Outside Chance (24 page)

‘Thanks, mate.' The jockey was on his feet in no time and moving towards the animal's head. ‘Couldn't give me a leg up, could you?'

‘Sure,' Ben heard himself say, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

As the slight figure beside him took hold of the reins, the horse, baulked of the chance to go forward, or even sideways, reverted to running round them both in tight circles. Ben felt the
beginnings of panic, and had there been anywhere for him to go, he would probably have gone – whatever the jockey might have thought of him – but the animal was effectively blocking all avenues of retreat at once.

‘Just put me up,' the jockey said over his shoulder, bending his left leg at the knee.

It had been years since Ben had legged anyone into the saddle but the skill seemed to have stayed with him. The next moment the jockey dropped lightly into the tiny flat saddle and pushed his feet into the stirrups.

‘OK?' Ben asked.

‘OK.' The blue and yellow silk-covered head nodded. Ben released the reins and the horse was away, trotting on a tight rein to join its fellows at the start.

Ben ducked back under the rails and turned to lean on them, breathing deeply to settle his racing pulse; no longer anxious to reach the starting area and the company of people who might notice his perspiring skin and shaking hands.

As he stared down at the lush green turf beneath his feet, he remembered Jakob Varga's parting words.
Fear itself isn't weakness, you know
.
The weakness is not admitting it
.

Well, he wasn't going to deny it any more. What if that had been Mikey dragging behind that horse? This time he'd forced himself to act but it had been a close-run thing. Finally he was prepared to admit that if he couldn't conquer his fear, he should find himself another line of work.

BEN THOUGHT HE
was going to pass out.

Melles. Big-chested. Just at that moment the huge grey shire seemed to fill the stable.

Ben began seriously to doubt his own resolve. He'd come to the stables looking for Jakob, and had approached Melles' box on nothing more than a whim. He knew the heavy horse was possibly the most placid animal in the Csikós' string and, as the long head reached forward to greet him, ears pricked, he steeled himself to rub the soft muzzle with his hand. His pulse rate moved up a notch and his breath shortened, but he handled it, and when Melles lost interest and returned to his hay net, Ben screwed up his courage, unbolted the door and stepped inside. The horse turned his head and regarded him with mild curiosity, completely unaware of what it was costing Ben to remain within the stable.

If he'd stayed by the door, he would probably have been all right, but Ben was determined to test himself. Three or four smooth paces brought
him to the horse's side and once more he reached out to stroke the animal, this time on the powerful crested neck, and once again – with slow deep breaths – he coped. A small swell of triumph rose within him.

And then Melles moved.

Suddenly a towering mountain of horseflesh blocked Ben's path to the door. He hadn't moved particularly fast but, somehow, by the time Ben realised his intent, it was already too late.

The loose box wasn't very big and with eighteen hands of shire blocking the light from the half-door, its dimensions shrank rapidly to claustrophobic. All the horror of the accident returned to stifle Ben. His vision started to break up and his chest contracted until he just couldn't seem to get his breath at all. Once again he felt the weight of the horse pressing him into the bodywork of the lorry and saw beside him the white, lifeless face of the person he held most dear: his twin brother, Alan.

Now, through his panic, Ben became aware of approaching footfalls; the quick, light tread that was characteristic of many of the troupe. Maybe that was why Melles had gone to the door. Pray God it wasn't Ferenc! In spite of – and also because of – his panic, Ben's pride recoiled from the idea of asking
him
for help.

A soft voice spoke to the horse in a tongue that could have been Hungarian, Romani, or a mixture of both, and Ben sent thanks winging upwards.

‘Jakob?'

‘Ben?' The answering voice sounded unsure.

The big grey moved back a step in response
to a hand on his nose, and Jakob's lined but infinitely welcome face peered in at Ben.

‘Are you all right?'

‘Yes, I'm OK.' Weak, nauseous and sweating from head to toe, but basically OK.

Jakob opened the door and came in, pushing Melles back another step or two. The big grey head dropped to nuzzle his hands for titbits.

