The Thunderbolt Pony

When I first got Gus, he came from a farm where he was in a big herd of horses. I thought maybe he’d miss having a herd, but when he came to live in Parnassus, it was like me and Jock and Moxy became his herd. With Gus and Jock, they have this real respectful relationship. Like, when we go for rides across the farm, Jock will always fall in at Gus’s heels and keep in time with his strides. Border collies are smart like that and Jock is super well-trained. He used to be a working dog until he got too old, and I can give him instructions and he does whatever I tell him.

Moxy is the wild one of the group – she always runs ahead, being our trailblazer, sniffing and scouting the way. She’s intrepid for a cat. It’s in her breeding. Cornish Rex are real explorers. If you don’t know what they look like, well, they are almost bald because they have this crinkled-up fur like they’ve been shaved and the skin stretches taut so you can see the bones of her skull through it and she’s super-skinny with a long, ropey tail like a rat. I’m not making her sound very beautiful and I guess she’s not, but she is kind of amazing-looking, like the sort of pet an Egyptian princess would own.

We paid almost a thousand dollars for Moxy, and Dad was furious when he found out because he said he could buy a good working dog for that and you can get kittens for free around here because people are always giving them away. You shouldn’t have to pay for them. But Mum said Cornish Rex weren’t like ordinary cats – they were explorers, more like dogs than cats in their way, and loyal like a dog is loyal, choosing just one master. Also she knew this lady in Christchurch who was a “cat fancier” who bred them and did us a cheap deal. She was a really odd woman – she kept her cats in cages and washed them in special shampoo and wouldn’t let you play with them and when you went round to her house it smelt of cat poo and all her furniture was covered in plastic.

Dad soon changed his mind about paying for a fancy cat once Moxy chalked up the highest kill rate of any ratter we’ve ever had. She’s an amazing huntress. And she eats the rats too. Lots of cats will eat mice but not rats because rats taste gross, I guess, but Moxy swallows them down – she crunches up everything except for the fangs at the front and the tail at the back.

Moxy is supposed to be my cat, but if she’s loyal to anyone it’s Gus. She thinks she belongs to him. Or maybe it’s the other way round and she thinks Gus is her horse. If I’m looking for her then I’ll find her out there in the paddock with him, curled up on top of his rump, purring contentedly.

Gus was the only one I told about my OCD for a long time. In fact, I never would have told Mum at all. I was going to keep it a secret forever. The problem was, the OCD got worse. It got so bad I began to lie about stuff. Like, I would pretend to be sick and just stay in bed all day because I figured if I didn’t move, if I did nothing at all, then I didn’t need to do any of my rituals and I wouldn’t have to try to fight the urges inside me.

Only Mum wouldn’t leave me alone. She kept insisting that if I wasn’t actually sick, I needed to go to school and do my chores. But the OCD made it impossible because I’d developed this complex world of chaos in my bedroom. It looked like a big mess, but it was all part of my plan and I’d lie in the middle of the floor like a statue with the lights as bright as heaven above, unable to switch them off and trying not to think as the bees made my head fuzzy.

One morning Mum came into my room. I’d had the lights on all night and when she left my door open and touched the light switch I started shouting. It all suddenly burst out of me like pus from a swollen wound.

“Mum!” I began sobbing. “There’s something wrong with me!”

It was Mum who looked up my symptoms on the internet and discovered I was OCD. The initials stand for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

“Evie,” she said, “it’s going to be OK. We’ll find someone who can help.”

That was what led us back to the hospital, following the blue line this time instead of the red. Once a week every Tuesday at four.

We come here, to these familiar corridors with their weird, tainted smell that is a mix of antiseptic and blood, and every time I catch sight of that sign in the lift that says “Level 8: Oncology” I feel the tears well up and I get so mad at myself, and I tell myself not to cry. I tell myself all sorts of things. And I count my footsteps. One-two. Even steps between each floor tile, an even number of buttons that must be pressed when I enter the lift, and two whole glasses of water from the cooler in the waiting room before I enter Willard Fox’s rooms to begin our session.

CHAPTER 3

The Minotaur

I still can’t believe Gus is gone. I stand beneath the bough of the tree where I tied him last night before I went to bed and then I walk round the tree again until I have done a full circle, as if this is some insane game of hide-and-seek.

