Mandy, prattling in over-excited Gobbledegook. Me, catching some of it and thinking, sure, a treasure hunt will be fun. Mandy, squeaking, “Look at this, Tessie! I can’t believe it! So exciting, hey Tessie?” Me, sighing outwardly and saying inwardly, God I wish she wouldn’t call me Tessie. Someone else riding into the ménage. Me, not taking much notice because I’m studying the typed list Miss Ashton has just handed me. Mandy, still wittering. Me, deciding to look up and see who’s late for the lesson. Him, closing the gate while mounted, turning his pony and nudging her towards the centre of the school and us.
My brain machine clunks all these facts over rapidly, scraps all except the last, and comes up with a single word.
“Why?!”
“What?” says Mandy. “Hey, now, I know where we can find most of these things. We can be partners, can’t we? We can gallop round so fast the others won’t keep up. That silly fat boy, Simon, will probably fall off anyway. Your pony is really fast, isn’t he?”
“She,” I whisper.
He’s halted. Sitting like a statue, staring at nothing, while Miss Ashton rushes around checking everyone else’s stirrups and girths. When High Time shifts her backside to rest a hind hoof, he moves with her like it was his idea. He doesn’t appear to have clocked me but my heart is galloping so fast it’s going to pop out of my chest and I’m prickling all over my arms and the back of my neck.
“It looks like rain, doesn’t it, but I haven’t heard any thunder. Have you? A pink wildflower? A fruit? Hmm, don’t know. What do you think? Shall we try Fifty Acre Meadow for that? Four horse cubes. Well we can get those from the feed room. An insect, dead or alive… God, whoever typed this was useless. They’ve put small letters where there should be capitals and capitals where there should be small letters. We’ll go together shall we Tessie? Come, we can walk on round the track now, can’t we?”
He has private lessons with Gill on Sundays so why is he here? Now? He doesn’t belong in our class.
Be invisible. Hat brim down, eyes low. But I’m making Peaches walk so close to Mandy’s pony that Miss Ashton yells, “Tessa! You’ll get that poor pony kicked! Leave a gap!” and everyone looks at me.
What was it Daddy once called her? A sergeant major. A regular sergeant major. And he said she’d get us all square-bashing. I haven’t a clue what he meant and I never asked.
“Right kids! Pairs. Mandy and… Debs. Elizabeth, you go with James. Simon, go with Richard. Helen and Belinda.”
My heart may have been galloping a few minutes ago, but now it’s stopped altogether.
I am the only one left. She won’t make me go on out my own. I simply cannot believe this is going to happen to me.
And sure enough, pointing at me, she says, “Okay Tessa, you go with Nathan. I know you two know each other because you’re always hanging about with Gillian.”
Now I don’t just want rain, I want an almighty thunderstorm and a hurricane and maybe a tornado for good measure. Desperately. Call this whole lark off. Peaches’ creamy coloured mane has a few blackjack seeds in it, so I pick at them like I’m trying to pretend I haven’t heard her. I will not cry. I’ve done nothing wrong.
I never split on you, Nathan. No-one knows what I know. I love Gill, but you scare me. You’re invisible ninety percent of the time, but then, when you do turn up, you’re good at things. You ride like you’re an extension of your horse and you swim faster than any of the other boys. And that time I nearly told Gill how I’d seen you win the race? I chickened out because I knew I couldn’t deal with it if she’d gone, Oh yeah! And what about the judges’ tent and Mr Westfield’s car? Did you see that?
“Tessa! Take the cotton wool out of your ears, girl!”
I want to ignore you and pretend you don’t exist but you won’t let me. You were there too that afternoon, kept in school and made to write out We must all learn to be honest and admit to our mistakes five hundred times and then We must consider the implications of our actions and how they might endanger others five hundred times and then do homework in silence for the rest of the time, like everyone else. You were there, only two rows in front of me and one desk across to the right, so I was able to keep spying on you sitting there with your dark head down while you wrote your lines – or I assume that’s what you were writing – and then reading a book, laid flat on the desk so I never got to see the title. And I watched you file out with the rest of your class, still with your back to me, and by the time I got out of the Hall you’d vanished.
“Come along now! Tessa! Nathan! Off you go!”
She has these really stubby hands and she’s rubbing them over the bumpy bulges at the top of her thighs. Her jodhpurs are way too tight.
