‘Wild Horses’ is featured in Issue Fourteen.

The cigarettes had occurred to her somewhere over Greenland. The man in the adjacent seat had fallen asleep almost as soon as they’d taken off from Atlanta, and his head had lolled and then bounced onto her shoulder, causing her to shrink herself against the window. An hour later, something about the perfect pluming whiteness of the clouds and the sly reek of smoke twisting from her neighbour had conspired to induce in her a hankering for a smoke, even though she hadn’t had one in twenty years. When they land at Heathrow, she told herself, she would go straight to the WHSmith in arrivals and buy a packet.

It must be something about going home. To Alison her hometown—for this is how she must still regard it—is a place of Marlboro Lights and Southern Comfort-and-lemonade; of pints of warm lager, and fish and chips eaten hot from the paper before the vinegar has a chance to evaporate, the wrapping chucked down the alley to decorate the sleeping drunks. It’s a stagnant, stagnating place, a scene of abominations and yearnings, of skirts rucked around hips, the stone of the wall harsh against buttocks. Sodden thighs and monthly-bated-breath. And now she’s going back.

Felix had dropped her at the short stay parking at the airport—‘It’s a fortune to park here these days’—with a flaccid pat on the knee. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ had been his final words, the manicured hand he’d wafted out of the window as he drove away betrayed by the swollen veins of late middle age. Both abandoned and emancipated, with two suitcases and an overnight bag, Alison made her way to check-in. The dislike she felt for her husband caused her to bristle, the once-blistering stream of loathing that had grown tepid through familiarity now scorching again.

#

She sits, one leg in, one leg out of the driver’s side of the hire car, and scrapes at the cellophane with her thumbnail; it’s rituals such as these that never die. She scrolls back the cardboard lid, and as though twenty years have suddenly been erased, her fingers know the exact dance to extract the foil from the top of the pack.

She slides a cigarette out with her thumb and lays it in her palm; it looks innocent enough. She sniffs the end, where tobacco sprouts, shrivelled and friable, and then she places it on her knee and picks up her bag from the passenger seat. Her new lipstick is in the inside pocket: Rimmel. She’d bought it at the airport, in the pharmacy in arrivals. They’ve changed all the names, of course, but she’s found an approximation of the shade she used to wear. ‘Alarm’ it’s called, a bright, bloody crimson. She pulls off the lid. After dragging down the sun visor and finding herself in the mirror, she runs the lipstick around her mouth, her lips instantly slick and moist and red. Its taste awakens a faint trace of memory, no more than a relic of her youth.

Her lips are sticky around the cigarette when it enters her mouth, and her hand trembles slightly with sleep deprivation and delicious anticipation as the lighter’s flame soars. With the first inhalation she can taste the heat of the fire that engulfs the tobacco, that sears her lungs, but she tries again, and soon the familiar chemical thrill is threading its way through her veins. She grins and groans and leans back in the driver’s seat. She’s just taken ten years off herself and the old days seem tangible. Coming home isn’t so hard.

#

The sat nav tells her three and a half hours, so she lines up an old Manics album on her phone and pairs it with the car’s audio. She’s nervous about driving on the left for the first time in so long, so she manoeuvres the hire car into the slip of a lorry in the slow lane and settles in. The drive along the M4 is uneventful and then, abruptly, the Severn Bridge appears, and she fumbles one-handed for her purse to pay the toll before she remembers that they’ve scrapped that now. When she first met Felix he’d made some joke about it being unfair that you had to pay to get into Wales—surely most people would pay to get out? He’d glanced around the other men who stood at the bar when he said that and grinned, waiting for laughter to be manufactured, his lazy anticipation that of the very wealthy who have grown accustomed to fawning subordinates. The other men hadn’t even made eye contact with him; they heard this same joke all the time from the out-of-towners.

