The Wish Pony (8 page)

‘Hey!' I said softly.

‘Oh, hi, Ruby,' he stuffed some homework in the mouth of the bag. It was the biggest bag in the whole grade. Ms Wardel had once joked that Bailey could survive a whole week without going home on the contents of that bag. ‘You want something?'

‘Just wanted to say ...' I stopped. I hadn't really planned this – what did I want to say? That I thought he was really cool and interesting? That I didn't even mind that he'd hit his best friend – not when it was to defend Magda and her orange hair? I had not thought this through at all. Bailey stood there, hugging the bag. ‘Umm … well, if you're seeing Magda today, say hi, will you?'

‘You can see her yourself in a minute,' Bailey said, ‘she's coming to pick me up.'

‘But your mum always ...'

‘My mum's a bit busy today,' Bailey dropped his voice and looked down at the tops of his runners, ‘so Magda's picking me up. She's my godmother, after all.'

‘Yes, of course. She picked me up and she's only an across-the-road neighbour.'

We walked out of the bag room together. Bailey still looking at his feet.

‘There she is,' I said quietly. I didn't want to draw undue attention to Magda. Her hair had not faded and bits of it escaped from the green velvet turban. She was wearing the orange coat and purple boots. Her coat and her hair were slightly different oranges. She was highly visible.

But Bailey dropped his bag, ran to her and gave her a big hug. In front of the entire school. I had to look away – but then I had to look back. Sam and Joel walked past sniggering and a couple of popular girls, you know –
those
girls – were laughing openly.

I walked up to them, carrying Bailey's bag. I wasn't a coward. Well, I might have been but I could change that.

‘Here's your bag, Bailey,' I said, putting it down at his feet. ‘Hi, Magda. Love the boots.'

‘Hello, Ruby. Thank you. Fond of them myself. These boots are made for walking. Well, they might be, once I've worn them in. At the moment they're a bit stiff and I might be getting blisters. I do hope your mother has bandaids, Bailey.'

‘Debbie always has bandaids,' Bailey said.

Debbie! Since when had Bailey called his mum Debbie?

He must have caught my look because he went a bit red.

‘We're trialling this new thing,' he muttered, ‘equality, mutual respect, courtesy and all that kind of thing, so I told Mum I shouldn't call her Mum because she doesn't call me Son. But I keep forgetting anyway.'

‘Well, come on, you two, if you're coming. Time to stagger on! If I stop too long I won't be able to convince my poor feet to start again. Definitely blisters.' Magda winced as she took a step forward.

‘We have a foot spa,' Bailey said. ‘Dad bought it for Mum when they were still ...' He stuttered to a stop.

‘Good, good,' Magda said, limping along slowly, ‘think of that, feet, spa at the end of the road!'

‘You coming?' Bailey asked.

I hovered. I wanted – I longed – to see Bailey's home. I'd heard – from Sam and Joel – that his bedroom was full of computer bits and that there was this huge map of the world across one wall with pins in every place Bailey planned to visit when he was older. On special days when his mum came to pick him up she bought treats for the whole class – like on Halloween last year she'd brought everyone ghost drops, and one Christmas party Bailey had come with an entire gingerbread house with licorice-allsorts tiles on the roof, a smartie door handle and icing snow piled up on the window sills. And she was a doctor!

‘I should go home,' I said but fell into step with them.

Magda looked at me. ‘You could send a message from Bailey's place.'

‘Send a message? You mean ring her?'

‘Yes, of course – sorry, so last century. Bailey is fixing up a paperback computer for me.'

‘Paperback?'

‘She means a notebook. It's a notebook computer, Magda. Think of making notes, not reading.'

‘Ah, yes, notepad. Well, whatever it is, Bailey is fixing it and I'll then be very much this century. You can phone your mother and tell her I'll bring you home. It isn't far. We'll have got there and rung her well before she's even thought of worrying.'

‘Okay. If you're sure I'm not a nuisance.'

‘Not to me,' Magda shrugged.

‘No, of course not,' Bailey said, as if it was entirely natural that I'd be walking home with him.

