I
June 2000
There's not much you can say to a fourteen year-old as he lies limp in your arms. If he's your brother, and you're only seventeen, there's not much you can say. My proficiency at lying - though it would improve - was not yet at a level that I could convince him he'd be fine. So I just stare down at him, fumbling for words.
He doesn't tell you to look after his kids and wife, or tell you to tell them he loves them. He doesn't tell you he loves you. He hasn't lived enough to have anything meaningful to say or to know how to say it.
He was Daniel and I was Beckett, and our other, middle brother, John, stood looking on.
It was a one mile walk from where the bus drops you off to the house. Narrow country road road, twisting and dipping, trees and foliage of all heights and breadths bordering your path. Cow-shite splattered all over the road. Farmhouses dotted here and there. Tractors, barb-wire fences, colloquialisms, innocence. Chaffinches chirping a cacophany that must surely be random but seemed to create a bizarrely paradoxical soundtrack. The blast of sunshine and warmth some kind of cruel cosmic joke. A disarmament.
I stopped dead when I met the beast. Maybe that wasn't the thing to do, but what did I know. A behooved behemoth stood me down fifteen feet away. I was at the head of our group I could sense the others slowing up behind me. A gust of wind from the nostrils like the releasing of an air brake on a big rig.
A bull is massive. Enormous. Any bull, and certainly this one. There was a herd behind him. The ladies filled the road twelve or fourteen deep, so we couldn't just slip quickly past him. The farmer was way back on a tractor, far enough that I couldn't hear the instructions he was bellowing over the noise of the engine.
I shift back slightly and to the side and his front hooves mirror my movements. His neck was ridiculous. A genetically modified hunchback. I felt like when he shifted his weight it'd give me some idea of the awesome power that stood behind that collar. I was wrong. He lurched towards me. Some of the gang took this as their cue to frantically clamber over the wire fence to the left and drop the five feet or so into the field below, but that was no longer an option for me. I was caught in his headlights.
He lurched again taking two steps this time. I was frozen. My heart tried to climb out of my chest. I daren't turn my back on him to see if the others were out of harm's way, but I could sense they'd all moved.
The farmer's cloth-capped head bobbed towards me through the cattle but not quickly enough, and finally I hear him shout,
"RUN!"
I drop my shoulder to the right letting my school-bag fall as I take off at the same time. The fence to my right is just reasonable enough for me to clear in one relatively fluid motion and I feel him cut across the path of where I had been a fraction of a second before. The vacuum created by him almost sucks me back onto the road.
He bears left and carries on through the fence I have just hurdled like it wasn't there, appearing now out on my right as he loops round to meet me. I try to think. There was a lot of open space ahead and no point running into it, I wouldn't outrun him. I stop dead, let him make the moves. If he charges from where he is his momentum should carry him past if I step out of the way at the last minute.
Adrenaline coursed through me. I figured if I could fox his next charge, I'd buy myself some time for the farmer to do something. He had slowed up and come to a halt as I had and pondered me from about forty feet away and sprung into motion again. His head was bowed and he gathered speed. I began to doubt. I planned to jump out of the way at the last second, maybe he'd career into these large Ash behind me, but I wasn't sure if I'd be able to move. I swayed myself to make sure I was limber. Not too much because I didn't want to be swaying the wrong way when it was time.
