Foal's Bread (39 page)

Mr Cousins eased his truck out onto the road into Wirri. For a moment the headlights landed on the dark waters of the Flagstaff and the new fence Uncle Owe had built with her mother and Lainey helping. Everything looked very neat, except for the river, rushing east before the sunrise.

Suddenly, the girl felt fear and it made her so ill she thought she'd have to puke out the truck window. Deep in her guts she felt sick, as if a fleet of lacewings were going mad inside her. To go without her mum, what in the hell was Mr Cousins thinking about?

If only they were just taking the horses somewhere for a bit of a ride or something. Helping Hirrips or eggboat man or anybody get in their steers. Or that with Mr Cousins at the wheel and Fly and the two jumping horses in the back they could keep on driving until eventually they reached the coast. Pulling in at the first chance, they'd get a feed of fish and chips before taking the horses down to the beach where Nin said Pop once used to train racehorses. Training runs on the sand with the big white lighthouse looking down.

What did Mr Cousins think he was doing, whistling away like that as they came into Wirri, past the butcher's, the bakehouse and then the hall? Lainey put her hands to her face in order to take deep draughts of the smell of saddle soap. Such a good clean yellow smell that she was instantly steadied. Enough to line up the corner gate to old Mrs Maddison's fancy garden and as usual jump it—the horse in her mind, Landy in this instance, standing right off and clearing it by miles.

No chance now of a photo of the Nancarrow greys jumping in the pair of hunters with mother and daughter on board. Not that Uncle Angus was the photographer anymore. But last year there'd been another man from the paper and he was good too. Maybe even better, her mother had thought; for that shot of Magpie he'd got right down on his belly. From that angle the jump looked colossal and Magpie just like a little black and white handkerchief flying over. Ears pricked like she knew she'd grown wings. Like she knew they'd be on the front page of the paper. Her mum and Maggie. Just beautiful. Even Nin had said so and clipped it very carefully for sticking in the scrapbook.

There'd still be time, wouldn't there, for her mother to ride the mare into Wirri? Lainey stuck her head out the window to look back along the road but it was empty. Why hadn't they just hauled her mum into the truck like a sack of potatoes? They could've got her going with something to eat at the showground.

But now, with the showground in sight, all such thoughts fell away in the face of high-jump dreams that had lived in her since before she was born. The truck travelled dreamily too, going so slowly through the wide gates at the back of the showground that now Lainey felt only a gladness. A magpie carolled in one camphor laurel tree and its mate, answering back, signalled that the day was going to be as clear as a bell.

She was about to become part of this hive of activity that was unfurling all around. There went some of the McCallister boys hauling their show calves; there were glossy hacks and hairy ponies and half a dozen or more horse lorries arriving. Look at that wild Alfy Pierce, trotting his lean mare around a yard. Jeez, the hands on it, but undeterred the boy who liked to undo her plaits at school crooked one finger up to wave.

Where would Mr Cousins set up now the horses were safely unloaded? Had air ever smelt so rich and alive? She couldn't keep the grin off her face, not even when Fly
,
being an idiot, snorted at a sign and made the other two horses whip sideways.

‘Here, something to nibble on,' urged Mr Cousins after he'd established a good spot for the truck where there'd be plenty of shade from the old camphor laurel later. Still everything was going so slowly that Lainey believed maybe her thoughts had somehow stopped the passage of time. When she was really little, she remembered, she could make the wind whistling down from One Tree's highest ridge stop and start, using her arms.

That feeling of inexplicable power stayed with her as she came second in the pair of hunts riding Landwind, with Sam Ridley on Seabreeze. In her riding class too, all the horses cantering around so slowly. Old Breeze just so like he was asleep in a paddock in the sun, that the judge didn't even call them in! That didn't matter. She couldn't care less. She wasn't here today for circles and riding neat figures of eight on the flat.

When she got back to the lorry, Mr Cousins waved at her from where he was helping Mrs Cousins set up the picnic rug under the pecan trees behind their car. Then Aunty Reenie, over from Port Lake for the day, came across to give her a squeeze and a ham sandwich. Lainey didn't know whether to laugh or cry when next, out came a tin of gingernuts. It was like she was eating inch by inch every legend ever told about her father. And George was doing exactly the same, right down to how many bites he was taking, solemn, as if at some level he'd be leaping that high jump right along with her.

