Fire and Hemlock

They went round the corner. Mr Lynn said, “Good Lord!” and a lot seemed to happen in no time at all.

The thing making the noise was a horse. It was loose in a narrow street with a rope bridle trailing off it, dodging and rearing as people tried to catch it – or the people might have been running away from it: it was not clear which. Slewed across the street behind the horse was a car with a broken headlight. A man was leaning angrily out of the car window, shouting. And the horse, a great, luminous, golden thing in the streetlights, slipping and crunching in the glass from the broken headlight, had just dodged someone’s grabbing hands and was now coming battering towards Polly and Mr Lynn, screaming more like a person than a horse.

There was just an instant, while Mr Lynn said “Good Lord!” when Polly could see Mr Lynn’s eyes behind the orange glow of his glasses, staring at her, wide and grey and incredulous. Then the horse was almost on top of them, and it reared.

Polly, to her everlasting disgust, did not behave anything like an assistant hero. She screamed almost as loudly as the horse and crouched on the pavement with her arms over her head. The horse was huge. It stood above her like a tower of golden flesh and bone, beating the air with its iron hooves, and screaming, screaming. Polly saw a big eye, a rolling bulge of blue-brown and white, shot with veins and tangled in pale horsehair, stuff like detergent bubbles dripping, and huge, square teeth. She knew the horse was mad with terror, and she screamed and screamed.

She heard Mr Lynn say, “Here.” Something hard and figure-eight-shaped was pushed into her fending hand. Polly’s fingers closed round it without telling her what it was. She just knelt and screamed among flying shadows while the front hooves of the horse crashed down close beside her with Mr Lynn’s feet next to them. Then its back feet crashed. Mr Lynn’s hunched shoulder had hit the horse in its side as its back feet left the ground to lash at Polly, and swung it round just enough to miss her. After that, he managed to grab the rope trailing from the horse’s nose.

There was furious trampling and squealing. Sparks that were pale in the orange light came from under the horse’s feet, and the horse’s head, twisting and flattened, more like a snake’s than a horse’s, darted at Mr Lynn’s arm and tried to fix the huge teeth in him.

Mr Lynn said words which Polly, up to then, had thought only Dad and the dustmen knew, and pulled hard down on the rope. There was a further rush of feet and sparks, and the two of them were trampling away from Polly towards the crashed car. The horse stopped screaming. Polly could hear the things Mr Lynn was saying quite clearly. Most of it was to the horse, but some of it seemed to be just swearing. She giggled rather, because Mr Lynn was not behaving like a hero either. Nor did he look like one. As the horse stamped round in a half-circle in front of the broken car, with Mr Lynn hanging on to the rope at the end of both long arms and his anorak up under his armpits, he looked more like an orangutan than anything else, or perhaps a spider monkey. His hair, which even the wind at the funeral had not done much to disarrange, was all over his face and he seemed to have lost his glasses.

Here Polly’s fingers told her again about the figure-of-eight object she was clutching. She looked down and found it was a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. She scrambled up and backed against a wall behind her, holding them very carefully. It would be awful if she broke Mr Lynn’s glasses. The horse was sliding about in the broken headlights. “Look where you put your bloody feet, you fool!” Mr Lynn said to it. It looked as if he was going to make it stand still any second.

The motorist climbed angrily out of his smashed car. “I say!” he called out in a loud, hectoring voice. “Is this your damned horse? It could have killed me!”

That set the horse off again. It became all orange, rearing panic, high on its back legs, with Mr Lynn frantically leaning on the rope. He swore at the horse, then at the motorist. “No, it is not my horse,” he added. “Get out of the way!”

The horse managed to land out with a hind foot before its front feet hit the road. The motorist bolted for his life. Mr Lynn yelled at the horse that its grandfather was a donkey with venereal disease and told it to Come off that! And the two of them came rushing back up the street again. They trampled round in front of Polly, with Mr Lynn practically swinging on the rope. Polly could feel waves of terror coming off the horse. She had to hold both hands, and Mr Lynn’s glasses, to her mouth to stop herself screaming this time. In front of her were huge, bent, golden hind legs, stronger than she could have imagined, and a tail that lashed her face like her own hair in the wind, only harder, smelling of burning. Someone’s burned it! she thought. No wonder it’s so upset!

