Sarah Lean - A HORSE FOR ANGEL

AITING AGAIN. THIS TIME IN THE CAR WHILE Mum rushed into the supermarket on the way home. She didn’t leave the keys behind, so I couldn’t open the windows or listen to the radio. I could only hear something rumbling outside and my own sighing.

Waiting makes you sigh. And sighing makes a white patch on the window so you can write HELLO backwards.

An old lady with a trolley stopped to read my message. So I smiled. But she frowned and walked on. So I wiped the window and watched a giant thundering yellow crane instead. It turned slowly in the sky, with a big chunk of concrete swinging on a thin wire below it. I didn’t blink for ages. Just watched it sway.

Mum came out of the supermarket, carrier bags in both hands, her big black handbag containing everything-anyone-could-possibly-need (and probably a hundred more things as well) weighing down her shoulder. Her phone was crushed between the strap and her ear.

I watch her face for clues and can usually work things out and guess what she’s decided. She has an are-you-listening-carefully face, a don’t-question-me- I-know-what-I’m-doing face and a slightly smiley making-up-for-what’s-missing face the rest of the time. And I could tell two things by the way her eyes were fixed on me as she walked and talked. The two things I could tell were this: first, the phone call was about me; and second, I didn’t have a choice.

“There’s been a change of plan,” Mum said, swinging the shopping bags into the back seat. “You’re going to Aunt Liv’s for the Easter holidays.”

I wasn’t expecting that.

“But I always stay with Nana in the holidays. Why have you changed it? Because I touched those stupid lights?”

Whatever she was about to say, she didn’t.

“It has nothing to do with that.”

“Yes, it is. You’ve changed it because of what happened earlier.”

“That’s not it at all. Nana’s had to go up to Leicester on the train to look after her cousin, who’s had a fall. Aunty Annabel. You remember her?”

Nope. And if you fold your arms, you don’t have to try to remember either.

“The one with the poodle,” Mum said, and I could hear her trying hard not to make this about the incident.

I couldn’t picture Aunty Annabel, just a trembling, pinkish poodle and a funny smell of ham.

“I thought you said it died.”

“Yes, but you know who I mean.”

“Why can’t somebody else look after her? Why does it have to be Nana?”

Mum continued as if I’d said nothing.

“The decision’s been made. When we get home, I want you to go up in the loft. There’s a big grey suitcase up there that you’re going to need.”

I noticed we’d completely left out a whole middle bit of the conversation where I could say I didn’t want to go. Which is always part of Mum’s master plan. Cut out the annoying middle bit and get to the point, or the next appointment. Never mind what I want.

“Start packing tonight,” she said. “You can do the rest tomorrow when we get back from your maths tutor and before swimming club, then I’ll drive you down to Aunt Liv’s on Sunday.”

I don’t like drama club and I don’t like the maths tutor either because her house smells of garlic. My swimming teacher says I swim like a cat, like something that doesn’t want to be in the water.

My life is a list of mostly boring or pointless activities that I didn’t choose, with a car drive and waiting in between. If you practise long enough, you don’t have to care that everything has been taken out of your hands. That’s what mums are for.

“So how was drama club? Apart from—”

“Fine,” I sighed.

When we got home, we ate cold pasta salad out of supermarket cartons. Mum had her phone glued to her head again and while she was talking she waved a finger towards the loft door in the hallway ceiling at the top of the stairs.

UR LOFT WAS AS SILENT AS THE MOON. EXCEPT for my footsteps, which sounded hollow against the boards. The yellow padding in the sloping walls blocked out the sounds of the world. It felt like a place from long ago that had stopped, with its old air and old things we keep because they don’t belong at the dump or in a charity shop or anywhere else but with us.

I saw the grey suitcase. And I could have just grabbed it and gone straight back downstairs. Instead, I pushed my shoulders back and turned my chin up. I was going to make a stand. And I didn’t mind being up there where the world had paused and nobody could see me or hear me. Just a few minutes of pretending…

I imagined telling Mum what I really thought.

Now listen, Mother, I don’t want to go to any stupid clubs. You see, I don’t like them and I don’t really have any friends at them because I’m not very good at anything and I’m not interested either. Now you want to dump me in a place where I don’t know anyone and I’ll have to do a whole load more things that I don’t care about. And I know how much it upset you and reminded you of Dad, even though you didn’t say… but I did actually want to fix those lights. And I really liked doing it.

I didn’t mean to think that last bit. And I knew I’d never be brave enough to say any of those things.

I sat down in the old dust and sighed. That’s when I noticed the tidy pile of cardboard boxes that I was sitting next to. I decided to open the top one.

Inside there was an old Mother’s Day card with crushed tissue flowers on the front, a lined notebook with big uncertain handwriting and pages and pages of scratchy drawings of a house with five-legged animals in it. At the bottom of the box were clumpy clay models and strange mixed-up creatures made from cardboard, wires, feathers and buttons. An elephant-giraffe with a long neck and a trunk, a hippo-bird with two clawed legs, and other impossible animals. It’s funny how you can’t remember making these things, even though you must be the same person with the same hands.

I noticed then that the cardboard box had a sticker on it. It said Nell – aged four. All the boxes had stickers saying my name and my age! Year by year, everything I’d made had been stored in a pile, getting taller every year. I looked inside some more of them. All the other boxes had schoolbooks and reports in them. How come I didn’t make things any more?

That’s when I saw a brown leather case behind the boxes, lying alone in the shadows under the eaves, under forgotten dust. It was a bit bigger than my school backpack and quite heavy. I heard things shifting inside as I dragged it over by the handle. The leather was worn, the seams grazed, like skin protecting the tender things inside.

There was no sticker on it with my name, but I flicked the catches open anyway.

Inside was like an ancient tomb, full of flat pieces of metal with holes round the edges, narrow strips like silver bones, scattered among ornaments and precious objects. I rummaged through the pieces and found a musical box and sixteen miniature painted horses. I liked the way one fitted in my hand with my fingers under its metal belly and its neck against my thumb. Its galloping legs were frozen in time, its silent eyes wide open. And then I remembered what it was.

Once, all the pieces had made a mechanical carousel, almost as big as our coffee table, but taller. I was four when I last saw the brilliance of it, when I last saw the lights and spinning horses. I opened the lined notebook again, the one from when I was four. That’s what the pictures were! Not strange creatures with five legs, but horses with long tails, and they weren’t in a house, they were on a carousel. And then I remembered the buzzing in my skin and brain, the laugh alive in my tummy, as I had crouched and gazed at the swirling, whirling carousel.