Sea Change Read Free Page A

country where he can make a thousand decisions and has all the time in the world to make them. He lets his thoughts run, hoping they might quarry a solution, then consciously he forces himself to think calmly, without panic. How did the horse get in here, he wonders, how did it just manage to appear like that on the small patch of dirt, and he has an unsettling vision of how it must have been, a few minutes ago, the stallion trotting noisily across the field, its hair shaking with the movement, while they’d been looking at the droplet of water, while Judy had been reading her poem. And while he’s imagining this he spots a five-bar gate on the brow of the field which is clearly half-open and leaning as if it’s come off its hinges. The gate’s open , he mouths to himself.
    ‘Daddy,’ Freya says, a little too loudly, ‘is it a pony or a horse?’
    ‘It’s a stallion.’
    Perhaps there’s a mare and foal beyond that gate, on the other side of the hedge - it’s possible. Maybe the mare is afraid of them approaching the foal and the stallion is trying to warn them off? Who knows? It feels plausible, in a moment full of uncertainties. He doesn’t even know how long they’ve been standing here. Probably just a minute or two. But Judy’s reached her limit.
    ‘Let’s go,’ she says.
    ‘Judy,’ he answers, ‘it’s going to move off, you know, it’s going to get bored. We’re doing nothing to bother it.’
    But at that moment the horse seems to drop a shoulder and lurch forward, stumbling into movement in fast trotting steps, beginning a steady jog which runs alongside the brook and turns into a wide curve towards them. Judy pulls at his arm, fixing herself to him, and Freya twists behind them, hiding, almost tripping him up as he takes a step back. It’s moving too quickly. His mind freezes, staring at the ridge of coarse hair, shaking with each step along its spine. At the random pattern of splattered mud across its back, at the heavy sense of muscle bending along its side, details, he’s trying to take it in, trying to work it out, when suddenly it stops, as abruptly as it started, mistrust in its every move, on the edge of the marshy grass, its stilt-like hooves sinking, readjusting, making puncture holes in the ground that fill immediately with dirty water.
    Judy swears, pulling him and Freya back as she does so, towards the oak tree.
    ‘Let’s get behind that trunk,’ she says, practically, and he knows that’s what they have to do and he has the unsettling image of the three of them, trying to skirt the big tree while that horse comes at them, and all three of them tripping up on each other and tripping up on those big roots he can see sticking out along the ground. It’s full of its own perils.
    ‘I’m not sure,’ he says. He takes a quick look at her expression, gauging it, and sees how dark and intense her eyes have become, her face is as sharp as an axe head. She’s not to be disagreed with. But just as they have started to move they all immediately stop, reacting on instinct to a new series of actions from the horse. A tossing and throwing of its head, its lips pulled back to reveal a dirty set of wide flat teeth. He sees strands of saliva falling from the mouth, the bumps of skin above, around the nostrils. Nostrils flaring in dark holes like the barrels of a gun, and he realizes he’s seeing these things in more detail now, because the animal is closer, much closer.
    Freya is twisting in his grip, doing the wrong thing, he looks at her shoes so clumsily placed in the soil, oddly turned. He imagines her running, how ineffective it would be, and he hopes the horse might tire or trip off to another edge of the field. Just a show of strength. Protecting its foal and family. A show of strength. And at that moment the stallion decides to come at them, dropping its shoulder like it did before but this time directed towards them, head on, in a stamping, bucking trot which shakes the horse as it