by Kate Lattey
“Yeah.” She licked the back of the spoon and looked at me with a wry smile. “You haven’t been getting on that well with him anyway, right?”
“Um…” Why was it so hard to admit? “Right. We’re just not…we just don’t click.”
“Yeah, I figured. Want some?” She held the yoghurt out to me. “I can get you a spoon, hang on.”
“It’s fine, don’t worry. I’m not hungry.”
“Suit yourself. More for me.”
“So you don’t mind?” I asked, because I couldn’t brush this off as easily as AJ was.
“Nah. I mean, if he was going super well for you and you were loving riding him, then great. But he’s not, and you don’t, so there’s no point torturing either of you. He won’t mind having a break.”
“Well I was thinking that you could ask Jonty to take him for a few weeks, ‘til you can ride again,” I suggested. “He rode him really well, and they’ve got a huge farm to ride over. Squib’d love it.”
“Could do. Or Susannah might take him. She suggested it to me, actually.”
“Oh.” I couldn’t explain why that made me feel uneasy. “Well, yeah. Or that.”
“But I don’t think I will,” AJ decided, scraping the sides of the now empty yoghurt container with the edge of her spoon. “It’s not gonna hurt Squibbles to have a break, and I’d miss him too much if he went away.”
“Okay. Well, good. So you’re not mad?”
“Are you kidding? I’m just grateful that you’re looking after him,” she went on, looking serious now. “Since you don’t charge me anything to keep Squib at yours, and I’m not even around now to help out in exchange for his board.”
“I know. I miss having you there,” I admitted. “It’s not the same without you hanging around and putting everything in the wrong place so I can’t find it.”
She laughed. “Picking up after you, you mean.”
“That too.”
AJ threw the empty yoghurt container into the sink. “I don’t even want to think about how messy that tack room must be without me tidying it up five times a day.”
I felt my cheeks flush, and couldn’t help the smile that crept onto my face as I thought of my tack room. “It’s a bit of a shambles,” I agreed.
“I knew it. Well, as soon as I can get this stupid sling off, I’ll be in there cleaning it up. Unless you want to do it yourself.”
“No way. It’s all yours,” I assured her, and she laughed.
“Great. So how’re the rest of the ponies going? And Tori?”
“Terrible,” I said honestly. “Well, the ponies are okay. I’m walking Lucas out every day, and he can start trotting soon.”
“That’s great!” AJ walked from the kitchen into the living room, and sat down on the couch, where I joined her.
“Yeah. The others are okay too,” I continued, without going into details. “But Tori is still…diabolical.”
AJ frowned. “What’s she done?”
“What hasn’t she done?” I muttered, then filled AJ in on the gory details of my dealings with Tori so far, finally being completely honest. She looked startled, then horrified, then resolute.
“Well that’s shitty. But you can’t give up,” she told me firmly. “Imagine if I’d given up on Squib when he was like that. Which he was. I think I fell off him every time I rode him for the first six months. Fell off twice when we tried him out,” she added, and I laughed.
“Really?”
“Yeah, well I had no idea what I was doing.”
“I thought I did.”
“You do. You’ve just lost your confidence. But I pushed through it, and you can too. You’ve just got to give yourself some more time. It didn’t happen overnight with Squib, and it won’t with Tori either.”
I sighed, wanting to believe her. “I just wish I knew what to do.”
“Have you asked Marlene?”
I shook my head firmly. “Nope. No way.”
AJ looked like she was about to argue, but didn’t. “Then what about that girl from the magazine? You know, the one who was riding Tori so well in the photo. She won that class, remember? So she must have some clue of how to get her going well.”
“Yeah, maybe. But I don’t even know who she was. Sophie somebody?” I shrugged, but AJ had an answer for everything.
She pulled her phone out of her pocket and waved it at me. “Sophie Hewitt, and lucky for you, she’s on Facebook.”
I stared at AJ as she swiped her phone on and started tapping the screen with her thumbs. “Have you been stalking her?”
