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Chapter Six

~

Devon, June 1996

Emily had been a resident at Exmoor Secure Children’s Centre for a month before William Huxtable came to visit, but he’d written to her several times. Usually, visits were restricted to family members only. Emily’s sister and mother came every week, but this weekend Amanda had stayed home to revise hard for her A-Levels. Instead, Will came. He’d told Emily jokingly that he was her cousin for the duration of the visit, but Emily suspected that her care coordinator would have been in favour of the visit anyway. After all, as she often told Emily, socialising with her peers was an important part of her treatment.

‘This place is not at all how I imagined it would be,’ Will said.

‘I know,’ Emily agreed, looking around her as they walked through the corridor towards the garden. The home had an institutional feel to it, but at the same time colourful naïve art pictures, in glassless frames, were displayed on the walls, which were themselves decorated in vivid tones.

Emily remembered the day she’d arrived. She’d been escorted through the gates and up the drive in a police car. The building had looked almost welcoming and not at all austere. She wouldn’t even have known what it was in different circumstances.

‘Were you expecting something resembling a Victorian workhouse?’ Emily asked. She certainly had been.

‘What?’ Will was absent-mindedly sifting through leaflets on contraception and healthy eating on the stand by the door to the garden.

‘You know, Oliver Twist?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Will said. ‘So what’s it like here?’

‘It’s OK. Everything is brand new. My bedroom still smells of paint! This place only opened about a month before I was sentenced…er, sent here. There’s a TV room where we all watch Neighbours after lunch and Home and Away after lessons. There’s also a library, although it could do with having a few more books. There’s a music room with a piano and a games room with table tennis. But the best bit is that twice a week after lessons I can paint for a couple of hours in the Art and Design workshop.’

‘You have lessons?’ Will was surprised. ‘You didn’t mention that in your letters.’

‘Didn’t I? Probably because I didn’t think it was very interesting. Yes, I have to study. I’ll be taking my GCSEs next year, you know, whether I’m still in here or not.’

‘I’m glad all that’s behind me,’ Will said. ‘That said, A-Levels are worse!’ He chuckled. He was eighteen months older than Emily, but a year ahead for his age at school, which put him in the same class as Amanda.

‘So, have you chosen a course?’

‘Yes, I have,’ Will replied. ‘My first choice is Veterinary Medicine at the University of Bristol. Dad’s still sulking, though.’

‘Why? Because you don’t want to go to Bicton College?’

‘Yeah. He really wanted me to take over the farm.’

‘And you definitely won’t?’

They sat down side by side on a bench in the Centre’s garden. The sun was shining and Will unzipped his jacket. They could see Josephine sitting on a bench a few metres away from them. Her book was open on her lap but her head was bowed low, and Emily assumed she was sleeping rather than reading. The moors rolled out in front of them, green dotted white with sheep, as far as the horizon.

‘As you know, Em, I want to be a vet. I got good grades in my mocks. I want to get out of Devon and live in a big city.’

Will was sitting close to her, on her right. Emily noticed him looking at the bandage on her right arm. She tugged down the sleeve of her jumper to cover her wrist. She could see that he wanted to ask her about her wounds, but she didn’t want to talk about it.

‘I can understand your dad being disappointed, though,’ she said quickly. ‘You were so helpful to him on the farm. Hey, do you remember lambing together?’

‘Of course!’ Will smiled. He started humming the melody to Stealers Wheel’s Stuck in the middle with you. Now it was Emily’s turn to smile. Will began to describe their experience of that spring, but Emily tuned out. Closing her eyes and offering her face to the sun, she relived the event for herself.

~

It was a sunny day in March of the previous year when Emily, Will and Amanda stepped off the school bus.

‘Em, would you like to come and see the newborn lambs?’ Will asked, loosening his school tie.

‘Yes, please!’

‘Well, go and get changed into some old clothes and put on your wellies. I’ll meet you at my dad’s farm in ten minutes.’

Will did not extend the invitation to Amanda.

Amanda and Will had been best friends for years, but recently they hadn’t so much as said hello to each other. Emily didn’t understand why. They’d fallen out on the day Emily’s cat, Smokey, had been found dead – run over, her father had said, its head severed from its body. Amanda said Will hadn’t been supportive. Maybe that was why they’d rowed.

Later that evening, Will’s dad had turned up, rather irate, on their doorstep. Emily remembered him and her own father shouting at each other, but she hadn’t been able to make out the words despite their raised voices. Graham stormed into Amanda’s bedroom as soon as Mr Huxtable had left. Emily heard him say: ‘Explain yourself, young lady!’ but then the door slammed shut behind her father and Emily overheard no more of the conversation.

When Emily had asked her about it the next day, Amanda was evasive. She’d muttered something about having to take the rap for Will.

