See If I Care (4 page)

The horse butted his head impatiently against Luke’s coat. This close, his body smelt like straw. He pushed his long nose up under Luke’s armpit, snorting loudly.

‘Hang on, hang on.’ Luke pulled an apple out of his pocket and held it flat in his palm, just under the horse’s nose. The horse sniffed it and then took it whole into his mouth and crunched it loudly. Little bits of apple flew out of his mouth.

Luke watched him, his hand wrapped around another apple in his pocket. He wondered what his mother would say if she knew that he saved his lunchbox apples so that he could feed them to a horse. He thought she’d probably go mad.

The horse wasn’t sleek and graceful, like a racehorse. He was a big, heavy farm horse with a shaggy mane and enormous strong legs, and his name was Chestnut. He belonged to Luke’s uncle Jack, who lived a few miles out of town, in the farmhouse he and Luke’s father had grown up in.

Chestnut didn’t work any more. For as long as Luke could remember, he’d spent his days in the field, pulling up the grass with his strong yellow teeth.

‘What kind of work did he do?’ Luke had asked Jack, when they were out visiting the farm one Sunday a few months ago.

‘Everything the tractor does now. Ploughing, dragging, lifting – he was a strong old fellow in his time.’

Luke looked up at the huge horse. ‘Did anyone ever ride him?’ He imagined sitting way up there, his legs pressed against Chestnut’s warm body, hanging on to the shaggy mane.

Jack nodded. ‘Charlie did a bit, when she was younger.’ Charlie was Jack’s daughter, away at college now. ‘But nobody’s been up on his back for a long time.’ He looked at Luke. ‘Would you fancy it? He’s very quiet – you’d be fine.’

Luke nodded, suddenly afraid to say anything.

‘Right, tell you what – I’ll collect you next Saturday,
on my way home from the market. That’ll give me a chance to track down the saddle.’ He paused. ‘And if you stay around after and give me a hand with the cleaning-up in the yard, I’ll give you a few euro for your trouble.’

And that was what happened, the next Saturday and most Saturdays since then. Jack called around to Luke’s house after dropping Luke’s aunt Maureen into the farmer’s market, where she sold fruit cakes and apple tarts. The two of them drove out to the farm, where Luke spent his first hour riding Chestnut around the field, and the next two helping Jack to hose down and scrub out the yard, and change the straw in the stable where Chestnut lived, and feed the pigs, and do anything else that needed doing, before Jack drove him home again, on his way to collect Maureen.

Luke got fifteen euro from Jack every Saturday. When he tried to give it back the first time, feeling awkward, Jack said, ‘If I got a stranger to help me, I’d pay him. Why wouldn’t I pay you, just because you’re family?’ So Luke took it, and brought it home and hid it in an old custard tin at the back of his wardrobe.

And now, eighteen weeks later, he had two hundred and seventy euro saved. Still a long way to go for
what he wanted.

On the way home, he asked Jack to drop him in town. ‘I have things to get.’

‘Fair enough.’

Luke walked down the main street, past the straggle of market stalls. He stopped outside Brady’s Electrical and looked in the window, and there it was.

Snow white, shining, with two neat rows of buttons running along its top panel, and a round glass door like a stomach in the middle of it. The door was open, and a blue towel was hanging halfway out of the stomach. The folded piece of card sitting on the top still said €409 in black marker – one hundred and thirty-nine euro more than Luke had saved.

It was the washing machine he was going to buy for his mother, to replace the one that was worn out from washing Anne’s wet sheets so often – or maybe just because it was so old, a wedding present from Granny and Grandpa Mitchell. It hadn’t actually given up yet, but it clanked and rattled every time it was switched on, and Luke’s mother lived in dread of it breaking down. Luke hoped he could save enough before that happened, but at the rate he was going, it would be well after Christmas, which was only six weeks away, by the time he had enough.

He turned to walk home, thinking hard. Was there anything else he could do to get more money? He passed a newsagent’s, and paused. What about a paper round? How much did they pay?

He walked in. There was a tall, dark-haired man behind the counter, serving a teenage girl with lots of studs in her ears. Luke waited until the teenager walked out, and then he said, ‘I was looking for a paper round.’

The man shook his head. ‘Sorry, son – I have my regulars for that.’

‘OK.’ Luke turned to go. He should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.

