The Language of Horses

The whole mess started, like most of my problems, because Maddy wouldn't leave me alone.

I'm Hannah, I'm forty-three, and I've never been married. I run the vet side of a horse auction barn out in rural New South Wales, which means my days are full of lungs, hooves, paperwork, and men arguing with me about penicillin. My last real romance was when I was twenty-four, a French farrier who was in the country for four months. Four months, then he flew home, and it was over. Nearly twenty years of nobody since, and I'd been perfectly fine with it. Mostly fine. Fine enough.

Maddy manages the barn and has been my friend since we were both young and stupid, and for about three years now she'd made it her personal mission to fix my single status. She'd set me up with a real estate agent who talked about his boat for ninety minutes. She'd set me up with a bloke from her church who asked me three separate times whether I could cook. So when she cornered me in the feed room on a Tuesday, holding her phone like it contained the chosen one, I should have seen it coming.

"Right, before you say anything," she said, "his name is Bo, he's a farrier, he does dressage horses, he's forty-six, and he's got his own teeth."

"Maddy."

"Listen. His hands. A man who works with his hands like that, and he asked about you at the pub, unprompted."

"Maddy, I can't."

"You can't what? You can't have dinner? You're forty-three, not dead."

And I don't know where the sentence came from. It came up out of some part of my brain that wanted to survive, and I said, "I can't, because I'm seeing someone."

She went completely still. The feed scoop was still in her hand. "Who?"

And of course that was the exact moment the door opened behind me, because God hates me, and in walked Sergio. Forty-five, the other head vet, my professional nemesis of five years. Five years of fighting over treatment protocols and who left whose stethoscope where and whether his discharge summaries were written by a drunk toddler. He's Black, Brazilian, from Salvador, he came here from a clinic in Bahia years back, and I have never once had a conversation with him that didn't end with one of us slamming a drug cabinet.

"Sergio," I said, before my mouth could get me killed, "was just telling me about, um, dinner Thursday."

Maddy's head went back and forth between us like she was watching a tennis match. "You two are seeing each other?"

"We're keeping it quiet," I said, and Sergio, to his eternal credit, said, "Very quiet," and picked up a bag of chaff like this was a normal Tuesday.

Maddy screamed. Actually screamed, in the feed room, and hugged me with the scoop still in her hand, and said she'd always suspected, and then she left to go tell, God help me, everyone.

The door had barely swung shut before Sergio put the chaff down and looked at me.

"Explain," he said.

"You heard all of that."

"I heard all of it, yes!"

"So," I said, and I leaned against the feed bin, because my options were laugh or lie down, "there's this woman in town who invites me to things, an old colleague of yours, maybe you know her, Carla, and she keeps giving me these looks of pity, and if you say Thursday dinner is real I will owe you a favor."

"Carla cornered me at the sale last month," he said. "She wants me to come to her place for a barbecue and meet her cousin."

"Her cousin."

"Her recently-single cousin."

"Oh no!"

"Yes. So!" He folded his arms. "One week. We say we are seeing each other, quietly, and in one week it ends, quietly, because it didn't work out. Everyone leaves us alone. Maddy stops feeding you farriers. Carla stops feeding me cousins."

"One week," I said.

"One week. And in exchange I will stop filing my radiograph reports in the shared folder in the wrong format."

"That alone is worth it."

"So we have a deal?" He stuck out his hand.

We shook on it, like idiots, a formal handshake over a fake relationship in a feed room that smelled like molasses and sawdust. And I'll be honest with myself now the way I wasn't then: I said yes mostly because I was bored. Bored of the same fights, the same feed room, the same empty house at the end of the day. A week of pretending seemed like it might at least be interesting.

It was interesting. That's one prediction I got right.

* * *

The deal had one practical clause, invented by Maddy within an hour, which was that we should be seen existing together. So that first night we ended up in the little kitchen behind the clinic, because it was late, the auction crowd had gone, and we were both still on site for a colt case that had resolved itself without us.

"I can cook," Sergio said, digging in the cupboard. "I refuse to eat takeaway twice this week."

"There's nothing here but Maddy's tea collection and a jar of something."

"That is a jar of olives, Hannah, I can read labels."

"The stove's out there on the bench," I said, and I brought in my camping stove, the little two-burner one I keep in the ute for when I'm out on farms all day. I set it on the bench, turned the gas on, and hit the igniter. Click. Nothing. Click click click. Nothing.

"It's out of gas," Sergio said.

"It's not out of gas, it does this."

"It does this, or it doesn't work?"

