She gives them a little upwards chin nod, and ushers them into the ludicrously warm kitchen.Christopher is fairly sure he had some icicles growing on him up to now.He thinks back to Dai, shivering in the shed with Nessa.
‘What’s the situation then?’She leans back against the counter, her arms still folded.‘Is he too tight to pay the bills?He’d peel an orange in his pocket, that one.’
Christopher decides to take the lead.‘His sheepdog, Nessa, is in labour.We’re all a bit concerned that there’s something going wrong, and we thought that, as you were near, you might be able to help.He won’t leave her and we don’t think she’s safe to travel to the vet, so we’re hoping you might have some ideas.’
She raises an eyebrow at this and sucks her teeth.‘Does he know you came here?’
‘He does.’
‘Hmm.’
‘But we didn’t tell him that you originally sent us the tip that something was up,’ adds Nash.
She sniffs, as though to dismiss this suggestion that she was the one who reached out to them.Well, Christopher thinks, they can go along with her curious fiction if she’ll agree to help.
After an excruciatingly long silence, she finally says, ‘You were right to come to me.I’ll go.’
Relief pours through Christopher as she grabs a thick coat from the back of the door.She doesn’t take off the apron, but fills a reusable shopping bag with towels from under the sink.She hands this to him as she passes, disappearing further into her house.
‘Thank fuck for that,’ whispers Nash.‘I was worried we were going to deliver a litter of puppies ourselves.’
‘Well, that might be a possibility.I think we should be there to make sure they don’t kill each other.’
‘Can we somehow take this heat back with us.My nipples were going to fall off in there.’
‘How curiously specific.’
Christopher’s doubly relieved, though.Things were so strange this morning, with Nash acting as if nothing happened at all.Something happened!Something huge!And they just didn’t talk about it?Nash just got up and made coffee and toast, which was nice of him, but was that it?Is Christopher supposed to just move on and forget about it?It makes him feel as if they are living in two parallel universes and he doesn’t know how to reach out to Nash’s.
That whole situation is way too complicated, to the point that dealing with these two cantankerous farmers who might try and kill each other in the world’s coldest barn feels like a much better prospect than going back to that tiny flat with Nash in tow.He doesn’t have time to think about how he feels about it all, in part because he feels so many different ways at once.
He’s grateful when Thelma returns in a blur of activity, so he and Nash are no longer alone with nothing to talk about.She hands Nash a bag this time.
‘All right lads.Let’s mynd,’ she says, ushering them out the door.
Nash holds the passenger side door open for her, but Thelma stomps off into the yard.‘Do you not want to come in the van?’he calls after her.
‘I’ve got my own transport.’She points to a tractor parked alongside the house.The exact tractor that Tamara was despairing that she drives.‘I’ll go through the field tracks and meet you there.’
Not ones to argue with a tiny terrifying woman, Christopher and Nash get back into the van.As Christopher backs them slowly out of the farmyard, they see her tiny yet stocky frame perched inside an enormous tractor lurching out of the gloom and chugging out into the field behind them.
‘Bloody hell,’ laughs Christopher.
‘You’d better drive fast or she’s going to beat us there and we might be walking into a murder scene.’
‘I probably should have packed yellow police tape in my prepper bag.’
It annoys him that this gets a laugh from Nash, even though he was trying to be funny, becauseurghit just feels strange to slip back into normality after last night.He’s probably being weird, and he knows that speaking to the gang would absolutely help, but what’s he supposed to do?Text them like,hey, just to let you know we had sex and I’m behaving not at all normally about it?Something to worry about when they are somewhere with signal, and when he isn’t driving quite quickly through the snow back to Pentre Farm.
Thelma’s tractor is already parked up when they arrive in Dai’s farmyard, but she’s still in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead.How long has she been here?How long must it have been since she was last here?They were childhood friends who inherited their family farms, so presumably she must have spent a lot of time here many, many years ago.Perhaps it’s like visiting a memory, or even a graveyard?And any good memories they have must be shadowed by the worst moments of their shared past.There must be so much history, not just here but between them.Even though she wants to help Dai, it sounds as if they’ve not been alone together for the whole time they haven’t spoken.They’ve been in rooms with other people, and still not spoken.
And now they’re going to have to communicate,reallycommunicate, for the first time in fifty years, in order to help Nessa.
What must that feel like, to see someone you loved so intensely after so long?After so much time and space and pain?It was pretty strange the first time he saw Laurel post break-up – the party where he met Haf was probably only the second or third time after that, and certainly was the first time he’d seen her with Mark, an odious man who is now thankfully her ex.It was strained, every time.They still loved each other, but time and space had bloomed distance between them.
Like Dai and Thelma, he and Laurel had been childhood friends, then teenage sweethearts.They had grown up together, and tried to grow into new people alongside each other.Luckily, they have developed a supportive friendship that has allowed both of them to become the people they were trying to be.But all that took a lot of honest, and often awkward, conversations.Plus one very drunken snog at her parents’ Christmas party.But he can’t imagine what that rekindling would be like after a whole life, after marriages and children and the loss of those spouses too, when you also hadn’t spoken for that entire time?How do you grow through that?How do you find each other again?
He almost doesn’t want to intrude on her quiet thinking, but needs must.They have a dog to help.
