A Horse Called El Dorado (7 page)

I woke to a damp, grey October morning. It took me a few moments to remember where I was, and then I jumped up out of bed and pulled back the curtains. With my nose up to the glass I had a view of the yard at the back of the house. There was a wheelbarrow with buckets in it. Behind a hedge were four goats. To the right was a small, stone outhouse and to the left another hedge. In front of this on a clothesline, my towel hung to dry among some other items. Some chance in this damp weather, I thought to myself. Where was the sun? The light outside was very dull. It looked cold. The hedge was a tangle of different types of leaves and thorns, an incredible weave of growth and colour. The few trees I could see had bronze and copper leaves that seemed to be shivering. I felt a bit of a shivering leaf myself.

Downstairs there were voices so I crept to my door, opened it and listened.

‘There isn’t a pick on him,’ Grandma was saying, and she did not mean her favourite goat.

‘He is small for his age all right,’ said Grandad, ‘and thin as a greyhound.’

‘Well, I can fatten him up, but what will we do with him then?’ ‘He can help out. Sure, there’s plenty to be done,’ Grandad said.

They talked on about me. About my papa and mama. They had not a good word to say for my parents. ‘
Irresponsible
’ was what they called my papa. I would look that word up when I had a chance. Then I heard another word, one that I dreaded: school. It seemed that Grandma was a teacher, because Grandad kept saying, ‘You can teach him at home,’ but she did not agree.

‘He cannot stay with us every day,’ she argued. ‘We can put up with each other, but why should he have to put with us?’

‘I think he might like it. He’s used to life on a
commune
and that is what we have here, sort of, a commune of our own.’

‘Commune!’ Grandma exclaimed. ‘Are you cracked? We’re not a commune! There are only the two of us. Can you not count?’

Her tone of voice was not cross, though. In fact, as I would learn, my grandparents never argued. Instead they laughed a lot, each making out that the other one was daft or going ‘batty’.

I waited until it was quiet before I came downstairs. Grandma had gone to her class. She taught in a school for children with special needs in Navan, a big town near us, but further away than Kells. I had a chance to
explore while Grandad was outside, washing some
buckets
in the yard.

The house was very old. Every ceiling in every room had damp patches and cracked plaster. The stairs wobbled and squeaked loudly. There were two windows in the long kitchen, an Aga cooker, a radio and a small television on a shelf above the door. Everything in the house seemed to lead into and out of the kitchen – the back door, a
passageway
leading to the front door, a downstairs bedroom, a scullery and a junk room with a computer.

The cats, Max and Mojo, were in the kitchen under siege by the dogs, which leaped up at the panes of glass on the back door trying to get in – I would soon understand that this battle never ended. If the cats were
outside
, the dogs were kept in. If the dogs got out, Max and Mojo had to run up the trees or onto the flat kitchen roof.

Grandad was nowhere to be seen when I went
outside
, so I had a look at a building that cast a dark shadow across one of the kitchen windows. This was a long, old shed with a red, galvanised roof. The metal door was unlocked, so I opened it and went in.

Inside it looked like a small science laboratory. It had two sinks, a freezer, shelves of jars, utensils,
thermometers
, round boxes and labels, all spotlessly clean. It was the cheese house, a place that Grandma would not encourage me to go into, because cheese-making was her special work. She even wore a white coat, plastic gloves, a hat and white wellingtons while working in the
cheese house. I went out again, carefully closing the door behind me.

As I was walking behind the outhouses, Grandad called me. He was in the growing tunnel, a plastic tunnel that looked like a very long boat lying upside down on the ground. The door consisted of a sheet of polythene framed with wood. Inside the growing tunnel it was warmer. There was a narrow path along the middle to the other end and the roof curved down at both sides.

