Greener Pastures Page 3

  Is cinnamon UR friend? Shelby asked.

  Cinnamon and I go way back, Chad typed.

  I'm here now so stop talking about me, Lindsey wrote.

  Soon Shelby was engrossed in three conversations. She didn't notice when her dad came home, or when her mother called her to set the table.

  'Shel,' her father said, tapping her on the shoulder.

  BRB, she typed, and minimised the window.

  The family sat down at the table.

  'So can I know the big secret now?' she asked, using the tongs to serve herself a cob of corn.

  'We're going to London! Yay!' Blake cheered.

  Shelby dropped the tongs. She looked to her parents' faces for confirmation. 'Really? You've decided for sure then?'

  'It's just too good an opportunity to pass up,' her father answered.

  'So that means we're moving?'

  Shelby's Aunty Jenny was about to take off on a round-the-world trip. She had asked Shelby's family to meet her in London during the Christmas holidays. The trouble was, to afford the fare, her parents planned to move into Aunty Jenny's house and rent out their house. Her great-aunt lived two hours up the coast. Shelby would have to change schools and find a new agistment place for Blue. She would still be able to see her friends sometimes, but it wouldn't be the same as spending time with them every day.

  She had been waiting for her parents to make a decision for so long that she had assumed they'd decided not to go. She'd almost forgotten about it altogether.

  'But I don't want to live at Aunty Jenny's.' Shelby could feel a lump forming in her throat. She tried to swallow it away.

  'You're going to love travel,' her mother assured Shelby. 'Once you start it will be hard to stop.'

  'I'm not going. I'll move in with Erin, or the Crooks. Maybe the Edels would have me.'

  Her parents traded that 'there she goes again' look. Tears of frustration prickled in her eyes, but she blinked them back.

  Shelby's father stood up and rummaged through his briefcase. He spread out a stack of brochures on the table as if they were a deck of cards.

  'Last week I went to the travel agent and asked her to research treks on horseback in Europe. We thought you could go on one, or we can do it together as a family after Christmas.'

  He selected one and unfolded it. 'See, this one here is driving sheep through the mountains in France. You can camp, or stay in this little village. In Ireland we can spend a week in this beautiful old farmhouse and each day you go on different rides.' He picked out another, pressing down the crease with the heel of his hand. 'See the picture? You can ride across the moor up to a castle.'

  'You made this decision a week ago?'

  'A moor, Shelby! Haven't you always wanted to ride across a moor?' her father asked.

  'I don't even know what a moor is,' Shelby said. The tears had started leaking now.

  'It's like a big paddock,' her mother explained.

  Shelby stared at her. 'I'm a trail-riding leader. I ride through a big paddock with a bunch of beginners every weekend!'

  'But there's no castle, is there?' her dad countered.

  Shelby tried to stay calm. She took a deep breath. If she started shouting and crying they would never listen to her. They would roll their eyes and write it off as a 'mood'.

  'It's not the travelling that is the problem. I would like to go overseas . . .' she began.

  'There, see?' her father said, obviously relieved.

  '. . . one day,' she added. 'But I don't want to move house and leave all my friends, and have to start all over again at a new school, and a new riding centre. Isn't there some way we can do it without moving house?'

  Her mother sat back and folded her arms. 'Yes, there is. If you can find a way of coming up with about ten thousand dollars.'

  Shelby opened her mouth. 'Well, I . . .' And then shut it again.

  4 The Crush

  On the side of the Gully where Shelby's friend Hayley lived, all the houses were grand Tudor-style homes complete with ivy, or architect-designed buildings of glass and stainless steel, or massive kit homes with wings and six-car garages and a pair of concrete lions by the front gate.

  Most of the houses were on two to five acres. They all had lavish pool areas and manicured gardens – some with elaborate bronze statues or ornate water features. Those that were not entirely dedicated to landscaping had horse paddocks, dotted with brightly coloured jump wings, flash show ponies, or striking eventers swathed in rugs – the horses being as ornamental as the bronze statues.

  Lydia did not live on Hayley's side of the Gully. Lydia didn't even live on Shelby's side of the Gully.

  Lydia lived on the side that used to be farmland – the sort of properties scattered with broken-down tractors and buses without wheels, fenced in rusty barbed-wire with ripped plastic bags caught in it, and the land itself sprinkled in grey patches of blackberry, choked with willow and the browned skeletons of old scotch thistles.

  Many of those properties had now given way to industrial blocks – clusters of car mechanic workshops, metal fabricators and self-storage complexes, discount ceramic pot distributors, security-door manufacturers or lumberyards.

