Pony Jumpers 9- Nine Lives

by Kate Lattey

  “Nice one,” Anders said as a huge moth hurtled into the house over his head and started bashing itself against the hallway light. Dax barked at it, and down the hall, I heard raised voices.

  I frowned as I walked into the house. Yelling wasn’t unusual around here, but it wasn’t often Aidan who was shouting. It was now though, and I looked quizzically at Anders as I dumped my bags in the middle of the floor. He shut the door behind me and raised his eyebrows, and I tuned into the shouted words.

  “Someone had to do something!” Aidan snapped. “You’re running at a loss, Dad. You might as well not be working at all for all the money you’re bringing in. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can make this into a viable business, if you just take a risk on occasion.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked Anders as I peeled my socks off and dropped them onto the floor.

  “Aidan got some big landscaping contract,” he said, and my heart leapt.

  “You’re kidding. He got it?”

  Anders lifted a quizzical eyebrow. “You knew about it?”

  “Yeah.” I paused, trying to hear what Dad’s rebuttal was, but his voice was pitched lower and I couldn’t make out his words. “I’m guessing Dad’s not thrilled.”

  “He turned it down. Aidan’s furious.”

  I sighed. The big moth swooped down towards the floor, and Dax snapped at it. To his great astonishment, he actually caught it. He immediately spat it back out, then stared as it fluttered helplessly on the rug, half-drowned in dog slobber.

  Laughing at his expression, I crouched down and gave Dax a sympathetic hug as Anders squashed the moth with one of his crutches.

  “Why’d he turn it down?” I asked my brother.

  “Reckons it’s too big of a job for three people. Especially with the tight deadline they’ve set for the first stage. Dad reckons he’d have to work twelve hour days for the next two weeks to get it done.”

  I thought glumly about the big subdivision. Maybe Aidan had bitten off more than he could chew.

  “Can’t we hire some extra help?”

  “Not enough to get it done in time. And Dad reckons he couldn’t afford to pay that many workers anyway.”

  I dug my fingers through Dax’s thick coat, thinking hard. There had to be an answer. If I’d learned anything lately, it was that where there was a will, there was usually a way.

  “What if they were volunteers?”

  Anders snorted. “Who’re you going to find to volunteer for a job like that?”

  I grinned at him as I stood up and headed towards the kitchen. “You leave that to me.”

  19

  You’re Welcome

  The vet was running late, and Deb was livid. The afternoon wore on as we waited, unable to even start making evening feeds until she had been and gone, because the mere presence of a person in the feed room would start a riot. Squib’s tummy was telling him that it was past dinnertime, and he stood at the gate of his paddock and squealed at me periodically in a totally unsubtle reminder that he was starving to death.

  In the stables, Katy was lying on her back on the narrow partition wall, watching a show jumping video on her phone. Deb was pacing up and down on her crutches, complaining about the vet’s lateness to anyone who would listen, which was basically just me, and I was in Tori’s stable, brushing her jet black coat. She was in a good mood, and was letting me brush under her stomach and across her flanks with a minimum of fuss. She’d even let me bandage her tail without much objection, and her placid attitude had me slightly worried that there was going to be nothing to find, that her twitchiness was just a bad attitude and this whole endeavour was a waste of time. If there was nothing physically wrong with her, the chances of Katy selling her would increase dramatically. But if there was something, something that could be fixed, then Tori had a chance. As long as it could be fixed. It’s not easy to brush a horse while you have your fingers crossed, but I persevered somehow.

  “We should’ve just booked Clive,” Deb said for the twentieth time as she paced past Tori’s box. “He’s always on time, or when he’s not, he at least calls to let us know.”

  I glanced at her as I ran the body brush down Tori’s shoulder. Susannah had given Katy her vet’s number so she could discuss her symptoms in more detail, and they’d ended up booking her to come and see the mare, since she had portable scanning equipment that Clive’s practice lacked.

  “Take a chill pill, Mum,” Katy said, her eyes still fixed on her phone. “She’s probably got some emergency to deal with. Either that, or someone has warned her about this black devil and she’s trying to come up with an excuse not to show up.”