She stops at a service station to use the bathroom and buy something to drink. It’s a mild afternoon but the sky is a blank grey canvas, just starting to darken. She leans against the side of the car and half smokes another cigarette, then grinds the last inch into the tarmac with her heel. Onwards.

It’s the dismal beauty of Port Talbot that makes her feel as though she’s on the cusp of a return. The heaving chimneys, silhouetted against an empty sky, chug out great white plumes: a salutation. After another half an hour or so, she comes off the motorway and approaches the town. Over the first roundabout and the road pitches and there are the electricity pylons. Four of them, skeletal and persistent against the now pinking sky. At school they used to say that if you stood under them for too long your brain would fry, and of course she and some of the others had tried it, camping out under the great scraggy megaliths, having strung together a story for their parents. No one’s brain had fried but there is, nevertheless, something intransigent about them, a stolid, unchanging presence that unsettles.

She decides to drive in along the back road, avoiding the High Street for now, and follows signs to a new multi-storey car park. It seems it is part of a development where the old cattle market used to be, a shopping centre: Zara, L’Occitane, Gap. A brand new cinema, solidified in homogenous red brick, a last-ditch attempt to breathe life into this grey town. It’s late afternoon now. Liver-hued and wet to the eye, the sky is pregnant with the threat of rain.

Sleep has eluded her for more than twenty-four hours, and she feels that heady mix of jetlag-induced somnolence coupled with the confounding thump of Red Bull. She’d tried to sleep on the plane, of course, but the lolling man had added to his misdemeanours with staccato snoring, so it had been a fitful, prickled sleep. She’d dreamed little and often, bright flashes: vignettes that illuminated her brain for what seemed like seconds when she woke, but could have lasted any number of milliseconds or minutes. Footsteps on cobbles, the clatter of bottles and a brief flash of white, vulnerable flesh. She woke, parched, somewhere over the Atlantic, with the sensation of trying to clutch at water.

#

Since she had come to the realisation that she could leave Felix, she’s always known she’d come back here, despite her attempts to kid herself that the world was her oyster. She pretended that she was genuinely considering renting a car to drive across the States, or that she might live in Europe for a bit and make the most of it before the effects of Brexit really kicked in and she’d need a visa. But the inevitability of a return to her hometown was insurmountable, a highway with no exits and nowhere to turn around, and so she invented a hitherto unmentioned and recently deceased aunt, booked her flight, and left.

She considers another smoke before she gets out of the car but can feel the dry ache in the back of her throat and thinks she will save them for later. She wonders if Sandra still smokes. A lot of people vape now instead but she doesn’t think of Sandra as that sort. No, Sandra was always a slave to the cigarettes, lighting up as soon as she’d finished her shift. Alison smiles to think of her old boss: head thrown back, elbow propped, cigarette inserted between sphincter-like lips, taking that first hard drag on the other side of the bar. ‘Jesus Christ, Ali, I need this,’ as though she’d been working down a coal pit all day, rather than a six-hour shift in the Ceffyl Du.

Alison had been surprised to learn that Sandra was still there after all this time. Once she’d consolidated her thoughts about leaving Felix, the first thing she had done was to consider her options for going home. She couldn’t face trying to contact any of the school friends she’d lost touch with, could already anticipate their stifled glee when she would have to admit that it hadn’t worked out in America. Her parents couldn’t help—they had died within months of each other six years ago. She’d wanted to come back for the funeral, of course, but they’d never been that close, and in the end Felix had persuaded her that she’d only find it distressing. They hadn’t included her in their wills. It was when Alison was considering her employment prospects that she’d thought about Sandra and tracked her down on Facebook. If she was going back home, she’d need a job, and she was hardly qualified to do much these days, was she? Their correspondence had been sparse, almost stilted, but Sandra had agreed that there were a few shifts she could pick up and had even said she could stay in one of the pub’s empty rooms upstairs.

