She looked up when he reached her, frowned for a moment then dug the ear phones out of their habitat. He could hear the music pouring out ever so faintly. It was something familiar. Something ye-olde-worldy from his mum’s record collection.
He could feel his face light up when he finally recognised the tune.
“Is that The Waterboys? It is, isn’t it? It’s Raggle Taggle Gypsy.”
She nodded slowly before pushing pause on the player. The frown dissipated and an inscrutable mask took its place.
“What can I do for you, Tull?” she asked evenly.
He flinched in surprise, “You know my name?”
The frown came back as she held his gaze, mixed with a sceptical curl of the mouth.
“Everyone knows who you are.”
“Not true,” he stated as he sat down, being careful not to break eye contact even for a fraction of a second. He had her but he knew it was a tenuous connection at best. There was wariness in her eyes, a preparedness to jump up and run at the drop of a hat that made her appear even more like a cat than the mere felineness of her quirky facial features suggested. He could sense her tense up more and finally looked away, picking up her empty cup to play with it.
“They know my name,” he said quietly, “but they haven’t got a clue, who I am. They know nothing real about me.”
She leant back on her chair, scrutinising him and he felt heat rising in his cheeks.
“Uh-huh,” she got up and started collecting her things, “Look, I don’t fancy you. I might be the only female in the entire building who doesn’t but I just don’t, okay? I stuck your food on my finger because you were hungry. You paid me back, we’re cool. Don’t make it uncool by running some kind of crappy teen drama scam on me. I don’t want to sound like a line from a book but this,” she made a sweeping gesture to indicate her face, “doesn’t change if I take off my invisible glasses, let my hair grow, pluck my eyebrows and slap on a bit of make up. I don’t have time for this. Besides, you’re really not my type.”
Her speech was slow and measured. Each word came out fully formed, the aural equivalent of having all the i-s dotted and all the t-s crossed. Tull realised that somewhere along the lines she’d had to work hard on this and he wondered how badly deformed she’d been at birth, how many operations she’d had to endure.
She was about to leave and he needed to stall her.
He picked up the last piece of paper she hadn’t gathered up yet, holding on to it while searching her eyes again.
“That’s me told,” he smiled earnestly then glanced at the sheet.
There were a series of roughly drawn rectangles on it with lines snaking within them, bits of song lyrics by their side and some acronyms he couldn’t fathom. He narrowed his eyes, studying the hieroglyphs in front of him. A vague memory flickered up and he laughed.
“I know what this is,” he exclaimed, “It’s a manege. These are horse riding figures, right? This,” he traced a finger along a line, “is a change of rein across the diagonal, right? I remember that. But how does the music fit in?”
She took the paper from his hand and started putting it away.
“It’s a dressage-to-music routine. It’s a display for a charity day at my yard. – Has your mum got a horse somewhere or something?”
Tull cocked his head and looked up at her, “Why does everyone always assume that riding is for girls? No, my mum hasn’t got a horse somewhere or something. I wish.”
It had come a lot more angrily than he’d intended but she smiled then, nevertheless. Still closed lipped, but it almost reached her eyes.
“You like horses?”
“Yeah,” he answered curtly.
“You ride?”
He shook his head and got up.
“No. There was never any money for it. And, you know,” he snorted sarcastically, “boys don’t ride, right? – See you around, Liberty. And good luck with your charity day.”
*****
It was Saturday mid-morning, his mum had gone out to see the group of student counsellors she supervised once a month and Tull felt at a bit of a loss. His shift at the supermarket didn’t start until 1pm and there was nothing he could think of that he wanted to watch or play or do until then.
He felt like this a lot of the time lately, like he was supposed to be doing something else with his life time, and his encounter the day before had amplified that feeling manifold.
There had been so much purpose in her scribbles, so much focus, so much love.
Liberty.
He sighed loudly into the emptiness of his room, went to the bathroom and ran a bath.
Half an hour later, he heard a noise downstairs through the open bathroom door.
The letter box flap opened, followed by a soft thud on the mat. Curious, he dragged himself out of the tub, wrapped a towel around his hips and went down the stairs, trailing water behind him.
On the floor in the hallway lay a brown jiffy bag. The original address, Brownleaf Stables, had been crossed out and TULL written above it in fat marker pen.
He’d just dried his hands on the towel to pick it up when he suddenly thought he could hear hooves in the distance outside.
Without a thought he opened the front door and the full force of the cold winter air hit his naked torso. He stepped out nevertheless to look up and down the road and sure enough, the big rump of a black, hairy Vanner was just disappearing around the corner. Tull had been too late to see the rider but his thumping heart had its own ideas.
He stepped back inside with chattering teeth, shut the door and picked up the parcel. He took it upstairs to his bedroom, climbed under the duvet and ripped it open.
There was a book inside.
He extracted it and a note fluttered out.
He turned the paperback in his hand. On the cover was a horse’s head but despite the pink lettering of the title it didn’t really look like a girlie book. It looked kind of cool and well thumbed. Like a book that had been read a million times.
He picked up the letter.
Tull,
Got Amelia to tell me where you live. Hope that’s ok.
