Dark Horse
Honey Brown lives in country Victoria with her husband and two children. She is the author of three previous novels:
The Good Daughter, After the Darkness
and
Red Queen
.
Red Queen
was published to critical acclaim in 2009 and won an Aurealis Award, and
The Good Daughter
was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award in 2011.
After the Darkness
was selected for the
Women’s Weekly
Great Read and for Get Reading 2012’s
50 Books You Can’t Put Down
campaign.
Where is the rich, dark earth, brown and moist?
Where is the smell of rain dripping from gum trees?
John Marsden,
The Rabbits
T
he blow put Sarah on the ground. That she was suddenly horizontal registered in her mind, then the pain came rushing through, washing over every other detail. A sigh escaped her lips and she lay motionless, struck dumb by the brute force of the hit.
She tasted blood, her lower face turned numb and her teeth felt out of place. The tip of her nose was stinging. Her ears were ringing. She rolled onto her side. Dust caught in her throat. Small stones dug into her shoulders, elbows, and then the palms of her hands as she rose. Her shirt and jeans had not protected her at all. Her riding boots felt like lead weights. She was slender, but any sense of lightness had left her. She stood and staggered to the side. A two-legged fool, in the shadow of Tansy, an impressive four-legged beast, pacing, a few guilty snorts from her flared nostrils, her lead dangling from the halter, and a nervous glint in her eyes.
Sorry
, the mare was saying,
but you can’t tell me you weren’t half expecting it
?
Tansy had baulked at the foot of the loading ramp, swung up her head in protest, and the broad bone of her nose had connected with Sarah’s jaw, chin and mouth. It could have been worse, if the impact had been a centimetre higher. Sarah checked to see that her nose
was
in one piece. She felt to see if her teeth were secure in their gums. It was the soft stuff inside her skull that had been shaken. Sarah’s vision grew blurry and she lowered into a crouch, fingers splayed in the dirt.
The float and Sarah’s old F100 were illuminated by the beam from the yard spotlight. The driver’s side door on her ute was open. The interior lamp burned and bounced a yellowed glow off the windscreen and dash. Pre-dawn twitters rang out from the black beyond the long row of stables. The air was still. Aside from the birdcalls, it was quiet. No sounds came from the darkened yards or from the stables, the silence adding to Tansy’s unease. Sarah tried standing again. It worked better this time.
Tansy continued to pace, keeping out of the wedge of light, her lines blurring. It was as though the mare had no separate body parts – no flank, no inside leg, no fetlock, no lashes – she was one inky entity, sable from the tips of her ears to the trailing ends of her tail. Tansy shook her head, rattling the clip on the halter. Now that she had all but knocked Sarah out, she seemed to feel it only right to continue her belligerence – loath to have caused injury for no good reason.
Sarah walked across to perch herself on the wheel arch of the float. She prodded her face some more. Patches of numbness remained. Blood covered her fingers. Dark spots were splattered down the front of her shirt and on the buttoned cuff. There were smears of blood across the back of her left hand. A spray of red on the side of her jeans. How had it gotten
there
? Sarah dabbed her face with the bottom of her untucked shirt.
The sky lightened and the twittering intensified. Sarah licked the dust and blood from her lips. Magpies began to warble. Moths around the spotlight disappeared. Shadows lost their depth. Her jaw grew tender, and the cold breeze made the bone throb. A headache threatened.
Sarah looked at the row of empty stables. Her gaze passed over the bare sheds and swept concrete, surveying the tidy yard, the cleared shelves of the tack room. She felt that her battered face suited the desolate setting. If, at thirty-five, she had managed to retain any youthful prettiness, it wasn’t there now. Sarah was a brunette, but she felt grey and washed-out, her hair was shoulder-length and shiny, but the long pieces that had escaped her ponytail fell lank around her face, her skin was olive, but she felt pale, her nose was pinched-in and small, but it felt meaty and bulbous. And her lips, referred to by some as sexy, her best feature, were full all right, blood-filled and bruised, a clown’s smile. Tansy’s blow hadn’t added insult to injury; it had worked the other way around.
Through the row of apple trees Sarah could see the large reinforced timber frame that held the oversized For Sale sign. A property like this one called for grand marketing strategies. The real estate agent had begun discussing the options before Sarah had even finished the final sweep of her signature on the Exclusive Sale Authority form. Sun angled down the valley. Out on the road, the photographs of Sarah’s lounge room, the stone fireplace, the country kitchen, the vaulted ceilings, the cedar-lined walls, would be bathed in a coppery blaze of light for those passing by. Images of the yards, the office, and an older snapshot of a line of horses and their riders heading off out the front gate were there for all to see.
