The Thunderbolt Pony

“Jock!”

He keeps howling and I know he’s been hurt and without thinking I find myself running back to him. My heart is pounding, and all I care about now is Jock and reaching him before the bull can get him again.

I run through the dark, stumbling and falling and getting up again until at last I reach Jock’s side. I stand over him and spin round in a full circle looking for the bull, making myself dizzy following the torch beam, hyperventilating with fear. Where is he? Where did he go?

Then my torch casts a shadow and I catch a flicker of something white in the furthest reaches of the beam. It’s the bull! He’s about ten metres to the right of us, and he’s moving in our direction.

At my feet Jock gives a whimper as if he’s trying to say, “You run!”

I can’t run, though. Not without him. So I throw my torch to the ground and yank my sweatshirt over my head and for a second everything is black and I’m panting and blind, and then with a tug my sight returns and I snatch up the torch in my left hand, and with the sweatshirt in my right, I focus back on the bull.

The sweatshirt is blue, which I know is the wrong colour. It should be red, right? Like a matador’s cape. But I am hoping that waving it around will have the same effect.

“Hoi!” I call out to the Charolais. “Hey, Bully Bull!”

I hold my sweatshirt out as far away as I can from my body and I wiggle it.

The bull pulls up to a halt, he stamps a hoof. He’s looking at me.

“No!” I say. “Not me. See the sweatshirt? Look at the pretty sweatshirt!”

The bull prepares to charge. As he angles his massive forehead towards the ground, the horns rise up and I see their gleaming, bony tips and I realise far too late how ridiculous I am with my matador cape. The bull is ten times my size and the sweatshirt is like a postage stamp to him.

I fling the sweatshirt hopelessly in his direction and I throw myself to the ground on top of Jock. And as the hooves thunder I know that any moment I will feel the impact. I’ve seen bulls attack cattle dogs. I once saw one on the farm get gored by a horn and he had to be put down. And that’s what I’m thinking this bull will do to me, and I can feel Jock squashed beneath me and I think at least he will be safe because the bull will get me first.

And at that moment I am Theseus, facing the Minotaur.

***

I’m back in the hospital for my second session with Willard Fox. I’m telling him about the Ancient Greek day we had at school.

“I went as the goddess Athena,” I say.

We had to dress as gods so I wore an old bed sheet knotted at the shoulder, and when I got on the bus George the bus driver gave me a look and said, “Your mum forget to wash your clothes?”

Half the kids on the bus weren’t even in costume.

“Moana was just in shorts and a T-shirt!” I tell Willard Fox. I was grumpy with her that day because we had a fight about superpowers.

“I said my superpower would be to jump those really huge four-star cross-country courses like at the Badminton Horse Trials,” I tell Willard Fox. “But Moana said horse riding’s not a superpower, even though it totally is.”

“So that’s why you had a fight?”

I shake my head. “No, we had the fight after that.”

Moana said her superpower would be mind reading and to show me she put her hands on my head with her fingers splayed at my temples. And that was when I panicked and pulled her hands off me because if Moana could read my mind then we wouldn’t be best friends any more. She would think I was a freak because of my OCD.

“So Moana doesn’t know you have OCD?” Willard Fox asks.

“No,” I say.

No one at school knows. Especially not Mrs Lowry, and sometimes it’s hard because she picks on me because I can’t write certain letters – like M and N. And so my spelling is bad.

At the Ancient Greek day, Mrs Lowry got Brodie to do the sacrifice to Zeus – because he’s her pet and he gets to do everything. But I am doing sacrifices too, every day and no one cares.

The counting and the rituals … even my bedroom. Mum thinks it’s a “god-awful mess” but really it’s my gift to the gods, a complex matrix of talismans and portents disguised as dirty clothes and old bowls of half-eaten cereal. And, then there’s my backpack, the most precious piece of my OCD universe. And those two braids in Gus’s mane. I must do them. I have to get them just right. If I don’t manage to ace it all – then I unleash hell.

“Evie, what if I told you that this is all the OCD? And it is tricking your brain. What if I told you that even though it seems real, your rituals don’t have the power to protect people?”

Willard Fox leans forward. “You’re doing this because you really love your animals, don’t you, Evie?”

I nod. “Of course I do! More than anything.”

“Well, what would you do if Gus got really sick?”

I feel my pulse quicken. I don’t like to imagine bad things happening to Gus.

“I’m protecting him,” I say abruptly. “He’s not sick.”

“Yes, but accidents happen, right?” Willard says. “So let’s say Gus gets hurt in the paddock. He cuts his leg. How would you fix it, Evie? Would you use your powers and do the braids in his mane? Pack things in and out of your backpack? Or …”

Willard Fox looks at me. “Or … would you maybe call the vet?”

I feel my cheeks turn hot. When he puts it that way I know that it is illogical, what I am doing.

“I’d call the vet.”

Willard looks at the backpack that I have beside me at my feet.

The force of my panic surprises me.

“Don’t touch it!”

“It’s OK …” Willard Fox says. “I know it’s precious. How about you show me?”

My hands are shaking as I pick up the backpack and put it on the table.

It sits there between me and Willard, like an unexploded bomb.

“Now what?” he says.

“I have to do the zips,” I say. “I do them twice. Before I take the things out.”

“OK,” Willard says. “So that’s the OCD talking. And today, we’re not going to give in to it. Today, instead of doing it twice, Evie, I want you to just unzip the zip and close it again once and then leave it. Can you do that?”

I reach out my hand, slowly, and when my fingers touch the zipper the bitter rush of pure adrenalin makes me want to be sick. Just the once? That’s so dangerous!

I close my eyes and I take a deep breath and I do it! I unzip the front pocket. Just once. It’s sitting there gaping open – taunting me! Then I zip it shut again. Just the once! It’s so wrong. I can feel the bees surging in my brain, imploring me to do it again, to make things even!”