Uchenna's Apples (4 page)

They went along at a fast walk for about five minutes before one of the hedges in front of them ran directly into the wall to their right, actually growing up against it somewhat now. Here Emer waved Uchenna off to the left, and they followed the hedge to a place where there was a hole in it big enough for them to creep through. “Watch the thorns—” Emer said, ducking through the hole.

I should have changed first…!
Uchenna thought: she was not going to get through that hole as easily as Emer. But she pushed the apple bag through the hole, then grabbed her skirt with both hands and tightened it around her before she slipped herself into the gap in the hedge. The spikes and spines of the hawthorn bushes that made up the hedge grazed Uchenna in a few places, and she sucked in breath as one of them dug hard into her arm as she came out on the other side.

“You okay?” Emer said as Uchenna straightened up.

“It got me a little,” Uchenna said, brushing at the scratch on her arm. “Not bad. Come on.”

Past the hedge, it was easier to see the developments further on. The trampled-down path angled away from the wall on the right, where the developed part of Adamstown pinched in a little and then bubbled out again in another set of circles. These were smaller than Uchenna’s, as were the houses in them: in the second phase of building, the construction company had probably decided it could make more money by packing more houses onto the same amount of land. Behind them, on the field side of the wall, there were also more houses that weren’t part of the development. Here little dirt or gravel roads, or tiny rubble-paved driveways, ran from small isolated cottages or old farmhouses to the narrow road that ran behind Adamstown and up to the wider county road north of the development and the school: and many more scraggly hedgerows divided the houses and their little fields from one another.

Emer paused again before they took the path that headed off to their left. She glanced behind them to see if anyone had followed them: but there was no one in sight. “Great. See them, there they are—!”

She trotted ahead on the path, Uchenna following. Another hedgerow lay across the path ahead of them, but at an angle: it was met by yet another hedge near the development wall, not far from where Emer’s house was—in fact Uchenna could see Emer’s upstairs bedroom window from here. The two of them angled rightwards around the place where the hedges met.

And there, inside the hedge, grazing, were the horses.

It seemed quiet, all of a sudden, as the two of them stood there and looked into the field. Five horses were there, as Emer had said. All of them were black and white, in various patterns, except for one that was almost all dirty white. Uchenna stared at them: and one after another, the horses’ heads came up, and they stared back. Even the smallest of them was as tall at the shoulder as she was.
They’re really big!
she thought.
Even the little one. I don’t want to go in there, I don’t care what Emer says!

But Emer was already working her way down toward where there was a gap in the old hedge that faced the development. Someone had banged an old wooden post into the ground there, maybe a chunk of a broken telephone pole, and had tied an ancient salvaged tubular metal yard gate to it. The other side of the gate was simply tied with more frayed moss-green rope to the thick branches of the hawthorn bush on the far side of the gap in the hedge. “Come on!” Emer said, and got up on the first rung of the yard gate, starting to climb over it.

“You’re gonna fall right on your head,” Uchenna said under her breath, hurrying forward to hold the gate so that it wouldn’t wobble while Emer was on it. “Will you just
wait?”

“Thanks,” Emer said, getting one foot up onto the second-from-the-top rung of the gate. She swung herself around so that she was on the inside facing out, and started climbing down again.

As she came down inside, Uchenna looked at where Emer was standing. “My dad was right,” she said. “There’s the mud.”

Emer looked at it and sniffed. “It’s hardly wet,” she said. “Just soft where they’ve been stepping on it a lot. Come on.” She put the bag down and held the gate.

The horses, one by one, were lowering their heads to graze again. Once they were all grazing, Uchenna went up the gate. She did it more slowly than Emer, partly because she suddenly really did not want to be doing this. “If they start looking at me or anything—” she said as she climbed.

Emer didn’t say a word, but her smile was both understanding and scornful. Uchenna swallowed and then set her face in what was meant to look like an I-don’t-care expression: but whether it would fool Emer was another story.
And whether it’ll fool
them—! Uchenna swung herself around with her back to the field, as Emer had, and burst into a sweat. Suddenly the breeze which would have been a comfort right now had dropped away to nothing: and everything had gone very quiet—she could actually hear the soft tearing sound of the horses pulling up their mouthfuls of grass from the ground.
Fine. As long as they’re biting the grass and not
me
—

She came down and turned right around. As she did, once more the horses’ heads came up. “Uh oh…” Uchenna said.