‘Welcome to Fordstown Organic Foods,’ Grandad smiled as I came in, shutting the door. ‘FOG, they call us locally, among other names. Yes, your Grandma and I grow vegetables and herbs and sell them on to stalls in the Dublin market. Some shops in Trim, Kells and Navan take our produce too, but no supermarkets. Look:
mushrooms
, onions, beetroot, scallions, celery, herbs … I tell you, we always have good soup. We also grow weeds, unfortunately.’ He smiled.

‘Wow,’ I said. It looked like a lot of work.

‘We are just a small grower. We also make goats’ cheeses, yoghurt and bread, as well as growing apples and pears, and plenty of potatoes. Well, we cannot eat them all ourselves and I love to live near growing food – the aroma of it; the colour of it. It is called “organic” because we use no fertilisers. I collect dung and other mulch from all over.’

I spent the rest of the day with Grandad, as he showed me around – the field of potatoes, the neat little orchard
of apple and pear trees. That evening I had done a half day’s work when Grandma arrived home. She baked a wholemeal pizza, topped with peppers, onions,
tomatoes
, some of her goats’ cheese, anchovies and chillies – they knew I would like chillies.

After our meal they got me to talk all about my life in Colombia, in the commune. At first I was shy and tongue-tied, as they sat silent looking at me. I felt as if they wanted me to stand up and sing a song for them. But soon I began to tell them about our last days at the
commune
. The attacks by AGRA. My ride on El Dorado to hide the treasure. The burning of the village. The
shootings
. My journey to Cali with Mama. It seemed to
entertain
them, and they listened carefully and asked questions, hushing each other every now and then so that I could continue. I began to enjoy telling my story. Grandma kept bringing out more and more food – apples, ginger cake, fruitcake, nuts and home-made toffee. It struck me that I would never go hungry in Ireland.

‘What a wonderful little man you are to have made it through all of that,’ said Grandma. She looked very impressed.

Then Grandad stood up. He almost had tears in his eyes as he went off to the junk room. He returned with a sea captain’s hat, with a peak and an anchor. When he put it on he asked me to stand up.

‘I salute you, Pepe Carroll,’ he said seriously. ‘You
have been in the wars. You have returned. When a
soldier
returns, he gets a pension.’ Grandad reached into his tattered coat, took out his wallet and handed me a
fifty-euro
note. Wow! It was more money than I had ever had in my life.

‘Yes, you deserve it,’ Grandma nodded. ‘Jack, why don’t you help him e-mail his parents.’

Grandad wrote the e-mails for me, one for Mama and one for my wandering papa. I typed in my name and clicked on ‘Send all’. Grandad said he would teach me more stuff on the computer and get some games for me.

Up in my bedroom I went through what remained of my father’s toys and looked at the pictures in his
story-books
. There was one of a cowboy on a horse with a guitar! Finally, I tried to read the
Dandy
, staring hard at the words, but I only got frustrated. Suddenly I heard them on the creaky stairs.

‘Oh, I’d say he’s fast asleep,’ I heard Grandad say. ‘If you look in on him it might wake him up. Poor auld soldier.’

‘You’re right,’ said Grandma. ‘Well, I’ll phone the school tomorrow. It’s a pity we couldn’t get him in locally, but the classes are all overcrowded. The school in Angerstown will be fine, though. Besides its only fifteen kilometres, twice a day. Do you think we can manage him here for the year, since his mother asked us?’

‘It’s only a year,’ said Grandad.

‘I know, but we reared our children long ago, and
even one turns us back into parents all over again,’
muttered
Grandma, puffing as she got to the top of the stairs.

I quickly put my light out and crept into bed. A year? What year? My mother was dumping me in Ireland for a whole year! I thought I was staying in Fordstown for a few weeks, and then going back to Mama after seeing my papa for a while. What was happening? Would anyone tell me? I began to feel helpless, lonely and upset. I cursed my papa and mama. But I would not cry. I would ask my grandparents about it in the morning. I wished for sleep to come, and eventually it did.