Stunning Home! Prime Acreage! Established Local Business!
the sign shouted in crude red letters. Then down the bottom: THE TRIFECTA! The agents thought they were clever, coming up with that. As though trail riding had anything to do with horse racing.
Dickheads.
Sarah looked away, to the ranges, to the bank of cloud gathering in the otherwise blue sky. It was an insult, an affront, to lose a business and a home, a way of life. It was deeply offensive, an all-round humiliation especially in a small town, where everyone was watching. Tansy was pawing at the ground by the back gate. She wanted to get into the long paddock, the one that could take her furthest away from the empty stables and the float.
Sarah left Tansy loose in the central yard, the lead still dangling from her halter. She pushed up the ramp on the empty float and bolted it into place. Sarah shut the car door and headed towards the house. Tansy whinnied.
Hey, don’t leave me hanging
. Followed by a louder whinny,
Sarah, don’t walk away . . .
Sulky, moody, headstrong, bursts of bad behaviour, while still fragile inside, quick to feel lost and rejected. A teenage girl, that would be Tansy’s human equivalent. Sarah remembered those years well. She could relate. She climbed the verandah steps.
In the photographs around Sarah’s house – taken down from the walls, leaning against the skirting and propped against boxes of packed belongings – Tansy was captured in each stage of her growth: a shy jet-black filly arriving at her new home, a playful kid settling in, a wary young mare fresh from being broken, a grown-up girl in the paddock with the other horses. Stacked in the hallway were the charcoal sketches of Tansy that Sarah had commissioned from her favourite animal artist. The dark horse shape was barely visible through the bubble wrap and masking tape, a shadow behind the layers. Shiny coloured sashes and framed endurance riding certificates bearing Tansy’s name were on Sarah’s bedroom wall.
Sarah stripped off her shirt, kicked off her boots and leaned forward over the sink to examine her injuries in the mirror. She tipped her face. She was going to bruise badly, yet, aside from the split lip and punctured tongue, no real damage had been done. She tried to roll her blood-filled lips in and make them disappear. She gently cupped her chin to disguise the redness, pulled her hair from its ponytail and arranged it close around her jaw to try to hide the swelling. She lowered her hand and relaxed her mouth. Sunglasses weren’t going to help. A surgeons mask was the only option that sprang to mind. If only there was a viral pandemic sweeping Australia’s eastern states.
For a few flat moments Sarah held her own reflected gaze, searched inside herself for something – a spark, energy, a reason to . . . keep going. She looked away.
Sarah removed her bloodstained bra and slid off her jeans. Summer days were spent in tank tops and long pants and she had the tan lines to prove it. Her arms were a dark coffee colour, her neck was brown, her chest and cleavage a little over-toasted, while her breasts and torso were a weaker shade of brown – latte perhaps. Sarah’s bloodlines weren’t as clean as Tansy’s. A dash of various nationalities coloured her. Sarah’s legs were long and waxed smooth. Her underwear was a triangle of sheer black fabric. A keen horse rider always had shape to their calves, thighs and bum, a horse-handler’s arms were nicely muscled. Sarah drew her share of double takes in town, and not just because of the gossip. She swallowed a painkiller and stepped into the shower to wash off the remaining blood and dust, to rid herself of the feeling that she’d been flattened.
‘Dad, I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it today, I’m sorry.’
Sarah fell silent, listening to her father’s response. When she realised she wasn’t going to get another word in for some time, she put the phone on loudspeaker and continued dressing. She chose a pair of dark denim jeans and a tight-fitting navy T-shirt. She pulled on a pair of knee-high riding boots. His reprimand continued from the dressing table, a thunder roll of barely contained anger, the sort of sound that made dogs whine and hide.
‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ she offered in the direction of the phone.
