Boris Becker

“There’s a horse in my bedroom,” I said.

Eric had stolen my heart when I was 17. It turned out that Eric stole pretty much everything he saw, spent his life in and out of prison and, when out, was always engaged in some mad scheme, usually at my expense.

I’d put up with a lot over the years, but surely this was the final straw, even Eric would have to admit that he’d gone too far. Contrition wasn’t his response however.

“One horse! For fuck’s sake, I left three. What’ve yer fucking done with the other two?”

“I didn’t count them,” I admitted. “I just…”

“If you’ve lost the horses I’m dead meat,” he said.

“How did you get three horses upstairs into my …”  I started but I wasn’t allowed to finish. Eric would make a merciless Mastermind host.

“I can’t trust you with nuffin’?”

He stomped out the stairs. Somehow I was the one in the wrong.

Sure enough there were not one, but three horses, all crammed into my little room. It already stank of piss.

“Why?” I said. “I know you’re not the sort to splash out on stable, but couldn’t you find a barn, or a shed or something?”

“”It’s a tax thing,” he said.

“Tax?”

“Yeah, you know what the Inland Revenue are like, they tax everything. Best to hide things away if you don’t wanna pay tax on ‘em.”

“You’ve bought three horses?” I said, incredulously. “Last week you said you didn’t have the money for a pint of milk.”

“It’s a consortium I’m involved with. An investment.”

“And nobody in this consortium has anywhere to put horses.”

“Don’t make a fuss. It’s just for a short time. Don’t get a strop on.”

“I’ve not got a strop on,” I said. “But this is my bedroom, where I sleep, my private space.”

“Well, you’ve got guests. Treat them nice, like when your mother stays.”

“My mother sleeps on the couch.”

“Your mother ain’t a horse though, is she?”

There’s no arguing with Eric. I don’t mean he’s persuasive in argument, I mean he’s likely to hit you if you argue back too much. Whatever dodgy deal this was it was probably his biggest to date, which meant that he was in over his head and it was bound to end in trouble.

I had no choice but to accept my fate. I rescued the mattress and bedding from my room andmade them up downstairs. I then set out to rescue my clothes, even the things in drawers and wardrobes. Then I drove to a pet supermarket and bought two bales of hay, which I threw down across the bedroom carpet, in a vain bid to mop up some of the piss and shit.

I stopped for a well-earned break, but I’d barely taken my first sip of tea when the doorbell rang.

I knew the man was a friend of Eric’s before he even spoke, he was all white van and confidence.

“You Julie?” he said.

“Judy,” I corrected.

“Yeah, that’s it. I’ve brought your food.”

“I’ve eaten,” I said.

“Not for you. For the horses. You know about the horses don’t you?”

“The ones in my bedroom. Yes, I have noticed.”

I let him in. With Eric you quickly learn when to bother making an argument. Never.

“There’s three horses,” the man said. “There’s s’posed to be four.”

“Have you looked in the wardrobe,” I said.

The man looked confused. “Na, it’s not big enough.”

“Neither’s the bedroom.”

“This is their food,” the man said, not willing to engage in debate on the feng shui horror that is too many horses in a small bedroom.

He handed over bags of what looked like a high-class breakfast cereal.

“Give them three scoops each, three times a day.”

“I’m a working woman,” I said. “What if I don’t have time.”

“Make time. These are important horses.”

“Important horses!” Who knew anything important would ever find itself in my bedroom, let alone horses.

“Yeah, we have look after them.” He corrected himself. “YOU have to look after them. Remember, three scoops each, three times a day, and as much water as they can drink.”

“Absolutely, I wouldn’t want them to let up on the pissing.”

“Don’t try and be funny. This is serious business. There’s a lot of money riding on this, don’t fuck it up.”

He left, leaving only instructions and expectations.

In spite of myself I did what I was told. I filled a bucket with water and took it into my room. I then filled their bowls with the expensive-cereal food. They ate it hungrily.

The horses were understandably in an anxious state. As well as feeding them I did what I could to calm them, talking to them as they ate, and stroking their noses.

All three horses were black, but I soon learnt to tell them apart. They all had identifiable marks, patches of white, like your first grey hairs popping up in random places. My favorite, the smaller of the three, had a white patch at the top of her nose, and loved it when I stroked it. One, the largest by a head, had a white stripe on it’s left hind leg. And the third was completely black all over, bar the very tip of its tail.

I looked after the horses for over a week. I did what I could to clean up their mess, but it would be a long time before I could sleep in my bedroom again, it was just too pissy.  I never saw Eric at all in all of this time, he was happy to make whatever money he could and leave me to do all the messy work.

And then one day they were gone. Just as magically as they arrived, as if there was a secret passageway to another universe that the horses would stroll in and out of at their whim.

I didn’t see Eric for a week after that. He didn’t answer his calls. You might think that he’d realized he’d overstepped the mark with the horses in the bedroom trick, but if you think that you really don’t know Eric. He’d either got into trouble over the missing fourth horse, or had made enough money from the scam to not have to bother with me again.

Same difference. Good riddance to him.

I thought that was the end of the matter, but one afternoon I sat down for a cuppa and put the TV. It was horse racing, not something I usually watch, I was about to switch channel when I recognized one of the horses.  The one with the white patch on its forehead, whose name was apparently Functionary.

I searched the horses in the next two races, and quickly found the other two. The white-tipped-tailed horse was called Fallacy and was twenty-to-one in the next race, the white-striped horse, Listen To Mother, was ten to one in the last race.

I still hadn’t worked out exactly what the scam was, but there was money in it, that’s for sure. I went to an online betting site and placed a £50 accumulator on the three races, not money I could easily spare, but it’s not often that the horses from your bedroom turn up on a racetrack.

They all ran by a mile and I cleaned up, over £40,000 in total.

I moved out of my pissy, shitty little house and put down a deposit on somewhere decent, somewhere that Eric would never find me.

I was free.