‘Hang on–’ The man rubbed his cheek. ‘I could do with getting my car washed, if you’re interested in making a few quid. No short cuts though – I’d expect a proper job.’

Luke stopped. He could wash a car; he’d often washed his mother’s one. ‘How much would you pay?’

The man considered. ‘If you do a proper job, I’ll give you a fiver.’

It didn’t sound like brilliant pay to Luke. If the man had a big car, ‘a proper job’ could take quite a while. But it was worth a try. ‘OK.’

It was a medium-sized Toyota, not too dirty-looking. It took Luke forty minutes to earn his five euro, and
the man told him to call back once a week if he wanted.

When Luke got home, he sat in front of the ancient computer in a corner of his father’s downstairs bedroom and typed:

At the bottom he put his name and phone number, and then he printed it out. The printer creaked and groaned as the page appeared bit by bit.

‘What’s that?’ asked his father from the armchair he spent most of the day in.

‘My new job,’ Luke told him. ‘Car washing.’

‘Car washing.’ His father turned and looked out the window. The small blue hatchback Luke’s mother had bought with the insurance money sat in the driveway. Luke wondered if his father remembered anything about the accident, or his life before it.

He thought again how strange that his penfriend’s father should have been in an accident too. The
difference was, it sounded like her father was going to get better.

Not like his, who would never be back to the way he was before. ‘His brain was damaged,’ their mother told the three children. ‘That’s why he can’t remember things, and why it’s a bit hard to talk to him the way we used to.’

‘Is he still our dad?’ Anne asked.

Helen snorted. ‘Course he is, dummy.’ But Luke knew what Anne meant.

He took the page about the car washing to his mother. ‘Could you copy this at work for me?’

His mother read it and then looked at Luke. ‘You want to wash cars?’

Luke shrugged. ‘I thought I might try – you know, save a bit for Christmas.’ He wondered if she remembered that Jack paid him every Saturday. He hadn’t mentioned it for ages – not since he’d decided what to spend it on.

She thought for a minute. ‘As long as you do your homework first.’ She held up the leaflet. ‘And you only do this around here, not all over the place.’

The next day she came home with twenty pages, and Luke went out before tea and shoved them through the letterboxes of the houses where he thought people might like someone to wash their
cars: Mr Madden, and the Lehane’s, and Mrs Lorrigan and Miss Looby, and the man at the end of the road who lived with his mother, whose name Luke didn’t know, and a few on the next road who might be interested.

He wondered if anyone would phone him. Maybe everyone went to automatic car washes now – maybe nobody wanted a human car wash any more.

After tea, he decided to get his next penfriend letter done, even though it wasn’t due until the middle of next week. He’d been feeling a bit guilty for telling her all those lies, especially as she seemed to believe that stupid story about Rocket breaking his leg and having to be put down, and the rubbish about him climbing mountains in Spain.

And even if she didn’t believe him, at least she didn’t say anything nasty.

He was sorry now for being so sarcastic about her mother’s gravy, and about her violin playing – telling her to join a world famous orchestra – that was a bit mean. Mrs Hutchinson said people who used sarcasm were trying to be funny in a nasty way. She said sarcasm was ‘the lowest form of wit’.

OK, no more lies. From now on, he’d tell her the truth. He picked up her envelope and looked at the way she’d written his name, with a little curled-up
line, like a pig’s tail, coming out of the end of the ‘e’. Pity she had to be a girl, though.

Then, for the first time, he noticed the stamp. The Queen of England was standing on her head.

Luke stared. Was she copying him, or had she just stuck it on in a hurry without realising? Were English people allowed to stick the Queen on upside down?

He took Mrs Hutchinson’s envelope from his schoolbag and wrote Elma’s name and school address on it. Just for the laugh, he put a curled-up line coming out of the end of the ‘y’ of ‘Davey’. She probably wouldn’t even notice.

He stuck on some famous church, with its steeple pointing down, in the top right hand corner, and then he opened his notebook.

As soon as the bell rang for break, Elma raced out of the classroom, across the playground and behind the bicycle shed. There she hid, clutching her side and panting as she struggled to catch her breath. She had to avoid Tara at all costs. Elma liked Tara very much. And Tara liked Elma. All the other girls in the class had given up on her years ago, soon after Dad’s accident. But Tara was new in her school, and she still thought that Elma was a normal girl from a normal family. She thought that the only strange thing about Elma was her mother’s bad cooking. Except for the lumpy gravy and the soggy carrots, she figured that everything was just fine with the Davey family. Tara knew about Dad’s accident, of
course, Evil Josh had seen to that, but she didn’t know how bad things were at home. She had absolutely no idea.

