Samphire Song (3 page)

I’ve always loved white horses the best, ever since Dad won me a cute model one on the pier by shooting ducks in a row. I named him Al as he was an albino with pink eyes – a bit odd, when you come to think of it. He lives on my bookcase now, next to my framed photo of Dad and me on our Welsh riding-trip.

There is a creaking sound, the unmistakable noise
of footsteps on our warped landing floorboards. The handle of my door is turning, ever so slowly. Despite being famously frightened of horror films and things that go bump in the night, I don’t even hold my breath. In fact, I’ve been expecting a visit.

‘Stick, are you awake?’ The voice is small and hushed. I can just make out the weird shape of my brother, in his oversized Spider-Man pyjamas, in the doorway.

‘Yeah,’ I tell him. At this, he launches himself at my bed and snuggles in next to me, his teeth chattering.

‘Aagh, your feet are really cold!’ I exclaim.

‘I’ve been doing stuff to the bomber,’ he tells me. Ed has trouble sleeping, but is quite happy to work on his kit planes until tiredness overtakes him. Mum and I often find him on the floor in the morning, covered in glue and fuselage parts, snoring.

‘Didn’t you go to sleep at all?’ I ask him.

‘Noooooooo,’ he sings, a high soprano.

‘Shh, Teddy, you’ll wake Mum up.’ I nudge him in the ribs, gently. ‘Me neither,’ I say. We grin at each other.

‘Stick?’

‘What?’

He motions for me to pull the duvet over our heads, so he can tell me something important. I’m reluctant to do this because before I can escape, he normally does something gross and smelly.

‘I’m getting a remote-controlled model PLANE!’ my brother squeals, making a drum roll in the bed with his feet.

‘And I’m going to find the most beautiful horse in the world,’ I whisper. It feels good to say the words out loud in the dark. It’s like announcing it to the universe.

‘Wish Dad could come and help me choose,’ says Ed, matter-of-factly. Ed often refers to Dad as if he’s away on a tour of duty and will be back soon.

‘Me too.’ We’re both silent for a few moments. Then Ed scratches his thigh and his elbow digs into me. I push it away, he forces it back. We have a contest for about twenty seconds and then give up and lie still again.

‘Mine’s a better present,’ Ed states.

‘How do you work that out?’ I yawn, getting sleepy now.

‘I don’t have to feed it, brush it, or clear up its poo. And I won’t need to do a thousand jobs to earn extra money to pay for its shoes and hairdresser,’ he tells me, holding his nose, making gestures that indicate my breath smells.

‘Horses don’t go to the hairdresser, idiot,’ I reply, huffing extra hard on him.

‘Who does all those plaity things, then?’ he asks, yawning too.

‘Their owners, usually.’

‘You don’t even brush your own hair,’ he says, voice trailing away.

I’m about to remind Ed that running his fingers once every morning through his own scarecrow tufts doesn’t count as a personal best in the style department when I see that his eyes are closed and his mouth slightly open. His breathing is regular and deep. He’s in
dreamland, probably with his remote-controlled plane, making it do loop-the-loops, thoughts of hospitals, tubes and dodgy kidneys wiped from his memory.

‘Sleep well, Teddy,’ I whisper, folding the duvet back, allowing cool, early-morning air to ripple over us.

Chapter Five

I’m waiting at the end of our lane for the school bus. Ed is going to hospital for dialysis today so I’m alone, but for a New Forest pony and a donkey grazing on the green opposite me.

It’s nice that animals roam where they please here. I often wonder how their owners find them to check their health, or to sell them on at one of the regular auctions. It must be a massive game of hide-and-seek, but even the cleverest horse will be discovered in the end; the New Forest is contained by cattle grids and gates on its boundaries.

There’s a low mist meandering across the dewy grass. The animals’ breath mingles with it and it looks like they’re standing on clouds.

A rumble to my right tells me that my bus is
arriving. My classmates’ faces are pressed against the glass, making them look like weird gargoyles. As the door flings open, a wave of harsh sound rushes out into the still morning. It hits my ears like small fists.

‘Morning,’ says Bill, the driver, cheerily. ‘All aboard for Disneyland.’

He says this every day with a big, toothy smile. My school, although rated ‘good’ in the results tables, is about as far from the Magic Kingdom as Iceland is from the Sahara Desert.

‘Morning,’ I reply, my eyes already scanning to see where the ‘safe’ seats are: the ones least likely to be in the firing line of Niall Taylor and his crew, who practise their throwing skills (anything from pens to packed lunches) from their regular places at the back. Susie Price and her mates, the ‘Glossies’, are also to be avoided. They think speaking while applying mascara counts as multitasking and reading
Heat
magazine ticks the English ‘background study’ box. Ed calls them the ‘Flossies’ because they all wear braces in the hope of achieving a Hollywood smile.

As usual, there’s an empty space next to Poppy Brill, who suffers from eczema and whose facial skin is deep red. She’s in my year and, like me, keeps herself to herself. Her lips are moving to some song on her iPod and she’s staring out of the steamed-up window, a slender hand tapping out the beat on her knee.

When I sit next to her, she glances at me and gives me a fleeting smile. I nod in acknowledgement and put my bag on my lap, like body armour. I’m wishing that Ed were here, even though he is annoyingly bubbly and talkative early in the morning. Having him around, until he gets dropped at the junior school, makes the journey go quicker and means I don’t get the chance to drift away into daydreams, which usually involve Dad and me galloping along the shore. It’s such a hard place to return from, and sometimes I have to shut myself in the loo before registration just to get a grip so that I don’t explode when girls like Alice Hebden and Sarah Sparks discuss nail varnish or designer jeans like they’re the most important things in the world.