I was grumpy the next morning at breakfast. It was Grandma’s ‘special’ – porridge with a sprinkling of flax, sunflower, sesame and hazelnuts that she reduced to powder in a coffee grinder. Their milk was unsweetened soya. There was no sugar in the house.

Grandad came in from the yard dressed in his fishing hat, dungarees and boots, and carrying a handful of eggs. ‘I couldn’t resist when I saw the loaf of brown bread you made, with a hump on it like a railway bridge,’ he said to Grandma. ‘How’s our little man?’ He looked at me.

‘I am feeling grumpy,’ I piped up.

‘Oh, why, Pepe?’ They both stopped and stared at me.

‘Oh, nothing,’ I muttered, spooning my porridge into me, secretly enjoying keeping them in suspense.

‘Come on. Out with it, soldier,’ Grandad said, sitting down in front of a huge bowl of porridge and tapping his spoon into the palm of one hand.

‘I am afraid to go to school, and …’ My voice gave out.

‘And?’ Grandma coaxed gently.

‘How long will I stay in …’ Suddenly I felt I couldn’t say, ‘How long will I stay with you?’ so I said, ‘How long
will I stay in school?’

They were very good about everything, and made me feel able to talk about my problems. They fully understood that I was missing my mama and papa. I must talk about it any time I felt lonely, they said. That made me feel better. And I could send e-mails whenever I wanted to.

Grandad was less strict about my going to school – he thought Grandma could teach me – but Grandma thought I should give it a try. ‘Besides,’ Grandad said, ‘there’s plenty to do around here. You can earn pocket money helping with the business.’ He always called it ‘the business’, and answered his phone, ‘Fordstown Organic Growers, Jack Carroll, can we help you?’ Grandma thought it was a bit ridiculous and often called us from the fields, ‘Will the Fordstown Organic Growers come in for their supper!’ If she needed
something
picked from the polytunnel, she would call out, ‘I have an order for Jack Carroll of the FOG.’ Grandad printed his invoices on the computer and did his accounts from a folder on the desktop marked ‘The Big Book of FOG’.

‘I don’t know how we’ll fox your granny on this school situation,’ he said later, as we weeded and hoed in the growing tunnel. ‘You know, if you wanted to stay with us,’ he said thoughtfully, looking like the ‘king of three acres’, as the villagers called him, ‘I’d make you the boss when I retire.’

‘But, Grandad, you told me you would never retire!’

‘Well now, so I did,’ he laughed. ‘So I did indeed.’

Every Saturday that autumn we got up very early. Saturday was market day in Dublin and we would be working in the growing tunnel by the light of a halogen lamp before dawn. I was glad of my gloves as we packed carrots, parsnips, broccoli and potatoes from the sandy pit, along with celery, onions, mushrooms, apples and the all-too-precious pears. It was heavy work, hoisting the boxes into the back of the jeep. Then, after our porridge and a cup of tea, we would set out for Dublin with our ‘treasures of the Earth’.

The growers met in a place called Smithfield, not far from the big river that goes through Dublin. The city early on a Saturday morning, with its bridges, castles, churches and countless streets sloping down to the Liffey, seemed a place for great adventures. Deliveries were easier than tending a stall at the market, according to Grandad. Our boxes would sell slowly, because Grandad was a small supplier. His customers were stallholders from various parts of the city. These buyers always wanted more and more when the produce was good. Sometimes Grandad’s pears would not get a very good price, but he said that people had no taste for Irish pears. The cooking and eating apples sold better, but easiest to sell were the vegetables and potatoes.

With our business done, we would head for one of the cafés near the market for our weekly grill. Grandad was not really a fan of the ‘Irish fry’. He would annoy the
people behind the counter, asking what oil they used for cooking their chips and insisting that none of his food should be reheated in a microwave. I did not always understand why, but he explained that he was ‘a bit of a health-food philosopher’.

‘They’d fry the tea in that greasy spoon if you didn’t keep an eye on them,’ he would say.