My feet did a little skip-walk all of their own accord. I was walking home with Bailey Ferguson. I didn't
like
him. Not the way every girl
liked
Curtis Shaw, Maddie Shaw's big brother who was so hot he sizzled. But I'd always been curious about Bailey. Being one of the Geeketeers never bothered him. He always seemed happy. He was equally happy volunteering the answers for tricky maths or science questions as he was playing soccer – not something he could do at all. He didn't seem to mind when he missed the ball and everyone laughed, or when his glasses fell off and he had to get down on his hands and knees and feel for them in the overgrown grass. He seemed to move around in a happy bubble. And I wanted to know how he did it.

Bailey's mum was there, sitting on the floor of the lounge room in the dark. The television wasn't even on. I would have expected Bailey's mum – maker of the edible Christmas tree and the Halloween treats – to be the kind of mother who would have whipped up a batch of muffins or anzac biscuits at the first sign of a visitor. But she just looked up, smiled the smallest smile that hardly lifted the sides of her mouth and stayed on the floor. She seemed to be listening to some music the rest of us couldn't hear. Bailey went right up to her and put his arms around her, awkwardly because of the way she was sitting.

‘How are you, Mu … Debbie? How has today been?'

Bailey's mum just nodded and whispered something I didn't hear.

‘That's good. I'm pleased. Magda's here because I'm helping her with her laptop and my friend Ruby from school is here too. She's watching. She needs to ring her mother, okay? Just to tell her where she is. Magda lives right across the road from them, isn't that amazing, Mum? I mean, Debbie?'

Bailey's mum looked up again and at me and nodded and smiled her unsmiling smile again. I couldn't understand why Bailey was talking to her as though she was sick or deaf.

I called Mum who said it was fine that I was at Bailey's – wasn't he one of those dux boys whose mum was a doctor? – and to make sure I thanked Magda for bringing me home. It was a blessing, really, she said, as she didn't feel well at all. Not that that was strange these days.

Magda's notebook computer turned out to be almost the same as her phone – quite large and clunky. Nothing like my mum's notebook which she used to run her card-making business, when it ran, which wasn't lately. Magda's notebook was more encyclopedia sized, I said, and Bailey snorted with laughter. I felt quite pleased to have made him laugh.

While he showed Magda how to use MSN, I looked around the room. It was definitely boysville. The doona cover was Doctor Who. There were old socks under the bed and various bits of clothing strewn all over the floor but the laundry bag – navy blue with white writing that said ‘Wash Me' – was empty. He had not one, but three bookcases in his room and the books (science fiction and fantasy, I could tell from the covers) on one of them were two deep. Around, under and on top of the desk lay all sorts of computer parts as well as two working computers. There was a Doctor Who poster on the wall and the famous map, bristling with pins.

Bailey must have seen me looking around.

‘It's normally a bit cleaner than this,' he said. ‘My dad used to yell at me before it got to this stage. But he's left now, so I can't be bothered to tidy it up. Yet.'

‘He's left?'

‘Yes,' Bailey said crisply and turned back to Magda's notebook, ‘some time ago.'

It made sense – Debbie sitting in the dark, the absence of muffins, Magda picking Bailey up.

‘Oh, Bailey,' I said, ‘I'm so sorry. I didn't know.'

‘How could you have when you're the first person – I mean the first person my own age – that I've told?'

I felt as though I'd been handed some kind of award. ‘When did he go?' I asked softly.

‘Weeks ago. They had a big argument and he just got up and left. But not like the other times when he stormed out. This was different. He wasn't yelling or anything. So I know he's not coming back no matter what Mum says. I just know.'

Magda put her hand on Bailey's head – she didn't stroke his dark curly hair or anything, just kept her hand there, for company. Bailey turned the notebook off and then said in a different kind of voice, a grown-up kind of voice, ‘Now, we're just rebooting this, Magda, and then you try to send an email and have a go at MSN, okay?'

‘Oh Bailey, how wonderful! Thank you.' Magda's hand stayed on Bailey's head while her other hand fossicked around in her coat pockets looking for something. ‘Here it is,' she crowed. ‘Always be prepared, that was a motto I learnt somewhere years and years ago – an email address.'

‘Right, well you try it now.' Bailey stood back and I browsed the bookshelves so Magda could write her email in privacy. ‘You can borrow anything you like,' Bailey offered, ‘you might like some of the fantasy books.'

