Horse Girl Rides Again

by John Larkin

  Kevin let his head mouse loose again. It had been a while since he’d let it out for a run. It was actually starting to hurt his brain a bit.

  ‘Hmmmm,’ he said. ‘Isn’t there a horse race in Nepal that you could enter, or something?’

  ‘Tickets.’

  ‘Not really,’ Rebecca replied. ‘I checked on the internet. Plenty of work for mules, carting climbing gear up mountains and that, but not much going for horses.’

  ‘Tickets.’

  ‘Couldn’t you tell them that you’re a big mule,’ suggested Kevin, ‘and that you can carry more?’

  ‘It’s not a job application,’ said Rebecca. ‘They’re not actually crying out for mules in Nepal you know?’

  ‘Tickets.’

  Kevin scratched at his head mouse. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Tickets.’

  Rebecca looked up at the old lady who was hovering over them, like a hovering old lady. ‘Sorry?’ said Rebecca.

  ‘I said “Tickets”,’ replied the old lady.

  ‘Yes, I know you said “Tickets”,’ said Rebecca. ‘I was just wondering why you’ve been wandering around saying “Tickets”, for no obvious reason.’ Rebecca didn’t like being rude, especially to hovering old ladies who kept saying ‘Tickets’ for no obvious reason. It’s just that being a horse was really starting to get on her nerves.

  ‘They’re raffle tickets, my dear,’ said the hovering old lady. ‘To help poor old Mrs Finnegan.’

  Rebecca cringed at the mention of poor old Mrs Finnegan’s name. She was the poor old lady that Rebecca had accidentally sent flying during their game of chasings on their last visit to the mall for school shoes. When Rebecca had slammed into poor old Mrs Finnegan’s wheelchair, the old dear had gone flying out of the mall and careering off down Steep Hill Drive. She’d tried to slow her descent using her umbrella as a sort of parachute, but she’d still managed to clear Raging River Creek on the full and had bounced clean over the electricity substation.

  It had taken the sniffer dogs ages to find poor old Mrs Finnegan. Still, Rebecca supposed, sniffer dogs wouldn’t have expected to find a wheelchair stuck up in a tree. They probably weren’t trained for that sort of thing.

  ‘Is poor old Mrs Finnegan still in hospital?’ Rebecca asked.

  ‘Oh no, dear,’ replied the hovering old lady. ‘The branches completely cushioned her fall. Not so much as a scratch.’

  Rebecca was confused. If poor old Mrs Finnegan wasn’t injured, then why were they selling raffle tickets to help her?

  ‘We’re raising money to send poor old Mrs Finnegan to Switzerland,’ said the hovering old lady. ‘She’s entered in the inaugural – that means “first”, my dears – thrill-seekers’ Olympics.’

  Now Rebecca really was confused. Kevin’s head mouse stopped running around inside its little wheel.

  ‘There’s an Over-85s’ division,’ continued the hovering old lady.

  Rebecca’s mouth fell open.

  ‘So which event is she entered in?’ asked Kevin.

  ‘The summer ski jump,’ said the old lady, who wasn’t hovering any more but sitting down at their table with them.

  ‘But,’ said Rebecca, ‘there won’t be any snow to land on in summer.’

  ‘That’s right, my dear.’

  ‘So what do they land on?’ asked Kevin.

  The no-longer-hovering old lady smiled warmly at them.

  ‘Cushions.’

  ‘Cushions?’ said Rebecca and Kevin together.

  ‘That’s right, my dears. The organisers have laid out about four million scatter cushions around the landing area.’

  ‘Wow!’ said Kevin, who Rebecca knew would have loved to have had a go.

  ‘Apparently, the secret,’ said the old lady, ‘is to get rid of your wheelchair as soon as you take off. So it doesn’t land on you. So would you care to buy a raffle ticket to help poor old Mrs Finnegan?’

  Rebecca didn’t know what was so poor about poor old Mrs Finnegan if she was going to Switzerland.

  ‘There are some very nice prizes,’ said the old lady. She stood up and started hovering again. Then she handed them a list of the prizes.

  Rebecca and Kevin took the list from the old lady and looked down at the prizes.

  THE HILLS DISTRICT CAKE MAKERS’, KNITTERS’ AND KARAOKE-SINGING, HOVERING OLD LADIES’ SOCIETY’S FIRST ANNUAL (THAT MEANS ONCE A YEAR) GUESSING COMPETITION TO SEND POOR OLD MRS FINNEGAN TO SWITZERLAND TO COMPETE IN THE OVER-85s’ WHEELCHAIR JUMP AND CUSHION DROP AT THE INAUGURAL THRILL-SEEKERS’ OLYMPICS.

