Horse Girl Rides Again Read online

  John Larkin had his first horse ride when he was only three years old. He promptly fell off and hasn’t been near the big doggies since. He prefers writing about horses (or rather girls who turn into them) than riding them. When he isn’t writing, John can generally be found reading, teaching, embarking on long and largely futile hunts for tadpoles with his children, and not riding horses.

  www.larkinabout.com.au

  John Larkin

  First published 2007 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Copyright © John Larkin 2007

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Larkin, John, 1963–.

  Horse girl rides again.

  For primary school children.

  ISBN 978 0 3304 2327 4 (pbk).

  1. Horses – Juvenile fiction. 2. Girls – Juvenile fiction. I. Title.

  A823.3

  Typeset in Minion 11.5 on 14 point by Post Pre-press Group

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  These electronic editions published in 2007 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Horse Girl Rides Again

  John Larkin

  Adobe eReader format 978-1-74197-839-1

  Microsoft Reader format 978-1-74197-880-3

  Mobipocket format 978-1-74197-921-3

  Online format 978-1-74197-962-6

  Epub format 978-1-74262-563-8

  Macmillan Digital Australia

  www.macmillandigital.com.au

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com.au to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks online. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.

  For my wonderful children Chantelle, Damian and Gabrielle, who haven’t, at the time of writing, shown any indication of turning into horses, ponies, zebras, or indeed any member of the equine family.

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  1

  Rebecca Yallop woke one morning from troubled dreams to find that she was still a gigantic horse. She was just about to get seriously annoyed about it when her little brother came screeching into her bedroom like a vulture at feeding time.

  ‘Get up, horse girl!’ screeched Kevin. ‘Up. Up. Up.’

  Rebecca pulled the doona over her enormous horse head. ‘Go away!’

  She was fed up with being a horse. It was such hard work trying to blend into the shadows so that no one would notice that she had turned into a horse. True, it had worked so far and only her stupid brother seemed to have noticed that she was a horse, but it was hard going and she was getting fed up with it.

  ‘up. uP. UP!’ Kevin shouted.

  ‘Go away!’ Rebecca pleaded.

  Kevin couldn’t be put off that easily. ‘C’mon, four hooves. Get up.’

  Rebecca slowly pulled back the doona with her front hooves. ‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘What are you so excited about, peanut-butter breath?’

  ‘Oh, duh! It’s the first day of the school holidays, remember?’

  ‘Oh no!’ snorted Rebecca.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Kevin.

  Rebecca put her hooves up to her head and tried to pull her hair. Not an easy task when you haven’t got any fingers.

  The first day of the school holidays meant one thing: shopping for school shoes.

  ‘I can’t go shoe shopping looking like this,’ Rebecca complained.

  ‘Why not?’ said Kevin.

  ‘Because,’ replied Rebecca, ‘the shoes won’t fit. I don’t have any toes, remember? And even if the shoes did fit, I’d need two pairs. The shoe store will probably just be full of silly kids anyway.’

  ‘So?’ said Kevin. ‘What’s the problem? You used to be a silly kid, remember?’

  ‘Yeah,’ whinnied Rebecca with a long face. ‘And now I’m a horse.’ She blew her huge, horsy nose into her doona.

  ‘Gross!’ said Kevin. ‘Mum!’ he yelled. ‘Rebecca’s blowing snarlers into her doona.’

  Right at that moment their mum burst into the room. ‘What’s going on in here, you pair?’

  ‘She’s blowing her nose into the doona,’ said Kevin.

  ‘Rebecca!’ snapped their mum.

  ‘Am not,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘Am too,’ said Kevin.

  ‘Am not.’

  ‘Am too.’

  ‘Quiet, you daft articles!’ yelped their mum. ‘I can hardly hear myself think.’

  Rebecca and Kevin burst out laughing. They loved it when their mum called them daft articles, or said things like, ‘I’ll give you something to laugh about in a minute.’ It soooo didn’t mean anything. They snorted like dogs in a pepper bush.

  She folded her arms and glared at them. ‘I’ll give you something to laugh about in a minute!’

  This made it about ten times worse. They fell out of bed and rolled around on the floor clutching their stomachs.

  ‘Oh, stop it!’ said their mum. ‘Rebecca, you haven’t got a horse in here, have you? I thought I heard whinnying before. You know the rules: no pets in the bedroom.’

  Rebecca stopped laughing and looked up at her mum and gulped. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t have a horse in here.’ Rebecca didn’t like lying to her mum, but when she thought about it she wasn’t actually lying. She didn’t have a horse in her bedroom. She was a horse in her bedroom.

