The first time I touched his hand was inside a cow, which proves nothing more than the countryside is bloody weird.London had sickened me in the end, just like Dad said it would. I arrived home in red soled shoes, my clothes in a bin bag, wine bottle clutched in my hand and my boss’s grope still hot on my breast. The clothes were bought, the grope unwanted, and the merlot I’d grabbed as I left the big smoke. It was my last chance. Up here, people considered wine to be something that came from a Land Rover gearbox if you pushed it above 20mph.
Dad watched me from the kitchen window, as I fended off muddy mops in the shape of sheepdogs. By the time I made it in to the house, my room was made up and the kettle was on. Dad spoke his love in deeds not words.
He died two hours after I arrived home.Oh don’t feel sorry for him, it’s exactly the sort of thing he’d do to make sure I stayed. Farming gets you like that, you try to leave it behind but somehow you never quite achieve escape velocity.The heart attack was quiet and efficient, he would have approved. For two weeks the neighbouring farms helped out. The cows were milked, the sheep brought down off the hills. Then the day after the wake they stopped coming. That’s enough lass, pull yourself together.
Five weeks in and I barely remembered London, some days I barely remembered to wash. A farm is like a newborn, it screams for attention, steals your sleep and involves more poop than you’d imagine. Sometimes I’d remember that there had been a point where I’d walked along the Thames, pausing to watch street performers, and eaten pasta in glass fronted restaurants. Wet bread, Dad called it. Pasta that is, not glass fronted restaurants. Nowadays I felt like the little boy with his finger in the dam, except there were lots of holes and I was running out of fingers.
It comes back to you though, like holding a pen after the summer holidays. Dad had managed it on his own, and in a fashion so could I. At some point I would even find time to buy clothes and cook proper meals, but at five weeks in I lived in Dad’s never-ending wardrobe of overalls and ate whatever I could cobble together. I counted time in the moments between fixing the fencing and the sheep breaking it again. Sheep are suicidally stupid, but cows kill more people than sharks. Remember that.
Difficult cows never birth during the day. An easy heifer will surprise you with a calf standing next to her in the field. A difficult one will howl like a wolf at the silvery moon before the cock has even contemplated crowing. Friday was a lovely cow. Unlike Clara. She’d headbutted me into a wall the day before the funeral, leaving me limping around the wake and drawing attention to myself. Being lovely doesn’t mean they’ll pop calves like shelling peas though.
I was on the verge of sleep when she kicked up a fuss. The dogs joined in for fun, and the goose down the yard harmonised. Groaning, I threw overalls on over my “I only bought them to be ironic” Mickey Mouse pyjamas and trudged out to the sheds. Her tail held high, two tiny hooves reached earth side. It should be easy from here. But Friday’s neck was straight and stiff. She steamed. This wasn’t something I could fix.
I grabbed my phone and tried to call the vets, but my mobile signal was missing, presumed gone back to London. I skittered back into the house. Under a pile of Farmer’s Weeklies, I found the telephone nesting. It was the old rotary sort. It took me until a week next Friday to dial the number.
The only plus side to an out-of-hours call out was that you were guaranteed to get the senior vet. The senior vet came with senior prices, but at least it wasn’t Aaron. Aaron was the newest addition. If he was a dog, he’d be a labrador cross spaniel, all chocolate brown eyes and soft wavy hair. But he wasn’t a dog, he was a person, a person I’d managed to knock a plate of buffet food into at the wake. A person whose shirt I’d made infinitely worse by trying to scrub it clean with a napkin. A person who I’d apologised profusely to and then found chives in my teeth.There were ten things that went wrong that night, guess what number three was.
With Friday haltered, Aaron gently checked on the little life reaching out for us. “The head isn’t forward. The calf needs pushing back, so the head can come around.” He’d already started unbuttoning his shirt.I flustered.I turned to face the wall. Promptly felt ridiculous and turned back. Blushed. Turned around again, and only faced him when he politely asked for hot water. The lights flickered as the generator boiled the kettle.“Do you have a torch?”I had a torch. What I didn’t have were batteries. The bare bulb in the shed was covered with so many cobwebs it constituted a fire hazard. I dusted it off with my hand, burnt my fingers and swore. The really bad word. I put my hand to my mouth, but the word had already bolted.He just laughed.
When he was scrubbed and ready, I stood at Friday’s head and whispered sweet nothings into her drowsy sedated ear. He was back there a lot longer than I expected, grunting and gasping through held breaths as he fought to right the calf. The lights flickered again. And dimmed.
“I can’t.” he said at last, appearing from behind her. “I can’t do it one handed.” The calf needed gently pushing back before its head could be moved forwards. Every time he tried to grab the calf’s head, Friday’s body pushed forward again. “I’m going to need your help.”In the half-light I blinked. And that’s when the lights out.“Shit. The generator.” The diesel delivery wasn’t due until tomorrow.
