Pony Jumpers 9- Nine Lives

by Kate Lattey

  I jumped on bareback and rode past the arena, where Katy was trotting around the outside track on Tori, her big black warmblood mare. Her father had bought the horse as a peace offering a few months ago, spending a ton of money in a show of support for Katy’s riding ambitions. Katy had been thrilled at first, but had quickly discovered that Tori was a difficult horse to ride and they hadn’t really bonded yet. Tori seemed to be going nicely today though, trotting along with her neck arched and her stride rhythmic and impulsive.

  “She looks good,” I asked Katy as she rode past.

  She grimaced. “Does she? She feels awful.”

  I looked closer as she circled, noticing Tori’s stiff neck and her rigid jaw as she resisted Katy’s quiet aids. My best friend usually made riding look effortless, but I could see the struggle on her face and in the bracing of her back as she tried to bend the mare to her will.

  Shaking her head, Katy drew the big horse back to a walk and loosened the reins a little. “You going for a hack?”

  “Just down to the river,” I said. “Wanna come?”

  “Nope.”

  “Sure? We’ll just walk. It’ll probably do Tori good to get out of the arena.”

  Katy pulled a face. “Why, so she can lose her mind and throw me off?”

  “She won’t,” I said confidently. “Come on, bring her for a swim.”

  My friend laughed bitterly and held up her arm, which was still in a cast. She’d had a nasty fall off one of her ponies at the Horse of the Year Show the month before, and although her wrist was mostly healed, she technically wasn’t supposed to be riding again yet. But one little cast wasn’t enough to stop her.

  “Can’t swim with this.”

  “You’re not supposed to be riding with it either,” I reminded her. “Come on Katy, live a little.”

  She caved, as I’d known she would. “Fine. But if I fall off and die, you’ll have to go to Ireland in my place.”

  “Deal.” I leaned down and unlatched the gate, kicking it open as she rode Tori towards it. “Although team management might have something to say about that.”

  Katy shrugged. “They probably wouldn’t even notice. Honestly, I have the worst feeling about this trip. It’s going to be a disaster.”

  I steadied Squib as he jigged excitedly next to Katy’s big-striding horse. “Why? You get to spend three weeks in Ireland, travelling the country and competing at some of their biggest horse shows as part of a New Zealand team,” I reminded her. “What could be wrong with that?”

  “You know how Mum’s leave application got declined at work, so she can’t come with me?” Katy asked, and I nodded sympathetically. “Well, it gets better. Turns out that my father is booked into a conference in Singapore right in the middle of the trip, and he reckons there’s no point in him flying all the way to Ireland to watch me ride at one show, so he’s bailed.” She scowled, and Tori tossed her head.

  “So you’re going on your own?”

  “Honestly, that would be preferable to the reality,” she said, just as Tori spotted a stick that she didn’t like the look of and slammed to a halt. Squib stopped too, looking around and trying to decide what he should be spooking at.

  “Don’t you start,” Katy warned her horse. Tori tossed her head defiantly, but when Squib decided to be brave and forge ahead, Tori followed him.

  “As I was saying,” Katy continued. “As it turns out, there’s one other family flying over on the same day as me. Can you guess who it is?”

  From the look on her face, I didn’t have to. “Lily.”

  “Got it in one.” Katy pretended to vomit off the side of her horse, who laid her ears back in evident disapproval. “Princess Lily and her doting parents. Ugh. I wish Susannah had made the team, or was allowed to travel with us as a reserve. Even with her scary father, at least she’s fun to be around. Instead I’m stuck with a spoilt little brat who can only ride pushbutton ponies and is probably going to crash and burn if she draws something she actually has to ride, and her parents who think she’s god’s gift to show jumping, even though she’s literally only just started riding like, a year or so ago. Kill me now.”

  Squib grabbed a mouthful of broom as we rode past it, and munched cheerfully as we carried on. “You know, that’s pretty much word-for-word what you told me about Susannah,” I reminded Katy. “Remember? When we first met, you hated her, but once you’d actually talked to her, she became one of our best friends. And she’s proven that she can ride more than pushbutton ponies,” I added, thinking of Forbes, the talented but challenging pony that Katy had sold Susannah a few months ago.

