Horse Tears

I remember it vividly. I wanted to wear my cherry jumper because it would look nice in the pictures. The eye-popping blue of the sky shouting summer off the page, the golden yellow gorse smiling brightly, then me, star of the show in bright red, tacking across the grass to send my kite soaring. Perfect. Auntie Alice hardly ever came to stay and I was adamant that she needed something to remember the week by. To remember how pretty I was.

Dad had agreed, although I’d known he wasn’t really looking and Auntie Alice stroked my hair and told me I’d look like a princess in anything. But Mum had refused. I’d boil she'd tutted, handing me a rejected orange t-shirt that I’d begged her to buy.

It was the first time I’d hated my Mum a little, as I pulled that fluoro t-shirt over my head - wishing I lived with Auntie Alice who’d probably let me wear whatever I wanted.

It didn’t last. The itch of rebellion dissolved the moment I twitched my toes onto the peeling paint of the doorstep. So hot. I turned back into the suddenly pitch hallway with a sheepish smile as a sort of apology. Mum had vanished though – the sharp clip of the back door a firm reminder that that spring I was a second best to her azaleas.

It had felt like the ban hit her the hardest. I don’t recall seeing her sit down once that month, or the next – always outside, always muttering. She started collecting used water; carefully salvaging soapy sink suds, ladling out the dregs of our short, shallow baths and teetering with slopping buckets down the stairs.

Dad had explained it away with a smile, her Pride of the Town title is hanging in the balance, he’d whisper to me as I watched her tenderly cupping petals and soaking the soil underneath. I couldn’t understand how flowers could be so important. Funny, now.

The morning was fast evaporating and Auntie Alice was restless. I think her flight back to London was that same day and she wasn’t keen on the plan of a trip out, but Dad had insisted. It was our first time heading up there that year and he obviously thought she’d like to join us, to feel part of a proper family. She squeezed past me into the sunshine, flipping her sunglasses from head to nose with a perfectly manicured forefinger. ‘Come on Ellie, life doesn’t favour dawdlers.’ A classic Alice phrase. She sailed the steps to the drive and opened the passenger door in one graceful movement. To me, back then, she seemed so sophisticated, so city sure, so brilliant. I’d wanted to be like her I think, when I was that young.

Dad had wanted to get going too, jangling the keys and giving me the wink which meant Luke was my job. Crouched behind the car, Luke was squishing gravel into the melting tarmac, setting toothy-grinned faces in the road. His feet were tucked up under him so he teetered on the curb and all it took was a light push to topple him forward, splaying his handful of stones scattergun – carefully placed artworks muddled away into a random pattern which no one would be able to decipher. He started to grimace until I scooped him up, telling him we’d make faces later, together. That now we were off to the moon.

Luke loved the moon, as he called it, its wide open spaces the perfect playground for townbound children, prisoners in a preened garden with brightly coloured borders barring us on all sides. And I did too. The air felt different on the moor, like it had travelled further so tasted more. It had the scent of life in it, sweet manure, heady gorse coconut, dry grass. Promise and mystery in fresh gulpfuls.

Dad would always start it, whenever we went up there. First thing he’d do was kneel down, put his arms around our shoulders and breathe. In through his nose until his chest was double the size – his nostrils flaring comically for effect, then out through his mouth in a hot, tickling breath. ‘Boy, that’s the stuff’, he’d mutter, before walking around to the boot to unpack whatever we’d brought to do that day. Then we’d copy him – noses too and word for word. It was special to us, that air, one of those family things you never forget.

The car couldn’t travel fast enough for me. I was restless and uncomfortable, desperate for a cooling breeze to blow the sweat out of my hair, dry the nooks of my arms and knees. The backseat was sticky hot, making my legs slide as we turned corners, weaving left and right down winding lanes. They felt like forever, those short journeys, but that day especially dragged unbearably, because Auntie Alice hadn’t wanted the windows down as it would mess up her hair.

Luke was tugging my t-shirt sleeve – eager to play the game where we held our faces out of the car to dry our tongues then wince as we made each other touch them, shocked every time at how alien they felt. I wanted to play too, but I also wanted Auntie Alice to have me up to stay with her and I knew bad hair would ruin my chances. So I squeezed Luke’s sweaty little fingers and gently pushed his tongue back in, making a silent promise to play the whole journey next time, once she had gone home.

Nearly there, Dad had beamed through the rear view mirror, sensing the frustration as I fidgeted nudges and kicks into the back of his seat. Your kite must be itching for a flight, he winked at me, cooped up all winter? Dad always seemed to get it. I had smiled and nodded, pleased he understood me.

It’s hard to imagine how I’d really felt that morning, now, looking back in retrospect. I think I was happy, hot but happy before we pulled into the car park. There was no sense of dread, nightmares weren’t a factor then; nothing really worried me. But it’s almost impossible to tease out the emotions - before and after - from the knotted mess of memories that sit, bundled up in my brain. The particulars of the incident itself are crystal clear, but how I dealt with it, how I changed because of it, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to decipher.

The earth had cracked under the tyres as we trundled into our usual spot, dusty plumes billowing around the doors. Auntie Alice’s mouth turned down as she pouffed her hair at the nape of her neck and rolled her eyes at Dad. My feet had tingled as I reached out from car to ground, heat sizzling instantly on skin.

Long dried out puddles stretched across the ochre dirt and cracks split wide and deep as I put my weight down, as if just tiptoeing across the surface would be too much for it to take. Dad’s door had popped before mine and Luke ran round to our side, expectantly, so we were both there, ready. Dad didn’t move. He just stood there, a wound down clockwork toy, arms limp; face static. There was no kneeling, no nostrils flaring, no familiar phrase.

The air was dead. No grassiness, no coconut. No sound or movement even. Just suffocating blue and suffocated brown. I heard Alice’s feet fatally crunch crevasses as she stomped around the bonnet to join us, followed by a gasp, hoarse and hollow, then a whimper.

That’s when I saw it.

Right in front of us, maybe 10 feet away, a pony. Collapsed in the dirt. Its side was ribbed with bones, a rattling cage rising slowly then falling as if the air was too heavy for it to push through. Deep wells pitted its body, craters and peaks at sharp angles pulling its skin taut and simultaneously leaving it loose, like a tarpaulin stretched the wrong way across a cheap tent frame. Its mane sat matted and brittle, dulled with dust, while its fur mirrored the moor that held it, a worn through carpet; patchy and desperate.

From where I had stood I could see its eyes – which was the worst. They weren’t looking anywhere, sort of closed but sort of open, a crust clumped in its lashes, the whites visible and dark rivulets running down its cheeks. I thought it was crying.

That was the moment for me, right there. I’ll never forget those horse tears, begging for life, or death, on the unforgiving moor. I wanted it to disappear so we could get back to breathing deep and kite flying and playtime. The sun fell hot on my face, cursing me, us, all of us, refusing to let us go. And I hated it, then, its heat and its pain and what it was doing.

I remember looking up and pleading the sky for rain, rain for days and days. I wanted the rain to carry the horse back to healthy, to turn the dust back to soil, to bring the life back to the air. The sky just stared back at me deep blue and deadly, refusing to even respond. Not one cloud brewed on the horizon.

Alice had turned away, burying her face in her arm and Luke’s eyes were clamped tight shut. A slow pitched whine started to build in his throat and Dad had moved swiftly, dropping down, hand out, drawing him in to his chest, to safety. When his voice came it was shallow and empty, “Mr Horse is just tired Luke, he’s just resting.”

But I knew he wasn’t. We all knew.