  Proudly sponsored by Wired Red Cordial

  FABULOUS PRIZES TO BE WON

  Tickets 50c each or 5 for $2.50

  1st Prize – Five (5) karaoke lessons to be given by Thelma Pettigrew, eight (8) times regional karaoke champion in the Over-78, Under-80 age group

  2nd Prize – One (1) free line-dancing lesson

  3rd Prize – Two (2) free line-dancing lessons

  4th Prize – A pogo stick

  5th Prize – Dinner for two (2) at the Kill ’em and Grill ’em Steak Lovers’ Grill and Gristle House

  6th Prize – A fully operational worm farm (worms not included)

  7th Prize – A nineteen-year-old parrot called Nigel

  8th Prize – An all-expenses-paid trip for two (2) to Nepal

  Rebecca fished inside her tracksuit pocket for fifty cents, which she handed to the hovering old lady.

  Kevin couldn’t take his eyes off the list of prizes. ‘What an unbelievable coincidence,’ he said. ‘I’ve always wanted a pogo stick.’

  31

  Rebecca could hear Kevin as he cautiously tiptoed down the hallway. Her heart thumped against her chest like an eagle against the bars of a budgie cage, her mouth as dry as a thong in the desert. She could sense his eyes peering into the room and then the danger seemed to have passed. Safe for now.

  ‘Aaarrrggghhh!’ screamed Kevin at the top of his lungs as he ripped the towels off her.

  Rebecca leaped high into the air, did two backward somersaults, and landed with a heavy clop on the bathroom floor.

  ‘Stop doing that!’ she panted.

  ‘Found you,’ said Kevin. ‘What a lame spot.’

  It was hard playing hide-and-seek when you were a 300-kilogram horse. She’d hid in the bath hoping that Kevin wouldn’t look in there.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Kevin, ‘if that’s the only place you could hide, why’d you make me count to three thousand?’

  ‘Because it’s really hard covering yourself with towels just using your teeth.’

  ‘Won’t it be great if we win that raffle?’ said Kevin.

  ‘It’ll be brillo, bro,’ replied Rebecca.

  ‘What are you so excited about, hay breath?’ said Kevin. ‘Horses can’t ride pogo sticks.’

  Rather coincidentally, right at that moment, their doorbell rang. Kevin raced down the hall and flung open the front door, hoping upon hope that the old lady from the mall would be standing there with a pogo stick.

  His face fell like a hippo from a helicopter when he saw that she wasn’t. Instead, the old lady from the mall was standing there with a parrot in a cage. Rebecca clip-clopped down the hall and joined Kevin.

  ‘Congratulations, my dears,’ said the old lady, with a smile so wide that one face wasn’t big enough to hold it. She looked like a politician on the campaign trail. ‘You’ve won seventh prize in the raffle.’ The old lady held up the cage. The nineteen-year-old parrot called Nigel let out a half-hearted squawk as if it really couldn’t be bothered with the whole squawking business.

  ‘Great!’ said Rebecca, trying to sound excited. What were they going to do with a nineteen-year-old-parrot called Nigel? They couldn’t keep it as a pet. Dad was allergic to birds. Or rather, birds were always attacking him. He couldn’t go out for his morning walk without being dive-bombed by about fifty magpies. Mum reckoned they were trying to get his hair to help build their nests. The weird thing was, their dad was as bald as a bowling ball. In the
end he’d started wearing a crash helmet on his walks, which was just sooooooooo embarrassing.

  ‘Maybe we could stick a couple of cardboard cylinders on its beak and call it a penguin,’ whispered Kevin.

  ‘It’s still a bird,’ hissed Rebecca. ‘The fossils won’t let us keep it. It’ll probably try to escape from its cage and beat Dad up.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Rebecca to the old lady. ‘We’re not allowed to have birds in the house.’

  ‘Oh no, my dears,’ said the old lady. ‘And why is that?’

  ‘’Cause they keep trying to peck our dad’s brain out,’ replied Kevin.

  ‘Hmmmm,’ said the old lady. ‘I wonder then if you would mind swapping prizes.’

  Kevin’s eyes lit up. ‘For the pogo stick?’

