by Kate Lattey
Looking back though, the weeks I spent riding slowly in the arena made a huge difference to my riding ability. Because I couldn’t do any fast work, or ride the half-broke horses that Ken used to put me on, Frankie started giving me lessons on the horses he’d been schooling. Horses that were supple and obedient to the leg, with smooth paces and mouths like butter. I learned to flex a horse around my inside leg, to ride forward into a contact, to ride lateral movements and square halts and rein-backs. To extend and collect the paces, to teach walk to canter transitions and flying changes, and to make the horses rideable.
They were ordinary horses, most of them. There were one or two special ones that were particularly talented or trainable, but they were always sold quickly. The ones that stuck around were the quirky horses, the ones with bad habits or emotional issues, that few people wanted to ride and nobody wanted to buy. Ken would mutter and grumble and threaten to send them to the hunt kennels, but Frankie always kept him placated, saying it was only a matter of time before we’d break through their bad habits and they’d be as good as gold and ready to find a new home. He could convince Ken of anything, a talent that I admired, because it was one that I demonstrably lacked. Ken and I had never managed to have much more than a tolerance for each other, but he would do anything that Frankie suggested, even when he swore he wouldn’t. They had a strange friendship, each holding a different balance of power, and I often felt like I was teetering in the middle, a pawn in their relentless game.
One afternoon at the end of summer, Frankie and I were finishing up a schooling session in the arena. He was riding OJ, the lanky chestnut who was now a fit, glossy horse that looked good enough to rival any horse you saw in a magazine. But OJ was a slow learner, and Frankie’s attempts that day to teach him how to do flying changes weren’t going too successfully.
Usually, Frankie was incredibly patient with the horses, but as OJ stuffed it up again and again and again, he started to lose his cool. I’d been watching their attempts as I trotted around the arena on a little grey mare, who had only been off the track for six weeks, but was a quick and willing learner. As Frankie pulled OJ up and flung the reins down onto his neck in frustration, I picked up a canter on Lace and, mimicking Frankie’s attempts, rode her across the diagonal at a forward canter and then turned the corner at the other end. Lace executed a tidy flying change and kept cantering smoothly around in the opposite direction, and I grinned at Frankie as I passed him.
“Why were you making it look so hard?”
“Well aren’t you brilliant. Perfect ten, send you to the Olympics, you’ve smashed the world record,” he said, his voice dripping with bitterness.
I circled Lace around him, trying not to show that I was hurt by his sarcasm. I’d expected him to laugh. We mocked each other mercilessly, day in and day out. It was our primary method of communication, but it was usually taken in good spirits.
“Sheesh, sorry.”
I brought Lace back to a walk as Frankie swung out of the saddle.
“It’s not you,” he said, running up OJ’s stirrups. “It’s just…well, it’s a few things. Don’t take it personally.”
“Water off a duck’s back,” I told him, letting Lace circle him on a loose rein. “I’ve already forgotten about it.”
“Good.” Frankie pulled the reins over the chestnut horse’s head and patted his neck. “Someone’s coming to see this guy on the weekend. You think you could school him for us tomorrow, see if you can’t get him to figure out those changes? Since you’re such a pro at it,” he said with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“It’s as good as done. He’ll be nailing them by the weekend,” I assured Frankie, who nodded.
“Okay. I can’t give you a ride home tonight,” he said as he led OJ towards the gate. “So you’ll have to make your own way. Sorry.”
I shrugged. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” I could see that something was weighing heavily on his mind, and I was quick to reassure him. “The walk’ll do me good.”
He hesitated, one hand on the gate latch, looking at me. “You’re not going to walk all that way.”
“Nah, I’ll probably flag down a ride. It’s fine, really.”
Frankie scratched his chin with one hand. “Just don’t get killed or anything.”
I grinned at him. “I won’t. Cross my heart.” I made the obligatory gesture over my heart, and Frankie frowned at me.
“You know you’re supposed to draw a cross, not an X, right?”
I just blinked at him. “Huh? Really?”
He rolled his eyes at me. “Just…whatever. Do whatever you like.”
And he turned and walked away.
The next day, Frankie didn’t turn up to the yard, and Ken stayed inside his house with the curtains closed. I fed and mucked out, then worked the horses on my own. Nobody came out to help, so I was still riding well into the evening, schooling OJ in the arena as the stars started coming out over our heads. He’d just landed his first successful flying change when I heard a door slam, and looked up to see Ken stepping out of his house and shuffling towards the stables with his head down. He was halfway there when he heard OJ’s hoof beats, and he flinched when he saw me. I knew then that he thought I’d gone home, and I felt guilty for still being there.
“What’re you doing here?” he growled.
“Riding OJ. I didn’t have time to get to him until now.”
Ken came over to me, squinting at the horse in the twilight. “Let’s see him.”
He leaned on the gate while I trotted OJ around the perimeter of the arena, lengthening his stride down the long sides and collecting it on the short ones, pushing him into canter as he rounded the turn and riding a perfectly shaped 20m circle at the far end. Then I threw caution to the wind and rode him across the diagonal, and switched directions in the corner. He executed his second flying change, and I reached forward to pat his glossy neck.
