A Horse for Angel

by Sarah Lean

  Dorothy tottered out behind me. Her pale golden eyes stared up at me. “Go away,” I whispered through my teeth.

  Rita came across the yard. She saw what I’d done, but didn’t say anything. She shooed Dorothy back into the stable with the foal and closed the door.

  “The chicken and geese need putting to bed,” she said softly. “Come on.”

  We held our arms wide. The geese were always much quieter in the evening. They moved like water as we guided them into the stables. The chicken went up the plank to a higher shelf. The six growing goslings scrabbled after her. They ducked under her. Bits of their downy bodies poked out here and there. They peeped softly, jostling for a warm spot. The hen twitched her eyes and shimmied her feathers to tuck them all under her wings. The lines in Rita’s face curved into a smile.

  “Why are you leaving?” I said. “You like it here, don’t you?”

  She sighed.

  “I was born and raised here. It’s been my life. My parents left the farm to me and Mr Hemsworth. We had no children of course, but then we had our animals. But that’s all gone now. I can’t do it on my own.”

  I remembered Aunt Liv asking her how she could leave all this behind and I knew we were both thinking about the people and the animals that were missing when Mrs Barker’s Land Rover rattled into the yard. My heart rumbled with the sound of Belle as she whinnied from the horsebox.

  “I asked her to bring Belle down,” Rita said, standing up straight and pushing her shoulders back as if she was making herself stronger.

  Rita invited Mrs Barker in and asked me to make a cup of tea. I listened to them talking as I hid behind the door in the hallway.

  “Could be anyone bidding in that auction on Saturday and who knows where she’ll end up,” Mrs Barker said. “I’m prepared to pay for her now, before she goes to auction.”

  I heard the tea being poured.

  “I’ve never known you to take an interest in horses before, Elizabeth. Your family have been rearing chickens for as long as I can remember. Why the sudden interest?”

  “Look, Rita,” Mrs Barker said, laughing a little, “I know Belle’s from a good line and I’m prepared to pay more for her. I’ll make sure she’s well looked after. What do you say? Take the cheque and we’ll say it’s done.”

  A moment passed. “What about her foal?” Rita said.

  I heard a cup being put down on the saucer.

  “Old Chambers didn’t think we should bother with the foal. But I’ll make sure he’s taken care of.”

  “So you don’t believe in the hundredth horse myth?” Rita said.

  “Bunkum,” said Mrs Barker. “You don’t believe it either.”

  “No, of course not. But I didn’t know whether you did.”

  “This place is full of old wives’ tales and other nonsense,” Mrs Barker laughed. “Why would one more horse spoil the rest of the herd?”

  Why were they talking about the hundredth horse as something bad again? That wasn’t what Angel had said at all. The hundredth horse was supposed to be the one to come for the princess. I shook my head. BOTH of them were made-up stories anyway!

  “Not before Saturday,” I heard Rita say. “And I want Belle left here until then.”

  Mrs Barker didn’t finish her tea. She led Belle from the horsebox, telling Rita she’d be back on Saturday morning before the auction.

  Belle walked into the yard like she was queen of the place. She made the bricks and air and fields of the farm seem alive. She filled the yard with her call. But not until Mrs Barker left did Rita let Lunar come out of the stable.

  We watched them for a minute and then I asked her, “Do you believe Mrs Barker, that she’ll look after Lunar.”

  “I’ve no reason not to,” Rita said. “Only I’d like you to tell me the story about the hundredth horse, the one that Angel told you.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Rita said slowly. “I know it’s only an old wives’ tale, but the story everyone around here knows is to do with a wild horse and how that one wild horse turned the rest of the herd wild. You’ve heard the saying one bad apple spoils the barrel?”

  I shook my head.

  “It means that one bad person can affect everyone. And I’m beginning to wonder that if Angel told you a different story, then she might mean something else by it.”

  LFIE AND GEM PAINTED FLOWERS AND RAINBOW stripes on the cart to make it look nice. Aunt Liv went up in the loft and came down with a box of fairy lights and I used some battery packs from their camping lamps and wired it all to the cart.

