Back to Blackbrick (3 page)

At first Granny Deedee was raging with Granddad about my horse. She asked him whether he had “utterly lost” his “marbles” and said that at the very least he should have consulted her. But he kept telling her that everything was going to be fine, and for a good while she kept believing him. We both did.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned it already, but the reason I had to move in with my grandparents was that my mum had to go to Sydney. It was something to do with how the market had dried up over here.

“At least she has her mobile phone,” my gran had said cheerfully, just after Mum left. And I'd said, “Yeah, great, thank goodness for that.”

Every time Mum called to say hi, I told Gran to let her know that I was a hundred percent fine. Gran would say, “Sweetheart, why don't you tell her yourself?” holding the phone out toward me like it was some kind of weapon. But I was usually too busy, to be perfectly honest. And anyway, you're rarely in the mood to talk to a person who goes off to Sydney when there are still loads of people over here who'd have found it sort of handy if she'd stayed where she was.

I don't mean to be nasty or anything, but I had begun to
think that my mum wasn't really a proper parent. Not only had she given me a fairly stupid name, she had also left me to cope with a lot of things that I shouldn't have had to deal with at all. I was only a kid. It wasn't fair.
I
didn't pack my bags and say I was leaving, however much I would have liked to. You don't take off like that just because times have gotten a bit rough.
I
happen to believe that when you have responsibilities, you should stick around.

I would have much preferred to keep my granddad's memory problems to myself, but it turns out that the guy I'd met at the train station was in my school. He told some of the people in my class about what he'd seen my granddad doing, and then those guys went around saying that my granddad was a psycho. They told everyone that he talked to lampposts and peed in public, which was true, but it sounded a lot worse the way they said it.

And then the whole entire school seemed to be in on the news that my granddad was a proper mental case, which was getting more and more difficult to disagree with.

You'd think that having a mental granddad might make people want to be slightly nice to you once in a while, but it doesn't work like that. D. J. Burke started to call me “Loser Boy.” It's not like I cared what anyone thought about me—it was just that “Loser Boy” happens to be exactly the kind of name that is quite hard to get rid of, especially when D. J. Burke starts calling you it.

“Don't give him any oxygen,” Granny Deedee said when I decided to tell her about it one night.

“Dee, that's the most ineffective advice you can give a boy in those kinds of circumstances,” said Granddad.

I was thrilled. More proof that my granddad's brain was still working fine.

Granddad took me by the shoulders and looked at me with a load of focus and enthusiasm, and he said, “Bring that boy to the ground with all the energy you have. Stand on his chest and point your shoe toward his chin, and tell him that your will is greater than his. Keep him on the ground like that until he agrees not to call you names anymore. That should do the trick.”

After my granddad was in bed, Gran said that I was not for a moment to consider taking that advice, and she explained that Granddad hadn't really been himself when he'd given it to me. I said that okay, I wouldn't, even though in my head I was thinking that it seemed like quite a good strategy. It felt like it would work much better than Granny Deedee's metaphorical oxygen-restricting guidelines.

Not long after that, D. J. spent an entire recess shouting, “Hey, Loser Boy,” at me. He walked over and stood for about ten seconds staring very closely at my face and breathing quite loudly. Then he spat his bubble gum at me and pulled my bag off my back so that everything in it, like my compass and ruler and copies and pens, clanged and
skidded and slid all over the floor of the corridor.

“Flip off,” I said as he was walking away, but I may have said it quite quietly, because I don't think he heard.

“Cosmo, why does chaos appear to accompany you wherever you go?” asked Mrs. Cribben, my history teacher, who happened to be passing by. And I felt like telling her to flip off with herself as well. But in the end I didn't bother.

Later in class when Mrs. Cribben asked each of us what our special skill was, I said “riding.”

The Geraghty twins both started to laugh in this identical way they have, showing off their oddly small teeth, and D. J. Burke did a mocking kind of snort until snot came out of his nose.

I didn't see what the problem with telling the truth was, even if it did sound hilarious to the three biggest idiots in my class.

My granddad had taught me all the things he knew about horses, including how to gallop really fast on them. It's a pretty difficult thing to do, but he always said I was a natural.

At least that's what he used to say until he forgot my name and started asking me who I was and what I was doing in his house.

It was excellent to be the owner of a horse, even though everyone kept having a huge convulsion about it because of the expense of renting the stables, but as far as I was
concerned, it was well worth it because otherwise we wouldn't have had anywhere to keep him.

My horse's name was John. I took him out after school every single day. I used to shout in for Granddad as soon as I got home, and then he'd put on his coat while I threw my bag at the door. And Gran would stick her head out the window when we were already on our way.

“WHEN are you going to do your HOMEwork?”

Me and Granddad would both say, “Later,” so that our voices sounded like we were one person, and then we'd walk down to the stables and Granddad would tell me that I was learning a million important things every time I went for a run with John—“Better than any homework,” is what he used to say.

Granddad would look carefully at each one of John's feet, and he would trace his stump of an index finger around the grooves of John's shoes and feel every single one of the little bolts to make sure they were fine and tight. If there was even the slightest thing loose or frayed or wrong, then Granddad would replace the shoe, filing down any scraggy bits, because only by doing that can you be a hundred percent sure that your horse is going to stay sound. Granddad showed me how to do it in case, he said, there might be a day when he wasn't able to.

We'd carefully put his saddle and bridle on, and then my granddad would watch me as I jumped up. John was able to move extremely fast. He was a thousand percent
better than a lot of humans I knew. For example, he never called me names or asked me nosy questions or got angry with me for being neurotic. Obviously. Because he was a horse.

Not everyone deserves to own a horse. It's not like having a Nintendo Wii or a skateboard or anything. People with short attention spans like most of the idiots in my class wouldn't have been able to take care of a horse in a million years. I mean, you can't throw them in the corner when you've finished with them. They are a massive responsibility.

Horses' feet are shaped like cups, and when they are galloping, the ridge of the cup connects with the ground and it expands ever so slightly to absorb the impact. So then the blood rushes to the horse's foot, which is exactly what the horse needs when he's running. Especially if there's a full-size human on his back.

If you keep a horse enclosed in wet conditions, then his feet can get all soggy, and if they get like that, they will eventually become horribly sore. If you change his shoes too often, then you can put too many nail holes in the rims of his hooves and wreck them. If you ever see a horse that's lame or limping, chances are that its owner didn't care enough about his feet.

Just by looking at the way a horse is standing, I can immediately tell you what's wrong and which foot needs
attention and why, and I can file down parts of the rim of the hoof that have grown too much, and I can replace shoes or take off ones that are faulty.

Even though he was the expert horseman, Granddad said that I taught him a few things too. He said I was able to get horses to trust me. They never freaked out when I came near them.

He said that being worthy of trust is half the battle in life, no matter what it is that you're trying to do.

Me and John often galloped so fast that the people at the stables took stopwatches out. They told my granddad that I should definitely think about entering some of the competitions in my age group.

But we never wanted to win any prizes. Granddad didn't keep track of our progress or our speed or anything like that, no matter how often people kept saying that he should.

“When ambition lifts its nasty nose, joy creeps away,” is what he used to say.

“What does that mean?” I asked him.

“It means that when you've found something that's worth doing for its own sake, you don't wreck it,” he replied.

It was great when John and me were out there flying around the place. My granddad would watch us, as he leaned up against the fence, resting his chin on his arms with a smile on his gentle old face. We never knew how far we had galloped. We never knew how fast we had gone. It didn't matter. We just did it for the sake of it.