My sheets twisted around me in a
sweaty mess, I woke up with a start. It was the middle of the night and I had
awoken with the sudden and paranoid awareness that nothing on the farm was
locked. This wasn’t due to negligence on my part: nothing was ever locked. The
front door didn’t even have a key hole, and the cars were never locked even when
they were parked in Lamastre. It had struck me as strange before, but because
of how remote the house was, it hadn’t struck me as dangerous. Now that I was
alone and half asleep, I felt much more vulnerable.
The feeling was exacerbated when a
car drove up about five hours later. The sun had risen by then, and I was
dressed, and the car turned out to be a benign cargo of raspberries for the
freezer being delivered by a very kindly and equally benign elderly couple. But
benignity aside, their fleeting presence brought it home to me how alone and
isolated I really was. John and Carla lived fairly close by, but they wouldn’t
be around during the day. I didn’t know any of the other neighbours, but they
definitely didn’t live so close by that they would be able to hear me scream if
anything were to happen.
I had to distract myself from the
morbid thoughts. The hens´ eggs needed collecting, so I dutifully went up to
the back of the coop and carefully lifted out the still-warm eggs, making sure
to leave the fake plastic egg in its place. Apparently the presence of a fake
egg encouraged the hens to lay, although I couldn’t see how it would make a
difference; I was sure that even the small brain of a hen could tell the
difference between lifeless plastic and warm, life-bearing shell. Eggs safely
in their padded basket, I unleashed the birds with a swipe at the wooden latch
on the coop door and ran away before the cockerel could make an appearance. I watered
the gardens to make sure that the plants didn’t go thirsty, cropped peas for a
while, and buried my mind into the disturbing pages of Sebastian Faulks’ Engelby in the comfy swinging hammock.
It was while reclining in the hammock that I had the sudden realisation that it
wasn’t just the plants on the farm that might be thirsty, or hungry for that
matter.
What did rabbits eat? How about
cats, dogs? I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t been aware of the pets being fed; Juan and
Malo must have done it whilst I had been working in the garden. It had
definitely been at least 24 hours since their last feed. I found grass for the
rabbits, poking it through the wire in the cage. They seemed to eat it, which
at the time was good enough for me, although whether they were simply eating
out of desperation I couldn’t tell. I topped up their water trough too, and put
out bowls of water for Pieski and the cats. I wasn’t sure what either of them
ate, or where to find the food, but I defrosted some milk as I had seen Anne-Marie
do; at least milk was nutritious.
In a moment of
inspiration, an event of the previous week came back to me. I had been presented
with a mousetrap, slightly bloodstained and holding a semi-masticated morsel of
comté and a very dead mouse, skull
crushed to oblivion. I had been asked if I felt comfortable with feeding it to
the cats. It later transpired that Anne-Marie had asked me simply because she
detested doing it herself, but at the time I thought that I was being tested
somehow, and I was keen not to be seen as a squeamish city-dweller. So, pulling
the mouse’s body from the spike, where it stuck a little because of the dried
blood and guts, I had done the deed. I thought I would never do it again. And
yet here I was, scouring the house for activated mousetraps. At least the cats
would have a little bit of meat to fight over.
Meanwhile, Pieski was becoming more
and more agitated. It worried me to start with, but panic set in when he began
to attack the cats. He was much bigger than them, and could easily have eaten
one. I didn’t want felinicide on my hands. But I was terrified of him in this
mood, too. Eventually, once Pieski had taken his growls elsewhere, I followed the
cats to where they were mewling, and with their help I uncovered barrels of
dried food hiding behind the tractor. I scattered it around like a farmer
sowing seed. I wasn’t at all sure that what I was doing was right, but at least
they were no longer going to starve, and I wouldn’t be found mauled to death by
a dog which so closely resembled a rug.
I was one death threat down, but
one remained; I needed to distract myself from the fact that I was going to have
to face the cockerel again that afternoon: I hardly relished the prospect of
another evening of ridiculous bedtime crooning, with or without lead piping. Since
my spring-cleaning spree of the previous day, I had been formulating a
cellar-based project to keep me cool that afternoon. I remembered that Anne-Marie
had been talking one day about how messy her stash of wine bottle labels was
and how she kept losing track of which labels needed reprinting. She had also moaned about what a chore it was
to count her stock of wine each month. So I tidied her boxes of labels, sorting
them into flavours, making paper dividers to keep them separate, and counting
how many labels were left of each, writing the count on each of the dividers.
My intention was that each time Anne-Marie used the labels, she would write on
the dividers how many she had used, thus keeping track of how many were left.
As for stock-keeping, I wrote a list of all the flavours and put them in a grid
against the months of the year. I hoped that each month she would fill it in,
and that it would make keeping track of sales much easier. I couldn’t know if
she would use my work or not, but I hoped it would prove useful, and in any
case it kept me happily occupied while cockerel-time crept closer.
Inevitably it did and inevitably I
was the protagonist in the same musical farce as I had been the night before, except
that this time I was emboldened by my lead piping. I still stood there coaxing
the winged devil for what seemed like hours, but my response to his talons in
my face was more assertive, and ultimately more effective. I went to bed
feeling like a powerful woman.
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