Star Dancer (2 page)

‘
WHO WAS THAT BOY YOU WERE TALKING TO
?’ Anne asked Suzanne as they fastened Star Dancer’s head collar to the crossties. With a rubber curry comb, Suzanne began rubbing away the damp mark on his back where the saddle had been. ‘Just a boy,’ she said. ‘He’s called Ger Casey.’

‘One of the grooms? He looked a bit young.’

‘I don’t think he works here.’

Star Dancer twisted his neck around so he could nudge Suzanne with his nose. The instructor frowned. ‘Have you been giving him sugar again? You shouldn’t do that, Suzanne, I’ve told you. It makes him beg and that’s a bad habit.’

‘But he loves it. And he’s been good.’

‘I know. Just remember to reward him with a pat instead. Giving sugar to horses makes some of them start biting, trying to get more.’

But Dancer wouldn’t bite, Suzanne thought to herself. She waited until she thought Anne was looking the other way, then took a lump of sugar from her pocket and slipped it to him.

‘I saw that,’ Anne said sternly. ‘Suzanne, I’m ashamed of you. You did something after I told you not to, and that’s not honest, is it?’

Suzanne felt the colour rise to her cheeks. ‘I … I s’pose not. I’m sorry.’

‘Sorry you got caught, you mean. Listen here to me. It’s important to be honest, Suzanne. Horses are very sensitive and
they pay a lot of attention to people. They can always tell if you aren’t honest, and they won’t trust you.’

‘I won’t do it again,’ Suzanne said, embarrassed. She wanted Star Dancer to trust her always.

Anne went off to talk with the parents of one of her other students and Suzanne began grooming Dancer. They both enjoyed it when she rubbed his muscles firmly with the rubber curry comb, then brushed him with long, sweeping strokes until his coat shone. With her fingers, she gently separated the strands of his black mane and tail, then brushed them too. Bending over, she lifted each of his feet in turn and scraped out the insides with a hoof pick, watching for small stones that could make him go lame. As a final touch she wiped his eyes and nostrils with a damp sponge. Then she put his lightweight rug on him and left him in his loose box with a bucket of fresh water and a net of fragrant hay.

By then the morning was over. There were no other riders left in the barn. Only the grooms remained, working over their charges. But Suzanne groomed Star Dancer herself at shows. Anne was pleased. ‘You’ll learn a lot more about your horse that way,’ she had told the girl.

As Suzanne left Dancer’s box, she almost bumped into Brendan Walsh. A thin, red-faced man who always wore a wool cap, Brendan was the stable manager at the stables where Dancer was kept. ‘Oh Suzanne, I was looking for you,’ he said. ‘Don’t suppose you’d have time to groom some ponies for me later, would you? We’re a bit shorthanded at this show. Especially tomorrow, with so many of our riders going in the hunter classes.’

‘I’ll have to ask my dad tonight,’ Suzanne said.

‘Ah sure, he won’t mind.’

‘My parents made me promise not to work around any horses but Dancer without checking with them first,’ Suzanne explained.

Brendan nodded. Trying to keep the child safe, they were, and no harm in that. ‘Ask away so,’ he said. ‘Tell me in the morning what they say.’

Suzanne left the stable to get a hamburger for her lunch, then ate it slowly while she watched some of the pony classes. She remembered when she thought it would be the most wonderful thing in the world to have a pony. Now she had a horse, and it was wonderful. Except …

Meanwhile, Ger was making his way home. He knew he was going in the right direction when he began seeing more boarded-up windows and more rubbish in the road. He thought of Star Dancer with every hair smooth and polished and perfect. Star Dancer taking every step just so, with his rider sitting up there on top like she owned the world.

‘Star Dancer.’ He said the name softly to himself, just to hear it.

Coming to a road he knew, he found Anto with Danny kicking cans at a dead tree in front of an abandoned shop. ‘Where’ve you been?’ Danny asked Ger.

‘At the RDS,’ Ger said.

‘Go ‘way out of that! You were not.’

‘I was so! I’ve a friend there, at the Spring Show.’

Anto snorted. ‘You do not.’

‘I do too. Her name’s Suzanne O … O something. She’s got a horse in the show and she’s going to let me ride it.’

The two boys looked at him. They didn’t quite believe him, but
they weren’t sure. Ger was a chancer, he might do anything.

‘If you ride a horse I want to be there,’ said Anto.

Ger replied quickly, ‘You can’t, you have to have a ticket.’

