Page 18 of The Show Woman

17

Small breaths

Rosie sits cross-legged on the stable floor, Tommy Pony’s head laid gently on her lap. His breathing is laboured, flanks heaving with the effort, and there are wisps of foam around his sage-soft muzzle.

‘Tommy,’ she whispers into the white star-shaped mark on his head, and the pony gives the smallest of whickers.

He can’t die on her. He just can’t. In this strange, sparkling, dangerous new world, where every day brings challenges and unfamiliar faces, where Rosie has struggled to find her voice, Tommy has been her ballast. The part of her past she has brought into her present, a final breath of her old life.

When her father brought Tommy Pony home to the farm on her thirteenth birthday, pleased as punch in a way that made her stomach turn, Rosie did not know how to feel. She knew that Tommy was a bribe, a gift for keeping quiet, for letting his filthy hands do what they wished to her, but one stroke of the crest of his mane, a mottled grey streaked with white, and it all fell away. The dark, terrifying nights, the bruises that marked her inner thighs, the rough yanks of her hair. She knew, from that moment on, that Tommy would be her saviour, and that one day, together, they would leave that place and be free.

She rests her lips on his head. It is hot, wet with sweat. The crown that Lena made still sits on her head, its long feathers tickling the nape of Tommy’s neck.

‘Hold on, my boy,’ she says. ‘Don’t go. Don’t leave me.’

Lena slips into the stall beside her. Violet has squatted down on the floor, leans her head on Rosie’s shoulder.

‘How is he?’ Lena asks, and Rosie looks into eyes filled with a deep, gentle concern. She cannot believe that it is mere weeks since she first met these women. She chokes back a sob.

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t look good. The stable boy’s gone to fetch a man in the town who knows about horses, a veterinarian.’ Her heart flutters in her chest at the thought of it, what he might do, or not be able to do, for Tommy. ‘I feel like I can’t breathe,’ she says, and Violet presses her hand to Rosie’s heart.

‘I’ll breathe for you,’ she says. ‘In and out. Gently now. That’s it. Small breaths.’

In Rosie’s lap Tommy stirs a little, long lashes fluttering, his flank rising and falling in rhythm, or so it seems, with their breathing. For a moment the three of them sit there in perfect unison, in and out, in and out.

‘What happened?’ asks Lena. ‘He seemed fine during the show. How can he have got so ill so quickly?’

Rosie takes another breath, gathering strength from the touch of Violet’s cool palm, and rests her hand on Tommy’s white star.

‘I brought him back to the stable and he was hungry. He always is after a show. I took his bridle off, put him in the stall and let him have something from the feed tub. When I came back this evening he was shaking all over. Like a fit. His mouth foaming, snorting and stamping his hooves. I remember a lad at school once did the same thing, mouth foaming, jiggering all over. It was like that. And then Tommy fell, sort of collapsed on the floor, and I’ve been here ever since.’

Lena walks over to the feed tub, starts rootling through the hay. She picks out something small. It blooms purple, like a bruise. ‘Deadly nightshade,’ she says.

She roots further into the tub, picks out more and more of the bell-shaped flowers. They nod innocently in her palm, and she clenches her fist to crush them.

‘Tommy’s been poisoned,’ she says, and Rosie collapses into tears.