Clearwater Bay 2- Against the Clock

by Kate Lattey

  The day passes in a haze of heat, sweat and wool. The shearing gang have been hired in, and they’re a tight family crew. Alec knows them all well, and they chat endlessly as they work. I help the rousies with the fleece, stuffing it tightly into big woolsacks that get securely stitched once they’re as full as we can make them, and listening to their banter as we work.

  At break time (or “smoko” as the shearers call it) we sit around drinking mugs of hot tea, eating sandwiches and Tabby’s fresh-baked scones, and listening as the shearers tell a series of tall tales. It’s a lot of fun, but the gang came here to work, and they’re hard workers, never still for a moment.

  We saddle the ponies in the early afternoon and ride them up to Pine Ridge to bring the rest of the sheep down. We get them easily enough, but once they’re bunched up and Alec’s counted them, we realise we’ve got three missing. He leaves me to hold the mob in the race while he goes back up into the pines to try and drive out the stragglers, and Finn is beside herself with irritation by the time he gets back almost half an hour later. Standing still, being left behind, and the quantity of flies that swarm around sheep on a hot summer’s day are all things she can’t abide, and I’m almost ready to murder her when Alec finally returns with the three missing sheep.

  Liam’s unimpressed when we get back with how long we took, and he gives Alec an earful as I unsaddle the ponies and hose them off, then turn them out in the paddock to roll. Finn canters away from me as soon as I release her, but Lucky hangs back to scratch his itchy head on my shoulder, almost bowling me over, before he wanders off to join Trixie and Jack in the shade. I can still hear Liam’s raised voice coming from the house so I stand at the gate and watch my pony roll instead of going in for lunch, waiting for the storm to blow over.

  Despite our late return with the last mob, the shearing goes quickly and is almost finished by mid-afternoon. One of the shearers lets Alec finish off, telling him that he can’t call himself a proper farmer until he can shear a sheep. He does a pretty good job on the first one, and gets a pat on the back from the head shearer. Liam looks at the sheep as it gets released back into the pen and shakes his head.

  “You missed a couple spots.”

  There’s an awkward pause for a moment, because shearing a sheep isn’t like clipping a horse - it hardly matters if there are a couple of patches of wool left behind. Then JB, one of the shearers, turns to Liam.

  “Why don’t you show the young fella how it’s done then, eh?”

  I expect Liam to scoff and walk out, but instead he grins at JB, taking me by surprise. It’s an expression I’ve rarely seen on him, and he looks like a completely different person when he smiles. He looks like Alec. His son grins back at him and they both get their blades ready as the gang pull out another two sheep and drag them across the floor to where Alec and his dad are waiting. They grab the sheep, gripping them between their knees, and start up their clippers.

  “Ready, go!”

  I hold my breath as they both start shearing. Alec is all focused concentration, running the blades over the sheep’s stomach as quickly as he can. Sweat drips off his forehead as he struggles to turn the animal, and its cloven hooves scrabble on the floorboards, seizing a possible opportunity to escape. JB steps in to help him, but Alec shakes his head as he regains control of the ewe. He glances over at his dad, whose head is down as he shears furiously. His sheep bleats loudly as he nicks it with the blades, but Liam doesn’t slow down, and finishes with a flourish, letting the sheep go. It clambers to its feet and runs back towards its herd, leaping comically in the air as it goes.

  Alec isn’t far behind, finishing his ewe off and letting her go only seconds after Liam. He straightens up and runs his forearm across his dripping brow, then meets his father’s eyes. I know the laughter and back-slapping of the shearing gang are of little comfort or importance to Alec right now. Despite everything that his tempestuous, violent father does to him, and no matter how often he says he wishes he could get away, Alec always tries to impress his dad. I hold my breath for a second as Liam stares back at him, then he nods to his son and steps forward to give him a pat on the shoulder. It’s a small gesture, but it means the world to Alec and he grins back at his old man.

  “Not bad, not bad at all,” Liam tells his son. “Might make a farmer out of you yet.”

  Alec nods, but makes no other response to his dad. “How many are left to do?” he asks JB, who leans over the railing and counts.

