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From Gliff, which will be published this month by Pantheon.

How do you say hello to a horse? I said.

I’ll show you, my sister said.

We were standing in the early morning, the air already thickening with mist, some of which seemed to be rising off the back of the horse. Someone called Arkan had cleared a patch of the playing field yesterday with a lawn mower and together the small group of people who lived here had helped us clear everything from it that might harm a horse. The makeshift fence round the cleared space was made of a lot of old classroom chairs and tables shoved up against one another in a big oblong. Two small feral-looking kids, ragged, both looked about seven years old, had been told off several times for knocking some of these flimsy chairs to one side as if to let the horse out.

This morning some of the chairs were lying on their sides on the grass and the fence was full of openings. But the horse was still there in the enclosure as if perfectly happy to be there and was now coming slowly across the shorter grass toward us in the mist.

I leaned on the back of one of the still-standing chairs.

It could easily just walk out of there, I said. And it hasn’t.

My sister shrugged.

I told him last thing last night I’d come and get him this morning and that we’d take him in before it got too hot today, she said.

Yeah but how much does a horse understand of what you’re saying? I said. I mean what did it, what did he, really know when you were telling him that?

You say hello like this, she said.

She stretched her arm out as the horse came near, her hand held toward the tip of its nose.

Not that he doesn’t also hear when you use words, she said. Hello Gliff.

The horse put its—his—nose into her hand. Even though there were already several possible ways through the furniture fence my sister shifted the two chairs directly in front of us so the horse could come out through the opening she made, and he did, came walking beside us all the way across the high dry grass to the building then over the old car park space, the tarmac already softening underfoot this early under the sun, then easily up the broad school steps and in.

The noise of him even just slow walking inside the building rang above us like weird magic all through the corridor and into the big hall.

You stay here with him while I sort this, my sister said.

I pulled myself up to sit on the edge of the stage, swung my legs, watched the horse just standing in all the empty space shifting his weight from hoof to hoof, head low to the parquet. My sister went back and fore between here and the toilets bringing half pailfuls of water one on each arm and pouring them into the things the people here had given us: a plastic bucket found in a cleaning cupboard, the plastic hood of the lawn mower, two large plastic storage tubs that looked like recycling bins.

The hall was cool and still. The horse stood, closed his eyes in what morning light came through the glass of the rusty skylights in the roof. One skylight was broken. Below it, all down the wall, all the way to the floor, was the stain of past rain.

This was a room from when children, in the old days, all learned things at once together in one building.

The people who lived here now were:

Oona.

Valentina Mini and her friend Arkan; they were in charge of the fence and the upkeep of things.

Ulyana, who knew about the sublime.

A thin clever man called Bertin; he was missing a finger on one hand. He said he’d caught it in a fence underwater and had had to choose whether to leave it behind or drown.

The girl who’d called me a cat and told me the big dogs would get me. Her name was Daisy.

A fifteen-year-old boy called Wolf whose job description, my sister and I decided, was to be as sullen as possible.

The two wild silent children with the ragged clothes and hair, one was called Little, and I never found out the other’s name.

Why was it different calling a person something from calling a horse a name? It was different, subtly different, but subtly the same too. I’d never thought about it before, and why did I myself really like having more than one name, as if I had more than one self? Why were my sister and I so careful and keen to evade when we told people our names?

Evade what? Why did we so often naturally know to tell them names that weren’t our names at all, and why did doing this leave us reeling with happiness, and was any of this related to saying hello to a horse? Or giving a horse as a name just some word, a meaningless word like “gliff,” from then on supposed to mean that individual horse whether the horse knew it or not?

Last night Oona’d ushered us in to what said on the door it was a headmasters office, we were carrying our rucksacks and kitchen stuff and what was left of our cans. It had been a badge of honor us arriving complete with a horse. It had made us unusually interesting.

This is Briar, also known as Brice, and this is Rose of Allendale.

That’s not my name, my sister’d said to the room. Then my sister and I had been made to sit on the most comfortable seats in the place and were given so much food to eat we couldn’t finish all of it.

Afterward Oona had sung an old song about clear, fair mornings, a calm sea, somebody at your side when you go wandering. There were a lot of flowers in the song, it was a song about flowers really, and about somebody whose name wasn’t Rose but who becomes a kind of symbolic rose to the singer. The singer is a person who’s been east and west and never been alone because of this rose coming with them wherever they are. When the singer’s boat is wrecked by sea storms, the rose alone withstands the storms. When the singer is fevered and thirsty in desert sand, the rose keeps the singer alive by telling them stories of all the other possible places, all the happinesses. At the end the singer says their life would have been nothing if they hadn’t had the Rose of Allendale in their life.

I take it back, my sister’d said when she heard it. I am Rose of Allendale.