But nothing else happened for the moment, except the horses’ jaws went around and around while they chewed their last mouthfuls and stared at the girls. Uchenna wasn’t anywhere near feeling relaxed, but she leaned against the gate and looked the horses over, fairly certain she wasn’t going to have to run away just now.

They looked nothing like the horses that Uchenna sometimes saw on the racing channel that her dad watched on weekend afternoons. Those were glossy creatures with long slender legs, narrow heads, straight noses and flowing tails.
These
horses were big-barreled, with heavyish legs, outward-curving noses, and big broad hooves plastered with dried mud: some of the hooves had long straggly dirty hair hanging down behind them. And the horses weren’t all one color, like the racehorses usually were. They were patchy, with big blotches of color on them, mostly black on white: though a couple of them had brown patches that overlapped the black ones in places. All of them had big dark eyes that seemed to be looking at Uchenna and Emer almost sadly: but it looked like a patient hopeless sort of sorrow, the kind that would just sigh at life and say “Oh well.”

“They really are big,” Uchenna said under her breath. When they shifted, you could feel the thump of their hooves against the ground. “Specially that one.”

She pointed with her chin at the one horse that wasn’t patchy-colored, just dingy white. The horse’s belly was twice the size of those of the other horses, and hung down further: when the horse moved, it did so slowly, as if all that weight was a burden.

“Yeah, which reminds me,” Emer said. “When’s your mam’s due date?”

“That
reminds you?” Uchenna said, shocked.

Emer gave Uchenna a you-poor-innocent kind of look. “Chen,” she said, “that’s a
mammy
horse. Or she’s gonna be a mammy real soon. What’d you think, that she’d just been hitting the chips too hard?”

Uchenna went hot. “Look,” she said, “I don’t know how to tell the boys from the girls with these guys. They’re not exactly my main subject.”

“The boys have boy stuff hanging down,” Emer said, pointing. “Or most of it. See that one’s butt? They took them off. It’s called ‘gelding’, it makes them not go crazy around the girls.”

Uchenna raised her eyebrows, thinking that there were some boys at school who should be told about this technique, if only to see the looks on their faces. “So we’ve got one, two…three guys.”

“And two girls. Maybe the other girl is a friend of the mammy’s.”

“Well, they get apples first,” Uchenna said.

Each of them cautiously threw an apple toward the mammy horse and her friend. The horses started with surprise: the mammy horse’s friend, mostly black with a white nose, actually reared up on her hind legs a little to get away from the apple, and at the big sudden motion a flush of terror went right over Uchenna in a wave. But a moment later the horses quieted down and stood still again, and looked at the apples suspiciously.

“Come on, guys,” Uchenna said under her breath, “you think we hauled these all the way over here for our health?” She took another apple out of the bag and rolled it over toward one of the boy horses, one who was mostly white with a black patch on his back like a saddle, and had a black nose-end. When it stopped rolling, he looked at it, then dropped his nose to it and smelled it, making a loud whuffly noise. “Eames,” Uchenna said, watching him, “how come they’re all so shaggy? I didn’t know horses came like that.”

Emer shrugged. “It’s like people,” she said: “you have to give them haircuts every now and then. Also I think when you leave them out in the open a lot, the hair grows faster so they don’t get cold.”

The boy horse with the black patch was starting to work out that the apple was something nice. He bit it in two: Uchenna could hear the sharp crunch of it from ten feet away. Then he straightened up, chewing, and the two other boy horses looked at him with interest. One of them went over to the other half of the apple, snuffled at it, and picked it up in his mouth, mumbling it around like he wasn’t sure what to do with it.

“Where did they come from?” Emer said, leaning beside her and holding out the plastic bag to Uchenna. The second boy horse was chewing, now, and the third one had come over to him to see what he had.

