Because there was no grass in this area – there wasn’t a garden within a mile, let alone a field, just streets of terraced houses with no bathrooms – horses were given a nosebag: oats mainly, hay rarely.
But the thing I remember most were the horses’ stomachs. It used to amaze me that such big strong animals could be so weak in the stomach. Horses can’t throw up the way you and I can. The kind of gut-ache they get can often lead to colic. It makes them sweat and they keep looking back at their flanks where the pain is – their intestines have twisted and they’re wondering what the fuck’s going on. A fine healthy specimen can go down and not get up again and be dead within two hours.
There are different types of colic, and without going into it in detail the horses round what I soon began to call ‘our way’ – mainly because the people were friendly and made me feel like one of them – sometimes got colic, because they’d eaten their straw bed or had been fed too quickly after building up a sweat between the shafts. To regulate their diet, the old guy I worked for used to send me up to the graveyard to get a sackful of grass. I’d no shears or anything. I had to pull it out by the roots. Sometimes, if you were lucky, they’d just mown between the graves and you could grab that. Though if old Francie McArdle had known, he’d have given me a boot in the arse. Diesel from the mower on the grass wasn’t any good for horses either, y’see. Sensitive bastards.
Francie was a thieving old goat, by the way. He was loaded, though to look at him you’d think he hadn’t tuppence. He used to wear an old fawn overcoat tied round his waist with a length of rope. If you stole lead off a roof and threw it on his scales – the old low flatbed type I’m talking about – he’d stick his shin against the bed to stop it going down as far as it should so it would register less weight and you’d get less money than you were entitled to. He’d strike up some interesting conversation or crack a joke, thinking you weren’t wise.
‘Get away t’fuck, ya aul’ bollocks ye,’ I’d’ve hit him with. My accent was a bit thicker in those days and not that of the suave sophisticate before you today.
He ended up having to let me go. Some fucker set fire to his yard one night when he was well stocked with rags and the whole lot went up.
The reason I’m telling you all this is because when I went and saw the state of McArdle’s yard – carts burned and all that – I wondered where the horses were. And I asked Francie. I was really only interested in one of them: a white pony mare called Peggy. She was in foal and I’d wanted to see it being born.
‘She lost it, Red,’ he said.
‘Whaddaya mean?’
‘She took fright and it brought her on early.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Sure I’d nowhere t’keep her, Red.’
He’d sold her to the knacker man for dog meat. She was getting on. That’s why he had her in foal. He wanted a replacement out of her before she copped it. The rest went to tinkers.
And this experience got me thinking. If fear could bring a mare on, was there any other way to make her foal before her time? So I looked into it. A vet book told me that by mixing follicle-inducing stimulants in with a mare’s feed, you could bring her into season quicker, for covering, but that you had to be sure you didn’t let a mare who was already in foal eat the same feed, otherwise she’d give birth prematurely – within forty-eight hours usually – but the foal would die. Because of that lung thing, y’know, it wouldn’t have a breath. Horses need breath. Bit of technical info for you there.
So I’m saying to myself: Conor’s a stallion man. He’d have a supply of stimulants. Lucille had gone to Clonkeelin. It doesn’t take a genius – after the event – to see that she could have got access to them. What if I stuff Anne’s mare with stimulants? All you have to do is shake a bucket and she’ll come over, tip them out and away you go, leaving her to it. And since mares invariably wait for the cover of darkness before foaling – gut-instinct survival crap that’s in them going back to the days when predators were knocking about and would’ve eaten the foal – the chances are she’ll do the same.
So I went back out to see how my bucket had worked, night three, Saturday, and found her lying on her side. And because the Donavans had no reason to be keeping a strict eye on her, because she wasn’t due for nearly six weeks, I more or less had a free hand.
Anyway, she got to her feet when she saw me coming, and I shone a torch on her rear end and saw that her croup had dropped – the croup is the part between the top of the rump and the tail. When it loses its roundness and slackens into a slightly concaved