“Only a little. Oh good, she’s accepted my friend request.” AJ scrolled down the screen a bit with a frown, then her expression cleared and she held the phone out to me. “It’s ringing.”
“It’s what?”
“Her cell number was listed on her page. Go on,” AJ urged me.
I hesitated, but I heard a click on the other end of the line, followed by a voice. “Hello?”
I grabbed the phone from AJ, my palms sweating slightly. I hated talking to strangers at the best of times, and having random phone conversations sprung on me was at the bottom of my list for ways to introduce myself.
“Um, hi. This is Katy O’Reilly.” I couldn’t think of what else to say, but thankfully, Sophie seemed to recognise my name. I supposed I’d been around the circuit long enough to have made an impression. I could only hope that it was a good one.
“Oh hi Katy. How’re you?”
“Good thanks.”
“Ponies jumping well?”
“Yeah, great.”
“Cool.” There was a pause. “So, what can I help you with?”
“I was wondering if I could talk to you about Tori. Um, Victorious LR.” I paused again, and waited for Sophie to respond.
“What about her?”
“Well, we bought her from Marlene a few weeks ago, and I was wondering, since I know you used to ride her, whether you could give me some advice.”
Sophie sucked in a sharp breath. “Wait, so you bought her?”
“Yeah.”
She sighed heavily. “Oh man. I heard she’d been sold, but I didn’t know who she’d gone to. Let me guess. Marlene told you she’d make a top Grand Prix prospect? Or was she a perfect Young Rider horse?”
“Um, both,” I admitted, my heart sinking. It was clear from her tone that Sophie didn’t think much of Tori. “Well, I was going to start out in Juniors, but long-term, yeah.”
Sophie sighed. “Right. Look, she’s a talented horse, but you don’t need me to tell you that. That’ll be why you bought her.” I murmured assent, and Sophie continued. “But she’s not an easy ride. Furthest thing from it, actually. I told Marlene to chuck her in the broodmare paddock and put her to something really placid, but I don’t think she wanted to risk ending up with another one like her.”
Goodbye backup plan, I thought morosely. Putting Tori in foal and trying to breed a champion out of her was an option I’d been considering, but now it seemed like even that wasn’t viable.
“So you’re saying she’s always been like this?”
“Well, that depends. What’s she been doing?”
So I explained, yet again, what had been going on – how Tori bit and kicked me on the ground, was almost impossible to lead, and had exploded on me at Waitemata. “I don’t know if you saw it, but she did like forty laps of the warm-up before I got her back under control.”
“Nah, I wasn’t there. I’m working down in Carterton now, we don’t go that far North. But she did something similar the last time I saw her out.”
I closed my eyes, resigning myself to the inevitable. “So she’s a dud, is what you’re saying? We got ripped off, and she’ll never be any good?”
“No, I’m not saying that,” Sophie replied. “I don’t know what you paid, so I can’t say whether or not you got ripped off, although if you thought you were buying a ready-made Junior Rider horse then I’d suggest that you probably did. But she’s not a write-off, be
cause she’s got the talent. She just doesn’t have the will. She doesn’t see why she should put herself out there, and to be honest with you? I don’t blame her.”
I steeled myself for the answers I needed, even if I didn’t want to hear them. “What happened?”