In the rear-view mirror, Alison reapplies her lipstick and then takes the smaller of her two suitcases from the trunk—she’ll have to get used to saying boot again—and locks the car. It’s a ten minute walk to the Ceff, and she plots her route using her memories of pub crawls of the past. They’d start off at the Coracle on East Street and then head up Drover’s Alley for a swift one in the Fleece, before grappling with the sticky doors and floors of the Angel and its crowds of young men, greedy with lust, their faces lupine, keen. The girls had relished the attention, had enjoyed the hunger evident in the opposition’s eyes, and they’d accept the offers of drinks and cigarettes and then pile out onto the pavement a squawking, tumbling mass, and saunter on to the next place.

It won’t be long before the shops start to empty, and the pubs fill up. It’s a Saturday, so she’ll need to get to the pub before the place gets too crowded; it used to get packed to the rafters after a match. It was on one of those Saturdays, when she’d been nearing the end of her shift, that Felix had elbowed his way up to the bar. He wasn’t much to look at: pale, slight, thinning on top, and a good twenty years older than her. Not someone she would have normally noticed or wasted any attention on, but when he’d leant over the bar and asked for a neat Scotch, she’d immediately caught the lazy drone of his accent, which carried with it a hint of the exotic, a faint transatlantic promise of something new. When her shift finished, he’d bought her a drink, and they’d chatted a bit. She enjoyed his fascination with her body, how his gaze was drawn to her skin where it was revealed by the sparse fabric of her top. It was a familiar feeling, the power bestowed by flesh, the sheer desire the meat of her could instil in a man. It made her feel perversely unassailable, as though she was in possession of something priceless, an asset which made her capable of negotiation. When he suggested they go and sit in his car, she’d half-heartedly wondered if he was going to try to screw her. He did, and she let him, and she had looked on, disinterested, as her body made all the right signs of enjoyment. Afterwards, she’d wiped herself down and given him directions to the coast.

She’d always felt at peace there: a ten minute drive from town, it was a barren and windswept place, backed by sand dunes and with a long flat shoreline and a view to the other side of the estuary that was occasionally dotted with sailing dinghies and the odd fishing boat. Sometimes, there were wild horses that wandered in from the grassy lowlands, and they would run with abandon, hooves kicking up the sand, their eyes wild. There, he’d parked the car and, because there hadn’t been anyone around, she’d let him lean her over the bonnet of the car and fuck her again.

Afterwards, he’d suggested she might go and stay with him for a while. Nothing heavy, just visit for a couple of weeks, have a look around the area. If she liked it, she could stay longer. It would be a chance to get out of this shithole. When he said that she’d felt an odd stirring of loyalty for her town, for where she’d grown up, which had quickly dissipated: the last dregs of bathwater swirling down the plug hole.

Two weeks later she was on a plane. He’d sent her the money for the flight—business class. She’d given Sandra a week’s notice and while the older woman had rolled her eyes and sucked away on her cigarette, you could tell that she was envious of Alison’s pending liberation.

It was Sandra who’d suggested the lock-in on Alison’s last night—just the regulars, plus half a dozen rugby-types who were over from Llanelli and hadn’t been causing any trouble. Sandra had been drinking since early evening, her smile getting loose and slick, her plum lipstick smearing jammily around her mouth. Tactile, and with an extra button undone on her blouse, she flitted between customers, her smattering laughter too loud. She’d taken the piss out of the Llanelli boys, calling them ‘bufty boys in your chinos and Ben Sherman shirts,’ which got a laugh from the locals, but hard stares from the rugby players. There was one in particular, a small, whippy guy who would probably have played on the wing, who held Alison’s eye for a long moment, longer than was necessary, before looking back into his pint glass. Later, he’d tried to feel her up on her way back from the bathroom, had pushed her up against the wall, his face too close to hers, reeking of beer and testosterone. She’d shoved him away and gone to stand behind the bar.

#

Dragging her suitcase along behind her, Alison wonders what she will tell Sandra about her twenty-year adventure that had started off with so much promise: a life with a millionaire restaurant owner that had turned into marriage (pre-nup, of course) before the indifference crystallised into mutual dislike and then a sharp loathing, merely a year or two later.

