The Blue Horse (11 page)

November days – always so dull and damp. Like a fog, winter had seeped in. By mid-afternoon the soft, hazy sun would disappear. The few trees in Ashfield estate had lost their leaves and stood spindly and bare, forming scary shadows.

‘Come on, Duffy, let’s go for a walk,’ Katie said one Saturday. The dog ran on ahead, snuffling amongst the wet, mouldy leaves.

Katie headed up towards Ashfield Grove. She’d call on Sally. They hadn’t seen each other for ages. Duffy was good company and wandered along beside her.

As soon as she turned the corner she saw that the ramshackle caravan was gone from Sally’s garden and the glass on the large bedroom window was cracked. The house looked empty, abandoned.

She rang the doorbell again and again. No one answered.

‘You’re wasting your time, love,’ the old man from across the street shouted at her, ‘they’ve gone!’

‘All of them?’ Katie couldn’t believe it.

‘Yeah, just upped and left. Didn’t even bother to lock the house up properly and the vandals got at it. Those type of people have no sense of responsibility, don’t care about their neighbours.’

Katie stared at him and then back at the house.

She felt guilty. She shouldn’t have waited such a long time before visiting Sally. She had been so caught up with school and homework and the family and herself. Now Sally was gone, back on the road and hadn’t even bothered to say goodbye.

‘Sally’s gone, Mam,’ she announced as soon as she got home. ‘The whole family left. They must be gone back on the road.’

Mam was busy buttering bread.

‘I’m not surprised, love.’

‘Did you know? Why didn’t you tell me? I never even said goodbye.’

‘It was just a feeling. Mary Ward told me often enough that they were thinking of going back on the road.’

‘More power to them, that’s what I say,’ stated her father, coming in the back door and leaving his muddy wellington boots on the doorstep. ‘Getting out of that house is probably the best thing Paddy Ward ever did.’

‘It’s winter, Ned, there’s not much sense going back on the road in the middle of the cold and wet.’

Katie stared at her parents. Somehow there had been a subtle shift in the conversation and she wasn’t sure anymore who Da was talking about.

The darkness would envelop the house and sometimes it seemed as if the four walls of the
house and the roof were a prison cell built to keep them in. Da would pace up and down before disappearing off into the night for a hour or two. During the day he would drive off to the local dump or any place which would be a source of scrap – he seemed to find it impossible to stay in the house for any length of time.

The minute they all came home from school the television was switched on and it was not turned off until bedtime. Strange voices and strange people held court in the middle of their living-room night after night. Katie found it hard to manage all the homework she had to do as there was only one table in the house, the kitchen table. She cleared the clutter off it and tried to spread out her books. Brian would take another corner. Sometimes she was just about to start when the tea would be ready and everything would have to be packed away in the bag until the last cup and plate had been washed and Hannah and herself had tidied everything away.

Sometimes Hannah would sit quietly looking at her books. ‘You’re real clever, Katie, I wish I was like you.’ She still had trouble reading and Katie would often find herself reading a story or explaining some history or geography to her little sister.

‘You make it sound so easy, Katie, I wish you were a teacher.’

It was hard to tell her to buzz off and it took Katie ages to get her own homework done. She was on her own and i f she didn’t know
something there was no point asking Mam or Da.

Brian was getting on well at school, so it came as a bit of a shock when he arrived home one day with a black eye. Katie was really surprised as he had never been a fighter.

‘I showed him how to stand up for himself,’ Paddy annouced. Trust Paddy.

‘There’s always a first time,’ stated Brian. ‘I’m not ashamed of what I am and I won’t be insulted. I don’t hide things. Next week teacher said he’s going to do a lesson on travelling. One of the boys in the class used to live out in Saudi Arabia and he is going to tell them about that and I’ll tell them about life on the road and living in a trailer. The teacher was pleased, but one of the other fellas beat me up.’ Katie looked at her younger brother and wished for his courage.

Natalie still teased her. She wished she could laugh or pretend she didn’t care or that it didn’t matter to her, but it did. She tried not to let the others see her when she felt like crying. Brona always seemed to be around when she needed someone to talk to. She lived near Natalie, but paid no heed to her bullying.

‘I know too much about that one for her to try it on me. Believe me, Katie, she has nothing much to be so full of herself about. Her family are a shower of wasters. Bullies like her always try to
pick on people who are a bit different – they haven’t the guts to do anything unusual themselves. She tried it on me when I got my hair spiked, but I put an end to it fast.’ To Katie it seemed there might never be an end to it!