Now though, everything was starting to go wrong. Tara was no longer satisfied with just being friends at school. She wanted to do other stuff with Elma, stuff that involved seeing each other outside school. And how could that ever happen?

Elma had to mind Zac and Dylan every day. If she left them with her dad, it just wouldn’t be safe. It would be like leaving a baby in charge of her baby brothers. Since his accident, Elma hadn’t trusted Dad very much, but after the day when Zac cut his face so badly, and Dad hadn’t even managed to drag himself out of bed to see if it was serious, she knew he was no help at all. So there was no way Elma could leave the boys and go to Tara’s house.

And how could she invite Tara to her house?

What if she saw the mess in the kitchen – the breakfast stuff all over the table, and probably some of the previous night’s dinner things, too?

What if Tara looked out of the window, expecting to see a lovely garden with flowers and swings, and instead saw Snowball rampaging around the yard, snarling?

What if Tara saw Elma’s dad, who hadn’t shaved or
cut his hair in months, lying on a couch in his old tracksuit bottoms, and whining for a cup of tea and a ham sandwich?

What if Mum came home and there was a huge row?

No, it just wasn’t even possible to think of it without feeling sick. She’d have to put Tara off.

But yesterday, Tara had been really pushy about it. ‘We’ve been best friends for two and a half months now,’ she said. ‘It’s time we did something fun. I’m going to ask my mum can we do something tomorrow. You can ask your mum, too. We could go to one of our houses for tea.’

Elma didn’t know what to say. She’d already invented ballet classes on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, and violin lessons on Tuesdays and Fridays, and she’d said that she always did family stuff at the weekends. But she hadn’t invented anything for Thursdays. And today was Thursday. But instead of just saying ‘no’, she’d said ‘maybe’, so now Tara was looking for her. And she was afraid if she put her off again, Tara would give up on her altogether, and she’d have no friend at all. There would be no one to defend her when Evil Josh called her names involving lumpy gravy and soggy carrots.

She peeped around the shed. She could see Josh
and his horrible friends strutting around like big ugly turkeys. She could see Tara looking all around the playground for her. She was glad when the bell rang. Back in the classroom, Tara came over. ‘Where were you?’ she asked. ‘I was looking for you. What did your mum say about this afternoon?’

Elma half turned away. Even though she’d had plenty of practice, she still wasn’t very good at telling lies (except in letters to Luke Mitchell, and that didn’t really count.)

‘Sorry, Tara,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘I was looking for you, too. I wanted to tell you I can’t do stuff with you after school today. I forgot that I have to go to the dentist.’

Tara gave her a hug. ‘You poor thing. Maybe next week.’

Elma put her head down. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘maybe.’

So instead of doing fun stuff in Tara’s house, the afternoon was just like all the others. Walk the boys home. Clean the house. Cook the tea. Try to ignore Snowball growling, and the endless noise of yet another nature programme from the living room.

She was so busy that she forgot all about Luke’s letter with the upside-down stamp, and the funny curly tail coming from the ‘y’ at the end of Davey.

As she sat down to do her homework, she pulled
the envelope out of her bag with one of her copies. She slipped the letter out and began to read.

When she was finished, she put the letter down and thought for a while. Luke wasn’t his usual self. Was it something she had said? He sounded kind of sad. Maybe it was because he had no brothers. Funny, really. He had no brothers, and she had no sisters. Maybe they should swap families or something. She made a face at the thought. Who’d want to swap families with her? Who’d volunteer to live her life? Not Luke Mitchell, with his perfect life, that was for sure.

He sounded like he really was sorry for what had happened to Dad. But that was only because he didn’t know the truth. If he knew about the toilet, he’d just laugh. Like everyone else.

That was the good thing about Luke Mitchell. He only knew what Elma decided he should know. And if it was only half-true, or even not at all true, well … he’d never know, would he? And what he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him. Could it?

She addressed her envelope with a curly ‘e’ in Luke, and a star with a face in it instead of a dot over the ‘i’ in Mitchell. She carefully stuck on her stamp upside down. Then she took a page and began to write.