The Wish Pony (9 page)

Instead he wished for her.

I wish the shiny girl's brother lives.
I wish her mother gets better fast.

He wished these two wishes over and over. They thudded through his head like hoof beats.

It seemed like hours before Magda spoke. She and I just looked at each other until my eyes burned from trying not to blink.

‘I can't,' she said finally, ‘I'm sorry, but I've given him to you and I can't take him back again.'

‘Why not? Why can't I give him to you? You gave him to me, I give him to you. That makes sense.'

‘Anyway,' she said, fiddling the bobbles on her dressing gown, ‘you don't seriously think a little glass ornamental horse has anything to do with your mother going into premature labour, do you?'

‘Yes,' I said, ‘yes, that's exactly what I think. I wished it and he made it come true. He's not just glass, Magda, you know that. He feels warm when you touch him and sometimes I can almost hear him whinny.'

‘He's still just an ornament,' Magda said almost angrily, ‘and I won't take him back. He's yours now. I suggest you wish harder to undo the wish you've made – if you believe in that nonsense. Also, you might try to do some good deeds to make up for the nasty little thoughts you've been thinking. That should put the universe back in balance.'

‘I didn't mean to think nasty thoughts. I didn't know anyone was listening.' I glared at Magda. ‘I didn't
want
this to happen.'

‘A little tiny bit of you must have,' Magda said calmly, ‘otherwise you wouldn't have wished for it.'

My heart stuttered. Magda was right. A little bit of me, the thoughtless, selfish bit, had wanted … not for this exactly, but certainly not to have a brother. Or, not even not to have a brother, but not to have all the changes that having a brother involved.

‘I'm as bad as Mary from
The Secret Garden
,' I told her, ‘before she became nice. I'm worse, really, because Mum and Dad do love me.'

‘Oh, Ruby, you've just hit a little rough patch, that's all. It can happen to anyone. Anyway, you can change things – Mary changed.'

‘With the help of a garden, not to mention the robin and Dickon.'

‘Well, there you go. That's all you need. Go and get the Wish Pony and start wishing – you want things to go well with your mum and you want a garden.'

As if that was going to work. But I did what Magda told me, holding on hard to the Wish Pony. I wasn't sure about wishing for a garden but it couldn't hurt. I needed all the help I could get.

Magda made a cup of tea.

‘Probably shouldn't have caffeine,' she said, turning the tea pot three times, ‘after yoga. It seems contradictory. But there you are. People are complex.'

I fetched Mum's good tea cup without her even asking and watched her drink two cups in silence.

‘So – any luck?' she asked, tipping the tea leaves into the compost bin.

‘What?'

‘Well, not with your mum, of course, not so soon. But with the garden?'

‘Oh, no. I don't think so.'

‘Well, let's go out and have a look, shall we? What would you like in this secret garden?'

‘Magda, it's dark, and the garden wouldn't be for me,' I said following her out. ‘It would be for Mum. A secret garden for her. Somewhere she could sit. A bit of sun and a bit of shade. Flowers. Not just ferns everywhere. Some pretty flowers for her to look at while she nurses the … my brother.'

‘Now you're thinking,' Magda said approvingly, ‘that's my girl! Pass me that torch.'

In my hand, the Wish Pony seemed to give a little shiver, the kind you make when someone scratches you in exactly the right place. I didn't tell Magda. If she wanted to think he was just an ornamental horse, she could.

‘Pansies,' I said, remembering Mum's collage, ‘she likes pansies. Look, Magda – there's a spot under the lillypilly tree. Do you think we could put pansies in a pot somewhere near there?'

The lillypilly tree was on next door's property, but shaded our side of the fence. On our side, a group of tall tree ferns arrowed up until they ended in a crown of fronds. There was just enough space between them and the next group for a couple of wide pots of flowers and a chair.

‘I don't see why not,' Magda said, waving the torch around and catching a possum in its beam. The possum stared at us for a frightened second and then scrambled further up the tree. ‘We'll have to get some pots and a punnet or two of pansies. Have you got any money?'

‘I can do some chores around the house,' I said. ‘Dad gives me five dollars for cleaning the upstairs bathroom and four dollars for sweeping the entrance hall and tidying the shoes. Would that be enough?'