  It was the sort of place you might find stolen cars burned out, skid-marks and discarded bottles from midnight street races, because no one is around at night, except for the residents living in the handful of little fibro houses that remained.

  Lydia lived in one of those.

  Shelby knew the area because she had often accompanied her father, an Alfa Romeo enthusiast, to the European car specialist in one of the workshops at the other end of the same street.

  'How much further?' Erin asked. She gripped Bandit's reins tightly as another carload of louts shouted out their windows and tooted their horn as they drove past the two horses walking along the grassy verge.

  'Why do they do that?' Shelby muttered again. Blue plodded on oblivious to the noise, but Bandit was getting skittish – probably responding to Erin's nervousness.

  'We're running out of light. There'll be no time to ride anywhere. We need to be home before dark.'

  Bandit spooked at a piece of truck tyre half-buried in the grass and Erin jerked on the reins.

  Shelby knew Erin needed distracting. 'So how long have you loved Ethan Agnew?'

  Erin put her hand up to her mouth. 'Omigod! How do you know that? Nobody knows that! It is my deepest, darkest secret!'

  'You just told me,' Shelby said, laughing. 'If you didn't love him you would have said, "Who? What are you talking about?"'

  'You know what, though?' Erin said. 'I can't decide if I love him, or if I actually hate him. He is like my Gilbert Blythe, except Gilbert Blythe was smart and handsome even from the beginning, and Ethan is not smart. He's not good-looking exactly. And Anne and Gilbert talked – well, argued. Ethan and I have never spoken.' She paused. 'That's not true. Two weeks ago he said, "Ta", when I let him go through a doorway before me. But later I was thinking he really should have let me go through first, because I am the girl, but then he could have been respecting my equality. Or maybe he didn't notice that I was a girl, so I thought I should do something more girlie with my hair, like put a ribbon in it, or run a brush through it every now and then. I should start wearing mascara. Most of the girls in our year wear mascara, but I tried it and I always forget, and then rub my eyes, and then it's all over my face. Do you think I should?'

  Shelby laughed again. 'Why are you asking me?'

  Erin raised her voice to be heard over a truck that drove past. 'I don't even know what it is. I just think about him all the time, and I can't stop even when I want to, and sometimes I just say his name by accident. Like, yesterday I said, "Pass the Ethan", when I meant tomato sauce, because it's an obsession. And sometimes I'm not really even thinking about him, like, I have been thinking about the hair thing for ages. Don't you think that's weird?'

  'Lots of things are weird about you,' Shelby said.

  'It's such a relief to finall
y tell someone. It's been boiling away inside my head, but whenever I tried to say it I just couldn't.' Erin sighed.

  The two girls steered their horses off the main road and into a side street. Erin hurried Bandit along so the two girls rode side by side. Since there was no traffic around at this end of the industrial estate the two girls rode down the middle of the road with their horses on a loose rein.

  Blue and Bandit watched each other, pulling faces, talking to each other in horse while the girls talked in human above their heads.

  Shelby wondered what they might be saying.

  Never been here before. What do you think of this surface?

  Not bad. I prefer gravel though. Those cars were noisy, eh? I hope there's kikuyu where we're going.

  Yeah? I'm a clover man, myself.

  'How do you know, anyway?' Erin asked.

  'I could tell when you looked at Ethan yesterday in Food Tech. You have a see-through face, Erin. You're like a real-life emoticon. And then last night you were going on about cinnamon. Who would remember that?'

  'Do you think he knows? Because I don't want him to know. I am just happy to love him from afar. Not even love. It's just a crush. I know it's dumb. Last year he was just Ethan, and now he's Ethan. The idea of actually speaking to him makes me want to leave the country. Did you have that with Chad?'

  Shelby started to speak, but Erin interrupted. 'Shh!' Erin blushed. She fanned her cheek with her hand, as if to cool it. 'See what happens? Let's not talk about it! Tell me something else.'

  Towards the end of the street the workshops and warehouses gave way to weed-infested lots surrounded by hurricane fencing, and vacant land strewn with rubble.

  'OK, here's something else.' Shelby took a deep breath. 'Yesterday I quit the trick-riding troupe –'

  'No way!' Erin said. 'I'm glad. I mean, you were good at it, but it looked dangerous. And you would have missed heaps of school, and then who would I sit next to?'

  'And Zeb offered to buy Blue –'

  'Pfft!' Erin interrupted. 'In his dreams! As if you are ever going to let Blue out of your sight again!'

  'For ten thousand dollars.'

  'Is he joking? No offence, Shel. I don't think he was being serious, because really, Blue has many good qualities – maybe a few years ago . . .' She reconsidered. 'No, not even a few years ago, and he's not even young now. Are you sure he didn't say ten hundred, which would be a thousand?'