Everybody except the small children raised their cups and glasses to Brice/Briar and Rose of Allendale. It was embarrassing, but also lovely, like we had a brightness round us, like we might really matter to a room full of people we didn’t know, and Oona’d sung that song with an unfussy voice that sounded as sturdy as a well-made wooden table and it was the first time I’d understood that the thought of an ordinary wooden table could itself be a kind of comfort.

They took us to another room on the ground floor, it said nurses office
on the door. They gave us clean bedding and made us up beds that were quite like real beds, one up on high legs, one on the floor, with pillows and such. The water in this building could be hot too, and was plentiful. There were showers that still worked. We were clean again. We’d eaten rice, cheese, actual vegetables; lucky for my sister who’d eaten nothing but sweet corn for the past couple of days the people here made real food in what had once been rooms where young people were taught how to make meals, where some ovens and hobs still worked, at least when the electricity was working. Valentina always knew how to get it working again and her friend Arkan who had a beard so long he tied it up in a knot at the top of his head to keep it out of the way when he was working or eating was always sorting the rubble where bits of the building had fallen in on themselves and trying to make it watertight before the big storms came, they were coming soon, they always did after the heat.

We could stay until we were ready to move on, Ulyana had told us last night. Could we shelter the horse from the sun somewhere? Yes, in what was called the assembly hall. But when we’d seen it with its good wooden floor we’d exchanged glances with each other. My sister had said two words.

Horsepiss. Horseshit.

Valentina had laughed and said, We don’t care! We never use this room. We’ll christen it Horse Hall at the first piss, she said.

All the people living here, including the feral children, were right now unverifiables. They were largely unverifiable because of words. One person here had been unverified for saying out loud that a war was a war when it wasn’t permitted to call it a war. Another had found herself declared unverifiable for writing online that the killing of many people by another people was a genocide.

Another had been unverified for defaming the oil conglomerates by saying they were directly responsible for climate catastrophe. Another had been unverified for speaking at a protest about people’s right to protest.

The ferals had been marked unverifiable simply because nobody knew what had happened to their adults and it couldn’t be proved who they were.

My sister came back, water slopping. The buckets she was carrying made her look even smaller.

I jumped down to help.

I’ve got it, she said. I’m doing it.

What’s the point? I said.

Horses need a lot of water.

No. I mean what’s the point in calling a horse a name? I said.

She looked at me like I was speaking a language she didn’t understand.

He’s mine, she said. Ours. We can call him what we like.

Yeah, but is that what a name is? Another word for ownership? When really you giving our money to a boy who says he or his father or whoever owns this horse, well, it doesn’t really make this horse, if we look at it from the horse’s worldview, any more their horse, your horse, or our horse, I said.

What’s another word for mad? she said.

Deranged? I said.

You’re deranged, she said.

But isn’t you thinking you can own it, or him, and call him a name, sort of deranged too? And isn’t it in fact exactly the same in some ways as the other people who’ll have called him other names before in his lifetime and thought they could decide what to do with his life, ride him, treat him well or badly, send him to a slaughterhouse?

My sister rolled her eyes.

Uh-huh. Whatever, she said.

She left the room with the empty pails on her arm.

Soon everybody else in the place would wake up and this hall would be full of the people who lived here coming to hang out with what they all called our horse.

I went and stood closer to the, our, horse.

I’m Bri. I’m deranged. More trouble than it’s worth, I said. What are you?

He opened one eye at me, then shut it again, lowered his head, breathed out wetly right onto me.

You don’t need a name, do you? I said.

He didn’t, any more than the dog we called Rogie that’d lived with us for a time then vanished, presumably gone on with his life elsewhere while we went on with ours without him, was ever really anything to do with the name we’d called him.

So there was the word that made the name, and there was the dog that it conjured in the mind, and there, way beyond it, totally free of it himself, was the real dog, wagging or not wagging his tail.

It was me who was tethered to the word.

What do you make of your new field? We have to keep you out of the sun but you’ll be able to go back out late today when it cools, and be out at night, and we’re sorting horse food for in here, I mean feed, as well as the grass you can eat out there, and we’re working out how to pay for it. We don’t know what we’re going to do, or how. But we’re going to do it.

The horse stood, indifferent.

What’s a horse day like? I said. What’s it like being a horse at night, can you see in the dark, like cats, and owls? What was it like last night in that moonlight? What’s it like if you’re out in a field and it starts to rain? Do you mind? Does it feel good? Unpleasant? Does horsehair keep the rain off? Do you prefer it when it’s cold out? Or hot? Can you feel heat, like, did you feel the heat on the tarmac when we came in, can you feel it up through your hooves? Do hooves feel? What was your life like before us? What are horse memories like? Where did you live? Who was your mother? What was she like? Who was your father? Do horses care about fathers, or mothers? How come you ended up in that abattoir field? Who owned you and did that to you? I mean, who thought they owned you?

Nothing.

Gliff, I said.

I said it to see how it felt.

I patted his neck like my sister had shown me how to.

Good Gliff, I said.


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