It takes her a moment to believe me, I think. ‘I’m really more of a hedgehog kind of girl,’ she says eventually.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh.’
‘It’s okay. I laughed about you wanting to be a mortician.’
I’m relieved she’s not upset, but I can still see a kind of closing up inside. Carys looks at me now, and her body seems held purposefully, like a ballet dancer. ‘I can’t imagine you on TikTok. Not because you’re not beautiful and funny, but I don’t have an account so to me it’s just the animal videos I see getting reposted to Instagram.’
‘Yeah, I’m not really filming animals over there.’
‘But it’s not just recipes? You said lifestyle content too. What is that?’
I wonder how to explain this if all she sees are videos of foxes and raccoons being friends. ‘Do you ever see –’ I take a breath, raise my voice into the influencer tone, and say, ‘–come with me for a day in the life?’
She bursts into giggles. ‘Yes, I know them. That’s vlogging, right?’
‘That name signals to the youths that we are ancient crones, but yes, I do a variation on those. So instead of just sharing a recipe I might be likewhat I eat in a day as a girlie who doesn’t restrict, orwhat I eat to power my workout, which always confuses people when they see a fat girl.’
She thinks for a moment, tapping her fingers against her chin. ‘I guess mine would be likecome with me for a day in the life of mucking out the pigs.’
‘ProbablyA Day in the Life on a City Farm, unless you wanted to do some kind of aspirational montage of faeces. You’ve only a few seconds to hook people in, so you essentially are laying out the thesis statement of what’s to come so people stay watching.’
‘That’s very smart. You can help me make some when we’reout of here then. Maybe it would be good to show people what I do for a living? Talk about food chains and green spaces and stuff.’
‘You care a lot about it, don’t you?’
‘Yeah, I do.’ She sighs happily, almost the same tone as when she talks about Patrick. ‘I know it sounds counterintuitive but a lot of it is about the people. Bringing children to see farm animals and touch them and learn about them for the first time. It’s kind of magic to see their eyes light up.’
‘And you love animals,’ I say, thinking about her and Patrick probably bonding over their favourite sheep breed or something like that.
I admittedly was not expecting her to launch into her favourite sheep breed, something called a Castlemilk Moorit. One of them unexpectedly had twins. ‘Lonnie decided that two were way more than she had bargained for.’
‘Fair enough, really.’
‘My sisters are twins so I can see it, but her plan was to starve one of them.’
‘Oh. Less fair.’
‘Nature can be brutal,’ she says, very matter of fact in the way only animal people can be. ‘So I took him home and bottle-fed him.’
‘In your house?’
‘Yeah, my housemates thought it was cute for a bit but he kept nibbling their stuff. I’d take Smudge to work every day and he’d follow me round everywhere.’
‘That sounds so cute. Is he still like that?’
‘Mostly but he quite likes being a sheep.’
‘You must miss him.’
‘Yeah, but I don’t have to pick up poo off my bedsheets anymore.’
Carys sighs deeply, rubs at her eyes with a knuckle like she’s trying to bore something out.
‘Are you alright?’ I ask.
‘Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just tired now.’ She brushes me off in a way that feels very practised too.
‘You know, you can talk to me about anything you want,’ I say slowly, and I notice her gaze, though aimed at the floor, intensify slightly, as she’s taking in what I say. ‘It’ll stay between us. What’s said in the bedroom stays in the bedroom.’
