The Sister Surprise by Abigail Mann (read full novel TXT) 📗

over the stiff brakes and the salty wind which slaps down in stinging bursts along the back of my hand. Streaks of orange paint the underside of thick clouds as I trail behind Kian. We bounce down uneven tracks, rain cutting deep rivulets into silt-strewn ruts that I’m constantly trying to steer my wheels out of. I briefly close my eyes in the first rays of sunshine that break over the hills, the fields so green that I see emerald on the backs of my eyelids. Sheep follow us along the fence, their heads hung low, coats heavy from the rain. I slide off my quad bike and take small, shuffling steps towards Kian, careful not to step on their hooves. The ewes are far less concerned about personal space than I am.

‘Do they get cold?’ I ask Kian. He pulls a hay bale to the floor, the herd bleating around him like a disorganised choir as he cuts the string with a pen knife.

‘What?’

‘Do they get cold?’ I look up as Kian shakes a section of hay from the bale and chucks it towards me. I clap it between my hands and sneeze as sweet-smelling dust puffs into a cloud around my face.

‘These lot?’ Kian laughs and gives one a dull pat on the rump. ‘No. They’re better off than you and me, and that’s without electric blankets and hot dinners.’

What’s this? Kian’s got an electric blanket? It’s no wonder I felt exhausted this morning, I must have burnt 800 calories shivering all night.

‘Ouch. Hey!’ I wave my hand behind me, where a mean-looking ewe stares at me with bulbous eyes. ‘Greedy.’

‘Can you do a count?’ says Kian, winding the frayed string in a loop around his elbow and palm. ‘I’ll do the same.’

Four rounds later, I’m still trying to figure out if the one with a brown eye-patch is number twenty-three or twenty-four. From behind, they appear like a crowd of Dulwich pensioners: cotton-haired ladies with tight mouths and watery eyes who complain about the same problems over the top of one another.

‘How many?’

‘Thirty-nine.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes. No. Why, how many should there be?’

‘Forty-two.’

‘Really? Hang on, I’ll count again. You should give them different coloured collars or something.’ I scoot around the herd as they tiptoe between each other, nibbling at the hay that is simultaneously being eaten and trodden into the ground. ‘Do sheep wear collars?’

‘I believe you’re thinking of One Hundred and One Dalmatians.’

‘Oh yeah. Maybe.’

I zigzag up and down and surprise myself by recognising a few of them by the way they shake their tails, or how belligerent they are about food. One such ewe clambers over her field buddy (don’t judge me, I’ve no idea how sheep use terms of endearment) and continues eating in a headstand position, her unexpectedly skinny legs pointing towards the sky amid a mass of woollen bodies. It’s like a burlesque routine, if you squint hard enough and start humming, ‘Ba da da daaaaa, ber da da daaaaa …’

I look over at Kian, who bites his lip and taps a thigh with one hand. ‘You’re right. There’s thirty-nine. Shite.’ He walks around the herd, glaring at each sheep in accusation like a tyrannical dinner lady. ‘There’s a troublemaker amongst this lot.’

‘What shall we do? Make an example of them? First in line for lamb shanks?’

‘Ava, no,’ says Kian, his eyes narrow. Not the time to make jokes, got it. ‘I know who it is.’ I wait for the big reveal. ‘Miranda.’ Ah, there we go. I’m no better informed. ‘She’s got a reputation. Led a couple of the others astray. She can’t be trusted.’

I step from one foot to another. My trainers are soaked through with a delightful shade of brown which I know for a fact is at least fifty per cent excrement. Who knew that some mud is preferable to others?

‘We’ll hop on the quads and look round the fence, see where they could have got out.’

A few minutes later, I’ve made it over ten miles per hour. I’m scanning the fence, but the whole process is like the world’s most boring Sherlock Holmes case. I’ve seen a few bits of wool caught on barbed wire and two empty bottles of Iron Bru by the water trough, but beyond that the field looks as generically field-like as ever.

When I reach Kian, the cause of the breakout becomes clear. The trunk of a pine tree has splintered five feet up and fallen into the field, squashing the fence and breaking the electric charge that runs through it.

‘Must have happened overnight. I’m surprised we didn’t hear it.’

‘They must have hopped over,’ I say. Have no fear, Kian, Captain Obvious is on the scene.

‘Ah, this isn’t good. I think Miranda is carrying triplets. She’s clever enough to climb out, but she’s hardly light on her feet when it comes to getting down the cliff edge. Ah, silly sods. We need to find them soon, or we’ll be scraping them off the rocks later.’

‘Oh God, really?’

‘It’s happened before. They get spooked and dive off the side like lemmings. You head along the tree line and I’ll take the track out towards John’s pasture. If you find them, try and herd them back this way, all right?’

‘Err, OK, sure.’ I nod, hesitating as I walk towards my quad bike in case Kian gives me an instruction more specific than ‘stop three sheep from dive-bombing off a cliff’, but he’s already driven away by the time I twist the key. A reverse alarm bleeps unnecessarily as I drive backwards in an arc. I’m so cautious a slug would have time to slither out of the way before popping beneath the wheels.

I copy Kian’s stance on the quad bike and stand up, hunched over the handlebars. I dip, rock, and lurch across the field, feeling braver as my knees intuitively flex in time with the bumps. I don’t know what the rules are concerning the quad bike highway code, so when I get to the gate,