Lessons are OK, especially maths and science, but I’m happiest at the stables or at home with Mum and Ed. But now I have something amazing to think about – something that will help me get through the school day: soon I’ll have another life to care for, whose very survival will rest in my hands.

‘I’m floatin’ on cloud nine, babe,’ sings Poppy beside me, her melodic voice now louder than a whisper. The Glossies mimic her, like a cats’ chorus, but she seems not to hear – or care – and carries on happily.

‘Hope you’ve got a head for heights, rise up and you’ll be mine,’ I sing, joining in, clicking my fingers to the tinny beat from the iPod. I’m not sure where this burst of defiance has come from. There is a stunned silence from behind us.

‘Rise up and you’ll be mi-i-ine.’ Poppy grins at me as we finish the verse with exaggerated feeling and our eyes screwed up, like the best pop stars.

My phone is vibrating. There’s a text from Ed.

Am getting a radio controlled plane :)
As if I’d forgotten!

Race you
I text in reply. My wonderful horse is going to run as swiftly as the wind.

Loser
responds my brother, who by now is probably hitched up to tubes, watching his blood roller-coaster through its cleaning process.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, I imagine a red jet doing aerobatics, high in the sky. It starts to plummet towards earth. The crowd below holds its breath. Any moment now, its nose will pull out of the dive. Any moment now, applause will ripple across the expectant masses. But the plane is gathering speed and its engines are making a high-pitched scream. In the cockpit, the face behind the visor is ashen, vibrating with the velocity of the fall. I know the features as well as my own, the fine jawbone, the straight nose, the dark pigmented skin on the left cheek. Sweat lines, like silver beads, are strung under his eyes, which are narrowing into slits as the ground looms closer and beyond it, the ocean.

The pilot is my dad. He is trying to manoeuvre the plummeting machine towards the expanse of sea.
There is a squeal of metal and a jolt and I am fighting to get off the stationary bus. As the doors open, I’m at the front of the surge of bodies that spills out on to the pavement. I stand, face almost pressed into the metal mesh fence, trying to steady my breathing.

I haven’t told Mum or Ed about my panic attacks.

‘You OK, Jodie?’ asks Poppy, her hand lightly on my arm.

‘Fine,’ I nod, managing a smile.

‘Thanks for the duet,’ she adds.

‘Maybe we should form a band,’ I manage to say, before my body is swept along in the tide of Brockenbank students. When I glance back, Poppy’s red head is only just above the water.

As I enter my classroom and sit at my desk, I feel my brow and realise I’m sweating. It’s hard to breathe, hard to stop my head sinking down under the waves.

Slowly, my lungs start to regulate. The ocean morphs into a riot of voices: gossiping, laughing, teasing. Words and faces are becoming distinct. Chairs
scrape against the wooden floor as girls and boys assemble for registration.

I’m not drowning this time.

‘Jodie?’ calls our lovely form teacher.

‘Yes, here, Miss Dawson,’ I reply, grateful to feel the solid floor beneath my feet.

Chapter Six

Warm neck gently steaming. Soft hair hidden by a mane twitching under the pressure from the brush. Mouth nuzzling at my boots. Shod foot idly scraping at the straw in the stable. Tail swishing with pleasure. The sweet, musty smell of hot horse filling the dimly lit space, wafting over the half-closed door and dispersing into the darkening evening. All bad thoughts from the day easing out of my fingertips with every sweep of the brush against flickering flesh.

I put my arm over Rambo’s solid shoulder and lean my face against his, staring deep into his left eye, a brown fathomless pool. His raises his front hoof and lets it rest against my left foot.

‘Hey you. Leave my boot alone, I know what you’re up to,’ I tell him, as he lets me rub his nose with my
fingers. That soft, velvety space between the nostrils is on my top ten list of everything. At this moment, it’s probably in my top three, after Mum and Ed (who tie first, natch) and giant chocolate buttons.

He’s pulling faces and showing me his teeth, which are huge and yellow. He’s not worried about having a Hollywood smile. I scratch his forelock playfully. He responds by leaning against me and standing on my foot. It’s his party piece. I reach into my pocket and produce a piece of browning apple. It’s the price for having my foot back.

‘You’re quite bad,’ I say, with affection. I’ve known Rambo for five years, ever since we moved to the Forest after Dad was stationed at Lyntonbury Haven airbase. At first, I wasn’t big enough to ride him. It took about eighteen months before I had the strength to handle his habit of grazing on the move. His unsuspecting young riders would often be thrown over his head for the sake of a dandelion or a patch of new grass.

That’s never happened to me, though. Rambo and
I have an understanding. He knows that if he’s good on a ride, he’ll be rewarded with something nice from my pocket.

In his stable, it’s a different set of rules. He pushes his luck, but out of fun, not malice. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve groomed him, untangled his mane, brushed the mud from his belly, polished his tack, secured his rug and wished him goodnight with a kiss between his eyes.

He’s not the best-looking horse on the block, but he’s been my special responsibility after school and in the holidays for so long, he’s my number one friend, after Ed. I’ve waved him off on his hacks and welcomed him home with bowls of mash and a one-to-one beauty treatment. I’ve sat with him when he’s been ill and brought him treats on Christmas Day, including my version of carrot cake, a mix of grated carrots and pony nuts, which he loves.

When the world fell in two years ago, and the RAF welfare officer arrived on our doorstep with the worst
news ever, I slept with Rambo, curled into the arch of his neck, my tears absorbed into the bristles of his mane. Usually a fidget, he didn’t move a muscle all night. When dawn broke, he nudged me awake, as if to say, ‘It’s a new day – look.’ He breathed into my hair, tickling my neck, and even made me smile.