  ‘No, my dear,’ replied the old lady. ‘Thelma Twistelton-Fife won the pogo stick. She was very excited.’

  ‘But isn’t she a hundred and three?’ asked Rebecca.

  ‘One hundred and four actually. Anyway,’ continued the old lady, ‘the gentleman who won the eighth prize isn’t really allowed to leave the country. Something about being in the witness-protection program or something. So he was wondering if you would be prepared to swap prizes. He’s always wanted to own a parrot apparently.’

  Rebecca couldn’t believe it. But then she remembered that she’d been turned into a 300-kilogram horse by someone who kept a half-dead seagull and called it a toucan.

  ‘Yeah, that’d be okay,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, that’s all worked out well then. Thank you, my dears.’ The old lady handed the plane tickets to Rebecca, who took them in her mouth. Then the old lady turned to the nineteen-year-old parrot called Nigel. ‘Come on then, Nigel. Let’s go and meet your new owner. Old Mr Jimmy Hoffa will be pleased.’

  Rebecca closed the door and looked at Kevin. ‘This is unbelievable. Two tickets to Nepal.’

  ‘I know,’ said Kevin. ‘Do you reckon Mrs Twistelton-Fife will swap them for her pogo stick?’

  Rebecca ignored Kevin and clip-clopped down the hallway to start packing her bag.

  32

  It was easier to catch the train to the airport than it was to drive. There was a lot more headroom on the suburban trains than there was in the back of Dad’s car. For some reason the suburban trains seemed to cater for any giraffes who might want to come on board without having to climb down from their pogo sticks. Also, Dad was too stingy to leave his car in the long-term car park.

  Fortunately for Rebecca and Kevin, their dad was going to a conference on hole-inspecting in Hawaii on the same day as their ‘school excursion’ to Nepal. Mum was going with Dad to mind his chair by the pool while he was off inspecting holes.

  ‘Your trip’s going to be fantastic,’ said Kevin, as they made their way through the airport. ‘Hawaii’s got some of the biggest holes in the world to inspect. What are those humungous holes called again?’

  ‘Volcanoes,’ said Dad.

  ‘Yeah, that’s it.’

  Rebecca looked at her mum and smiled. Maybe their dad was a vulcanologist after all.

  Mum and Dad had a morning flight, but Rebecca and Kevin’s wasn’t until a couple of hours later, which was why no one else from their school was at the airport yet. Rebecca promised their parents that they would be fine until the teachers turned up. She hated lying to them, but she hated being a horse even more.

  When their parents had given them a hug and made their way through customs to the departure gates, Rebecca and Kevin hung around the food court until it was time for them to go. Rebecca nibbled on a couple of muesli bars while Kevin hoed into a hamburger. It wasn’t pretty, but it was all part of the food chain.

  Rebecca was a bit worried about how she was going to squish herself into her seat once she was on the plane, but that was the least of her worries at the moment. First, she had to get on the plane by getting through customs and security. And Rebecca was pretty sure that she looked nothing like her passport photo.

  ‘Next, please.’

  Rebecca and Kevin stepped up to the customs counter. Kevin handed the customs guy their passports, which they’d got last year when the family had gone to Tasmania – their dad wasn’t sure if Tasmania counted as being overseas, so he played it safe and arranged for them to get passports, just in case.

  The customs guy looked at their tickets and passports. ‘Off to Nepal then are you?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ replied Kevin. ‘School excursion.’

  The customs guy looked at Rebecca and then back at the photograph in her passport. He looked back at Rebecca and then back at her photo again.

  ‘Hmmm. Just a moment,’ he said in a stern voice, like a principal to a student who was about to hurl an apple off a balcony.

  Rebecca gulped as the customs guy got up and walked over to another customs official who was probably his boss. She wasn’t sure if she should just make a run for it; gallop out of the departure area and go and hide in the duty-free shop with the stuffed wallabies and the didgeridoos that were probably made in China.

  ‘What’ll we do?’ hissed Kevin like a beach ball deflating in a rosebush.

  ‘You’re okay,’ whispered Rebecca out of the corner of her mouth. ‘It’s me that they’re after.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ said Kevin. ‘So you’ll get busted and sent to horse jail or something and I’ll have to go to Nepal on my own.’

  Rebecca shrugged as much as it was possible for a horse to shrug, which wasn’t very much.

  Kevin shook his head. ‘We should’ve gone for the pogo stick instead.’

