Robbie and Miranda had gone ahead because they always went first, so that just left him and Teddy and Beth. Teddy was the cleverest of all of them. He couldn’t speak right but everyone knew he was clever. He even wrote stuff using a proper computer.
‘Teddy?’ said Charlie, and the boy beside him jerked his head awkwardly and pointed his shiny, spit-covered chin at Charlie.
Cocking his head to keep eye-contact, Charlie sang:
Charlie waited for Teddy to join in, but he didn’t, so he looked at Beth. He couldn’t tell whether she was looking back because her eyes were so squinty, but she said ‘Shut up, retard’ – so he just continued quietly by himself.
Teddy Loosemore turned his head away and looked out through the windscreen at the rows of cars reflecting the high sun in the middle of the field. They were parked a little distance from the other cars – closer to the tents and the toilets. Beth always needed to be close to the toilets.
They were late. They were always late wherever they went in the minibus. Teddy hated it but he had no control over it. He tried to look at the watch his mother had bought him for his birthday, but couldn’t make his wrist turn the right way. He gripped it with his other hand and turned the watch face towards him. Almost 11am. The day was half over. The other kids didn’t care, but Teddy did. When he had a day out, he wanted it to start when it did for normal people. The others probably didn’t even know they were at a horse show.
In his head, Teddy sighed. In his mouth, it sounded like a weird grunt.
In a minute Mrs Johnson, whose name was Mary, and Mr King, whose name was Michael, would come back for him and Beth. The other two volunteers would stay with Robbie and Miranda. Teddy wished they would hurry up. It was hot and he wanted to see the horses. He was glad he was next off the bus. Charlie would be last, as usual, because he never made a fuss.
Poor Charlie.
Teddy knew what had happened to Charlie, although nobody had ever told him. Because he was twisted and couldn’t get his words out and was usually covered in drool, people talked about private things right in front of Teddy. So he knew that the umbilical cord had got stuck around Charlie’s neck when he was being born, and that was why he had the brain of a four-year-old, even though he was fourteen.
Teddy knew all kinds of things that people didn’t know he knew. He heard things and remembered them. He knew that Mrs Johnson’s daughter-in-law drank too much and then drove the children to school; he knew Mr King’s wife had left him for a man twice his size and with half his IQ. And he knew that Beth’s mother had been in prison for soliciting, although he was hazy on why being a solicitor was a crime.
Teddy also knew things he’d read in books and online – stories of heroes and inventors and soldiers and spacemen – and when he read those things he was
Teddy’s mother always told him how lucky he was. Lucky to be living in England instead of India, where he’d be begging in a gutter; lucky to have the internet when children in Africa didn’t even have books or electric lights to read them by. Lucky to be alive.
Teddy’s head jerked angrily. Sometimes it was hard to feel lucky.
Charlie sang quietly beside him. As usual. He only knew three songs. ‘One Man Went to Mow’, ‘Ten Green Bottles’ and ‘Waltzing Matilda’. He didn’t know all the right words and couldn’t count up past ten or back down at all, which made his song choices unfortunate. Sometimes Teddy imagined that baby cord squeezing Charlie’s tiny neck like a cruel python. What could Charlie have been without that cord? What songs might he have sung then? But it wasn’t all bad. That fouled cord may have squeezed most of the IQ clean out of Charlie’s head, but it had also squeezed out all the bad things – leaving only sunshine and smiles and a breathy, tuneful little-boy voice.
Teddy suddenly felt guilty for not singing along with Charlie.
‘They’re coming,’ said Beth, and Teddy saw Mr King and Mrs Johnson walking back to them across the lush meadow, both wearing dark glasses that made them look like spies. He thought how amazing it would be to be a spy, and then realized that he almost was one – the way he picked up information while nobody thought he knew what they were saying. In his head he
In his head he could be anything.
It made him happy, and when Charlie counted down from four men to one man – via nine men – he suddenly joined him:
Charlie giggled. Only Teddy knew that bit, although when he sang it, it sounded like ‘da, Spa! Oddey o pa!’
‘Warm enough for you, Charlie?’ Mr King took off his sunglasses and winked at Charlie, and Charlie laughed and nodded. Mr King smiled and ruffled the boy’s wispy yellow hair. ‘Be back for you in a mo, OK, big man?’
‘OK, Mr King.’ He loved it when Mr King called him big man.
Beth and Teddy got out – Teddy in his wheelchair on the lift that Charlie liked to ride on when everyone was in a good mood – and he said goodbye and watched them cross the grass towards the tents and the horses and the flags and the fun.
Jonas eyed the horses from the safety of the refreshment tent. Now and then a child would amble over with a pony in tow like a saddled dog, and fumble change out of her jodhpurs for an ice cream, but mostly the horses stayed on the other side of the blue nylon rope that divided the middle of the field into three square rings – two for showing and one for jumping.
It was years since he’d been to a horse show. Not since he was a boy. He couldn’t remember the name of the pony he’d borrowed from Springer Farm, but he remembered the sun beating down on his back, and the same smells of leather, hot grass and manure.
For some reason, they made him feel uneasy.
In a minute he’d have to make another circuit through the car park. The first two had been fraught with contact. Everyone wanted to say hello and shake his hand and ask how he was. Now Jonas was lingering over the dregs of his tea before venturing out into the open again.
The Exmoor foxhounds were in the showing ring. All tongues and tails, crowded around the huntsman with his red coat, white whip and gleaming britches. Children had been invited in to pet the big brown and white dogs, in a get-’em-early PR exercise for the hunt. There was even a boy in an electric wheelchair, flapping his crooked arms and looking at the sky, while a hound pissed on his wheel.
Now and then a hound would detach itself from the pack and lope across the ring after a scent. A sharp call of its name would bring it back in an instant. It had always amazed Jonas that the huntsman knew each of his forty or so dogs by name, when they all looked so similar.
‘Daisy!’
‘Dandy!’
‘Milo!’
And the errant dog would lope back to the pack and join the patchwork mayhem.
In the nearest ring a fat grey pony put in a dirty stop and launched a tiny child over a shin-high fence. The girl’s mother ducked under the nylon and hurried over. She stood the sobbing five-year-old on her feet, brushed her down, wiped her face and plonked her back on the grazing beast, with the usual instructions about heels and hands and showing him who was boss. The pigtailed tot sniffed, nodded fiercely and flapped her skinny peach legs up and down, before trotting a circle and performing a perfect action replay. The bell rang to say they’d been disqualified, and the judge in the caravan asked for a round of applause for a brave try. The mother picked up the pieces and left, leading the girl by one hand and the devious pony by the other – apparently far crosser with the former than the latter.
