by Kate Lattey
“You know, wash the ponies, clean the tack, empty the truck…”
Alec grins widely, revealing a dimple in his left cheek that I’ve never noticed before. “Feel free,” he says with a wave of his arm towards the woolshed.
“Were you not going to wash the ponies?” I sit down next to him, and a black and white cat appears out of nowhere to wind itself around my ankles. I rub its ears and it purrs enthusiastically and springs into my lap, rubbing its face against mine.
“I’ll hose the mud off the white bits,” he concedes. “And the tack probably should be cleaned, I haven’t done it in ages. I’m not real fussy about that stuff. But if that’s what floats your boat, go for it. The nags are in the hill paddock, there might be some shampoo under the kitchen sink, and last I checked there was saddle soap in that green bucket in the woolshed.”
“What’d your last slave die of?” I mutter, feeling disappointed. It’s not that I’m desperate to spend all day grooming someone else’s ponies, but I always enjoyed getting ready the day before a show. My friends and I would spend the entire day fussing over our ponies, laughing at one another’s attempts at neat plaits and trying to get the ponies to stand still while we washed their tails. Apparently even such a simple ritual is completely different over here.
“Hey, if you want to make the effort, that’d be great,” Alec says honestly, crunching down the rest of his toast and swallowing hard. “But we had a couple of pipes burst overnight so I’m going to be busy most of the day helping Dad down the back paddocks, fixing the water troughs. Pip’s gotta get cracking on the truck, ‘cause it’s always a pigsty at this time of year, so sprucing up the ponies isn’t something we usually have time to do. But if you want to,” he says, pushing his cap back on his head, “knock yourself out.”
I consider telling him to “get stuffed”, as Tegan undoubtedly would have, as she’s far from a voluntary worker, but there’s a long day stretching ahead of me and I’ve got nothing else to do with it.
“Well I’ll get cracking too then,” I tell him as we both stand up and he laughs at my attempt to copy his slang.
“Good on ya,” Alec says, slapping me on the shoulder before heading off towards the tractor shed.
A couple of hours later, I’m seriously rethinking my decision. Dolly is very silly about being washed and exhausts both of us in her efforts to run away from the hose, leading me a crazy chase around the concrete hosing pad. I manage to scrub her down with shampoo, and the foam comes away brown and gritty, but when I try to hose her down again she pulls back and gets loose, running around the yards for almost ten minutes before I manage to catch her. Once she’s finally clean I tie her up in a yard, and she stands there shivering and pinning her ears at me as I move on to Trixie, who turns out to be extremely ticklish under her belly, kicking wildly at the spray of water every time it goes near her back legs. Her mane and tail are so thick and full of knots that it takes nearly an entire bottle of conditioner to get the tangles out. I finally get her looking reasonable, put them both in the holding paddock by the woolshed, and trudge up the hill to catch the other two.
Jess, true to form, decides to be impossible and won’t let me catch her. After twenty frustrating minutes I give up and bring Lucky down, hoping Jess will follow. For a wonder she does, and quietly allows me to halter her at the gate. Feeling pleased with myself, I lead the two of them back to the yard, only to discover that Dolly and Trixie have found the one tiny patch of mud in the holding paddock and both enjoyed a thoroughly good roll.
I stop dead, staring at them as they groom the mud into one another’s coats. Jess tugs impatiently at the leadrope and Lucky resumes his attempts to drag me to the nearest patch of tasty grass, and I find myself fighting back tears of frustration. All my work this morning, gone to nothing.
I’m scrubbing away at the tack in the woolshed when Tabby finds me. At least the saddles can’t go and get dirty as soon as I’m done cleaning them. I’ve put Jess and Lucky out with the others, no longer caring whether I’ll be able to get the grass stains off Jess’s hocks, or how long it’s going to take me to get the dreadlocks out of Lucky’s tail. Not that the tack is much easier. Clearly it hasn’t been properly cleaned in years. The saddles are covered in mud and sweat, the girths are sticky and one of the saddles has stuffing leaking out the back. The bridles aren’t much better - the leather straps are all brittle and stiff, the buckles rusty and the bits caked in dried grass. I’m doing my best, but I can’t actually believe that Alec was planning to go to a show with his tack in this condition.
