Authors: Natasha Farrant
Early morning, Horsehill Farm. Clear blue sky, pale gold sunlight, mist rising from the ground. The trees here have shed more leaves than those in London. Those that remain, in shades of red and yellow and orange, sway in a crisp autumn breeze.
Half a dozen ponies stand in the clean, swept yard between the stables and the paddock, tethered to the wooden fence. Inside the barn, the familiar figures of GLORIA, TWIG and the massive silhouette of Grandma’s neighbour ISAMBARD HANRATTY are busying about. Twig spreads fresh straw in horseboxes. Gloria unpacks
crates in the new tack room built last week by Isambard, who is nailing rows of hooks to the wall on which to hang halters and bridles.
CAMERAMAN (BLUEBELL)’s breath makes puffs of steam in the air. In the field beyond the paddock, SKYE HANRATTY (fourteen years old, no riding hat or saddle, sandy hair sticking straight up, wire-rimmed glasses held together with sticking plaster, a broad grin over newly acquired braces) and JASMINE are exercising horses. Manes fly, hooves thunder. Skye rides Tuesday, the black mare and biggest pony in the stables, but Jasmine on Mopsy is doing a fine job of keeping up as they tear around the field, her long hair streaming behind her like a banner from beneath her hat. The Dartmoor hills spread out beyond them in a circle of green and russet.
It is like the chalk drawing under the motorway come to life.
The ponies finish their lap of the field and decelerate like a car
changing gears, from a gallop to a canter, a trot and then a jog and finally a walk as they file through the gate into the paddock where Cameraman is standing.
Skye and Jasmine are beaming. No – they are glowing, eyes bright, cheeks whipped to high colour by the exercise. As they lean down to pat their ponies’ necks, to pull their ears and tug their manes and congratulate them, they don’t look like riders at all. Rather, they are extensions of their mounts, so that it is almost a shock, when they slide off in the yard, to discover they have legs of their own and a human shape.
It is almost impossible to imagine two people looking more happy.
When we left Grandma at the end of the last holidays, she was all small and frail because she’d been ill and kept forgetting things. But when we arrived yesterday she was at the station with Zoran to meet us, looking a bit thin but otherwise exactly like she always has in her usual combination of pearls and gardening clothes, and not at all like a woman who needs looking after.
Last night at dinner, she sat at the head of the table tucking into Zoran’s beef casserole like she hadn’t eaten for weeks, firing away horse questions at Gloria like, WILL THE BLACK MARE FOAL NEXT SPRING? and SHOULD YOU TRY THE BROWN GELDING ON THE MARTINGALE? almost as loudly as she used to.
Horsehill has become completely horse mad.
Everyone is happy here. Pixie is happy because she says being here feels just like being with her family where she lives in the country in Ireland, and Pumpkin is happy because seeing so many ponies all together is blowing his tiny baby mind, and Twig is happy because when he is here he spends his whole time doing things like investigating natural science stuff like the lifecycle of newts or the nesting habits
of barn owls, and not getting beaten up playing rugby. And Gloria is happy because she loves having so much space for the ponies, and Zoran is happy because he’s always either playing the piano or cooking, when he isn’t running down to the yard to kiss Gloria when he thinks nobody is looking.
Even Mum and Dad are happy, because they’ve stayed all alone in London for some Mum and Dad time, and happiest of all is Jas, who has morphed right back to being a half-wild person with tangled hair who spends her life galloping about on horseback wearing layers of torn multi-coloured jumpers over jodhpurs covered in mud and horse hair.
I am the only person, I think, who is not completely overjoyed to be here.
There’s no Wi-Fi at Grandma’s house (though Zoran says he’s going to change that), and no mobile signal either. The only way you can actually send messages to anybody is using the broadband connection in Grandma’s study, and even that’s not easy because her life’s mission has always been to shoo people outside because ‘nothing beats fresh air and exercise’. I have been checking email and Facebook whenever I can get past Grandma, and this afternoon I took my phone on a walk up a hill to try
to get some reception. I got three bars of signal for about half a minute, but Dodi still hasn’t answered.
What if she never does?
Was it worth sacrificing our whole friendship just because she was a bit bossy?
