There was only one person.

A faint voice, careful. ‘Hello?’

‘It’s Polly. I found a deer. It’s injured. I don’t know what to do.’

There was a long silence.

‘Where are you?’

I told him as best I could.

‘Does it have antlers?’

‘No.’

‘Is it moving?’

‘Not really.’

A fuzzing noise in the background. ‘I’m at work. Be there soon. Don’t get too close.’

I sat down a few feet away. The deer bent its front legs and rubbed its cheek and ear into the grass, as if tired and trying to find the right position to fall asleep in. The back legs didn’t move at all. Tiny tremblings ran along its neck and chest, something bubbling under the hide. A bird wheezed overhead.

This didn’t quite feel real. The deer’s fur was as short and uneven as carpet in a student house, and its ears were wisped, the ears of a much older animal. It raised a slender front leg, trying to touch something in the air above it, and brought it down again carefully.

No cars passed. Two or three snarled along the main road like distant drills. The sun was ironing out my forehead. I had water in my bag – maybe I could dribble some into its mouth. As I brought my rucksack slowly over one shoulder, the deer moved again, its chest rising, and a sound came tightly out, a slow-motion sound from very far away, coming closer.

A long, curving broo-oo-oo-ooeeee, broken up. Desperate. Almost human.

The bird stopped. The air seemed to stall and thicken. All I could hear were the deer’s exhalations, grey and regular. I pushed myself up off the grass with my hands, just enough to move closer. There was a small, pale patch under its eye like a tear. I wanted to put my fingers out, touch the raised bone above its nose.

Eyelashes like pine needle fur encircled the rubbery eye-rim, with fine, long hairs winding out. I dared to lean over. The brown iris had a corduroy pattern – and something else. A white misting, like the reflection of a cloud. But then the mist travelled across the eye, and formed a shape.

Like in the garden.

A tightness in my throat, someone pinching the skin inside and twisting it. The shape wavered, a slight bend in the centre of it. I didn’t breathe. The black bar of the pupil swivelled up to me and suddenly the deer jolted and kicked out, catching my shin.

I jerked back, a thin, slicing pain in my leg, like being caught by the edge of a hotplate. A line two inches across began to pink, the blood seeping up. I should have moved, got out of its eyesight, but something made me stay. That sound it had made – its mourning. It felt right to be bleeding. I would stay. Bleed with it. Rolling back to where I’d been sitting, I slowly put my hand in the air above its neck.