I shove my torch under my armpit to free up my hands so I can untie the remaining length of rope that he left behind. When I touch the frayed ends where the rope has been broken off, it makes me feel sick. Poor Gus! He must have been terrified to rip it apart like that. It would have taken such force! He must have pulled back like mad when the quake struck. Terrified and alone, desperate to escape.

I work the rope free, prising it off with my shaky fingers, and all the while Jock stays with me and squashes so hard against my thigh I can feel his heart pounding through his bony ribcage. I lower my hand to his head and stroke his ears to soothe him with my own trembling fingers. He gazes up at me and gives this desperate whimper and we look each other in the eye and I know what he’s thinking because I’m thinking it too.

“It’s OK,” I say. “We’re in this together and we will find him.”

Anyway there’s no way we can make it to Kaikoura where the rescue boat will be waiting without him. And it won’t wait forever. Time is already running out. So we have to find him, and soon.

But I don’t even know where to start, here in the dark in this paddock somewhere between Hawkswood and Ferniehurst, the remotest hill country of the South Island coast. No people for miles, no houses, no lights.

I desperately want to go back into the tent and curl up in a ball and cling on to Moxy and stay in the tent with her and Jock. Then we could look for Gus when the dawn comes. But I can’t do that. I think of my pony out there on his own and I know he’s scared and he’s in trouble and I can’t abandon him to survive the night alone. Darkness or not, I’m going to find him.

One thing on my side is that Gus is a smart horse. Back at home in Parnassus, when I fetch him from the paddock, I don’t need to go far because I can call him to me. So even out here in the middle of nowhere, I know that if he can hear me, he’ll come to me.

And so I call him.

“Gus!” My voice breaks in the night air and it sounds so frail I hardly recognise it.

“Gus!” I try to be stronger this time. I need the sound to travel as far as it can for him to hear me.

I don’t keep shouting. I pause for a minute and wait to see if he will whinny back to me. That’s what he does back home. Gus is clever. He’s always known his name. He knew it even before me, from the very beginning …

***

“So you didn’t name him Gus?” Willard Fox asks me.

“No,” I say. “He was already called that when I got him. You never change a pony’s name. It’s bad luck.”

“And you’re superstitious about it, huh?”

I raise an eyebrow, as this seems like a dumb question. I am superstitious about everything.

“What sort of riding do you do with Gus?” Willard asks.

“He’s really good at cross-country,” I say. We’ve jumped one-star fences at home, which is really big for a 14.2 pony. I think he’s good enough to make Eventing Champs.

“His actual competition name isn’t Gus. It’s Pegasus. I just call him Gus for short.”

“Pegasus!” Willard Fox exclaims. “Nice. Like the horse in the Greek myth?”

“Well, Pegasus was white and Gus is kind of, well, he’s dapple-grey,” I say. “And so they’re the same except the Greek Pegasus had wings and he was born from the neck of the Medusa to be the carrier of thunderbolts for Zeus.”

Willard Fox looks impressed. “So you know your Greek gods?”

“We’re studying them at school.”

I thought Willard Fox would be different from this. A psychologist should have a white coat or a stethoscope or something. Willard Fox wears a plaid shirt and jeans and his hair sticks up all scruffy and he’s got this smile that takes up his whole face. He gives me one of his big grins when he says, “You must be really upset to be missing school,” but I don’t smile back.

“I’d rather be in school,” I say.

“Really?” He doesn’t look at all offended, he just shrugs it off. “OK, cool. So this whole psychologist thing is all your mum’s idea, huh?”

I don’t reply.

“So why don’t you want to be here, Evie?”

“Because,” I say, “I don’t even have OCD.”

Willard nods. “Fair enough,” he says. “Tell me, why are you so certain, Evie, that you don’t have OCD?”

I frown as I think about this. “Well, I don’t ever care if my hands are dirty.”

Willard nods thoughtfully. “So that means you can’t have OCD, right? Because people with OCD are clean freaks, right? They wash their hands all the time and they keep things totally neat. And they say things like, “Oh, I simply have to keep the kitchen spotless because I’m sooooo OCD!”

He waves his hands about theatrically as he says this and I can’t help laughing.

He sees me laugh and he smiles too and his goofy little-kid grin takes up his whole face again.