  “Ten. Three each for us guys and one for you, so we should all finish at about the same time,” he teases.

  Alec laughs and rolls his shoulders back, his muscles crackling as he loosens them off. “Only if you give me a head-start,” he replies in his usual self-deprecating way as Liam walks out of the woolshed, leaving them to finish the work.

  * * *

  Almost before I know it, school is out for the summer holidays and we’re heading off to show jumping camp, to prepare a squad for Cambridge. After my less than stellar performances in the ring lately, I’m more aware than ever that I’ve only been invited along to make up numbers, but it’s still three days of coaching that I can’t afford to turn down. And quietly, just quietly, I’ve still got a glimmer of hope. Finn has flashes of brilliance, and I just need to be able to harness that ability of hers when I need it. This could be the weekend that everything turns around for us. It could be the start of everything.

  I’m nervous though, and my stomach is churning as we trundle out of the Bay on Monday morning. But once we’ve been on the road for an hour, I start feeling hungry, and when my stomach rumbles audibly, Alec turns and gives me a look.

  “Forget your breakfast?”

  “I wasn’t hungry when I got up.”

  “Well, when you pass out from starvation, don’t look at me to rescue you.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I assure him, thinking of lunch as I check the time. My heart sinks as I discover that it’s not even ten o’clock yet. “Can we stop off at McDonald’s or something?” I suggest, knowing that Alec is hungry 24-hours a day and will be keen as well.

  “Too late now, we’re almost there,” Tabby replies, turning off the highway onto a country road lined with tall grass waving in the mild breeze. The surrounding paddocks are flat and full of well-fed cattle, and I finally think to ask where exactly it is that we’re going.

  “Eleanor Harbridge’s place,” Tabby tells me. “She’s got quite the facility, and always hosts the camp.”

  “She’s a cow,” Alec says, matter-of-factly. I raise my eyebrows and he shrugs. “Well, she is. Right Mum?”

  Tabby nods. “She doesn’t have a lot of charm, let’s put it that way. But she knows her stuff. Besides, she won’t be coaching you herself.”

  “Thank God for that,” Alec mutters. “They do have good coaches though. Bruce Goddard came last year.” He sees the blank look on my face and clarifies. “He wins all the big Grand Prix and rode at the Olympics a few years ago.”

  “Quite a few years ago,” Tabby corrects him. “I used to ride with Bruce at Pony Club myself.”

  “Back in the Dark Ages, then,” Alec tells me with a wink, ducking his mother’s playful swipe at his head. “But last year he only coached the Seniors, so we were stuck with Ollie Foxhall-James, and he was useless.”

  I feel a little defensive of Ollie, who’s always been friendly to me. “What’s wrong with Ollie? He’s a good rider.” Good-looking too, I think to myself, but I’m not saying that one out loud. Not that Alec can’t read between the lines, and he rolls his eyes at me mockingly.

  “He can ride okay on his million dollar horses, but he can’t coach worth a damn,” Alec says. “We could all tell he didn’t want to be there, and when people had problems he didn’t really know what to do. His horses are super talented and get him out of any sticky situations, so when Amy fell off Spud his only advice to her was to go buy a better pony. Then he told us to jump off impossible angles and all the ponies started stopping. It was a bit of a di
saster.”

  Before I can comment, Tabby slows down and swings into a wide driveway, following a float that’s crawling along the dirt road, throwing up a big cloud of dust in its wake. Tabby trundles slowly in behind it, muttering about Sunday drivers, as I stare around us as we pass acres of well-fenced paddocks and gleaming sport horses.

  “Is she a breeder, this Eleanor woman?” I ask as Alec coughs through the dust and winds up his window to avoid getting a lungful.

  “Something like that. Married a rich bloke, spent all his money setting this place up, then he popped off and she got to keep it.”

  “Lucky her.”

  “Probably put arsenic in his soup or something,” Alec mutters. “Wouldn’t put it past the old bag.”

  The truck’s cab is stiflingly hot now as we turn the corner into the yard, and the sight laid out before us takes my breath away.

  “Oh, wow.”

