Tenterhooks. Suzannah Dunn

to Mum every year on the day of the kennel fête: ‘You don’t have to do anything with the greyhound, Mum. If you win him, then you’re his owner, you make up his name, you can go and see him whenever you want, but he lives in the kennels and they feed him, train him, race him.’ The ideal dog, surely, in her opinion. The only dog, I suspect, that she would ever allow us to have. Because she says that They’re worse than kids; they’re always under your feet or mating with your leg; they’re noisy and smelly and they have to be taken everywhere; they eat that foul food and they poo everywhere.

      Dad says they do not poo everywhere if they have been trained. And he knows, because his family had lots of them when he was little. He seems to remember them by how they died: Bruno as a puppy from a virus, Jake in old age from diabetes, Slipper by mistake from rat poison.

      Across the table, Mum shuts her eyes hard, then opens them hard: a sign that she refuses to say a word.

      Once, I pointed out to her that Grandma’s poodle, Rebel, has never mated with our legs, but she said, ‘That yapping perm is incapable of mating with anything.’

      And so we have Leo: for my fifth birthday, I was allowed to choose from the box of kittens and I chose him because he looked sad and trodden on, but this is how he has behaved ever since, he has never grown happy or clever. We hardly ever see him: the only evidence that he lives here is his two bowls on our kitchen floor.

      One of Mum’s arms flops down onto the table; her head stays in her other hand. ‘But how on earth would Tim find the time to keep running Alison up to the kennels? He’s forever ferrying her from home to school to Mrs Mortimer.’

      ‘She was fine when she failed to win that pony,’ Dad sounds worried. ‘She seemed to accept the situation.’

      ‘And how do you know?’ Mum squeaks. Her other arm thuds onto the table. The thud jogs me, jogs my pen so that the red bucket seems to have grown an extra handle. ‘When are you ever here to see how she is? You men, off to work every day. Who stays around to pick up the pieces? What else was she going to do, other than accept the situation? But how do any of us know what she was going through? That obsession, those books … she was coming here with what must have been the library’s entire collection of books on ponies. And then she spent her birthday money on more pony books. All for four or five questions, four or five little questions on that entry form. And she was ringing up local farmers, you know; did you know that? Asking questions. About feeding and forelocks and whatever. Mrs Mortimer found her on the phone, a couple of times, asking questions about hooves and hay, whatever. And that notebook full of tie-breakers! She was working on her tie-breaker for months, lots of clever little lines.’ Mum has to stop for breath. ‘Apparently she’d always wanted a pony, but never this badly. And do you know what she said to me when she knew that she hadn’t won? There’s always next year. Just like that: There’s always next year. Sometimes, I have to say, she gives me the creeps.’

      ‘Gina, please,’ Dad whispers, his head turning towards the door.

      I keep all my wishes for a pony; I wish on every first star that I see, on every birthday candle that I blow. And I tell no one, because if I told, those wishes would be wiped away. I have had so many wishes by now that eventually one of them will come true. But in the meantime I would love to win the greyhound.

      ‘She’s so like Tim, in some ways; wouldn’t you say?’ Mum is quieter, now. ‘Sitting by the phone, but firm in her belief that there’s-always-next-year. And in other ways she’s the opposite: so much hope and determination. Tim could do with some of that; we might have had Anne back by now if he had made an effort to find her, if he had gone after her.’

      Should I chance this red pen on the girl’s cheeks? Does anyone really have red cheeks? Even someone with cheeks as chunky as these?

      ‘But you said that we should let her go.’

      ‘Yes, now. But if Tim had had more get up and go, she might never have got up and gone.’

      How did she go? On a bus?

      ‘That’s unfair.’ Dad sounds tired. ‘Tim’s a lovely bloke.’

      ‘I know he’s a lovely bloke.’ Mum, too: very tired. ‘Perhaps that was the problem.’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      I know a good word for this girl: apple-cheeked. The apples that we are given by Mrs Mortimer have red on them, she has to find the three most beautiful apples in the box. Mum walks around behind her, saying, Anything will do, really, honestly; but Mrs Mortimer laughs and says, No, no, looks are important.

      ‘Well, you know, not everyone wants a lovely bloke, or not all the time.’

      ‘They don’t?’

      Mum breathes down her nose. ‘You wouldn’t understand. This place …’

      ‘There are worse places.’ Dad seems to be checking through his newspaper for something; the turning pages fan me, fluffing my hair.

      ‘Well, yes, of course, but what are the two main excitements, here, every year?’ Mum leaves us and crosses to the window. ‘The kennel fête,’ she says to the window, ‘and the point-to-point: fund-raising for greyhounds, and betting on horses.’

      I love the point-to-point, I love to walk over the fields which are usually only a boring view from our bedroom windows, fields which look flat from our bedroom windows but which, when we walk on them, are clumps of grass. I love to walk to the hedges that have been built for the horses to jump: higher than real hedges, impossibly high. Then there are the marquees, massive, with tatty flaps for doorways. Everyone from around here comes to the races, but there are hundreds of other people and I have no idea where they come from. Nor do I have any idea where the horses and jockeys come from; but they are proper horses and jockeys, they look like the horses and jockeys that I have seen on the telly. Lots of people have picnics: paper plates and sausage rolls.