All the while as she chewed, she was aware of the men at work on the high jump that, with the hunts over for the day, was being raised in readiness in front of the biggest stand. ‘Gunna be jumpin Landy and Breeze over that,' she told her brother. ‘Then after, it'll be you and Fly in the bend and flag. And gee, George, you done a good job on polishing my boots. You did too! See my face in them, I can.' As she dipped her gingernut into a cup of tea she distracted herself from any nervousness by recollecting novelty events she'd won when she was small. To stop George gnawing at his own biscuit like a rat she offered him her cup for a dunk and it fell in and floated there, still perfectly round except for a few tooth marks on one edge.

What about that bareback gallop? Lainey at the front on old Creamy. Her mum that excited at the sight that she'd called out, ‘She wins, she wins, she pisses it in!' And her dad, alive and proud in his own quieter way.

‘Hear you're jumpin two today,' Mr and Mrs Gentle came over to say.

‘How'd y'know that?'

‘Oh, somebody told us. What happened to your mum?'

‘Weaners give her vomitin brucellosis.'

‘I tell you what, we were looking forward to seeing her jump that little piebald again. My word. After last year.'

‘We all was.' Lainey felt a flicker of sadness but quelled it. Tuning in to Mr Gentle's advice.

‘Listen,' he was saying, ‘you want to go steady on the turn in towards the fence. Not too fast but not dawdlin either.'

Not too fast, but not dawdlin, she repeated in her mind, watching the Gentles walk away.

She found herself imagining the horses being so good that the jump would just keep on going up: nine, ten, fifteen foot. Up, up into the sky, until horse and rider, Lainey and Landy, would take an almighty leap and never be seen at Wirri showground again. For one moment, she thought that the great wings either side of the high jump could be the gates of heaven. Made of hardwood from the mill instead of pearls.

Just time for one last very important thing. And could it be luckier, that they'd even scored that yard under the pair of bunya pines for the horses? Her father had shown her his secret when she was just five years old. Feel, he'd said, making her close her eyes as he drew her finger into the initials he'd carved in the bottom railing by the big corner post. NN, because even before I asked I just knew that girl Noey Childs, that was yer mum, would marry me.

Lainey crouched down. Last year her mother had knelt down here too. Her father so sure of his chances that before he'd even asked her mother for a dance he'd carved a crooked heart around the letters down where lichen and mossy things liked to grow. But now a wash of scornful sorrow came. For what her mother had done last night. NN. Noah No-good. Noah Nuthin. Full of rubbish. From the final of the Wirri Hotel trot she heard the fierce sound of hooves and the urging of the drivers and riders.

Before Lainey knew it, she was buckling on her mother's spurs, cleaned two nights ago until no sign remained of any old blood or mud. They hadn't had spurs on the horses for about four weeks so that they'd be sharp to them today.

People everywhere. Under the line of big trees, all picnic rugs now and people going about, unaware of the feeling of space opening up inside the girl. Wider and wider it grew, as if the Flaggy in flood, not a knife, was carving out something new under her rib cage.

To shut out the voice of her mother roaring away in her head, she unrolled a leg bandage just to have something in her hands to roll back up again.

‘Me mum couldn't come,' said Lainey in answer to Mr Naseby's question. ‘Got brucellosis she thinks. Said for me to ride both the horses instead.'

‘So, Lainey, you're entered on good old Seabreeze,' he said, consulting a list. ‘And your mum was to be riding Landwind and Magpie?'

‘Left Maggie at home.' Lainey gestured over to where Mr Cousins was holding the two greys. ‘But that Landy, we thought he should have his go.'

‘Well,' said old Snowy Naseby, high-jump judge since just about anyone could remember, ‘don't think that should be a worry. None of you other ladies mind, do you, if Lainey here has two to ride?' He looked at the other women who all, bar a woman Lainey didn't recognise, said no, of course not, and that for sure any horse with a bit of Chalcedite blood in it should get a jump. Specially if it were Lainey in the saddle. They all smiled except for this one woman, from Queensland it turned out and who no one knew anything much about.

