by Linda Cracknell

'That many things on a farm are answered by this stuff,' Dan said. He was winding bristly orange baling-twine between two gates to make an enclosure. When he swung the gate open for them, the ewe and her new lamb crackled onto the clean bed of straw.

Jill leant over the gate and tickled the ewe's head. The fleece felt greasy and soft.

'Sweet,' she said.

'Eh?' he leaned the side of his head towards her. 'You speak that bloody quiet.'

'So sweet. That's all,' Jill said.

Dan leant in and gave the ewe a nudge, pushed the lamb's tail-end so it was pointing its nose up towards the udder. Its black legs were comically splayed but at least they were holding it up now.

'Softy, eh?' he said.

Jill saw that he had grown man's hands - big, calloused and workish, grained with dirt. But he was still gentle, the way he handled the animals.

Dan had been here every Easter when she visited, just a few years ahead of her, a bit like a brother might be, she supposed. He'd always been active on the farm, but now it seemed to be a real job. Under his baseball cap, his face was tanned from the weeks of Easter holiday sunshine. She watched him close the gate and tie a second knot of orange to keep the sheep in. Something about his hands made her feel funny, like wanting to look, but wanting to look away all at the same time.

'See,' he said, standing up from the gate and pointing at his boot laced at the ankle with orange. 'Boot laces. Light switch.' He pulled at the dangling orange twine that led to a bare bulb in the ceiling of the barn. 'And belt.' With a big grin, he pulled up his shirt and revealed his waist, the jeans cinched through the belt loops with baling twine.

She saw the bare skin of his belly and pretended to scratch her ear, so her hand covered part of her cheek.

He dropped his shirt.

'We use it loads too,' she said, after a pause. She pulled her T-shirt downwards. It gave her hands something to do. She'd also seen in the mirror how it made it look almost as if she had tits.

'Aye?'

'At the stables. For mending hay-nets. And we tether the ponies with it, in case they pull back. It snaps,' she explained, finding her confidence now. 'Rather than hurting them if the head-collar digs in. Or breaking the head-collar. Because they're expensive.'

On quiet days at the stables, they also plaited the twine to make leading ropes, and halters. One day Sandy Montgomery had woven a length of it into the long plait that swished down her back. She said it was in this summer, she'd seen Kate Moss with a braid, and it looked dead cool. Jill didn't know anything about that.

Jill's mother got furious with her for coming home every Saturday evening in the winter months with pockets full of the stuff. She pushed it in there when she scattered the hay bales in the field at the end of the day. The twine nested in her pockets, caught up with sweetie wrappers and bits of hay. Her mother had to throw it out before Jill's clothes went in the washing machine. Apparently it brought hay into the bloody house, and hay belonged outside.

'You've finally got a pony then?'

'Not my own. I help there, at the stables.' Then she corrected herself. ' Work there.'

Each weekend as they approached on the bumpy track leading to the stables, the excitement would bubble up in her - before Brian released her from the air-conditioned, silent, smoky world of his car.

She didn't tell Dan how she could have been going to the stables every day during the holiday, instead of this long, empty stay at her grandma's in the middle of nowhere. She might even have taken a sleeping bag and stayed over in the tack room. She didn't mention to Dan how she thought enviously of the other girls going there today - arriving with sandwich boxes, and their leather whips, running across the yard in their rubber riding boots to their favourite horse, and throwing arms around its neck.

'I ride Lightning,' she said, as if that made him more hers, and more present. 'I look after him. He's cool.'

The thought of who might be combing the knots out of Lightning's shiny black mane and buffing his hind-quarters with a body brush, made her want to wee. Or there was something tight and tingling down there if she thought about it too much anyway.

'So you're Thunder, eh?' He sat sideways on the quad bike, one foot raised on the wheel arch, grinning. He took out a packet of cigarettes. As he put one in his mouth, she thought he hesitated, as if about to offer her one. But then he stuffed them back into his shirt pocket. She hadn't seen him smoke before, looked over her shoulder, wondered if his mother knew about it.

'So what's cool about him? This Lightning. Fast is he?'

She nodded, 'Gentle too though'. She didn't mention the fact she could only ride him once a fortnight because that's all her mum could afford, or how she'd overheard Brian use the 'f-word' when her mum had told him how much it cost.

'You don't want to spoil her,' was what he had said.

One of the OK things about coming here were the big bare green hills. She could walk for ever. If she tried to walk at home, there were always big boys who fired potato guns and bad words at her. There were tunnels under the roads with dogs in them, and people with dark faces. Up here in these hills, she could ride Lightning for as long as she liked, in secret. She would give him his head and gallop flat out - a streak across the skyline, Lightning snorting and pounding under her.

In the long afternoons if she stayed in the cottage while her grandma napped, she put the TV on as she straddled the arm of the big corduroy sofa, flung reins over a wheel-back chair in front of it, and rode for Scotland . Her crotch would slide rhythmically along the sofa arm - Lightning's bare back - as she sat the bucks, piloted him expertly over jumps and swam with him through flooding rivers. It was so good it tingled. The afternoons could be boring, but on this visit, with the good weather, she spent most of the day outside.