No heartbeat, and now no breathing. High Time’s hoofs are brushing through the grass and my tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth. What did I expect you to do that day? Refuse to do the punishment or create a scene? Give me some justification to tell Mr Westfield I’d seen you skulking about by the tent during the tea break last Saturday? You know I saw you, of course. You probably imagine that, in spite of your protestation of innocence, I believe you were the one who tied the car to the tent and that I’m just too scared to say anything. But I am damned certain you weren’t the culprit. And I don’t want to be anywhere near you ever again.
I’ve never actually addressed him. So what am I going to say? Why are you here?
So I do. Or not quite like that. My voice, all by itself, accuses him, “You’re not in our class.”
Stupid thing to say. He shrugs.
“We’re off on holiday tomorrow. I wanted to have a go over the cross country practice jumps this weekend, so I came over today instead. But you guys are having a treasure hunt, so Junie here wouldn’t let me go galloping around upsetting your ponies. She said she had an odd number of you in the class, which meant you’d have to have one group of three and then she hinted that if I joined in to make up the numbers I could use the jumps afterwards. So here I am. You here every Saturday?”
Junie? I’ll never be able to look at her the same way again. Junie, with the thigh bulges. Oh God, Tessa, don’t snort or giggle, please.
Yes, I’d forgotten. Of course. Gill did say she was going to Durban, but I didn’t know it was tomorrow.
“How shall we go about this, then?”
His voice is so normal, polite and quiet. He hesitates, like he’s waiting for an answer, then swings High Time around and I have no choice but to follow him to the gate.
It’s so hot that everything is hazy. I’m sweating and so’s the world, like the sun is heavy somehow. I can see the stone domes of Domboshawa in the distance but instead of being grey they are shiny and shimmery. There are warm smells like saddle soap and ponies and I have to wave my riding crop around my face to get rid of some very dozy flies.
We do lots of trotting, stopping and turning to find the items – the pink flower from a crop of candy-coloured cosmos, the wild berry from a dark leafed bush, the smooth stone and the three different pieces of bark. I just take them from him and put them in my carrier bag and keep schtum. He speaks to me, but very little. He says things like “Here”, “Over there”, “Come this way” and he does all the dismounting and remounting. He talks to High Time though, constantly, very quietly, and his moves are smooth, and calm. He touches her often, on the crest of her mane or on the muzzle when he’s on the ground, and he scratches her back behind the saddle. I’ve never seen anyone do that and I copy him, sneakily, so he doesn’t see me doing it. I don’t know what Peaches makes of it, but it doesn’t stop her from trying to grab illicit mouthfuls of grass. I keep the reins short and never once get jerked out of the saddle and am very pleased with myself about this. I hope he’s noticed.
Occasionally we spot the other groups, hear child-laughter, someone shouting at a pony. I tag along behind him, and I know I shouldn’t just let him do everything, but I do. He finds all the items on the list, even the live insect, and it’s only because of this that I end up talking to him. He goes still, staring at the branch of a msasa tree, then his hand shoots out, he plucks something off it and he offers the hand to me. Between forefinger and thumb is a beetle. It’s so pretty – shiny yellow and green, like it’s made out of metal. It’s very frightened, waving its legs and its antennae pathetically, and without even a thought I lean over, take it from him and exclaim, “Oh, don’t hurt it!” because in my experience ten-year-old boys often do nasty things to insects.
Then I’m much too close to his face. I snap back upright and retract my hand with a jerk, nearly dropping the beetle. He has brown eyes, again unlike Gill. I can feel my face burning and he gets that very, very small twitch in his mouth, like the one I saw when he was cheeky to Mrs Anderson. He drops his reins and holds up both hands.
“I won’t, okay? Well there you are, then. You take it. It’s a change to meet a girl who doesn’t scream when she sees a creepy-crawly.”
He takes up a contact again, nudges High Time and starts to move off, saying, “Gill doesn’t either.”
We get back to the yard just after Mandy and Debs but they’re disqualified because their insect is a spider. Mandy argues, but Miss Ashton isn’t having any of it. She tells Mandy to count its legs.
“Eight legs, girl. If it’s got eight legs, it doesn’t count. And no pulling two of them off!”
She examines the objects in my carrier bag. When I look round, there’s no sign of Nathan and High Time. I didn’t even see them go.
And he didn’t say a single word about the gala.
I hook one of the two red rosettes she hands me onto Peaches’ bridle and lead her around to show off a bit. I’ll have to give Gill the other rosette when she gets back from holiday and tell her to pass it on to Nathan. Then I let the beetle go in a bush near the gate before I take Peaches back to her stable. I might be Mrs Adams in Born Free, releasing animals into the wild. A beetle’s not very much like a lion, but that’s where day-dreams win. You can make anything into anything.