“Whatcha doing?” Tabby is staring around her in shock at the organisation. I’ve laid everything out, sorting tack and equipment into piles for each pony. Dolly’s tack is clean, the stirrups run up and bridle neatly cleaned and hung over it. I’m scrubbing away at Jess’s bridle, and Tabby runs her hand over the grey mare’s saddle, perched on a rickety sawhorse.
“This is my old hunting saddle. Takes me back. All the different horses I rode in this saddle. Out hunting, no matter what the weather, jumping all the biggest fences when the rest of the girls went around them.” She looks over at me, perched awkwardly on an upturned bucket with a towel over my knee, scrubbing at a cheekpiece. “You’re doing a great job here,” she tells me. “You can get started on the ponies next.”
I pull a face. “Tried that already. They just went right out and rolled in the mud.”
Tabby laughs. “They’re ponies, they’ll do that. Come have some lunch, and I’ll give you a hand with all this afterwards.”
The Harrisons’ house is about as nice inside as I’d expected from looking at the outside. I follow Tabby into the kitchen with its grimy surfaces, cobwebbed windows, mismatched furniture that has all seen much better days, and barely a place to sit down because of all the cats and dogs sprawled around the house. It’s slightly odd to me that despite all that, I like it here. My mum would’ve had a conniption and practically disinfected me from head to toe if she knew I’d so much as stepped inside this house, let alone allowed me to eat or sleep over here. But the Harrisons are all perfectly healthy. Alec says he’s never sick, claiming that he has developed a super powered immune system from years of extensive exposure to dirt and germs.
Pip is sitting at the table with a book in one hand and a sandwich in the other. Her dirty bare feet rest on the table and a scruffy grey kitten is curled up in her lap. She greets me cheerfully as always, and puts her book down to chat. I glance curiously at the cover.
“East of Eden,” I read aloud.
“It’s good,” Pip says. “Man, someday I gotta go out West in America. Round up some cattle, camp out in the desert.” She grins, stroking the kitten absently and it purrs and rolls over, batting at her fingers with its tiny claws.
“Jay has been cleaning tack all morning,” Tabby informs Pip as she dumps a plate of sandwiches in front of us. Pip looks impressed as we both start stuffing our faces with food.
“And how’s that going?”
“Slowly,” I admit, and she laughs, dangling a scrap of ham in front of the grey kitten’s nose. I have to smile, feeling my frustration ebbing away as I try to explain. “Back home, we used to spend hours grooming our ponies before shows. Our yard manager insisted that we were as well turned out as possible, because it made the yard look good to have us well presented.”
“Nothing you do to our ponies could make our yard look any better,” Pip teases me. “You don’t have to look nice to show jump, cleanliness has nothing to do with it. Just gotta get over the jumps without knocking them down, that’s the aim of the game. So you’re going to ride Dolly tomorrow?”
“Me?” I ask in confusion. “No, Alec is. She’s his pony.”
“Pfft.” Pip throws a piece of her sandwich crust to the terrier sitting under her chair and it launches itself onto the scrap. “He’s got three others. You should ride her. She goes well for you and he’s only got her entered in a couple of eighty centimetre classes.”
I look
at her and then across at Tabby, not sure if Pip is being serious, but Tabby nods.
“That’s a good idea. Alec won’t mind.”
“Are you sure?” I ask, excitement bubbling up inside me. “Oh, but I don’t have a riding coat. I outgrew mine so I didn’t bring it with me.”
“I’ll lend you one,” Pip assures me. “I’ve got one that’s too small for me now, I’m sure it’ll fit you. I’ll go get it, you can try it on.” She places the kitten on the table, where it makes a beeline for the sandwiches. I toss the crusts of my own sandwich onto the floor, and two terriers start squabbling over it, snapping and snarling at one another.
Pip returns with a charcoal grey coat that’s far from new and not particularly clean, but it’s not falling to pieces and does fit me fairly well. I thank her, but she shrugs off my gratitude.
“It’s fine. Keep it if you want, I’ve got no use for it, and you deserve some kind of reward for your superhuman pony scrubbing efforts. I’d better get started on the truck. Wanna help?”
