by Kate Lattey
My voice chokes up a little, and Tegan leans over and gives me a tight hug that threatens to crack my bones.
“Sorry. You can have my mum if you want,” she offers.
“Will she buy me a pony?”
“Yeah, but she’ll tell you that it’s only because Finn is so crap and useless and a waste of space,” Tegan mutters, finally freeing me from her bone-crunching embrace.
“No thanks, then.” My mind flashes to the mysterious Nina, and I wonder what she’ll think of Finn. “Hey, I’ve got some breaking news. My dad has a girlfriend.”
“What?” Tegan’s jaw has literally dropped as she stares at me, and I nod.
“I know. He told me yesterday. She’s a lawyer.”
“Ugh.” Tegan flips her hair back over her shoulder in disgust. “Would’ve thought your dad had better taste than that.”
“Well you’d have thought wrong, apparently,” I reply, looking out of the window as we leave Clearwater Bay.
The sky is blue and the sun is blinding me as it hits the surface of the water. The long curve of golden sand stretches towards us from the other end of the bay, and farms stretch across the flat land between the sea and the giant hills that surround them, cupping the houses like a sheltering hand. I breathe in the strong smell of freshly-cut pine as we pass the sawmill - Clearwater Bay’s primary industry and the main reason for its existence. I try not to look at the bare patches on the hills where logging has most recently been done. For some reason, it always upsets me to see the landscape so torn up. Instead, I pull my eyes back to the gently rolling land that’s unfolding beneath us as the bus trundles its way down the hill.
Clearwater Bay is a small, close-knit community, and I’ve been here long enough now to recognise most of the bigger farms, held by their families for several generations. There’s the Mackinnons’ place, going all the way up into the hills. The Delaneys own the land just below us, the Haxtons are down the other end, and the McKendricks are close to the shore. The Harrisons live up in the valley, and I keep my pony Finn on their ramshackle farm. Partly from convenience, since Dad and I live only half a kilometre up the road from them, and partly because Alec is another close friend, and his family’s knowledge about horses far exceeds my own.
The bus turns a corner, and I catch a glimpse of Tegan’s house with its wide white verandah and immaculate garden, and the straight rows of the McLeod family’s kiwifruit orchard, the shapes of their four daughters’ many ponies grazing in the paddocks beyond it. The McLeod twins, Amy and Sarah, are in my year at school, but we don’t socialise much outside of equestrian circles, and my eye roves to the house closest to theirs, where the Westcotts live. Natalie Westcott and I have hated each other since the moment we met, when she blamed me for laming her sister’s pony, even though it wasn’t my fault at all. You might think she’d have been grateful that I caught him running loose on the road, and saved him from being crushed by a logging truck, but you’d be wrong. All she had done was yell at me, and tell everyone else in the Bay that I wasn’t to be trusted. Fortunately for me, Tegan couldn’t care less about Natalie’s opinion on anything, because she likes her even less than I do.
“Aren’t you glad I decided to come back?” I ask Tegan.
She shrugs. “Nah.”
“Don’t lie. Without me here, you’d have no friends at all.”
She punches my shoulder, and I yelp and shove her back, almost tipping her off her seat and into the aisle. She shrieks and grabs at my arm to keep her balance, and I do my best to squirm out of her grip. I see Natalie and the twins, sitting a couple of seats ahead of us, swivel around and glare in our direction, then with a casual flip of her perfectly straight hair, Natalie turns back to face the front.
“I think we’ve offended Her Highness,” I tell Tegan as I pull her back into a sitting position.
Tegan sticks her tongue out at Natalie’s back. “Her existence offends me,” she retorts, her voice carrying down the bus.
Natalie doesn’t move, but her spine seems to stiffen slightly.
“Why is she such a horrible snob?” Tegan continues, still watching Natalie’s back and trying to get a rise out of her. “It’s not like we ever did anything to her.”
I shrug. “Well, there was that one time that Alec painted her pony green,” I remind her, grinning to myself at the memory.