She dreaded the days when it rained at the stables. If rides got cancelled, they would all be stuck in the tack room together, and the older girls would tell gross stories about boyfriends or get the younger ones to do things they didn't want to do. Sometimes they sent Jill to the corner shop to buy cigarettes. She always got laughed at by the shop-keeper, it was so obvious she wasn't sixteen, and she would come back empty-handed and drenched to the skin.

Recently they'd had a phase of trying to get Jill and the younger ones to faint. Standing in one of the stables, a girl would squeeze the air out of you from behind, and then lower you onto the straw, speaking gobbledegook into your ear. Or they'd sling a leading rein over the beam in the tack room, place a chair under it and get you to stand on it with your neck caught in the noose. The chair was pulled away, then put back quickly before you really floundered, before you hung.

It was best to avoid the place if it rained. Or at least keep out of the tack room and go and talk to Lightning while he munched his hay.

Dan was tugging a loop of baling twine in his hands. 'You say it snaps, eh?' he said. Takes a bit to break this stuff. Strong as f.'

When she lifted hay bales at the stables, clinching the two strands of twine in one hand, the bale would bang against her legs as she carried it out to the field.

'Slave labour,' she'd heard Brian mutter when he'd come too early to collect her one evening, and watched her grappling with the weight of a bale. He'd seen afterwards the two long red dents on her bare hands.

Dan swung onto the quad bike. The engine rattled. He stood tall on the foot pegs as he reversed it, and then zoomed forward, over the sun-baked, rutted track, waving goodbye at her. And she was left alone watching the ewes and their lambs.

On the top of the hill, on its very highest point, there was a sharp blue breeze that cooled the sweat under her T-shirt as her lungs calmed down after the climb. The sky seemed to arc huge over her and she turned on her axis and took in the full compass of the hills.

The pointy shape over there she knew as Tinto Hill. Her mum had dragged her up it for a picnic. In those days, before Brian, she and her mother had visited Grandma together rather than Jill being packaged off alone. Another turn, and she was looking down on the woodland that crowned a low hill. Another turn, and she stared up to the summit pronged with its three antennae. Tucked below it, was the farm and her grandma's cottage hidden by the dark strip of forest. She couldn't see it, but knew that underneath the green canopy of trees, rabbits with bobtails bounced about, and there was a heap of wood offcuts getting ready for a bonfire, and black plastic that flapped and ghosted in the wind at night. She turned again. On the main road, trucks pulled great flat rectangles of shadow towards England .

She lay down on her back in the grass, out of the cool cut of the wind, and watched some black and white birds scudding above her.

'Rest,' she said to Lightning, who she could trust to graze nearby with his reins loose on his neck. He was loyal - would stay close by without her holding him. Every now and again he pricked his head up to listen for something. Horses were ace at listening. You could talk and talk to them, quietly in the stall, straight into the furry lining of their long ears. They listened hard. You could tell they were listening because they didn't muck about.

There was a bald patch exactly on the summit of the hill, and on it lay a charred log which had been burnt into a strange shape - like the head of a big bird. It made her think of one of those beaked dinosaur things. She sat up and cupped it in her hands. When she put it down again she saw that her hands were black. Instead of wiping them on the grass, an impulse took them to her face where she smeared a line on each cheek.

She let Lightning have his head so he could pick his own way back down the steep hill. She rode the odd stumble. When they got to the flat field at the bottom, she gathered up the reins and galloped him hard towards the wide ditch, urging him on with her voice and legs and the grinding of her bum, just as she'd been taught, and yelling 'hup' as they took off. She thrust herself forward, soaring over the ditch to land, and then pulled him back into a collected canter, circling and controlled. She didn't like to gallop him too much. The ground was like rock after all this dry weather. It could jar his legs. They dropped back to an extended walk, working on a loose rein, just as Robbie, her instructor, insisted they did at the end of a jumping session, to cool down.

Robbie had looked at her in a long smirking way recently. It made her stare straight ahead as she rode around him in a circle.

'You're going to be trouble, aren't you? Legs up to your armpits,' he'd said. And when she'd misjudged a jump, and landed, painfully, on the pommel of the saddle, he'd shrieked, 'Lost something, have you Jill?'

But she didn't know what he meant and had felt confused, as if she was supposed to have dropped something, and she said, 'No.'

'Not already lost it?' he seemed to be pretending shock. She couldn't think of a reply.

She became aware of the quad bike crossing the next field, and then coming towards her. Lightning vanished. She dropped her hands from the reins, let them fall to her sides, pulling at her T-shirt. She knelt on the grass, plucking daisies into a pile, and pretended surprise when Dan greeted her and turned off the engine.

'Hi Thunder. What's with the face?' He mimed two swipes across his cheeks.