The good thing about the house being packed up and ready for the removalists was that there was very little evidence of the other
him
who asserted his presence in Sarah’s life. Anything
he’d
left behind was shoved down in the corner of a box, or thrown in the bin, from a height, with force. Walking through the rooms, weaving around the collected household items and neat piles of assorted soft furnishings, it wasn’t obvious that Sarah was only one half of the equation. The bigger items not packed away, were too generic to give any clues – the desk in the study didn’t say ‘married couple’, the TV didn’t say ‘Mr and Mrs’, the dining table didn’t say ‘soul mates’, nor did the washer/drier, not even the king-sized bed. Sarah might have liked to sprawl while sleeping; she might have had a very active single life and needed the extra mattress space for a variety of exciting adventures. Not likely. If only the king-sized bed had been a hotbed of promiscuity. If only her husband had never stretched his long frame out on top of it. But then she would have to go back further, wouldn’t she – so that they’d never been together to purchase the bed in the first place. She’d have to go years back, swathes of history deleted: holidays, parties, countless horse rides, birthdays, dinners, the honeymoon, the wedding, the purchase of the property. Or did it all come down to the bed? Sex was, after all, at the heart of it, what drew them together initially and what had torn them apart.
Her husband, ex-husband, was tall. All his adult life he’d wanted a king-sized bed. At last he’d got one. Sarah was standing at the foot of it, her father’s lecturing rumble now pouring from the phone directly into her ear, worsening her headache. Sarah uncoiled her favourite leather belt, and, one-handed, threaded it through the loops around her waist and fastened the buckle. The problem being that the king-sized mattress hadn’t stopped her husband from climbing onto other, different sized mattresses. Nothing, not even a wedding ring, had put a stop to that.
Back in the kitchen Sarah said, ‘Dad, I have to go.’
She was quiet while he retorted.
From the kitchen window, out past the front gate, she could see the girl from across the road riding a small motorbike. Tinsel glinted on the bike’s handlebars. The girl’s helmet had furry reindeer antlers attached to the top. The girl’s mother, in a dressing gown and slippers, was standing by the roadside taking photos of her daughter. It was six a.m. The day now had that gentle verve unique to Christmas morning. Goodwill seemed to have changed things on a molecular level. All those excited children’s thoughts and praying-to-have-purchased-right parents supercharging the atmosphere.
There weren’t any decorations up at Sarah’s place. Erecting a Christmas tree hadn’t been high on her list of things to do. Sarah looked at the bundle of unopened Christmas cards on the kitchen bench.
Her father wasn’t drawing breath. He talked right through the girl on the bike mounting the curb, swerving to miss Sarah’s letterbox, and skidding on the gravel, tumbling off in a cloud of dust. The mother rushed to her daughter and brushed her down, realigned the antlers, helped her back onto the bike (straight back in the saddle), and still Sarah’s father was talking.
‘You’re not the first person to go through a divorce, and you’re certainly not the first person to find out their partner is a cheating bloody liar. Your mother’s spent weeks preparing. What if everyone getting a divorce didn’t turn up for Christmas lunch? What then? What about all the couples out there with kids involved – it’s harder for them and they still manage.’
‘You’re right.’
‘You’re coming then?’
‘No.’
‘Sarah!’
This was where the thunder and lightning came together with a crack and you knew the storm was right overhead. Only kids and dogs got frightened in that kind of weather though, adults sometimes liked to walk right out and soak in nature’s fury. ‘Merry Christmas, Dad.’
‘What?’
‘And Happy New Year.’
‘I swear to God, if you don’t get your ar—’
She moved the receiver away from her ear. Without distance, a storm did tend to rattle the nerves a bit.
She reached for the pile of mail. An envelope addressed to
Dean and Sarah
Barnard
caught her eye. She took out the Christmas card.
Inside was written:
Devil Mountain Duo, have a great chrissy! Hope all is well. Have to catch up soon as we’re back in Oz. Love the Trekking Two xx
They’d included a snapshot of themselves dressed in hiking gear standing together on the slopes of a shaly hill, beaming faces, arms slung around one another’s shoulders. Sarah lifted her gaze from the photo and stared off across the room.
In her mind’s eye she could see her own husband, strolling in through the door, sunglasses on, beard trimmed and hair styled with product, groomed within an inch. She should have clicked years ago. The horses didn’t need him looking that good, Sarah didn’t either, she’d loved him most mid-ride, sweaty, eyes fixed on the trail ahead, forgetting he was handsome. Sarah loved earthy outdoor smells, perfumes made her sneeze, artificial scents repelled her, so why had he drenched himself in aftershave each morning and after every shower? And what was with all those showers? Three a day? Really? Naively, Sarah had begun to wonder if he had OCD.