‘You shouldn't be in here. We have insurance, but not for this. Not for you on your own.'

Ben slipped past him and out into the yard. It was raining, a slow steady drizzle, which matched his mood.

Something of it must have shown in his face, for as Jakob shut the door and turned, he looked sharply at Ben.

‘You
are
all right?'

Ben forced a smile and nodded. ‘Yeah. Sorry about the insurance. You know I wouldn't have claimed, anyway.'

‘I know. And Melles is not the horse to harm you. Unless, of course, he had stood on your foot. Tamás said you were looking for me?' The lift in his voice turned it into a question.

‘Yes . . .' Ben hesitated, not sure if he could go through with it now.

‘You want to ride again.'

‘Yes. That is . . . I did. Now I'm not sure.'

‘Deep down, you do. Or you wouldn't be here,' Jakob said simply. He put his arm round the younger man's shoulders. ‘Come. First we will drink coffee and you will tell me from where comes this great fear.'

The canteen area was deserted when Jakob and
Ben reached it; the van closed and many of the chairs and tables stacked against the side.

‘You're moving today,' Ben said, remembering.

‘This afternoon. Come on in. I'll make us a drink.'

Jakob opened a door in the end of the catering wagon and they both went inside. Jakob immediately began to busy himself while Ben leaned against the worktop and watched, but the link between his eyes and his brain was only superficial; his thoughts were firmly elsewhere.

‘If you want to beat this, you have to tell me everything,' Jakob said after a moment. ‘You've kept it inside for too long. Fear thrives in dark, secret places. It grows bigger and bigger until you can't see the edges any more and you feel that if it escaped it would take control. But that's not true, Ben. You need to share it – to drag it into the open and face it, and then it will start to shrink. I promise you it is so.'

Jakob's phrasing was melodramatic but, nevertheless, Ben knew he was right.

Knowing it was one thing, but overcoming the habit of a lifetime was quite another. For the first fourteen years of his life he'd had Alan to confide in – who understood him as only a twin could. But after his death there had been no one; his parents had drawn inexorably and bitterly apart, and neither had much time for their remaining son except as a weapon with which to wound the other. Sharing his worries was a luxury he had learned to live without. Now, he wasn't even sure he could.

‘Tell me the start of it,' Jakob suggested, placing
a mug of coffee on the worktop in front of Ben and pulling out a couple of tall stools to sit on.

Ben took a mouthful of strong, black coffee and burnt his tongue, but hardly noticed.

‘Was it an accident? How old were you?'

‘I was fourteen –
we
were fourteen; I had a twin.'

Jakob's prompting finally loosened Ben's tongue.

‘There were always horses when I was growing up.my parents were dealers: they bought and sold show ponies and jumpers, and from the time we were big enough to sit in a saddle, my brother Alan and I would spend every weekend – and a good few weekdays – at horse shows. Mum and Dad would buy unbroken youngsters, back them and school them with us on board, and then we'd hit the shows to win prizes and bump up the resale value. It was a very successful operation, as far as I can remember. Dad, especially, had a great eye for raw talent, and Mum took charge of the breaking and schooling. Alan and I got to be very good at getting the best out of a variety of ponies – and then horses, of course, as we got older. We used to win all the time. I expect we were horribly conceited brats. Some of the other kids on the circuit really hated us, but it never mattered, of course, because we had each other.

‘We missed a fair amount of school in our early years, but when we started GCSEs our parents got quite strict. We still did the weekend shows but on weekdays we had to go to school, unless it was a very important show. The horses we were riding were big enough by then for Mum to take over during the week.'

Ben paused, and when he continued his voice and expression were bleak.

‘This one day, we should have been at school – our parents thought we were – but we'd bunked off. Played truant. It was the Bath and West, you see. One of our favourites, and we'd never missed it before. Dad had a heavyweight hunter he was pretty sure would take the championship and we wanted to be there. So we planned it in advance, got off the bus at the second stop and doubled back. We thought if we hid in the horsebox until we got there they'd be pretty angry, but it'd be too late for them to do anything about it.