‘How old are you?' asked the woman, whose name was Mrs Charlotte Knox.

‘Nearly fourteen.'

‘Is that allowed?' she said.

‘Well,' said Snowy Naseby, his own face as blistered as the nose of a white horse in summer, ‘this is Wirri Show and she's Rowley and Noey Nancarra's only daughter so I reckon there ain't a problem.'

Lainey shot him a lean, bright-eyed look of thanks. Seeing that the not-very-capable woman of Whittaker and even Leonora King, who was eliminated at Port Lake last year before the height of the fence had been raised, were having a go made Lainey feel much better.

Lainey looked at the stranger woman and tried to smile. Mrs Knox wouldn't reply to the smile and said, ‘Well let's all touch wood she doesn't kill herself or one of her horses,' and stretched out her arm to touch the timber of the jump. And Lainey thought it was funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha, that the woman's horse turned out to be named Bloodwood.

‘Now then,' said Mr Naseby. ‘Since you're the only one with two horses, Lainey, you can jump first and last. Alright. So go and warm up now.'

‘Hey, Breezy, what do you reckon?' And the old horse, ridden over jumps by her father long before they'd bought him to be the first in the Nancarrow team, flicked his ear back to listen to Lainey's voice. His nostrils cracked in the clear blue air of the afternoon, and he cantered a little stiffly but still eagerly forward. He really was such a breeze to ride that Lainey had to smile. No tricks, just always out to do the best job on the day.

She was using Roley's saddle, the one with the banana rolls at the front. Although it was a bit big she couldn't say no to the chance to be with the deep dark leather which held the smell of year after year of her father's triumphs.

Even people who didn't know who she was or anything of the Nancarrow story couldn't help but watch. She sat the old white horse with such a feeling of certainty. And Seabreeze
,
old-timer that he was, just going so calmly and kindly, as if out for a Sunday hack rather than about to go over the starting height of five and a half feet.

‘You ready then, Lainey?' asked Mr Naseby when she pulled up in front of him.

She nodded.

‘Good luck, little Lainey,' shouted old Mr Bowie Rolston who somehow, even with his legs no good from the first war, got hoisted onto a platform almost as tall as the jump, every high-jump event Lainey could ever remember at Wirri Show. Wouldn't be Wirri without him there like a bony old eagle on its nest with a hat on its bald head. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him waving his cane at her.

‘Well, on your merry way then,' said Mr Naseby.

She heard the announcer correcting himself. ‘Sorry, ladies and gentlemen,
not
the veteran high jumper Mrs Noah Nancarrow, I've just been told to alter that. Mrs Nancarrow took ill last night. That's Lainey Nancarrow in the saddle today, and she's riding one her father often won on. Famous in his day. Seabreeze. An aged gelding but still going strong.'

Lainey vaguely heard the claps from the crowd.

Although registering the little knot of centre-ring onlookers wishing her well she was totally unaware of the greater crowd on the stand and at the ringside edge. At one moment, the sunshine seemed to shift from the people, onto the top rail of the jump; at the next, she was circling around, coming into the jump very calm, because in her head she'd determined to make out she was jumping in the paddock at home.

When Seabreeze, just a bit careless, touched the jump on his way down, the crowd, already on her side, groaned with disappointment, because that rail coming down was instant elimination.

‘Could happen to anyone,' Mr Cousins assured her. ‘Such bad luck.'

But the girl felt ashamed, for it was exactly how she'd been eliminated last year. No better than bloody Leonora, she didn't say to Mr Cousins, as Leonora King's long-necked, short-legged chestnut baulked and was also out.

The woman of Knox jumped third and no doubt about it, she and the roan mare were very good. ‘But not to worry,' Mr Cousins was saying. ‘Better you just have the one to jump I reckon.' And he helped her switch the jumping pad from Seabreeze to Landy in readiness.

Next Mrs Whittaker on Hirrips' Happy Go Lucky flew over the fence like it was a picnic. Then Mrs Eileen Copley on Treacle, followed by a skinny horse with its black winter coat coming through and an upside-down neck, that reefed the reins out of Annie Lupin's hands but still went clear.