Grounded

by Wilkinson, Sheena;

  ‘But she’s not ready for a nasty shock! Oh Cam, she’s going to hurt herself. Look, I should go in and get her.’ I reach for the gate.

  ‘Declan.’ Cam puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘You could get hurt. She’ll calm down. She’s just nervous. Everything’s strange to her. Go and take Joy round the farm trail. I don’t want to see you back here for an hour.’

  ‘I can’t – what if something happens?’

  ‘I’ve run this yard for eight years. I’ll manage. I have Lara for a lesson; I can keep an eye on Folly from the school. Go. It’s an order.’

  I go.

  Joy’s fit enough now that the hills of the farm trail don’t make her sweat and huff, and when I put her at a couple of logs she pops over them happily. Two years ago this would have been enough for me – to take a horse, any horse, round the farm trail, going where I want, being in charge. But today all I can think of is Folly. I know she’ll break out. Easy for Cam to say she can keep an eye from the school – it’s five minutes away. When things go wrong with horses they tend to go wrong in a split second.

  By the time I get back to the yard I know Folly has burst through the fence, maybe scared herself so much she’s had a heart attack. Or she’s tried to jump the gate and broken her leg. It’s almost a shock not to see the vet’s car in the yard.

  I can’t hear anything weird. Just Cam’s voice in the school: ‘You need to pick up the left lead immediately. Now. Good.’

  I throw myself off Joy and drag her behind me to her stable to untack her. ‘Come on, you lazy brute!’ Joy likes to rub her face on you when you get off, and she’s offended to be lugged around like this. I yank her tack off, getting her reins all tangled the way I did when I started riding and everything was a mystery to me. I dump her expensive tack outside her stable, ram the bolt home in the door and dash down to the field.

  The fence is in one piece. Folly is one piece. Oh thank you God; I will never ask for anything again. She’s grazing; not with the single-minded intensity she did the last couple of weeks at Rosevale – her ears flicker and she looks up every few seconds – but she’s grazing. She’s rolled in the muddy patch beside the gate and looks like a skewbald, big splashes of brown spattered over the white. I let out a long slow breath.

  ‘OK?’ Cam calls from the school.

  ‘Yeah.’ I bend over and get my breath back properly.

  Lara canters Willow round in circles. She’s looking in the direction of the field. I wonder what she thinks of Folly. I lean on the gate again and survey my horse. I try to imagine I don’t know where she came from. I try to pretend she’s not my horse. What does she look like?

  Dirty. Sweaty, her coat roughened with dried-up patches. Skinny, ribs still showing clearly. She looks like what she is: a knacker.

  But out of my memory comes Seaneen’s voice: ‘Anybody can go out and buy a horse with their daddy’s money.’

  I’d love to go and get Folly and groom her and make her all clean and shining. But that’s not fair. Showing her off doesn’t matter. Letting her settle does. So I open the gate very quietly and walk up to her.

  ‘Folly,’ I say, very low. She doesn’t know her name but I like to think she knows my voice. She looks up, goggles at me, then settles back to grazing. I’m happy to be ignored. ‘Good girl,’ I say. ‘Clever Folly.’ I get closer and she lets me stroke her neck. The sweat has dried into wavy curls. ‘Poor old girl,’ I whisper. ‘It’s OK. This is your new home. You’re never going anywhere bad again, I promise.’

  But I don’t think she believes me.

  6.

  ‘Declan.’ Cam appears beside me at the gate of Folly’s paddock, holding Joy’s headcollar rope. She’s just been to turn her out in the bottom field. ‘For God’s sake, go home. Has your bike even got lights?’

  ‘It has a light.’

  ‘Folly’s fine. And I’m here. I can check on her from the landing window.’

  ‘D’you not think she’s a bit less settled than she was?’

  ‘She was interested in Joy going past, that’s all.’ Folly lifts up her head and gives a high-pitched neigh. ‘She’s a bit anxious, maybe, but you standing round here looking at her every two seconds isn’t going to change that.’

  ‘She drank loads. What if she gets colic?’

