by Kate Lattey
“Don’t get all proud on me now,” Frankie complained. “I’m just trying to help.”
“I know, but you’re driving past my horse,” I told him, and he slowed down, peering through the rain-streaked glass to see Whisper knee-deep in grass on the side of the road, grazing happily.
“Never misses a meal, that one,” Frankie commented as he drew to a stop. “Speaking of which, you want to get some dinner later?”
“Um, maybe,” I said, my eyes fixed on my horse. He’d lifted his head when he heard the car, and was watching me, clearly debating whether to run or let me catch him. “Can I decide later, when I’ve got him home?”
“Yeah.” Frankie stopped the engine and unclipped his seatbelt. “I’ll help you catch him, if you like. Or can you do that on your own as well?”
“Probably, but you can help,” I said, getting slowly out of the car, my breath catching as I tried to use my core. It was going to be a painful ride back to the yard.
“That poor horse is about to blow his brains out.”
I braced my back and pulled hard on the reins, struggling to bring Whisper back down to a trot. He leaned against the bit and powered on, ignoring my efforts. Two more weeks had passed since I’d bruised my ribs, but they were stubbornly slow to heal and were still giving me grief.
“What?” I asked Frankie, who was leaning on the arena fence with a smug expression.
“What are you trying to do?” he asked me.
“What’s it look like?” I snapped, turning Whisper in a smaller circle.
My horse kept cantering, then stumbled, finally breaking into a trot simply in order to keep his balance.
“Other than piss your horse off, I’ve got no idea,” Frankie replied. “If you’d just get out of his face for five seconds, he might stop fighting you and slow down of his own accord.”
I glanced at him sideways, then let the reins slacken against Whisper’s dark neck. He surged forwards, snatching at the bit and breaking into a canter.
“Yeah, that worked,” I said sarcastically as I shortened my reins again, and the familiar leaden feeling returned to my arms as Whisper bore down on the contact again.
“That’s because you did it wrong. But by all means carry on as you are.”
Frankie turned away with a shrug, and started walking back towards the stable yard. I glared after him, then did what he’d known I would do all along. I asked for help.
“So what should I be doing?”
Frankie turned around with an expression of mock surprise. “I’m sorry, are you talking to me? I thought you were an expert by now, and no longer needed my help.”
His words made me realise what a jerk I’d been lately.
“Sorry. Yes, I need help. If you’re still willing to give it to me.”
He narrowed his eyes, and I smiled hopefully. Frankie heaved a great sigh and came back towards me.
“You’re lucky you’re cute.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I thought I wasn’t your type.”
“I’m revising my opinion. Relax, I’m kidding,” he said, catching sight of the look on my face. “You’re still too young. Now put him on a circle, and for Christ’s sake let go of his mouth. Give the poor horse a chance to get some feeling back in his gums.”
KNIFE’S EDGE
As the weeks slipped by, Whisper finally started to improve again, and under Frankie’s watchful eye, we began making steady progress. It was all baby steps to begin with, and my impatience to move up frustrated Frankie, who couldn’t understand how I could be so patient with the other young horses, but constantly put so much pressure on Whisper to perform. At least, he said he couldn’t understand, but I was pretty sure he got it. I had no personal stake in those other horses, and generally the more I liked them, the more slowly I produced them, because I wanted them to stick around. But I wanted Whisper to be ready to compete when the show jumping season started, and it wasn’t far away now. Frankie had promised that he’d help me get Whisper to some shows, and I was determined to start as soon as possible.
But like most horses, Whisper had no idea that he was on a schedule. He was a quick learner and incredibly athletic, but he still had a tendency to lose the plot if things went wrong, and whenever he missed a distance or knocked a rail, he’d invariably have a massive meltdown that would leave me eating dirt. He was a big horse at almost seventeen hands, and all the good feed and hard work I’d put into him had made him immensely powerful. He could throw me off without a second thought, and it had become second nature to him to deck me if I pissed him off too much.
