Beginner's Luck, page 12
Once she was inside, they strapped Lindsey tightly across her chest, tummy and knees with what looked like a seatbelt. The rescue worker untied rolls of the seatbelt material from the corners, and as the crane lifted him and Lindsey up into the air, they unfurled like ribbons. Shelby wondered what they were for.
Lindsey's mum had her fingers hooked into the fence mesh. Her face was white and stretched into a grimace.
When the basket moved over the fence, four rescue workers stepped forward holding their hands in the air, and Shelby understood that they were trying to catch the ribbons to keep the basket steady as it was lowered to the ground.
One of the ambulance workers had a stretcher on wheels, and with much shouting and waving at the crane driver, and the four steadying lines, they were able to place Lindsey directly onto the ambulance stretcher.
Lindsey's mother rushed over to her. Shelby was going to follow but her father held her back.
'Best keep out of the way for now. You can talk to her later,' he said.
Lindsey and her mother were stowed in the back of the ambulance and it whisked away with its lights on. When it reached the part of Gully Way where the traffic was flowing the siren came on, and Shelby could hear the course it took as it rushed along Gully Way and off towards the hospital.
The rescue workers started to pack their gear. Shelby was amazed at how much they could squeeze into each truck's roller door compartments. She watched as the ambulance workers, still in the ravine, inched their way up the slope and back through the hole in the fence.
One by one the trucks filled with people and drove away.
The crane personnel stacked the witches' hats on top of one another and stowed them inside the truck.
'Hang on a second! Shelby walked quickly towards Sergeant Everard. 'Stop! Where are they going?' Shelby asked. 'What about Blue?'
Sergeant Everard shook her head. 'I'm sorry, but we're only in the business of rescuing people.'
28 Two Wrongs
Shelby watched helplessly as the crane rumbled away. She ran after it, waving her arms and shouting. 'No! You can't go yet. My horse is down there!' But it kept moving.
She turned to her father, feeling a lump in her throat and butterflies in her stomach. 'Dad, make them stop!'
He shook his head. 'There's nothing I can do, Honey. Blue will be OK for one night. We'll come back in the morning and decide what to do. Let's get you home. How long is it since you've eaten something?'
Shelby stared at him. 'You can't be serious. He has no water. He's tied up. We can't leave him like that!'
'He will be fine for twelve hours.'
'No! I'm not going. We have to get him out now!' Shelby insisted.
Her father frowned. 'You know, in the olden days when horses were useful they were tied up for a lot longer than that, and they had to pull and carry things as well – heavy things – in the rain and snow. Blue will be fine. Now, get in the car.'
Shelby looked at his face and could see that he was nearing the end of his patience. There was no point arguing with him, so she did as she was told.
At home her mother warmed a bowl of pasta that they had kept aside for her.
'I don't understand what happened. Tell me from the beginning,' her mother said.
Shelby picked at her fingernails. 'Well, I entered the competition.' She decided to skip the part where she forged her mother's signature. 'And I rode with Erin and Lindsey for a while, but then these guys were riding past really fast, and I kind of lost them.'
That was mostly true. 'So I was riding along and I got to the storm water tunnel, and I thought that nobody had looked to see what was on the other side of it. I thought that the Matchstick Town was probably down there. So I went in.' Shelby stopped.
'Yes?' prompted her father.
'So I got to the bottom and I tried to climb out again, but the slope collapsed, and then . . .' She skipped a few hours. 'And then I saw that somebody was coming along, but I didn't know who it was at first, but it was Lindsey and she was climbing down the steep part.' Shelby chose not to specify which steep part. 'And she fell and hurt her shoulder. So we . . . I . . .' She thought about the bandage, but decided not to mention it again. 'So I climbed out the other end and came around the back of the electricity station. Then there was the back of the nursery and I thought it would be faster to go through it.'
Shelby's mother shook her head.
'And I was a little bit afraid of the dark. So I jumped the fence, but there was a big dog there. The security guard came. He wasn't very nice. He thought I was a burglar, because I had black marks on my face, but it wasn't, it was burnt . . .' She almost said 'damper and golden syrup', but stopped herself in time.
'Anyway, he wouldn't help, even when I explained about Lindsey. He called the police, and then Sergeant Everard took me back to the stables. You know everything that happened after that.'
'What was burnt? Shelby, you left the house ten hours ago!' her father said.
She shrugged. 'Well, that's what happened, mostly.'
'What do you mean mostly?' he demanded.
She thought about it for a little while. She didn't want to tell them anything. She wanted to check with Lindsey first. She squirmed in the chair. 'OK, I fell off,' she blurted. 'Twice. But the second time I wasn't on Blue. It was later. I fell into the billa . . . into the pool of water, but I didn't want to tell you about the falling bits, because you worry about quadriplegia already. I don't want to have to play ping-pong.'
Her mother took hold of Shelby's hand. 'Honey, we want you to tell us everything that happens to you. Sometimes we will be cross, but we just want you to be safe.'
Shelby really wanted to tell her parents the whole story, but she knew that it would come out wrong.
