The Thunderbolt Pony

It’s my pony. It is Gus.

CHAPTER 5

Pegasus and Athena

Gus charges in at a gallop, and he pulls to a halt right between me and the Charolais. I see his eyes, dark and burning, as he squares off against the bull, and I feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up at the heat of the desert blood in him. Gus taunts the Charolais, flashing back and forth in front of him in a high-stepping trot, then circling around, keeping just far enough away so that the bull cannot reach him. I keep my torch trained on them and its beam becomes the spotlight illuminating a grand performance as Gus dances rings around the Charolais. The dance is deadly, but there’s such grace and beauty to it. He spins and arches his neck, hocks driving beneath him so that one moment he almost seems to trot on the spot and the next he’s flying forward, his mane whipping in the vortex created by his acceleration. I have never seen him look more Arabian than he does at this moment.

Compared to the fluid beauty of my horse’s movement, the Charolais looks like an old, punch-drunk prizefighter who’s been beaten too many times in the ring. He’s a lumbering oaf, slow and witless. He staggers around, bewildered by Gus’s display, and then, shaking his enormous head as if he’s been dazed and suddenly woken up, he gives a snort and charges. He is too slow. Gus is already gone, and the bull misses completely and now Gus loops behind him and circles round and round, still just out of reach in his high-striding trot, and then as he dashes past once more he shoots off, moving purposefully away from me and Jock so that the bull gives chase. They disappear into the darkness and that’s when I know we have our chance to get to safety. I grab Jock by the collar and we run.

Jock is on his feet and he’s matching my stride. I still don’t know how badly he’s injured from the bull’s strike but despite his wounds he can move well enough. He bounds on in front of me, leading the way, and my torch beam is wobbling so that the world seems to fling about in front of my eyes but I keep running. Then up ahead of us I can see the tree where I tied Gus last night and I know we have somehow found our way back to camp.

My fingers fumble to unzip the tent. I can hear Moxy yowling her distress inside. I scoop her up in my arms, and she does this thing she does when she is really, really pleased to see me where she bites my face. And then she even smooches all over Jock, which is unusual because she’s mostly a bit stand-offish with him and not all cuddly like she is with Gus. I see her sniff at Jock’s side, examining him, and he whimpers and begins licking the spot with his tongue and I can see now where the bull got him. There’s a cut on his flank where he got nicked by the tip of the horn. Even though there’s blood, the wound is shallow. If I was a vet I don’t think I’d even do stitches, and Jock is licking it clean so he will be OK.

Jock and I lie there beside each other, both of us panting, exhausted from running all the way back, Moxy purring all around us. I shine the torch on my watch and see that it’s four am. I want to get out and search for Gus again but it would be better to wait until it’s light. At least I know he’s close now and we can find him when the dawn comes, but I’m not going back into the dark with the bull still out there. Gus can outrun him, I’m certain of that. But we’re not as quick. And so we lie there and when I get my breath back, I pick up my backpack and I zip and unzip it again. I do my rituals, until my heart is beating at the regular pace once more.

Not all rituals are bad. Mum used to say it was “our ritual”, whenever we went to see Willard Fox, to stop off on the way back in Parnassus at the dairy to get an ice cream.

If my friend Gemma was working, I’d always get a single cone of vanilla because Gemma does big scoops. But if Scary Mary was behind the counter then I’d have to go for a Choc Bomb because Scary Mary’s scoops are too stingy.

Scary Mary owns the Parnassus Dairy. She doesn’t let you browse the Horse & Pony either. She has a grumpy handwritten sign up over the magazine section that says: “Please purchase before you read. This is not a Library.”

Anyway, I’m in my tent doing my ritual with the backpack, and I’m thinking about Willard Fox and the very last time I saw him. We were rating all the things that give me OCD on a scale of one to ten, and then Willard Fox came to my backpack.

“On a scale of one to ten,” Willard Fox asks me, “where would you put the backpack, Evie?”

The backpack is my portable OCD world. You could take the sum of all my fears and shove them together and they would fit neatly inside that backpack. I look at Willard Fox. “A ten.”

“Evie,” Willard says, “I feel like we’ve been here together in the foothills for a long time now and you’ve done all this stuff in preparation, and now you’re ready. It’s time to go up Mount Everest.”

I know what he wants and it makes the bees in my brain start humming.

I mutter something about how I’ve done enough. My OCD is much better now, and maybe I don’t even need to come and see him any more, but Willard Fox still wants to look inside my backpack.

“What’s in there?” he asks me.

“It’s personal,” I say.

Willard Fox leans forward, his elbows on his knees. “Do you know what rust is, Evie?”

“Like on a car?” I say.