So we focused on the basics, over and over, working over poles and low fences, jumping off angles and on circles and working on balance and straightness and rhythm, all of the things we would need to find success in the arena. And slowly, far more slowly than I wanted it to, but more quickly than I deserved, he improved. He learned to use his body correctly, to wait for his fences, to balance around the turns and rock back onto his haunches in front of the fences. Frankie still wasn’t satisfied – he was fixated how heavy Whisper still was in the reins, and was always on at me to soften my hand and lighten the contact, but that involved way more flatwork than I was prepared to do. All I wanted to do was jump.
Whisper wasn’t a straightforward horse, but he was the one bright spot in an otherwise dark time in my life. Dad still hadn’t found work, and his drinking was getting worse, to the point that he was perpetually either drunk or hung over. At least when he was nursing one off, he was quiet and compliant, and we just moved softly around the house and stayed outside – and out of his way – as much as possible. But when he’d been drinking, he was unpredictable. Mum’s threats to leave him continued, but she never followed through on them. He knew she wouldn’t. More and more, Phoebe would crawl onto the couch with me at night, too afraid to sleep alone, and several times she woke me up in the early hours of the morning in the throes of a nightmare, thrashing around and battering her heels against my shins. I would wake her up and hold her tight until she calmed down, but when I woke up one morning to find Morgan sleeping on the floor next to us, I started taking the couch cushions into their room and sleeping on the floor to keep them company. Even then, half the time Phoebe preferred to sleep on the floor with me rather than in her own bed.
It was a rough time, punctuated by brief periods of calm when things would go back to normal for a while, before another storm would hit and we’d all find ourselves sheltering together and trying to ride it out.
Things came to a head one evening when Dad was in a particularly bad mood. He’d been shortlisted for a job opportunity that had come up in town, and had convinced himself that he was sure to get it, so his disappointment when he didn’t had swiftly turned to anger once he had a bottle in his hand. There aren’t too many things in my life that I’ve blocked out, but that night is one of them. Even now, when I try and think too much about it, my brain just shies away of its own accord. I don’t remember much about what happened, and I don’t want to. But the aftermath left me with a deep cut across the back of my hand that hurt like hell and left one hell of a scar.
I’d turned up to work next morning with the hand tightly bandaged, but it bled every time I moved it, and I was in a fairly serious amount of pain when Frankie found me attempting to muck out.
“What’re you doing in there, having a wank?” Frankie asked as he walked past, pushing a heaped wheelbarrow out towards the muck heap. He’d arrived late, after I’d already started mucking out, and hadn’t seen my bandaged hand yet. “I’ve never known you to take so long to do one box.”
I didn’t reply, which was his second clue that something was wrong. Setting the wheelbarrow handles down, he came to the door of the loosebox and looked over at me as I struggled to fork up wet shavings with one hand.
“What the hell happened to you?”
“Had a bit of an accident,” I said, trying to keep my voice casual. “It’ll be all right. Just needs a few days to heal up, that’s al
l.”
Frankie pushed past the wheelbarrow in the doorway and walked up to me, grabbing my wrist. I flinched as his fingers felt the swelling that had spread up my forearm. “Jesus Christ.” He started unravelling the bandage, and I grabbed his hand with my free one, trying to stop him.
“It’s fine, really.”
Frankie looked me in the eyes. “Don’t make me fight you. I’ll win.”
“You sure about that?”
Frankie raised his eyebrows speculatively. We were almost the same height now, and while he still had several kilos on me, I’d built up enough muscle from all the riding and yard work to be able to hold my own. But I was one-handed, and Frankie wasn’t unwilling to playing up his advantage.
“Want me to squeeze your hand real hard and we can find out?”
I cringed at the thought, and conceded defeat. “Fine. But it looks worse than it is. Honest.”
Frankie unwound the crepe bandage, lifted the layer of gauze beneath to reveal the wound, and swore loudly.
