Annan Water (7 page)

It was late when they got back, but Jean put on a proper dinner while the others unloaded the horses and tack, and settled the yard for the night. If she hadn’t tried to light the fire, the meal would have been perfect. As it was, the whole house was full of smoke, and they had to eat in the freezing draughts from the open door and windows.

After dinner Michael took his school bag to his room. He had piles of homework and had meant to do it all. But the words stayed stuck on the pages of his text books. No matter how hard he tried to concentrate, they wouldn’t make the transition into his head. He could read them, even speak them, but he couldn’t make them work for him.

Later, in the windswept night, the books woke him as they fell from his bed on to the floor.

B
ETWEEN A FLAT CAR
battery and a broken fence which let seven horses out on to the main road, Monday got lost.

On Tuesday Jean and Michael went drag hunting on Bandit and Horrocks. Michael hated the high boots, the fussy stock and the new hacking jacket. They made him feel like a fool. But he loved the mad, muddy charge across the landscape, the neglect of sinew and bone in the rush of recklessness as they leaped and plunged and scrambled over every obstacle they encountered.

After that, on Wednesday, school was an ignominy. The other lads had tired of the ‘woe betide you’ taunt. It hadn’t produced the desired result. Instead they relegated Michael to the edges of everything: their groups, their fields of vision, their boisterous lives. There were other boys out there with him in that no-man’s-land of otherness. Like him, they endured.

‘No essay for me?’ said Mr Burns, walking backwards up the classroom, gathering the homework.

‘I left it at home,’ said Michael.

‘Bring it in tomorrow.’ Mr Burns passed on.

The bell rang. The class broke up and bolted for the door. Michael drifted after them. The bustling corridors were lined with paintings, team photographs, club notice boards.

But, like his bedroom, the school bore no record of Michael’s existence.

O
N SATURDAY MORNING, WHEN
they clattered into the yard from their roadwork, Annie was waiting. She was wearing her black jeans and a neat, black bomber jacket with a huge red butterfly painted on the back. She waved up at Michael, but his hands were too full of reins to wave back.

She helped him. She came and held Oliver while he put away the grey mare, then insisted on leading him across the yard to the narrow shed where he was billeted. Michael showed her how to do it properly; to walk at the horse’s left shoulder instead of in front of him.

‘Save your good boots,’ he said. ‘And the good feet inside them.’

She took the tack off as well, following Michael’s instructions deftly; learning quickly. There was an eagerness about her; a delight in the simplest and most mundane of equine things. It surprised him. Perhaps she needed the funereal clothes and all that ironmongery to hold her down. As though, beneath it, she was as light and as translucent as a spirit.

She followed him to the dairy and pounced on the grooming box. ‘Can I brush him?’ she said. ‘Or Bandit? Can I brush Bandit?’

There were muscles in Michael’s face that he had forgotten about.

‘He smiles!’ said Annie. ‘Lo and behold!’

‘You can brush anyone you like,’ he said.

‘You’ll wish you hadn’t said that.’ She pursued him across the yard with the body brush until he collided with Jean and the two of them went down beneath her armload of tack.

‘Sorry,’ said Annie, pulling the three bridles into a hopeless tangle. ‘Sorry.’

But Jean was laughing. She twisted Michael’s arm behind his back and wouldn’t let him up until Annie got her way with the brush.

They rode in the field, Annie on Bandit and Michael on a young Irish sport horse that Jean had just finished breaking. He had a brilliant pedigree but an accident in the lorry coming over had left him with a pair of capped hocks and brought him within their budget. They had high hopes for him.

Michael had dug out one of his outgrown skull caps for Annie. She looked good in it, with her scarlet hair curling out around its frame. She wanted to gallop and jump, but he made her stick to the basics: stopping and starting, circling at a walk and a trot. He did the same things himself, and by the end of the hour he was well satisfied with his teaching. Annie was dropping her hands. The sport horse was dropping his head. Everyone was making contact. He called a halt while the good notes held.

It was colder inside the house than outside it. Michael put the kettle on and lit the gas heater.

Annie hugged herself and wandered into the sitting room. ‘Shall I light the fire?’ she said.

‘It won’t light,’ said Michael. ‘The smoke comes back.’