'There's an old man who lives down there secretly. I thought he was a bunyip and then I thought he was Santa. He fed us damper and told us stories, and asked us to promise not to tell anyone he's there because he's afraid of raffles.'
Her parents would never believe her. They were big on stranger danger. They would think he was some kind of dangerous weirdo, or a drug dealer or something.
Even if she got the story out in a way that they understood, she couldn't tell. It was different from lying to Erin about the Matchstick Town. That was a choice between right and wrong, but this was a choice between two wrongs – keep information from her parents, or betray Frank and Lindsey. She had to figure out which was the worse wrong.
Now Shelby understood why Lindsey had behaved so strangely with her on the day that they met in the rain and during the Matchstick Challenge. It wasn't Lindsey's secret to tell, and it wasn't Shelby's either.
'That's all I can say until I see Lindsey,' she said quietly.
Shelby's dad blew his top, yelling all the things that every parent yells at a teenager. 'You tell us what happened right this second! Don't you keep secrets from us, young lady. I won't have it!' His face was all red and he stared at her. 'Spit it out right now!'
Her mother rested her head on her chin and sighed. 'I know that there comes a time in every child's life when they stop telling their parents everything, but I just didn't think it would be so soon, Shel.'
Looking at her mother's face, Shelby hoped that she had made the right wrong choice.
She went to bed straight after a shower. She had intended to get up in the middle of the night after her parents had gone to sleep and head to The Pocket then, but when she opened her eyes she could already see the grey haze of first light.
Shelby dressed quickly in a tee-shirt, long shorts and joggers, and shoved a tube of sunscreen into one of the pockets on the side of her knee. She wouldn't need it for a few hours, and she could apply it on the way.
Out in the garage Shelby quietly shuffled objects around – a suitcase, a tent, an esky and a plastic box of her dad's gardening tools. Behind it all she found what she was looking for – her old bike. It was a pink Y-frame, with white wheels – a bit dinky-looking, and too small for her now, but she was pleased to see that the tyres were still inflated. There was a combination lock and chain wound around the handlebars from when she used to ride it to primary school, and she tried to remember the four-digit code.
She thought opening the garage door would be too loud, so she wheeled it back into the house and out the front door, closing the screen carefully behind her.
Shelby slid on her helmet and cycled down the street. There were no cars and the air was fresh and cool. She hadn't ridden her bike for a long time and after a few minutes she could already feel some tightness in the muscles along her thighs.
As she turned the corner at the end of the street she smiled. Before she owned Blue she used to call her bike Misty and, when she rode it, she pretended that she was horse-riding and that the gutters were jumps.
Back then she had wanted a horse so badly. She dreamed about it all the time. She read all the books and watched movies that had horses in them. Her parents thought she would grow out of it, but she hadn't yet.
The newsagent was open, and as she passed the bakery she could smell the wonderful aroma of freshly cooked bread. Her stomach grumbled and she realised that she'd forgotten breakfast. She wished she'd brought some money. Their cheese and bacon rolls were the best. Shelby often bought one while she waited for the bus to school.
As she headed uphill Shelby stood up, pumping the pedals, and the bike swayed from side to side. Up ahead a man in a moke was delivering the newspaper, flicking the rolled-up paper out the window and over the fence. She waved to him as she passed and continued up the hill.
At the next corner she held her hand out, indicating right, even though there was no one to see her, and she whizzed along the flat, enjoying the wind in her face.
Eventually she reached the corner of Gully Way. The traffic was light but moving along swiftly. She waited for a break in the traffic and turned right, crossing the lanes and then tucking into the shoulder. She didn't like riding along the busy roads. When the cars whooshed past the wind nearly knocked her over.
Shelby assumed that nobody would have fixed the fence above the storm water tunnel from the night before. She wanted to check on Blue first, and then she planned to ride around to the back of the nursery and follow the path that led to the rock face.
The road above the tunnel looked empty, now that she had seen it crowded with emergency vehicles.
At the top she stopped, dropped the bike and locked it to one of the fence posts with the chain that she kept around the handlebars. She climbed through the hole in the fence, scanning the area below.
Shelby could see the billabong, with its resident cormorant, and her saddle rug at the edge where Lindsey had been lying on it. She could see her old saddle still resting on its pommel. What she couldn't see was Blue.
29 Lateral Thinking
'Frank must have let him go last night after everybody left,' Shelby said out loud. It made sense, but she couldn't stop her heartbeat from quickening in her chest. He probably had, but what if he hadn't? What if Blue had been bitten by a snake and was lying flat-out somewhere, straining and grunting, while the poison gradually overcame his whole body? What if he was caught up in his reins and they were strapped tightly around his legs and his neck, and he was slowly choking to death just beyond her current view?
'Blue!' she called, cupping her hands to the sides of her mouth. She peered into the scrub, but she couldn't see his familiar patchwork hide moving in the undergrowth.
It would take another half an hour, at least, to ride her bike to the back of the nursery, and then along the path. She wanted to make sure Blue was all right this minute.
A truck drove past behind her, making her clothes billow, and her hair ruffle around her ears. Shelby looked down into the billabong again, biting her lip. It was a very long way down, but she had done it before.
