‘Yes. All the damn pigs,’ Kirsty said. ‘The poor girl gets grief about what I do – you know, keeping the pigs in cages. From other kids at the school, I mean. It’s sad. She’s so desperate to be popular but she has to learn to stand up for herself.’

‘Her drawings are great. The one of that hole in the water …’

Kirsty looked up sharply. ‘Did she talk to you about that one?’

‘She mentioned a boy. What was that about?’

‘Oh, nothing. She talks nonsense. It’s the bell-mouth spillway in the reservoir. The overflow. It’s spectacular in full flow. But yes, Frankie is good. I keep trying to get her to enter an art competition. She’s lost her confidence though. It’s terrible what happens to girls at that age. She used to be so exuberant. Didn’t care what anyone thought. Now it’s all about being thin and pretty and getting likes on bloody social media.’

‘It’s awful for teenagers,’ Fiona said. ‘My younger brother’s the same. I know people think it’s not as bad for boys, but he’s obsessed with videoing himself doing stupid things to get attention.’

Kirsty shook her head. ‘Anyway, it horrifies me to say it, but those pigs are doing a spectacular job on the lamb. Do you want to see?’

We stood and followed her from the kitchen, out of the house and across the yard into the pig barn.

All was much quieter now, with some of the pigs lying down and others licking at the trough.

I’d been sure they’d leave fragments. That the pigs at the abattoir couldn’t have eaten a person, because more would have been left. That they wouldn’t have chomped their way through the hips, the femurs, the backbone, the skull.

‘Wow,’ Fiona said.

I fished out my camera and took photographs of the trough, the straw, the pigs. The trough was smeared with blood, like the one at the abattoir had been, but there was no bone in it.

Nothing was left of the person-sized sheep.

21

Bex – August 1999

Bex held the plastic toy cone near the pig’s face. The pig reached forward and touched it with her nose. Bex made a clicking noise, gave the pig a pellet of food, and held the cone target out again.

‘Perfect,’ her dad said. ‘You’re a natural.’ He was sitting at the picnic table that overlooked the pig field. It was another warm, shimmery day, the air touched with the smell of a rose that drifted across from the garden. They’d been her mum’s roses. They were neglected now, unpruned and straggly, grass and bindweed growing through their thorny stems. Bex wondered how her mother could have left her beloved roses. But that was a ridiculous thought, given that she’d left her children.