  “Are you going to look after the foal now?” Gem said as I left them with paint on their faces and hands.

  I nodded.

  “Good,” she said. “He needs somebody like you.”

  And that made me go back and kiss her, and Alfie blushed when I hugged him too.

  Rita was at her sewing machine. I took Lunar in to see her. She was helping Aunt Liv make Alfie and Gem’s pea costumes for the Spring Parade.

  “Would you like to see what I’ve got for you as well?” Rita said.

  “For me?”

  Rita beckoned me over.

  “Angel asked me to make something for you.”

  “She did?”

  Rita chuckled, but sadness reddened her eyes for a moment. Maybe she was thinking what I was thinking. I’d only be here for a few more days. We didn’t know if we were going to see Angel ever again.

  “Under the bed.” Rita pointed.

  There were frames made from coat hangers shaped into long, thin ovals. Rita had stretched white material over the frames, then sewn feathers on the top, just like real wings – made from black and white and grey goose feathers. The feathers that Angel had collected from Aunt Liv’s lawn!

  I held the wings and Lunar came straight over to look at them. He raised his head and snickered, his eyes wide and shining, but I didn’t really understand what they were for.

  I looked at Rita. All the words disappeared and neither of us could speak. Angel wasn’t who people said she was. Rita and I knew that.

  And then Belle whinnied from outside. We heard her hooves clatter on the porch and went out to see. We took Lunar back to her, but she was unsettled, lifting her head high, her nostrils breathing in big bellyfuls of air. She paced around the yard, Lunar pressed to her side.

  “What is it, Belle?” Rita asked.

  Belle called again, flicking her tail, tossing her mane. She looked to the sky, to the trees behind the farmhouse. I ran my hands over her, felt the stirring huge life in her, saw the black and the white of her skin.

  I remembered the moon. I remembered how Angel had said that although part of the moon might be hidden in shadows, and you couldn’t see it all, the whole of it was still there. You just had to use your imagination to see it differently. I looked around the yard. I didn’t see what was missing. I saw what was actually there.

  “Nothing’s missing, Rita,” I said, suddenly bursting with what I knew Angel had meant. “It’s all still here!”

  “What’s all here?” Rita said.

  “All the things that belong to the farm. They’re all still here somewhere, even if you can’t see them.”

  Rita chuckled. “You’re starting to sound like someone else we know.”

  I grabbed her arms to make her face me, so sure I had to be heard, to try to make sense of what was whirling in my mind.

  “Angel was right, Rita! Look!”

  “I’m looking,” she said.

  “The chickens and the geese. Belle and the foal and the goat, and I know the goat’s not yours, but that doesn’t matter.”

  I had to wave my arms, because what was inside me was fighting to get out.

  “And all your horses, Rita. They’re not sold yet!”

  I dragged her back into the hallway.

  “The clock’s ticking again, like a heart beating, like it’s alive, and it makes you think about Mr Hemsworth, as if he’s here. That’s what an
gels do, Rita! They bring things back to life. And she did it for you!”

  Rita’s hand held her mouth, her other arm tightly folded around her.

  I thought of the carousel.

  “Don’t you see? It’s like all the pieces of my carousel. They are just bits and pieces until they all come together. Then they make something extraordinary, something alive. Angel’s been trying to put your farm back together again because it was so special to her too!”

  The tin girl was there in my mind.

  “Where am I?” she whispered.

  I could hardly catch my breath, overwhelmed by what I suddenly knew. That one special piece that made everything else work.

  “Angel’s here, Rita! I know she is and Belle knows too!”

  I ran. I knew exactly where she was.

  The caravan was in shadow. The big coat was in a heap on the floor inside.

  I went round the back and saw how Angel had been able to climb up and down. A plastic garden chair, a water butt on bricks, a piece of rope tied to a branch. I climbed up. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be, but I could see why Angel had gone up there. From the top you could see if anyone was coming down the lane, or into the yard, or across the farm’s empty fields. It was a good place for a lookout.