She sat down, slid off her shoes and pushed her socks right up to the toe. She tied the laces together, and then, standing on the edge, she spun them over her head by the laces and threw them, like a hammer thrower. The shoes hit a branch on the other side of the billabong and then dropped down to the ground below, near the saddle blanket.
Shelby turned backwards and, using her hands and feet, slid down the slope for a short distance. The sharp stones hurt the soles of her feet and her hands were still raw from the day before.
She turned around carefully, resting most of her weight on a large rock jutting out of the slope, and holding onto a clump of grass. She bent her knees, and took a deep breath. She was about to jump but she hesitated. It was dangerous. She'd been told that you weren't supposed to jump in water unless you knew how deep it was. You could break your neck.
Besides that, it would be cold. And then there were those unidentified slimy things.
Shelby remembered Frank's story about the half-eaten girl. She could see the sandy mud through the yellow-coloured water at the edge of the pool, but beyond that it was murky and all she could see was the reflection of the white clouds above her – cumulonimbus, she remembered from Geography. All across the water were tiny little circles where gnats, bugs and dragonflies skimmed over the surface.
She looked up and realised that she would have trouble climbing back up to the road again, even if she wanted to, and her shoes were on the other side of the pool anyway.
When she had fallen in the day before she had not hit anything, but she wondered if that was because she had hit the surface of the water flat on her back. She knew from going to the local pool that she would not dive as deeply into the water if she bombed or belly-flopped as she would if she dropped straight, like a pin.
She took a deep breath again, squeezed her eyes shut, and this time she jumped, folding her legs underneath her and wrapping her hands around her knees. She could feel the air under her chin, and her hair lifting from her forehead. Suddenly she was sure that she wasn't going to make the water, and instead would hit the dirt further down the hill and break her back. She felt her bottom hit the water like a slap. The cold water around her, and the noise of it, sent a jolt of adrenalin streaking through her limbs.
She bobbed to the surface and swam quickly to the edge, eager to be out of the muddy water. She had closed her mouth tightly, but could still taste the sludge on her lips.
As she strode out of the pool the water streamed from her clothing. She wrung out the loose material around her legs and flapped her tee-shirt, but there was no getting around the fact that she was completely soaked, and would be for some time. To make matters worse, when she walked over to gather her shoes her feet got covered with dirt, sand and dead leaves. She used one of the socks to brush them off, but it made little difference, because then it was on her socks, and they still had to go inside her shoes. She slid the shoes on her feet and tied the laces loosely.
On closer inspection she discovered that the bridle had been dismantled and was laid out, with the reins neatly coiled, between two roots of the tree to which Blue had been tied. Frank must have let him go, but Shelby still wanted to see that he was all right.
She grabbed the bridle, tucked the saddle and cloth under her arm, and made her way through the glade. She glanced left and right, calling to Blue, but she couldn't see him. When she reached the clearing she jogged around past the buildings to the fireplace at the back. Blue wasn't there either.
Frank was sitting on the block of wood with a mug in his hand. He had taken his beanie off and what little hair he had on the top of his head stood up on end, making him look even more like an ancient wild man.
'Morning young-un,' he said, cheerily. He looked her up and down. 'You've been trying to catch a kipper for breakfast by the look of you.'
'Where's Blue?' Shelby asked.
'Until I am measured, I am not known, but you will miss me when I am flown. What am I?' he asked.
'What?' Shelby frowned.
'I beg your pardon,' the old man corrected.
'Have you seen Blue?' she asked.
'Time,' he answered.
Shelby stared at him.
He took a sip of his tea. 'Each morning I appear at your feet, you cannot outrun me, but I nearly perish in the midday sun.'
'Shadow,' Shelby answered. It was an easy one.
'Very good,' he said, raising his mug to her. 'Would you like some? You might want to share my fire for a while. The expression "drowned rat" springs to mind.'
'I need to find Blue. Can you please tell me if you have seen him today?'
'How far will a horse walk into a forest?' he retorted.
Shelby shook her head. 'Please help me. I just want to know that he's safe.'
'Ah, but none of us are ever completely safe,' Frank replied. 'You've outswum the bunyip, but what about influenza, cholera, typhoid or other waterborne nasties?'
Shelby was angry. Frank was very irresponsible. He was supposed to be a grown-up, and yet all he cared about was his tea, his privacy and his silly riddles. Last night, when he realised how serious her injury was, he should have helped Lindsey straight away, and they should not have made her move. He should be helping Shelby now. Instead she was right back where she started, about to make the same mistakes over again.
The same mistakes over again. The phrase reminded Shelby of the magician at Erin's party. She tried to remember what he said. If you're smart you do things a little differently the second time around.
What was different? She turned away, looking into the bush.
'How far will a horse walk into a forest?' Frank repeated.
Roos, thought Shelby. Twice she had seen kangaroos, and twice they bounded away – but not aimless bounding – both times they had hopped in the same direction. There might be some better grazing where they went. Blue might have followed. Maybe the roos even knew a way out? It was at least worth a try.