The next thing Polly knew, the motorist was standing beside her, watching the horse and Mr Lynn rush away down the street. “How was I to know it wasn’t his bloody horse?” he said to Polly. “He’s behaving as if he knows it.”

“Be quiet,” Polly said. Her voice was thick from screaming. “Mr Lynn’s being a hero.”

The motorist did not seem at all grateful. “Well, he needn’t have said that to me,” he said.

When Polly did not answer, he gave her up and went to complain to some of the people further down the street. Polly could hear him, all the time Mr Lynn was dragging the horse to a standstill, telling someone that the horse had appeared out of the blue right in front of his car and that people shouldn’t be allowed to own wild animals like that.

The horse stood still at last, orange flecked with detergent stuff, swishing its tail. Each of its legs seemed to be shaking at a different speed. Polly could see shivers chasing up and down them as she walked gently towards it. Mr Lynn was rubbing its nose and calling it soothing bad names. “You cartload of cat’s meat,” she heard him say. “Mindless dog food. They’ll eat you in Belgium for less than this.”

Before Polly had reached Mr Lynn, people at the sides of the road began crowding forward. “That’ll be them,” someone said. “Help at last!”

The horse shivered and stamped. “Keep back, can’t you!” Mr Lynn said over his shoulder.

Everyone, Polly included, prudently stopped. Two small, worried-looking men in greasy body-warmers slipped hurriedly round the broken car and came rather cautiously up to Mr Lynn and the horse.

“Thank you, sir,” said one. “Thought we’d never catch him.”

“Kid let off a firework in his stall,” said the other.

“I thought I smelled burning,” Mr Lynn answered. The horse answered too, in his way, by putting his head down and letting one of the small men feed him peppermint. Mr Lynn passed the other one the rope.

This made it clear to the motorist and to all the other people that the horse belonged to the two little men. They crowded round – at a safe distance – and called complaints. “Wild horses like that!… Ruined my car!… Panicked the whole street… Really dangerous! Ought not to be loose!… Scared my old mother stiff… No end of damage… Police…”

In the midst of the babble Mr Lynn somehow located Polly and stretched a long arm backwards to her. Polly put his glasses into his hand.

Mr Lynn thankfully put them on. He took them off again quickly. “Can’t see a thing. All greasy,” he said. On one side of him, the motorist was trying to grab his arm. On the other, one of the little men was trying to thank him. Mr Lynn was clearly embarrassed. Polly could see sweat shining on him. “Polly,” he said. “Find the back door.”

Polly looked round. There was more movement up the street, where a police car was coming whispering to a stop. “At last! The fuzz are never here when you need them!” someone said. Polly realised that she would never get to the lawyer’s by five-thirty unless they went at once.

“This way,” she said. “Quick.” She pushed Mr Lynn round the broken car and along the empty street beyond. Everyone’s voices rose to a big babble and then faded as Polly kept on pushing Mr Lynn. “The police are there now,” she explained.

“Thanks!” said Mr Lynn. He was trying to clean his glasses on a handkerchief. “Keep guiding me, or I shall be apologising to doorsteps and lampposts. I can barely see a thing without my glasses.”

This was obviously true. Polly found she had to steer Mr Lynn round three dustbins, some plastic sacks and a bicycle. His face looked odd with no glasses and his hair hanging down in front of it. It looked longer and smoother, more like a real face. But his eyes did not look fat like Nina’s did. “How ever did you see the horse?” she said.

“It was a bit big to miss,” he said in his most apologising way. Then he added in quite a different way, “But what an extraordinary thing, though! Just after we’d been talking about my horse! You’d almost think—”

“You would,” Polly agreed. “But it wasn’t the right colour to be the Chinese horse.”

“Streetlights,” said Mr Lynn as she steered him round a doorstep.