  It’s the nicest set-up I’ve ever seen. There are two huge arenas with brightly painted show jumps, a big American style barn and a long row of covered yards. Not to mention several other outbuildings and a huge flat paddock with several cross country jumps. The place is idyllic, and I can’t help comparing it to the Harrisons’ ramshackle farmyard, with its bits of old machinery lying around, and fences that might fall down if the ponies lean on them.

  Oh, to live here and have all this, I think longingly as we follow the float into the big flat paddock, where Tabby finds a park on the end of the row as I imagine jumping Finn over the big cross-country obstacles in front of us, splashing through the stream, galloping on, fit as a fiddle and raring to go…

  I’m startled out of my daydream when Alec opens the door and jumps down from the cab, and I follow him as a woman comes marching over to us holding a clipboard. She’s short and round, with frizzy blonde hair and a squashed face like a pug dog.

  “Who do we have here?” she asked. “Oh it’s you.” She ticks Alec’s name off on her clipboard, then looks at me. “And you are?”

  “Jay Evans,” I tell her. She scans her list and frowns, giving me a heart-stopping moment before flipping over the page and finding my name. “Oh yes, here you are. Get your ponies unloaded and put them into yards. Same ones as last year, Alec knows where they are. Give them some hay and water, feed if you need to. You won’t be riding until this afternoon.”

  “Who’s teaching us?” Alec asks as he drops the ramp and Finn welcomes everyone with a shrill whinny.

  “I am, today,” Eleanor tells him with a dark look. “But I have Steph Marshall coming in tomorrow, so you’ll be working with her.”

  My heart soars as I lead Finn down the ramp. Steph is a close friend of Abby’s – and her greatest rival – and she’s a fantastic rider. If anyone can get Finn jumping well, it’ll be her.

  “Hi Jay!” I look up to see Anneke walking past with her gorgeous bay pony Danny. His coat is shining in the sun, and his muscles ripple gently as he walks.

  “Hi!” I call back as Finn pulls her head down and starts stuffing herself with the green grass at her feet.

  “Do you know where you’re sleeping?” Anneke asks, and when I shake my head, she looks excited. “Come bunk with me! There’s a little storage room upstairs in the barn at the end of the hayloft, and I’ve called dibs on it. Tiana was supposed to be sharing it with me but her pony’s gone lame so she’s stayed at home, and I don’t want to sleep in there on my own.”

  I quickly agree, instantly feeling much more at ease now that I know I have more than one friend here. Anneke leads her gleaming bay pony into the barn, and Finn yanks at the leadrope, wanting that particular tasty patch of grass just over there and making sure I let her get to it. I look at my pony critically as I follow along, trying to remember what she looked like when I first got her. Skinny neck, skinny body, mane down to there and no muscle to speak of. And a slightly fearful look in her eye that has long since gone, although it seems to have been replaced by a wilful expression that is proving even more difficult to deal with.

  Alec leads Jack down the ramp, his untrimmed fetlocks and short scruffy mane making Finn look positively glamourous in comparison, and something occurs to me.

  “Wait, what’s Anneke doing here? I didn’t think she was in our region.”

  “She’s not. She’ll be riding for Central Waikato,” Alec explains. “They’re training both squads together, always do. On the last day we’ll do a mock competition. Us versus them. They always win, and that old hag loves it.”

  “Watch it,” Tabby says, overhearing him. “Don’t let her over hear you say that, or I’ll be getting another phone call to pick you up.”

  “Another one?”

  “She kicked me out early my first year,” Alec grins. “Said I was being disruptive. But she doesn’t get to pick the teams, so I made the team anyway and then came back to camp last year. Makes her so happy.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  I follow Alec as he leads the way to our yards. Sarah and Amy have just arrived, and Amy gives us a brief wave as she walks Spud down the ramp of their float, blinding everyone with his hot pink travelling boots and matching halter.

  We lead our ponies past the huge barn, and I glance inside to see Anneke standing in the aisle and chatting to someone, while her pony looks out over a loosebox door. I guess it was too much to ask to expect our ponies to be allowed into the sanctum of the barn, but I lead Finn eagerly towards the covered yards, deeply bedded in sawdust and half-full of ponies standing contentedly in their shade, wondering which one will be hers.

