by Kate Lattey
The hoof beats were still thudding through my head, but more slowly now. I sat up, kicking my blanket off and resting my elbows on my knees for a moment as I wondered what on earth I was going to do all day. I’d spent the past few weeks finding work for myself, but I was starting to run out of ideas. I’d rigged up a swing for Phoebe in the back yard, groomed Taniwha to within an inch of his life, built a picnic table out of salvaged wood and bent nails, dug in a whole new vege garden and planted it for Mum.
I went running every morning, down the dusty road past paddocks filled with fat sheep and sleek cattle, my feet slapping out a rhythm in my worn-out trainers, trying to keep fit, and had played a few pick-up games of rugby with mates from school, but I missed riding. It was as though I’d had a piece of my soul sucked out, and I couldn’t seem to find my way back to it.
The hoof beats were coming closer, and I frowned as I stood up. I’d done my best to tighten the wire on our front fence last week, but it was a bit hard without the right tools, and I knew Taniwha could get out easily enough if he really wanted to. I hoped it wasn’t him loose on the road. I stood up and stretched, then went to the front door to check.
I swung it open and squinted out into the bright morning as a mottled blur came bounding across the grass towards me, his tail wagging enthusiastically. I greeted the cattle dog with a smile, leaning down to rub his ears as the hoof beats on the road picked up pace, and I looked up to see a familiar bay pony trotting away from me. Tess sat quietly in the saddle, her long curly hair hanging down her back in a thick ponytail, and I leaned against the doorframe and watched her as Colin licked my hand. She would never know what it was to have the horse you loved sold out from underneath you. She’d had Rory for years now, ever since I’d met her four years ago, and they’d developed a solid partnership. I envied her then, as I had so many times before, wishing that I’d had her start in life. This farm was hers to inherit, if she wanted it. I couldn’t imagine Hayley wanting to stay here forever, but Tess fit into the landscape as though she was a part of it. I watched her trot steadily along the road, at one with Rory’s swinging stride. Everything in her life was as solid and reliable as the pony she rode, and the road ran straight and flat in front of her, with only a small pothole or two lying in wait for her to manoeuvre around. I had no idea what kind of path I would end up on, but I was sure that it wasn’t going to be anything like as straightforward as hers.
Tess glanced down at the road beside her, then twisted in the saddle and looked back over her shoulder, and I knew she was searching for Colin. I scratched his ears harder, selfishly wanting him to remain with me instead of returning to her. But Tess lifted a dog whistle to her lips and called him, and Colin leapt out from under my hand, racing across the lawn and shimmying through the fence as he made his way loyally back to Tess.
She noticed me at last. I couldn’t see the expression on her face, but I raised a hand to wave, wishing I’d thought to put a shirt on before I stepped out of the house. I was fit enough from all the riding I’d done, but I knew I wasn’t much to look at. Still pretty scrawny, as Frankie was always reminding me. Not that I cared. Wasn’t like I was trying to impress her or anything.
Right?
Tess turned away from me, her eyes fixed on the road ahead as Rory jogged steadily homeward. I stood and watched her ride away, wishing I could go with her. Wishing there was some version of the future where I had her life, where I could stay on this farm and work the land. Where John trusted me, and Tess smiled at me, and Hayley was nice to me. A future where I could ride out early in the morning, checking the stock, on a faithful horse that I’d known for years, covering every inch of the farm until I knew it like the back of my hand, with a loyal dog at my heels. It was seeming like an increasingly impossible dream, but no matter what I did, and no matter how often I reminded myself that it was never going to happen, it wouldn’t go away.
Tess turned the corner, disappearing from my sight. Rory’s hoof beats faded out, and I went back inside and shut the door behind me, still dreaming.
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This was not a book I ever intended to write, but I couldn’t go any further in the series without telling Jonty’s full backstory. This was supposed to be a short story, about half the length of the other Pony Jumpers books, but it has ended up being one of the longest. I guess I underestimated him, as I have many times before. He was only ever supposed to be a cameo in one book, but from the moment he stepped onto the page, he has taken over the narrative in his own relentlessly charming way.