She wiped at her face with spit on the back of her hand and waved vaguely back in the direction of the hill.

'Been up there?'

She nodded, colour rising at the thought he'd seen her galloping with her hands held out in front of her, and heard all that shouting.

'What you doing?'

'Making a necklace,' she said, absorbed by trying to insert a stalk into the narrow incision made by her thumbnail.

'Daisy-chaining. At your age,' he laughed.

She dropped the daisies, ashamed of her childishness. When she looked up at him, she saw a wry grin and wondered if he'd meant something she hadn't understood.

'Grow up fast these days,' he said. 'So you've been up Gallow Law the day.'

'Where?'

He nodded up at the hill. 'That yin.'

'Yes.'

'Used to have fires up there.'

'Why?'

He shrugged. 'Protection'.

'From what?'

'Witches. Disease. Thunder and lightning'. He laughed. 'In the old days.'

She remained puzzled. In the past she and Dan had played together easily despite the difference in their ages. But it all suddenly seemed complicated and confusing.

'Seen who I've got in here?' Dan pulled at his jacket zip.

She stood up. A small white head appeared against his chest.

'Oooh,' her cry launched itself and her hand shot out towards the lamb, but it retreated again before she made contact. She pulled at her T-shirt.

'Stroke it if you want.'

Her hand went out again and touched the soft head, but her face blazed. Her hand was suddenly too close to the hollow at the base of Dan's neck, just above the lamb's head. At Brian's neck, in the same place, hair seemed to crawl up and out of his shirts, like it did from his nostrils. Combined with the smell of cigars that clung to Brian, it made her shrink away.

'Mother rejected it,' Dan said.

'Why?'

'They do sometimes. Or the mothers die.'

'What from?'

'The birth. Disease. Whatever.'

'Poor thing,' she whispered to its soft ear.

'Aye,' Dan said, and patted at the top of its head. She wished, suddenly, that she was the lamb curled up against his chest, all safe, and rescued and warm.

The sun was sinking behind the strip of forest when she walked back down the track to the cottage. It made a dark green pool in which the sparkling new lambs played together while their mothers grazed nearby. She felt like skipping and didn't care who saw her.

The next afternoon, her grandma napped as usual, and Jill mounted the sofa arm. She was distracted from Lightning and water-jumps by a dark-haired woman in black and white on the TV, slowly approaching a man. She undid his tie, and twining it about his neck, pulled his head down to her, into a kiss that seemed to go on and on.

The 'reins' that Jill used around the chair back became a tie. Closing her eyes as the woman had done, she tipped the chair towards her face, till her mouth touched the smooth hard rail of its back. She gathered her lips into a full cushion, and kissed. She kissed the broad coroneted brow between Lightning's eyes, and she kissed Dan's smiling tanned face, at one and the same time.

She practised and practised all afternoon.

When she got into the yard the next morning, all was quiet. The quad was parked up, and she looked for Dan in the barn and out where the hay bales were kept. She passed the rusty tractor, the trailer with only one wheel, the pile of tyres. Then something white and fluffy caught her eye. It was too big for a lamb. A mound of fleece on its side, its back to her.

'Ah, sweet,' she thought. 'Sleeping'.

But as she got closer, she saw that there was something too still about it. Its legs were immobile and straight. Did Dan realise, she wondered. Could he save it if she could find him and let him know?

But as she crept closer, something else caught her eye, stopped her from going to look for Dan. A tail of orange twine led from the ewe's neck. And she could see a dent in the fleece where it had been pulled tight. The ewe had been noosed, lassoed with baling twine.

'Thunder!' Dan was suddenly behind her. 'Looking for lambs?'

'What happened?' She pointed at the hung sheep.

'Casualty. Last night.'

'Why. why has it got baling twine..'

He shrugged. 'Had to get it off the hill.'

She stared at Dan.

'Behind the quad bike,' he said.

She still stared.

He laughed. 'I dragged it down.'

Tears pricked behind her eyes. She thought of the hard ground, of all the ruts and bumps the poor soft ewe must have bounced over.

'It was dead already,' he said, and laughed again.

For the first time his laugh sounded rough and smoky, like Brian's. Perhaps he had hairy nostrils too, that she had never noticed. Her attempt to make sense of it, of him, felt like a twisted coil of twine in her pocket, caught up with biros or paper and bits of hay, and impossible to pull back to the simple loop it had started with.

She pulled down her T-shirt. She pulled at it so there was something for her hands to do whilst she fought with her tears. The T-shirt was taut under the arms of the jacket tied around her waist. She saw Dan look. He looked there, at her tits, or where they should be. He held his gaze there, and then looked up at her face, grinning.

No words came. She turned away and ran back down the track towards the cottage. A few drops of rain spat onto her hot face and she slowed to a walk. She put her jacket back on, and thrust her hands deep into her hay-filled pockets.

© Linda Cracknell

Linda has provided a link which will yield further information. Those who are curious should go to:- http://textualities.net/writer-pages/a-m/