  “Yeah, well. I can’t see that happening with Lily,” Katy muttered. “Besides, that was your bad influence, because you went and made friends with Susannah, so I had to as well.”

  “And you haven’t regretted it,” I reminded her. “Maybe you just need to give Lily a chance. Who knows? You might even come back as BFFs.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Doubt it. She’s like, twelve. What do I have in common with a twelve-year-old?”

  I shrugged. “Emotional maturity level?”

  “Hey!” Offended, Katy reached over and took a swipe at me with her good arm. I dodged, she missed, and Tori objected to the whole situation by sticking her head between her knees and throwing an enormous buck. Katy fell forward onto Tori’s neck, and made an attempt to stay on by wrapping her arms around the mare, but Tori wasn’t having it. Another big, twisting buck followed the first one, and Katy hit the hard, dry ground with a thump.

  “Are you okay?” I jumped off Squib and reached for Tori’s reins as she spun around, but I missed. Throwing her head into the air triumphantly, the black mare took off towards home, her stirrups flapping as Squib stood goggle-eyed at the end of my reins, watching her leave us behind.

  Katy sat up, cradling her arm in its cast. “Ow.” She looked at Tori’s retreating figure, and scowled. “I’m going to kill that horse.”

  “C’mon, get up.” I grabbed her good arm and helped her to her feet. “You can ride Squib back if you want.”

  “Pass. Be safer to walk.” She took a couple of steps and winced. “Why does the ground have to be so hard?”

  I took the opportunity to make light of it. “It just feels that way because you’ve got no meat on your bones,” I teased. “You need a bit of natural padding, like me and Squib.”

  Squib nudged my elbow with his nose as Katy and I turned around and walked back towards home. There wouldn’t be any swimming for either of us today. I slung an arm over his solid neck and gave him a pat.

  “I told you that would happen,” Katy grumbled as we walked.

  “You want a trophy for being right?”

  “Yes,” she said sullenly. “Since it’s probably the only trophy Tori and I will ever win.”

  “Come on now, don’t sell yourself short,” I teased her. “There’s plenty of time left to win all kinds of prizes. Most Spectacular Fall and Best Concussion both have your name all over them.”

  “I’m definitely a shoe-in for Least Likely to Succeed,” she muttered, scuffing her boots against the dusty track. Behind us, I heard the distant roar of a high-powered dirt bike, travelling at speed.

  “I hope that’s not coming our way,” I said, glancing behind me as Squib shot forward, his ears swivelling back.

  “It’s just Phil,” Katy said, her eyes lighting up as my heart sank.

  To Katy, Phil Fitzherbert was her next-door neighbour and former best friend from her childhood. To me, he was an arrogant pain in the neck who couldn’t be trusted not to spook the ponies with his wild dirt bike riding. Unfortunately, most of the farm that we rode on belonged to his family, so we couldn’t do anything to stop him, but the sound of his bike always wound Squib right up. At first, Katy had complained about him too, complaining about him tearing up the tracks and alarming Puppet, but lately she’d changed her tune, and they’d been spending a lot of time together. As far as I was aware, they were nothing more than good frie
nds, and I hoped it would stay that way. Surely Katy would soon realise that she could do so much better than Phil, whose surly, taciturn nature and increasing demands on her attention would have been driving me up the wall. Meanwhile, Katy didn’t like Harry much either, finding his sarcastic teasing abrasive instead of amusing. As we walked on towards the setting sun, I wondered how we could be such close friends, yet have such utterly different taste in the opposite sex.

  I was walking towards my bedroom that evening, our big German Shepherd trailing loyally at my heels, when Anders came swinging out of his room on his crutches. I had to sidestep fast to avoid smacking right into my older brother, and my foot landed on Dax’s paw, making him yelp.

  “Sorry,” I told the dog as he limped away down the hall, shooting me a beleaguered look over his shoulder.

  “I feel your pain, buddy,” Anders called after him, then looked at me. “Kill any plants today?”

