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

‘Is this some kind of Highland initiation test?’ I ask.

‘Exactly that,’ says Kian. He drags out a bleached wooden chest from the back of a cupboard and puts it on the table, tapping the lid with his knuckles. ‘If you can still stand at the end, you’ve passed. Jesus, I don’t think I can sit down,’ he adds, rubbing the spot where he was unwittingly inoculated, eyes smarting.

‘I thought it was meant to be a “cruelty free” method of immunisation,’ I say.

He pulls open the waistband of his pants to inspect the injury.

‘It is if you’re a pig. They’ve got thicker skin than us,’ he says, rubbing the spot with the heel of his hand. ‘You really hit the bullseye, Moira.’

‘Ah, I’m sorry. In my defence, it looked similar.’

‘Geez, thanks,’ says Kian, looking hard done by.

‘Not like that, I mean, you moved and I was already there. It’s a compliment! Edith’s rump meat would fetch a decent price if you sold her.’ Moira’s eyes are wide and earnest.

‘Not going to do that, though, am I?’

‘How come?’

‘I can make more money using them to work the woodland. I’m going to get truffles growing up there.’

‘It was pig racing last week,’ says Moira, rolling her eyes affectionately.

‘To be fair, I know a few people in London who would see truffle hunting with a bunch of delinquent pigs as a real expedition. It’s that quirky countryside thing, isn’t it?’

Kian nods as though this has confirmed a long-held theory, then riffles through a drawer. He jots something down, scratches his chin, and looks at the folders I’ve organised, quietly intimidated.

‘You’re going to be upset if I don’t put this in the right place, aren’t you?’

‘Ha, I’m not that neurotic,’ I lie. ‘Leave it on the top. I’ll show you where to slot it another time.’

‘Right you are,’ he says, reaching for a set of dusty tumblers.

‘Wouldn’t it be good to have the money now?’ says Moira, caution softening her words.

‘Sure, but I’m not sending any of them to the abattoir.’

‘Not even if it would make that pile less scary?’ she says, nodding to the invoices that I neatly stacked in a wire paper tray this morning. I’m glad someone has noticed without me having to point it out. I scraped a C in my maths GCSE, but even I know that negative signs usually mean that numbers are going in the wrong direction. ‘The bank will hold off, but only if they can see that you’re trying to balance things up—’

‘Moira. No more business talk, all right? Ava’s here, the pigs are fine, I’m more than fine – going by the recent boost to my immune system – and it’s Friday. If we were in Edinburgh, we’d be at a bar lining up Jägerbombs by now.’

Moira looks at Kian from under her thick fringe, made fluffy from a slapdash attempt to dry it with a hand towel.

‘You know I can’t open The Locker without you,’ says Kian.

Moira’s cheeks twitch with a barely contained smile. ‘Oh, go on then.’

***

‘I’m still not convinced this is safe to drink, you know,’ I say, tilting my glass in the light. ‘It looks like it’s been dredged from a riverbed.’

‘Look, this is the finest whisky that’ll pass your lips, lass,’ says Kian.

‘Is it normal for him to get more Scottish when he drinks?’ I ask Moira, whose head is slumped in her hand.

‘Oh, aye. He lost a lot of his accent when he moved away for university, didn’t you?’

Kian leans back in his chair, a lazy smile on his face.

‘Yeah, well, I didn’t want to get banded together with the other lads who jumped when a tram went by and only drank the stuff their daddy’d brewed in the cow shed.’ I laugh, expecting Moira to join in, but she has her eyes down, tracing a line of wood grain on the table. ‘Either that or they went completely the other way, you know? Cocaine five times a day until they got raging heart palpitations in a lecture and had to go home for the rest of the course.’

I take a tentative sip from my glass. The taste is musty, like licking the inside of a tobacco tin. ‘I didn’t do the whole “university experience” thing. Stayed at home.’

‘Ah, I’m a homebird too,’ says Moira, brightening.

‘Don’t you go to college?’

‘Oh, aye. But it’s only a wee bus ride away.’

‘Moira studies veterinary nursing. That’s why I can get her down here to sort the animals out and don’t have to pay her anything,’ says Kian, with a wink.

I’ve not got the mentalist skills of Derren Brown, but I’m pretty sure that if Moira were 500 miles away and asked to castrate a pedigree Rottweiler in Kilroch, she’d be out the door and on the way before the scalpel clattered to the ground.

‘Ah, I don’t mind. It’s cheaper staying at home. I wanted to save a wee bit of money from my grant, but it got cut right before I started. I give horse riding lessons every now and again, but we sold the ponies to pay for house repairs after the river burst its banks and took half our garden with it. We’ve only got a wee Shetland now. She’s good for the odd gymkhana, but there aren’t enough kids who want to learn.’

Kian pulls the cork out of a teardrop-shaped whisky bottle to top up his glass.

‘Veterinary nursing is good, aye, but it’s mostly snipping tubes and tying off testicles, you know?’ says Moira, blowing her fringe out of her eyes, her cheeks increasingly pink.

Kian winces and crosses his legs.

‘I like bigger animals. Ones you can’t wrap your arms round. Larger than a Golden Retriever, smaller than a camel,’ she says, nodding purposefully.

‘Could you do a conversion course or something?

Kian raises his head, his eyes a little bloodshot. ‘Hey, what about that thing with the teeth? Ah, Christ. What’s it called?’

‘Dentistry?’ I offer.

He clicks his fingers and points at me in confirmation.

‘Animal dentistry,’ says Moira, delicately sipping