I turn her down, explaining that I still have a lot of work to do on the ponies and tack. Tabby helps me bring Lucky and Jess in and wash them off, and by three o’clock all of the ponies are looking reasonable. The tack isn’t exactly gleaming but it does look clean, and I’m well pleased with the results by the time we are ready to start loading up.
“You know if you cleaned your tack every time you use it, it wouldn’t be such a mission,” I tell Pip as I pass her a saddle, and she laughs as she slings it onto the top rack.
“And if there were twenty-five hours in a day, we might,” she replies, then shakes her head. “Who am I kidding, we still wouldn’t bother. We’d always have something else more important to do.”
Once all the tack is loaded, Pip and I wrap Dolly’s legs, as she tends to scramble in the truck, but Pip leaves the other ponies’ legs bare.
“They’ll be right,” she insists. “Never hurt themselves before, no reason they should start now.”
Sometimes I feel a bit sorry for their ponies, who do end up with a fair share of cuts and scrapes that could have been avoided, in my opinion. But like their owners, their environment makes the Harrisons’ ponies ‘harden up’, as Alec puts it. We load them all on and climb into the truck.
“Break a leg,” Pip tells us and I look at her in surprise.
“You’re not coming?”
“Someone has to stick around and cook Dad dinner. He’s useless on his own. Besides, it’s the maid’s weekend off, so there’s all that housework to do.” She winks at me and I feel my face redden. “Have a good time. Don’t let my little brother boss you around too much.”
Tabby climbs into the cab and turns on the radio, changing it to a talkback station and making Alec groan.
“If you’re going to listen to this crap, I’m sitting in the back.”
“Go ahead,” his mum replies. “I’m not stopping you.”
“C’mon Jay. You’ll get bored to death if you stay here.” I shrug and follow him into the accommodation. Alec sits down on the bed as we rumble out of the driveway and pats the space next to him on the bottom bunk bed. “Come sit.”
I raise my eyebrows and hesitate for a moment before dropping down next to him. He immediately swings around and drapes his legs across my lap, leans back and lets out a contented sigh.
“That’s better,” he grins as I shove his legs off my lap, forcing him off balance in the narrow bunk. At the same moment we hit a pothole in the road, the ponies skitter as the whole truck convulses and Alec goes sprawling onto the floor. I take advantage of the now vacant bunk bed to fling myself out fully on it, digging my fingers into the mattress as Alec grabs my arm and tries to pull me onto the floor with him. I let out a squeal of protest and there’s a resounding shudder along the truck walls as one of the ponies freaks out. A different thumping comes from the wall next to us, and Alec regains his feet and leans over me to pull back a tattered yellow curtain that covers a window into the cab.
Tabby glares at us in the rearview mirror and draws a finger across her throat, the universal gesture for cut it out! I yell “Sorry” at her, but Alec just grins at her before he yanks the curtain shut again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Almost five hours later, we finally arrive at a farm that belongs to some of Tabby’s old hunting friends, who are both English, having emigrated to New Zealand some thirty years ago. Their house is stuffed to the gunnels with hunting paraphernalia, and the old man, Charlie, looks like he’s stepped straight out of a Thelwell cartoon with his long skinny legs and thick grey moustache. He keeps asking me questions about England, and lamenting the sad fate of foxhunting in that country.
“Bloody ridiculous animal rights people!” he shouts, slamming his fist down onto the table and making the cutlery jump into the air. I’m a bit shocked at this outburst, but everyone else treats it as completely normal. “All up in arms over one little fox. If they knew how rarely we actually used to catch the little rotters. Sly things, foxes. Bloody cunning. Not like the hares we hunt out here. They’re much easier to catch. Bit quicker, mind, but not as intelligent. We can kill a couple of them in a day, but you’re lucky to get a fox in a month’s solid hunting over in England. But those animal activists won’t bloody listen. Whole country’s gone to the dogs. Crying shame, but that’s the world these days. We’ve left you kids a sorry mess to clean up.”
