by Ella West
I nod again. It’s all I can do.
‘Jack,’ he says, and Jack finally turns to his father. ‘Jack, I’ve got to go, but one word: schoolwork please. Well, that’s two words, but get some done, okay?’
‘See you later, Dad,’ Jack says. The look on his face says it all – Dad, just get lost, now.
The sun has come out, although it might only be brief. The last few weeks have been fine while we packed up the house, but last night it rained, with more forecasted. Jack drove Tassie over with him yesterday from Christchurch and we had one final ride on Fairdown Beach in the afternoon. Even he admitted it wasn’t the same in the sunshine, that he missed the rain. It felt good to be riding again, my stomach only aching slightly from where the bullet went in. Jack lifted up my T-shirt to inspect the wound, pressing his fingers against it. ‘You’re going to be left with a scar,’ he whispered.
But that was yesterday and now everything is dripping wet again and glistening and Blue has to leave. We’re hoping it will settle Blue, having Tassie for company for the four-hour drive through the alps. Jack has backed the float down our driveway, past the real estate agent’s Sold sign by our hedge. A retired couple from Nelson have bought the house. They didn’t want to live in a city, and they loved the look of our home, how old it was – and the freshly painted pale blue hallway, of course.
So now I’m standing with Blue, one hand holding his lead rope, the other on his halter, Mum and Dad watching. Dad starts his new job on Monday, still driving trains, but along the East Coast out of Christchurch this time. There won’t be shift work, and he won’t have to work through the night, so he’s happy. And Mum is happy, although she hasn’t found a job yet. She’ll start looking once we are all settled. The school was sad to see her go.
Jack has given me one chance to get Blue onto the float, and if it doesn’t work he’ll do it himself.
I’ve told Blue what’s about to happen, when we were alone and no one else was listening. That this is goodbye to his paddock, to the beach, to Westport, to the Coast, to the rain. He listened, stamped his feet, ate his hay. I don’t think he understood. How could he? I don’t even think I do.
And this is it. Right now. A few steps, that’s all it will take, and he will be on the float and the door will be shut and he and Jack and Tassie will be on the road to Christchurch. I tighten my hand around the halter strap.
I take a deep breath. ‘Okay, Blue, let’s do this.’
I wish he would take one last look at his paddock, at the bush, at the mountains, at the sky. But he doesn’t. He just munches on the carrot he found in my pocket, the one I was meant to use to lead him into the float. I step forward and he moves with me. I’m up onto the ramp of the float, Blue right beside me, but then his front hooves hit the metal and the sound echoes against the inside of the box and there he stops. I let go of his halter and keep walking into the float, pulling on the lead rope, but I know it’s no use. He has his back heels dug in. He’s not going anywhere. Tassie, in her stall, looks back at us bored.
Jack takes the lead rope out of my hands and turns Blue around, off the ramp. He walks him around our driveway for a minute and then walks straight back onto the float and inside. Blue follows without a misstep. Then Jack is back out, closing the doors.
‘He’s fine,’ he tells me.
‘You sure?’
‘He’ll be fine. I promise.’ Then Jack looks around, makes sure my parents aren’t watching, and kisses me.
‘See you over there,’ he says.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In 2012, about 1100 people were employed at Solid Energy’s Stockton open-cast mine but only three years later it had dropped to 225 as coal exports to China and elsewhere dwindled and the price of coal fell. The lower volumes of coal transported by rail to Lyttelton meant train drivers lost their jobs too. Government-owned Solid Energy had invested heavily in expansion before the Global Financial Crisis and could no longer pay its interest bill so the mine was put on the market in 2015, which is when this book is set. In early 2016, Solid Energy announced that a decision on whether to close Stockton, if it was not sold, would be made by mid-year. At the last minute it was bought by a group of businesses that have ties to Westport. They took over the mine in 2017.
Further south, Spring Creek near Greymouth, also owned by Solid Energy, was not so lucky. It failed to find a buyer and the mine was sealed and flooded in 2017/2018. It was believed to be the last underground coalmine in the country.
New Zealand coalmines are not the only ones to have closed, or partly closed, around the world. In December 2015, Britain’s very last underground coalminers came topside for the final time at the Kellingley mine in North Yorkshire. In Australia, Queensland’s Isaac Plains, a coking coalmine like Stockton, sold for just $1 in 2015. Three years earlier it had been valued at $A860 million. More than 4000 coalmining jobs were lost in Australia between 2014 and 2016. Mines have closed and jobs lost also in the United States – in West Virginia, Kentucky, Colorado, Indiana and Utah.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’ve got to thank amazing author Stacy Gregg who I met at a Storylines event in Dunedin in 2015. She reminded me just how good horse stories are. It’s because of her that Annie has Blue in this book. Stacy, I hope I got all of the horse stuff right! And also my thanks to Jan and Ian MacKenzie, Wayne and Bronwyn Smaill, and Colin and Barbara Chalmers, for also answering all my questions about pacers and quarter horses and barrel racing and saddles and bridles and everything else I needed to know about horses. Thanks guys. Now we can talk about other stuff, like cows and sheep and tractors.
Thank you to all of the good friends we have in Westport – the Jacksons, O’Connors, Hamiltons, Parsons, Milnes, Keoghans and Coburns, who we can always call in on at any time and they always welcome us home.
Thank you to M for taking me and the rest of my family on that trip through the Buller River Gorge many years ago – not on the road side.
Thank you to the fantastic team at Allen & Unwin in Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland. Without you this story wouldn’t be told. Thank you to Eva, Susannah, Hilary, Sophie, Angela, Julia, Jo and everyone else who has been involved. Thank you also to my amazing agent Grace Heifetz at Curtis Brown Australia.
Thank you to John McIntyre of the Wellington Children’s Bookshop, who told me he wanted so much to read this book, especially as he had grown up at Jacksons near Otira on the West Coast. John, we were so lucky to have you. We miss you.
And thank you to Country Blue, who I once galloped down Fairdown Beach, totally out of control, until we had to stop at the mouth of Whareatea River. And I didn’t fall off.
