City Paddock

By Myra King

An eclectic collection of short stories tackling subjects as varied as psychological mind games, the effects of war on those left behind, the vagaries of heterosexual and lesbian love, self-abortion, and murder, told through characters as diverse as a retired Light Horseman, a lighthouse keeper’s wife, and an old Aboriginal man, and set in

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debbie Lee
• Release date: Jan 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781760410827

Myra King

Myra King lives on the coast of South Australia with her rescue greyhound, Sparky. She has come first in the UK Global, second in the Cambridge Fiction Award and been shortlisted in the Scarlet Stiletto, Glass Woman (USA) and the E.J. Brady writing awards. Myra has written for many equine and literary publications, including R.M. Williams's Hoofs and Horns, Best (new) Australian Writing and Boston Literary Magazine.

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City Paddock

City Paddock

Myra King

Ginninderra Press

Contents

Copyright

Acknowledgements

City Paddock

Cracked Glass Door

Dust to Water

My Brother Brannigan

Where the Kookaburras Laugh

Mind Games

The District Nurse Will Be Here Soon

Men-o-stop

Broken Connections

Where the Truth Lies

City Paddock

ISBN 978 1 76041 082 7

Copyright © Myra King 2010

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All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Requests for permission should be sent to the publisher at the address below.

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First published 2010

Reprinted 2016

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Ginninderra Press

PO Box 3461 Port Adelaide SA 5015

www.ginninderrapress.com.au

Acknowledgements

‘Cracked Glass Door’, Shortlisted in the E.J. Brady (major section) (2007)

‘Dust to Water’, First prize, open section,

published by Deakin University Press (2008)

‘My Brother Brannigan’,

Commended in the Scarlet Stiletto Awards (2008)

‘Where the Kookaburras Laugh’, First Prize, UK Global Short Story

‘Mind Games’, published in Eclecticism (2008)

‘Men-o-Stop’, Finalist in Slippery When Wet competition (2008)

‘Where the Truth Lies’, Highly Commended,

JBWB short story comp (UK, 2009)

‘The District Nurse Will Be Here Soon’, published in Islet (2010)

City Paddock

I’ve been watching grass grow. Every morning you can see me, an old bloke, on my way to the shops, lifting my feet carefully as I cross over a strip of it outlining a path. At first there were only grass seeds, scattered like salt in the earth. But when I started noticing the new grass grow a little more each day, I thought, How bloody sad am I?

I’ve stopped saying hello and avert my eyes when passing another footpath jockey. Too many knock-backs of the non-verbal kind. My g’day had gone to the wind once too often and when I stopped saying anything at all I knew I’d become like them. That’s when I realised I needed to get back to where I came from.

The bucolic in me becomes more melancholic every passing day. I miss my old life. I miss the horses. I miss the early starts, the cold mornings at the track, the air breathing out of my lungs like frosted smoke.

I miss my mates and I miss my youth. And, worst of all, I don’t feel any different. Of course I’ve slowed down a bit. But I know I could still show these young riders a thing or two about the game.

Horsemanship has become a dying art, just like me. Nearly finished my race but way behind the field. Eighty-two and put out to pasture like an old bloody horse left to neglect and the whim of the weather so the owners can say, ‘Sure, I’ve still got Punters Pride. Couldn’t let him go to the doggers. He’s won us a lot of money over the years.’

Yeah, shoved out in the paddock of the forgotten. Same as me, only I got the city paddock. Its houses are hemmed in by fences of the private kind, to keep eyes from spying and feet from treading. Plants all identical – there must have been a sale on weeping mulberries at my local garden centre. Every bloody front yard in my street grows one like some bloody sad song.

Conforming to conformity, that’s me. That old man who walks to the shop every day at the same time to buy his paper, more regular than your morning crap.

And as I walk home and pass over my strip of grass I wonder how many people do see me. The invisible, the untouchable, the unknown. Neighbours, but more distant than a foreign country. And none of them would ever guess what I am going to do this Sunday.

Kill Marguerite.

My mind will take me no further than this thought, this promise to myself. I can’t see beyond this one deed I have been planning for less than a week.

Perhaps kill is too harsh a word. But it sounds quick and clean like I hope it will be. There is a word for a word which sounds like its meaning. But my schooling stopped with the war.

I’m not complaining; it’s how I got started with the horses. And they became my life, more part of me than my own skin.

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I was in the Light Horse, post Beersheba. I was with them too when they were disbanded in 1941.

Sad time for us when we were converted to a motor regiment. But we conformed and managed, and in a way I was glad our horses didn’t have to suffer like those poor buggers did in the Great War. In the end, overwork, thirst and a bullet were all the rewards they got.

I joined up when I was only fifteen. Course I cheated on my age, lots of us did; no one insisted on birth certificates and such back then.

Old Jack Trentham took me under his wing. What he didn’t know about horses wasn’t worth remembering. He’d been dredged up from the Great War to teach us newcomers. We all thought we were crash hot. Most of us had come off farms and thought we knew it all. I was no different. And I wasn’t a bad rider; well, you couldn’t be no good and get in, you had to pass the test. Riding horses bareback over fences. Some of the horses were only newly broke too, and I remember watching several lads in front being dumped even before they got to the first jump.

I got lucky. The one I was given had some draught horse in him and he wasn’t as spooky as the thoroughbred types. And his withers weren’t as sharp. Some of the guys told me later they’d been nearly de-knackered on theirs.

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I have only a few days to set the wheels of my plan in motion, literally. I don’t own a car, only learnt to drive in my forties. Horses were my main