A HORSE FOR ANGEL

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“Why can’t somebody else look after her? Why does it have to be Nana?”

Mum continued as if I’d said nothing.

“The decision’s been made. When we get home, I want you to go up in the loft. There’s a big grey suitcase up there that you’re going to need.”

I noticed we’d completely left out a whole middle bit of the conversation where I could say I didn’t want to go. Which is always part of Mum’s master plan. Cut out the annoying middle bit and get to the point, or the next appointment. Never mind what I want.

“Start packing tonight,” she said. “You can do the rest tomorrow when we get back from your maths tutor and before swimming club, then I’ll drive you down to Aunt Liv’s on Sunday.”

I don’t like drama club and I don’t like the maths tutor either because her house smells of garlic. My swimming teacher says I swim like a cat, like something that doesn’t want to be in the water.

My life is a list of mostly boring or pointless activities that I didn’t choose, with a car drive and waiting in between. If you practise long enough, you don’t have to care that everything has been taken out of your hands. That’s what mums are for.

“So how was drama club? Apart from—”

“Fine,” I sighed.

When we got home, we ate cold pasta salad out of supermarket cartons. Mum had her phone glued to her head again and while she was talking she waved a finger towards the loft door in the hallway ceiling at the top of the stairs.

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UR LOFT WAS AS SILENT AS THE MOON. EXCEPT for my footsteps, which sounded hollow against the boards. The yellow padding in the sloping walls blocked out the sounds of the world. It felt like a place from long ago that had stopped, with its old air and old things we keep because they don’t belong at the dump or in a charity shop or anywhere else but with us.

I saw the grey suitcase. And I could have just grabbed it and gone straight back downstairs. Instead, I pushed my shoulders back and turned my chin up. I was going to make a stand. And I didn’t mind being up there where the world had paused and nobody could see me or hear me. Just a few minutes of pretending…

I imagined telling Mum what I really thought.

Now listen, Mother, I don’t want to go to any stupid clubs. You see, I don’t like them and I don’t really have any friends at them because I’m not very good at anything and I’m not interested either. Now you want to dump me in a place where I don’t know anyone and I’ll have to do a whole load more things that I don’t care about. And I know how much it upset you and reminded you of Dad, even though you didn’t say… but I did actually want to fix those lights. And I really liked doing it.

I didn’t mean to think that last bit. And I knew I’d never be brave enough to say any of those things.

I sat down in the old dust and sighed. That’s when I noticed the tidy pile of cardboard boxes that I was sitting next to. I decided to open the top one.

Inside there was an old Mother’s Day card with crushed tissue flowers on the front, a lined notebook with big uncertain handwriting and pages and pages of scratchy drawings of a house with five-legged animals in it. At the bottom of the box were clumpy clay models and strange mixed-up creatures made from cardboard, wires, feathers and buttons. An elephant-giraffe with a long neck and a trunk, a hippo-bird with two clawed legs, and other impossible animals. It’s funny how you can’t remember making these things, even though you must be the same person with the same hands.

I noticed then that the cardboard box had a sticker on it. It said Nell – aged four. All the boxes had stickers saying my name and my age! Year by year, everything I’d made had been stored in a pile, getting taller every year. I looked inside some more of them. All the other boxes had schoolbooks and reports in them. How come I didn’t make things any more?

That’s when I saw a brown leather case behind the boxes, lying alone in the shadows under the eaves, under forgotten dust. It was a bit bigger than my school backpack and quite heavy. I heard things shifting inside as I dragged it over by the handle. The leather was worn, the seams grazed, like skin protecting the tender things inside.

There was no sticker on it with my name, but I flicked the catches open anyway.

Inside was like an ancient tomb, full of flat pieces of metal with holes round the edges, narrow strips like silver bones, scattered among ornaments and precious objects. I rummaged through the pieces and found a musical box and sixteen miniature painted horses. I liked the way one fitted in my hand with my fingers under its metal belly and its neck against my thumb. Its galloping legs were frozen in time, its silent eyes wide open. And then I remembered what it was.

Once, all the pieces had made a mechanical carousel, almost as big as our coffee table, but taller. I was four when I last saw the brilliance of it, when I last saw the lights and spinning horses. I opened the lined notebook again, the one from when I was four. That’s what the pictures were! Not strange creatures with five legs, but horses with long tails, and they weren’t in a house, they were on a carousel. And then I remembered the buzzing in my skin and brain, the laugh alive in my tummy, as I had crouched and gazed at the swirling, whirling carousel.

I held the strings of tiny lights. I could see the filaments inside, as fine as baby hair. I arranged the horses in a circle. I poked the wires from the lights into a black battery cylinder. My hands remembered what to do. The lights burned, white and gold and pink. I turned the handle on the musical box, heard the rusty chimes speed up and come to life. All the fragments lay around me, all the pieces. But I thought the horses kicked; I thought they were spinning beside me, as if they were alive.

“Nell? Can’t you find it?” Mum called. “Do you need me to come up and look?”

I scrambled to scoop all the pieces back up, to hide them away again.

“No! Don’t come up!” I said quickly as I snapped the case shut. “I’ve found it.”

Then I wondered what would be in a box called Nell – aged eleven. And I remembered why I didn’t make things any more.

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CARRIED BOTH CASES DOWN FROM THE LOFT, WITHOUT Mum knowing. I hid the secret brown leather one under my bed.

That night I lay waiting for the noises in the house to tell me Mum had stopped turning and was asleep. And I was remembering the carousel and who had made it all. My dad.

Mum said he had always been drawn to lights. It was his business, making spectacular lighting displays for spectacular shows. Then seven years ago he ran away to somewhere called Las Vegas with someone – called Susie or something – to see the biggest lights of all. We never saw or heard from him again. Mum had said he was probably too dazzled to remember he had responsibilities. She said we had a new life to live and that now we were free of the pointless dreams of a man who had betrayed us.

Mum couldn’t have known the carousel was in the loft. She would never have let anything of his remain behind. What he didn’t take was put in bags and binned. There were no reminders of him. So why was the carousel still here?

And then suddenly I remembered the tin girl, who stood on top of the carousel with her arms out and her head back as if she was about to fly. I remembered waiting for her to turn round, to look at me, as she spun past. Looking at the sky, looking at me.

I got up and crawled under the bed. Quietly I opened the case and turned the metal pieces so they didn’t clatter together, so Mum didn’t hear and wake. But it was too dark and I couldn’t find the tin girl, couldn’t feel her in there. Where was she?

I got back into bed with one of the horses. The metal warmed in my hand. I could feel the ribs of thick paint brushstrokes.

I turned the horse, felt the smooth curve of its neck, its hooves kicked up in a gallop as it no longer touched the earth. I thought I felt the sway of its mane against my fingertips.

I dreamed. Horses pounded in my heart. Lights brightened, circled, turning faster, spreading wider until I saw her in the middle. The tin girl was real! As tall as me, her skin reflected the dazzle of the carousel. She lowered her arms and turned her face to me.

“Where am I?” she whispered.