The Horse Dancer (4 page)

He was too taken aback to refuse. She took the newspaper, flipped it over and read the story twice, the colour draining from her face, then handed it back. ‘Thank you,’ she said weakly. The teenager beside her was smirking, as though he could hardly believe the breach of passenger etiquette that had taken place in front of him.

Sarah cut the second square of sandwiches twice diagonally, then wrapped both sets carefully in greaseproof paper. One she placed in the fridge, the other she tucked carefully into her bag with two apples. She wiped the work surface with a damp cloth, then scanned the little kitchen for crumbs before she turned off the radio. Papa hated crumbs.

Far below, the distant whine of the milk float signalled its departure from the courtyard. The milkman wouldn’t deliver up the stairs any more, not since someone had driven off with his float while he was on the fifth floor. He still put out bottles for the old ladies in the sheltered housing opposite, but everyone else had to go to the supermarket, then lug their litre cartons back on overcrowded buses or haul them on foot in bulging shopping bags. If she made it down there, he’d let her buy one; most mornings she made it.

She checked her watch, then the filter paper to see whether the dark brown liquid had drained through. She told Papa every week that the real stuff cost loads more than instant, but he just shrugged and said that some savings were a false economy. She wiped the bottom of the mug, then walked into the narrow hallway and stood outside his room.

‘Papa?’ He had long since stopped being Grandpapa.

She pushed the door with her shoulder. The little room was glowing with the morning sunlight and for a minute you could pretend outside was somewhere lovely, a beach or a country garden, instead of a tired 1960s estate in East London. On the other side of his bed a small bureau gleamed, his hair and clothes brushes neatly lined up below the photograph of Nana. He had not had a double bed since she’d died; there was more space in his room with a single, he said. She knew he couldn’t face the emptiness of a large bed without her grandmother in it.

‘Coffee.’

The old man pushed himself up from the pillow and scrabbled on the bedside table for his glasses. ‘You’re going now? What’s the time?’

‘Just after six.’

He picked up his watch and squinted at it. He looked curiously vulnerable in his pyjamas, this man who wore his clothes as if they were a uniform. Papa was always properly dressed. ‘Will you catch the ten past?’

‘If I run. Your sandwiches are in the fridge.’

‘Tell the mad cowboy I will pay him this afternoon.’

‘I told him yesterday, Papa. He’s fine.’

‘And get him to put some eggs by. We’ll have them tomorrow.’

She made the bus, but only because it was a minute late. Puffing, she hurled herself on board, her bag swinging wildly behind her. She showed her pass, then sat down, nodding to the Indian woman who sat in the same spot opposite every morning, her mop and bucket still in her hand. ‘Beautiful,’ the woman said, as the bus pulled past the betting shop.

Sarah glanced behind her, at the grimy streets illuminated in the watery morning light. ‘Going to be,’ she conceded.

‘You will be hot in those boots,’ the woman said.

Sarah patted her bag. ‘Got my school shoes in here,’ she said. They smiled awkwardly at each other, as if, after months of silence, they were embarrassed to have said so much, Sarah settled back in her seat and turned to the window.

The route to Cowboy John’s took seventeen minutes at this time of the morning; an hour later, when the roads to the east of the City were clogged with traffic it would take almost three times as long. She was usually there before him, the only person to whom he would give a spare set of keys. Most days, she would be letting out the hens by the time he came sauntering, stiff-legged, up the road. You could usually hear him singing.

Sheba, the Alsatian, barked once as Sarah fiddled with the padlock on the wire gate, then, realising who it was, sat and waited, her tail beating an expectant tattoo. Sarah threw her a treat from her pocket and walked into the little yard, closing the gates with a muted crash behind her.

Once, this part of London had been dotted with stableyards, tucked at the end of narrow, cobbled streets, behind barn doors, under arches. Horses had pulled the brewery drays, the coal and rag-and-bone carts, and it had not been unusual to see a much-loved family cob or a couple of fine trotters out for a circuit of the park on Saturday afternoon. Cowboy John’s was one of the few that remained, taking up some four railway arches, with three or four stables and lock-ups built into each, at the far end of a lane that ended on the high street. There was a walled yard in front of the arches, with a cobbled floor, in which were stacked pallets, chicken coops, bins, a skip or two, and whatever old car Cowboy John was selling, plus a brazier that never went out. Every twenty minutes or so a commuter train would rumble overhead, but neither humans nor animals took any notice. Chickens pecked, a goat took a speculative bite of whatever it was not supposed to eat, and Sheba’s amber eyes gazed warily out at the world beyond the gates, ready to snap at anyone who was not on her register.

