The Trouble with Goats and Sheep

by Joanna Cannon

There was nowhere to escape the heat. It was there every day when we awoke, persistent and unbroken, and hanging in the air like an unfinished argument. It leaked people’s days onto pavements and patios and, no longer able to contain ourselves within brick and cement, we melted into the outside, bringing our lives along with us. Meals, conversations, arguments were all woken and untethered and allowed outdoors. Even the avenue itself had changed. Giant fissures opened on yellowed lawns and paths felt soft and unsteady. Things which had been solid and reliable were now pliant and uncertain. Nothing felt sure anymore. The bonds which held things together were destroyed by the temperature—this is what my father said—but it felt more sinister than that. It felt as though the whole avenue was

Routine inquiries, he said. I thought I would like a job where inquiring about everyone else’s private business was considered perfectly routine.

All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

Then those on the left will go away to eternal punishment, and only those on the right to eternal life.

“I think that’s the trouble,” I said, “it’s not always that easy to tell the difference.”

The heat had become a gatekeeper. It refused to let anything past, holding itself up against the rest of the world, and sealing them all in an airless prison.

It seemed that people couldn’t quite let go of the weather, and felt the need to carry every form of it around with them, at all times, for safekeeping.

It smelled of unturned pages and unseen adventures, and on every shelf were people I had yet to meet, and places I had yet to visit. Each time, I lost myself in the corridors of books and the polished, wooden rooms, deciding which journey to go on next.

Sheila wonders, for one brief moment, if someone so weak and so bland could really be that much of a threat, and then she remembers Lisa’s father, and her own father, and all the other men who came wrapped in harmless packaging.

still hadn’t learned the power of words. How, once they have left your mouth, they have a breath and a life of their own. I had yet to realize that you no longer own them. I hadn’t learned that, once you have let them go, the words can then, in fact, become the owners of you.

I wondered where this sense of community was. Perhaps it was waiting at the back of Sheila Dakin’s pantry or hidden in the loneliness of Eric Lamb’s shed. I wondered if it sat with May Roper on her crocheted settee, or had scratched itself into the paintwork of Walter Bishop’s rotten windows. Or perhaps it was in all of those places, but I had yet to find it.