The Horse Dancer (17 page)

She was conscious of their stares as she made her way up to Boo’s stable, and grateful when they were distracted by Ralph’s haplessness at hosing the jittery beast’s legs.

Sarah always felt sorry for the trotters and pacers: fine-limbed and doe-eyed, they were shipped into the yard, fed up to the gills, driven relentlessly until their legs went, or Sal lost interest, and then just disappeared. Papa disapproved of the way they were forced to pound up and down the roads, the fierce punishments meted out to those who showed fear or disobeyed. There would be silent exchanges of looks when Sal lost his temper and thrashed one. But no one ever said anything to him. He wasn’t that kind of person.

Boo whickered softly when she entered the stable, his head already reaching over the stable door, searching for treats. She gave him a mint and held his neck, breathing in his sweet scent, letting him nose her pockets for more treats then set about refreshing his water and tidying the straw bedding.

Despite Cowboy John’s help, caring for Boo was becoming increasingly difficult. The Hewitts, whose immaculate home had never housed so much as a goldfish, had become frustrated by her apparent failure to arrive home when they expected her. She had no explanation for them (she had swiftly exhausted late buses, detentions, an emergency visit to her grandfather, and knew she was no longer believed) and would endure yet another exasperated lecture about how important it was that they always knew her whereabouts, about the perils of disappearing for hours at a time. Then – if she suspected they were really monitoring her – she would miss classes the next day. School did not seem to have registered her absences yet, but she knew she was on borrowed time. But what choice did she have? Sometimes it was the only way she could get to the stables to feed him.

She let Boo out of his stable and walked him on a long lead rope up and down Sparepenny Lane, keeping to the kerb to avoid the passing cars and talking softly to him when pent-up energy caused him to skitter sideways or balk at a road sign. It was only to be expected: he was a horse who liked to work, who needed not just the physical challenge but the mental exercise. ‘Too smart for his own good,’ Cowboy John would say, after Boo had undone the top bolt of his stable for the umpteenth time.

‘Too smart for you,’ Papa would retort.

‘How much brains he need for the Big Top?’

She stood at the top of the lane, quiet now as dusk fell, and tried not to think about how fragile Papa had looked that day. What would it feel like to have the steel core of you reduced to something feeble and dependent? It was hard, seeing him like that, to believe he would return to their flat, to their old life. But she had to believe he would.

She walked the horse up and down once more, apologising to him for her lack of time, as if he might understand. He tossed his head, his pricked ears and easy jog a mute request to go faster, further. When she turned back towards the gates, his head dropped a little, as if in disappointment, and she was suffused with guilt. Maltese Sal and his friends were up the far end of the little yard, smoking and talking over each other. As she pushed the gate open, she could see Ralph hovering at the edge of them. He idolised Maltese Sal; when Sal tossed him a cigarette he would actually colour with pleasure.

It was as she opened her lock-up, where she stored her feed, that her heart sank. There were four flaps of hay – less than half a bale. She had been so busy that week she had forgotten to ask Cowboy John for more. His was locked up.

She reached into her pockets, searching for loose change, with which she could perhaps buy a little more from Ralph. Forty-six pence and her bus pass.

She heard a sound behind her. Sal was opening his own lock-up. He was whistling. Through the doorway, she saw the neatly stacked bales, the bags of expensive horse feed. She had never seen so much good forage in one place. As she stared, he turned abruptly and she blushed to be caught looking.

He peered past her into her lock-up. ‘You short, huh?’

At first she didn’t answer him. She busied herself opening a hay net.

He sucked his teeth. ‘Looks like the cupboard’s bare.’

‘We’re fine,’ she said.

Maltese Sal let the door close behind him and took a step towards her. His shirt was immaculate, as if he had been nowhere near a horse, and his gold tooth glinted when he opened his mouth. ‘You got enough hay?’

She met his eye, then looked away. ‘John was . . . going to lend me some.’

‘John’s got business to sort out. He isn’t back till tomorrow. So, you got a problem.’