‘Not quite,' Magda said, ‘not if you want big pots. Maybe you could ask your father for some money?'

I shook my head. I wanted this to be entirely my idea and nothing to do with Dad.

‘Babysitting?' Magda suggested. ‘That would even give you practice looking after children younger than yourself.'

‘I'm not old enough,' I said, ‘and anyway, there aren't many kids around our street, just dogs. Hey, Magda – do you reckon you have to be a certain age to be a dogwalker? I could do that.'

‘I think you just have to have strong arms!' Magda said. ‘Roll your sleeves up, Ruby – how are those muscles?'

‘I'll type something up on the computer and do a letterbox drop,' I said. ‘I'll put one in every box on this street and the next – except that corner place with the big barking dog. I hate him.'

‘He's probably the one who needs you most,' Magda said. ‘I bet he barks because he longs to be out and about. You'll have to call yourself something snappy – something that makes people look at your flier before they just put it in the recycle bin with all the other advertising.'

‘With a picture,' I said, ‘a picture of a really happy dog.'

‘You can come and do it on my tabletop,' Magda said proudly. ‘It's all hooked up now to bandwidth and I bought a little printer.'

‘Magda, that's really nice of you, but we probably should stay here in case Dad calls. And Magda, you've got a notebook or a laptop, not a tabletop. It's broadband, too.'

Magda waved her hand in the air, ‘Broadband, brass band, jazz band, I don't care what it is. It lets me be on SNM and talk to people across the other side of the world.'

‘MSN,' I said gently. ‘You're lucky you have someone to talk to.'

‘I talk to Bailey, among other people. I can count you in to our next conversation if you're on NSM too.'

‘Oh, that's okay,' I was surprisingly nervous about the idea of talking to Bailey, ‘but I'll give you my MSN details and then we could talk sometimes.'

‘We talk now, face to face,' Magda said, ‘much easier guessing what you really mean when I can see you and not just horrible grinning faces.'

It took Magda and me the better part of the night to design my flier but when we had finished it looked fantastic!

I put my name at the bottom with our phone number and we found this terrific drawing of a poodle highstepping along with ribbons in her topknot that we inserted at the very top of the flier. It looked so professional. I wrote the poem myself – the only help Magda had to give me was to suggest other words for dog. I didn't think of pooch, but when she did, I thought of prancing. It's an alliteration – prancing pooch. We've just done them in school.

‘Well,' Magda said as the first flier slid out of the printer, ‘if that doesn't get you some business, nothing will!'

I wanted to colour in the ribbons by hand – some blue, some pink, so I wasn't a sexist dog walker – but by then it was past my bedtime and Magda said I'd have to do it the next day. I hid the fliers in my desk drawer and said goodnight to Magda sleepily. Dad still hadn't rung – it had been hours and hours, but Magda said that wasn't a bad sign.

‘No news is good news,' she said, which didn't sound right to me, no news was just no news, but I was really too sleepy to work it out properly.

I wanted to make at least ten wishes on the Wish Pony for my mother and little brother before I went to sleep. I made four and a half – but I think the half counted.

 

 

The Wish Pony liked having a hand curled around him. He liked feeling the warm breath against his back and hearing a heartbeat. It made him think of standing in a field, the sun on his flanks and the smell of fresh grass fizzing up his nostrils.

He took over Ruby's wishes at four and a half and counted up to 101 before he, too, slid into something like sleep.

In the kitchen, Magda finished the crossword in yesterday's paper which she had fished out of the recycle bin. She checked her answers against the current newspaper which was lying on the kitchen table. She made twenty-five words from the letter jumble but didn't get the nine-letter word. She had another cup of tea. She skimmed through a recipe book belonging to Ruby's mother.

‘I might try that one,' she thought, examining a photograph of a glossy rhubarb tart, and she wrote the recipe down in a small notebook she discovered in one of her dressing-gown pockets. Finally, she discovered a stack of overdue library books and started to read a mystery set in the 1930s. It was the cover that attracted her – she was almost positive she had worn a frock like the one swathed around the heroine. She remembered smoothing the silk over her knees. It had felt like cool water under her fingers.

Magda made no wishes. Not even for Ruby's dad to come home so she could go across the road to bed. Let what happens, happen, Magda thought. You never know what the universe wants until it's taken – or given.