  I looked up, stared and stared into the branches until my eyes were sure what they could see in the dark shadows and between the big hand-shaped leaves.

  My scalp tingled. Angel was crouched on a branch high up in the tree.

  “Come down,” I said.

  She didn’t move for a moment.

  “Nobody knows you’re here. Just me and Rita.”

  It was harder going backwards to get down off the caravan roof. I didn’t know how Angel had jumped down before. She still got to the ground before me.

  I’d never seen her without the coat before. She was just a skinny girl, wearing the same scruffy clothes, who needed a bath and a hairbrush. She was just a girl that nobody looked after.

  “Belle’s here,” I said. “Come and see.”

  We ran hand in hand back to the farmyard. I was just as fast as Angel until I let her go ahead. Belle didn’t care what she looked like, or anything bad she might have done. Belle knew the inside of her, and so did I.

  They lowered their heads. Angel leaned against Belle, as if there was nothing left of Angel. And Belle just stood steady, like an immovable mountain, with Lunar nuzzling at Angel’s side.

  I waited in the bathroom. Waited while Rita talked to Angel about how the police had been here. I sat on the floor of the bathroom against the bath and turned the taps on full, so they whistled with the pressure from the water. So I couldn’t hear the things I didn’t want to hear.

  Rita opened the door, led Angel in and we left her to have a bath.

  We sat in silence until Angel came out wearing Mr Hemsworth’s bathrobe. It dragged on the floor behind her; it swamped her. That’s when I knew the coat she’d been wearing was Mr Hemsworth’s. A part of the farm as it used to be. She wore it so that Rita wasn’t alone, so she wasn’t alone either. She’d found the grandfather clock key in his pocket.

  “Mr Hemsworth would have given the shirt off his back to see you were all right,” Rita said. “I wonder what he’d be thinking now.”

  Angel chewed her top lip, but couldn’t look at us.

  Rita made a fire and we sat together, listening to the crackling wood. I brushed Angel’s hair, untangled the knots. I plaited it. Rita made some sweet tea. What else could we have done for her?

  “You know I have to tell the police you’re here,” Rita said.

  I heard the hurt in her voice, that she didn’t want to say what had to be said. I saw concern in her eyes.

  Angel nodded.

  I felt the panic in my stomach, in my throat. Why did this all have to be over? It felt unfinished, like the carousel without the tin girl. Like something was still missing.

  “Not yet… please,” I said. “Not until I go too.”

  Rita’s mouth smiled and she nodded. Angel’s eyes hung on to me just as I was trying to hang on to her.

  “You look like you need a good meal inside you, girl. I’ll make you something to eat.”

  Rita went out to the kitchen.

  Angel went under the bed and brought out the wings that she’d asked Rita to make. She smoothed the goose feathers and then gave them to me.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What are they for?”

  We stared into the fire at the flickering life.

  “You know when I came and helped with the piglet,” Angel said. “And then the next day you asked me if I was an angel?”

  I nodded. I remembered. I felt all the miracles she’d shown me since then.

  “I thought that’s why you were here,” she said, “why you found me. I thought you might be an angel. Only you’d lost your wings so you’d forgotten you could fly.”

  HE MOON WAS EXACTLY HALF MILKY WHITE, HALF hidden in the night when Angel and I arrived with Belle and Lunar for the Spring Parade.

  That afternoon I had made some lights and wound them round Belle’s halter. Angel and I had brushed her tail and washed the long feathery hair round her legs. We’d brushed her until she gleamed, the black shining, the white bright. We’d plaited her long mane and she looked beautiful.

  Angel said Lunar had to keep wearing Rita’s blue cardigan; she didn’t want him getting cold. Rita had given us some coloured ribbons and we looped them through the edges and made bows and plaits and took off his leg braces. He seemed much taller than before and so proud of his straighter legs.

  I wore black clothes, like a puppeteer on the stage, so I wouldn’t show up against Belle and the foal and they would look as if they were walking on their own.

  “You look like me,” Angel said.