Saint Brendan’s Technical School, Angerstown, in the south of County Meath, was my school and it was
horrible
. The school building was very old, with windows that rattled in the wind and long, dark corridors where the paint flaked from the ceilings. The tarmacadam covering the yard was crumbling and looked like a layer of coal dust.

My name made everyone laugh from the first day. The other children pronounced it ‘Pee-Pee’ instead of Pepe. All the local children seemed to know each other well, and hung around in various gangs and groups. Hardly anyone ever spoke to me, except to imitate my accent, which they thought was hilarious.

Our teacher, Mr Kermody, was nicknamed ‘Crab’
Kermody
, because of the way he sat at his desk and stared without moving his head, and because of his slow,
shuffling
walk. He had curly, red hair, wore a cardigan with missing buttons, twirled his hands nervously and wheezed before speaking. His thick glasses made his eyes look like two tiny dots, while his teeth were broken and tobacco stained. His Adam’s apple moved up and down on his long neck when he got angry, which was
most of the time. He reminded me of a big, fat bird with his nasal, tweeting voice.

The boys and girls were reading really hard books, while I could not read anything in English. Metalwork and woodwork were a bit better, but I could not read the instructions off the blackboard in these classes either. When it came to history I knew nothing, because I had never been told about anything to do with the outside world at the commune. When did the Titanic sink? Who were the presidents of Ireland? Who was Saint Patrick? Finn MacCool? I knew nothing of the Great Famine, the Rising of 1916, the Great War, the Aran Islands, the
All-Ireland
hurling championship.

Everything was news to me, and this seemed to annoy my fellow students. They would ask me, ‘Do you know what year it is?’ Really, all I knew about Ireland was my U2 CD with the little kid on the front cover wearing a war helmet.

I felt like an idiot in class, but I couldn’t pluck up the courage to ask Grandma to let me stay on the farm and work all day. At least I knew a bit about vegetables. But I knew she would not allow it, no matter how much I hated that school.

I soon had other nicknames – they began to call me ‘Captain Colombo’ after I mentioned escaping from the guerrillas in Colombia. I soon stopped telling anyone about myself.

I was also known as ‘Peeper’ Carroll. Oh well, at least
‘Peeper’ was better than ‘Pee-Pee’. Other boys had
nicknames
too: Fishface Gibbons, Slob Nally and Frog Fanning.

On the drive to school with Grandad each morning we passed a group of caravans, parked together at the side of the road. It looked like a sort of commune, and there were even a few ponies. ‘They’re our native
tincéirí
, the Travellers,’ said Grandad, ‘the Joyces, the Tanseys and other families.’ There were heaps of scrap metal piled up – old washing machines and fridges, parts for cars and vans. Like me, these people were outsiders. I longed to make a visit.

One afternoon, after I got home from my horrible school, I was kicking a ball up and down the yard.
Grandad
was going about his chores, inspecting our supply of potatoes stored in their huge crates in the shed. He came out with his glasses on, holding a thick notebook and his calculator. He was working at his ‘sums’, as he called the accounts, so I left him alone.

I looked out onto the road and, just then, a young horse came galloping past, obviously distressed and frightened. She was followed by five Traveller lads,
running
at full speed, trying to catch her. I took off after them, to see what was going on.

When I got to the village green the boys were in a group around the pony, trying to calm her down. Some local men were watching from the pub window, while a few others gaped from inside the post office. The
Travellers were throwing a rope, trying to lasso the
terrified
animal. I watched for a moment, knowing that they were doing it wrong.

‘That’s not the right way,’ I piped up, but they didn’t hear me. The pony shied and careered away from the boys, big lads in denims and stained fleece jackets, zipped up against the cold day.

‘Come on, Starlight, stop all this messin’,’ shouted one of them to the pony.

‘Don’t ever rush a pony that has taken fright, lads,’ someone called from inside the door of the pub. ‘Go and get your father. He’s the only one who can control that beast.’