He rummaged for biscuits. Annie was on her knees in front of the fireplace, peering up the chimney.

‘It’s blocked, that’s all,’ she said.

‘I suppose we’ll call in a sweep some time.’

‘Have you no chimney rods?’

Chimney rods.

‘Aren’t they the same as drain rods?’ said Michael.

There was no brush with the rods but they improvised with two dandy brushes wired on back to back. Annie showed how it was done, feeding the first two rods up the chimney then screwing on the third one and pushing it on up. After five, maybe six lengths, the progress of the brushes was halted.

Annie pulled back an arm’s length of the rods and gave a shove. A blackened twig dropped into the grate.

‘There’s your problem,’ she said.

‘That was hardly blocking it,’ said Michael.

‘Jackdaws,’ said Annie. ‘They build dirty great beaver dams for nests. Wait till you see.’

She rolled up her sleeves, and Michael saw the ranked scars. Some of them were still pink, still healing. Annie saw him looking.

‘I cut myself,’ she said.

‘Why?’

She shrugged and, with ferocious energy, began to ram away at the blockage in the chimney. Her strength surprised him, but apart from another small trickle of broken twigs, she wasn’t getting anywhere.

When she stopped for a breather he took over. It felt to him as though he was thumping away at something much more substantial than twigs.

‘Can’t be just a nest,’ he said.

‘Bet you it is.’ Annie took the rods back, and for the next few minutes they took it in turns to assault the obstruction. More twigs fell. A small, downy feather. A few wisps of dried grass. Then, without warning, the whole lot came down. The grate was buried in sooty sticks and dust. They both stepped back, waiting for the avalanche to subside and for the soot to settle.

‘You’ll have kindling there for a month,’ said Annie.

Michael was busy with the hearth brush and Annie was tying up the rods again when Frank came in, dripping blood and looking for plasters.

‘Kettle’s boiling,’ he said. ‘My God. A fire. How did you do that?’

Annie helped Frank bind up his bleeding thumb, and Michael went to call Jean in from the yard. When she came in she found the sofa and armchairs pulled up to a roaring fire, and a pot of tea brewing on the hearth.

She shoved a dog aside and sat down. ‘You should come here more often,’ she said to Annie.

After lunch, Michael and Jean rode Horrocks and Oliver in the paddock. Annie helped Frank with the jumps. They were just returning to the yard when Jimmy and Ruth arrived in the van.

Annie was reluctant to leave. ‘Can I come again tomorrow?’ she said.

‘We have to go to a show,’ said Michael.

‘Can I come? Pleasepleaseplease?’

‘Of course you can,’ said Jean. ‘If you don’t mind squashing up in the lorry.’

Annie squealed, danced over to the van and dived in. ‘What time?’ she called through the window.

‘Eight o’clock,’ said Frank.

Annie waved at them until she was out of sight.

‘Wow,’ said Jean.

‘Wow,’ said Frank.

A hot surge of joy raced through Michael’s blood. He wanted to climb the house, stand on the liberated chimney stack, broadcast Annie’s name to the four corners of the world.

Those forgotten muscles had locked themselves into a foolish grin. To conceal it from his parents, Michael turned and sprinted back to the house.

A
NNIE BENT OVER BACKWARDS
to make herself useful at the show, but most of the time she got in everybody’s way. She didn’t understand the routines, the urgencies and overlaps, the acute concentration required by everyone to make sure that the right horse was ready at exactly the right time. She pestered Michael with questions, dividing his attention, taking his eye off the ball. She fetched things that hadn’t been asked for, got on the wrong sides of horses, ropes, partitions; brought cups of tea when no one had time to drink them.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if Michael had been able to ignore her. But he feasted on her bright presence; he couldn’t take his eyes off her. His face was permanently set in that goony grin.

His parents’ tolerance lasted until he almost missed his turn in the first class. They found him sitting on the chestnut pony outside the arena, chatting dreamily to Annie, while his name was being called inside.

It knocked the smile off his face. He tore through the waiting riders into the ring and made it just in time. But the panic had unsettled the pony. They had two fences down.

‘Sorry,’ said Annie, as he came out. ‘Sorrysorrysorry.’

The smile stole up on him again.

