Goats and Ponies

He could hear splashing on the flagstones outside; Martha must be watering the hanging baskets again. Gazing through the window toward the tree line, he thought idly of someone at that very moment in, where, the Sahel maybe, dragging along, going for a plastic canister of muddy, bug-ridden water. The house was encircled by the baskets, heavy with polychromatic blooms. Hold on, polychromatic, isn’t that just paint? Well, they were like painted things; you didn’t get real wild flowers in those colours and in that tight proximity, nothing natural about it. He thought too that there were half a dozen too many, and the cottage was old, early eighteenth-century; the rich colours clashed with the weathered old slate and stone.
The small house was dark and cool, darker and cooler than even the depths of the wood he was looking into. He could go for a walk in the wood but tended to avoid it in the middle of the day; at this time of year at least, the deep shadows and listlessness of the creatures living there had something oppressive about them. He would go for a walk, but into the open spaces of the moor behind the cottage. Take the dog, stretch his legs and get some air, put some sun block on first though and take a hat.
A stop in the bathroom to apply some protection against or own star, he thought, we’re making ourselves aliens to our own planet. He stuck a bush hat on his head, whistled to the wiemaraner and, with the clicking of her toes on the stone floors telling him that she was following, headed out the back door, away from the sound of the splashing water.
He walked past the bird-feeders and the pens for the ornamental chickens and ducks; through the wooden gate and onto the moor. He always wore long trousers now on these walks; partly so his bone-white legs wouldn’t burn, partly because of the rise in the number of ticks. He did not want to contract Weil’s disease, he thought; start composing Threepenny Opera’s all over the place. That’s a terrible joke, he scolded himself. On a previous walk he had cut across a hillside of burnt heather. The woody remnants had acted like charcoal on the material of his trousers, they carry, he had thought, a mysterious message in unknown hieroglyphs.
‘Ulf!’ The big dog had disappeared over the brow of the hill. There were not too many sheep around here now, but the farmers still retained their distrust of free-running dogs, so he always took the leash, only using it when the land maggots appeared. Ulf! Martha named all their animals and birds, but while it hardly mattered what you name a rabbit; he always felt an idiot shouting a name that made it sound like he’d just taken a thump in the belly. She’d got it out some book, he couldn’t remember which.
His mind went back to the sound of the water. Would we ever look back at such waste and feel guilt? He wondered if women were more inclined to such waste; water pouring unnoticed from tap down the drain without having been used at all, as if its presence was as totally natural as a waterfall, just one that had cleverly been redirected through pipes into the house. His granddad had worked on dams in Scotland in the thirties, left the farm in Donegal for the big wages to be made in back-breaking labouring in big projects in Britain. Few mechanical diggers around, instead hundreds of men on piece-work, shovelling hour in hour out for days and weeks and months. He wouldn’t have taken clean drinking water for granted. And his grandmother back on the farm; for drinkable water she had to take two enamel buckets and walk down the glen to a spring. It tasted beautiful and maybe all the more so after the labour it took to get it. He could probably bottle it now with his cousin who had the farm, sell it in a million shops and make a fortune; but it wouldn’t taste as good. He thought his gran wouldn’t have wasted water like Martha and other women these days. But hold on there, he told himself, what about all those men washing great big stupid cars and what about all the water that gets used on golf-courses, mainly a man’s game. People in countries all over the place were struggling to get water through their taps because of big golf developments springing up in near desert conditions; take the water from the kids’ mouth to keep the greens green. Talking of water, he thought, there’s where the old reservoir was. Ahead was deep green, where the water had been was thick now with iris, sedge, meadowsweet and other plants he could not name. Ulf disappeared into it, sending ten, twelve wild duck rocketing skyward.
He skirted the marshy area and started to breathe heavily as he climbed a hill, heading for the site of an Iron Age fort. The period named, he told himself, for when people really started to look after their clothes. Eyes fixed to the ground he noted the flowers; tormentil and devil’s-bit scabious. Tormenting devil by the biting of scabs, nice thought. There’s some mountain pansy, elevated pensees, the heights of pensiveness or are they dog violence, dog violets. No sign now of the fort; he only knew it was here from the maps, maybe he would buy a metal detector and unearth a spearhead. He looked out over the countryside. Life a stopgap between birth and death, he thought, then noticed a large flying insect. Is it a dragonfly or damselfly? It landed. Dragonfly. Holds its wings crosswise, a forty-five degree angle when at rest, not along the body like the damselfly. Too big for a damselfly anyway. He crouched for a better look. The insect swivelled its head. He loved the way that that head swivelled; loved that sixty thousand images of him in those compound eyes were being translated into one image in the creature’s tiny brain. Calmly the dragonfly took flight, its front legs held in a skeletal net to scoop prey, smaller insects, from the air.