“Let’s sort some extra light.” He sounded completely unflustered, as if being plunged into darkness whilst topless in a cowshed was an everyday occurrence.
I kicked myself for not remembering to buy batteries when I’d last ventured out. Dad always sorted that. He’d had drawers full of them back when I was a child. Back when I lived and breathed this place. “There might be a gasoline lamp somewhere? And candles?”“Naked flames in a cow shed, what’s the worst that could happen?” I could hear his smile.I scurried off towards the house, grateful for the moon to guide me across the crater strewn yard. Twenty minutes later and Friday’s stall was bathed in a soft glow. Three pillar candles twinkled on the window sill, and the lamp threw long shadows from the corner. Time for me to scrub up.
I peeled off the top half of my overalls.“That’s an interesting choice.” Aaron's eyebrow raised so high it nearly left his head.The Mickey Mouse pyjama top smiled cheerfully in reply. “It’s supposed to be ironic.” I muttered.“There’s no judgement here.” he was rescrubbing in the water. I grimaced, pulled the t-shirt over my head, and tried to pretend I was wearing more than just a bra. A red, satin bra.“It’s laundry day.” I explained, plunging my hands into the bucket. The water had chilled and I squealed.I stood, semi naked and goosebumped. Our eyes met across the candle lit cow.“We do this together.” He said. “And gently. Is it your first time?”I bit my lip and nodded.
I tried standing a good three feet from him, acutely aware of the half a metric ton of garlic on my breath from dinner. But Friday was a cow, not a tennis court. There was no room for distance here. He put his arm around me and pulled so we were chest to chest. And then, together, we saved a life.Aaron had one hand braced against the back wall. With the other he held mine and gently guided me towards the little life. With my eyes closed, my fingertips painted a picture in my head of the calf, its feet leaping forward but its head looking back. Its breastbone the jutting figurehead of its ship. Its neck looped neatly back as if it were a preening swan. Aaron’s hand slipped out of mine and steadied itself against the calf’s chest. “Three, two, one…”
I had my chest pressed against his. My neck locked against his pulse. His breath was on my shoulder. Pushing against the wall, he heaved the calf back as I wrapped my hand around its tiny neck and gently guided it forward. It slowly uncurled, I moved my hand and found ears, and then a jaw and then a nose. Aaron’s breathing was heavy. Where there should have been aftershave there was just antibacterial soap.“The nose is forward.” I said, stepping out of the way. In one easy movement Aaron had hold of the cloven hooves with both hands and had swooped the calf out into the here and now.I cried. Aaron sighed with relief. Friday didn’t even murmur, away as she was, tripping the meadows in cow nirvana. The calf coughed. Aaron was clearing the mucus from its nose, I was towelling it dry with straw. And there it was. A beautiful red heifer, looking around her and wondering what all the fuss was about.
And in the joy of that moment, I forgot that I was stood there, in inappropriate underwear and rolled down overalls, opposite the local Adonis.“What now?” I asked.“We wait. She’ll be out of her sedation soon, we’ll wait to see how she takes to the calf.” The calf looked at her legs trying to work out what they were for. “Time for a brew then?”
I washed off in the cold water, biting hard on my tongue so I didn’t appear like a southern softie. In the kitchen, I struggled to find the kettle in the dark. I looked at it, confused, when I flicked the little switch and nothing happened. No electric. No kettle.So, I grabbed the only thing I had: the bottle of merlot I’d half-inched from my flat share in London, and two half pint glasses.I knew I looked ridiculous. Trudging in wellies that were Dad’s size not mine, into a candle lit barn, to offer red wine to someone I’d just been pressed against the naked chest of. Some ghost of a former self washed back over me as I took in his surprised look, “I believe it’s customary to share a cigarette after an encounter like that,” I set to work with the corkscrew like the dab hand I was. “However, this is all I have, so this will have to do.”
Friday was moving now, staggering to her calf and starting to gently lick her ears. She knew it was hers. We moved out of the stall to let them get acquainted.“I was wondering,” Aaron took the glass from me, “If you’d like to meet up sometime?”“You mean a date?” I regretted it as soon as I said it. What if he didn’t mean a date. What if he wanted to talk about my account? Or ongoing herd management plans. Oh god, I was going to have to change vets.
Aaron took a sip of the wine. That’s all he had, one sip. “Recork the bottle.” He said, and, from under thick eyelashes that were wasted on a man, added, “We’ll drink it on our second date.”“Second?”He cast a hand around the barn. “Candle light, wine, red underwear… as first dates go, I don’t think I’ve had better.”
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