My First Bedfellow
[Following on from... our story starts in the field where the horses regain their freedom each night. But night has now past. Lizzie is not known as Lizzie. I was just plain ‘Liz’ in those days. Liz is eleven, plump, blonde and Horse mad. It’s the blazing summer of 1971.]
No one told her it was dangerous.
Bikey – a child’s bike which she’d outgrown five years previously – sank as her bottom hit the puny saddle. If she pedalled fast enough, Octava would still be ‘down’.
The rest of Hayling was still asleep, the heat not yet strong enough to blister arms and legs unused to the combination of salty air and sun on skin. Liz was already well weathered, she was a local, her face golden, her blue eyes only focused on cycling along the endlessly long Beach Road.
Octava. Kind. Special. Her Special. Would she be in her usual place?
Liz ignored the tightness in her chest and aching calves as Bikey laboured past the gorse-shrouded Golf Club. Beach Road eventually led to The Kench – a small inlet where the Wares lived in a rusting beached ship. In a barn opposite, guarded by an Alsatian trained to kill, they kept the treasures of their work – a handful of race and eventing horses that the campers would never see.
But Liz’s destination was much closer. She veered off the road and paused by an almost unnoticeable gap in the hedge. Lifting Bikey over the stile, she manoeuvred down the narrow path, ditched Bikey and clambered between two lines of barbed wire.
A few heads momentarily look up from their grazing. Thankfully, Anna – as vicious and nervy as any horse who has once been hurt by a human – wasn’t obstructing Liz’s way.
Yes. Octava was lying down.
‘Please. Please don’t get up.’
The flaxen-haired child who I’ve morphed into as my pen gingerly inks itself across the page, tiptoes up to Octava.
Will Octava allow this closeness, allow this skin-to-skin intimacy to jump species and grant the sweetness of sleeping together?
Almost crawling now, Liz curls up against the mare’s belly and closes her eyes. She presses her small hand over Octava’s front leg to find the soft loose wrinkled place in front of her chest. Hope turns into prayer and she can hear the pounding of her heart, aching with the need to convey the strength of her love for the old mare.
She trusts somehow it will be felt.
And the somehow turns into something tender which she doesn’t understand but makes her T-shirt wet with tears. The Horse exhales as Liz nuzzles between her belly and foreleg…
… and inhales the innocence of a child’s first full blown taste of love.
If Liz’s parents, the Wares, or any of the older know-it-all helpers had known where she was they’d have been livid. Utter stupidity. Waiting to be kicked or squashed.
But Liz knew she was safe. There is no fear in love. And in this case, no danger either.
We leave Octava and Liz in the timelessness of shared sleep, perhaps for not much more than ten or fifteen minutes before they and the rest of the herd hear voices in the distance.
My pen stops and it’s 2026 again. But, wait! I hear a sound echoing across the Wiltshire fields which The House of Light overlooks…
A horse, whinnying.
It’s the first time I’ve heard it. Octava may be long gone, but the spirit of Horse is still close by.
#horse #interspecies #communication #love