Just wanted to say sorry if I came across as rude yesterday.
I haven’t got much practise in talking to boys that I don’t share any DNA with. Actually, make that none.
You asked why everyone always makes the assumption that boys don’t ride. It’s not true. Most of the best riders in the world are still men.
I don’t know if you read much but I’ve enclosed one of my favourite books of all time for you to borrow (I’d like it back please). One of the main characters in it is a boy who rides. There are many other books about boys and their horses, like “The Black Stallion” series and the “Flicka” trilogy but most of them were written in the 1940s. This one is set in the here and now and it is very special to me. Hope you like it.
Liberty
Her writing was as measured and neat as her speech had been. He read the note a dozen or so times before he picked up the book again.
If he was honest, despite being a stickler for grammar and capable of beating his mum at Scrabble any day, he wasn’t much of a reader but as he turned the dog-eared volume over, his eyes caught on the word ‘scar-faced’ among the blurb on the back.
It dawned on him then that this was more than a story to her. He crawled further under the duvet, opened it and began to read.
It was twenty to one when he realised that he was definitely going to be late for work.
*****
The big friendly chestnut pushed its nose into Tull’s cupped hands and tenderly snuffled around his palms, leaving the boy with goose bumps all over. While his outer shell was leaning nonchalantly against the stable door outside of which the horse was tied up, on the inside little Tull was excitedly jumping up and down with amazement.
He’d simply strolled in.
Just like that.
Heart in hand he’d hurried past the sign into the yar
d, headed for the indoor stable block adjacent to what looked like a massive barn structure and had walked through the entrance into the wide aisle that divided two long rows of stable boxes.
He had never imagined it to be this easy.
There were a fair number of people about, grooming their horses, mucking out or tacking down after their Sunday afternoon ride. As he’d arrived, one girl had just finished saddling a woolly looking bay pony and was leading it out through another door situated somewhere between the row of boxes on the right, into the main building.
He had surveyed the picture in front of him and had soon recognised the sun around which all these people-horse planets were orbiting. She was an older lady with short salt-and-pepper hair who was crouching down by the left hind leg of a large, fidgety chestnut, trying to bandage it up.
Tull had made a beeline for the horse and was now standing by its head, still unacknowledged by the human but more than appreciated by the animal, which had started licking his palms with long, sloppy drags of the tongue.
“You!” the woman looked up and narrowed her eyes at Tull, crinkling up her abundance of laughter lines, “Whatever it is you’re doing at the front there, keep doing it. The oaf is finally standing still.”
She returned to wrapping the leg and when she was finished got up slowly, a hand on her back.
“Ugh, I’m getting old. Thank you for your help. You might want to take the hand away now. If he likes the taste of someone, he’ll go on forever. And he likes you.”
Tull waited until the chestnut had finished testing out the spaces between his fingers with the tip of its tongue and had returned to long licks of the palm before he took the hand away. He dried it on his jeans and raised it to stroke the horse’s strong neck.
“That’s alright,” he said, looking into the eye of the animal, “I like him, too.”
“I can see that,” the woman answered with laughter in her voice, “I’m Lisa Vance, I run this ship, what can I do for you?”
Tull dragged his attention away from the horse and turned to her fully.
“I’m looking for Liberty.”
Suddenly the woman’s demeanour changed completely. All humour drained from her eyes as she looked him up and down, unashamedly appraising his worthiness. If there had been space Tull would have taken a step back. He quickly got the feeling that he was being found entirely wanting.
“She lent me something. I’ve come to give it back,” he added quickly to justify his temporary existence in this solar system.
The woman nodded tersely then indicated the door the bay pony had disappeared through earlier.
“She’s in there. Riding.”
“Thank you,” Tull replied and started making towards the gap between the boxes.
“You can’t go through that way,” Lisa Vance sighed loudly, “But if you turn left out of the building, there is a side entrance to the spectator area.”
Tull followed her directions and soon found himself inside an indoor manege, standing on the raised floor next to the sand school, leaning against the solid wooden panel that separated arena from platform. Behind him were three tiers of solid stage rises complete with rows of empty seats.
There were three riders in the school, all obviously exercising their horses to their own agenda. One was the girl on the shaggy and rather overweight pony, another was a woman who was riding a tall ribby dapple grey and then there were Liberty and the same black gypsy cob she had delivered the parcel on the day before. Or so Tull assumed. The rump looked the same. The rest of the pony was as roundly muscled as its rear and its bones thick set and heavy. Nevertheless it seemed surprisingly agile and light footed.
Presently, Liberty and the cob were cantering along the long side of the arena, with some change of movement every three strides. The long mane and feathers of the pony were flying with the motion, making it look like a wild, beautiful dance.
Indeed, the whole scene reminded him of the ballroom his mum had dragged him to on their holiday to Tenerife four years ago. Only that ballroom had been hot and sticky whereas in here it was freezing.
In front of him the three pairs of dancers commanded the floor, each pair in its own world, weaving figures and changing speed in entirely uncorrelated patterns. Tull couldn’t help wondering how on earth they didn’t bump into one another but after a while he realised that there was some kind of traffic code in operation.