‘I’ve got enough.’ She began to scoop the four flaps into her arms. She straightened and made to move past him, but he stood in her way, not blocking her, but enough that she had to ask him to move.

‘You got a nice horse.’

‘I know.’

‘You can’t feed a horse like that shit off the floor.’

‘It’s just till tomorrow.’

He took the cigarette from his mouth and pulled a piece of hay from the bundle she was carrying, put the glowing end against it and watched it reduce to a blackened wisp. ‘Good for burning. Nothing else. Your grandfather’s still sick, huh?’

She nodded. A train rumbled overhead, but she didn’t take her eyes off him.

‘I don’t want you to feed your horse that shit. Here, put it down.’ He stuck his cigarette back in his mouth, walked into his lock-up and brought out a bale of hay. It was still slightly green and gave off a soft, meadowy scent. He carried it, effortlessly, swinging it by its twine, into her lock-up and put it in the corner. As she stood against the wall, he went back and got a second. Then he picked up a large bag of premium horse feed and, with a grunt, swung it through her doorway. ‘There,’ he said. ‘That’ll keep you going.’

‘I can’t,’ she whispered. ‘I haven’t got any money.’

He seemed to see right through her. ‘You pay me when you got the money, okay? If I’m going to run this place I don’t want to see a good horse going down because of a bad diet.’ He kicked his heel into the four flaps of hay. ‘Stick that on the brazier.’

‘But—’

‘You take it from John, yes?’ His eyes were on her. She nodded reluctantly. ‘So take it from me. Now I need to get on.’

He walked away into the yard, a slight swagger in the way he moved.

Sarah watched him as he rejoined the men, then stooped to breathe in the smell of the new bales. It was better quality than she was used to. She suspected that if Papa had been there he would not have allowed her to accept it. But that was the whole point.

She glanced at her watch and flinched. She had fourteen minutes before she was due back at the Hewitts’. Fourteen minutes to make a fifty-five-minute two-bus journey. She cut the strings on the bale and grabbed an armful, half walking, half running to where her horse stood waiting.

The silence of a London house had a curious poignancy to it, she observed, as she closed the door behind her, her call echoing into nothing. Somehow the quiet that hung over a London street and into a stilled hallway made hers feel far emptier than her place in the country. Or perhaps it was the possibility that, these days, someone else might be in it.

Natasha stepped over the now omnipresent camera-bags and went into the living room. She sighed a little at the sight of the photographic lights stacked in a corner, and checked the answering-machine; the steady red light told her there were no messages.

She sniffed for hints of wine or cigarette smoke, a signal that he might have had people over, but there was nothing. The sofa cushions were indented, telling of a night in front of the television, and she picked up each one in turn, plumping it and replacing it neatly, then felt vaguely irritated that she had done so.

She walked back into the hallway, picked up her bag and went upstairs, the sound of her footfall echoing in a way that made her feel self-conscious, a stranger in her own home.

She and Conor had recovered the weekend after its acrimonious start, but she knew they had been shocked by the ferocity of their argument, by the sudden spectre of feelings both had sought to deny. She was secretly pleased it mattered to him that Mac was there, but simultaneously resentful. He was asking her to grant him a say in her life without offering to make any more space in his own. ‘You will meet the kids, Hotshot,’ he said, as he had dropped her off, ‘I promise. Just give me some more time, yes?’ He had not asked to come in.

She dropped her bag on her bed and undid the catch. She would load the washing-machine, then iron her work shirts in front of the television. Later she would sit at her desk and prepare the paperwork for court tomorrow morning, making sure she had everything she needed; a Sunday-night routine that was as familiar to her as her left hand.

Natasha stood still for several minutes, somehow paralysed by this new atmosphere. Despite the lack of his presence, Mac felt omnipresent in the house, as if he had reclaimed it for his own. ‘You want to check he’s not taking books, pictures, and squirrelling them away,’ Conor had said. ‘Giving him access to everything is the divorce equivalent of writing a blank cheque.’ But she didn’t care about the prospect of losing stuff, even if she’d believed Mac capable of taking it. It was his presence, the air around him, that disoriented her.

