Do Sheep Scream?
They were shown to a table by the window which offered a bracing view of the misty, green field-scape that stretched to infinity. It was a pristine, clear morning: perfect.
Greta swallowed back the lump that had formed in her throat at the sight of it and chastised herself for being so ridiculous: it was only a weekend in the Cotswolds. Against the gentle clatter of cutlery and crockery and the murmured conversations of the other hotel guests she smiled across the table at Will.
“Gorgeous view isn’t it?” she said, trying not to sound too over-enthusiastic. Will was still adjusting to being out the city.
He smiled thinly back, “yeah.”
She looked at the breakfast menu and noticed there were boiled eggs with soldiers. This made her think of Will’s Match profile and how under his ‘likes’ he’d put: ‘Sunday mornings with runny boiled eggs, and buttery doorstep soldiers.’ She wondered if the hotel’s boiled eggs would be up to scratch. The first time she had stayed over at Will’s, (the first time they’d slept together), after a drunken night out in Islington (their third date), he’d made her his famous boiled eggs in the morning and they were wonderful. But today, Will ordered scrambled eggs with mushrooms.
When the waiter took her order, she paused, debating whether to go for the kippers, which were what she really fancied, but instead ordering the same as Will. She worried the kippers would smell. It was not good to have kipper-breath for the first day of the first weekend away with your new boyfriend, your vegetarian new boyfriend.
“Fancy going to market in the town this morning?” Will asked as he buttered his wholemeal toast.
“Yes, we could have a walk through the fields en route. It’s such a …”
“Maybe we should drive. It finishes at lunchtime.”
“But it’s such a beautiful day. The country air will do you good.”
She touched his arm; he smiled nervously, “OK,”
His apparent fear of the countryside was endearing to her. It was strange – he’d grown up on the outskirts of the Peak District, but had spent all his adult life in cities. Most of the other guys on the dating site were adrenaline-junkies who went rock-climbing, surfing, or orienteering on the weekend, but here he who was better than any of them: Will, the sensitive, art-loving charity worker who had been an animal-rights activist in his student days (and who now subscribed to a more liberal-left political outlook), but who hated the great outdoors and the countryside.
She had been sceptical about meeting a man of boyfriend quality on a dating site, but all her friends had tried it and encouraged her to give it a go. The first few dates had been a parade of complete losers: the computer geek with the bad trainers, The Dwarf, Mr. Zero-Personality, The Misogynist. And then Will’s profile popped up: the picture of a smiling, dark-haired guy with the sensitive good-looks of a 90s film star, dressed in a tuxedo. She clicked on him, he clicked back, and the moment she set eyes on his physical incarnation she fell head over heels like a teenager. He was intelligent, amusing and so polite. He made her feel beautiful, sexy and funny.
This weekend was the pinnicle of their budding relationship so far. Will had suggested Paris, but Greta had petitioned for a weekend in a boutique hotel in the English countryside, and eventually Will had given in. What could possibly be so bad about the countryside? She was determined to convert Will, to make him realise what he was missing. She had been amused by the twitchiness that had afflicted him from the outset of the trip, his approaching of every task and action as if it was related to some impending disaster.
After breakfast they went up to their room and put on their outdoor clothes: Will, a black wool coat, jeans, trainers, Greta, her pink, fleece-lined cycling jacket, which she though looked a little bit sexier than her usual hiking gear.
She packed the map in her small rucksack.
“All set?” Will asked.
She put her arms round him and kissed him, “thanks for coming.”
“Come on, let’s get it over with,” he said.
Greta found a route on the map which would take them across the fields, through a small corpse and into the market town. They set out, through the kissing gate at the bottom of the hotel’s grounds. They strolled across the open field and Greta stopped to take a photograph of a Ragged Robin flower.
“It’s a rarity,” she said.
“I know,” nodded Will.
The air was so clean they drank it in like the purest water. Greta checked the map again. “The footpath goes over there,” she said, gesturing to a field where a herd of sheep silently grazed.
Will took a sharp intake of breath, “er…” he said.
“It won’t be far,”
“I…er…I don’t want to go that way,”
“Why ever not? It’s a marked path,”
“I just don’t”
She stood back and surveyed him, “what’s wrong?”
“I don’t want to go near them. Near the sheep.”
Greta let out an involuntary laugh.
“Are you joking?”
“No.”
“Will, honey, they won’t do anything.”
“It’s not that…it’s…oh Greta, you don’t understand. This is a disaster, I should never have come.”
He turned to run – yes, run – away, but she grabbed him and pulled him close.
“What are you doing? What’s the matter?”
There was fear in his eyes and he was breathing short and fast.
They were sitting a pub. Greta, after the previous half hour’s events, was drinking a glass of white wine. Will cradled a whiskey. He stared into the glass, a look on his face like he was mulling over all the problems in the world.
“I need to understand what happened back there,” she said finally.
He looked up from his whiskey, staring beyond her.
“When I was thirteen I went camping with two friends. Out in the Peaks. We were camping on top of a cliff edge, a sheer drop down to the valley below. We were drunk on cheap cider. We played this game…a stupid game of dare. They dared me. I was a stupid boy, never thought much about anything. I wanted to impress my mates.
“So I caught one, this poor young thing.”
His voice had become tight. He drank half his whiskey. Greta felt an unease crawling over her.
“They helped to drag it over. It was making such a noise I thought the farmer would come running…kind of hoped he would, but he didn’t. So I managed to get it to the edge of that fucking cliff, and I swear it must have sensed what was going to happen because it started shaking. ‘Go on’ my mates were saying, ‘do it’. So I give the wretched thing a shove.
“It looked up at me before it fell, eye to eye. And then it went, limbs flailing all over the place, off the edge of the cliff. God, Greta, it made this noise, this horrid, guttural bleating, almost a scream, if sheep scream. I can’t forget it.
“The next day we passed the corpse on our way home.”
He downed the rest of the whiskey and frowned. Greta had put her hand over her mouth in disgust, but she moved it and looked at her wine glass as he focused on her.
Neither of them spoke, until Will, composing himself, gave a little laugh.
“Do you think I’m a weirdo now?”
It was the kind of funny story you told your friends after you dumped someone. The boyfriend that had a thing with sheep. But she couldn’t dump Will, not over this.
“No, of course not.”
They ambled around the market town, Will putting on an air of joviality that was unwarranted by the over-priced, unfriendly market stalls, before lunching in a quaint tea room. It felt as though the dynamic had changed, though, and both of them knew it – as if Will was no longer the urban-loving aesthetist, as he had pretended to be, but was something else and now that she knew there was an assumption between them that he had betrayed her and she had a right to be off with him.
They returned to the hotel for dinner and then, in the king-sized bed in their boutique hotel room, he loomed above her, trying to make love as he had done the day before. But she found she could think of nothing but the sheep – the poor lamb he had chucked to its slaughter.
Afterwards, as she lay in his arms, she cursed herself, repeated the line in her head: ‘it was only a sheep’, but she had the sinking feeling that on Monday morning she would be logging onto Match.com again.
