Two Worlds in a Barn

Two Worlds in a Barn Episode 1: The Goat Who Hated Jane Chapter One: The Goat Who Hated Jane At half past five on a grey September morning, Jane O'Connell was losing an argument with a goat. It was not the first time. It was not even the first time that week. But it was, Jane felt, the first time the goat had looked so pleased about it. "Biscuit. Give it here." Biscuit, who weighed less than a sack of flour and carried herself like a magistrate, held the strap of the feed bucket firmly between her teeth and looked Jane dead in the eye. Her eyes were yellow, with those strange horizontal pupils, and they conveyed, quite clearly, that the matter had been heard, judged, and decided in her favour. "I've fed you every day for four months," said Jane, tugging. "Every single day. Rain, shine, and that awful week with the frost. And not once have you said thank you." Biscuit chewed. The strap got shorter. "Not once!" Biscuit sneezed. Then, with tremendous dignity, she let go of the bucket so suddenly that Jane sat down in the dust, and trotted across the yard to where Cousin Bridget was loading a suitcase into the back of a wood-panelled station wagon. She pressed her nose into Bridget's hand. She was rewarded with half a carrot. "She loves everyone," said Jane bitterly, from the ground. "She loves everyone who isn't holding the bucket," Bridget said. She hauled Jane to her feet, brushed the straw off her cardigan, and kissed her on the cheek. "Don't take it personally, honey. She's a goat. Now, you've got the numbers for the doctor, the vet and Mrs. Pruitt, they're on the fridge, under the magnet shaped like a pig. Mom, Dad and I will be home a week from Sunday, rain permitting." "Rain permitting," Jane repeated. It was the sort of thing people said in Pine Ridge about everything: weddings, harvests, the end of the world. When Jane had first arrived, she had thought it was a figure of speech. By now she understood that it was closer to a creed. Out here, the weather was not something that happened to you. It was a neighbour, and an unpredictable one, and you kept on good terms with it. In the back seat, Aunt Dot rolled down the window and pressed a foil-wrapped parcel into Jane's hands. It was still warm. The smell that rose from it, cinnamon and nutmeg and brown sugar, nearly made her forget the goat entirely. "Pumpkin bread," said Aunt Dot. "Keep it away from the cows. And eat something that isn't toast, sweetheart. I mean it. I've seen what you eat when nobody's looking." "I eat perfectly well." "You eat toast. Standing up. Over the sink." "That's an efficient way to eat toast." "That's a way to get indigestion." Aunt Dot patted her hand through the window. "I've left a casserole in the icebox. Don't give it to the dog." "We haven't got a dog." "Then it's perfectly safe." Uncle Walt, in the driver's seat, said nothing, as was his custom. He simply lifted two fingers from the steering wheel in a salute that managed to contain affection, instruction and a mild warning about the tractor, all at once. Jane had learned to read it, the way you learn to read a foreign road sign. It said: You'll be fine. Don't touch the red lever. "I'll guard it with my life," said Jane, holding up the bread. The station wagon rattled down the lane, trailing dust and waving arms and one forgotten umbrella that Bridget flapped out of the window like a flag of surrender. Jane waved until the car had dwindled to a dot, and then to nothing, and then she stood there a moment longer in the dust, with a loaf of pumpkin bread in her arms and the sudden, odd sensation of being very small in a very large place. The farm went quiet in a way it never did when people were home. It was not a silence, exactly. The cows chewed. The swallows argued in the rafters of the barn. The old pump handle ticked as it cooled. A long way off, a dog barked at nothing, and another dog answered it, and then both thought better of it. But beneath all these small noises ran something wider, a kind of enormous, listening hush, as though the whole valley had turned its head to see what she would do now that she was in charge. Somewhere in the hay, a goat was hiding a bucket. "Eight weeks and two days," Jane told the nearest cow. The cow, a placid brown creature named Clementine, looked at her with the calm incuriosity of an animal who had never been to England and saw no reason to start. Jane hadn't meant to count. She really hadn't. But she did, every night, lying in the narrow iron bed in the room under the eaves, listening to the house tick and settle: the way other people counted sheep. Eight weeks and two days until the plane back to London. Until her mother's flat above the bakery, and the smell of yeast and toast coming up through the floorboards at four in the morning. Until her brother's dreadful jokes, which he told at funerals, weddings and christenings with equal enthusiasm and no discernible shame. Until rain on pavements she knew by heart. She loved Pine Ridge. That was the odd part. She loved the creaking barn, and the Henderson children who raced her up the lane every afternoon and always, suspiciously, let her win. She loved the way old Mr. Pruitt lifted his cap to her from his porch, every single morning, as though she were a duchess and not a girl in her cousin's second-best wellies. She loved the pumpkin bread and the porch swing and the great, slow, golden evenings that seemed to go on for hours. But love and homesickness, she had learned, could live in the