The black eye was gone, but the black attitude wasn’t. As soon as the boy came into the arena, Michael could see what was about to happen. The bay pony was stiff with apprehension. Her mind was anywhere and everywhere, except on the job. After the first refusal the boy belted her three times with the stick. After the second, the pony bolted across the ring before she could be hit again. They narrowly avoided elimination.

Even Annie noticed.

‘The little bollocks.’

‘That was one of ours,’ said Michael. ‘We sold her a while back.’

He wasn’t the only one to have remembered that. A few minutes after the boy’s undignified exit, his mother appeared on the scene.

‘You must be delighted with yourselves,’ she said.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Jean.

‘You managed to palm that one off on us.’

Frank was watching the pony in the ring, but he had heard. He swung round. The colour was rising to his cheeks. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember selling you anything.’

Her husband emerged from the crowd at the appropriate moment. ‘You sold it to me,’ he said.

‘I did,’ said Frank. ‘But I wouldn’t have if I’d known who she was going to.’

‘What exactly are you saying?’

The atmosphere was becoming brittle. Michael noticed that Annie was reversing quietly in behind him. Frank squared up to the man. ‘I’m saying your boy wants a few lessons. There’s nothing wrong with that pony.’

‘You’ve always got an answer, haven’t you? Someone else’s fault. Bloody dealers!’

He took his wife’s arm and made to move away, but Frank wasn’t finished.

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’m not having that.’ He jerked his thumb towards the exit. An elastoplast was hanging off it. ‘Come here with me.’

Annie was at Michael’s shoulder. He could feel her tension through the light contact where her clothes touched his.

‘Oh, no,’ she whispered.

But Michael knew that Frank wasn’t proposing a fight. He had something else up his sleeve.

Michael, shadowed by Annie, went back to the lorry, put away the chestnut and tacked up the grey mare, ready for the Open. He was just starting to warm her up in the practice ring when Frank called him over to the fence. He was leading the bay pony.

‘Hop up on this lady,’ he said. ‘I got them to enter her in the Open for you.’

‘In the Open! She’s only got half a dozen points!’

‘Come on, Michael.’ Frank was serious. ‘We can’t take that kind of crap from the likes of them.’

Michael sighed, slid down from the mare and swapped his saddle over. From her perch on the wooden rails, Annie was watching. Michael’s stomach turned. It was do or die. Get the pony back on the rails or make almighty fools of them all. It would have been bad enough without Annie’s admiring gaze. Her presence put an extra, almost unbearable pressure on him.

He vaulted up and rode into the practice ring. He could hardly believe it was the same pony. She was edgy and hesitant, no longer sure what any of his instructions meant. She was carrying her head way too high, and her ears were directed towards him, instead of the rest of the world. She showed all the signs of a very frightened pony.

He walked, trotted, turned, bent the pony this way and that. He made her think; made her concentrate. Inside ten minutes she was beginning to remember him; relaxing between his light hands and firm, reassuring heels. She lowered her head and began to move more freely. Her ears faced forwards for longer and longer spells.

Michael was pleased with her progress. He glanced up, hoping that Frank was watching. He wasn’t, but the boy’s parents were. And Annie. Where was Annie?

When he saw her, the shock he got made him pull the pony to a stop. Sometimes he thought that Frank was mentally damaged. He had put Annie, bareback, up on the grey mare. She was walking her around among the mêlée of riders charging backwards and forwards between the practice area and the collecting ring. He started for the exit, then stopped again.

Annie wasn’t the only one who was happy. The mare was mooching around, plucking the odd blade of grass out of the mud, as relaxed as if she was in a summer meadow. Absurdly, it was Annie’s ignorance that was keeping her safe. She was as happy and calm as could be, twiddling the mare’s short mane; talking, maybe even singing, to her.

Michael turned back to the job in hand. He had a lot to do in the next twenty minutes.

By the time his turn came to jump, he had ironed all the hesitancy out of the pony and got her back on an even keel. But he was under no illusions. It was asking a lot of a novice pony to jump an Open course.

Jean had put her own saddle on the grey mare and was warming her up again. Annie was waiting with Frank in the passage. She stepped forward and patted the bay pony as Michael went past.