When he got home, Martha was cleaning out a rabbit hutch. That’s our life now, he thought, housekeeping for rodents. Not rodents, lagomorphs. And Ulf walking. When they’d sold up the business in the city and moved here, he had felt a bit like some Roman patrician retiring from military and political life to his farm. He pictured himself and his retinue leaving Glasgow in a series of chariots and wagons, the mob cheering and waving as slaves distributed generous parting gifts from the people’s favourite senator. Bet they don’t even remember me now.
‘I thought you had fallen down some bottomless pit.’
Thought…or hoped, dear Calpurnia.
‘Make some coffee, darling, and I’ll love you forever.’
Or at least until the ides do fall.
‘Do we have any biscuits?’ Those chocolate ones out of Marks with the hole in the middle that he liked, though he’d just as soon like them better if they dispensed with the hole and filled it with biscuit and chocolate.
‘We have if you haven’t eaten them all.’
He hung Ulf’s leash behind the door and washed his hands before taking down the biscuit tin. It was the Schrodinger’s Cat moment he hated. Did the biscuits exist or were they extinct?
Martha came in to coffee and shortbread.
’You should ration yourself; make the chocolate ones last longer. I’ll get more tomorrow when I’m picking up feed.’
That’s it feed. Pour it from the grain sack and stir a few biscuits into it and me and the livestock’ll just tuck in. This is no life. We can’t get away because of all these dependants. It’s because the kids are gone isn’t it? We’ve replaced them with other, goat kids, daft little ponies. We should take our money from the bank and re-open some coalmine just so we can put ponies to work down there, then rescue them. They’d be eternally grateful as long as we kept out the way initially so they couldn’t recognise us as having been in on the plot from the start.
Little animals. Fun-sized animals. Bonsai creatures; eventually get them down to table-top size, little enclosures on a plateau above the Turkish carpet a new, miniaturized Lost World. Combine two interests by having a train set on the table, the locos chuffing along past real, tiny, cows and horses, fingernail-sized pigs and sheep. Maybe nature would kick in with foxes to scale; hard to keep out of the house, wily enough to reach the high table, picking off flea-sized chickens and ducks.
In the morning, as if they had been conjured up by his daydreams, foxes, full-sized ones presumably, had got into the bird pen and killed the lot. Little feathery feet were scattered on the ground. It made him think of a student job he had one summer, cleaning out old buildings for a college to refurbish and let out. In one building he found that, over the years, hundreds of butterflies must have hibernated in the building and perished in the winters. Their bodies had rotted away or fed spiders but their wings were scattered all over the floor, thousands of fragments which seemed all to have broken into triangles, small tortoiseshell tesserae.
Martha wanted to wreak her vengeance on the local fox population; he suggested she get a saddle for one of the Shetland ponies and hunt them, in short bursts. She saw sense quick enough, though she didn’t like his description of the hen runs as being a vending machine for delinquent carnivores, penniless but determined to have the goodies on display. They made do with the dogs, ponies and goats after that; they were all big and mean enough to kick the living daylights out of any fox. Or tod, he thought, the old name for fox. Badger; brock or grey and hare, mawkin. Listen to the grizzled countryman.
Long after dinner that night he sat gazing distractedly through the living-room window. He noticed the row of little ceramic cottages on the sill. When did they turn into the kind of people who buy such rubbish? Was it another example of shrinking the world? They were belittling existence, acting like Brobdingnagians. Who were the ones who argued over which end of the egg to break? Tomorrow for breakfast he would have two boiled eggs and open one at the big end and one at the little; confuse any observers, reports would be inconclusive, the warring parties would dismiss his potential as ally or enemy. Gulliver’s Travels. Tulliver’s Gravels: Driveways of Distinction. Who were the Tullivers again? That’s it, ‘The Mill on the Floss’. Daft name for a river; every time it was mentioned he imagined it all big and fluffy. And pink. Candy floss. You wouldn’t drown in that; just lose your teeth to decay. It’s a nice night, he said, I’ll just go for a last check around the place. The night sky was clear and vast, the stars pin sharp. This was one of the countryside’s attractions that had drawn them from the gaudily illuminated city. He looked up at the Milky Way. A great white gravel drive for God’s 4x4. He went up to the field and unlocked the padlocked gate that led to the moor, but the ponies and goats just stayed where they were, grazing calmly and looking at him occasionally as if he was some kind of crackpot.; maybe some kind of partisan of the fox people; a foxite, a foxian, a cryto-foxist. The minute I find a casserole dish big enough, he thought, as he locked up the gate and walked back to the house. A tawny owl in a nearby tree watched the grass about his feet as he walked: perhaps the shambling giant would flush out a mouse.