same chest for months without once speaking to each other. They simply sat there, side by side, like two strangers on a train, each politely pretending the other wasn't there. Over the ridge, grey clouds were stacking up like bad news. They were dark at the bottom and bruised at the edges, and they were moving with a sort of lazy purpose, the way a cat moves toward a mouse it has no particular hurry to catch. Thunder muttered somewhere far off, so low she felt it in the soles of her boots before she heard it. "Rain permitting," said Jane, to nobody, and went to find her bucket. It took twenty minutes. It was under the porch. Biscuit was sitting beside it, looking, for the first time in four months, almost apologetic. "Don't," said Jane. "Don't you dare look sorry now." Biscuit ate a button off her cuff. Chapter Two: A Tree, a Car and a Very Rude Awakening The rain came at three in the afternoon, fat and sudden, as though someone upstairs had tipped over a bath. There was no drizzle first, no polite warning. One moment the sky over the lower field was the colour of pewter and the air smelled of hot dust and cut grass. The next, the whole world was water. It hammered on the tin roof of the barn, it hissed in the yard, it turned the lane to a brown river in under a minute, and Jane, caught halfway between the fence and the farmhouse with a pocketful of staples and a hammer, said a word her mother would not have liked. She was in the lower field, fixing a stretch of wire that Duchess had leaned on once too often, when she heard it. A squeal of tyres on wet road, long and high and terrible. A c***k like a rifle shot. And then, worst of all, a silence. She ran. She didn't decide to. Her wellies simply carried her, the way they did when a calf got stuck or the hens got out or Mr. Henderson's bull found the gap in the hedge. She went over the gate without opening it and down the slope in a flat, sliding sprint, and by the time she reached the lane, rain was streaming down her face and into her collar, and a silver sports car sat nose-first against the old oak, steam hissing from its crumpled front end. It was not the kind of car you saw in Pine Ridge. Pine Ridge ran on pickup trucks and tractors and one very elderly Buick that belonged to the minister's wife. This was low and sleek and the colour of a new coin, and it looked, wrapped around the oak, like something that had fallen out of the sky. "Hello?" she shouted. "Can you hear me?" Nothing. The rain drummed. Steam rolled up from the bonnet in slow white coils. "Hello? Hello?" The driver's door creaked open. A young man tumbled out onto the wet gravel, all long limbs and no coordination, like a deckchair coming unfolded. He was pale as paper. There was blood coming from his nose and from a deep cut over one eyebrow, and he was cradling his right arm against his chest like a broken wing. His hair, which had clearly been arranged that morning by someone who took it very seriously, was plastered to his forehead. "There was a thing," he said. His voice was thin and dazed. "In the road. Small. Furry. Did I hit it?" Jane glanced back down the lane. Rain. Gravel. A long grey ribbon of nothing. "There's nothing in the road," she said. "It's probably sitting in a hedge, thinking about what it's done." She dropped to her knees beside him and, with two fingers under his chin, tilted his face up to the grey light. His pupils, thank goodness, were the same size. "Look at me. Follow my finger. Left. Right. Good. What's your name?" "Harry." He frowned. It clearly hurt. "Harry... what day is it?" "Monday. Up you get, lad. Lean on me." "I'm very heavy." "You're very wet, which is worse. Up." He wasn't heavy at all, in the end. But the lane was a quarter of a mile of mud, and he was a good head taller than she was, and every third step his knees folded like a newborn calf's. It took ten minutes to get him up the slope and across the yard, past an extremely interested goat, and through the farmhouse door. By the time she lowered him onto the kitchen settee he had gone quiet in a way that made her stomach drop. "Stay with me," she said. "Harry. Eyes open. Tell me something. Anything." "I like your... ceiling," said Harry faintly. "That's something." She worked fast. She had done this before, on animals mostly, but a body was a body and blood was blood. She cleaned the cut over his eyebrow with warm water and the good antiseptic from Aunt Dot's cupboard, and he hissed through his teeth and said something that sounded like ow, ma'am. She packed his nose with gauze. She felt along his collarbone and down his arm, and when she reached the wrist he went rather white, so she rigged a sling out of one of Aunt Dot's best tea towels, the one with the roosters, and tied it off with a neat, firm knot. Then she rang Dr. Hobbs. The line crackled. Somewhere in the background a clock chimed, a kettle whistled, and a man cleared his throat in the unhurried manner of someone who had never once been late for anything because he had never once believed in lateness. "Bridge is out, Jane," said Dr. Hobbs, in the leisurely tone of a man born in the valley and planning to die there. "Creek's over the planks. I won't get across till the water drops. I'll come by in the morning. Meanwhile, keep an eye on the boy." "Keep an eye on him?" "That's right. Wake him every couple of hours. Ask him his name. If he can't tell you, ring me." "And if the telephone line's down?" "Then he'll just have to remember it," said Dr. Hobbs, comfortably, and