Willard Fox nods. “The thing about rust is, if you remove it, you have to get rid of all of it because if there’s still a little bit of it left then it grows back again.”

He looks at me. “OCD is like rust. We need to get it all out …”

“Or the OCD will come back again …” I finish his sentence.

I clutch the backpack to me. “If I let you look inside,” I say, “it will ruin it.”

Willard Fox nods. “Do you want to tell me then?”

I take a deep breath. “There’s a pen,” I say, “and a takeaway container, and a pair of glasses and a notebook.”

“And why these four things?” Willard Fox asks.

“Because I like even numbers.”

“Why else, Evie?”

There’s a pause in the room and you can hear the clock. I listen to it ticking. Willard Fox is good at silence, though, and he holds on and he waits for me.

“They were on my dad’s beside table,” I say. “In the hospital. When I did it.”

“When you did what, Evie?” Willard Fox says.

I don’t answer.

“Evie, do you think you made something bad happen?”

I am shaking. I look down at my hands and see that they’re bound in a tight knot. This was why I never wanted to come here! I knew it would come to this eventually. Willard Fox is too smart for me. I knew he would find out what I’ve done.

“Yes … no … maybe.”

“Well, that covers all the bases,” Willard Fox says.

I haven’t admitted this before, not to Mum or even to Gus. But with Willard the words just come out before I realise I’ve said them.

“That day when we visited Dad,” I say, “I … I was trying to stop having the OCD and I … I made myself do it.”

“What did you do? What do you mean, Evie?”

“I didn’t know it would happen! I was trying to be good.”

There is no air in the room and the dust motes float and I am not in my body any more. And I can hear my voice but it sounds like it isn’t mine as I tell Willard Fox what I did.

“I came home and I got out of the car and only slammed it once. And that was when it happened.”

I’m in tears now, and I can barely sob the words out.

“That was the day he died.”

“Evie? Do you really think your dad died because you didn’t slam a car door twice?”

He’s not being funny right now and his smile, for once, is gone.

“Yes,” I say softly.

Willard Fox leans forward and makes a steeple with his fingertips. “You know, if this was Ancient Greece, we could have blamed the gods for your dad, right? Maybe your sacrifice to Zeus wasn’t quite right. Or maybe you angered one of the other gods, like Hera, maybe?”

I nod, my eyes misting with tears.

“Things were a lot easier, I think,” Willard Fox says, “when we had gods to shoulder the responsibility for our fates. Because without gods, how do we explain famine and disease and war? Or the death of someone we love. Without gods, there is no reason. All we have is the randomness of life. So why does fate make our car tyre go flat, or make our horse go lame just before a big competition, or give us the cancer that kills us?

Willard Fox hands me a tissue and I blow my nose.

“Evie, your OCD wants you to believe that you can slam a car door twice and change the course of the future, that you are the mastermind of this universe, that your rituals will bring order. But they won’t. So here’s the deal. You have to accept that the world is beyond your control. Stop making sacrifices to fake gods and take back your real power.”

He smiles at me. “Can you do it?”

I sniffle a little and then I look him square in the eye and I say it: “I’m in charge, OCD. I’m taking the reins.”

And this time, I really, really mean it.

***

“Are you ready, Evie?”

It’s the weekend after my last session with Willard Fox and I’m in the best place in the whole world. At the start line of a cross-country course.

Mum is standing beside me with Gus in his full tack. He has a martingale on him, and his new cross-country tendon boots. I pull on my gloves and tighten the chinstrap on my helmet, and then Mum gives me a leg up. I feel a rush run through me as I land lightly in the saddle and slip my feet into the irons.

My OCD has been bad this morning. As I was tacking up, I could hear the bees ready to swarm and at the last minute I caved in to them and hastily put two tiny braids into Gus’s mane after all. No big deal. Just to be safe. To be safe. Now, as they’re calling out my number, 23, I get another twinge of OCD. I look down at my bib and wish it was an even number. Even would be safer. Even would be good.

“Two riders to go ahead of you …” Mum looks at number 21 who’s at the start box and about to be given the signal to set off on the course. “You can head down there now …”

She smiles and gives Gus a slappy pat on his shoulder. “Remember to slow down into the woods to take the roll top,” she says. “You need to give his eyes a chance to adjust to the light in there. Evie, remember at the ditch, look up! Never, ever look down or he’ll stop. Your eyes will take you where you want to go …”

At the warm-up area beside the start box I take a tight hold on Gus and look out over the fences and trace my battle plan in my mind. Mum and I have already walked the course twice this morning. There are sixteen jumps and it seemed to me that her advice for each fence was usually exactly the same. “Sit up, keep straight and kick on!”

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