‘How’d you get in then? You had no ticket and no money either.’

Ger grinned. ‘I snuck in.’

Danny said, ‘We will too, then.’

Ger began to feel trapped. ‘Suzanne mightn’t like it. Look it, she gave me a ticket so I could come back tomorrow and ride her horse, but if you two snuck in it might make trouble, and …’ He trailed off. His friends were staring at him with growing disbelief.

‘You don’t know any Suzanne O with a horse,’ Anto said firmly. It was the first time he had ever challenged Ger.

Ger stuck out his jaw. ‘I do too. Come on tomorrow and see for yourself if you don’t believe me. But I can’t get you a ticket.’

‘Oh, we’ll get in if you did,’ Anto promised. ‘We’ll be there all right. Just wait and see.’ He made it sound like a threat.

Next morning Ger was up and out of the flat before anyone else was awake. There was nothing to eat in the kitchen but cereal and half a carton of milk. Nothing in the cupboard but his mother’s vodka bottle.

There was always vodka, even if there wasn’t food, Ger thought sourly.

A torn plastic bag slumped on the stairs, vomiting out its rubbish. Ger edged past the mess and ran down the stairs and out into the morning.

Suzanne was in a hurry too, that morning. Her father drove her to the RDS from their home in Stepaside, but he couldn’t stay at the showgrounds with her. He had to go to work. ‘I’ll take the
afternoon off and come and watch you show,’ he promised.

‘Will Mum be able to come too?’ Suzanne asked hopefully.

Mr O’Gorman frowned at the steering wheel as he drove. ‘I don’t think so, Suzanne. The tourist season is just starting and she’ll need to stay home if she wants to make a go of this Bed and Breakfast idea of hers. Can’t afford to miss a potential customer, you know.’

Suzanne knew. A horse was a luxury her family could hardly afford. Suzanne was their only child and they made sacrifices for her, but she must not ask for too much.

Besides, Mum hardly ever wanted to watch her ride, which was strange. Suzanne’s mother had been a rider herself once.

Mr O’Gorman let his daughter out of the car at the gates of the RDS, then drove on to the newsagent’s he owned in the city. There wasn’t much traffic on the road yet. Many people were still in their beds.

But the grounds of the RDS were a-bustle. Everyone was busy preparing for the events of the day to come. Booths were being set up, gardens watered, horses groomed. When Suzanne entered the stable, she could hear the ponies and horses nickering for their breakfast and banging their feed buckets. Grooms were pouring scoops of horse nuts into feed buckets and breaking open bales of hay. Some of the ponies who would be in the morning classes were already fastened in crossties, being curried and brushed.

Brendan Walsh was rubbing saddle soap into the flaps of a saddle. He glanced up as Suzanne passed by. ‘Your horse has been looking for you. I gave him a bucket of fresh water when I did the others.’

‘Oh, thank you!’ Suzanne hurried on to Dancer’s box and went
inside. He came to meet her, stretching out his neck so he could touch her cheek with his velvety muzzle. It was the way he always said hello. His breath was warm and sweet.

‘Are you showing today?’ asked a boy just entering the loose box next to Dancer’s. His pony was a black mare who had won a jumping class the day before. The first place rosette gleamed proudly from the door where it was fastened.

‘I’m in the dressage, just after lunch,’ Suzanne said.

‘They’re mostly grown-ups. Why don’t you ride in the hunter classes with kids your own age?’

‘Kids do dressage too,’ Suzanne said stiffly.

‘Don’t you like hunting? Don’t you like to jump fences?’

Why doesn’t he mind his own business? Suzanne wondered.

She didn’t answer the boy with the black pony. She pretended she hadn’t heard his question.

Don’t you like to jump fences?

Suzanne busied herself with a stable fork, mucking out Dancer’s loose box, separating piles of manure from the golden bedding straw. She put the manure in a manure basket outside the door.

Don’t think about the nightmare, she warned herself as she worked. Don’t, don’t, don’t!

Sometimes days, even weeks went by without the nightmare. She would almost forget. Then one night she would wake up in bed with fear cutting her stomach like a knife. The nightmare would be all around her, more real than her bed or her room.

A nightmare of falling and pain and awful things happening.

She would sit clutching her blankets and shivering, afraid to go back to sleep. ‘It’s just a dream,’ she would tell herself over and
over, like a magic spell to protect her from harm.

‘Just a stupid old dream.’