  But as she spoke, we heard the crunch of tyres on gravel, and a silver ute came bumping down the potholed driveway.

  “About time,” Deb said, making her way over to meet it as it pulled up.

  I gave Tori a gentle pat as Katy sat up, swinging her legs to the side and jumping down into the empty stable next door.

  “This could be the first day of the rest of your life, Tor,” I told her. “And even if it’s not, even if there’s nothing…well, at least we did our best.”

  She turned her head and nudged my hip, and I was sure that she knew I was on her side.

  “Hi AJ.”

  I looked up to see Susannah walking up to me with a smile.

  “Hi!” I left Tori’s side and went over to her. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “Tagging along,” she smiled. “Sorry we’re late, but we got a call out on the way here for a horse that was colicking, and we had to go there first.”

  “Of course.” I glanced over at Deb, who was watching the diminutive blonde vet unloading equipment from the back of her ute. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Deb laughed, and I felt myself relax. All was obviously forgiven.

  Moments later, Lesley came towards us, carrying a needle and syringe. “Right, who’s the lucky person that’s going to hold her still?”

  “I guess that’d be me,” I said, then turned to Tori. “C’mon then, you. Come get stabbed in the neck with a needle.”

  Tori stood still as I clipped up her lead rope and held her in the middle of her stable.

  “You are a beauty, aren’t you?” Lesley greeted her, placing the capped syringe on the partition before unlooping the bright pink stethoscope from around her neck. “Let’s just listen to your heart first, my lady. Just to be sure there’s nothing funky going on in there.”

  Tori eyed her suspiciously, but allowed Lesley to listen to her heart rate without argument. The vet nodded approval when she’d finished, straightening up and handing the stethoscope to Susannah before picking up the syringe.

  “Heartbeat’s strong, so I’m happy to sedate her.”

  “I’m not sure that she feels the same way,” I said, and Lesley laughed.

  Tori eyed the vet suspiciously as she returned to her side, and tensed up her muscles when she touched her neck.

  “Now don’t go making my life difficult,” Lesley warned her good-naturedly.

  Deb snorted. “That’s her main area of expertise.”

  “It’s on the front page of her CV,” Katy concurred. “Make life as difficult as possible for the people around you. Check.”

  “Don’t listen to them, Tori,” I told the horse. “It’s okay to be a bit scared. Nobody likes needles.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Lesley agreed, running her hand down Tori’s hard neck. “Just relax, girl. It’s for your own good, I promise.”

  But Tori didn’t believe her. As soon as the vet pinched up a flap of skin, the big mare leapt sideways as though she’d been stung, almost crashing into the opposite wall.

  “Woah, girl,” I said, trying to calm her. “Easy now.”

  I looked uneasily at Lesley, knowing that Clive would’ve been swearing black and blue by now, but she just grinned at me.

  “Spoke too soon, huh? Okay, let’s go again and this time I’ll be quicker. Cover her eye with one hand
so she can’t see me coming. That’ll distract her too.” She nodded confidently at me. “Just stroke your hand over her eye, nice and gentle. She’ll close it reflexively and then I’ll pop the needle in when she least expects it.”

  I nodded, pretending to believe that it’d be that easy. “Okay.”

  “Soon as you like.”

  I moved in closer to Tori and raised my hand to her face. She threw her head up, sticking her nose in the air defiantly, and I looked over at Lesley.

  “Take your time,” she said calmly. “Rushing her will only make it take longer.”

  Her relaxed demeanour put me at ease, and I stroked Tori’s chin gently, then her cheek. She lowered her head a bit, and I fossicked in my pocket for a few bits of sweet feed to encourage her. As meagre as the offering was, it inspired Tori to lower her head enough for me to stroke over her eye. Her eyelashes fluttered under my hand, and I ran my thumb gently across her eyelid as it closed. On the second pass, she flinched and tried to move her head away, but I kept going, determined to distract her for long enough for Lesley to get the needle in.

  “Good girl, almost done,” Lesley said, the cap of the needle between her teeth, and I stared at her, amazed. She’d moved in so quickly for the injection that even I hadn’t seen her coming, and now she was done.