If you’ve come to this book before reading any of the rest of the Pony Jumpers series, then hopefully you liked this one enough to pick the rest up. Jonty features in most of them from book 4 onwards – in fact, the last scene in this book also ties into one of the first scenes in book 4 of the series, Four Faults, which is told from Tess’s perspective.
All quotations used belong to their respective copyright owners. Full credit to Joss Whedon for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer quotes, which are not directly attributed to him here but which he wrote for the outstanding Season 2 finale Becoming, Part I.
You can visit the Locations page on my website at nzponywriter.com to see photos of farms in Waipukurau, where this story is set; and if you check out the Music page, you will also find the song that I listened to almost on repeat while writing this book: I’ll Be Good, by Jaymes Young. For whatever reason, from the first time I heard it, that song spoke to me in Jonty’s most authentic voice, showing me a side of him that I hadn’t realised existed up until then. Give it a listen, and decide for yourself.
PONY JUMPERS
Follow AJ, Katy, Susannah and Tess
as they negotiate the ups and downs of
life, love and show jumping.
#1 First Fence
#2 Double Clear
#3 Triple Bar
#4 Four Faults
#5 Five Stride Line
#6 Six to Ride
#7 Seventh Place
#8 Eight Away
Special Edition #1 – Jonty
COMING SOON:
#9 Nine Lives
Preview of Pony Jumpers #9
NINE LIVES
CHAPTER ONE
~ CONVOS IN CARS WITH PIES ~
“Ready to knock off for lunch?”
I stood up and rolled my aching shoulders back, then brushed loose soil off my hands onto the seat of my jeans.
“More ready than I’ve ever been in my life,” I told my father as he threw his spade into the back of his work truck.
He grinned at me. “Bit of hard yakka never hurt anyone.”
“I know how to do hard work,” I reminded him. “I muck out Squib’s paddock every day, and ride him, which isn’t exactly a cake walk. And soon I’ll have to do all four of Katy’s ponies as well.”
My best friend Katy was spending the first week of the holidays with her dad, and had asked me to ride her team of show jumpers in her absence. I was excited about the prospect, but slightly nervous as well. Katy trusted me, and I didn’t want to mess anything up.
“That’ll keep you out of trouble,” Dad agreed, grabbing hold of a wool sack overflowing with uprooted weeds and hefting it towards the back of the truck. “Water those plants in for us, would you? There’s a hose on the side of the house.”
It was late summer, supposedly autumn but with no sign of it approaching. Sweat was running down my back underneath my dirty t-shirt, and making my skin itch. I uncoiled the garden hose and turned it on the row of shrugs I’d just planted, watching the water sink into the dry soil. The school holidays had just begun, and I had been anticipating two weeks of pony-filled days. But Dad had been left short-handed when his part-time worker upped sticks and moved to Australia a couple of weeks ago. In previous years, he’d enlisted one or both of my brothers to help him out, but Aidan had gone off to university down in Otago, and Anders’s leg had been smashed up in a car accident a few months ago, leaving him unable to do
any physical labour. Or run, or play rugby, or do anything he liked doing. Lately he just spent most of his time moping around the house playing Xbox and grumbling at anyone who tried to cheer him up, no matter how good their intentions were.
Dad packed up the truck while I finished the watering, then stepped back to survey the finished scene. When we’d arrived, the garden had been a shambles, full of scraggly weeds and overgrown shrubs. Between us, Dad and I had transformed it into a garden that looked like someone actually cared about it.
The truck’s diesel engine roared into life behind me as Dad got ready to move on to the next job, and I raised my arms over my head and stretched my aching back. I was used to the physical side of looking after and riding horses, but the crouching and bending involved in gardening used a whole different set of muscles.
“Reckon it looks all right?” Dad asked, coming and standing next to me.