At first, her life had consisted of the gym and shopping trips, paid for by Felix, and meals out (at his own restaurants) and lots of sex, the likes of which she hadn’t encountered in her brief history of Tesco’s car park and the bus station. Felix’s tastes were wide-ranging and relentless, and even though she agreed to stay on after the initial two-week holiday, she found herself increasingly perturbed by his predilections. The persistence of the rumours about Felix’s dalliances with the younger waiting staff was a constant low-frequency buzz in her self-esteem, an insect that would hover, unseen, its drone a mild but relentless irritant.

After a while, she stopped going to the gym, and instead spent her time at coffee shops and bakeries, ordering more than she could possibly eat and cramming the sweet distractions into her mouth with expensively manicured fingers. As an anticipated result, her youthful angularity gave way to softer, more pliable curves, and Felix took to spending longer at his restaurants, where his employees had the jutting hip bones of teenagers and the wholesome tooth-whitened zest of catalogue models.

#

When the tarmacked pavement gives way to cobbles, the suitcase bumps painfully along behind her. The chip shop on Church Street is just opening, the first oleaginous guffs pumping through the open door. A group of teenaged girls is tottering foal-like on too-high heels on the corner, their shoulders poking, goose-pimpled and vulnerable, from strappy tops. She wasn’t that much older than them when she left this town and she hopes they have better luck than she did. Turning left at the bingo hall, she pushes the button at the pedestrian crossing. A car approaches from behind, and there’s a shout: ‘Alright, love?’ Instinctively, she straightens: belly in, tits out. The car passes, and she sees young men—boys, really—hanging out of the back windows. ‘Sorry, grandma,’ comes the cry, and there’s a collective guffaw as the car disappears around the corner. The skin on the back of her hand feels papery dry against her mouth as she swipes away the lipstick.

Finally, she is standing at the bottom of the High Street, looking up the faint incline, and she can just about make out the sign that hangs perpendicular to the wall of the pub. A black horse, rearing up on its hind legs, the paint flaking now and faded.

#

It was only when the true nature of the revelations about Felix’s behaviour were made known that she started to entertain the notion that she could leave him. For years they’d plodded on, their marriage silently acknowledged to be a mistake, but neither of them with the energy or inclination to do anything about it. They each knew about the others’ indiscretions, and even if his were more transgressive than hers, she let him get away with it, because what was the point of rocking the boat? She finds it difficult to pinpoint the exact moment it had dawned on her that she could leave. It wasn’t a lightbulb moment, more a gradual enlightenment, a glacial shifting of a realisation that she didn’t have to stay—there was nothing tying her to their house and the restaurants. It really was as easy as packing her bags and going home.

#

Sandra is behind the bar and she doesn’t look up. She’s pouring a pint for an old guy who’s perched on one of the bar stools, the usual sort: flat cap, tweed jacket that will be pungently reminiscent of sheep dip and creosote. Sandra’s hair is still bleached and scraggy, and pulled up in a tight ponytail on the top of her head—what they’d have called a council facelift, back in the day. She’s scrawny-thin, but the tops of her arms where they peer from the sleeves of her blouse are glutinous, like cheap ice cream melting in the tub. She’s still wearing the low-cut tops, and Alison can see the curve of her breasts, hoisted artificially high, wrinkled and parched. When Sandra does look up, Alison is absurdly shocked that she is still wearing her trademark plum lipstick. At her age.

At first, neither woman says anything, and silence sits between them, as thick and stultifying as tide-sodden sand. Then Sandra lifts the flap at the end of the bar and walks very deliberately towards Alison, her careful gait alluding to the fact that she will have been on the Malibu since the start of her shift, unless something’s changed.