  'Have you ever heard anyone say, "ten hundred"?' Shelby asked.

  Erin shrugged. 'They say eleven hundred and twelve hundred. And Zeb is some funny nationality, isn't he?'

  'He said ten thousand,' Shelby assured her.

  'Wow! Are you going to?' Erin held her hand up like a stop sign. 'I hope you are going to say, "No way, Erin, that would be crazy. After all we have been through together, Blue is the love of my life."'

  Shelby nodded. 'I did say that at three thousand, which was his opening offer, and at five thousand, but ten thousand, Erin. That's a big holiday overseas.'

  In her head Shelby was all ready to tell Erin about the trip to London, but now that she was on the verge of it she felt as though her throat was closing up and she was worried that she might start crying. She didn't want to do that and look like a big drama queen, especially since she wasn't going overseas. There had to be another way.

  'That's a deposit on a house,' she said instead.

  Erin blinked. 'A house in Wambangalang.'

  'Where's Wambangalang?' Shelby asked.

  'This is my point. You might be able to buy that, though,' Erin said, nodding ahead.

  At the end of the cul-de-sac was Lydia's little fibro house. The two girls were not yet able to see into the back garden due to a tall corrugated iron fence, and a ute and trailer parked in the driveway. The trailer was sign-written in a sloping script, 'Greener Pastures', and then in smaller print, 'Meeting your commercial landscaping needs naturally'.

  Shelby bit her lip. She liked to think of herself as open-minded, but after talking to Lydia and learning where she lived, she had already made a judgement about what she expected to see behind that fence. What worried her was whether she was going to be able to do anything about it.

  5 Chance

  Lydia's parents had cordoned off a bit of scrub behind the house with star pickets and three rows of white electric tape wired to a battery unit. The paddock was about half an acre, with lots of trees, interspersed with patches of tufty native grasses. There was a laundry tub for water. There was no stable or shed that Shelby could see – not even a garden shed for storing feed, but it was a reasonable, safe, sheltered paddock considering what she had been expecting.

  It was a much better paddock than the one where Shelby used to keep Blue before he moved to the stables. That paddock had been fenced mostly with rusted strands of barbed wire, old shipping pallets and baling twine. Thinking back now, Shelby realised she was lucky he'd never tried to escape. It reminded her of just how far she and Blue had come in the past few years.

  Their new friend was near the makeshift gate astride a pretty grey pony of about thirteen hands. Shelby thought he looked at least part Arab. He was a bit thick around the joints, but otherwise appeared to be in very good condition – perhaps even a little fat.

  Lydia introduced the girls to her father, Lee. He was fit and wiry, with a deep tan. Shelby guessed he must spend a lot of time outdoors with his landscaping business.

  'Is that your trailer out the front?' Shelby asked.

  Lydia's face lit up. 'Dad just got a big contract doing the landscaping at the Gully Golf Club.'

  'That's why we got the pony for Lydia,' Lee added.

  Shelby assumed he must mean that they couldn't afford to keep a horse before.

  Erin surveyed the paddock with her hands on her hips. 'Not much pick. Must be a good doer,' she commented.

  'I'm sorry?' asked Lee.

  'She said the pony can maintain his weight,' Shelby explained. 'So what's his name?' she asked as she tightened the cheek strap of his bridle. The ring-snaffle had been hanging low in the pony's mouth and he was chewing on it, as if trying to hold it in place. The rest of the gear was basic, but clean and in good nick.

  'He's called Chance,' Lydia replied. 'He's a foundation horse.'

  Shelby understood 'foundation' to be a breeding term. She hadn't researched breeding much but she thought it meant a horse that was the beginning of a bloodline in a studbook.

  'Is he a stallion?' Shelby asked.

  'Yes, but he's been fixed,' Lee said. 'Neutered.'

  Shelby shot a look at Erin, who shrugged. It was obvious that Lydia and her dad didn't know much about horses. 'Gelding' was a pretty basic term. She wondered if they had misheard about him being 'foundation'.

  'Where do you ride around here?' Shelby asked.

  'Up the road and around the corner you can get onto a fire-trail that goes to the back of the show-ground. It goes further, but I haven't explored any more yet.' Lydia grinned again. Shelby remembered what it was like when she first got Blue and every single ride was an exciting adventure.

  'Are you ready to go then? We don't have much time.' The two girls stepped back.

  Lydia waved her arms and legs. She kicked the pony. Shelby could hear the thump, thump of her boots against his ribs. The little pony dug his heels in. He set his jaw against the bit. Every muscle along his neck was tense.