“Evie,” Willard Fox says, “it’s not about being a neat freak. There are lots of different ways to be OCD. So tell me about you. Let’s talk about what you do.”

Then there is this enormous vacuum in the room where I say nothing for ages and Willard Fox just sits there and he says nothing too. And he waits and waits and when I speak at last my voice is all trembly.

“I count things …”

***

I shine my torch into the darkness in every direction but I can’t see Gus and I am just thinking I should give up when Jock, who is still glued to my side, lets out this low growl.

“What is it?” I say.

Jock growls again, and this time it’s in the back of his throat, and the growl gets lower and lower until it becomes a bark.

Grr-woof, grr-woof!

I put my hand down to touch him and realise that the hackles have risen up on the back of his neck. Does he sense that Gus is near or is it something else? “What’s up, Jock?” I ask him.

The only time I’ve seen Jock act like this is when an aftershock is coming. And so I brace myself for the boom and the rumble beneath my feet, but then when it doesn’t come and he’s still growl-barking I know there is something out there. It must be Gus.

Jock tenses up. He wants to go, but I’m worried I’ll lose him too! I grab his collar to hang on to him and he strains against my hand as I take the rope that I pulled down from the tree and I tie it on to him.

A Border collie knows one hundred and sixty words. I remember Dad telling me that. I’ve always wondered how many words Jock really knows. I know he knows my name, and his. I’m pretty certain too that he knows “Gus”.

“Jock,” I hold his muzzle in my hands as I speak to him. “Go. Find. Gus.”

When I let go of him this time, I feel the rope go taut in my hand and he pulls me forward with a lurch. I stumble to keep up and I train my torch beam on to Jock’s back so I can follow him. I’m surrounded by darkness except for his blurry black and white form that moves ahead of me through the void.

The rye grass is long and damp from evening dew and I feel wetness seeping through above the top of my riding boots as I half walk, half jog to keep up with him.

I can feel the anxiety creeping up on me, making my pulse race. I hope the braids in Gus’s mane have held. I can’t do anything about them now, but there are other rituals I can do. I could stop again and arrange the contents of my backpack to squash the anxiety back down. But I push through the fear and keep going, even though my mind is racing with thoughts like What if we get lost? Then we’ll never find our way back and Moxy will end up trapped in the tent alone and she’ll be stuck in there forever and she’ll starve and die …

… and just as I’m running all the worst-case scenarios through my head and I’m about to lose it, Jock stops running. He freezes in front of me and the hackles on his neck stiffen straight up and he starts barking his head off. But when I shine the torchlight ahead of us, there’s nothing there!

What is he going on about?

“Gus?” I call out.

“Gus!”

I shift my torch to the left and there in the clean, white beam of light he stands facing us. His white face is dappled like the moon, dark eyes reflecting and unblinking.

If I had hackles like Jock, they would rise on the back of my neck too. Because the eyes captured in my torchlight are not the ones I expected. The fur is grey like Gus, but the face is broader and coarse, and gleaming above his temples there are two sleek, hard horns, lethal and as highly polished as sabres, curving and sharpening to a brutal point on either side.

Jock growls and the creature returns my dog’s warning with a threat of his own – a deep, indignant snort expelling streams of mucus from his nostrils.

This is not my horse. Not Pegasus at all, but the Minotaur. I am staring at the face of a great, white bull.

CHAPTER 4

The Sacrifices

The white bull stares back at me, his eyes boring down my torch beam. For a moment, we hold each other’s gaze. And then I run!

Almost immediately I know it’s the very worst thing I could possibly have done. Idiot! I curse myself for turning my back on him. But the fear is so deep and so primal, I’m not thinking, I’m just falling and getting up again and scrambling for my life, running through the deep grass and then tumbling forward, down on my hands and knees, panting and sobbing, as I try to escape.

I can hear Jock behind me and he’s barking his head off! He didn’t run after me. The herding dog blood is so strong in him, he’s instinctively turned to face the bull. I’ve seen him do it before. Once he dominated a whole stampeding dairy herd and turned them round by holding his ground. But a white Charolais is not the same as a Friesian cow, and even a working dog with Jock’s awesome skills can’t back him off for long. I hear my dog’s valiant woofs and in reply come the angered snorts of the bull. There’s silence, a stand-off of sorts, and then the ground shakes and I think aftershock. But it’s not an earthquake this time. It’s the lumbering gait of the bull.