“Someone’s coming to try him this weekend,” Ken told me.
“I know. Frankie said.” I drew the horse back to a trot and headed towards Ken. “How come he didn’t show up today? Is he sick or something?”
Ken scoffed. “Sick of work, maybe. He quit.”
“What? Why?”
Ken narrowed his eyes at me. “Got a better offer, apparently. He’s gone to Aussie to ride.”
I couldn’t believe that Frankie would leave without telling me. “Is he coming back?”
Ken shrugged as he turned away. “Who bloody knows. Get that horse cooled out and bugger off home.”
He walked back to his house, and slammed the door behind him.
PART V
-
BARGAINING
You cannot train a horse with shouts
and expect it to obey a whisper.
- Dagobert D. Runes
AS YOU WERE
I look back now and wonder why I stayed. With Frankie gone, life at Ken’s went back to the way it had been before – hard slog with little reward. Simply having the opportunity to ride had long since stopped being enough for me, but somehow there was always one horse or another to make it worthwhile. And there was only Taniwha at home to ride, and as much as I loved that little pony, he would never be my first choice.
Ken was a rough and ready horse trainer, who had a tendency to chuck horses in the deep end and hope that they would swim. Without Frankie’s calming influence, I found myself clashing with Ken again and again, struggling to bring myself to follow his training methods now that I knew better. I could see the way that the horses started shutting down inside, simply going through the motions of good behaviour because they were too fearful of being punished for doing something wrong, not because they genuinely wanted to please. I could never get used to that distant look that would come into their eyes when Ken would raise his voice – or a whip – and threaten them. It was like they disappeared inside themselves, leaving their outer shell to deal with the pain while their brain dissociated their bodies from wha
t was happening.
I knew how they felt. I’d been those horses, plenty of times, lying in bed and listening to my father stumbling drunkenly around the house. I knew how it felt to shift my mind away, to stop listening and go somewhere else in my mind. I still followed that childhood dream I’d harboured for so long but never quite fulfilled of galloping bareback down the beach, nothing but me, my horse, the sand, sea and salt air. As a kid, it had been the black stallion from the movie that I’d imagined beneath me, but in later years it was always Bonfire, the horse I’d never had the chance to tame. We galloped on and on, never tiring, free from responsibility and financial burdens, which were constantly nagging at the back of my mind as I got older and started to see what dire straits my family was really in.
Ken continued to pay me, not much, but enough to make a small difference. Mum had come to depend on what I earned, and so despite my personality clash with Ken, I stayed on and I did my best to shelter the horses from his quick temper. I learned, through necessity, how to teach a new concept to a horse as quickly as possible. I trained them to move immediately and respectfully off my aids, whether I was riding them or handling them on the ground, but I never used fear of punishment to get that reaction. It took a little longer in the beginning, but I soon discovered it was much easier to teach something to a horse that was in a calm state of mind. I built partnership after partnership with those horses, all so different and yet all fundamentally the same. They were just looking for a world that made sense to them, and a place to belong in it. I couldn’t give them much, but I could give them that, even if I couldn’t find it for myself.
Ken had a girlfriend who lived with him for a while, and he mellowed out while she was there, becoming much more accommodating towards the horses and their foibles. But although Macy considered herself a horsewoman, she was deeply devoted to draw reins and put them on all of the horses she rode, undoing much of what I considered my good work by holding their heads down and working them until they were soaked in sweat. I hated seeing it, but I was at the bottom of the pecking order and there was nothing I could do to stop her. Fortunately, she only stuck around for a few months before she got sick of Ken and left, but I had a hell of a time trying to get the horses confident and seeking the bridle again after she’d gone.
Her departure made Ken even more irascible than he had been before she’d arrived, and the horses bore the brunt of his frustrations. More than once, I came in after school to find a horse with welts on its sides or a mouth rubbed raw from the bit. It broke my heart, but what could I do, when the horses whinnied at the sight of me, when they buried their heads against my chest, or tried their best to please me whenever I rode them? I couldn’t walk away and leave them. Who would look after them, without me there?
I probably would’ve quit anyway, until one overcast afternoon came along and changed everything. Ken and I were standing in the middle of his yard, unloading a transport of new horses from the racetrack. They’d all been sacked from their racing careers, but while the blingy chestnut and the fat bay had been let down in a paddock for six months afterwards, the grey was fresh off the track. Ken had seen him race a month ago and earmarked him then as a potential horse to on-sell, but when I led him down the ramp of the transporter, Ken was furious. The horse was dog lame, barely able to put any weight on his left foreleg.
“What the hell is this?” he demanded of the driver, who just shrugged.
“He was like that when he went on.”
“Then you should’ve kicked him back off! What use do I have for a lame horse?”
I stood next to the grey’s head and stroked his face, watching his ears swivel nervously back and forth at Ken’s raised voice.
“Put him back on the truck, Jonty,” Ken demanded. “He’s not staying here, crocked up like that.”