‘A rabbit would be nice.’ Mr McKeown tried to persuade her, holding out the template of a round, fat bunny.

‘I’d like to try a horse, sir!’

‘Katie, what about a duck, or a train engine?’

He picked up each template and showed it to her.

‘Don’t you have a horse?’

He shook his head.

‘I could draw one onto the wood myself.’

‘Well, if you want to try it, but it’s a difficult shape. Most people usually like the rabbit.’

She was about to say: I’m not most people, when he laughed and said, ‘Just don’t say it.’

She got two or three sheets of white paper from the back of the class.

‘How’s it going?’ Brona asked her. Every Monday when Brona arrived back at school people had to be prepared for the unexpected. At the moment she had all her hair in tiny tight little plaits with multicoloured ribbons on each of them. Katie smiled and stopped at her workbench.

‘Fine, thanks.’

‘Do you like the hair?’

Katie couldn’t help herself smiling.

‘Yeah, nothing in the rules against plaits!’ and
she began to laugh.

Katie looked down at what Brona was working on. She was cutting out very small pieces of wood into triangles and circles and rectangles.

‘Your jewellery?’

Brona held up a leather thong and a triangular piece of wood with a Celtic design in black etched into it.

‘Great, aren’t they! My brother will sell them on his stall in the market on Saturdays. This kind of stuff will go a bomb, won’t it? Susan’s making a few too.’ Katie smiled at the bespectacled girl sitting quietly on the opposite side of the desk.

‘What are you at?’

‘I want to draw out and then make a horse.’

‘Yeah, that would be right. You people are mad about horses aren’t you?’

Katie tried to explain. ‘This isn’t an ordinary horse, but …’ She trailed off.

Drawing the horse was another matter. She had thought it would be easy. All her years had been spent with horses in some way or another. Now for the life of her she could hardly get the shape of one to come out properly at all. Drawing and painting had never been a priority growing up in the overcrowded trailer.

At last! She drew one that managed to look different from a big dog or a donkey. She was pleased with herself and longed to cut it out.

‘Wrong, it looks all wrong.’

Disappointment swept over her. It wasn’t right at all, it was too ordinary, too rigid. It was a horse so unlike the one she imagined and longed to create. Crestfallen, she stared at it.

‘Katie!’ It was Mr McKeown. ‘Is there a problem?’

She looked at the simple silly horse shape. This was a stiff, heavy horse that would plod around a field pulling a cart, not the horse of her dreams, the one that came night after night unbeckoned, a horse that had travelled the length and breadth of the country and witnessed hail and rain and storm and heatwaves and snow. Silent through generations, it had watched over her family. This was a simple wooden shape, nothing more, nothing less.

‘Well done!’ He picked it up and turned it over.

She studied it.

‘It’s not right. It’s not what I imagined at all,’ she shrugged.

He stared at her.

‘This is very good work, Katie, don’t take that away from yourself! What is it for?’

He wouldn’t understand. ‘It was meant to be for my Mam, for our family.’

‘Well, I’m sure they’ll love it.’ He passed it back to her.

‘I think I’ll give it to my little brother Davey, he likes horses. He can play with it.’

‘That’s nice.’ He was about to turn away from
her. ‘But I want to make another horse, sir, this time more rounded, more shaped, a proper horse not like a cardboard cut-out one. Better than this.’

‘Almost carved,’ he murmured.

‘That’s right! Can I try again?’

‘It’s a lot of work.’

‘I want to make it, sir, it’s real important.’

‘What kind of horse are we talking about, Katie?’ He stared at her quizzically.

‘A blue horse, sir.’

‘Is there such a creature?’

‘There was,’ she said, then corrected herself, ‘there is, sir.’

‘Not a real horse then, Katie, but an imaginary one.’

‘It’s the horse of my dreams.’ She hoped he wouldn’t laugh at her.

‘Well … every girl is entitled to her dream. How about we make a start next week?’

It was a funny thing, but finally she could sleep at night. The walls no longer came in on her, the blue horse, if it did appear, was no longer crazed. It still enjoyed a run in the wind, but it also liked to stand in the shade and gaze at the vast meadow and chew the grass. It would swish its tail at the flies. It just enjoyed being.