“She got off to a bad start, for one thing,” Sophie said. “Marlene sends her horses to this breaker up the road from her, and they all go there sweet as pie and come home completely wild. I don’t know why she keeps sending them to the guy – with the amount of money she spends breeding those horses, why would you screw them over by having the living daylights terrified out of them at the breaker’s?” I had no answer for that, and neither did Sophie. After a pause, she carried on. “Most of them would come back nervous, a bit flighty, and so shut down under saddle that they would just do as they were told, for fear of reprisal. I’m pretty sure he used tie-downs or draw reins from day one, because they’d all hide behind the bit and just go along like little robots with their noses tucked in, but she thought they looked good. I got sick of it, and I couldn’t convince her to let me start the horses, or to send them to someone else, so in the end I quit.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“No, well, there was only so much of that I could deal with. Especially with her wanting me to keep using the draw reins on a daily basis. I hate the things, and so did Tori. I was the only one who would ride her, because she chucked everyone else off, but she was okay for me. I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe because she’d known me before she got sent away. She’d always been a sassy, opinionated mare, but she wasn’t nasty with it until she came back from the breakers. It was like she’d developed a vendetta against the world during her time there. And she was in a right state, too. Marlene turned her out in one of the back paddocks almost immediately and wouldn’t let us have anything to do with her, which was weird because normally we’d put them straight into work and keep them going. But when I finally got a chance a few days later to go and check on Tori, I discovered why.”
I held my breath as Sophie paused, wondering what I was about to hear.
“She was a mess. She’d obviously fought him hard – her mouth was raw, she had spur marks down her sides, and she wouldn’t let me anywhere near her head. I confronted Marlene about it, but she didn’t want to know. Just said that Roger had decided Tori still needed time to mature, and to send her back to him in six weeks.”
She huffed out angrily. “I almost quit then and there, because I was fed up with it, but I didn’t want that man to have a chance to get his hands back on Tori. So I started going out to the paddock and handling her as much as I could every day. I eventually got a halter on her, but she was still pretty violent about having her head touched, especially around the poll.”
“She’s still like that,” I told her quickly. “Tried to front-foot me when I went to bridle her.”
“Yeah, I reckon he bashed her over the head quite a few times. Probably while he was on her,” Sophie replied. “Have you tried touching her head while you’re riding?”
“Um…”
“Don’t worry. You’d remember, if you had. My suggestion is, don’t try. So anyway, I somehow convinced Marlene to let me ride her, since she was supposedly half-broke, and I just started her in a halter because her mouth was still raw. She was difficult, but we made it work eventually, and by the time Roger wanted her back to ‘finish the job’ I had her doing basic flatwork and schooling over low fences, so thankfully Marlene turned him down and let me carry on.”
“So what went wrong?”
“She was too talented, too clever,” Sophie replied. “She showed loads of scope and promise from day one, and only two weeks after she’d jumped her first fence, Marlene had me competing her in the Four Year Old classes. Tori was nervous, clearing everything by miles because she was green as grass and had no real idea what she was doing, but everyone thought it looked impressive. After that, Marlene started pushing me to jump Tori higher. Not at shows, for appearance’s sake, because everyone knew she was only a youngster, but at home we were regularly schooling around metre-twenty, metre-thirty courses. On on four-year-old. I hated doing it, especially when Tori started to struggle. I knew I shouldn’t push her, but Marlene’s a hard person to say no to.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed.”
“We made it through the season, and she had a break over winter, and then a longer one when she got kicked in the stifle and was out of action for several months. She came back in only a few weeks before Waitemata, and she jumped incredibly well to win the the Five Year Old Champ. But the next day, Marlene made me start her in the Mini Prix. And it went…badly. She missed at a big oxer and I fell off, broke my arm. That’s when Steve MacClennan started riding her, which was a stroke of good luck for Tori really, because he’s such a good rider. He got her going pretty well, although she still fought him at times and he couldn’t get near her on the ground. But he went home after HOY, and Marlene decided to work Tori harder over winter instead of turning her out, since she’d already had so much time off. I was still injured, so she put Bonnie on her, but when she missed a couple of times and Tori stopped, Bonnie laid into her with the whip. Tori went sour fast, and pretty soon she wouldn’t even let Bonnie get on her. I’d long since quit by then, because I was totally fed up with the place. I saw Tori out at shows a couple of times in the next few months, but she never went very well, and then she disappeared off the circuit. I figured she’d finally been put into foal, but someone told me she’d been sold.”
“Wow.” The pieces were falling into place now, and I started to feel sorry for my mare. “Kinda wish I’d talked to you before we bought her.”