“Jonty, what the hell is this?” His eyes bored into mine as he gripped my shoulder with one hand, his fingertips digging into my flesh. “This is not nothing! Did someone do this to you?”
“Nobody. I mean, it was an accident.” Frankie looked deeply sceptical, but I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t tell him what had happened. “I swear.”
“Have you seen a doctor?”
I shook my head as the cut started bleeding again, dripping into the bedding. My whole hand was red and swollen, and I could hardly look at the gash that ran in a steep curve from the space between my last two knuckles down to my wrist.
“Can you move your fingers?”
I flexed my hand, wincing as fresh blood pooled in the wound. My little finger stayed stubbornly still, no matter how hard I tried to move it, and Frankie frowned as he pressed the bloody gauze back onto it.
“Looks like you might’ve cut a tendon. It needs stitching, at the very least.” Frankie rewrapped the bandage painfully tight around my hand, but once he was done, it felt a bit better. “Get in the car. Now. I’m taking you to the hospital. And on the way there, you can tell me exactly what happened.”
I followed him out of the stable, still shaking my head. “I can’t.”
“Yes you can, and you need to. Stop protecting him,” Frankie said, his eyes flashing with anger. “He’s not worth it.”
I stared past him, fixing my eyes on a trail of green slime running down the side of the concrete building.
“Jonty. Mate.” Frankie put a hand on my shoulder again, gently this time. “You have to let me help you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re clearly incapable of helping yourself.”
Frankie pursed his lips, his expression anxious. He could see that he wasn’t getting through to me, and that clearly worried him.
“What’s all this? I don’t pay you two to be having romantic episodes in the middle of my yard.”
Ken’s back door slammed shut behind him as he strode across the yard towards us. Frankie let go of me, and turned towards our employer.
“I’m taking him to the hospital. He’s cut his hand.”
“How’d he do that?”
“He won’t say.”
Ken’s eyes narrowed as he reached us, and he looked down at my bandaged hand, which I was cradling with my other arm. I’d given up pretending that it didn’t hurt.
“Didn’t do it here, did you?” he asked warily.
I shook my head. “At home.”
“Right then.” He stopped moving, and looked at Frankie. “How long d’you reckon it’ll take you? There’s someone coming to try that bay mare at ten-thirty and I don’t want to muck them around.”
“Are you joking?” Frankie’s eyes bulged in their sockets. “The kid’s got a cut an inch deep across the back of his hand! He’s lucky his fingers still move, and God only knows how long he’s been in this condition for. But you want him to wait a couple more hours so I can show someone a horse? Piss off.”
“All right, keep your hair on. It was just a suggestion.” Ken looked at me, and sniffed. “That bad, is it?”
I shrugged, and Frankie huffed out an impatient sigh. “Wait in the car, Jonty.”
I shuffled over to Frankie’s sports car and climbed into the passenger seat, moving slowly now that I was finally accepting the extent of my injury. I leaned back against the cool seat, resting my head on the headrest, and tried to ignore the throbbing in my hand.
Frankie was still going off at Ken, and I closed my eyes and tried to take my mind off the pain. But everything I thought of, things that usually calmed me down or let me divorce my mind from what was happening, kept pulling me back. In my head, I climbed the hill opposite our cottage so I could see the view across the farm, but I couldn’t reach the summit, no matter how hard I tried. I screwed my eyes shut tighter and switched to thinking of Whisper, imagining cantering him along the top of the ridgeline with a couple of well-trained dogs at our heels and nothing in front of us except more room to run. But imaginary Whisper was no better behaved than his real life counterpart, and he spun around and threw me into a fence.