On arriving at the farm, Emily gazed in awe at about a dozen tiny creatures as they suckled from their mothers and wobbled around on unsteady legs. Will told her that many of them had been born only yesterday. He was feeding what seemed to be the smallest lamb in a pen with heating lamps when Emily tiptoed into the barn.

‘No need to be scared,’ he said. ‘Come here and give the bottle to this lamb. It was born earlier today and its mother died. It needs to be fed colostrum.’

‘What’s colostrum?’ Emily asked as Will gently transferred the bottle to her hands.

‘It’s a mother’s first milk. It gives the baby vitamins and antibodies. We keep cow colostrum frozen for orphan lambs. It happens sometimes. We’ll find another mother for this little thing later.’ The lamb sucked greedily and noisily at the teat, and the liquid soon disappeared. ‘Dad has taken the cows for milking,’ Will continued. ‘I need to go and check on a ewe having a difficult labour.’

Will led the way to another pen. He sucked in his breath when he saw that the ewe’s lamb was presenting its head, but his voice was even.

‘This lamb is not in the right birthing position, Em,’ Will explained. ‘I’m going to need your help. There’s no time to fetch the vet now. Or my dad for that matter.’

‘OK,’ said Emily, unsure. ‘Tell me what to do.’

‘For now, I just want you to hold the ewe and keep her as still and as calm as possible.’ He placed his hands on Emily’s shoulders and guided her to the front of the sheep, then placed her hands on either side of the ewe. Then she watched Will as he carefully felt and prodded the animal’s belly. ‘She’s expecting twins,’ he said.

He poured something that smelt like disinfectant onto his hands followed by a liquid that made his hands glisten. Lubricant, Emily supposed.

‘The lamb should come out with its feet under its chin, and that’s not the case,’ Will said as he carefully knotted a thin piece of cord around the lamb’s head, which he then proceeded to push gently.

Emily observed Will. He was frowning and puffing. He was clearly having difficulty.

‘This is hard!’ he commented unnecessarily. ‘The ewe is pushing the lamb to get her out, and I’m trying to push it back in!’

After a few seconds, he grunted in satisfaction and knelt down on one knee. ‘Phew!’

Emily kept her eyes on Will. Poking his tongue out in concentration, he repositioned the lamb inside the ewe. His blond hair was quite long at the front and it flopped down over his eyes. He tried unsuccessfully to blow it away. Keeping one of her hands firmly on the sheep’s side as Will had shown her, Emily stroked the ewe with her other hand.

A few minutes later, Will said, ‘OK, there should be a bit more room to manoeuvre now. Are you all right there, Em?’

Emily nodded. She was amazed at his cool competence.

‘Em, I think it would be easier if the ewe was on her back. That way, we’ll have gravity on our side. Can you give me a hand?’

Together they laid the ewe on her side, and then rolled her onto her back. Will talked Emily softly through each step. Then his hands disappeared inside the ewe again and finally emerged holding the lamb’s two little legs. Its nose and head followed. Will tied another piece of rope around the legs.

‘Nearly done,’ he said, smiling now. ‘This is the easy bit.’ He gently pulled as the ewe pushed, and the lamb slipped out in one go. ‘Come here, Em,’ he said, his smile even wider as he removed the ties. ‘Grab some straw and rub the lamb to get her blood circulating properly.’

Emily did as she was instructed. She saw the lamb’s belly rising and falling. It was breathing.

‘It’s going to be fine now,’ Will said. His hands felt the second lamb inside the ewe. ‘This one’s in a good position,’ he said. ‘We can leave the ewe to get on with it when she’s ready.’

Will’s high spirits were contagious and Emily found herself mirroring his smile. He started to sing and dance around the pen. ‘Stuck in the middle of a ewe.’ Then he laughed.

‘Is that even a real song?’ Emily asked, which only served to make Will laugh more.

‘Not quite,’ he replied. ‘The title is Stuck in the middle with you.’ Emily laughed too as she got the pun.

‘I hope you don’t want to be a singer when you grow up, Will,’ she joked. ‘I don’t know the song, but it sounds terribly out of tune.’

‘No,’ Will chuckled, ‘I want to be a vet. How about you, Em? What do you want to be when you grow up?’

‘Happy,’ Emily replied.

‘That’s a good goal,’ Will said, his smile slipping slightly.

‘Who sings that song anyway?’

‘I have no idea. It was part of the soundtrack to the film Reservoir Dogs.’

‘Have you seen that film?’ Emily was incredulous. She knew it had an 18 age certificate. The only film she’d watched that her parents had deemed unsuitable was Wayne’s World, but she hadn’t really understood much of it anyway.

‘Yeah. With a friend at the cinema in Barnstaple last summer.’