I nod sympathetically, wondering if he’s completely off his rocker and not having the slightest idea whether he’s right or wrong about any of it. His wife Betsy pours me a glass of red wine, seemingly unfazed about serving alcohol to a minor. I glance at Alec, who is thanking her for his glass, and he raises it in a toast to me. We clink glasses and drink. Charlie is still going on about hunting, talking more to himself than anyone else as we are all ignoring him.
“They’ve ruined the hunting over there, totally ruined it, and it’s a crying shame. A crying bloody shame.”
A solid meal and another large glass of wine later, Alec and I wander back out to the truck to sleep. Conversation over dinner was almost solely comprised of hunting stories - some hilarious, some terrifying, some horrific. I’ve now been assured many times that I’ll love hunting, and that they’ll be happy to take me out when the season starts. Part of me is excited for the adrenalin rush, but another more sensible part of me is quietly freaking out at the very thought, especially after all their horror stories. And despite Charlie’s comments, I don’t much like the idea of chasing down and killing a defenceless animal. Even if they are classified as environmental pests. I can’t tell Alec this though, or he’ll think I’m a proper wimp.
There are two bunk beds in the truck, a low narrow one that we use as a seat during the day, and a huge top one that stretches out over the truck cab. Pip told me everyone uses this one, squishing up alongside one another in their sleeping bags, though Tabby sometimes sleeps on the bottom bunk if she’s been out partying all night. I had assumed that Pip was kidding, but they had just opened their third bottle of wine as we left the house, and were showing no signs of stopping.
For now, I’m more concerned about how I’m going to get changed into my pyjamas without Alec seeing anything he shouldn’t. It’s easy enough for him. He pulls off his jeans and t-shirt and stands at the sink, brushing his teeth, dressed only in loose boxer shorts. I sit down on the bunk and wriggle out of my jeans, leaning over and pulling my pyjama shorts on as quickly as I can. I can feel my face turning red as I continue to manoeuvre myself out of my clothes, unhooking my bra and struggling out of it underneath my t-shirt. Alec is pretending to stare out of the window, but he can’t see anything as it’s pitch black out. The wine has gone to my head somewhat and is making it even harder to co-ordinate my movements. Alec turns and grins at me.
“You need some help with that?”
I glare at him. “No. Shut up.”
He spits out his toothpaste and walks over to me. I freeze, arms still stuck awkwardly inside my t-shirt, heart be
ating loudly and wondering at how trusting Tabby is to allow us two teenagers out here in the middle of the night, partly drunk and completely without supervision, since she’s already told us she’s sleeping in the house tonight. Alec puts a foot on the low bunk and springs up onto the top deck.
“Your mum is very trusting, y’know.” My speech is slightly slurred and Alec chuckles overhead.
“You’re drunk.”
“I am not. Well, maybe a little bit. But I’m serious. We could be getting up to anything out here.” I finally manage to remove my bra and I bury it under my jeans in a pile on the floor. I scramble up onto the top bunk and wriggle into my sleeping bag.
Alec props himself up on his elbow and turns out the overhead light. Everything is suddenly very dark, and the cicadas chirping outside seem almost deafening.
“Why, did you want to get up to something?” he whispers, teasing laughter in his voice.
“No. Don’t be stupid. We’re just friends,” I reply quickly.
He says nothing, and I lie there for a moment, listening to the cicadas.
“It’s good that she trusts us, ‘cause she should,” I tell him. “I’m just surprised. That’s all. Goodnight.”
“Night.” Barely more than a mumble from him, and then I close my eyes and fall asleep.
Alec shakes me awake in the morning and I sit up with a groan. My head is a little fuzzy, and I’m feeling rather queasy. He laughs at me before vacating the truck so I can get dressed in private. I struggle into my clothes and wander up to the house for breakfast, but can only manage a cup of coffee and a bit of dry toast. Alec wolfs down about six pieces of toast, as well as bacon and eggs and breakfast sausages.
“Doesn’t your mother feed you?” Bess teases him as she flips another egg onto his plate, and he shakes his head.
“Not like this,” he grins through a mouthful of food, swilling it down with a gulp of coffee. “You sure you don’t wanna move to our place Bess? We’ve been thinking of hiring a housekeeper.”