  ‘Declan.’ Cam puts both hands on my shoulders and pretends to drag me away from the fence. ‘If you get mowed down by a lorry because you’re cycling home in the dark you needn’t think I am going to look after that nag for you.’ She smiles. ‘So go.’

  ‘I’ll be here extra early in the morning,’ I promise, walking beside her back up to the yard where my bike is in its usual place against the wall. I won’t sleep, worrying about Folly. Mum’s out tonight with Colette; Colette’s taking her for dinner for her birthday. This will be the first time they’ve met since the night I landed, drunk, at Colette’s house. I want to time my arrival back home so that I don’t have to see her.

  At the end of Cam’s road I nearly turn back for a last check, but a Land Rover beeps at me and I remember what Cam said about getting mowed down in the dark so I force myself to turn left and freewheel down the hill. I count everything to distract me – fields with horses in them, road signs, houses for sale … It only half works. After five minutes the rain starts – a drizzle at first, then proper cold rain that makes my hoody heavy and freezes my hands on the handlebars. And gives me something new to worry about – Folly getting chilled from sweating up then getting rained on.

  I hate cycling past the barn. But the other road home is three miles longer and far hillier. I still don’t like looking over the overgrown messy hedge and seeing the roof of the barn in at the far end of the field, but every time, I can’t stop myself from standing up on my pedals and checking it out. Tonight somebody’s dumped an old car seat, a portable barbecue and two TVs on top of the usual litter of beer cans in the gateway. If I hadn’t stopped that night, Folly would be lying in there dead now. I put my head down and cycle past.

  I change gears as the hills get steeper. The bike tyres whizz through puddles. I give myself a good talking to. It’ll be OK. She’ll settle down and bond with me and I’ll make her a champion.

  In my mind I’m jumping Folly round the same course I did at Balmoral on Flight, only she’s even better, faster, surer. And mine. I turn into Tirconnell Parade. It’s properly dark now. There’s no light in any of the windows of our house so Mum mustn’t be back yet. With any luck, if I go straight to bed, I won’t have to talk to her or Colette.

  That Cian’s sitting on the wall outside our house, tracing wet shapes on the ground with the side of his trainer. I stop the bike and stand straddling it. ‘Piss off and sit on your own wall.’

  ‘I’m only sitting here. You don’t own the wall.’

  I remember shouting over the same thing to old Mrs Mulholland, Seaneen’s granny, when me and Emmet McCann – before we were enemies – and a whole load of people used to sit on her wall. She’d come barging out, arms crossed under her big mono-boob, and shout, ‘Will youse’uns get off my wall; youse have your own frigging walls.’

  Like anybody ever wanted to sit on their own wall.

  She stopped when we got big enough to scare her, and then we got even bigger and stopped getting our kicks from sitting on walls sharing a bottle of Strongbow.

  And now the old bag’s dead and this wee rat lives in her house and sits on people’s walls. But there’s something about the way he’s sitting, with the rain misting his hair in droplets, as if he hasn’t so much chosen to be here as found himself here.

  ‘Why are you sitting out here in the rain?’

  He shrugs and keeps moving his foot. I glance over at his house and see an unfamiliar Honda Civic parked outside. And remember something else. That I didn’t only sit around on people’s walls to annoy them and I didn’t always do it with my mates. Sometimes it was raining like now and I was on my own and it was boring and cold but it was better than going home. To Barry or Mike or Colin
or the one before Colin with the motorbike, who was nice at first and then not, whose name I can’t remember.

  And Stacey said she had a new man.

  ‘Your ma throw you out?’ I ask.

  Cian shrugs again. There’s something different about him tonight but I can’t work out what.

  ‘I hear she has a fella.’

  He screws up his mouth.

  I’m about to go on past with a dirty look to show him I’m above worrying about whose wall he’s sitting on, when my phone buzzes in my pocket and I grab for it so fast I nearly let the bike fall. When I see it’s a text from Cam I’m nearly scared to read it. Folly settled. Grazing. So go to sleep and stop worrying!!

  I must let my breath out really loudly because the nosy wee bastard goes, ‘What is it?’

  ‘None of your business,’ I snap. Then find myself saying, ‘It’s my horse.’ I get a rush of pride at the words.