  “None that I know of, and I didn’t hack up anyone’s prize camellias either,” I said, making a dig at one of his more memorable past blunders. “Are you gonna keep clogging up the hallway or can I go take a shower?”

  Anders narrowed his eyes at me and made a small, sudden movement in my direction. A few months ago I’d have been fleeing in response, because it usually meant that he was about to tackle me to the floor or put me into a headlock, and demand that I apologise for teasing him. But he couldn’t take me anymore, and we both knew it. Some of the spark went out of his blue eyes as he hopped out of my way. I kept a wary eye on him as I passed, not sure whether he was going to trip me with one of his crutches on my way past, but he let me go.

  I drummed my knuckles against Astrid’s closed door as I passed it, just to irritate her, then flung open the door to the family bathroom.

  “I’m in here!” Alexia screeched, and I rolled my eyes and pulled the door shut again.

  “Lock the door next time, Lex!”

  “I can’t, the lock’s broken. Go away!”

  “When did it break?”

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t me that broke it.”

  “Are you gonna be long?” I asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “At least she’s honest,” Anders said, and I turned to see him still standing outside his bedroom, watching me.

  “Don’t you have anything better to do than annoy me?”

  Anders’s expression didn’t change. “Does it look like I’ve got anything else to do, Poss?” he asked, using my childhood nickname that nobody in my family had ever allowed me to outgrow.

  “Some people have these things called hobbies,” I told him. “Maybe you should go find one that doesn’t involve annoying the crap out of everyone who is forced to live with you.”

  Anders tilted his head to the side and almost smiled. “What would be the fun in that?”

  We were halfway through dinner that night when Dax suddenly started barking and ran to the front door with his ears on high alert.

  “Dax, enough!” Dad shouted over him, and the big dog quietened, then whined as we heard a car door shut outside. “Someone go see who that is.”

  I dropped my fork and pressed my thumb to my forehead. “Bags not.”

  Astrid and Lexi followed suit in unison, and we all looked triumphantly at Anders. He shook his head and mimed tossing a playing card into the middle of the table.

  “Cripple card,” he said.

  Dad signed and pushed his chair back, and I nudged Astrid with my elbow.

  “Go get the door.”

  “Dad’s already doing it.”

  “Dad and I have been working all day,” I reminded her. “You’ve just been sitting on your bum reading books.”

  “Too late now, anyway,” Astrid shrugged, as Dad got to his feet with a sigh.

  He was halfway to the door when we heard voices outside, and Dax started scrabbling in a frenzy of excitement at the door until it swung open. My eldest brother Aidan stepped inside with a duffel bag over his shoulder and a sheepish grin on his face.

  “Evening all.”

  “Aidan!” Mum dropped her cutlery and stood up, surprise and concern warring on her face as Aidan dropped his bag on the floor and leaned down to scruff Dax’s head. “What’re you doing home?”

  It was a fair question, and one written on all of our faces. Aidan had gone off to university months ago, before the semester had even started. He had a job down in Dunedin and last we’d all heard, he was going to be working all through the holidays and wouldn’t make it home until mid-winter at the earliest.

  “Got sick of the weather down south,” Aidan said casually as he came over and gave Mum a brief hug. “It’s freezing down there already. You guys have no idea how good you’ve got it in the Bay. That smells awesome,” he added hopefully, looking around at our loaded plates.

  “There’s more in the kitchen,” Dad said, giving Aidan a slap on the shoulder as he walked past to get him a plate of food. “Good to see you, son.”

  “Yeah, you too.” Aidan sat down next to me with a grin. “How’s it going, Poss? That wild pony hasn’t killed you yet, I see.”

  “Of course not. Squib’s perfectly safe these days, and I haven’t fallen off him in weeks. Katy’s the one with the fire-breathing dragon.”

  Aidan grinned at me. “Is she? Bet you’ll be riding that one too, soon enough.”

  “Oh, no she won’t,” Mum declared as Dad came back into the room and set a stacked plate of apricot chicken and rice in front of my brother. “You’ve had enough injuries lately.”