“It looks a thousand times better,” I told him with satisfaction, kneading my lower back with my knuckles. “Pretty cool how much we improved it in such a short time.”
“Couldn’t have done it without you,” Dad said, and clapped a hand onto my shoulder. “C’mon, let’s go grab some lunch.”
I followed him back to the truck. “Can we go to Kiss and Bake Up? They have the best butter chicken pies in the world.”
“If you like,” Dad said agreeably. “It’s on the way to the next job.”
I eyed up the truck ahead and quickened my pace to match his. “Hey, can I drive?”
“No.”
“But I got my Learner’s last week,” I reminded him. “You said once I got that, you’d start teaching me to drive.”
“Not in the truck,” Dad replied, climbing into the driver’s side of his small green truck, the tip tray loaded up with weeds and branches. “Trust me, you don’t want to learn to drive in this thing.”
I sighed as I scrambled in the other side. Loud beeping filled the cab as he carefully reversed down the driveway, and I rested one foot on the edge of the dashboard and fished my cell phone out of my pocket. 3 unread messages.
I punched in the code, a recent security measure I’d had to set up after Anders had nicked my phone one day and renamed all of my closest contacts with his own invented nicknames, filled up my memory by taking about 300 pictures of our dog sleeping, and then changed the language setting to Chinese before I’d caught him.
“Seatbelt,” Dad reminded me, and I reached over my shoulder and pulled it down across me as I thumbed through the messages.
The first one was from Cool Bro, otherwise known as Anders himself, wanting me to tell Dad that we were almost out of milk and bacon. I relayed the information out loud, then swiped to the next message. It was from Katy (Katy-did according to my phone, super original) telling me that she’d taken Squib’s fly sheet off so he could roll, and he’d found a patch of mud where one of the troughs had leaked and got himself plastered with mud. Sorry, she’d tacked onto the end of the message, then sent a photo. My grey pony was grazing happily, looking extremely pleased with himself, his sides coated in thick wet mud. I shook my head, knowing I had a lot of grooming ahead of me when I finally got to the paddock after work.
The last message was from my boyfriend Harry, now listed on my phone as Scud, because that was his rugby nickname and he played with Anders in our school’s First XV. Hey weedkiller u havin fun mum wants u to come over 4 dinner on Fri night we can catch a movie after lemme know k xx
I had to read it a couple of times, mentally inserting the punctuation he’d left out. The truck jolted to a stop before I could reply, and I looked up to see the bakery in front of us already. I shoved my phone back into my pocket and jumped down from the cab as Dad’s cell rang.
“There’s always one,” he muttered, picking it up and glancing at it before answering. “Hi Lexi. What’s up?” He reached into his back pocket for his wallet and threw it across the bench seat towards me. “Steak and cheese pie and a Coke,” he told me before returning to his call. “Yes I’m listening. Anders did what?”
I left him to field that phone call, and crossed the hot tarmac towards the bakery. My sister Lexi was on the autism spectrum, and while she was classified as ‘highly functional’, she didn’t cope well with change. Having Anders around the house all day was definitely abnormal, and he’d been doing her head in lately. The door to the bakery chimed as I pushed it open, and inhaled the delicious smells of fresh bread and pastries. I lined up in front of the glass-covered shelves, staring in at the rows of cream donuts and custard squares and tightly wrapped sandwiches. A little girl in front of me was leaving steamy breath on the glass as she pressed her hands against it, gazed longingly at thick slabs of lolly cake.
“Looks pretty good, huh?” I said to her, and she smiled shyly up at me.
Her mother turned around and looked me up and down, taking in my filthy clothes and messy hair, then put a hand on her daughter’s arm and pulled her towards the counter. The kid squirmed uncomfortably, and I felt sorry for her as I slid open the door to the pie warmer and grabbed a pair of tongs. Some people could be so judgemental.
“Will that be all?” the girl behind the counter asked when I finally made it to the front of the line.