hung up. Jane lowered the receiver. The farmhouse cat, a large grey animal of no fixed opinions, was curled on the dresser, watching her with half-closed eyes. "Keep an eye on him," Jane told the cat. "Brilliant." The cat yawned. She built up the fire. She hung his jacket on the back of a chair, where it dripped steadily on the flagstones. It was cream linen and clearly very expensive, and she did not want to think about what the rain had done to it. She found a blanket. She checked on him twice. Then, because it was something to do and because she could not think of anything else that would help, she went to the stove and made pumpkin soup. It was Aunt Dot's recipe: pumpkin and onion and a little cream, with a pinch of nutmeg that Aunt Dot swore by and refused to measure. Twenty minutes later, the whole house smelled of it, warm and golden and impossibly comforting, and the stranger on the settee stirred, and sighed, and opened his eyes. He saw a low, beamed ceiling. A fire in the grate. A rag rug and a rocking chair and a row of copper pans glinting in the firelight. And a girl, with damp hair and a flannel shirt two sizes too big for her, standing over him with a steaming bowl and an expression of grim, practical kindness. "Right, then," said Jane. "You're awake. Thank goodness. Soup?" Harry stared at her. He stared for a long time. His mouth opened slightly. His eyes went from her face to the beams, and from the beams to the fire, and from the fire back to her face, and a look of slow, dawning horror crept across his features like a tide coming in. "Oh no," he whispered. "Oh my God. Am I in England?" "Pardon?" "Did I crash and wake up in London? Am I dead? Are those the same thing?" He tried to sit up, got about four inches, and fell back with a groan. "Why do you sound like that? Where's Big Ben? What the hell am I doing in Britain?" Jane considered the question. It was, in fairness, a very fair one. "You're in Pine Ridge, Pennsylvania," she said, setting down the bowl on the little table beside him. "You hit our tree. I sound like this because I'm from Surrey, I'm staying with my cousin, and you've had a nasty knock on the head." "You sound like the Queen." "The Queen would be insulted." "I think I'm in a movie." "You're in a farmhouse, and you're dripping on Aunt Dot's settee. Drink your soup." He looked at the bowl. He looked at her. And then, with the air of a man who has decided that if he is going to die in a foreign country, he might as well do it on a full stomach, he picked up the spoon with his good hand and took a mouthful. There was a pause. His eyes closed. A kind of peace descended on his face. "That," said Harry, with great reluctance, "is the best thing I have ever tasted." "It's pumpkin." "It's a religious experience." "It's pumpkin and a bit of cream," said Jane, who was trying not to look pleased and failing. "Eat it before it gets cold." He ate. It took him a full minute before he looked up again, and when he did, it was with the frown of a man remembering something important. "Where's my car?" "Wrapped round the oak. The bonnet's folded up like a book." "The hood." "The bonnet." "It's a hood!" "It's a bonnet, and it's ruined, and you're welcome." She tucked the blanket around his shoulders with brisk, businesslike hands, the way she would have tucked in a sick lamb. "Your trousers are drying by the fire, by the way. They were soaked through." Harry looked down. He was wearing a pair of flannel pyjama bottoms, patterned with small blue ducks, that were quite clearly not his own. Beneath them, a pair of very bare ankles stuck out of the blanket. "My pants?" he said. "Trousers." "Pants." "Pants are what go underneath trousers, you silly man, and I would rather not discuss it." Jane went red to the tips of her ears. It was a spectacular blush, starting somewhere around the collar and travelling upward like a thermometer in July. She turned to the fire and began to poke it with great vigour. "Drink your soup." Behind her, there was a small, strangled noise. She turned. Harry was grinning into the bowl, and it was clearly hurting his nose, and he clearly didn't care. Blood-crusted, battered, bandaged and wearing someone else's pyjamas, he was, nonetheless, the happiest-looking person she had ever seen. "I'm Harry," he said, when he could manage it. "Harry Mercer." And he watched her face closely. It was a habit, by now, as automatic as breathing: the way he'd watched a thousand faces in a thousand stage doors, from the first flicker of recognition to the gasp, the squeal, the pen thrust beneath his nose. He knew the whole sequence. He could have drawn it from memory. Nothing happened. She simply took a piece of bread from the plate, tore it in half, and handed him the larger piece. "Jane O'Connell," she said. "Eyes on me, Harry Mercer. How many fingers?" He squinted. "Three." "Two." She lowered her hand. "We'll try again in an hour." Outside, the rain went on. It hammered on the roof and chuckled in the gutters, and somewhere in the yard a goat, who had been watching the whole business through the kitchen window, turned and walked away with the air of an animal who had seen everything and would be telling nobody. In the firelight, Harry Mercer ate his bread and his soup and said nothing at all for several minutes. He couldn't remember the last time that had happened. To be continued...Next episode: Harry discovers what it's like to be nobody, and Jane discovers what it's like to peel a potato next to a man who cannot