  Too late I remember the way Cian got on in the Spar, calling me horse boy, saying I smelled, but instead of taking the piss he says, ‘Your own horse? No way.’

  ‘I just got her.’ The temptation to talk about Folly is stronger than the dislike I have for this kid.

  ‘Got a photo?’

  After a small hesitation I show him my phone – just show it, don’t let him take it in his thieving mitts.

  ‘It’s awful skinny,’ he says.

  I snatch the phone away. ‘That’s because she was rescued. You should have seen her a few weeks ago.’

  When I look at his snipey wee face it’s full of something I’ve never seen in it before: interest. So instead of telling him where to go I say I found her starving in a barn.

  ‘So is it like finders keepers?’

  ‘No. I had to fill in forms and all. It’s all official.’

  My hands are cold and wet on the handlebars. I don’t need to be standing here with this loser. I could be in a nice warm house – a nice warm empty house for once – maybe having a lovely long hot bath without Mum yelling through the door about the hot water.

  I don’t know why I’m not.

  Just because this kid reminds me of me, not wanting to go home and deal with some new man. Or not allowed to. I remember Stacey saying she just wanted him out of the way when – what was his name? – Darren was round.

  Just because he’s shown a bit of interest in Folly. I don’t even want him to be interested in Folly. I remember when I first saw Flight, it was like having a crush, but Vicky was always there, whispering ‘mine’.

  But I also think about Seaneen: Seaneen wouldn’t be going in to a hot bath and leaving him sitting out in the rain, keeping watch until it was safe to go home.

  For God’s sake! This kid walked into our house and helped himself to whatever he wanted! I don’t owe him a thing.

  Still I find myself saying, ‘If you want to come in for a cup of tea, you can. Get dry.’

  Cian looks startled for a moment, then shrugs, says, ‘Might as well,’ and heaves himself off the wall like he’s doing me a favour. So I regret asking him before I even put the key in the door. What if he goes up to the loo? He knows where my £200 is now – I put it back in the same place. Will I have to search him when he comes downstairs? This is a stupid idea.

  I leave the door into the kitchen open while I make the tea and stick four rounds of bread into the toaster. Cian sits on the sofa, arms folded like he’s worked out I’m keeping tabs on him.

  ‘How do you like your tea?’ I shout in.

  ‘Tea? Have you no proper drink?’

  ‘No.’ I bring the tea in – he’s got it milk, no sugar and if he doesn’t like it he can go back out and sit on the wall and I hope his ma keeps on shagging or whatever she’s doing for another few hours. And I hope it keeps raining. When he takes the tea and reaches out for a slice of toast I see his eyes clocking the packet of Silk Cut on the arm of the sofa and I realise what’s different about him tonight. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him when he hasn’t been on something, or at least looked as if he was.

  He munches through most of the toast and drinks the tea happily enough. He keeps looking round the room. Casing it probably.

  ‘Is that you on that big red horse?’ he asks, jerking his head at the framed photo Vicky gave me for my eighteenth. It wasn’t long after she’d bust her leg and I’d started competing on Flight. It’s one of those professional pictures that photographers take at shows and it’s a really good one. I hate Mum having school photos of me and all but I’ve never minded this being on display. At least it proves it was all real.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘My ma said you were a jockey.’

  I can’t help a grin at that. Jockey sounds better than shit shoveller. ‘No. Showjumping.’

  ‘So it’s not a race?’

  ‘No. Sometimes it’s against the clock, but.’

  ‘But that’s not the horse on your phone?’

  ‘No. That’s Flight. He was sold.’ I chew on a bit of toast.

  ‘So you have a different one?’ He sets his mug down on the arm of the sofa.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And does it jump like that?’

  ‘Not yet. I have to train her.’

  ‘I used to have a dog,’ he says. ‘One time.’

  I can’t imagine Stacey with a dog, unless maybe one of those ratty things that live in handbags.

  ‘A Labrador. Gypsy.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought your mum would go for big dogs.’

  ‘Not her,’ he says like I’m stupid. ‘Somebody else.’

