All hands to the pump

Wind-driven rain beats on the windscreen. There’s tree debris in the road and standing water in all the usual places when it rains as hard and as long as this. The fuel gauge is resting on empty but I make it to the garage, which is still open. All the pumps are free except one, which has a horse standing next to it. I draw up at the next one and bung in a tenner’s worth.

Three people are clustered round this horse. A man in overalls is kneeling on the concrete and doing something to its hoof; a woman in jodhpurs and an expensive hair-do is stroking its head and talking to it; and an oppressed-looking boy with a sharp, upper-class face is standing back and watching the man. The horse’s jacket of orange, yellow and black horizontal stripes looks glamorous under the forecourt’s halogen lighting. The horse is standing quietly, with dignity.

While I’m filling up, I notice also that the garage forecourt is awash with blood. I would have noticed it at first, but the blood is black under the bright artificial lights and I’d mistaken the puddles of blood for oil or rainwater. I try to put the petrol in as quietly as possible so as not to disturb the horse, but the whirring of the pump and the clatter of replacing the nozzle for some reason is always louder after dark.

Before going inside to pay, I stroll over and ask the people clustered round the horse what happened to the horse. They all three of them start telling me at once, then the woman with the big hair, then the kneeling man drop out, leaving the boy to explain. They’d taken the bend too fast, he says, and the horse fell over in the horse-box, cutting his leg open.