  But Alec keeps walking, seeming to know exactly where he’s headed, and I follow him behind the covered area to find a group of old yards with sagging rails, knee deep in lush green grass.

  “This is us.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I told you she hates me.”

  “But…” I look over my shoulder at the fancy facilities, then back at the shabby place I’m supposed to leave my pony. “Anneke was in the barn,” I complain.

  “Favouritism,” Alec replies. “The Central riders always get the best of everything, and we get the dregs.”

  He assures me that there’s no point arguing about it, so I set Finn up with hay and water, but she’s too busy tucking into the long grass to notice. I hope all that greenery doesn’t go to her head, and I wonder what Amy and Sarah are going to make of this set-up. I’m sure they’re not going to be any happier about the situation than I am, and I wonder if their mother and Tabby could band together and demand better facilities for us.

  But when we’ve finished tying our ponies’ yards shut with leadropes so they don’t break out through the flimsy rails, Alec and I walk back around the building to find Sarah and Amy happily installing their ponies in the nice covered yards. I stop and my mouth drops open.

  “Hey! That’s not fair,” I object.

  Eleanor is right there with her clipboard, and she turns to glare at me. “What’s not fair?”

  “They got nice yards, we got rubbish ones,” I argue. “And we got here before them!”

  “You were a late addition to the squad,” she tells me. “By the time you were added to my list, all of the covered yards had been allocated.”

  That can’t be true, since Alec was surely one of the first people selected, but I remember what he’d said about being sent home early, and bite my tongue. I didn’t work this hard to make it here to stuff it all up now by running my mouth.

  “Suck it up, buttercup,” Alec tells me as we walk back to the truck to collect our gear, and I glower at him.

  “It’s not fair.”

  “Life’s not fair,” he shrugs. “Build a bridge, get over it.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  We finish unpacking the truck and stowing our gear, which is at least permitted to be stored in the same tack room as everyone else’s, and we’re just wave Tabby off when Tegan’s float pulls into the yard. I feel a bit better when I discover that Nugget is being installed in the yard next to Finn, bu
t Tegan grumbles even more loudly than me about the state of our facilities.

  “Quit your belly-aching,” Alec tells us as he lugs the last water bucket into the yard and snubs it to the fence with baling twine. “Don’t you two have anything better to do than bitch and moan all the time?”

  Tegan spins around and opens her mouth to argue when Anneke calls to us as she walks past.

  “Are you guys coming in for lunch?”

  I stuff myself with sandwiches, trying to catch up on my missed breakfast, and meet the other Intermediate riders. Alongside Anneke, the riders from Central are a boy called Noah, who talks himself up a lot, and a heavy-set blonde girl called Carly, who looks vaguely familiar. Eleanor lectures us as we eat about being tidy and cleaning up after ourselves, and doing as we’re told by our instructors. Alec pretends to doze off while she’s talking, and earns himself a few sharp glares. It’s pretty funny, but I hope he’s not going to get us into trouble. This whole thing might be a joke to him, a social gathering to get through before he can be officially named in the team, but for me it’s a learning opportunity that I can’t afford to jeopardise.

  Once we’re stuffed so full we can hardly walk, Eleanor tells us to saddle up and meet in the arena in twenty minutes. Chaos ensues, but we’re all ready before she even gets there, and end up huddled in the middle of the arena chatting and casting a curious eye over each other’s ponies. Anneke is riding her athletic dark bay, Noah’s pony Dusty is a solid dun with one blue eye, and Carly has a well-built chestnut gelding with a very cute, expressive face. She’s the only one of us actually warming up right now, and I watch as she saws repeatedly on her pony’s reins to bring it down onto the bit. I’m no great dressage rider, but even I know that’s wrong, and cringe in sympathy for the long-suffering chestnut.

  “Good to see she finally bought a new pony,” Alec says to Anneke, with a flick of his head in Carly’s direction. “She was in serious danger of breaking that black one’s back.”