‘Oh thanks, but I'm still reading
The Cuckoo Clock
.'

‘Do you only read one book at a time?'

‘Yes, of course. That way I've finished it and I know what's happened. If I didn't read only one, I'd get confused. I'd mix up the stories. Wouldn't I?'

Bailey shrugged. ‘I don't,' he said, ‘and I read hundreds at a time. Well, five anyway.' He pointed to underneath the bed where I could actually count five books lying facedown, all open and in various stages of being read.

‘Terrible,' Magda said, ‘scatterbrained, that's what it is. It's a good thing you're so smart, Bailey Ferguson, because if you weren't you'd never get anything done.'

‘He got four awards last year,' I told her – I thought that was the kind of thing a great great godmother should know.

‘And how many did you get?'

‘Only one. But I only ever get one, or sometimes two if I get the Tried Hard in something.'

‘She almost always gets the Art Award,' Bailey said, ‘and that's one of the hardest to get, I reckon, because it's so subjective. Don't you think, Magda?'

‘Very true,' Magda said. ‘Well, that's that sent. Now which button turns this thing off?'

I wondered what subjective meant and I was going to ask Mum when I got home but she was lying down. I was about to ask Dad over takeaway chicken dinner – Mum was having hers on a tray – when a sudden wailing noise from the bedroom made both Dad and me leap up and run to Mum.

She was standing at the bedroom door clutching the balloon and around her feet was a kind of puddle of water.

‘Mum!' I couldn't believe it. She'd wet herself. My mother had wet herself like a kinder kid.

‘Rita!' Dad almost screamed. ‘I'll ring an ambulance. Don't move.'

‘Mum doesn't need an ambulance,' I said, ‘she needs a nappy.'

Dad shot me a vicious look. ‘Her waters have broken,' he said angrily, ‘that means the baby's coming.'

‘What? But the baby can't come yet. It's too early ...'

‘Exactly.' Dad's voice, even from the lounge room, sounded cold.

‘Oh Mum!' I didn't know what to do. If I hugged her, would that make the baby come more quickly? She was shaking and I picked up her dressing gown and hung it on her shoulders.

‘Thanks, Ruby,' she whispered, ‘thanks.' Her voice was small and scared and when she looked at me her eyes were scared as well. She looked like a little girl who'd suddenly realised she was lost.

‘Oh Mum.' I wanted to cry, but I couldn't because she was crying and I had to look after her. ‘Do you want to sit down?'

‘I don't know,' she said, ‘I don't know, Ruby,' and the tears spilled down her face.

I found a hanky in her bedside-table drawer and mopped up her face. ‘You just stay there, Mum, it'll be okay. I can hear Dad putting the phone back. That will mean the ambulance is on its way. They'll look after you.'

‘It's hurting,' she said, ‘the contractions have started. I shouldn't be having this baby yet. It's not time. He won't be big enough, Ruby. He'll be too little. He'll … die.'

‘Mum, don't cry,' I said hopelessly, feeling my face get wet from my own tears, ‘it'll be fine. Really really little babies still live. I've seen photos in the paper.'

The ambulance arrived at the same time as Magda. The ambulance men drove off with Mum on a stretcher and Dad beside her, paler than I'd ever seen him, holding her hand.

Magda was wearing a purple dressing gown and a paler purple turban.

‘I was doing my Tibetan whirls,' she said to me as we both watched the ambulance drive away, its siren blaring, ‘that's why the dressing gown. Oh Ruby, your poor mother!'

‘Magda,' I said, ‘I want you to take the Wish Pony. I think it's my fault the baby's going to come early. It's all my fault.'

 

 

Of course she'd blame me, the Wish Pony thought. Why not? Easier to do that, after all. Easy not to look into your own conscience. Huh! He snorted through his nostrils. Well, she's stuck with me. That's the rules. Magda knows.

Still he felt sorry for the girl with the shiny name. It was awful having a sick mother and then the possibility of your baby brother not living long enough to get to know him. It wasn't any wonder she was upset. He would have liked to whiffle gently into her face and nudge his head under her hands so she had to pat him, but he couldn't do that.