Emer shook her head as she dug into the bag for another apple. “It’s too far to walk them over here from the road,” she said. “Somebody must have brought them in a trailer or something…”

“But why?” Uchenna said. “Who do they belong to?” She pulled out an apple too, threw it toward the mammy horse.

Emer shook her head again. “Maybe somebody who knows whoever owns this field,” she said. “I think people rent their fields out sometimes so that other people can graze their cows or sheep or whatever on them…”

Uchenna shrugged. Though she’d been born in Ireland, this was part of life here she didn’t really know much about. She was a city kid: or at least she’d thought of herself that way until the family moved here. The family’s previous house had been buried deep in miles and miles of suburbs, all front yards and driveways as far as the eye could see: pastures and fields with crops growing in them were something you didn’t see until you got on the motorway to go for a Sunday drive or to go to the airport. She could still remember her shock when the family had flown back from London, once, and she’d looked down as they landed and seen the cows grazing in fields just past the runway.

Now one of the boy horses took a couple of steps toward them. Uchenna began feeling nervous again: the other horses’ heads had come up, and they were watching their braver friend to see what he did. “How many apples have we got left?” she said to Emer.

Emer dug around in the rustly plastic bag. “Six…”

“No way this is going to come out even,” Uchenna said, as a second of the boy horses took a step toward them. “That first one’s taking everybody else’s share. Greedy pig!— Look, just throw the apples out there, let them sort it out.”

Emer rolled the remaining apples across the grass to the horses. The two boys and the mammy horse’s black-and-white friend moved forward, nosing at the apples as Uchenna turned to climb back up the gate. It wobbled.

“Hey, wait for me,” Emer said. But Uchenna was halfway over already. Emer braced the gate while the horses snuffled at the apples, picking them up and then chomping on them, so that small pieces and chunks sprayed in various directions around the grass. Uchenna turned and hopped down and braced the gate for Emer: Emer climbed up and over, and came down beside Uchenna.

For a few moments more they watched the horses squabble gently over the remaining bits of apple on the poached-up ground, snorting at each other and shoving each other out of the way. Only the mammy horse hung back, watching the others, looking sad and extremely heavy: when she moved, she let out a little whuff of breath that almost sounded like a moan.

“She hardly got any,” Uchenna said under her breath. “Poor thing.” She glanced around the little field. It wasn’t big—maybe the size of the property her house stood on, or a little more than that. And there wasn’t that much grass in it. A lot of what there was had already been grazed down short. “This can’t be all they eat,” she said to Emer. “It’s almost all gone, and they just got here.”

Emer shook her head. “I think they have to have other food too,” she said. “I don’t know. Oats? Some kind of grain, anyway. And hay sometimes.”

“We should keep an eye on them,” Uchenna said. “See who brings them food.”

“See
if
anybody brings them food…” Uchenna said.

In her pocket, her phone suddenly rang, starting to sing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” at the top of its little lungs. In the field, the horses shied and stamped their feet: two of them actually turned and ran to the other end of the little field, then turned around again and stood staring.

“Oh no, it’s mam,” Uchenna said.

“Were we at the library yet?” Emer said as they hurried back along the path.

“I don’t know,” Uchenna said, “wait a moment…” She got the phone out, snapped it open. “Hello?”

“Where’d you go off to in such a hurry?” her mam said. “You dad finally got his mind made up, he’ll be home in an hour.”

“Are we going out?” Uchenna said, glancing over her shoulder at the field. Things seemed to be quieting down in there: and as they left, she saw one head come up: the dirty white head of the Mammy Horse, looking after them with that same sad, tired expression.

“No, he’s bringing pizza,” her mam said. “Will you stop at the Spar on the way back, sweet? Get a big bottle of white lemonade and a big bottle of Coke. And a loaf of bread: we’re almost out.”

“Okay, mam,” Uchenna said. “I’ll call you on the way back. Bye!” And she hung up.

“Come on,” she said to Emer, turning around on the path. “We have to go to the shops.”

They headed back the way they’d come: the path past the field would bring them up against the development wall again, and a little further down that way was a path that would lead between two of the circles to the road that went up to the smaller of the two Adamstown shopping areas. “You didn’t even have to say we were at the library or whatever,” Emer said.