“It’s just an abscess,” the driver said. “That’s what Barry told me, and I’ve never known him to lie before.”
“Then clearly you’ve never met the man, because he lies morning, noon and night,” Ken told him.
He kept trying to convince the driver to take the horse away again, but without success. The transporter was on its way to the South Island, and had a ferry to catch that evening, and the driver wasn’t going to turn around and drive a horse back to Taupo just because Ken didn’t want him anymore.
I reached down and dug a piece of loose gravel out of the toe of my boot. The sole had come away from the leather weeks ago, but I couldn’t afford to buy new ones because Ken had conveniently forgotten to pay me for the past few weeks. I’d made the mistake of letting it go at first, figuring he’d just lost track of time or was just waiting for another sale, but the situation was getting desperate. I had a shopping list in my pocket of essentials that I needed to take home today, or my sisters would have nothing for lunch at school tomorrow.
Ken was standing in the middle of the driveway with his hands on his hips, watching the truck drive away, and I decided that now was as good a time as any to bring it up. I already knew that I couldn’t make him any madder.
“Ken?”
“What?” he snapped, turning around and glaring at the grey horse like he’d gone lame on purpose.
“You haven’t paid me for last week.”
“Counting now, are you?”
“I’ve been counting for almost a month,” I told him. “Thing is, I need the money.”
“I haven’t got the money,” Ken said. “If I did, I’d give it to you, but I don’t. I got this lot in to turn a quick profit on, so if you help me do that, then you get paid. Not before.” He took the grey horse’s lead rope from my hand and led him forward, watching the tall gelding stumble as he tried to walk.
“That’s what you said last time,” I reminded him. “And the time before.”
Ken shot me a dirty look. “What do you want me to do, conjure money out of thin air?”
I crossed my arms over my chest, determined not to back down this time. “I want you to pay me for the work I’ve been doing.”
“Fine.” Ken ted the stumbling grey horse over to me and put the lead rope into my hand. “There. Now you’re paid.”
I looked at the grey, then back at Ken. “What?”
“You wanted a horse, didn’t you? Well, this one’s all yours.”
“He’s lame.”
“You’re a horse whisperer. Whisper him back to soundness.”
The horse lifted his head and looked at me, and I reached out a hand to him. For a moment we stood suspended in time, looking at each other, then he extended his muzzle towards me and lipped gently at my fingers. I scratched him between the eyes, he let out a heavy sigh, and I was lost.
REUNION
I was cooling out a horse in Ken’s arena a few days later when a familiar red sports car came tearing up the driveway and skidded to a stop in front of the barn. The horse I was riding, a leggy bay colt, spun around and stood splay-legged, staring at the car with boggling eyes. I ran a hand down his neck and watched as Frankie climbed out of the car and looked around, hands resting on his slim hips. He’d lost weight and developed a tan, but otherwise he looked exactly the same as before. Spider snorted, and Frankie pushed his sunglasses up onto his head and grinned at me.
“Hello stranger. Miss me?”
He strolled over to the arena and leaned on the gate, holding out a hand to Spider, who eyed him warily. I’d been riding the young bay for a few weeks and still hadn’t earned his trust, and he wasn’t about to offer it to someone he didn’t know. I swung out of the saddle, landing on the ground next to the horse and giving his shoulder a pat.
“Jesus, look at you.” Frankie stood back and scanned me from head to foot, looking unimpressed. “You’re even scrawnier than you were when I left. Have you been off your oats lately or something?”
“What oats?” I asked pointedly as I ran up Spider’s stirrups.
“Old man still out of work?”
“Yep.”
“Shit.”
I l
ooked at him. “What’d you expect, that we’d all just sort our lives out while you were gone?”
“Honestly?” Frankie asked, putting his sunglasses back on despite the dimming sun. “I was hoping you’d be long gone. It’d make it easier for me to leave again.”
I loosened Spider’s girth a couple of holes, and the gelding let out a heavy sigh. “Didn’t stop you before.”
“Yeah, well. We all make mistakes, don’t we.”
Frankie looked slightly nervous as I led Spider out of the arena towards the stables, but he fell into step next to me. I wanted to be mad at him, but he was right. I’d missed him. Not that I was going to let him know that.
“So you got fired, huh?”
His eyebrows shot skyward, disappearing into his thick hair. “Uh, no. I’ve never been fired in my life, thanks very much. It was more what you’d call a well-timed departure.”
“So you left before they could fire you.”
“Something like that. You know, you don’t seem too thrilled to see me,” he said, sounding a bit prickly. “What kind of greeting is that to give your mentor?”
“The kind you give a mentor who walked out without warning eight months ago,” I told him. “You didn’t tell me you were going, didn’t even say goodbye. You just left.”
“Aww.” His lips turned up at the corners mockingly, but I caught the flash of guilt in his eyes. “I didn’t realise I was supposed to ask for your permission.”
“Would’ve been nice if you’d said something,” I muttered, leading the horse past him.
“Okay, okay. Wait!”
I kept walking, and heard him jogging to catch up. Then his hand was on my shoulder, stopping me.