One of Natalie’s obsessions in life is keeping her grey pony Spider spotlessly clean, and at a show last season she had layered him in so many rugs that he was barely recognisable beneath them all. Alec and I had felt sorry for him, so we’d snuck out in the middle of the night and given Spider a makeover. The green and red paint had washed off without leaving a mark, but Natalie and her mother still claimed that the whole ordeal had upset their pony, who hadn’t performed very well the following day. Personally I thought Spider hadn’t performed very well because his rider was a bit useless, but there had been no point saying that to them.
“I will never forget the look on her face when she took all his rugs off and found Alec’s masterpiece. Priceless!” Tegan grins, leaning back into her seat and enjoying the memory. “Man, I can’t wait to get to Kapanui Show this weekend! I am so ready to compete again!”
The week drags by, as weeks with school in them always do, but finally it’s Saturday morning. I’m lying in bed, trying to sleep in despite the bright sunlight beaming in through my thin bedroom curtains, when the rumble of a heavy vehicle coming up the road disturbs my peace. I roll my eyes and pull the pillow over my head, cursing whoever’s driving this far up the road at this time on a Saturday morning. Chewy starts barking, and I groan and wait for the rumbling to die away again, but it reaches maximum volume and stays there. After a moment, I sit up and pull the curtains back to see an old blue tractor idling in our front yard as its driver tussles with Chewy in the long grass.
Moments later, I open the front door and walk barefoot across the verandah in my pyjamas.
“Who dares disturb my slumber?” I ask as menacingly as I can while wearing cotton shorts with kittens on them.
Alec looks up with a grin, his hazel eyes crinkling at the corners as he takes his earmuffs off and straightens up to greet me.
“Good morning sleepyhead.”
“It was until you turned up, making that unholy racket.” I rub my scratchy eyes. “What on earth are you doing here?”
Alec motions to the flat piece of machinery hitched to the back of the tractor. “Mowing your lawn.”
“With a tractor?”
“Do you think a hand-mower would do the job?” he asks pointedly, and I have to concede that he’s right.
If Dad even owned a lawnmower, which I’m fairly certain he doesn’t, it would barely make a dent out here. Our front yard is a thigh-high mess of grass, blackberry bushes and wildflowers, with only a narrow track leading to the front door that we’ve stomped down by our frequent trespass. I had been shocked by the state of it when I arrived, but now I’ve gotten used to the mess.
“But why?”
“Your dad asked me to.”
Alec sits his earmuffs back over his ears and gestures Chewy onto the verandah as he returns to the tractor. I sit on the steps with the dog beside me and watch as Alec drives methodically back and forth across our small front yard, hacking our lawn into shape.
Nina.
This must be because of her. I feel a surge of resentment coming on as I consider that Dad hadn’t deemed me coming to live here important enough to bother fixing up the yard for, but a girlfriend he’s had for all of a month is having the place smartened up just in case she swung by.
“Next thing you know, he’ll be painting the house,” I tell Chewy, who cocks an ear at me. “If she does come over, he’d better warn me first.”
I rest a hand on Chewy’s head as Alec finishes up and turns the tractor engine off. I have to admit that it does look better, although the cut is rough and there are masses of clippings and torn up bits of blackberry all over the place. Alec clim
bs down from the driver’s seat and Chewy bounds towards him. He only makes it about six strides before yelping and skidding to a halt with a paw in the air and a pained expression.
“Sook dog,” Alec tells him as he reaches Chewy’s side and persuades him back to the verandah. Sitting on the step next to me, he holds his hand out to the dog. “Give us a look.”
Chewy offers a paw with a pathetic whimper, and Alec swiftly pulls a blackberry thorn from the pad.
“There you go, mate,” he tells Chewy.
The dog flops down gratefully with his head in Alec’s lap, gazing up at him with an adoring expression as Alec leans back on his hands and looks at me.
“Sorry I woke you.”
“No you’re not,” I reply, and he grins.
“Well, it is…” He flips his wrist over and looks at his battered watch. “Half past nine. Well past time you were up.”
“I was trying to have a lie in. Ever hear of one of those?”
He shakes his head. “Nope. Hey, can you do me a favour?”