‘Our father is away in Kells,’ one of the boys replied aggressively. ‘We can tackle our own horse. We don’t need the father.’

Three of the boys looked alike, short and stocky with flaming red hair. The other two were darker. I moved over behind the one with the rope, one of the
carrot-haired
boys, and poked him in the elbow to get his
attention
. He twisted back to look for a second.

‘What’s up, doc?’ he bellowed viciously, then turned to face the pony again.

‘He is afraid of you and your brothers,’ I told him.

‘Don’t be annoying me,’ he said. ‘Don’t meddle with men’s work. Do you know anything about the horses? Do you?’

‘Yes, I do,’ I said, fighting my nerves.

‘I suppose you can spell “horse” and that’s about it.’ Carrot threw this back at me and kept his eyes on Starlight.

‘I will show you,’ I demanded.

‘He’d knock you down with a kick,’ shouted one of the others, but I walked out in front of them towards the pony. Just then I saw Grandad come onto the green. He stayed out of the way though, as one of our neighbours filled him in on the situation.

This was my moment. I knew that I had to ignore the crowd and focus on Starlight. She side-glanced me but still pranced rearwards. I put out a limp arm and began making clicking noises. ‘Starlight, let me come over,’ I said in a low voice. I turned to the Traveller boys and with a look, somehow got them to move back.

‘Starlight, I’ll meet you halfway. Come on, little pony. I can’t hurt you,’ I called out softly as the crowd went into an expectant silence.

I walked forward, making each step slower, more guarded, and keeping a low murmur focused on Starlight. If she rose up to attack me, I would fall back, and could trust the boys to rush to my support with shouts. Meanwhile, I advanced slowly, trying to gain Starlight’s confidence, so that she would let me get closer.

And that is what happened. It may have looked like I was going into the lion’s den, but really I was just showing a nervous animal a kind hand, something to calm her down. I kept reassuring her and it was not too
long before she let me stroke her head and her mane, and rub her back. The crowd had the sense not to break the silence until one of the boys handed me the halter, out of sight of Starlight, and after more calming words I slipped it on her.

Leading the pony back towards its owners I felt like a champion. I saw Grandad out of the corner of my eye, biting his lip in relief and trying to conceal his widening grin.

Mrs Tansey, the boys’ grandmother, known locally as ‘The Witch Tansey’, came over as a crowd gathered around. She grabbed my shoulders and stared into my eyes as if she was trying to look at something deep inside me. ‘Listen, young fella, I saw something this day. You’re made for the horses. D’you hear? Go off to the horses with you!’ Her face was wizened, her voice sharp and I hardly understood a word of what she said, but they say that genuine witches can see into the future, and perhaps that is true.

Meanwhile the people all around the green cheered and clapped, and Grandad came over and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘You had the heart sideways in me for a minute there, Pepe,’ he said.

When we got back to Grandma, she was correcting school essays while waiting for a batch of bread to cook. She thought we had gone ‘for a bit of jaunt’ to Navan or Kells.

‘Oh, my god,’ she exclaimed on hearing about my
‘taming’ the pony for the Tanseys. ‘Well, now, if they can’t settle their horse and Pepe can, that is something. That really is something.’

‘Oh, it’s more than something,’ said Grandad, beaming from ear to ear. He had a strange look in his eyes.

‘What is?’ I asked, confused.

‘Yes, what?’ asked Grandma, turning to face Grandad. She looked as lost as I was.

‘Can’t you see?’ He laughed like a madman. ‘You like horses, don’t you, Pepe? Don’t answer. You do, and they like you. That’s it!’ He clapped his hands. ‘Why didn’t I ever think of it before, especially when you told us about your adventures in Colombia?’

So I left them to it. Talking in riddles. Were they going to get me a job with the Tanseys minding the ponies? Hardly. But it must be something. Still, anything to get me out of that horrible school.