I flinched and gritted my teeth, searching through my mind for something that I could hold onto. A flash of a memory caught my attention, but the harder I tried to grasp it, the more it slipped away. I took a deep breath and let it out again, trying to relax. Another deep breath in, and out. The throbbing in my hand eased slightly, and the memory floated towards the surface again, clearly this time. The soft curve of a freckled cheek, the very edge of a smile, just visible as she turned her head. The sunlight catching her soft hair, tight curls that bounced on her narrow shoulders. I was back there again, sitting at the back of the school bus, watching as she twisted in her seat, and for a brief moment, her eyes met mine. I lost myself into those sparkling hazel eyes, so full of emotion that I couldn’t quite read. In my imagination, I stood up and went closer, sat down in the seat in front, leaned over the back of it and started a conversation. But only ever in my head. In reality, I had simply stayed where I was, and she had turned back around, utterly oblivious.
“Are you still with us, or have you passed out?”
I opened my eyes and looked at Frankie as he slid into the driver’s seat. Ken was still standing in the middle of the yard, his hair tousled, and he made his way back towards the house, walking in front of the car as Frankie revved the engine, pretending to run him over. Unexpectedly, Ken just smiled, and as I looked over at Frankie’s grinning response, I saw something between them that I’d never noticed before. Something that now that it had been seen, could never be unseen. Frankie put the car in reverse, then slung his arm across the back of my seat as he backed the car out.
“So you going to tell me yet how you got hurt?”
“Nope.”
He sighed as he removed his arm and put the car into drive. “Are you ever going to tell anyone?”
A flickering face, a fading smile. I pushed her out of my mind, focusing on the road ahead. “Nope.”
Frankie frowned as he accelerated up the road. “Don’t you trust me?” he asked, sounding hurt.
I turned my head and looked at him. “We all have secrets. This is mine.” He glanced at me, and his expression shifted when he caught the look in my eyes. For a moment, he seemed defeated, deflated. No longer the cocksure version of himself that I usually saw. “Let it go, Frankie. It was an accident, like I said.”
It was obvious that he didn’t believe me, but for once in his life he stopped prodding. I never did tell him the truth. I never told the nurse who saw me at the hospital, or the doctor who stitched me up, or anyone else who has ever asked me how I got that scar. There are only two other people in the world who know what happened, and that’s because they were there. And none of us will ever tell.
JUMP THE MOON
I was jumping Whisper in the front paddock one day when I realised that we had an audience. I’d gone around putting everything
at the very top of the stands to see how high Whisper could jump, and he rose to the challenge, jumping keenly and eagerly around a good metre-thirty course. I’d had the horse for almost eight months, but we had really clicked over the past six months, and he would try his heart out for me, stretching his body out over the wide oxers, tucking his knees tightly over the high verticals, never so much as brushing a rail.
I’d seen her out of the corner of my eye as I was jumping, but it wasn’t until I had brought Whisper back down to a trot and was patting his arched neck that I recognised Hayley. She was leaning on the fence, her mouth half-open and an incredulous expression on her face. I grinned as I guided Whisper over to the fence and halted him in front of her.
“Looking for a ride on the best horse in the universe?”
She squinted up at me in the sunlight, and shook her head. “It is you. I thought I was seeing things.” She held a hand out to Whisper, who nudged it hopefully, looking for a treat. “This horse can really jump.”
“I know. I trained him.”
Hayley’s expression turned sceptical. “Whose is he?”
“Mine.”
She looked like she believed me even less. “Is he for sale?”
“No,” I said firmly. “Definitely not.”
Hayley pouted. “Why not? Be a waste not to compete him, with talent like that,” she said. “Even if he is just a Thoroughbred.”
I ignored the dig at his parentage. “Who says he won’t be competing?” I asked her pointedly.
“Who’s going to ride him, you?”
“Why not?”
Her mouth turned up at the corners like a cat. “Where’re you going to get the money for that?”
I was still figuring that one out. “What d’you care?”
“I don’t,” she said. “Never have. Just be a real waste of a good horse to leave him sitting in a paddock doing nothing.” She pushed herself back off the fence, and shook her hair out over her shoulders. “Well, see ya.”
