The Country Escape - Jane Lovering Page 0,21

we were standing face to face there wasn’t room for either of us to do anything with the raised hand, and we lowered them again.

‘Take it as read?’ he said, after a bit of elbow-clonking.

‘I think so, yes.’ I opened the door.

Keenan, mac over head dripping like a gutter, jumped and then said, ‘We’d better go. I think I’m dissolving.’

I closed the door and went back to Patrick’s bucket.

7

The rain had stopped when I woke up the next morning. I knew it was late from the way the sun was inching its way up over the breast of the hill, and sat up in a panic.

‘Poppy! You’ll be late for school! Are you up?’

There was no reply. Maybe she’d managed to get up, get ready for school and leave for the bus without waking me? I laughed at my delusion. Poppy hadn’t managed to do anything silently since she was about seven; every movement was accompanied with either music blaring or heavy footsteps and sighing. I pulled a dressing gown on over my pyjamas. It had been a cool night and the sun’s edges had definite overtones of crispness about them.

No sign of her in the house, and the back door was wide open. I stuck my head outside and felt the cold grip of horror constrict my throat.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

I was hardly even aware of what I was doing and my vision had narrowed to a sliver through my lashes. All I could focus on was Poppy sitting, perched up on Patrick’s wide back, reading a book. She was lolling sideways, the book resting on his scrubby withers, whilst he grazed absolutely unconcerned, stepping carefully around a huge puddle that had accumulated yesterday in the middle of the field.

‘Get down now!’ I had to have two goes at getting the words out – my mouth was sticky and my tongue dry as a feather.

Poppy looked up from her book. Patrick raised his head briefly, snorted, and went back to the grass. ‘Why?’

The ‘because I say so’ response had been eliminated from my toolbox of parental equipment a long time ago, by the series of ‘why?’s that always resulted, so I had to think fast. ‘Because it’s not safe!’

Something in my tone, or the fact that I’d run out in only my slippers across the wet grass and mud, was clearly convincing because she sighed and slid down, landing her booted feet alongside Patrick’s huge ones. He shook himself and wandered off. ‘Wow, overreaction much? It’s not fair. I’ve got this pony and I can’t even sit on him? Dad says—’

‘I am so uninterested in what your father says that I am practically comatose about it.’ Relief heated my veins. ‘Patrick is – well, he might not even be broken to ride, and anything could have startled him.’

We both looked at the stolid fourteen hands of eating machine, ripping grass from under the big apple tree with his teeth and a noise like a hundred plasters being removed at once. Anything less likely to be flighty and easily startled it was hard to imagine. He had all the capriciousness of a tonne of wet concrete.

‘You are not to sit on him again.’ The hot wet flood of relief through my veins made my words sharper than was wise.

Poppy rolled her eyes and did the deep shrug that meant she’d taken my words on board and they’d last as long as it took her to work out an argument against them. It was no good. Patrick would have to go. I couldn’t risk her doing this sort of thing again; not when anything could happen. A bird could fly out of a hedge, startle the pony, and then she’d be thrown… ‘And why aren’t you at school?’

She started her dismal stomp towards the front door, and barely hesitated. ‘Because it’s Saturday, Mum, and even those slave drivers don’t make us go in on a Saturday.’ A hesitation in her step. ‘Mum…’ There was a tone of concerned affection in the word, which meant she wanted something.

‘What?’ I tried not to sound sarcastic. She’d got off Patrick, the danger was over, and I needed to keep her onside about this. Any kind of annoyance would increase the stomp.

‘Please would you drop me over in Steepleton in a bit? Rory and I are going to hang out and he’s going to talk to his mum about me getting a job waitressing in her café, that’s not in Steepleton it’s a