But they had to arrive first.
It couldn’t have been more than a minute or two, but it felt like geological ages, watching the sweat breaking out on his baby’s forehead and seeing her twist and moan with discomfort as the infection rampaged unchecked through her already beleaguered system. Eventually there were flashing lights outside, and a heavy knock at the door.
11
SNARES
WITH SPRING CAME RABBITS, INCLUDING IN THE fields around the Farrow’s farm, and Gar was showing Matt how to make and set snares. Matt had not been keen about the idea to begin with because as far as he was concerned rabbit trapping was for pikeys and gyppos, plus Gar scared the absolute shit out of him, but Mother had insisted, and he had quickly come to learn that when Mother snapped her fingers everybody at the farm jumped. And it turned out that it was actually quite fun.
He had to admit straight up that he had no idea what Gar was. Everett had claimed that they were brothers, and Matt had shrugged okay, whatever, but he wasn’t sure that the pair of them were even the same species. He was like something off one of those programmes about conjoined twins. He had hair growing down his back. Not long like a girl’s, but as in thick black hair growing out of the skin down past his shoulder blades. And there was definitely something wrong with the guy’s head – maybe it was in his genes or maybe he’d had an accident or something, because who had teeth like that? But that was only on the outside. Gar was a man of few words, conveying all the meaning he needed in just a few grunts, and he appreciated that. Gar listened instead of delivering speeches, and Matt appreciated that too.
For most of his adolescence the countryside had simply been miles of fuck-all between where he was and where he wanted to be, navigable only by sucking up to mates with cars or spending what little he had on Ubers – but never the bus, not that there were any, and only under the most dire of circumstances begging a lift from his mum. He walked when he had to, with headphones in and face to his phone. It never occurred to him that there might be anything worth looking at on the other sides of the hedgerows.
Gar took him out into the field behind the stone barn just before dawn. The air smelled clear and damp and dew soaked his ankles as they walked, Matt hurrying to keep pace with Gar’s enormous strides. But he slowed down as they approached a stile in the hedge, turned back and mimed shh with a finger to his lips, then indicated that Matt should go first over the stile. Matt eased himself slowly through the gap in the hedge, and as he saw dozens of furry shapes bounding away with their white tails flashing he felt a surge of childlike joy that he hadn’t experienced in a long time. Gar joined him, and showed him the trails that Benjamin Bunny and his mates had made coming through hedgerows, and the burrows where they were hiding.
‘Supper,’ Gar had said, pointing, but since his mouth couldn’t form p’s correctly it had sounded more like ‘suffer’.
Matt didn’t know how Everett’s group was funding itself but it seemed that there was a genuine need to feed quite a few mouths. Sometimes people stayed to supper, but none of them were accorded the privilege of being allowed to live at the farmhouse like Matt was, and he appreciated that most of all. So when Mother said that Gar was to teach him how to snare rabbits, he hadn’t complained.
The first time he’d got bored and started checking his social media, Gar had slapped the phone out of his hand and grunted: ‘No.’ The second time, Gar had grabbed it off him and squeezed it until Matt could see it actually bending, and when Matt had pleaded with him to stop he’d given it back and repeated: ‘No!’ and Matt stashed it away.
But Gar’s heavy fingers were also oddly delicate when it came to the practice of setting snares. It was a lot easier than he’d expected: a wide slip-knot of wire with its free end tied to a stake and hammered into the ground on one side of Benjamin’s trail, and hanging loosely on a smaller stake on the other side of the trail, so that the open mouth of the snare’s loop covered the trail itself, about half an inch above the ground. Mr Bunny came hopping along, popped his head through the snare, strangulating himself as he tried to escape, and hey presto – rabbit stew. Together he and Gar set a dozen of these around the farm, and then came back the next day to see if they had worked. There were three rabbits, one of them in a snare that Matt had built and set completely on his own, and he felt another swelling of a long-forgotten feeling. This one was pride.
The rabbit was still alive, having got a forepaw through the snare too and so prevented itself from strangling, and it kicked and thrashed in exhausted panic, its eyes wide and rolling, as he knelt down beside it. Having only ever seen them as roadkill, he marvelled at how soft and fluffy its fur actually was.
Gar grunted, and mimed a twisting motion with both hands.
‘Really?’ he asked. ‘We’ve already got two. Can’t we let this one go?’
Gar repeated the motion.
Matt sighed. ‘Sorry, chum,’ he murmured. It was a word he’d heard Everett using, and it sounded nice and retro. The rabbit froze in terror as he pinned it to the ground with one hand, feeling how warm it was and its tiny heart hammering away, as he loosened the snare with the other. Without trying to think too much about what he was doing,
