him to it, walking back up to the house in search of something living.
Stacey was sitting on the gate, letting it swing back and forth beneath her. My stomach flipped with joy at seeing her.
“You’ve had a haircut,” she said. She had a packet of crisps in her hand, and she offered me one from the crackling bag. It tasted far more satisfying than the pithy leftover taste of tangerine in my mouth.
“Stacey, why don’t you—” I started.
But, “Shh, I want to show you something,” she said, wiping salty potato crumbs from her lips. Jumping down from the last bar of the gate, she took off, not looking back to see if I was following.
She led me through the village to a paddock behind a farmhouse. I hurried after her, intent on asking her about school, but when she stopped, the question fell from my lips. A donkey stood at the fence staring at nothing, its ribs clearly visible under its shaggy coat.
“It’s going to die this afternoon,” Stacey said, watching me for a reaction. “I heard the farmer. They’re going to put it down.”
“Why?” I stepped closer to the animal. Its ears twitched, but it continued to stare into nothing.
Stacey shrugged. “It’s old.”
“Has it got a name?” I reached my hand out tentatively, touching the donkey’s muzzle. Long gray hairs prickled my hand.
“I think it’s called Billy,” she said, climbing the fence and prodding the donkey’s flank with a stick. His tail swished angrily. He was chewing slowly, his lower lip working up and down, wobbling gently. A fat strip of hay dangled from between his teeth. I touched the edge of it as it trembled in his velvet mouth, and his lips caressed my fingers. How could such an old mouth be so soft?
“Will it...will it hurt him?”
“Nah, it’s quick. One shot to his brain and he’ll be gone, none the wiser.”
“Shot? They...they shoot him?” Putting down suggested a gentle collapsing of limbs. I had imagined the vet’s hand laid on the animal’s side until he bent his aged legs and lay, quietly, asleep. Shooting, on the other hand, was violent and loud: an angry death.
“Can’t they give him some medicine to make him go to sleep instead?”
“Not something this big. They have to get them right here, between the eyes.” She formed her hand into a gun shape and touched her fingertips to Billy’s forehead. He blinked. “Got to get the brain. Don’t worry. He won’t know what’s happening.”
But I will, I thought.
Her warm, slightly sticky hand pushed its way into mine, and I looked up to see her looking into my eyes. “It’s the kindest thing, Romilly,” she said, squeezing my hand. “Are you okay? Mum says sometimes I go a bit far.”
I sniffed, wiping my nose on my sleeve, and nodded.
“Good, ’cause you’re my friend and I don’t ever want to upset you.”
I smiled and squeezed her hand back.
“I’m going to come and watch. If I ask, they might let me hold him while they do it.” Stacey’s eyes glittered. “Do you want to come?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head vehemently as I looked into his huge, treacle eye. The whole of the farmland behind me was reflected in it, stained brown like an underwater world. I could see my own tear-filled eyes reflected there too. Billy had stopped chewing. He was looking at me. Carefully I pulled the blade of hay from his mouth and tucked it into my pocket. His warm, sweet breath lingered with me all the way home, and it wasn’t until I was curled up in bed that I realized Stacey hadn’t told me where she’d been all summer.
A week later, I opened the back door of Braër House, and even from this far away I could see something had changed down in the meadow. In the gray dusk, a tall pole stretched up to the sky. It was moving slowly, like the pendulum of a clock.
I ran to the meadow. Close-up, the pole was bent slightly like a giant tusk. Dad was standing next to it, gazing upward, his face sweaty and earth covered. I watched for a moment, then backed away, not sure I wanted him to know I had been there.
Over the next few weeks, as the leaves turned yellow and red and began to fall from the trees, more giant metal structures appeared in the meadow: great swinging pieces that whorled and swung above your head in the slightest of breezes. Some resembled animals and birds; others were strange collections of metal that looked lighter than paper when they skimmed the grass.
“What are they, Dad?” I finally asked, staring up at the huge structures apprehensively one evening.
“They’re mobiles,” he said.
“What are they for?”
“They’re not really for anything. They just are. You mustn’t go in there, Romilly, not without me. They’re dangerous. They could flatten you in an instant.”
I nodded, staring in awe at the huge mobiles. I wasn’t sure if they were the sort of thing that could fix the boiler or feed us more than jacket potatoes and beans, but I was happy Dad was busy. I couldn’t wait to show Stacey.