  “Don’t remind me,” I muttered, my recently healed collarbone giving a well-timed twinge as Aidan sat down next to me and started shovelling food into his mouth.

  But Mum wasn’t going to let him off that easy. “Why are you home so early?” she asked. “Everything okay down in Dunedin?”

  Aidan nodded, unable to talk around his mouthful of food. I wondered if that was strategic.

  “How’s Sadie?” Dad asked.

  Aidan shrugged as he swallowed thickly. “Okay, I think. Dunno really. We broke up.”

  “Oh sweetheart, I’m sorry,” Mum said as the rest of us shared startled glances.

  Aidan and Sadie had been dating since Year 11, and had both gone to Otago University so they could stay together while they were studying. Sadie had gone into pre-med, and Mum had always considered her a good influence, since Aidan wasn’t particularly bookish. His decision to follow Sadie down there and study physiotherapy had made both of our parents wildly proud. For the rest of us, we’d just been relieved that at least one of us was going to get a degree, because it took some of the pressure off.

  “It’s okay,” Aidan said. “We’d been growing apart for a while. I reckon I knew it wasn’t going to work out before we went down there, but she wanted to give it a go, so…” He shrugged again, his eyes on his plate.

  “I never liked her anyway,” Lexi declared. “I think you’re better off without her.”

  “Thanks Lex,” Aidan said, shovelling so much food into his mouth that he could barely chew it. But if he thought that was going to stop Mum’s interrogation, he was wrong.

  “And how are your classes going?” she asked. “I didn’t think your break started until next week.”

  Aidan didn’t meet her eyes as he replied through his mouthful of food. “It doesn’t. I came home early. Sorry,” he said, lifting a hand to cover his mouth as he sprayed bits of rice across the table.

  I picked a soft grain off my arm and flicked it at his head, watching in satisfaction as it landed in his ear. Bullseye.

  “You can’t just skip class, Aidan,” Mum lectured him. “You might miss something important. And what about your job?”

  Aidan stuck his finger in his ear and fished the grain of rice out, then wiped it on the edge of his plate. “I quit. Don’t look at me like that, Mum. The job sucked, okay?”

  “Lots of people work jobs that suck,” Mum reminded him snippily. “That was a good job, one a lot of students would kil
l for.”

  “Let them have it then,” Aidan said. “If they’re happy stocking shelves and being treated as slave labour, more power to them.”

  “It can’t have been slave labour,” Lexi interjected before Mum could speak again. “Slavery is when someone owns another person, and treats them like property instead of as an individual. And if they did that, you have rights under the Employment Relations Act, and you could file a grievance against them,” she added.

  “Now look what you’ve done, with your fancy speaking in metaphors,” Anders told Aidan with a wry grin. “Go on Lex, tell us more,” he added, resting his chin in his hand and staring at Lexi as if in rapt attention. She glared at him, clearly sensing that he was teasing her.

  “It’s not actually a metaphor,” Astrid piped up, adding her two cents before Lexi could continue literally laying down the law. “He said he was treated as slave labour, not that he actually was a slave, so technically it’s a simile.”

  “Who needs university anyway, when you get an education like this around the dinner table?” I asked Aidan, who grinned at me.

  Lexi started talking again, still discussing technicalities with herself and apparently failing to notice that nobody was disputing her claims. “Slavery has never existed in New Zealand – not recognised by law, anyway. Some Maori tribes used to enslave their captives, but it was never widespread practice amongst the Europeans,” she said, her brow furrowing as she dug into her mental encyclopedia of historical information. Nothing got Lexi more excited than history, and she didn’t care if everyone else was bored to tears. “It died out when –”

  “That’s enough, Lexi,” Mum said firmly, cutting her off and attempting to restart her sermon on the value of a job, but Dad interrupted her.

  “Let the boy eat his dinner without giving him an earful,” he said. “We’ll talk it over later.”

  Aidan shot Dad a grateful look and kept eating. Lexi kept muttering historical facts under her breath, and Mum sighed and took a large sip of wine. I reached for my own cutlery, only to discover that Astrid had nicked it while I wasn’t looking.