Twelve horses were resident at the moment, including twin Clydesdales owned by Tony, the retired drayman, the fine-necked, wild-eyed trotters of Maltese Sal and his betting cohorts, and an assortment of scruffy ponies kept by local children. Sarah was never sure how many people knew they were there – the park keeper, who regularly chased them off the common, did and occasionally they received letters addressed to ‘The Horse Owners, Sparepenny Lane Arches’, threatening court action if they continued to trespass. Cowboy John would laugh and throw them into the brazier. ‘Far as I know, horses was here first,’ he would drawl.

He claimed to be an original member of the Philadelphia Black Cowboys. They weren’t real cowboys – not the cattle-ranching kind, at least. In America, he said, there were city yards like his, bigger ones, where men could keep and race their animals, and young kids came to learn and escape lives that were otherwise ghetto-bound. He had arrived in London in the sixties, following a woman who had turned out to be ‘way, way too much trouble’. He had liked the city, but missed his horses so much that he had bought a broken-kneed thoroughbred from Southall market and some near-derelict Victorian stables from the council. As far as anyone could tell, the council had regretted it ever since.

Cowboy John’s was an institution now, or a nuisance, depending on where you stood. The officials from the town hall didn’t like it, forever issuing warnings about environmental health and pest control, even though John told them they could sit out here all night dipped in cheese sauce and they wouldn’t see one rodent – he had a posse of mean cats. Property developers didn’t like it because they wanted to stick their blocks of flats there and Cowboy John wouldn’t sell. But most of the neighbours didn’t mind: they stopped by daily to chat to him, or buy whatever fresh produce he had on offer. The local restaurants liked it: sometimes Ranjeet or Neela from the Raj Palace called in if they needed hens or eggs or the odd goat, and then there were a few like Sarah, who was there whenever she didn’t have to be at school. With its tidy Victorian stables and teetering stacks of hay and straw, it was a refuge from the relentless noise and chaos of the city streets around it.

‘You let that fool goose out yet?’

She was throwing hay to the ponies when Cowboy John arrived. He was wearing his Stetson – in case people didn’t get the message – and his hollow cheeks were burnished with the effort of walking and smoking in the already warm sun.

‘Nope. It keeps biting my legs.’

‘Mine too. I’m going to see if that new restaurant wants it. Man, I’ve got welts all round my ankles.’ They stopped to eye the oversized bird he had bought on a whim at the previous week’s market. ‘Plum sauce!’ he barked, and it hissed in reply.

Sarah couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t spent most of her days at Sparepenny Lane. When she was tiny Papa would sit her on Cowboy John’s shaggy Shetland ponies, and Nana would tut contentedly, as if Papa’s passion for horses was something he shouldn’t pass on. When her mother had first left, Papa brought her there so that she couldn’t hear Nana crying or, on the few occasions her mother came home, yelling at her, or pleading with her to get straight.

It was here that Papa had taught her to ride, running up and down the back-streets until she had mastered the rising trot. Papa despised the way most of the owners at Cowboy John’s kept their horses; being in a city was no reason not to exercise them every day, he said. He never let her eat before her horse had been fed, never let her have a bath before she had polished her boots. And then, after Nana died, Baucher, whom they called Boo, had arrived. They had needed something to focus on, a reason to be out of a home that no longer felt like one. And Papa, who saw dangers for a wide-eyed girl just into her teens, had decided she needed a route out. He began to train the copper-coloured colt and his granddaughter. He trained her far beyond what the local kids called riding: the vaulting on to a pony’s back and haring down the streets until you reached the marshes, the scraping over park benches, fruit crates, any obstacles that offered a thrill. Ppa would drill her and drill her about stuff they couldn’t even see – the correct angle of her lower leg to within a millimetre, the perfect stillness of her hands – until she wept because sometimes she just wanted to goof around with the others and he wouldn’t let her. Not just because he wanted to protect Boo’s legs from the tarmac roads, but also because she had to learn, he said, that the only way to achieve something magical was through work and discipline.