  She took the needle out, and Tori pulled a vicious face at her.

  “Not friends yet, are we?” Lesley asked her cheerfully. “Ah well, you’ll come around. Give her a moment to recover her dignity, then bring her out and we’ll take her into the crush before she gets too sleepy.”

  It was fortunate that Katy and her mum had ended up with wooden railings left over when they’d had their paddocks fenced years ago, because Deb had had the inspired idea to use the leftover timber to build a crush at one end of the stables. It wasn’t used much, mostly as an excess storage space for hay bales and broken buckets, but Katy and I had cleared it out a couple of days ago in preparation.

  The sedative kicked in fast, and after only a few moments’ hesitation, Tori allowed me to lead her into the narrow crush, and Susannah and Katy quickly slid the bar across behind her, shutting her into the narrow space. Tori took a step backwards and bumped the back rail, then flattened her ears.

  “I know. It’s not for too long,” I promised her, stroking her face gently as she struggled to keep her wits about her.

  “Is she supposed to be this quiet?” I asked Lesley as she set up her equipment. Tori’s eyes were closed and she was leaning against one side of the wooden railing. I was starting to wonder whether she’d even still be standing if she wasn’t being held up by the crush.

  “She’ll wake up in a minute,” Katy said, pulling a face as Lesley slid a long glove on and pulled it up past her elbow.

  “Okay, people,” the vet said. “Now for the fun part. Bucket, please.”

  In the end, the scan itself only took a few minutes. Lesley lubed up her gloved arm, then lifted the mare’s bandaged tail and slid her arm inside her, a procedure which Tori unsurprisingly objected to, finding a new reserve of energy to start kicking out, despite the sedation. But her defiance didn’t last long, and I watched in disgusted fascination as Lesley unpacked manure from the mare’s rectum, then inserted the camera and started the scan. From my position at Tori’s head, I could barely see the grainy images on the ultrasound monitor, and probably wouldn’t be able to tell what I was looking at even if I could, so I focused on keeping the mare as calm and still as possible. I’d gone back to stroking her over her eye, which was a good trick to distract her from the goings-on at the other end of her body. She leaned her heavy head on my arm, which was starting to ache under the weight, but I couldn’t bring myself to move away from the most affection she’d ever given me. Even if it was only because she was drugged up to her eyeballs.

  “A-ha.” Lesley’s voice jolted me back to attention.

  “What is it?” Susannah asked, at the same time as Katy spoke.

  “How can you see anything in all that fuzz?”

  “Years of training,” Lesley replied. I watched as she moved her arm inside the mare, adjusting the camera. “Okay, freeze.” Susannah tapped a key on the ultrasound machine, and Lesley nodded at the image. “See that?”

  “No,” Katy said, but Susannah was pointing at the screen.

  “That there? Is that the ovary?”

  “It’s one of them.”

  “And?” Deb demanded.

  “Definitely abnormal. It’s three or four times the size it should be.” She moved her hand and nodded to Susannah, who hit the key again to capture another image.

  “Is it a tumour?” Katy asked, her eyes skating across mine before returning to the screen.

  “Looks that way,” Lesley agreed. “Granulosa-Theca cell tumour. Probably about the size of a chicken egg.”

  As Deb swore under her breath, and the others gaped at each other, I breathed out a sigh of relief. Leaning in closer to Tori, I pressed my cheek against her face. Thank you. I didn’t know who I was praying to, but I had to thank someone. There was a reason, after all. I was right.

  “So would that be what was causing her bad behaviour?”

  “Without a doubt it’d be having some effect,” Lesley said. “Even the smaller tumours can have a big effect on horses, and sometimes you find…holy cow.”

  What?” Katy demanded.

  Lesley said nothing for a moment, just moved the camera around. Tori tossed her head anxiously and surged backwards.

  “Woah, mare. I know, I feel ya,” the vet reassured her, before nodding to Susannah. “There. You see that?”

  Susannah tilted her head, looking at the image on the screen. “Is that…” Her eyes went wide. “Is all that…?”

  “That,” Lesley said, “is the mama of all ovarian tumours.”

