Read Annan Water Online

Authors: Kate Thompson

Annan Water (8 page)

BOOK: Annan Water
3.26Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

‘Show ’em how it’s done,’ she said.

His heart sank. She had no idea.

But the pony amazed them all. Her confidence was restored. Her concentration was perfect. She listened attentively to Michael and responded instantly to his every signal. When they cleared the last of the eleven fences, a single high-pitched cheer rose above the scattered clapping.

Michael blushed. He had a fan.

‘I’ll buy her back off you,’ Frank was saying to the boy’s parents as Michael jumped down. ‘I’ll give you a hundred pounds profit.’

They glanced at each other. The man shook his head. They were already leading the pony away as Michael retrieved his saddle.

‘Two hundred pounds!’ Frank called after them. ‘Two hundred and fifty!’

But they were gone, and he was laughing. He cuffed Michael affectionately. ‘Good lad,’ he said.

Michael’s spirit swelled, but it was nothing compared to how he felt a few minutes later. Annie walked with him towards the practice area, to take the grey mare from Jean. The rain had started again. Neither of them noticed.

‘You know what you are?’ said Annie.

‘No?’

‘A bloody genius, that’s all.’

He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been jumping in shows. Winning still gave him a buzz; it was what it was all about. But nothing in his life before had ever made him feel as good as Annie’s praise.

And that was only the beginning. The grey mare bounced and battled her way into first place, and brought the girl and her father back to have another look at her afterwards.

‘The price has gone up,’ said Frank. He was in high spirits. ‘It’ll go up again next week.’

The girl looked crestfallen and her father groaned.

‘It’s just that we’ve been warned,’ he said. ‘Not to buy anything without taking it on trial first.’

‘It’s good advice,’ said Frank. ‘I can’t help you, though. You can take a spin on her now, if you like. Or come and ride her at our place. Every day for a fortnight, if it suits you.’

The man shook his head and walked away. Michael watched as, out of earshot, he entered into a long argument with his daughter. Eventually they came back and took Frank’s name and address. Frank winked slyly at Annie.

Bandit, cheered on frantically by Annie, went clear in the first round. He went clear again in the jump-off, but hopelessly slowly. It wasn’t enough to get him in the money, but he collected a pink ribbon, which Michael gave to Annie.

She couldn’t have been more thrilled if she had won it herself. ‘I’ll hang it on the cow’s horn,’ she said. ‘My first departure into pink.’

‘Do you want a red one instead?’ Michael asked her.

‘Not unless Bandit won it,’ she said.

‘That’ll be the day,’ said Michael.

He let her ride Bandit back to the lorry.

‘Look at me,’ she said. ‘I mean, just look at me! I’m at a horse show, riding a horse. I just can’t believe it!’

Michael was besieged by a series of vivid images. Annie jumping Bandit over cross-poles. Annie jumping in shows. Annie beside him in the yard, in the house, around the fire …

His thought process stalled. He had been glacial for far too long. The sudden meltwaters threatened to carry his mind away on their tide.

‘You look great up there,’ was all he said. ‘You look the part.’

The Menace was still lame. Jean had only one to go in the Open, and he was already off the lorry, getting warmed up. Michael and Annie got the others settled with their haynets and went into the little groom’s compartment. There were sandwiches and chocolate bars and flasks of sweet, milky coffee in there.

‘This is brilliant,’ said Annie. ‘You could live in here.’

‘You could, I suppose,’ said Michael, glancing at the bunk above the transom.

‘I could,’ said Annie. ‘Maybe I’ll rent it off you. How much?’

Michael laughed, but something had happened. A shutter had fallen behind Annie’s eyes. She was miles away from him, as dark and distant as the first time he had seen her.

‘I’m not staying at home, anyway,’ she said. ‘Not once my dad comes home.’

‘Your dad?’ said Michael. ‘Why? Where is he?’

Her right knee was suddenly in frantic motion. The heel of her black boot hammered on the frayed matting. She looked up at him. Ravens lurked in her dark eyes.

‘He’s in prison,’ she said. ‘I put him there.’

Michael couldn’t believe he could come down so quickly. Even the sky seemed to be collapsing outside the open door, as the mist and the night fell together.

‘Why?’ he said. ‘What did he do?’

Annie didn’t answer. She was so far gone from him that he needed her name to call her back.

‘Annie?’

She looked up, hard still.