She realised she was still angry with him; angry that he had not been there when she needed him, angry that he had returned to disrupt her life when she had rebuilt it. Typical Mac, crashing in with no thought of the consequences. She blamed him for the weekend, even while the rational part of her knew it was not his fault. She blamed him for the fact that she had had to leave her home. And to all of this he seemed impervious: he walked in, as he always had, with his charming smile and easy ways, as if nothing could hurt him. As if their marriage had been the smallest blip on his emotional radar.

Almost without knowing what she was doing, Natasha went across the landing to the spare room. She called again, then pushed tentatively at the door, registering Mac’s rumpled bed, the piles of unwashed clothes in the corner by the linen basket, the faint sweet smell of dope.

Not so reformed, after all. She hovered in the doorway, then found herself treading quietly through the room and into the en-suite bathroom. His razor stood in a glass, with toothpaste and a brush. The bathmat lay skewed on the tiled floor and she fought the urge to straighten it. But the mess was perversely reassuring: an echo of the man she knew he was. Chaotic. Imperfect. This is why we’re divorcing, she reminded herself, and almost felt fondly towards him for that reassurance.

It was as she made to walk out again that she caught sight of the pot on the glass shelf at the end of the bath, packaged in an expensive cream and gold box: a woman’s moisturiser. Beside it, a packet of makeup remover pads.

Something in her cooled and solidified. And then, blinking, her feet landing without care or quiet, Natasha turned and walked swiftly out of the spare room.

 

 

 

The carpet in the headmaster’s room was a deep plush blue, so luxuriant and soft that almost no pupil who ended up in there was able to banish the thought of how it might feel to shed their shoes and socks and sink their bare toes into it. Perhaps it accounted for how distracted many of Mr Phipps’s errant visitors appeared, rather than reflecting accurately the level of ADHD in the school.

Sarah was not distracted by the carpet. She was distracted by the fact that she had not been able to get to the stables for almost forty-eight hours.

‘It’s the fourth time you’ve missed double English in this half of the term, Sarah. It used to be one of your better subjects.’ Mr Phipps examined the papers in front of him.

She twisted her hands in front of her.

‘I know things are a bit difficult for you at home, but your attendance record was always good. Are you having problems getting to school? Are your foster-family not helping?’

She couldn’t tell him the truth – that she had told the Hewitts she had lost her bus pass, and the money they had given her for fares had gone towards Boo’s bedding.

‘They have an obligation, Sarah, to ensure you get to school. So, if they’re not helping you get here for your morning lessons, we need to know about it.’

‘They are helping.’

‘Then why have you missed the classes?’

‘I . . . get confused about the different bus routes. I missed the bus.’

Boo was beginning to react to the loss of his routine. That morning he had almost broken out of his stable, then had spooked at a woman with a baby buggy and careered into the road so that a taxi had blared its horn. Sarah had stood in front of the bonnet, yelling at the driver. When she had got Boo to the park he had bucked, then braced himself against her instructions, setting his mouth against the bit. She had been angry and frustrated with him, and regretted it afterwards when they walked home sweating and miserable.

‘The local authority will pay for a minicab. We’ll do what it takes, Sarah, if transport really is the problem.’ He placed the tips of his fingers together. ‘But I don’t think that’s the whole story. It says here that you’ve missed geography twice on Thursday afternoons, and PE three times on Friday afternoons. Do you want to tell me how that came about?’

She stared at her feet. Someone with a carpet so rich couldn’t possibly understand a life like hers. ‘I went to see my granddad,’ she muttered.

‘He’s in hospital still, is he?’

She nodded. Even Papa had been cross with her when she had turned up on Friday. He had looked up at the clock on the wall and muttered: ‘Wrong.
Après
.’ She hadn’t had to struggle to grasp his meaning. He had told her she was not to come at that time again. But he had no idea. He didn’t know that she spent half her days running across north-east London, hopping from one foot to the other at bus stops, or jogging down back-streets, trying to get to and from the stables in time to meet everyone else’s deadlines.