Grandma came in as I was composing an email to Dodi, to send with a picture of the horses this morning, and asked what I was doing. When I explained, she said that it’s difficult to be friends with someone who is very controlling, that if we were truly friends, then Dodi will forgive me and also that I should stop writing to her but talk to her face to face.
‘But …’
Grandma took my hand off the mouse, turned off the computer and told me to go outside.
I’ve found Marek on Facebook. I want to write to him.
I want to ask, am I right? Is it you? And if it is, why do you do it?
The film I made this morning is pretty. What with the mist and the galloping horsemen, it looks mysterious and almost poetic. I wonder what Marek would think of it. I broke my rule of not sharing my films this afternoon and showed it to Skye when I came back from my walk.
‘Do you like it?’ I asked.
Skye looked out across the paddock to the field where half a dozen horses and ponies were grazing. Gloria and Zoran were walking towards them, hand in hand. The sun was already setting. The sky was darkening, touched with pink and gold around the edges, and our breath was coming out in puffs again.
‘I do,’ he said. ‘But it’s not as good as the real thing.’
I thought a lot of things when he said that.
I thought, I wonder what Marek would think of my film if I showed it to him?
I thought of his chalk ponies that looked like they were galloping to life underneath the motorway.
And I thought, I don’t want to make films that are as good as the real thing.
I want to make films that are better.
Why do you draw in secret?
And why does he target me?
Jas drowned the hair straighteners today. We all had to witness it. She made us process from the paddock to the stream, with her leading the way on Mopsy and
Skye’s dog Elsie trotting beside her and her tiara on her head instead of a riding hat, like a princess setting out to slay a dragon, except she wasn’t carrying a sword but the hair straighteners on a ceremonial blue sofa cushion in front of her on the saddle.
She rode Mopsy right to the middle of the bridge over Grandma’s stream, and then she held up a hand to tell us all to stop on the banks, and stood up in the stirrups with the cushion held out before her and shouted, ‘I banish thee!’
Grandma asked, please could someone explain what was going on?
‘We are here to banish Jas’s demons,’ Pixie explained. She had changed out of her usual boiler suit for the occasion, and was wearing a sort of black witch’s cloak she had found in a charity shop in Plumpton, with a garland of ivy in her hair. Grandma said, please could someone else explain, because she failed to understand what demons had to do to with hair curlers.
‘They’re not curlers, they’re straighteners,’ I told her. ‘And they have been making Jas pretend she is something she’s not.’
Gloria remarked you could hardly blame the straighteners. Twig agreed but said we couldn’t very well drown Megan, Courtney, Chandra and Fran.
‘Apart from it being illegal,’ Twig said, ‘they are not actually here.’
‘Karma,’ Pixie murmured, but no-one answered because this was the moment when Jas brandished the straighteners over her head and hurled them over the bridge and into the water.
‘It’s not very ecological,’ Zoran said.
‘She just wants to blow the electrics,’ Twig said.
Then Jas recited a poem all about how bad straighteners are for hair, Twig fished them out of the stream, Isambard inspected them and said they were irreparable and they all went in for tea.
I didn’t go with them. Instead I walked out on to the moor, up and up until I reached the top of the hill. It was freezing and a fog was coming in. I shouldn’t have stayed – people lose their way and die on the moor every year in weather like that. But you feel so free, up there. I spread my arms and the wind rushed up and whipped my face, and my lungs filled with the damp, cold fog, and I ran in swooping circles pretending to be an aeroplane until I got dizzy, and crashed and lay on my back on the wet green grass alone in my whited-out world, laughing like a crazy person.
But then, when I’d finished laughing, I wanted to cry like I always do when I come here, because this was Iris’s favourite place in the world, and it was so
beautiful, and even if I could capture it on camera or turn it into a picture as perfect as Marek’s, she would never see it.
I woke up before dawn to the sound of an engine outside my window, and when I opened my curtains there was Flora spilling out of a very old-looking car that was mainly blue but with one red door, dressed in her bunny rabbit onesie, snow boots, a duffle coat and a red tartan blanket. She saw me watching and waved. Other people started to climb out of the car after her.
‘What?’ I actually rubbed my eyes to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.