"It works. It's temperamental." I hit it again. Click. Click. "It needs, I don't know, a minute."

"Every time you use this stove, how long does it take?"

"Shut up."

He leaned on the bench with both hands and watched me click at it for a solid forty-five seconds. "In Brazil I cooked for twelve people on a stove I built myself out of a drum."

"Well, we're not in Brazil, Sergio, we're in New South Wales and my stove is having a moment."

"Give it here."

"Excuse me?"

"Give. It. Here." He held out his hand, so I handed it over, and he turned it around, looked at the bottom, and pulled a little plastic dial thing off and reseated it. Then he clicked it once and both burners lit up blue.

I stood there. "What did you do."

"The igniter cap was loose. It was loose the whole time."

"I know that."

"You clearly do not know that."

"I absolutely was about to check that."

He was grinning at me. I'd worked with this man for five years and I'd seen maybe four of his teeth, total, and now he was grinning at the stove and then at me, and something about it, the sheer smugness of it, made me laugh. Actually laugh, properly, standing in the barn kitchen at nine at night holding a jar of olives.

"It's not funny," he said, still grinning.

"It's extremely funny. You smug drum-cooking bastard."

"Twelve people, Hannah. Twelve."

"I got it," I said, wiping my eyes. "Okay. Fine. You can cook. But I'm chopping, and if you say one word about my knife work I'm turning the gas off."

"Deal," he said, and handed me the olives, and that was the first evening of seven.

I didn't know it yet, but that laugh in the kitchen was the exact moment the week stopped being a chore and started being something I'd have to think about later, alone, in bed, annoyed at myself.

The driving lesson was Wednesday, because Wednesday afternoons the arena went quiet and nobody minded us taking over the paddock track. I'd been teaching Deuce, the stablehand, to drive the ute for a month. He's twenty-six and built with a lean, narrow frame, and he treats the gearstick like it might bite him.

"Clutch. Slowly. Deuce, slowly is a word I know you own."

"Sorry, Hannah."

"You're fine. Just ride it out."

We were crawling along the fence line in first gear when I saw Sergio leaning on the rail with a coffee, watching us like a man at the cinema.

"Is he judging us?" Deuce asked.

"He's always judging us. Ignore him."

Sergio called out, "Hannah, you are teaching him the clutch like it is an enemy. Be kind to it."

"Stay on your side of the fence, Sergio."

"I am on my side. My side is the correct side." He walked along the rail as we bumped past. "Deuce, tell her the truth. How many stalls has she stalled this thing?"

"Three," Deuce said, and I nearly lost the ute laughing, which did nothing for Deuce's nerves.

"Traitor," I said. "Both of you. Deuce, second gear. Lift the foot slow, slow."

He got it into second without a lurch and his whole face changed, and honestly that's the best part of teaching, that look. Sergio applauded from the fence, two claps, maximum sarcasm. But then he climbed halfway over the rail and said, "Now brake with the engine first, not with your foot. Let the machine do the work," and the thing was, that was exactly the right advice, and Deuce did it, and I hated how good it looked.

We finished at four. Sergio walked me back to the shed, hands in his pockets, and said nothing about the lesson, which I noticed.

* * *

The colic call came Friday at 11:40 at night. Lot 88, a six-year-old bay mare, down and rolling in the hospital box, heart rate climbing. I got there first. Sergio arrived eight minutes later in his boots and a coat over pyjama pants, and I didn't even say anything, just threw him the stomach tube.

After that it was ninety minutes of the smoothest work I've ever done with another person. He passed the tube while I held the mare's head. I ran the fluids while he listened to her gut. We swapped positions twice without a word about it, and when she needed walking, we walked her, one on each side, around and around the box under the one working light.

"You're breathing on my shoulder," I said at some point.

"You are counting her steps out loud."

"Somebody has to count."

"I am also counting. We are both counting. It is fine."

By 1:18 she'd passed gas, which in that trade is a beautiful sound, and her gut sounds came back soft and even, and we leaned against the clinic counter side by side, both filthy, both wrecked, a bucket of used syringes between us.

"Heart rate's down to thirty-nine," I said.

"Thirty-nine, two minutes ago."

"Don't start."

"Too late. Thirty-nine." He peeled his gloves off. And I watched his hands while he did it, which was a strange thing to catch myself doing. I'd watched those hands work for five years. They're quick, they're precise, they're honestly annoying how good they are. But peeling a glove off slowly, flexing his fingers, tapping the counter once, twice, I don't know. They were gentle hands. Not just skilled.