He still talked like that, Papa. That was why John and the others called him Captain. It was supposed to be a joke, but she knew they were a bit wary of him too.

‘You want tea?’ Cowboy John gestured at his kettle.

‘No. I’ve only got half an hour to ride. I have to be at school early today.’

‘You still working on yo’ tricks?’

‘Actually,’ she said, with exaggerated politeness, ‘this morning we will be working on our half-pass, with a flying change of legs and some
piaffe
. Under the orders of the Captain.’ She stroked the horse’s gleaming neck.

Cowboy John snorted. ‘I got to give it to your old man. Next time the circus comes by they’ll be biting his arm off.’

In Natasha’s line of work it was hardly unusual to find, within weeks, the child one had just represented up before the court again, recipient of a new ASBO or youth-custody order. Occasionally they might even make the newspaper. But this one surprised her, not just for the severity of his crime but because of who he was. Day after day the children came in and told stories of despair, abuse and neglect. For the most part she could listen without wincing. After ten years she had heard so many that few prompted more in her than a mental checklist: does he meet the criteria? Has she signed the legal-aid papers? How strong is the defence likely to be? Is he a believable witness? Just like the others, Ali Ahmadi should have faded from memory, processed by her staff, another name on the court roster to be swiftly forgotten.

He had come into her office two months earlier, with the wary, hollow-eyed look of distrust and despair that so many wore, feet squashed into cheap, donated trainers, an ill-fitting shirt hanging off his thin frame. He was in need of an emergency injunction to prevent him being sent back to the country he claimed had nearly destroyed him.

‘I don’t really do immigration,’ she had explained, but Ravi, who handled those cases, was off and they were desperate.

‘Please,’ the foster-mother said, ‘I know you, Natasha. You can do this for us.’ Two years previously Natasha had represented another of her children.

She had scanned the paperwork, looked up and smiled at him, and after a moment, he had smiled back. Not a confident smile, more appeasement. As if it was expected of him. As she had speed-read the notes, he had started to speak, growing more urgent as the woman translated, his hands illustrating the words she could not understand.

His family had been targeted as political dissidents. His father had disappeared on the way home from work; his mother had been beaten in the street, then disappeared with his sister. Ali’s desperation had been such that he had walked to the border in thirteen days. He began to cry silently as he spoke, blinking away the tears with adolescent embarrassment. He would be killed if he returned home. He was fifteen.

It was a fairly unremarkable story, as they went.

Linda had been hovering by the door. ‘Can you ring the judge’s clerk for me? See if we can get Court four?’

As they left she put her hand on the boy’s shoulder – she hadn’t realised until then how tall he was. He had seemed to shrink while he told his story, as if parts of him had been hacked away with his history. ‘I’ll do my best,’ she said, ‘but I still think you’d be better off with someone else.’

She won him the injunction, and would have thought no more of him, but as she had swept her papers into her briefcase, ready to leave the court, she had noticed he was crying again, in the corner of the courtroom, heaving great silent sobs. A little taken aback, she had averted her eyes as she passed him, but he had broken away from his foster-mother, pulled a chain from his neck and pressed it into her hands. He wouldn’t look at her, even as she told him it was unnecessary. He just stood there, head down, body a question mark, his palms pressed to hers, even though such contact was against the dictates of his religion. She remembered how his hands had enfolded hers in a curiously adult gesture.

The same hands which had, two nights ago, apparently perpetrated a ‘prolonged and vicious attack’ on an as yet unnamed sales assistant, 26, in her own home.

Her phone sounded again. More tutting, unrestrained this time. With another apology, Natasha stood, gathered her belongings and made her way through the crowded carriage, struggling to stay upright as the train swung suddenly to the left. Tucking her case under her arm, she lurched towards the standing area, and found herself a small space by the window, as close to a mobile-friendly carriage as she could get. She dropped her bags as the caller disconnected, and swore. She had relinquished her seat for nothing. She was about to tuck her phone into her pocket when she saw the text message: