Hot Potato (4 page)

The afternoon sunlight slipped through the cracks
between the wall palings, leaving bands of light and
shade on the floor. One of the muscular feed-shed
rat-cats lay on a stack of hay bales licking its paws.
The striped shadows on its fur made it look like a
tiger.

Shelby looked up at the blackboard, muttered,
'Two green chaff, one pellets, two stud mix,' and then
slid the dipper into the chaff bin.

Some of the agisters at the stables kept their own
feed in their tack rooms, while others paid extra to
have their horses fed by the staff.

The feed buckets for these clients had the horses'
names on them. It was simply a matter of filling it
with the ingredients listed on the board next to the
horse's name and then placing the bucket in the trolley
ready to take out to the stables.

All around were the sounds of horses – snorting
into their bins, cantering in the arena, clip-clopping
down the laneway. Shelby could hear the puff-squeak
of electric brakes from a truck backing in. She could
hear the crackly thumping and scraping of someone
moving bags of feed around in their tack room. In the
arena Miss Anita's voice was calling out military-style,
'Left, right, left, right.' Somewhere in the next stable
block a group of girls laughed.

Shelby was starting to feel silly for the way she had
behaved with her friends. Lindsey should have waited,
but Shelby doubted that she herself would have, if
she'd been the one to arrive first. Was it a big enough
deal to go off in a huff and miss out on a whole afternoon
of playing with the new pony?

'No,' she muttered out loud, wishing she'd let it
go, like Erin had.

Picking up the next bucket, Shelby glanced up at
the blackboard and thrust the dipper into the bin of
pony pellets.

Lindsey was right too. She had paid for the horse,
and they probably would have decided that she should
ride first. Now Shelby would have to make up with
her, and there would be that little while afterwards
that was strained and awkward.

Shelby sighed. 'I'm a duffer.'

The best way to make amends would be to give
Lindsey the fifty dollars. Then they would be square.
It was just a matter of finding it.

Shelby didn't get pocket money from her parents.
She had asked to have it weeks in advance so many
times that her parents had lost count and given up.
Now they had agreed on the things they would buy
for her – like money for the canteen at school, Blue's
food and worming paste, getting his feet trimmed, and
her pony club fees. For anything above that she had to
do extra chores around the house.

What could she tell them she was buying? It
seemed as though her parents were paying attention to
what she said these days, so she would have to be
careful.

With all the feeds made up, Shelby hefted a bale of
hay onto the front of the trolley and dragged it out
of the shed. She stopped at the first stable, tipped the
feed into the bin and dropped a biscuit of hay into
the bag hooked on the wall.

For safety, they always put the feeds in the stables
before bringing the horses in from the day-paddocks
one at a time, and then once they were eating calmly,
the two girls put the horses' rugs on. All the horses
knew the routine, and that made their behaviour more
predictable.

One by one Shelby emptied the buckets into the
waiting bins, until she reached the last stable in the row.
A woman named Tammy rented this one. She had a
stock horse gelding called Ajax that Shelby didn't like
very much.

Shelby loved most horses, but she was wary
around Ajax. He was kept in a day-paddock on his
own because when he was left with other horses he
would herd them into the corner and kick them. He
also smelt funny – more like a dog than a horse. You
could see the whites of his eyes, even when he was
resting, and his rump was short and sloping – not
round, like an apple – so he always looked tucked up
at the back.

Shelby wasn't such a big fan of Tammy either. If
she had been a Disney cartoon she would have been
drawn all angles and dark shadows.

Tammy only came to the stables once a fortnight.
She didn't always ride. She often brought friends with
her and she always had some complaint to make. She
wanted extra rice hulls for her stable floor. She didn't
think the girls were cleaning it properly. She wanted to
know exactly what time Ajax's rugs came off in the
mornings, and insisted that they took his off last when
the weather was cooler.

One time Tammy had written a letter of complaint
about Lindsey and Shelby because she overheard them
laughing in the feed shed. She had said that the whole
place would run more efficiently if the two girls were
made to work separately.

'What a witch!' Lindsey had said. 'You know she
pulled me up the other day for not hanging her rugs
straight? She said they were getting damaged from
being scrunched!'

'She's a witch who pays two months in advance,'
Mrs Edel had remarked. 'She's not asking for anything
we can't do with a little bit of effort.'

'She's only got a horse so she can say that she has
one,' Lindsey added under her breath.

Shelby opened the gate and walked though Ajax's
yard into the stable, wrinkling her nose. She could
smell his faintly doggy aroma. The tack room door at
the back of the stable was open a fraction. Shelby
moved to close it.

Lying on the tack room floor, in the gloom,
crumpled like an autumn leaf, was a fifty-dollar note.

Shelby looked over her shoulder. There was no one
around. She stared at the note for a second and then
slipped it into her pocket.

I will give it to Mrs Edel
, she told herself.

Shelby tipped Ajax's feed into the bin and then,
while she pushed the trolley around the corner to the
next row, she thought about Tammy's nasty letter. As
long as everything was done safely, did it really matter
if they laughed while they worked?

She also remembered seeing Ajax kick an
appaloosa filly half his size while the filly squealed
with fear and pain. It had been awful.

Tammy received special treatment all the time.
Shelby didn't know if she paid extra. She doubted it,
but even if she did, Shelby and Lindsey were the ones
who actually had to do the extra work, and they
didn't get anything more for it.

Besides that, who leaves fifty dollars lying around?
Tammy must be pretty rich not to have noticed that
it was missing.

Maybe I should consider it payment?
she thought.
A one-off tax – a 'levy', as they'd learned in Commerce
at school.

Shelby prised another biscuit from the bale. No,
she couldn't do that, but she could borrow it for a
while, just until she had figured out another way of
getting the money.

She was pretty sure she could remember seeing
Tammy at the stables on the weekend just past, so she
had two weeks to put it back. Two weeks was ages!

'How's Lindsey's new horse?' Shelby's mother asked as
she climbed into the car. Shelby had finished work for
the day. Lindsey and Erin hadn't returned from the
back paddock before it was time for Shelby to go.
Shelby was glad, because she wasn't sure how they
would behave.

'It's OK.'

'Did you have a ride?'

'No.' Shelby wound down the window and rested
her feet on the dashboard.

At the bottom of the driveway her mother waited
for a break in the traffic. She steered the car onto the
road. 'Are you going off horses?'

'No way! I'm still going to be riding horses when
I'm eighty.'

'It's just that normally I wouldn't be able to shut
you up about a new horse. You went on for a week
about that riding pony.'

It was true. The previous month Miss Anita had
schooled a beautiful black show pony for a few weeks.
While he was there Shelby tried to get through her work
quickly so that she could sit on the fence at the edge of
the arena and watch Miss Anita work. Afterwards she
would offer to hose him off in the wash bay and take
him back to his yard. He loved a bath and would poke
his nose into the stream of water with his eyes closed.

Shelby had decided that pony was her second
favourite horse in the world, after Blue, of course, but
now the black pony had shuffled down to third place.

Shelby shrugged. 'There's just nothing to say.'

'Did something happen at the sales that you
haven't talked about?'

'What makes you say that?'

'We were so sure that you were going to be upset,
and since then you've been quiet. I want you to tell me
if you're upset about something. It's bad for you to
keep things locked up inside.'

'I'm not upset,' Shelby reassured her.

Her mother glanced at her. There was a long
silence while she waited.

Shelby shrugged again. 'You can't tell where
they've come from. You have no idea if they've come
from a bad home and are going to a good one, or the
other way around,' she explained. 'Besides that, it's a
completely unnatural place, so of course they're going
to be a bit frightened. Also, you only see them for
about half an hour. You don't know anything about
them. Some of them had cuts and scratches, but you
don't know how they got them. They could be mean,
like Ajax, and just picked the wrong horse to bully.'
Shelby paused, frowning while she thought about it.
'I'm sure I could get upset if I had more information.'

'That's a sensible way to think about it. It's wise to
delay distress until you know all the facts.' Her
mother smiled.

