Diana Hendry
SHORT STORIES
Many of Diana’s stories have been published in magazines and anthologies and read on BBC Radio 4. Anthologised Stories include: Afternoon Tea; 2.5 is the Norm; The Spit Stealer; Mrs. McCoy and Moses; The Novel, Novel Paper; Just Breathing; The Trio and My Father as an Ant .
Broadcast Stories include The Lady of the Sea; The Proposal; Female Company; The Noisiness of Sheep; Somebody Smith; My Father as an Ant: The Sweet Possessive and After the Snow Queen.
The Noisiness of Sheep
Harry says it’s him or Agnes. He says I’ve got to choose. He says it’s one thing being followed to school by a snowy little lamb when you’re seven and quite another being stalked by a fat grubby ewe when you’re seventeen. Harry says he doesn’t want to be seen out with me. Me and Agnes that is. Harry says he’s become a laughing stock.
I love Harry. I’ve loved Harry since I was fourteen. It’s taken me three years of patient adoration to win him. Well, more than adoration really. Winning Harry has been like a campaign. I had to date Garth Lewis for three months to make Harry jealous. In fact I had to do a fair bit of stalking myself really. Just appearing, by chance as it were, at the tennis courts when Harry was playing a match. He’s got a serve to make you melt. And he looks wonderful in his tennis whites. Well, he looks wonderful most of the time really.
Once upon a time – before we were an item – Harry thought Agnes was amusing. Everyone did. It’s because of Agnes that people call me Mary. My real name’s Stephanie but I hardly bother with that now. I’ve been Mary ever since my Dad bought me my first lamb as a birthday present when I was seven.
Actually I wanted a dog but my Dad had a thing about little girls and lambs. And that first lamb was terribly sweet. When I look in our old photo albums I can see that we made the perfect couple. Me with my hair in bunches and with blue ribbons and the lamb with a matching blue ribbon round its neck. The photo’s taken in the back garden. The pair of us ‘gamboling’ – I think that’s what lambs are meant to do isn’t it? Anyway, we’re the picture of innocence! We could have been in the garden of Eden that lamb and I. I reared it myself with a baby’s bottle (there’s another photo of that) and washed it under the shower to keep it snowy white.
But no it didn’t follow me to school. Not that lamb and not the next one because my Dad bought me a new lamb on every birthday. My Mum got awfully fed up with it. In fact it’s a wonder she didn’t do a Harry and say ‘either that lamb goes or I do’. But she’s very tolerant my Mum and apart from his lamb fetish my Dad’s a really nice bloke. Normal. Whatever my friend Andrea says.
Andrea says that giving your daughter a lamb every year is psychological abuse and that having a lamb at your heels forces you to be sweet and that feminists have worked really hard to stop us being sweet and if she was me she’d send the next lamb to the butchers. No-one could say Andrea is sweet.
Anyway, when I was about twelve my Mum said, “Jim, you’ve got to let Mary grow up – even my mother called me Mary by then, I mean I was known by that lamb just as Andrea was known by her long ginger plaits – “she’s too old for lambs,” my mother said, “how about a horse?”
“He won’t get you a horse,” Andrea said. “Horses are sexy.”
And she was right. I got Agnes instead. And Agnes was different from all the previous lambs. I mean I’d been fond of the others, but one lamb seemed much like another. I didn’t get attached to them. Not the way I am with Agnes.
How can I explain? Agnes was an intelligent lamb. Understanding even. When I was upset she’d come and nuzzle me. Once, when our smoke alarm went off, she actually pulled me out of bed with her teeth. She’d begun sleeping in my room by then. And yes, it was Agnes who followed me. Followed me everywhere. School. The shops. The swimming pool. The library.
We read a poem at school recently. It’s about a nymph and her faun and how this faun was so kind and pure it was like ‘lillies without’ and ‘roses within’. Well, I know Agnes is nothing like a faun and, as Andrea would be quick to tell you, my thighs are too fat for a nymph. But the point is that although Agnes’s fleece isn’t soft and snowy white any more, but rather rough and grey and although, I admit, she does get a bit smelly these days, at heart, she’s like that faun.
Andrea just said “oh get real!” when I compared Agnes to the faun. But then in my opinion Andrea’s never loved anyone but herself whereas my problem is that I love Agnes and Harry. Anyway, just before my thirteenth birthday, roundabout the time one lamb-come-sheep was replaced by another, I told my Dad I didn’t want another lamb. I wanted to keep Agnes.
I think by then my Dad had lost interest in lambs. He’d begun an Open University Foundation course, he was into paintings of the Madonna. The original one, I mean. Andrea says this is just as suspect as lambs. She’s very cynical is Andrea. She thinks my dad must have a mistress somewhere. “Someone really tarty,” Andrea says. I don’t think he’s got the time with all those OU essays. But I suppose there is the Summer School …
Anyway, Agnes didn’t go off to market like the other lambs. Agnes stayed. I suppose I did begin to think about getting rid of her about the time I first clapped eyes on Harry. I was in the third form and he was in the fifth form and even though he had a bit of acne it didn’t matter because he was so hunky and he had dark hair that fell over his eyes so that he had to flip it back. He was shy and hunky then. That was before he realised that half the girls in the school fancied him.
