“Why’s he stressed? Have you fallen out?”
“Hope not. I told him I loved him.”
I hadn’t meant to spill my guts to my mother, but sometimes it went down that way, and I wasn’t ashamed. How could I be when my ma was a fucking angel?
Sal heard me out—I spared her the gory details—and said nothing until I’d talked as much as I was ever going to. Then she drew the teapot across the table and topped up my mug. “Sweetheart, I don’t know much about romance these days—if I even ever did—but if that big boy doesn’t love you right back, I’ll eat my yard boots.”
“You never wear your yard boots.”
“So? Doesn’t make them any tastier, does it?”
“You fucking loon.”
Sal cuffed me playfully. “Don’t talk to your mother like that. You know I’m right.”
Perhaps I did, but was that really the problem? “I know he cares about me... about all of us. But he’s got a life in London, Ma. A job at a hospital—patients and stuff. Even if we did some lame co-dependent, long-distance thing, we’d never see each other. He works as much as I do.”
“What do youwanthim to do?”
I rolled my eyes, because if she didn’t know the answer to that, she was as daft as me. “It doesn’t matter what I want. It can’t happen.”
Sal gave me a look—thelook, which meant that she was about to say something that I’d better not dare argue with. “Joe, this farm doesn’t keep going with us thinking that things can’t be done. If you want that boy to stay here and share this life with you, you’ve got to tell him. Give him thechoice.Nothing is impossible if you want it enough.”
“Bollocks. I want a new stable block and a credit account at the organic feed place. Can’t have that, can I?”
“Not right now. But things change. If they didn’t, none of us would still be here.”
My ma could be a wise woman when she wanted to be, but on this occasion, I couldn’t see how she could possibly be right. Asking Harry to live on the farm was easy. I’d do it in a heartbeat if I didn’t know how much it would kill him to refuse. Whether he loved me or not, I couldn’t be sure, but—
The phone rang again, the ear-splitting peal startling me out of my introspective melodrama. Sal answered it and passed it over when the caller identified themselves.
It was Newquay police station and I couldn’t help but laugh as they explained the reason for the call. “You’ve just locked my dad up for the foreseeable and now you want me to do you a favour?”
“If you wouldn’t mind,” the policewoman said. “The RSPCA can’t come out until tomorrow, and there’s all kinds of animals on this property.”
“How many horses?”
“I’m not entirely sure.”
“I don’t have the space for more strays as it is. I’m still housing the last lot.”
“I appreciate that, Mr. Carter, but if we can’t round some of these animals up, we’ll have to call a vet...”
And so it went on. Luckily for the nags, wherever I was going, two of our younger horses had been donated to a riding school the week after I’d come home from hospital, freeing up a couple of stalls if some old timers went back to sharing. Maybe it wouldn’t come to that, but who the hell knew anymore?
I took the location down and relayed the message to Sal. “I’m heading out. Did George put diesel in the horsebox? It conked out on me yesterday.”
“I don’t think so, luv. He got caught up trimming hooves. Said he’d do it tomorrow.”
Damn it. Though I couldn’t really complain. Bending to trim hooves had been impossible for me in the weeks after Shadow booting me, and George had picked up the slack. Keeping the vehicles running was myresponsibility, and I’d fucked it up.
Again.
“I’ll take the van,” I said. “If there’s anything to come back, I’ll pick some diesel up on the way.”
I left Sal in the kitchen and hit the road, driving out of town and all the way down to Redruth where the police waited for me at a sprawling property that was nothing like the shit holes they usually dragged me out to.
A sergeant showed me inside, and for the first time in years, I was truly shocked by what I saw. Most of the house was empty, but a living room that was larger than the entire ground floor of my house housed a gang of more cats than I’d ever seen in one place. Dozens of them, all in various states of health, and the room stank to high heaven. “Erm, you know I run a horse farm, right?”