  Rebecca watched as the customs guy and his boss came back over to them.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the boss, ‘but we’ve just been looking at your passport photo.’

  Rebecca gulped as though she was trying to swallow a basketball.

  ‘And, um,’ said the boss. ‘And, um, we just want to ask you a question.’

  Rebecca could see the headlines in Suburban Snippets already:

  Twelve-Year-Old Girl Thrown in Jail

  for Being a Horse

  Cat Still Stuck up Tree

  ‘What’s the problem, officer?’ said Rebecca. Kevin stood to one side with a face longer than a wet weekend. Rebecca realised that if the customs guys sprung her for being a horse, then Kevin would have to go to Nepal by himself when he obviously would have preferred to have been boinging down the Hill of Death on Mrs Twistelton-Fife’s pogo stick.

  ‘We were just examining your photo,’ said the customs guy. ‘And it seems to us . . . ’ he trailed off.

  ‘Yes?’ Rebecca prompted him.

  ‘Yes, well it seems to us,’ continued the customs guy’s boss, ‘that you, and correct me if I’m wrong, used to star in Saddle Soar.’

  Rebecca immediately stopped slouching and looked up.

  ‘You were Ricky Dixie, weren’t you?’ said the boss.

  ‘Yes,’ she snorted. ‘Yes, I was.’

  ‘Would you mind very much?’ said the customs guy, sliding a piece of paper and a pen across to Rebecca.

  ‘Our kids are big fans of yours,’ said the boss. ‘Very big fans.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Could you make it out to Ethel and Bob.’

  Rebecca looked at the customs guy’s and the customs guy’s boss’s name tags. ‘Ethel and Bob?’ she asked.

  The customs guy’s boss and the customs guy looked at their own name tags. ‘Er, yes. Ethel and Bob.’

  Rebecca smiled and then signed the note to Ethel and Bob, with the pen shoved in her mouth. Then she collected her passport from Ethel and Bob and clip-clopped over to the security check.

  Kevin made it through the metal detector with no problems. As soon as Rebecca went through, however, the metal detector went ping.

  The security guard asked Rebecca to remove all metal items and then go back through the metal detector. Kevin helped his sister take off her Pegasus lucky-charm necklace and put it in the plastic tray to be X-rayed.

  Rebecca clip-clopped through the metal de
tector again, only this time without her necklace. The metal detector went pong.

  ‘Mm,’ said the security guard. ‘Come with me, please.’ Luckily the security guard had a nice, friendly manner, like an aunt who had just baked 30,000 scones for the weekend cake fair.

  Rebecca hoped that the security guard (whose name she noticed was Darlene) was a fan of Saddle Soar and that like Ethel and Bob she just wanted an autograph.

  Rebecca stepped aside with Darlene who then ran a hand-held metal detector up and down Rebecca’s massive 300-kilogram body. The machine didn’t stop pinging and ponging the entire time. When she’d finished, Darlene banged her metal detector hard against the wall. ‘Probably just needs new batteries,’ she said.

  ‘Can I go now?’ asked Rebecca.

  ‘Er, not just yet I’m afraid,’ replied Darlene. ‘I can’t let you go until you’ve stopped pinging and ponging. Or else we’ve found out what caused the ping and pong machine to ping and pong.

  ‘It’s probably my braces,’ said Rebecca. She gave Darlene an exaggerated smile. ‘See.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve got braces,’ said Darlene. She ran her ping and pong machine up to Rebecca’s mouth. The machine pinged and ponged all the way up to Rebecca’s mouth. As soon as it got there, however, it suddenly stopped.

  ‘Now that is weird,’ said Darlene.

  Darlene gestured to her boss to come and join them.

  ‘What seems to be the problem?’ said Darlene’s boss, as he sauntered over.

  Darlene tapped her hand-held ping and pong machine against the wall again. ‘My ping and pong machine keeps pinging and ponging when I run it over this young lady.’

  ‘Show me,’ said Darlene’s boss.

  Darlene ran her ping and pong machine up and down Rebecca’s entire length. Her machine pinged and ponged the entire time.

  ‘This is interesting,’ said Darlene’s boss. ‘Well you know the rules. She’ll have to be X-rayed.’

  Kevin watched in awe as Darlene led Rebecca back through the metal detector. Darlene then made Rebecca climb up onto the rack and then onto the conveyor belt that went through the X-ray machine. Rebecca had to squish her 300-kilogram body as flat as a pancake, so that she wouldn’t get stuck in the X-ray machine.