It was through Agnes that I learnt that you can weather being laughed at. I mean there was a time when wherever I went – wherever we went, Agnes and I – someone would be sure to shout Mint Sauce! Mint Sauce! after us. And Agnes would lower her head and drag her little hooves and I knew her feelings were hurt, even if she didn’t understand the threat of mint sauce.
But after a while people got tired of shouting mint sauce. In fact friends at school got quite fond of Agnes. Particularly Garth Lewis. He used to bring her apple peel every morning. Also I made Agnes some really cute headgear, braids and stuff. Agnes and me – we were sort of eccentric and trendy.
But all that was before Harry and I began going out together. And then I discovered that you can weather being laughed at, but you can’t weather being in love. Not if you have a sheep that is.
Of course I tried leaving Agnes at home when Harry and I went out. I shut her in the back garden when we went to see The Silence of the Lambs (I didn’t think it was very nice of Harry to chose a film like that, but still, we did have the back row…) Anyway, Agnes may be too old to gambol these days, but she can still jump. And jump she did. Over the garden wall. Goodness knows how she got into town. I’ve heard stories of people who swear they saw her on the bus – the 23 that goes from outside our house - but I don’t believe it, I really don’t. But there she was, waiting outside the ABC for us and Harry was furious. Furious at having to walk through town with Agnes stomping behind us and some of his mates shouting really rude things at him. Things I can’t repeat.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if Agnes hadn’t kept on BA-ing. BA BA BA all the way home. I mean Agnes doesn’t BA much. Maybe when my alarm clock goes off in the morning. Or sometimes if she hears a cat or an owl at night. So I knew all that BA-ing was a kind of protest. I knew she didn’t like Harry.
After that night I tried to make sure Agnes stayed at home whenever I went out with him. But it wasn’t easy. Agnes pined. She grew thinner and thinner and her fleece looked all manky. I could be wrong but I think she was just that little bit more smelly.
The really difficult times were when Mum and Dad went out and Harry and I had the house to ourselves. We’d snuggle up on the sofa with the telly and have a bit of a snog and well, it might have been a lot more than that if it wasn’t for Agnes. If I shut her out of the room she just battered and butted at the door and went in for a long continuous BAAAAA BAAAA. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but there’s something terribly monotonous about a sheep’s BAA. It can really get to you. It certainly got to Harry.
But then if I let her in the room, that was even worse. Agnes just stared at us. You know that glassy stare a sheep has? Agnes just stood there, four square and staring. That was when Harry totally lost his rag and said I had to chose. It was him or Agnes.
It wasn’t an easy decision, I can tell you. I mean I wanted Harry, really wanted him. And the way things were going I thought it was going to be as hard to lose my virginity as it was to lose Agnes. I know it’s awful of me, because Agnes has been such a dear, good friend - but I began to wish she’d die. Just naturally. That I’d wake up one morning and she’d just be – well, rug. After all, she’s getting on a bit. But then so am I. I’ll be eighteen next month.
Eventually I spoke to Dad. Of course I didn’t tell him about Harry or my virginity beginning to weigh on me like a bad conscience. I just said I thought Agnes was getting old and maybe a bit arthritic, didn’t he think? And I wouldn’t want her to suffer. And next year I’d be going to college and obviously I couldn’t take Agnes with me then, could I? How would he and Mum feel about looking after her while I was away?
D’you know, I don’t think Dad’s really looked at me or Agnes for at least a year. His vision must be clouded with Madonnas-and-Child, because when he looked at me he said, ‘How long have you been wearing your hair like that?’ And when he looked at Agnes he sort of recoiled. You’d think he’d have noticed the bits of fleece on the sofa or the droppings in the garden, but no, he’s a one obsession at a time man, my Dad and lambs turning into sheep and little girls into big girls wasn’t on his OU syllabus.
Mum said that maybe there was a kind of sheep sanctuary, like they have for donkeys, but we couldn’t find one. So in the end it was a trip to the vet’s for Agnes and me. And it was painless, I’m sure, even if Agnes did stare at me for what seemed an awfully long time and gave a kind of bleat, just she had when she was a little lamb. So I cried. Quite a lot really. At least a box of tissues.
So that left me free for Harry. And the next night my parents were out, Harry was round at our place p.d.q. Only it was odd. Suddenly I didn’t fancy him any more. And it wasn’t just that he didn’t say a word about Agnes when everyone at school has been really sympathetic and Andrea even sent me a card saying ‘sorry for your loss’ – no, it wasn’t just that. It was more that I didn’t think him handsome and sexy any more. I thought his eyes were cold and his mouth had a cruel twist. And all that flicking back of his hair – a real poseur. The person Harry loves, I thought, is Harry.
Things never do turn out as you expect, do they? So now I’ve lost Agnes and kept my virginity. Still, I thought I might go back to Garth Lewis. Garth calls me Stephanie, not Mary. And I haven’t forgotten the appple peel he gave to Agnes.
Broadcast as Afternoon Short Story by BBC Radio 4
Copyright Diana Hendry 2010 Website by fdmedia