“You and me both,” Sophie agreed. “If I’d known she was on the market, I’d have tried to buy her myself.”
“Do you want her?” I asked quickly. “Because we’d be willing to sell.”
“Oh man, I do, but the timing sucks. I’m heading overseas in two weeks,” Sophie said, sounding genuinely disappointed. “Off to Belgium to groom for a year on the European circuit. It’s all sorted now, and I can’t take her with me.”
“Oh. Okay.” I couldn’t hide my disappointment, and I heard Sophie chuckle softly.
“Just give her a chance, Katy. Now that you know her background, at least you’re going into it with all the facts.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I replied. “So what’s your advice, as far as how to handle her and ride her and stuff? Like, do I go easy on her, or be firm with her, or what?”
Sophie hesitated for a moment. “Where do you live?”
“Havelock North.”
“Hmm. That’s not too far from me, and I’m supposed to be going to Taupo in a few days to see family before I head overseas. I could swing by, maybe watch you ride her, see if I can offer any pointers.”
“Really? That’d be great!” I exclaimed. “Oh my God, that would be actually perfect.”
Sophie was laughing now. “Yeah, it’s no problem. I want Tori to be happy, and you too.”
“Thank you so much,” I told her. “I really appreciate it.”
“Yeah, no worries. I’m coming up on Thursday, so I’ll text you and we can organise a time. I’d better go, I’ve still got horses to work, but I’ll see you in a few days.”
AJ was looking at me with a smug expression as I hung up her phone and handed it back to her.
“You’re welcome.”
I beamed at her. “Thanks. You’re a good friend.”
“You know it. And now, my good friend, it’s time for lunch.”
I was chewing around the edges of a cheese toasted sandwich when a bell rang down the hall. AJ rolled her eyes and stood up.
“I knew we shouldn’t have given him that thing. Anders,” she explained. “Ringing for attention. And Mum’s still out, which means I have to go and deal with him.”
I stood up quickly. “I’ll go, if you want.”
AJ gave me a measured look, her lips thinning slightly, then shrugged. “F
ine. He’s all yours.”
The door to Anders’ bedroom was ajar, and I poked my head around it and looked at him, stretched out on the bed. “You rang?”
“Hey, Katy-did. Didn’t know you were here.”
“Yeah, I just came over to see AJ.” I stepped into the room, pushing the door open as I entered. “What d’you need?”
“Something to drink, if you don’t mind,” he replied, motioning towards the empty glass next to his bed.
“Sure. Water, juice, or…?”
“Water’s fine. With some ice. Please.”
“Okay.” I made my way across his room and picked up the glass. “Anything else?”
He started to shake his head, then sniffed the air. “What’s that you’re cooking?”
“Toasted sandwiches.”
“Nice. Tell Poss to whip me up a plate of those as well. Cheese and onion’d be good.”
“Okay.”
I was almost at the door when he spoke again. “Hey, Katy.”
I turned back, my heart thumping. “Yeah?”
“C’mere a sec.”
I swallowed hard, and walked back over to him. He was propped up on his pillows, and despite the fact that his room kind of stank, and he clearly hadn’t had a shower in a couple of days, and there was a tomato sauce stain on the front of his grey t-shirt, he was still as attractive as ever. He was looking serious though, and he ran a hand back and forth through his thick blonde hair.
“I haven’t been fair to you,” he said eventually.
“What d’you mean?” My throat was dry, and the words kept sticking in it.
“I mean…you know that there’s nothing between us, right?” He was looking right at me with those grey-blue eyes, and I wished I could tear mine away, but somehow I was locked into place, unable to move a muscle. “We can be mates, but that’s it.”
I’d never felt more stupid or embarrassed in my whole life. “Um yeah. Of course.” I could feel my cheeks burning, and started to back up, wanting to get out of the room.
“Just in case you were thinking there was more, or could be more,” he continued, pouring salt on my open wound. “There’s not, and even if there was, you’re my sister’s best friend. That’s a no-go.”