The builder boyfriend is no figment of my imagination

The lady who walks her dog past my horses every day was obviously eager to tell me something. I have exchanged only a few polite words with her in the past but as she made her way slowly towards my field gate, she lingered, cutting a lonely figure.

‘Let’s go and talk to that lady,’ I said to the builder boyfriend, who was busy holding Darcy the thoroughbred by her lead rope, scratching her neck as she likes him to do, while I put her rug on.

I always like to reach out to locals who seem friendly because the vast majority of passers-by in this neck of the woods seem to be thoroughly obnoxious. This lady always has her dog on a lead and is respectful of the horses. So I made a beeline for her on the basis that she might be the only nice person we ever meet walking by our field.

The builder boyfriend made a fuss of her little dog and she said she was on her own that day because her husband was in bed with a bad back. She said her daughter, also, was not well. She looked very odd for a few moments and then said: ‘She had a cardiac arrest a year ago. She’s 21.’ We stared back, open-mouthed, and she continued: ‘My husband came home and found her on the floor unresponsive. He managed to revive her by doing CPR because he’s trained as a first aider.’

As usual in these somehow increasing situations, we did not know what to say. ‘You mean the girl who sometimes walks past with the dog?’ She said yes, and I remembered how this girl walked very slowly and was deathly pale.

‘She was in a coma for a month and when they woke her up one side of her body wasn’t working.