I turn with my torch and see Jock, unbowed and unafraid, facing him down and barking like mad.

The bull stops for a moment, and I think maybe Jock has him. But then he lets out this bellow, and the noise is so strong and low and terrifying, it’s like a lion’s roar. And then there’s the thunder of hooves once more and with my wobbly torch trained on the bull I don’t entirely see, but I know that he’s got Jock!

I can hear him yelping!

“Jock!”

He keeps howling and I know he’s been hurt and without thinking I find myself running back to him. My heart is pounding, and all I care about now is Jock and reaching him before the bull can get him again.

I run through the dark, stumbling and falling and getting up again until at last I reach Jock’s side. I stand over him and spin round in a full circle looking for the bull, making myself dizzy following the torch beam, hyperventilating with fear. Where is he? Where did he go?

Then my torch casts a shadow and I catch a flicker of something white in the furthest reaches of the beam. It’s the bull! He’s about ten metres to the right of us, and he’s moving in our direction.

At my feet Jock gives a whimper as if he’s trying to say, “You run!”

I can’t run, though. Not without him. So I throw my torch to the ground and yank my sweatshirt over my head and for a second everything is black and I’m panting and blind, and then with a tug my sight returns and I snatch up the torch in my left hand, and with the sweatshirt in my right, I focus back on the bull.

The sweatshirt is blue, which I know is the wrong colour. It should be red, right? Like a matador’s cape. But I am hoping that waving it around will have the same effect.

“Hoi!” I call out to the Charolais. “Hey, Bully Bull!”

I hold my sweatshirt out as far away as I can from my body and I wiggle it.

The bull pulls up to a halt, he stamps a hoof. He’s looking at me.

“No!” I say. “Not me. See the sweatshirt? Look at the pretty sweatshirt!”

The bull prepares to charge. As he angles his massive forehead towards the ground, the horns rise up and I see their gleaming, bony tips and I realise far too late how ridiculous I am with my matador cape. The bull is ten times my size and the sweatshirt is like a postage stamp to him.

I fling the sweatshirt hopelessly in his direction and I throw myself to the ground on top of Jock. And as the hooves thunder I know that any moment I will feel the impact. I’ve seen bulls attack cattle dogs. I once saw one on the farm get gored by a horn and he had to be put down. And that’s what I’m thinking this bull will do to me, and I can feel Jock squashed beneath me and I think at least he will be safe because the bull will get me first.

And at that moment I am Theseus, facing the Minotaur.

***

I’m back in the hospital for my second session with Willard Fox. I’m telling him about the Ancient Greek day we had at school.

“I went as the goddess Athena,” I say.

We had to dress as gods so I wore an old bed sheet knotted at the shoulder, and when I got on the bus George the bus driver gave me a look and said, “Your mum forget to wash your clothes?”

Half the kids on the bus weren’t even in costume.

“Moana was just in shorts and a T-shirt!” I tell Willard Fox. I was grumpy with her that day because we had a fight about superpowers.

“I said my superpower would be to jump those really huge four-star cross-country courses like at the Badminton Horse Trials,” I tell Willard Fox. “But Moana said horse riding’s not a superpower, even though it totally is.”

“So that’s why you had a fight?”

I shake my head. “No, we had the fight after that.”

Moana said her superpower would be mind reading and to show me she put her hands on my head with her fingers splayed at my temples. And that was when I panicked and pulled her hands off me because if Moana could read my mind then we wouldn’t be best friends any more. She would think I was a freak because of my OCD.

“So Moana doesn’t know you have OCD?” Willard Fox asks.

“No,” I say.

No one at school knows. Especially not Mrs Lowry, and sometimes it’s hard because she picks on me because I can’t write certain letters – like M and N. And so my spelling is bad.

At the Ancient Greek day, Mrs Lowry got Brodie to do the sacrifice to Zeus – because he’s her pet and he gets to do everything. But I am doing sacrifices too, every day and no one cares.