But it was more than a dream. It seemed terribly real, and the memory lasted for a long time. Standing close to the comforting bulk of Star Dancer, Suzanne admitted to herself that the dream was haunting her.

‘I’m scared, Dancer,’ she whispered to her friend. ‘I’m scared.’

Being able to say the words helped a little. She could say anything to Dancer.

She couldn’t tell her parents about the dream or her fear. They had made sacrifices so she could have a horse. All her life she had wanted a horse more than anything else in the world. There were pictures of horses cut from magazines on the walls of her room, and statues of horses on every windowsill.

Now she had a horse. A wonderful horse.

And she was afraid.

It wasn’t fair!

‘Did you remember to get your parents’ permission to groom for me today?’ Brendan asked as Suzanne returned from emptying the manure basket outside the stable.

‘I forgot,’ she said guiltily. ‘Oh, Mr Walsh, I’m sorry!’

Brendan pursed his lips in an expression of disapproval. Suzanne felt awful. She couldn’t bear to have anyone angry with her. ‘I meant to ask,’ she said, ‘only I was thinking about the dressage test today, and I just …’

But Brendan had turned his back on her and was walking away. She gazed after him, stricken.

‘Suzanne O,’ said a voice behind her.

Suzanne whirled around. There stood the red-haired boy from
yesterday, grinning at her. ‘What did you call me?’ she asked.

‘Suzanne O.’ Ger was too embarrassed to admit he had forgotten the rest of her name.

Suzanne giggled. ‘I like it. No one’s ever called me that before.’

Standing beside her, Ger looked into the loose box at Dancer. ‘How’s he doing today?’

‘Grand.’ Suzanne looked at her horse too. He was so big and strong, so sure of his own power. ‘Will you be watching his class this afternoon?’ she asked Ger. ‘The dressage, at three o’clock?’

‘Yeah, of course. But … er, d’you think I could … I mean … well, sit on him, like? First?’

Suzanne stared at Ger. ‘Sit on him? On Dancer?’

Gazing at his feet, Ger mumbled, ‘It’s sort of hard to explain, but …’ He twitched his shoulders and scuffled his feet.

Suzanne sat down on a dusty wooden tack box outside Dancer’s door and gestured to Ger to sit beside her. ‘Tell me,’ she said. She was smiling, and her eyes were kind.

‘Well. You see … I kind of told these pals of mine that I was going to … I mean, that you’d let me … I mean …’

Suddenly Suzanne understood. ‘You told your friends you were going to ride my horse. And they’re expecting to see you on him.’

Ger looked away from Suzanne, staring off into the shadows at the end of the stable. ‘Yes, that’s it.’

‘Oh Ger, you mustn’t lie, not around horses. They know, you see. And they won’t trust you.’

He looked at her in surprise. ‘Are you having me on? Horses know when you’re telling a lie?’

‘They do,’ she told him solemnly.

Ger thought for a moment. ‘I don’t tell lies. Not really. I just
sort of … tell stories.’

‘Why?’ Suzanne cocked her head to one side.

No one had ever asked him such a question. But Suzanne seemed really interested in knowing. So he tried to tell her. ‘I s’pose … things don’t make much sense, do they? In the world, I mean. Not to me. So I … I tell stories that make it make more sense. Make it the way I think it should be. I’m not hurting anyone,’ he added quickly.

Suzanne was nodding. ‘I understand. Things don’t always make sense to me, either.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like … I love Dancer, and I love riding him. But I’m scared.’

‘Scared of your own horse?’

‘Not of him. But of falling off him and getting hurt.’

‘Have you ever fallen off?’

‘Loads of times,’ Suzanne replied. ‘When I first started riding I rode ponies, and I was always tumbling off them. I was never scared then, though. I just got back on. We live up the road from a farm with a big stables – that’s where we keep Dancer at livery now – and I’d go down there and beg to ride their ponies. In the end my dad paid for me to have lessons. When I could ride well enough he bought me my own fat little pony.’

‘Star Dancer?’

Suzanne laughed. ‘Ger, Dancer’s a horse, not a pony. My pony was called Cauliflower and I loved her, but I grew out of her. When my feet were almost touching the ground my riding teacher told my parents I was ready for a horse. She found this dressage horse for sale cheap. He’d strained a tendon and the lady who owned him was too heavy for him to carry while it was still weak.
And she didn’t want to turn him out to pasture until it healed, she wanted another horse she could show right away. So she sold Star Dancer to us. I wasn’t too heavy for him at all, and he got well and we’ve been together ever since.’