‘Well. Look at you then.’ Alison feels stripped bare, vulnerable, as Sandra’s eyes travel over her body; there is no trace of the potency she would feel as a young woman when men and boys would appraise her form. Sandra’s gaze is critical, assessing. ‘We’ve neither of us got any younger, have we?’ the older woman barks, and a flame of indignation sparks in Alison’s chest. Sandra must be, what? Ten, fifteen years older than her? She is suddenly conscious of the added weight around her hips, the fat that creases her belly.

‘You still on the cancer sticks, then Sandra? Not good for the complexion, you know.’ It’s cruel, and she’s sorry as soon as she’s said it, but Sandra doesn’t seem to mind.

‘Yeah. I was just going out the back for one, matter of fact, before it starts to fill up in here. You coming?’

Alison feels as though she’s been wrongfooted, as though her need to defend herself by taking down the other woman has cast her as the villain. Still, she tells herself, they must be allies if this new life of hers is going to work. She starts to tell Sandra that she doesn’t smoke anymore, then remembers the packet of Marlboro Lights in her handbag. ‘Any chance of a drink with that?’

Sandra gives her a wink and retreats behind the bar. She doesn’t ask what Alison wants, but instead pours a double measure of Southern Comfort into a glass and tops it up with a splash of lemonade from the tap. No ice. She looks pleased with herself.

‘See? Twenty years and I haven’t forgotten.’ She picks up a half pint of brown liquid from under the bar which Alison knows will contain as much Malibu as it does Coke, and leads the way through the outside door that will take them into the alley.

It hasn’t changed. None of it. The same whitewashed brick wall, the crates of empty bottles, the damp air that is lit now by the pale orange streetlight. Alison will wonder later if it is these prompts which summon the memory. That last night at the pub, and her sudden realisation that Sandra wasn’t in the bar and that Alison was doing all the serving. Going to look for her—first in the ladies’ and then outside in the alley. Sandra, pushed up against the wall by the rugby player from Llanelli, blouse ripped open, bra torn. Breasts bare, eyes wide, feral. Pleading. The bottle in Alison’s hand, grabbed from one of the empty crates, and smashing down on the side of the man’s head, the resulting crack shockingly satisfying in the silence of the alley. His hand up at his temple and Sandra wriggling free and Alison raising the bottle again. And he’d bolted. Just like that, he ran away, disappeared down the alley. At that moment, Alison had felt a power unlike any other. Then the soothing, the smoothing of clothes, the drying of tears, the embrace.

Alison has no recollection of what came after. Her next memory is of boarding the flight at Heathrow the following morning, her excitement tempered only slightly by her hangover.

#

‘Got a light?’ Sandra asks, wriggling out a cigarette and placing it between her lips. Alison juggles her drink and fishes in her bag, and finally retrieves the lighter. She flicks it and leans forward, Sandra’s free hand cupping around it to shield it from the breeze.

‘Jesus Christ, Ali, I need this,’ says Sandra after blowing out a stream of smoke. The two women lean against the whitewashed wall, sucking and puffing and sipping in silence.

Of the past, they do not speak. It is there, in the broken glass glittering in the amber glow of the streetlight; in the yeasty bloom rising from the crates of empty beer bottles and in the silence that inhabits the space between them. A brittle, friable silence, that could crumble at any moment.

It is there in the flutter of fingers against the back of Alison’s hand.

‘Welcome home, girl. Welcome home.’

Lucie McKnight Hardy (she/her) is the author of the novel Water Shall Refuse Them (2019) and a collection of short stories, Dead Relatives (2021), of which the Guardian said, ‘This short story collection confirms the author’s reputation in the field of literary horror.’ Her stories have featured in various publications in addition to The Lonely Crowd, including Best British Short Stories 2019, Uncertainties IV, The New Abject, Black Static and as a limited edition chapbook from Nightjar Press. 

Her next novel, Night Babies, will be published by John Murray in Spring 2026.

You can find out more about her and her publications at lmcknighthardy.com

Image by John Lavin.