The counting and the rituals … even my bedroom. Mum thinks it’s a “god-awful mess” but really it’s my gift to the gods, a complex matrix of talismans and portents disguised as dirty clothes and old bowls of half-eaten cereal. And, then there’s my backpack, the most precious piece of my OCD universe. And those two braids in Gus’s mane. I must do them. I have to get them just right. If I don’t manage to ace it all – then I unleash hell.

“Evie, what if I told you that this is all the OCD? And it is tricking your brain. What if I told you that even though it seems real, your rituals don’t have the power to protect people?”

Willard Fox leans forward. “You’re doing this because you really love your animals, don’t you, Evie?”

I nod. “Of course I do! More than anything.”

“Well, what would you do if Gus got really sick?”

I feel my pulse quicken. I don’t like to imagine bad things happening to Gus.

“I’m protecting him,” I say abruptly. “He’s not sick.”

“Yes, but accidents happen, right?” Willard says. “So let’s say Gus gets hurt in the paddock. He cuts his leg. How would you fix it, Evie? Would you use your powers and do the braids in his mane? Pack things in and out of your backpack? Or …”

Willard Fox looks at me. “Or … would you maybe call the vet?”

I feel my cheeks turn hot. When he puts it that way I know that it is illogical, what I am doing.

“I’d call the vet.”

Willard looks at the backpack that I have beside me at my feet.

The force of my panic surprises me.

“Don’t touch it!”

“It’s OK …” Willard Fox says. “I know it’s precious. How about you show me?”

My hands are shaking as I pick up the backpack and put it on the table.

It sits there between me and Willard, like an unexploded bomb.

“Now what?” he says.

“I have to do the zips,” I say. “I do them twice. Before I take the things out.”

“OK,” Willard says. “So that’s the OCD talking. And today, we’re not going to give in to it. Today, instead of doing it twice, Evie, I want you to just unzip the zip and close it again once and then leave it. Can you do that?”

I reach out my hand, slowly, and when my fingers touch the zipper the bitter rush of pure adrenalin makes me want to be sick. Just the once? That’s so dangerous!

I close my eyes and I take a deep breath and I do it! I unzip the front pocket. Just once. It’s sitting there gaping open – taunting me! Then I zip it shut again. Just the once! It’s so wrong. I can feel the bees surging in my brain, imploring me to do it again, to make things even!”

“You’re doing great, Evie,” Willard Fox says.

Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod!! I hold my hand there, wanting to unzip-zip it a second time, tantalisingly close to giving in to the urge to do it again. It takes every bit of my willpower to fight it and all the time I can hear Willard’s voice talking me down, but it sounds fuzzy through the buzz of the bees in my brain.

“On a scale of one to ten,” he is saying, “where are you now Evie?”

“… eight,” I pant out the word. “I can’t breathe!”

I want to make the world safe!

“Evie,” Willard Fox says my name like he’s invoking a god. “You. Can. Do. This! I want you to say out loud with me: ‘I’m in charge, OCD. I’m taking the reins!”

I look at him and I feel a lump in my throat that blocks the words.

“Come on, Evie!” Willard says. “You don’t want to be controlled like this so do something about it. You need to fight it. Do it!”

And there, in the middle of his office, I hear his voice and then I hear another voice and it’s mine but it doesn’t sound like me. I’m screaming. “I’m in charge, OCD. I’m taking the reins!”

When I finish shouting the words, I burst into tears. Great big gasping sobs, and Willard is right there with me, telling me it will be OK and to take breaths, big deep breaths.

“Good work, Evie,” he says to me. “I’ll see you next week.”

***

Fear is not static – it is a living thing. Like the earth beneath my feet, constantly moving and changing. It sounds crazy, but looking back, at that moment in Willard’s rooms the zip on my backpack was just as terrifying to me as this half-a-tonne of Charolais bull in front of me is.

In the beam of my torch, the bull is bearing down on me. I know what’s coming and I’m about to close my eyes and brace myself for the death blow, the sharp stab of the lethal point of the horn into my gut. But the impact doesn’t come.

Thunder rolls through the ground once more and I look up and see a pale shadow appear from the darkness, galloping its way towards us and coming between me and Jock and the bull. In my torch beam, the grey dapples bleach away so that the horse looks almost white and the tail that unfurls behind him is flecked with stars. He looks like a creature from a Greek myth himself, like Pegasus. But he’s totally real, and my heart soars.