The jeep came humming up the road. A scritch of the handbrake.

‘Polly, get back from there.’

I wanted to protest but his voice was so dark, and dense as oil. I removed my hovering hand and shuffled away on my arse, my palms rashing on nettles.

Jim walked over very quietly and stood by the deer’s head. It made a sudden, alarming bucking, a small movement full of furious energy, as though it were being electrocuted. Or as if, in its mind, it were leaping away from him, tearing over the hills. It blurted, a dry, open sound. Its eye rolled.

For a moment everything seemed suspended. He and the deer, eyeing each other. A still life.

In one swift movement, Jim pulled out a knife from his back pocket, crouched down and, holding the deer by an ear and at the back of its skull, slit its throat.

‘No,’ I said.

The deer twisted and barked, a sound like stones being scraped on a road. Jim put his knee on its chest. More garbled, choking sounds. The front legs flailed. I stumbled onto the tarmac, clutched my elbows. Jim stayed on top of it, squatting, his hand between its ears. His knuckles were inky, scabbed.

The deer had stopped moving. A pool of blood like a silk scarf.

There was a hum and a car came the other way, slowing as it passed, a small girl with heart-shaped sunglasses open-mouthed against the window.

He wiped the knife on the grass and straightened. ‘You’re bleeding.’

There was a little trail down my leg, welling where the sock bunched at my ankle. ‘I don’t care.’

Jim opened the boot of the jeep and spread a plastic sheet out. He stood over the deer for a second, placed his hands underneath its belly and hauled it onto his shoulder, clasping the front ankles together in one hand. Its head hung down at his thigh. The pointillist painting in the garden that first morning reduced to something garish, ludicrous. As he turned, I saw the flank that had been lying against the grass, a near-perfect circle of exposed flesh, like the hide had been meticulously snipped away. Jim manoeuvred the deer into the jeep, working the body off his shoulder, the hooves catching on the frame, and bent its head to fit it in.

I saw the lolling, grey-pink tongue before he shut the door. ‘You like killing things, don’t you?’

He stiffened and tucked his chin down to his chest for a moment before turning around slowly and looking me straight in the eye. Flakes of bark clung to his jumper. ‘Think I shouldn’t have done that?’

I couldn’t answer. I just shook my head, my lips clamped shut.

‘Let’s see to your leg.’

I shook my head again and stared past him up the road.

He took a breath in and put his hands flat on the front of his jeans. ‘Just – we should just stop it bleeding.’

‘Fuck off,’ I said, tightly, stupidly. My palms stung. ‘You just want to eat it.’