  ‘C’mon then,’ said their mum. ‘Make your bed and then come and join us for breakfast.’ She turned to leave.

  Rebecca dragged herself up off the floor and began making her bed with her teeth.

  It was going to be a long s
ummer.

  2

  Rebecca clip-clopped out to the kitchen table and plonked herself on the floor. Since she’d become a horse she’d broken three dining chairs and her dad was starting to get annoyed because it had taken an entire glue stick to fix them. It was safer and more comfortable to sit on the floor.

  Across the table Kevin tore into his banana-and-Nutella toast.

  ‘Gross!’ said Rebecca.

  ‘Be quiet, four hooves,’ said Kevin as he sprayed half a mouthful of toast, banana and Nutella across the table.

  ‘Kevin!’ snapped their father, without removing his nose from the morning paper. ‘Don’t speak with your mouth full. And don’t tell your sister to be quiet.’

  ‘And don’t call her four hooves,’ interjected their mum.

  Rebecca poked her tongue out at Kevin. It travelled halfway across the table. Luckily their parents didn’t see it.

  ‘Anyway,’ sulked Kevin. ‘She has got four hooves. She’s a big, fat, smelly old horse.’

  Dad put down his paper. First time for everything. ‘What’s wrong with you this morning, Kevin? Rebecca’s not big, she’s not fat and she’s certainly not smelly.’

  Kevin took another bite of his toast. ‘Still a horse, but.’

  Mum glared at Kevin. ‘I’ll big-fat-smelly-old-horse you in a minute!’

  This was too much for Rebecca and Kevin. They fell off their chairs (well, Kevin did) and rolled around on the ground snorting like pigs in mud.

  ‘What’s wrong with them today?’ said Dad.

  ‘First day of the holidays, I suppose,’ replied their mum. ‘Ignore them. They’re only doing it for attention.’

  Dad returned to his paper. ‘I’m just reading an article about a man who jumped out of a plane without his parachute.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Mum. ‘The silly sausage. What happened to him?’

  ‘He was only doing it for attention,’ said Rebecca, and she and Kevin started snorting again.

  ‘Well,’ said Dad, ignoring the commotion from the floor. ‘He was very lucky. Landed on a rubber factory.’

  ‘I didn’t know they made factories out of rubber,’ said Kevin, beating the floor with his fists.

  ‘They make rubber products, silly,’ said their mum. Then she turned to their father. ‘Did he survive?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dad. ‘Bounced all the way back up to the plane apparently.’

  Rebecca and Kevin roared and rolled around on the ground in hysterics until they were fit to vomit.

  But as funny as the fossils were, Rebecca found that she couldn’t completely let herself go and enjoy the moment. At the back of her mind there was a constant nagging thought. She had turned into a 300-kilogram horse and she had to find a way of being turned back into a twelve-year-old girl again. Or spend the rest of her life hiding, or in a field, or something.

  3

  ‘C’mon then, you daft articles,’ said their mum. She looked up at the threatening clouds. ‘In you get, before it starts raining.’

  Rebecca looked at her mum’s car and gulped. She hadn’t been in a car since she’d turned into a horse. A school bus was one thing, her mum’s old beetle car was something else. She’d never be able to squish herself into it.

  ‘Can’t we walk?’ asked Rebecca.

  Her mum looked at her. ‘It’s about three kilometres up Steep Hill Drive.’

  ‘Great!’ said Kevin. ‘We could come back in a shopping trolley. Roll down the hill.’

  Rebecca looked at Kevin and put her hooves on her hips. ‘If I can’t fit in Mum’s car, you goose,’ she whispered out the corner of her mouth, ‘how am I supposed to fit in a shopping trolley?’

  ‘You could use four,’ said Kevin. ‘One for each leg.’

  Rebecca tried to imagine herself hurtling down Steep Hill Drive using shopping trolleys as rollerskates. Kevin was right. It would be great. Except that the wheels on shopping trolleys always seemed to want to go in different directions. Also, when you got to the bottom of Steep Hill Drive, the road veered sharply away to avoid Raging River Creek.

  ‘Imagine the belly flop into the creek you’d do if you made it all the way down the hill,’ said Kevin.

  Rebecca looked at her mum’s car and smiled. She had an idea. ‘Can we take the top down?’ She said this just as the rain started drip drip dripping onto the car’s roof.

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Kevin. ‘Brilliant.’