  I’m about to say, ‘Oh yeah, I heard you got fostered,’ but I stop myself because I remember how annoying it is to have strangers knowing stuff about you. When I got out of Bankside, loads of teachers, ones that didn’t even teach me, ones that had damn-all to do with me, would give me sideways looks in the corridor like they’d had a meeting about me or something. So instead I just put on this innocent, sort of interested face, and Cian pauses then says, like he’s telling me something important, ‘Helen and Sam.’

  I hand him the last slice of toast. ‘How come?’

  ‘Foster care,’ he says. I wait for him to say more, but he doesn’t. He just looks at me with those weird fox’s eyes narrowed. I know he’s waiting for me to ask him something.

  ‘So why was that?’

  He shakes his head, then shrugs. ‘I don’t know. Don’t remember. Mum says I was too much for her.’

  ‘Do you remember being taken away?’

  ‘Nah.’ He wipes toast crumbs from his mouth and says, ‘Have you really not got a proper drink?’

  ‘We don’t keep it in the house.’

  ‘Is your mum an alchie?’

  I consider this. She hasn’t had a drink for over two years. But she says it’s always there, in the back of her head. Sometimes she goes to her AA meetings a lot and I know she’s finding it harder. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘A recovering one. So next time you come here robbing, you know that’s one thing you won’t find.’

  He looks down and bites his lip and I feel guilty. A tiny bit.

  ‘I was off my head,’ Cian says. ‘I’m always doing stupid stuff.’

  ‘So why get off your head?’

  He shrugs. ‘Nothing else to do.’

  I haven’t sat through years of Mr Pastoral Care Dermott for nothing. ‘That’s bollocks.’

  ‘Yeah? So what did you do when you were my age?’

  ‘Well – hung out. You know. With my mates.’

  ‘Drinking?’

  I shrug. ‘Suppose.’

  ‘Smoking? Sitting on walls annoying people? Nicking cars? Drugs?’

  I sigh. There’s no point lying. ‘Yes to most of those. Only not drugs. And it was a car. Once.’

  ‘See?’

  ‘But there’s other stuff you could do. Go to the youth club. Boxing?’ Some of the ones I was at school with are well into their boxing. Go all over the place with it. ‘Football?’

  ‘Nah. I just like having a laugh.’

/>   I feel like I should say something to him. Something – I don’t know – wise or helpful or something, the kind of thing Seaneen would think of, but all I can come up with is, ‘Well, I didn’t see you laughing too hard tonight.’

  7.

  ‘Good girl.’ I set Folly’s hoof down on the floor of her stable – Flight’s old stable – and straighten up. It’s taken ten minutes to pick out three hooves, and the sweat’s running down inside my T-shirt. Thank God horses only have four legs. It’s taken us weeks to get to this stage. Weeks of gut-twisting worry, praying that she’ll let me touch her without flinching and shifting to the back of the stable, and then occasional breakthroughs like her letting me lift a back hoof for the first time. I’ve hardly been home except to sleep. Seaneen complains that she never sees me. That there’s another woman in my life now. It started as a joke but lately she’s been sounding pissed off.

  ‘C’mon. Last one.’ I run my hand down her back leg. ‘Up.’ She lifts the hoof but then strikes out with it so I have to yank my hand away before it gets kicked. ‘No.’ I keep my voice firm and low. The ring of hooves outside makes Folly start and prick her ears. A shadow falls across the stable door and Lara looks in. She’s on Willow. She looks smugly relaxed, feet out of her stirrups, reins loose. Willow pins his ears back at Folly and Lara kicks him and hauls on the reins so he backs up a couple of steps but she doesn’t piss off out of my way.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re still picking out her feet.’

  I ignore her and pull again at the tiny frill of white hair at the back of Folly’s leg. ‘Up, girl.’

  This time the hoof remains firmly on the ground.

  ‘You should hit her. You’re too soft. It’s just badness.’

  Without looking up I say, ‘It’s not badness. She’s scared. If she gives me her hoof she can’t run away.’

  Lara gives me a ‘Duh!’ look. ‘She’s in a stable. She can’t go anywhere anyway.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s why she feels more vulnerable. Especially because she was locked up.’