‘The thing is, we never got there. Halfway down the A303 some guy fell asleep at the wheel and jackknifed his articulated lorry right in front of us. Dad tried to avoid it, bounced off the crash barrier, ran up a bank and the horsebox went over on its side.'

He paused again, staring into his coffee cup.

‘Dad's show hunter had pulled one of his leg protectors off earlier in the trip, and Alan and I were in the back, trying to put it back on. When the lorry went over, Trojan came over on top of us. With the lorry on its side he couldn't get up and we were trapped underneath him . . .' Ben swallowed hard, and the coffee in his cup rippled as his hand began to shake. ‘I was near Trojan's head but Alan was under his belly. He couldn't breathe. I could just see his face. He cried out to me a couple of times and then went quiet. We were looking at one another and I watched him die.'

There was a long moment of silence in the catering van and Ben watched in surprise as a
splash of moisture landed on the worktop. As he emerged from his memories, he found his vision swimming with unshed tears.

The discovery was shocking.

He'd never been able to cry for his brother before. At the time, shock had given way to a form of denial; a numbness that dulled all his senses for months to follow. By the time the numbness passed, suppression had become a habit.

Jakob was watching him, a wealth of sympathy in his hooded black eyes.

‘Why are you blaming yourself, Ben? There was nothing you could have done.'

Ben put a hand to his eyes, shook his head and sniffed.

‘But you see, it
was
my fault, because it was
my
idea. If I hadn't suggested it, Alan would still be alive.'

‘I doubt it,' Jakob said. ‘You were twins, Ben. I'm sure you only said what he was already thinking. If you hadn't suggested it, he would have done. You didn't force him to go along.'

Ben shook his head again. ‘No. I didn't force him.'

‘Then there is no blame.' Jakob made a small noise of disgust and spoke a few words in his own tongue before saying, ‘Someone should have talked to you at the time. A child – and you were only a child – should never have been left to deal with such a thing, such a tragedy, on his own.'

Ben pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and made good use of it.

‘My parents were too busy blaming each other,
and themselves,' he explained. ‘They divorced less than a year after it happened. Everything was a mess.'

‘And you? What happened to you?'

‘Oh, I went to live with my father but he was determined to put it all behind him. He wouldn't speak of it. It was almost as if Alan had never existed. Pretty soon he got married again, and then he had a new life that I didn't really fit into. I packed up and left to go and live with my mother, but halfway there I changed my mind. I went to Dover, got on a cross-channel ferry and spent the next six months in France. I spent my sixteenth birthday working in a vineyard in the Dordogne.' Back on a more even keel, Ben took a sip from his cup. ‘I travelled for a couple of years, then came back to catch up on my schooling and eventually went to university. That's basically it,' he finished, with an apologetic smile. ‘I thought I'd put it behind me, but it just keeps coming back.'

‘Every time you get close to horses, and yet, you choose to work around them. Are you punishing yourself for what happened, Ben? For the death of your twin and the break-up of your family? I think you are.'

Ben was taken aback. ‘That's pretty deep, isn't it? Where did that come from?'

Smiling slightly, Jakob shook his head.

‘You forget, I am Rom – Romani – or at least part of me is. We have the sight.' He read the burgeoning cynicism in Ben's eyes and threw up his hands to silence him. ‘No, I'm not talking about tea-leaves or crystal balls, that's just for the Gadje – the tourists. I mean what we see in here.'
He tapped his temple with his index finger. ‘Ah, I can see you don't believe – I don't need the sight to see that; it's in your face for the world to see.' He shook his head again. ‘That's all right; I'm used to it. But I want to help you, Ben. We have to remove the fear so you can move on.'

‘So, you think I must ride again.'

‘Yes. You must ride again, and I will help you, if you will let me. Will you let me?'

Ben hesitated, feeling his heart begin to thud heavily.

‘Yes. All right. But it must be now. We have to do it now.'

Jakob stood and picked up the cups. Putting them in the sink, he said, ‘I am ready.'