‘Are you OK?’ he said.

She shrugged. Her knee had stopped jerking. She sighed, softened a bit. ‘I’m supposed to go down there for a couple of days next week with my mum. Counsellors and all that crap. I’ve been there. Done that. No way am I going again.’

‘Maybe you should go?’ said Michael. ‘Tell them how you feel.’

She shook her head. ‘I want him to come back. He’s promised to look after Mum. She wants him back so I don’t have to be tied down because of her MS. She thinks if he comes back I’ll forgive him and we’ll all be a happy family again. I won’t, though. I’ll never forgive him.’

Michael’s head was full of questions that he didn’t feel he could ask. How long had he been in prison? What had he done to her?

‘Will you really leave?’ is what he said.

Annie nodded. ‘I won’t set foot in the house once he comes back. Never.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘I dunno. Out of Scotland, anyway.’

The mist seemed to be pushing in through the door, but Michael couldn’t seem to find the will to close it. Instead, they both sat in silence, immune to the surrounding contentment of the munching horses.

27

T
HEY HAD TO CRAWL
home through the dense mist. Jean and Frank took turns to sleep in the transom. Michael and Annie sat side by side in the double passenger seat. He ached to put his arm around her, take her head and all its sorrows on to his shoulder. In the end it was he who nodded off and slumped towards her, and woke when the lorry bumped over a railway crossing and knocked their skulls together.

It broke them out of their gloom. Frank started singing the only song he knew. ‘
One man went to mow
…’

Annie joined in. They giggled and sang the rest of the way home.

When they got back, Annie helped Michael to carry haynets and water buckets around the yard. While she was kissing Bandit good night, an idea occurred to him.

‘Why don’t you stay here?’

‘Your mum said she’d drop me home.’

‘No, I don’t mean tonight. I mean next week. When your mum’s away.’

She looked up at him. He could tell she wanted to. ‘What about your folks?’

‘Oh, they’re cool. They like you. It won’t be a problem.’

‘I might,’ she said. ‘I’ll ring you.’

He squatted on the damp cobbles and carved his phone number with a hoof pick on a broken piece of slate. Frank passed by, a bale of straw on his back.

‘Be sure and come back now, you hear?’ he said to Annie. ‘As soon as you like.’

‘See?’ said Michael. ‘I told you.’

He dreamed that the jackdaws were back, pouring concrete down the chimney. He was trying to swim through it before it set when he woke. The song, and that old, dead stump, were lurking in his mind.

Woe betide the willow wan,

And woe betide the bush and briar,

For they broke beneath her true love’s hand,

When strength did fail and limb did tire.

He was amazed that those lines had taken so long to return to him. They were the ones that he had waited for every time his grandmother sang it; that had made the blood rush up his spine, even as a small child. They were doing it again now. There was another one as well. What was it?

It wasn’t just the river that was condemned, then. That was why the banks were bare. It must have been that stretch of water the young man tried to cross. He nearly made it, but the growing things failed him. They broke away as he tried to struggle out, and they had been cursed for it. Every one of them had died, and never grown again.

He tried to find his reason. It couldn’t possibly be true. It was just a song, just a coincidence. But the hour was against him. He was still half in the dream-time, and the song ran on through him. It was no longer his grandmother’s voice that carried it. Somehow, he didn’t know how, it was the river’s.

28

A
S SOON AS HE
got up, it was in his mind that Annie might ring. It was in his mind even at school. He was lifting the phone, trying cool, then surprised, then delighted, when he was ambushed by the maths teacher.

‘You’re looking very cheerful there, Michael,’ she said. ‘Finished those problems?’

He put his face back into neutral. ‘No, miss.’

She began to walk towards his desk. He checked his neighbour’s book for the page number and opened his copy.

‘A pen might help,’ said the teacher.

Michael felt the colour in his cheeks. He poked around in his bag.

The teacher sighed. ‘It’s up to you,’ she said. All of you. I can’t programme you. If you don’t do the work you won’t pass the exam. It’s as simple as that.’

Michael leaned on his elbows and scratched his head. Something grey and scrofulous dropped onto the white page. He picked it up on the tip of his pen and scribbled it into a clean corner. It must have come out of the body brush when Annie caught up with him on Saturday.

He locked his jaw so that his face couldn’t betray him again, and surrendered to the memory.

She phoned on Wednesday evening.

‘Is it still all right to stay with you?’