‘Open the door!’ she called up to me. ‘We’re dying of cold and I’m bursting for a pee!’
I tiptoed out of my room towards the stairs, but everyone was already awake.
‘Is something wrong?’ Zoran staggered on to the landing, rubbing his eyes.
‘What on earth is that racket?’ Grandma appeared in her dressing gown, clutching her walking stick like it was a weapon.
‘FLORA’S HERE!’ Jas’s bedroom door burst open.
In the dark behind, Twig groaned from under a heap of blankets. Outside, Flora and her friends were singing ‘Frosty the Snowman’ to keep warm. Pumpkin started to cry. In the bed next to his cot, Pixie started crooning. Gloria followed Zoran out on to the landing wearing her jodhpurs and muckingout sweater.
‘Might as well get up,’ she yawned.
There were four drama students singing on the step when I opened the door – Flora, a massive bearded boy called Peter who looks like a bear, another boy called Barney with wild curly blond hair, and a beautiful girl with copper hair down to her waist and an old-fashioned velvet dress who said we should call her Maud, even though it’s not her real name.
‘Because of Maud Gonne,’ Peter-the-bear explained. ‘She was an Irish actress married to the poet W.B. Yeats. We all had to pick someone we admired at the beginning of term and think about how we would act them. She’s been pretending to be Maud since September.’
‘I love her,’ Maud said simply.
‘And I’m starving!’ Flora cried. ‘Is there any breakfast?’
They ate, and ate, and ate. They finished all
the eggs and all the bacon and all the bread. They used all the milk in big frothy cups of coffee and they devastated the fruit bowl and then, when they couldn’t eat any more, Flora announced they had to sleep because they had been driving all night and were fit to drop.
‘What are we going to eat?’ Twig peered crossly at the empty fridge.
‘We’ll go to the shops after we’ve slept,’ Flora promised.
‘But I’m hungry now.’
Zoran asked how long was Flora planning on staying and where was she intending to sleep? Flora said she hadn’t thought of that, she’d just come for a bit of a holiday and didn’t we all think it was a lovely surprise?
‘Are you on half-term?’ Jas asked. ‘We’re staying until Sunday.’
She drooped a bit when she said that, I think because she remembered that Sunday is Halloween.
‘We might be sort of just a tiny bit bunking off,’ Flora admitted. She put her arms round Grandma. ‘Don’t tell Mum and Dad?’
Grandma, who adores Flora and intrigue and anything rebellious, said of course she wouldn’t. Zoran gazed at her like he was saying please tell your
grand-daughter this just isn’t possible. Grandma, who was listening to Maud recite the poetry of W.B. Yeats, said nonsense, of course they could stay.
‘Flora and Maud and Jas can move in with Blue,’ Grandma said. ‘And the boys can share with Twig. There’s plenty of bedding.’
‘But the cooking …’
‘I’ll help,’ Barney said. ‘I like cooking.’
And so they stayed, and took over the house. They slept all morning after breakfast, so Jas and Twig and I had to tiptoe in and out of our rooms to get dressed, and they never did make it to the shops. Instead when they woke up, they went to the pub, and they came back singing at five o’clock when it was getting dark, long after Zoran, Twig and I had been shopping and peeled a mountain of potatoes and chopped a tonne of onions and carrots and celery.
Barney didn’t help to cook at all. Instead he sat in the bath for hours, using up all the hot water and playing his violin. Peter, who has the most delicate hands for a person so big, left a trail of wood shavings all over the kitchen, carving a horse for Jas out of a piece of wood he picked up on the way home from the pub, and Maud spooked the real horses by practising the trumpet out by the paddock.
And nobody minded. How could we? After dinner, while the rest of us washed up, Zoran played the piano while Barney played the fiddle. And after the washing up, Maud said we had to dance. ‘Outside!’ she insisted. ‘By the light of the moon!’
We’ve danced outside at Horsehill, but never in winter, with the air so cold it burns your lungs and face and hands. And we’ve sung round the piano many times, but never so loud. It was two o’clock in the morning by the time we finally went to bed, Skye wobbling away to the Hanrattys’ on his bicycle, Gloria grumbling that she had to be up again at dawn for the horses.