Christmas came and went. They put a small pine tree in the corner of the living room. Hannah and Paddy made all kinds of decorations at school
and hung them from it. There was a new doll for Hannah, a small blond mirror-image of herself, which had been christened Alice. Davey loved the simple wooden horse Katie had made. Paddy and Brian got a set of racing cars and a game. Katie got a book token from Mam and Da. They would never be able to pick out a book for her – this way she had hours of choice ahead.

Being under a good dry roof while the wind and rain howled around outside was a great feeling. And when snow fell in January, the small council house seemed suddenly huge and warm and safe.

Katie smiled to herself. Even a few months ago she would never have thought of this place as home. Now it was a safe haven at the end of the day. The memory of last summer, and the campsite and Francis and his goats seemed almost a century away.

Brona had invited her to a party in two weeks’ time. She was so excited, but also worried about it. None of the rest of them in school knew it was her first time ever being invited to a party. She fretted about what she was going to wear and what Brona would like as a present – you had to bring a gift and she wanted it to be right – but despite these fears nothing would stop her going.

‘Stop!’

She got such a fright she nearly dropped it.

‘Don’t do one more thing with it or you’ll ruin
it.’ Mr McKeown was striding over to her.

‘One thing you’ve got to learn, girl, is never overwork something. Take it a step too far and often you just destroy it.’

Reluctantly Katie put down the chisel. Maybe one of the legs was still a bit too wide? Maybe she should narrow it more? The tail a fraction too long?

The teacher seemed to read her mind.

‘It’s perfect, not one thing more.’

‘But …’ she began.

‘Katie, trust me. You’ve had four attempts. This is the perfect one!’ he insisted.

‘It’s beautiful, Katie.’ Rory stopped his work and gazed at it too.

The horse stood on the worktable in front of her. It was perfect. She knew every inch of it. Time after time she had closed her eyes and run her fingers over it till it felt right.

‘Tomorrow I’ll paint it,’ she decided.

‘Do you have to, Katie? The wood is so lovely. You’ll ruin it putting a coat of paint on it.’ The teacher tried hard to persuade her to change her mind.

But she was adamant – blue.

Often she wondered how her great-grandfather had originally begun to paint a blue horse on the wagons and carts he made. Perhaps he had dreamt of one too. A horse that came in the night and yet was the colour of the morning sky.

The others in the class gathered around. It was
usual to view and comment on each other’s work. She felt embarrassed and longed to be out of the room, and yet a part of her was proud of this piece of wood. Her first real carving.

‘Phew, it’s just –’ Katie could feel her mouth go dry – ‘it’s brilliant.’

‘Well done!’

‘Not bad.’

‘You’re so talented, Katie,’ Brona winked at her. ‘It’s better than any tinker horses I’ve ever seen.’

‘You’re so lucky to be so good.’

She stood there, her heart beating. She rubbed her hands quietly together. The skin on her fingers was rough.

‘Thank you,’ was about all she could manage to say to a classful of smiling faces.

‘Go on, Mam, open it!’

She could hardly bear this moment now it had come.

Everyone had been sitting quietly watching television when Katie ran upstairs, pulled the big white plastic bag out from under the bed and carried it downstairs. She laid it in front of Mam.

‘What is it, girl?’ Mam wondered.

‘Open it!’ shrieked the twins.

‘Let your father do it,’ Mam offered.

‘Kathleen, get on with it,’ Da urged.

The bag was coming off. She could see the tip of his ears, his nose.

‘What is it?’ pleaded Hannah, pushing between the others to see.

‘A horse! Oh my God! It’s my blue horse.’ Mam could hardly speak. Her eyes met Katie’s.

‘Thank you. How can I thank you? It’s so beautiful, just like the old one. Perhaps,’ she felt it, ‘even better! Did you make it all yourself?’

Katie began to tell how she drew it first and then tried to cut it out, but she could tell that nobody was listening. Mam held the horse close to her, studying it. Then they all took a turn to pet it and stroke it before Mam let Da place it on the windowsill where the moonlight shone in on it.

‘Rest easy there for the moment,’ Da told it – you’d nearly think it was a child he was talking to.

‘It’ll bring us luck, Katie. I can almost feel it already.’ Mam was smiling. ‘No matter where we stop or where we travel, it doesn’t matter where we roam, it’ll stay with us. A sign for all the world to see that the Connors family will go on and on. Nothing will get the better of us.’

The blue horse stood still staring out through the glass. Beyond these walls were fields and roads and mountains and forests and winding cliff paths and clear cool streams.

Katie looked at it. The blue horse was home.