‘Yeah,’ he spluttered. ‘Definitely’

‘Tonight? Until Saturday?’

‘Brilliant!’

‘Jimmy says he can drop me over in a while. He’ll mind my mum and drive her down tomorrow.’

‘Brilliant,’ he said again. ‘Come whenever you like.’

He wandered out into the yard. Frank was in the hay shed, making doors for the new boxes.

‘Annie’s coming over,’ said Michael.

‘Now?’ said Frank.

‘For a couple of days.’

‘A couple of days?’

‘Her mum’s going away.’

Frank examined a nail underneath the dangling bulb, then hammered it into the door. ‘How’ll you manage with school and all that?’

Michael shrugged. ‘It’s only a couple of days.’

Frank dug into the nail bucket again. ‘How are you doing, anyway?’

‘Oh, grand.’

‘Keeping up all right?’

‘Yeah. Fine.’

Frank hammered again. ‘No, it’s just … I got a phone call the other day. We seem to have missed some meeting or other. Parent-teacher.’

Michael nodded. ‘I gave you the letter.’

‘Did you?’

‘It doesn’t matter, anyway. Most of the parents didn’t bother.’

‘As long as you’re doing all right.’

‘I’m doing all right.’

Michael went back to the house and retrieved the crumpled letter from the bottom of his bag. He smoothed it out as well as he could and pushed it into the middle of the paper stack at the end of the table. He sifted through it. There were bills with
FINAL NOTICE
plastered across them. A car tax renewal form. Catalogues for shows and sales. Entry forms, some half filled in. Registration documents from the BSJA. They had no filing system. This was it.

He fingered the notes in his pocket uneasily. He took a share of the profits, but he also shared the liability. The unpaid bills made him anxious. It wouldn’t be the first time that he would see his money swallowed up by the running of the house and yard.

There was a bag of baking potatoes on the counter. He turned on the oven and threw six of them in. Then, as a joyful afterthought, he threw in two more. He changed into his mucky jeans and went out to start on the yard, but the van was already there. Frank was leaning into the cab, talking to Jimmy and Ruth. Annie was walking towards him, carrying two bulging carrier bags.

‘Gross,’ said Annie, when she saw his room. ‘We’ll have to do something about this.’

‘Fine by me,’ said Michael. ‘When do we start?’

‘Got any paint?’

‘I can get some tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow, then,’ said Annie. ‘We start tomorrow.’

He showed her to the spare bedroom next door and dredged though the unsorted chaos of clothes in the airing cupboard in search of clean sheets and blankets. When they’d made up the bed they clattered back down to the kitchen.

Frank was sitting at the table. He looked up as they came in. ‘Everything all right?’

‘Brilliant,’ said Annie.

Frank galloped his fingers on the table for a moment. ‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realize.’

‘She could be worse,’ said Annie. ‘She’s in remission.’

Frank nodded, but Michael could see the recent shock still present in his eyes. It was more than Ruth’s condition, he was sure of that. They had told him something else as well.

‘I didn’t realize,’ he said again. ‘Be sure and make yourself at home.’

29

T
HEY WERE ALL DOWNSTAIRS
before dawn; Annie pale and bewildered by the early start. But the prospect of a ride drove all else from her thoughts, and she was soon firing on all cylinders and eager to be off.

‘Do you sleep in all that chandlery?’ said Frank. ‘Doesn’t it get tangled up in the bedclothes?’

Michael signed the hand-me-down skull cap over to her. ‘It’s yours,’ he said.

‘Class!’

She turned it between her hands and Michael could see her mind working. It wouldn’t be long before that helmet bore Annie’s mark. A death’s head. A line of Japanese characters. A fresh coat of black paint with red pinstripes. It would be indisputably hers, then. In all the years Michael had owned it, it had acquired none of his personality at all, apart from a few scrapes and chips.

‘You’d be as well to get a new one,’ said Jean. ‘If you’re going to take riding seriously, that is. They say you should replace them if you drop them.’

‘That one’s been dropped a hundred times,’ said Frank.

BOOK: Annan Water
3.26Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Coming Around Again by Billy London
Wild Justice by Phillip Margolin
Double Blind by Heidi Cullinan
Love Again by Christina Marie
animal stories by Herriot, James
Conspiracy Game by Christine Feehan
Dead Dreams by Emma Right
Lucinda by Paige Mallory