“Yeah. No, hang on.” I ducked out of the queue and grabbed a couple of bottles of Coke from the fridge, then set them on the counter next to the pies. “These too.”
The girl smiled. “Anything else?” she asked, waving a hand towards the cabinet of temptation.
“Um.” I opened Dad’s wallet and discovered a wad of twenty dollar notes. Who carried that much cash around these days? “Actually, can I have a couple of cream donuts as well?”
Dad was just getting off the phone with Alexia as I made it back to the truck, my hands full of paper bags.
“This one mine?” Dad asked as he picked up a pie.
I shrugged. “I can’t remember which is which.”
Dad gingerly bit into the pie, then peered inside at the orange filling and pulled a face. “You got me.”
“Swap.” I held out the other pie to him and took my butter chicken one, then tucked my Coke bottle between my legs and unscrewed the cap as Dad peeked into one of the other bags.
“Donuts too, eh?”
“I figured we’d earned them.”
“Fair enough.” He took a bite of his pie, crunching through the golden pastry with an expression of rapture. “Mmm. Nothing beats a good pie, I reckon.”
“You’re probably right about that one.” I peeled the paper bag back off mine and took a careful bite.
“Don’t forget to blow on it,” Dad said, watching steam billow out of my pie.
“Dad, I’m sixteen,” I reminded him. “I know how to eat a pie.”
He just shook his head. “Where does the time go, eh? Seems like only yesterday you were crawling around in nappies.”
“Don’t go getting all nostalgic on me,” I said. “Admit it, you can’t wait until we’ve all flown the nest and you and Mum can both retire.”
Dad smiled at me but said nothing, and for the first time I wondered whether he had a retirement plan. His landscaping business kept him busy enough, but keeping Lexi on an even keel was almost a full time job in itself, and Mum’s career as a police detective meant that most of the caregiving had always fallen to Dad. He set his pie down and unscrewed the lid of his Coke as I bit into mine and promptly burnt my tongue.
“Ow!”
“What’d I just tell you?”
I rolled my eyes at him and finished my mouthful as he took a long swig of his Coke.
“Yeah, okay. You might have a bit of wisdom lodged up in that brain of yours.”
Dad grinned. “So you got any plans this weekend?”
I shook my head. “Not with the horses, if that’s what you mean. With Katy away, there’s not much point in Deb taking just me all the way up to Woodhill Sands.”
I tried to keep the disappointment out of my voice. The car crash that had busted And
ers’s knee had also broken my collarbone and given me a concussion, and by the time I’d been cleared to ride again, there hadn’t been many shows left on the calendar. I was trying to be patient, but I was also painfully aware that I only had one season before I turned seventeen and aged out of ponies. I had my work cut out for me over the winter if I wanted to have Squib ready for the Pony Grand Prix circuit next season, but I was determined to do my best to get him there.
“What about the world outside of horses?”
I paused mid-bite, and stared at my father. “There’s a world outside of horses?”
Dad just smiled. “So they say.”
“Actually, yes,” I remembered. “Harry wants me to have dinner at his place on Friday night. Or his mum does, or something. We might go to the movies after.”
I shrugged noncommittally as my father finished off his pie and looked around for a paper napkin.
“Serviette?”
I’d forgotten to grab any. “Sorry.”
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’ll cope. How is Harry? I haven’t seen him in a few days.”
“He’s good. Been busy helping his dad,” I told him, which made him smile.
Harry’s father Rick was our local farrier, and I’d first met his son when he’d come on a shoeing run to Katy’s place and trimmed Squib’s hooves for me. He was a year older than me, tall and fit with reddish-brown hair, green eyes and a cheeky smile, and I’d liked him from the start, but struggled to believe that he actually liked me back. But he’d invited me along on an indoor rock climbing trip over New Year’s, and had insisted on belaying me the whole time, encouraging me to climb up the highest walls and cheering me on when I made it to the top. Then after we’d returned our gear and headed back out towards the car park, he’d pulled me out of sight of the others and kissed me.