It was around the time he graduated and had to move back home. He’d drank his way around the city for long enough, and he hadn’t got lucky the entire time he was there. Course he told his friends he’d done it lots of times.
He packed his bags, said a goodbye to the stinking fridge and a ‘see you later’ to his housemates. Then Mother drove him all the way home. There was no real heartbreak.
Sloping onto the families drive Mother pulled up the handbrake and told him it was good to have him back and that it had been quiet without him, then they went inside.
It quickly became apparent that things were different. Dad was fat and the living room had been rearranged. The dog had lost his pep and his parents watched TV in separate rooms in the evenings. Sister had grown tits too and she was seeing some barman from down the way. Dad said she wasn’t in very often and she liked to come home late when she was. He also said her skirts were
‘waaaay too short’. It was all very dissatisfying.
They lived on a simple estate that if you looked at it from above, looked like a jesters face in profile. You had your hook nose and your prominent chin and that was where the houses were. Then you had the long hair which was the forest. He had no friends in the area so he took the dog on walks there. It wasn’t big but it was certainly green and that was aesthetically enough.
He found a livery on one of those walks, just through the edge of the Jester’s Hair Forest on a pitching yellow hill. Youngsters rode there at weekends and people kept their horses there and you could go down and watch the horses on the jumps too if you wanted. Not that anybody really did. He found it one evening, semi-drunk on a half a hip flask of Dad’s cheap port and wearing Mother’s fleece that stank of Chesterfield cigarettes.
“That’s a nice horse.” He said after a healthy nip, stuffing the flask back in the arse pocket of his jeans.
“Which one?” said the woman he spoke to.
“Him,” he pointed at the grey one with the black mane.
“Oh yeah, he’s a beauty.”
“You work here?”
“Yeah,”
“Can you ride?”
“What do you think?”
“Yeah, I thought so. I’ve got a sense for these things. I used to ride myself,”
“Yeah?”
“Oh shit I was pretty good. I rode all the time. I did jumps...you know...jumping.”
“Wow that’s great. Good for you,” she said, “I mean that.”
She had her hair cut short and she was older than him and she wore jeans and one of those anorak tank tops. She was packing away her gear into a metal shed container that was lit by a floodlight and illuminating the blue air all around. She had a brusque manner that he found unsurprising.
“Do many people work here?” he said.
“A few of us do yeah,”
He felt a little bold. “Well, you need any more people? For work I mean. To help out?”
“You could always volunteer I suppose,” she said, finally stopping and looking him up and down in his green fleece, blue denims and trainers that used to be white.
“What volunteering? Working for free?”
“That’s what volunteering is you know,”
“Yeah, course. What I actually meant was what would I be doing?”
“Well it won’t be glamorous. Maybe mucking out, helping tidy up. Checking the gear...”
“Hey why not just let me get to the good stuff? You know, the riding and shit.”
She’d bent down to put some rope into the metal shed so he took the chance whilst her back was turned, to have another massive slurp from the flask. He was drunk. The dog quivered behind his legs pathetically, cowering from one of the horses which had made its way over and was now hanging its huge brown head over the wooden beam of the fence, half a yard away from where he stood.
“You need to train for that kind of stuff you know, there’s safety to think about. You can’t just walk straight on in and-”
“Listen, I know what to do. You stick ‘em on the horse and you tell ‘em to go round the track. They’re kids they’ll be fine.”
“It’s a little bit more complicated than that,”
“So you say. Listen let me have a go at it. I’ll prove it to you,”
“I’m not sure, you might-”
“Yeah you are. And if I do it you take me on and you come out for a drink with me. What do you reckon?”
“What so you ride the track and I come out for a drink and then I give you a job,”
“Yeah, but actually fuck the job.”
She laughed and she checked her watch and looked him up and down. He smirked slightly, hands sinking into his pockets and breath slowing.
“Well seeing as you’ve a nice smile alright. But you have to do all the jumps too,”
“Easy.”
The light continued to fade as he swung a leg uneasily over the wooden fence. The horses were docile in their coats and produced occasional brays and squeals, swishing their tails to rid themselves of flies. He wished he could do the same. It was summer and it was a buzzing free for all everywhere around him and he could almost feel the flies on his scalp and in his ears, touching onto the flesh and then flying off again as soon as a hand was raised to them. It was a constant restless itch that he felt all over himself all the time and it wasn’t just here and now it was everywhere. The flies never stopped and neither did anything else.
She was wrenching on the reins of one of the horses that had looked like he might buck and scare off, and she was calming him down, whispering in his ear. She turned away from the horse and looked over.
“Come on then. He’s already saddled,”
“What’s his name?”
“Jerry,”
He hated that name. He uneasily placed one foot in Jerry’s stirrup and a hand on the pommel of the saddle. Then he attempted to hike himself over but found he couldn’t do it first time. He tried a couple more times but each time he got up, hiked half a leg up, managed to get the heel on the horses rear end but then couldn’t quite get it all the way over.
“Want a hand?”
“No.”
He did it at last and when he hauled himself up he had the gall to look down on her from Jerry’s back like he’d acheived something. He nodded and smiled, his head reeling slightly, and was shocked when she actually smiled back at him. He hoped that she hadn’t smelled the booze on his breath or the smoke from within the fleece.
The dog sat on it’s haunches beyond the fence, cocking its head to one side and looking at him. The flies buzzed and the light continued to fade. They were all stood on sand and dirt, everything smelled of shit and of the country and the evening colour had now changed from the red to the blue to a light hazy black.
And then it was pretty much time to start so he kicked his heels into Jerry’s sides and they set off at a canter. As they went he thought about leaving university and about how everything was now that he was back and there was nothing to do. There was Mother’s sad resigned smile, Dad fat and oblivious to it all and his Sisters new tits, and right there and then it was all just a little too close to home.
Jerry’s hooves hit the sand in tandem, speeding up far faster than was expected, and for a moment he forgot the booze and considered that just two basic riding lessons when he was a boy might not be enough for this task. But it didn’t matter, because as the first fence loomed he bounced up and down and back and forth on the saddle on Jerry’s back, his arse aching, holding on tightly, beyond all fear and supposing all the way that this must at least be worth a try.
The dog was looking on and it barked and leapt into the air then just as Jerry the horse jumped, and at that moment the flies finally felt like they’d stopped buzzing.
He floated there and he couldn’t see anything, not the girl, not the forest beyond or his house through all that. All he could see was the possibility of landing and the possibilty of falling, so he held on tight and hoped.