I narrow my eyes suspiciously. Alec’s requests for favours are rarely small things – usually they end up taking all day. “What?”
“Dad’s got a list of chores for me to get through as long as my arm, and I haven’t got the ponies sorted for tomorrow yet. Can you come down and get the tack sorted and packed into the truck for us? And maybe wash a couple of tails? Trixie’s got half a gorse bush stuck in hers.”
“I saw that yesterday,” I tell him. “And I wondered how long it would be before you asked me to get it out.”
Alec grins. “You know me too well.”
“Inside out and back to front,” I agree, and it’s probably true.
Alec and I have been friends since we met, but we grew closer over the cold winter months, riding together every evening after school in the limited daylight, going hunting together on the weekends, sleeping over in their truck with his mum and sometimes his sister Pip, who works at a trekking place up north but was home for a while during the off-season. Our friendship has, typically, set some people to speculating that we’re more than just friends – rumours I always quell as soon as I hear them. Alec is like a brother to me, and I could never see him any other way.
“So you’re taking Trixie, Lucky and Jack tomorrow, right?” I ask.
“And your devil pony,” he nods, and I glare at him for the slight against my beloved Finn. “What? She tried to kick me in the head yesterday!”
“You probably deserved it,” I retort.
“Who, me? Not likely.” Alec stands up, pushing his dirty baseball cap further back on his head and scratching his short auburn hair. “Oh hey, I meant to tell you that Pony Club starts up again next week.”
I grin at him. “That’s great!”
Alec rolls his eyes at my enthusiasm, but I’m serious. I love going to Pony Club rallies. They’re the only real instruction I get, and although all the hunting over winter has improved Finn’s jumping, her flatwork has gone from poor to non-existent. Relatively inexperienced in that area myself, I’ve been struggling to get her to settle down and trot in circles without trying to explode into a gallop, so although I know I’m in for a bollocking about it, I can’t wait to get someone on the ground who can help me improve Finn’s schooling. Alec’s no help, he just tells me that endless circles are a special form of torture for ponies, and the less you do of them the better. And Tegan is just as bad, absolutely refusing to even attempt any form of circling as protest against her sisters, who compete successfully in showing, which as Tegan regularly claims, is entirely comprised of pointless circles and might as well be done on a carousel.
“Your enthusiasm is contagious,” Alec deadpans.
“If you hate it that much, why do you even go?” I ask him.
“Beats me.”
He thinks for a moment , and I have a momentary panic that I’ve talked him out of it. If Alec doesn’t go to Pony Club, I don’t know how I’ll get Finn there, and I quickly work to convince him.
“You love it really,” I insist.
“Mm,” he says noncommittally. “Well, I’d like to get Jack up to Cambridge, and if he keeps jumping as well as he has been lately, he’s got a good shot at making the team. So I guess I’ll stick around for that.”
“What’s in Cambridge?”
“National Pony Club Show Jumping Champs. Big teams event in January, always held in Cambridge so that’s what we call it. They’re doing squad selection soon, then they’ll hold a training camp before Christmas to select the final team. They used to announce it months before the event, but people’s horses kept going lame and they had to change about fifty times anyway, so now they just register a squad and fill in the names a week or two beforehand.”
“Sounds fun.”
“It’s a good event. Lots of fun classes, Gambler’s and Jigsaw and that. You should try get Finn into the squad. Even if she doesn’t make the team, the camp’s a pretty good experience. They always bring in some hotshot Grand Prix rider to coach us, so it’s usually worth going to.”
“It sounds brilliant. Count me in!”
Alec grins at me again, and I catch a glimpse of the gap in his top row of teeth. I’ve finally stopped being startled by the omission of that tooth, but the memory of the accident that had caused it to be knocked out still gives me nightmares on occasion. His wild grey pony Jess had thrown him during a jump-off last season, and Alec had been rushed to hospital with a fractured jaw and multiple other injuries. His father had been so upset that he’d shot Alec’s pony in retaliation for its sins, and his actions had scared me so badly that I’d fled back to England to escape him. Since my return, I’ve avoided Liam Harrison as much as I can, but with Finn living at their farm, I can’t dodge him entirely. Alec claims to have forgiven his father for his misdemeanour, but the tension that has always existed between them is building by the day.