  Luckily their mum’s old beetle car was a convertible. She hadn’t bought it that way. Their dad had done it himself using a can opener and a whipper snipper.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ replied their mum. ‘It’s raining.’

  ‘It’s only drizzling, but,’ argued Kevin.

  ‘Kevin,’ said Mum. ‘Don’t end sentences with “but”.’

  Kevin looked at their mum. ‘You just did, but.’

  ‘Yes, but,’ replied Mum, ‘that was to show you that you can’t end sentences in “but”, but.’

  ‘Please,’ pleaded Rebecca. ‘Can we put the top down? I’m claustra . . . clostra . . . closetra . . . closet-trofobic . . . I don’t like closed-in spaces.’

  ‘Claustrophobic?’ Rebecca’s mum corrected her. ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since now,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘Get in the car,’ insisted their mum. ‘Pleeeeeeease. We haven’t got all day.’

  ‘Wait a sec,’ said Kevin. ‘I’ve got an idea.’

  Kevin raced into the house and came back dragging their dad’s huge golf umbrella.

  Ten minutes later the old beetle car chugged slowly up Steep Hill Drive. Rebecca was spread out comfortably on the back seat. Kevin held the umbrella over their mum’s head.

  4

  If Rebecca hated one thing more than being turned into a horse it was shopping for school shoes. Parents must take a special course in how to embarrass their kids in shoe shops. They always made you do weird things in your new school shoes. Like jumping up and down, running on the spot and that dreaded walk across the shoe-shop floor to make sure that the shoes actually worked and weren’t about to explode or something. And every now and then Rebecca’s mum would drop to her knees and become obsessed with finding Rebecca’s big toe, which would be really hard now that she didn’t have any.

  At least they bought their shoes now. Once, poor Kevin was given a pair of their dad’s old hand-me-down school shoes. School-shoemakers must have been a bit loopy in the olden days because their dad’s old school shoes had animal tracks on the soles and a compass in the heel. So every time Kevin turned around on the walk home from school he thought he was being followed by a lion. And the first time he tried to use the compass, when he got lost on a bushwalk, he found that it had dissolved. In the end the school bully, Roland Rogers, had thrown Kevin’s school shoes into Raging River Creek. This had really upset Kevin. Not because they were his dad’s shoes, but because when Roland Rogers had thrown them into Raging River Creek, Kevin still had them on.

  Rebecca didn’t know why they couldn’t be like a normal family and wait until the last day of school holidays before buying their shoes in a mad panic. Instead, their mum took them school-shoe shopping on the first day of the holidays to avoid the crowds. She had to buy them extra large shoes that they could ‘grow into’ during the rest of the holidays.

  So Rebecca was forced to snort back a laugh as Kevin flapped around the store in his oversized shoes as though they were flippers.

  Then it was Rebecca’s turn. She sat down in the special shoe-trying-on chair. Kevin hid behind a mountain of trainers and made faces at her.

  The sales lady looked at Rebecca and then at Rebecca’s mum. ‘Do you want one or two pairs?’ she said.

  Rebecca’s mum looked at the sales lady as if she was a bit loopy. ‘One please,’ she said. ‘I’m not made of money.’

  ‘It’s just that we have a special on,’ smiled the shoe-trying-on lady. ‘Two for the price of one.’

  Rebecca’s mum’s face lit up. ‘Oh, in that case we’ll have two, tha
nk you.’

  The sales lady took Rebecca’s measurement on her special metal measuring thing. Then she went out to the stock room and came back with two boxes.

  The sales lady slipped the shoes on Rebecca’s hooves. ‘Do you like horses?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Rebecca tentatively. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because these are a new brand,’ said the sales lady. ‘They’ve got horse-shoe prints on the soles.’

  Rebecca snorted back a laugh. Behind the mountain of trainers, Kevin made a whinnying sound.

  ‘Okay,’ said Rebecca’s mum. ‘Stand up.’

  Cautiously Rebecca stood up in her new horse-print shoes.

  ‘How do they feel?’ asked her mum.

  ‘Fine,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘Not too tight?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not too loose?’

  Yes. ‘No.’

  ‘Wide enough?’

  Oh brother. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not too wide?’

  Help! ‘No.’

  Rebecca’s mum stood back and considered the shoes. Then she dropped to her knees and started sniffing around Rebecca’s feet like a dog in the park. She prodded and poked the shoe, trying to find Rebecca’s non-existent big toe.

  When Rebecca’s mum was finally satisfied that the shoes fitted, she made Rebecca go for the dreaded walk around the shop.

  Rebecca cantered across the polished wooden floor in her new horse-print shoes.