  “How big is it?” I asked as the others crowded around the screen, blocking my view of the grey fuzz.

  Lesley looked at me. “Probably close to the size of a rugby ball, if not bigger.”

  My jaw dropped. “Are you serious?”

  “As a heart attack. A few more photos, then we’re done,” she told Tori, patting her rump gently with her free hand.

  Shortly afterwards, once Lesley had extracted her arm and her ultrasound equipment, we released Tori from the crush, slowly backing her out and returning her to her stable. She walked slowly, her steps wobbly and her head low.

  “How long will it take for her to bounce back?” I asked, looking over the door as I latched it behind the dozy horse.

  “It’ll be a few hours before she’s completely herself again,” Lesley said. “Just leave her to sleep for a while. Give her some hay when she tells you she’s hungry, and keep her in overnight if you can.”

  “Speaking of hay, I guess I better make some while the sun is shining,” Katy said, letting herself into the stable and approaching the sleepy mare.

  It was the first time in a long time that Katy had touched Tori willingly and out of a desire to communicate with her, rather an a sense of obligation. I watched as she stepped up to Tori’s head and started stroking the white stripe between her eyes. Tori had lifted her head slightly at Katy’s approach, but then she stood quietly, letting Katy touch her without objection. My friend smiled, and I turned away, unprepared for the surge of jealousy that I felt at the sight of them.

  It’s what you wanted, I reminded myself. You want Katy to keep her, and now she might.

  “AJ, come have a look at this,” Susannah urged, and I made my way over to the ultrasound screen, trying to focus on the blurry images that she was showing me.

  Behind us, Deb was talking to Lesley, making plans to book Tori in for the surgery that would remove the ovaries and – hopefully – make her into a more tractable, sweet-natured horse.

  “Some of them have a personality change overnight,” Lesley was saying. “Once the tumours are gone and their hormone levels rebalance, they go back to being nice, well-mannered horses.”

  “We
don’t know that she was ever particularly nice,” Deb said. “She’s been like this since we’ve had her, and we found out later that she already had a reputation for being difficult. Who knows what her true personality even is?”

  “Well, I guess you’ll find out,” Lesley said. “But it’s unlikely to be worse than what it was.”

  “Sophie said she was sweet at first,” Katy said. I turned to look at her, and saw that Tori was resting her sleepy head against Katy’s shirt. I flinched, and looked away. Susannah’s arm bumped against mine, and I turned to see a sympathetic expression in her eyes.

  “At least now you know that you were right.”

  “Yeah.” I made myself smile at her, and slowly the elation returned. “I was.”

  The sun was shining on my back as I set my foot on the top of the spade and pressed down. It bit into the soil, and I felt a sense of satisfaction as I dug out the hole, setting the soil off to the side and squaring the edges before moving on to the next plant. Astrid was following along behind me, dropping fertiliser tablets into the holes, and as she scurried off to refill her container, I paused, resting on my spade as I looked around the busy subdivision. Katy was working alongside me, setting plants into the holes that I dug and pressing the soil close around them. Across from me, Harry was diligently digging, working hard as the sun beat down on the back of his neck and turned it pink. Phil was here too, dragged along by Katy in an attempt to convince me that he was of some use, and I had to admit that he seemed to be taking the challenge seriously. He was planting steadily over on Harry’s side of the garden, keeping up easily with my boyfriend as the garden took shape around us.

  I looked across the road to where Jesse was pushing a wheelbarrow full of mulch towards another, larger street garden. Tamati and some of the other boys that had played rugby with Anders were spreading it out and raking it smooth around the plants, and Anders himself was sitting behind a folding table near the gate, his braced leg stuck out in front of him as he organised our volunteers. The entire St Helen’s girls’ rugby team were hard at work in yet another plot under Aidan’s supervision, and even Lexi had done her part for the cause, making stacks of sandwiches to feed the troops. The whole place was a hive of activity, and I grinned in satisfaction as I surveyed the large areas that were already planted up. There was still a lot to do, and Dad and Aidan had their work cut out for them over the few days before the deadline arrived, but the biggest sections were almost complete, and it was now a manageable goal.