  I scowled.

  “Now I do,” I said, trying not to laugh. But it was impossible because Angel giggled.

  She messed up my hair some more and I practised smirking like her until she said to stop, her ribs hurt from laughing.

  I had tried to tell her that someone would recognise her, but she wanted to come to the parade, to watch. She had no other clothes so I’d given her some of mine: my clean white jumper and red skirt. She looked like someone new too.

  Angel put the wings on me that she’d asked Rita to make.

  We stood in front of Rita’s long mirror for a while, just looking at our reflections and wondering about ourselves and each other.

  “Maybe we are two halves of one person,” Angel said.

  I realised then that I had been lonely for a long time. And I only knew that because I didn’t feel like that any more. Because of Angel. Because we’d found the things about us that weren’t different.

  “Maybe inside we’re exactly the same,” I’d said.

  And I knew because I felt like her that I would be able to walk through the street with Belle and Lunar at the Spring Parade and not hide from everyone.

  I smelled the air. Silvery metallic mist and dew, rich with toffee apples, hot dogs and onions. Light bulbs haloed. Music rang from the fair. We heard voices from the village murmuring, talking, laughing, waiting for the parade to begin. Angel hung back in the shadows as I went over to Aunt Liv, Rita and my cousins, who were waiting for me at the end of the village.

  Alfie and Gem wore their green socks and tights and hats. They had paper flowers stuck all over their green padded round pea costumes.

  “Ready?” said Aunt Liv.

  My cousins each picked up a handle on their cart. Aunt Liv flicked the switch on the batteries. The flashing bulbs lit up the cart, the bamboo wigwams and their faces.

  “All the way down to the end of the village, round the green and finish over by the fair,” Aunt Liv said. “Rita and I will meet you there after.”

  We could see a stream of people dressed as morris dancers, scarecrows, milkmaids, pantomime characters, their faces bright with face paints going into the village; tractors rumbled and towed tra
ilers with children in them, children dressed as witches and elves and other made-up things.

  We were about to join the parade when I saw headlights splashing across the hedgerows as a car came up the lane behind us. Not the police, not yet!

  I saw Angel about to run.

  “Angel, love,” Rita said, calling her, asking her to stop. “I know you want to be with Belle and Lunar, but I’ll make sure Mrs Barker looks after them. I’ll find a way for you to visit them.”

  “You don’t understand,” Angel said through her teeth. “She’s sending them away. They’re going abroad.”

  Rita went to her, caught hold of her.

  “You have to let them go, Angel.”

  Angel wriggled and slipped from Rita’s hands. She struggled to speak, her wild eyes looking between Lunar and me. Belle’s anxious hooves clattered against the road; her mane swayed wide as she tossed her head.

  “Nell, I wasn’t lying,” Angel said. “He said the hundredth horse was coming for me. For me!”

  We heard the car pull up nearby and the door open. I could see the blue of Angel’s eyes, truer than summer sky. I didn’t want her to leave, but I let her slip the rope from my hands.

  She leapt on Belle and took off, Lunar at Belle’s heels. But what did she mean the hundredth horse was coming for her? I remembered what Aunt Liv had said about stories being about us, about what it’s like to be us. I stared at Rita, my mouth open. Suddenly it all made sense.

  “The story, Rita!” I gasped. “The story about the hundredth horse is true!”

  I didn’t have time to explain. I ran as fast as I could, following Angel and Belle as they took off across the fields, Lunar behind them trying to keep up. The wind was in my ears, but I heard the car engine start up and I guessed the police would be coming around the lanes. I had to get to Angel first.

  SAW THE OPEN GATE AT OLD CHAMBERS’ FIELDS, but I couldn’t see Angel or Lunar. Belle’s head was raised high as she thundered across the field, the white of her skin etched in silver under the half-moon. She tossed her head and called the herd, the anxious sound prickling my scalp. I felt the rumble through the earth under my feet, I heard the thump of their hooves get louder, saw the flashes of white from their skins, as ninety-nine horses gathered and rushed from the far side of the fields.