‘I don’t belong here,’ I said to myself. Before I even opened my eyes.
It was my morning ritual. To ward off the smell and the dirt and the fights and the noise of the day. To keep me in that bright green place in my mind which had no proper name; I called it ‘Wide’.
‘I don’t belong here,’ I said again. A dirty-faced fifteen-year-old girl frowsy-eyed from sleep, blinking at the hard grey light filtering through the grimy window. I looked up to the arched ceiling of the caravan, the damp sacking near my face as I lay on the top bunk; and then I glanced quickly to my left to the bunk to see if Dandy was awake.
Dandy: my black-eyed, black-haired, equally dirty-faced sister. Dandy, the lazy one, the liar, the thief.
Her eyes, dark as blackberries, twinkled at me.
‘I don’t belong here,’ I whispered once more to the dream world of Wide which faded even as I called to it. Then I said aloud to Dandy:
‘Getting up?’
‘Did you dream of it – Sarah?’ she asked me softly, calling me by my magic secret name. The name I knew from my dreams of Wide. The magic name I use in that magic land.
‘Yes,’ I said, and I turned my face away from her to the stained wall and tried not to mind that Wide was just a dream and a pretence. That the real world was here. Here where they knew nothing of Wide, had never even heard of such a place. Where, except for Dandy, they would not call me Sarah when I had once asked. They had laughed at me and gone on calling me by my real name, Meridon.
‘What did you dream?’ Dandy probed. She was not cruel, but she was too curious to spare me.
‘I dreamed I had a father, a great big fair-headed man and he lifted me up. High, high up on to his horse. And I rode before him, down a lane away from our house and past some fields. Then up a path which went higher and higher, and through a wood and out to the very top of the fields, and he pointed his horse to look back down the way we had come, and I saw our house: a lovely square yellow house, small as a toy house on the green below us.’
‘Go on,’ said Dandy.
‘Shut up you two,’ a muffled voice growled in the half-light of the caravan. ‘It’s still night.’
‘It ain’t,’ I said, instantly argumentative. My father’s dark, tousled head peered around the head of his bunk and scowled at me. ‘I’ll strap you,’ he warned me. ‘Go to sleep.’
I said not another word. Dandy waited and in a few moments she said, in a whisper so soft that our da – his head buried beneath the dirty blankets – could not hear, ‘What then?’
‘We rode home,’ I said, screwing my eyes tight to re-live the vision of the little red-headed girl and the fair man and the great horse and the cool green of the arching beech trees over the drive. ‘And then he let me ride alone.’
Dandy nodded, but she was unimpressed. We had both been on and around horses since we were weaned. And I had no words to convey the delight of the great strides of the horse in the dream.
‘He was telling me how to ride,’ I said. My voice went quieter still, and my throat tightened. ‘He loved me,’ I said miserably. ‘He did. I could tell by the way he spoke to me. He was my da – but he loved me.’
‘And then?’ said Dandy, impatient.
‘I woke up,’ I said. ‘That was all.’
‘Didn’t you see the house, or your clothes or the food?’ she asked disappointed.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not this time.’
‘Oh,’ she said and was silent a moment. ‘I wish I could dream of it like you do,’ she said longingly. ‘’Taint fair.’
A warning grunt from the bed made us lower our voices again.
‘I wish I could see it,’ she said.
‘You will,’ I promised. ‘It is a real place. It is real somewhere. I know that somewhere it is a real place. And we will both be there, someday.’
‘Wide,’ she said. ‘It’s a funny name.’
‘That’s not the whole name,’ I said cautiously. ‘Not quite Wide. Maybe it’s something-Wide. I never hear it clear enough. I listen and I listen but I’m never quite sure of it. But it’s a real place. It is real somewhere. And it’s where I belong.’
I lay on my back and looked at the stains on the sacking roof of the caravan and smelled the stink of four people sleeping close with no windows open, the acid smell of stale urine from last night’s pot.
‘It’s real somewhere,’ I said to myself. ‘It has to be.’
There were three good things in my life, that dirty painful life of a gypsy child with a father who cared nothing for her, and a stepmother who cared less. There was Dandy my twin sister – as unlike me as if I were a changeling. There were the horses we trained and sold. And there was the dream of Wide.
If it had not been for Dandy I think I would have run away as soon as I was old enough to leave. I would have upped and gone, run off to one of the sleepy little villages in the New Forest in that hot summer of 1805 when I was fifteen. That was the summer I turned on Da and stood up to him for the first time ever.
We had been breaking a pony to sell as a lady’s ride. I said the horse was not ready for a rider. Da swore she was. He was wrong. Anyone but an idiot could have seen that the horse was nervy and half wild. But Da had put her on the lunge rein two or three times and she had gone well enough. He wanted to put me up on her. He didn’t waste his breath asking Dandy to do it. She would have smiled one of her sweet slow smiles and disappeared off for the rest of the day with a hunk of bread and rind of cheese in her pocket. She’d come back in the evening with a dead chicken tucked in her shawl so there was never a beating for Dandy.
But he ordered me up on the animal. A half-wild, half-foolish foal too young to be broke, too frightened to be ridden.
‘She’s not ready,’ I said looking at the flaring nostrils and the rolling whites of her eyes and smelling that special acrid smell of fearful sweat.
‘She’ll do,’ Da said. ‘Get up on her.’
I looked at Da, not at the horse. Da’s dark eyes were red rimmed, the stubble on his chin stained his face blue. The red kerchief at his neck showed bright against his pallor. He had been drinking last night and I guessed he felt ill. He had no patience to stand in the midday sunshine with a skittish pony on a lunge rein.
‘I’ll lunge her,’ I offered. ‘I’ll train her for you.’
‘You’ll ride her, you cheeky dog,’ he said to me harshly. ‘No whelp tells me how to train a horse.’
‘What’s the hurry?’ I asked, backing out of arm’s reach. Da had to hold the horse and could not grab me.
‘I got a buyer,’ he said. ‘A farmer at Beaulieu wants her for his daughter. But he wants her next week for her birthday or summat. So she’s got to be ready for then.’
‘I’ll lunge her,’ I offered again. ‘I’ll work her all day, and tomorrow or the day after I’ll get up on her.’
‘You get up now,’ he said harshly. Then he raised his voice and yelled: ‘Zima!’