“I better get going,” he says, as though reading my thoughts. “Dad’ll be on my case if I’m late. He’s probably already looking for me.”
“Okay. I’ll come down later and get the truck sorted.”
“You’re a legend,” he tells me as he swings up into the tractor and starts it up.
“I know,” I reply, but he can’t hear me over the clattering engine.
He waves briefly as he drives away, and I raise a hand in farewell. Chewy whimpers sadly at the sight of Alec’s departing back, and I nudge him with my toe.
“Come on dog, let’s have some breakfast. How do you feel about bacon rinds?”
CHAPTER TWO
Finn is bubbling over with nervous energy as I work her in for our first class of the new season. Her narrow chestnut neck is arched in front of me, and her hooves dig into the soft turf. Kapanui Sports is a small, unremarkable show run by one of the local Pony Clubs, and we’ve just come along because it’s close by and the entry fees are low. But it hasn’t turned out to be the quiet start to the season that we’d planned when we entered. The show grounds are absolutely teeming with horses, as apparently everyone else in the horse world has decided to use this as their first start as well. The warm-up area is crowded and Finn doesn’t want to settle down. I take her out of the worst of the melee and do lots of transitions, trying to get her attention, but she’s frazzled by the commotion and keeps snatching at the reins and refusing to listen to me.
Alec rides over on Lucky, looking relaxed as usual. He takes one look at my furious expression and grimaces.
“Easy there,” he says. “What’s up?”
“She’s going nuts!” I complain to him. “My hands are raw, and I’ve been trying to get her to slow down and listen to me but all she wants to do is canter.”
“So let her,” Alec advises. “Canter her for five minutes straight. She’ll get tired of it pretty quick.”
He gets called to the gate then, and I decide to take his advice, picking up the reins and asking Finn to canter. She bursts forward, and I’m struggling to hold her at first, but after about
twenty circuits of the warm-up area she stops pulling quite so hard. I bring her back to a trot and for the first time today she doesn’t attempt to tear my arms out of their sockets. I relax slightly, and pat her sweaty neck.
“Just chill out, okay?” I tell her. “It’s not a race.”
The steward at the gate sends Alec into the ring, and consults her list. “After this one will be Up and Over, followed by That’s Final, Sine Qua Non, Kanga Roux, Te Atiawa Flashback and Dot.com.”
I keep Finn trotting until I see Alec canter Lucky through the finish flags, giving his pony a quick pat as he waits for his jump off bell. One, seven, three, four, six AB, nine, I recite in my head, watching as Alec spins the dark bay pony quickly around the course. They leave all of the fences up, and Alec reaches forward and rubs Lucky affectionately between his ears as they trot out of the ring. He gives me a thumbs-up on his way over to Tabby, who is standing nearby and holding Dolly, ready for him to switch onto her.
I halt Finn at the gate as the rider before me starts the course, but my pony is restless and jibbing, swinging her hindquarters around and almost knocking the steward over.
“Take it away and keep it moving,” the steward grumbles at me as Finn narrowly avoids treading on her toes for the second time. “I’ll give you a yell when we’re ready for you.”
“Okay.”
I trot Finn away, trying to keep her mind occupied, but she’s back in racing mode and despite the running martingale I’ve put on her, she keeps throwing her head up, reminding me of the time last season when she gave me a nasty nosebleed right before my first class. I don’t want a repeat of that. I turn her in circles, trying to get her to concentrate on me, before I finally hear Finn’s name being called and see the steward waving me over.
I turn Finn sharply towards the arena gate, but suddenly we’re boxed in, with horses and ponies all trotting and cantering on either side of us, and find ourselves right behind a slender black pony. I pull back hard on the reins to prevent Finn crashing into it, but she fights me, and before I can react the pony has lashed out with a hind leg. I feel Finn stumble and pitch forward, and I look down in horror, expecting to see a gushing wound.