His elbow was bony and quivering rather. Polly kept her hands on it to guide him and stared up at Mr Lynn’s bewildered, naked face. She wanted to say what she had to say before he put his glasses on again and could look at her. She took in a gasp of breath. “I didn’t help at all. I was too scared.”

“You aren’t heavy enough to have stopped it,” said Mr Lynn. “You’d just have dangled.” Polly thought that was very nice of him. He finished cleaning his glasses at the end of the street and put them on. He looked up at the street name, then at his watch, and set off again much faster, in the direction they needed to go. “If it’s any comfort,” he said, “I was scared stiff too.”

“But you did something,” Polly said, rather breathless from hurrying. They turned into another street before she got her second wind.

“How did you know what to do?” she asked. “You did know.”

They swung round another corner, with Polly sort of swirling out on the end of Mr Lynn’s arm. “Laurel taught me about horses,” Mr Lynn said.

They were opposite a small park now. CLOWNS, CLOWNS, CLOWNS!!! said notices along the park fence. Coloured lights looped in the trees. JACK’S CIRCUS, read a canvas banner over the park gate. There was music, and a smell of squashed grass and of animals. Polly could just see the orange-white shine of the big tent above the entrance booth by the gate.

“That’s where the horse came from!” said Mr Lynn. “I wondered how—” He looked down at Polly. “Are you all right?”

“Oh yes,” Polly said drearily.

Mr Lynn slowed down and looked carefully at Polly. “Now, come on,” he said. “You must know that when heroes do their deeds in these modern times, there has to be a modern explanation. I can’t have everybody guessing I’m really Tan Coul, can I? This circus is only a disguise.”

Polly smiled gratefully, although she rather thought that it was not the circus that was the matter with her. It was the way Mr Lynn mentioned Laurel. “Anyway,” she said as they hurried on again, “you are a hero. Except for swearing. That may be a disguise too.”

Mr Lynn gave his guilty cut-off yelp of laughter. It was not just the way he laughed at funerals. He always laughed like that. “Call it a symptom,” he said. “Expert heroes never swear.”

“I shall be a hero too,” Polly panted. “I’m going into training from now on.”

By the time they reached the lawyer’s, it was so late that Mum was standing in the street beside a waiting taxi. She was in such a state that she barely looked at Mr Lynn. “Come on, Polly!” she said. “It’s rush hour and I don’t know what time we’ll get home! Say goodbye,” she added as she bundled Polly into the taxi. That was all the notice she took of Mr Lynn politely holding the taxi door open for her. Polly was the one who remembered to call out “Thank you for having me!” as the taxi drove away. She was rather surprised that Ivy had forgotten to remind her to say it – usually she made such a point of it – but she could see Mum was in a real state.

Unfortunately, Ivy’s state was a silent one. Polly was dying to tell her all about tea and Mr Lynn’s flat and, above all, about the horse, but Ivy sat fenced in silence as thick as barbed wire, and Polly knew better than to try to break in. The train was so crowded that Polly had to perch on Mum’s knee, and Ivy’s mood made that knee stiff and uncomfortable.

Ivy said just one thing on the train. She said, “Well, Polly, I’ve taken a step.”

And so have I, I suppose, Polly thought with a kind of dismal excitement. I saw Mr Lynn when they said not to. But all she could really think about was the unheroic way she had screamed and crouched on the pavement and given Mr Lynn no help at all.

When they got home, instead of looking in the fridge or suggesting fish and chips, Ivy sat down at the kitchen table and talked to Polly. “I suppose I owe it to you to explain a bit,” she said, sitting very upright and staring into the distance. “I went to talk to that lawyer about getting a divorce from your father. You may well ask why—”

Polly hurriedly shook her head. She knew now why she had dreaded being told about Dad. But Ivy talked anyway. Polly listened in silence, hoping she would begin feeling honoured soon that Mum was confiding in her. She told herself she felt honoured, but in fact she mostly felt shocked and awed by the way tears came and went in Ivy’s eyes without quite ever falling out and running down her face.