The woman on the grey slowed down to a walk, steered away from the outside lane, rested the reins on her horse’s neck, placed a leg in front of the saddle, lifted the flap and loosened the girth underneath. The girl on the bay and Liberty were currently trotting in opposite directions of travel. They passed each other, left shoulder to left shoulder, before the girl on the bay did exactly what the grey’s rider had done. Liberty turned around in the next corner, still at a trot, and rode up to the girl’s side. She slowed her cob to a walk, put the reins in her left hand and extracted an earphone from her right ear. They were walking two abreast towards where Tull was standing now but Liberty still didn’t appear to have noticed him.
“She’s never going to lose any weight like this, Charlotte,” he heard Liberty scold the girl, “You don’t just ride around for twenty minutes and then give up. She needs more exercise. You need to get her heart rate going. If she looks like this now, in the middle of winter, what do you think she’s going to look like in spring? She’ll end up with laminitis again.”
The girl shrugged, “I’m cold, Lips. I want to go home.”
They’d come level with Tull now and the boy’s heart was beating in his throat. They rode past him and it promptly sank to the bottom of his stomach.
“Well, if you ride her properly, it’ll soon warm you up. Don’t just let her carry you, ride her,” Liberty continued and shook her head in obvious dismay, reining her own pony to a halt. She made it go backwards five neat steps then stopped next to Tull, patting the neck of the black.
“Good boy,” she praised the pony before cocking her head to look at Tull.
Evidently, it was frown time again.
Before she could say anything, Tull pulled the paperback out of his bag and laid it on top of the partition.
“I’ve come to return this,” he explained.
“Oh,” beyond the frown her face momentarily seemed to fall but the inscrutable mask quickly took over, “You didn’t want to read it then?”
“What? No. I’ve read it. I loved it. It is singlehandedly responsible for me getting about four hours sleep in the last twenty-four hours. I couldn’t put it down. And I don’t normally read. It’s a really cool book, Liberty, thank you,” feeling extremely self-conscious all of a sudden in the beam of her sparkling eyes, he diverted his attention to the pony who was still standing good as gold, “He’s a Vanner, isn’t he?”
She leant onto her pony’s neck and smiled at him, a proper big smile that showed the teeth, “That’s what the Americans usually call them but yes, he is. We usually say Irish Cob.”
“Or Gypsy Cob?”
“Or Gypsy Cob,” she agreed, catching his flitting eyes again, “I need to warm him down now but if you’ve got time, do you want me to show you around the yard afterwards?”
*****
It was still pitch black when Tull left his house the next morning and he pondered for a while when he’d last risen so early out of his own free will. He put the hood of his kagool up to protect his head from the constant cold drizzle and wished he’d chosen a thicker jacket.
As he walked briskly towards his destination, he tried to remember all the horses’ names she’d introduced him to the day before as well as all the other bits and pieces of information she’d strewn like breadcrumbs along their way around the yard. Their round had consisted of almost three hours in the end, during which she had effortlessly woven him into her duties.
‘Hold this’, ‘Muck out that’, ‘Here, this is how you do this,’ had constituted most of their conversation. And Tull had
loved every minute of it. He’d got to help her bring in horses from the field, brush and feed them, refill hay nets and put night rugs on.
At times he’d asked himself whether he was more of a hindrance than a help but if he had been then Liberty had not let on. On the contrary, she had been a patient, kind tutor, always cool and reserved but also encouraging even when he’d got stuff wrong.
The only thing marring the experience had been Lisa Vance’s obvious antipathy. The owner of Brownleaf Stables couldn’t have made it any clearer that she didn’t like him hanging around but when he’d mentioned it to Liberty on the way home she’d shrugged it off.
“Hang around and she’ll come around,” she had said during their goodbyes on her doorstep, “We could really do with an extra pair of hands right now. Especially with the charity day coming up. She’d adore you already if you had an eye missing or a limp or really bad acne. You’re just too pretty is your problem. If you can show her you’re a grafter, she’ll start seeing the ugly inside and then you’ll be fine.”
It was by far one of the weirdest things anyone had ever said to him but he’d heard the invitation wrapped inside it.
Although standing outside her house now, at stupid o’clock in the morning waiting for her to emerge he began doubting whether she’d meant it. Liberty’s face when she stepped out of the door and spotted him didn’t reassure him either. She stopped in front of him, silently did up the long oil skin coat she was wearing and then looked into his eyes incredulously.
“What on earth are you doing here?”
Tull shrugged and mustered his widest smile.
“You said you needed help and that you start at half past five. I figured we’d walk together.”
She kept staring at him as if frozen in time and Tull felt reminded of when she’d dressed him down in the dinner hall. He hoped she wasn’t going to repeat the performance and just leave him standing here.
Finally she shook her head.
“I thought maybe you might want to come for a couple of hours in the afternoon some days, like yesterday. Help out a bit. I didn’t realise you were going to apply for my job.”
“I’m not. I just thought…I wasn’t expecting to get paid or anything…I just…oh man…do you want me to go away?” he stuttered feeling like a complete fool.
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