They stopped at the supermarket on the way
home. Shelby helped her mother select the week's groceries.
She persuaded her mum to buy tacos. The
whole family loved them, although Shelby's brothers
generally wore more than they ate.

They played a game where Shelby had to add up
each item as they went around, and if she got the total
right at the end she was allowed to have a Chupa
Chups. She was out by four dollars, but her mum let
her have the lollipop anyway.

As she helped her mother load the bags into the
boot she noticed that her mother was smiling.

'What?' Shelby asked.

'I was a bit worried when Brenda first offered you
the job at the stables. I didn't think you were mature
enough. There have been times in the past when
you've been impulsive and not thought your actions
through, but you seem to have settled down and
started making sensible decisions recently. I was
wrong. This job has been really good for you.'

'Mm, yeah,' Shelby replied. 'I'm looking forward
to those tacos!'

The next day at school before the lessons began, Erin
ran towards Shelby in the quadrangle, her bag
bouncing on her back. Even from a distance Shelby
could see her grinning. It seemed as though Shelby's
tantrum had been forgotten.

'We're going to give CC to Gwen Stefani,' Erin
puffed when she reached her friend.

'What?' Shelby scooted along the bench to give
Erin some room.

'If Lindsey's mum sees this horse that doesn't
belong to anyone, then we're in all sorts of trouble, so
we've decided that we are going to give her to Gwen
Stefani. Lindsey came up with the idea. The girl's a
genius.'

'What are you talking about?'

Erin sighed, as though she was explaining something
obvious to a small child. 'If Lindsey's mum sees
CC, she'll want to know who owns it. We can't just
say it's yours or mine, because Mrs Edel needs to
charge someone for the agistment. When the money is
due she'll ring our parents. But if Lindsey goes into the
computer files and makes up an account then Mrs Edel
can bill any expenses to it. We can pay it off between
ourselves. Lindsey can say that the client gave the cash
to her, and Mrs Edel won't know the difference.'

Shelby nodded. It was an ingenious plan.

The bell rang for first class and the two girls
followed the jostling crowd into the corridors. Shelby
had to raise her voice to be heard.

'Won't her mum be suspicious? She knows all the
horses.'

'Remember when Lindsey broke her collarbone?
She and her mum swapped jobs and Lindsey did all
the paperwork for the business. Lindsey said that at
the beginning she made heaps of mistakes and it got a
bit messy until she figured out how to work the
computer program properly. If she backdates the entry
to somewhere around then, her mum will think it
slipped through in all the confusion.'

'That's a great idea!'

They reached the science lab and filed in behind a
group of boys. Shelby picked a desk in the middle of
the room and perched on the wooden stool. She took
out her books and pencil case from her bag. 'But why
Gwen Stefani? Shouldn't we use a plain name?'

Erin giggled. She placed her pens in a row on the
desk, selected a bright pink one, and drew a neat
margin on the next blank page in her exercise book.
'You know how hopeless I am! If we pick an ordinary
name and Mrs Edel asks me about it, I'm sure to
forget, and I'll say, "Who's that? I've never heard of
them!" and then a few seconds later I'll go, "Oh! I
remember," and we'll be busted like custard. But if she
says, "Gwen Stefani's horse," we'll all know straight
away who she's talking about.'

Mrs Singh hurried into the room with a pile of
folders under her arm. All the students hushed.

'That's a good idea.' Shelby whispered. She kept
her eyes to the front of the room and murmured to
Erin from the side of her mouth. 'Are you sure Mrs
Edel doesn't know who Gwen Stefani is?'

'No chance! I had to explain who she was to
Lindsey!'

Shelby turned to a new page, creasing it in place
with the heel of her hand. 'That sounds about right!'

She remembered the ride home in the truck, and
Lindsey singing 'la, la', because she didn't know the
words. She could imagine Erin singing Gwen Stefani
songs to her and Lindsey shaking her head, mystified.
Then Erin probably said, 'You know,
super hot female
?'
and finally Lindsey would have understood.

Erin and Lindsey were so different. If they didn't
have horses in common they would never be friends.
Thanks heavens for horses!
Shelby thought, smiling.