‘Was it any good? Is it really as violent as everyone says?’

‘Yeah, it has some pretty horrific scenes,’ Will said. ‘For example, that song is playing when a character called Mr Blonde tortures a policeman he’s holding hostage. He dances along to the radio while he cuts the man’s ear off with a razor.’

‘That sounds horrible!’ Emily exclaimed and Will laughed again. Then he grabbed Emily round the waist and continued to sing Stuck in the middle of a ewe.

Their laughter and Will’s singing stopped at once when his father erupted into the barn. The reason for Mr Huxtable’s foul mood was unclear, but Will was immediately ordered to check on another ewe and Emily was sent home.

~

Will finished reminiscing. ‘Do you think there’s any chance of you coming home soon?’ he asked now.

‘I don’t know,’ Emily said. ‘I think at some point I can come home and be monitored there for a few months – follow-up, they call it. In the meantime, I’m getting treatment here, so I don’t know whether they’ll let me out early or not. I’m here for two years at most, so I may be allowed out after twelve months. You’ll have gone to university by the time I get home anyway.’

‘I think you might be going away, too,’ Will said.

‘What do you mean?’

Will hesitated a little before answering. ‘Your house is on the market. Didn’t your mum tell you?’

‘No. She said the stables had burnt down one night. Is that why she’s selling? I expect the house and grounds are way too big for her to manage alone anyway.’

‘I knew about the fire. My mum was the one who called the fire brigade. But your mum told me today that she’s selling because she needs the money to pay for Amanda’s studies.’

Amanda wanted to read psychiatry and hoped to get in to Oxford.

‘Oh.’ All this was news to Emily. ‘It’s probably just as well she’s leaving the Old Manor House. Too many bad memories in that place. It will be good to go somewhere else.’

‘I can’t wait to get away from home,’ Will said. ‘It’s…stifling. We’ll keep in touch though, OK?’

‘Definitely,’ Emily said.

Will had turned towards her and his knee was touching hers. She saw him glance down again and wondered if he was looking at her bandaged wrist or at her stomach. She used both hands to try and flatten down her tummy. Both the GP at the Centre and her psychiatrist had told her that it was barely showing, though, even after six months. No one had noticed – not even Emily herself. Not really. She’d had stomach pains and nausea and had been feeling very tired, but she’d put that down to stress and her medication.

The doctor had prescribed blood tests, but the results had come as a complete shock to everyone. Dr Irvine, who had continued to treat Emily after the trial, said that Emily was understandably in a state of denial about her condition.

Will didn’t know, did he? Her mother certainly wouldn’t have told him. According to Amanda, she’d scarcely spoken a word at all since she’d found out the previous week. Amanda didn’t talk to Will, and she wouldn’t have told a soul, anyway. He couldn’t know.

‘Are you left-handed?’ Will asked.

‘Yes,’ Emily said.

So it was her arm he’d been scrutinising.

‘Did you do that to yourself?’ Will gently folded back the cuff of Emily’s jumper to reveal the bandage.

‘No, of course not.’ Emily’s voice didn’t sound at all convincing, even to her own ears. ‘It can get a bit rough in here at times, you know.’

‘Can I ask you something else?’

‘Yes, all right.’ Will could be quite frank and Emily wondered what he was going to say.

‘That night, you were lying in bed holding a razor blade. Why?’

‘How did you know that?’ Emily was taken aback by the question.

‘It was in the North Devon Journal.’

‘Oh, I see.’ Emily was silent for a while. ‘Well, you know why, Will. You may even be the only one who knows.’

‘You were going to cut off his ear?’

‘Uh-huh,’ Emily replied noncommittally. ‘Did they print that in the article, too?’

‘No. No, of course not. It was only a short news story. In fact, the reporter didn’t even print your name.’

Emily turned to face Will. She had tears in her eyes. She never talked about that night, but she had a sudden urge to tell Will everything.

‘So, did you change your mind? You decided to shoot him instead?’

‘Something like that, I suppose. I wasn’t really thinking clearly.’

‘And you shot him with his own gun?’

‘Mmmm.’ There was a short silence during which both Emily and Will were lost in their thoughts.

‘What gun? Not with his clay pigeon shotgun, surely? You couldn’t have… Wasn’t your father…? How did you—?’

‘There’s a lot I don’t remember about that night.’

She’d used the same answer several times when she was being interrogated by the police a few months ago. That put an end to their conversation. Emily told Will nothing about that night after all.

Suddenly, her tummy tightened painfully. Maybe it was hunger. She’d deliberately made herself sick after lunch. But Emily wondered if it could be a contraction, even though that only made six months.

‘I think you should go now,’ she said to Will. She resolved not to reply to his letters from now on.