top

Pete and John are good mates of mine. The best! They helped me get the pony into the spare bedroom while She was at work. They’re both good mates, like I said.

So I left them to it, with their takeaway meal and their six-packs of beer.

She came home, tired dirty and grumpy as usual but I was ready for her the moment She stepped out of the shower, filling her glass from the bottle of white wine I’d specially opened, smiling sweetly when she sat down to eat the evening meal I’d prepared. Pork steaks in a mild cheese sauce with garden peas, mash and broccoli spears.

She’d had a bloody awful day at work, she said. Management issues, pig ignorant clients and brain dead sales staff. As for the IT manager, well she was fucked if she was going to be spoken to by anyone like that ever again!

Savagely attacking her bit of pork she glared at me.

“And what have you been doing all day?” She asked.

“Pete and John called in for a while and we had a…….”

“Huh!” She snorted “Them two!! Bloody wasters if there ever were one……..”

Well I finished my peas, scooped up the remainder of the cheese sauce with the last of the broccoli and thought about serving the afters. I considered, briefly, correcting her grammar then thought better of it, She’d get a big enough surprise later on anyway, I thought.

“Was that alright?” I enquired lightly as She put down her knife and fork.

She nodded absently, looked thoughtful, scratched the side of her nose…….

“Afters?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know…….”

Obviously She has something on her mind and, knowing her, sooner or later She’d come out with it properly.

“Bit of fruit perhaps?” I suggested.

“Alright” she agreed.

I fetched the bowl.

“I’m thinking of doing something new” she announced at length, halfway through a particularly juicy apple.

“Oh yes…….?”

“Something different and more bloody satisfying” she continued.

“Good idea!” I encouraged. “What……..what are you going to do?”

She looked at me for a moment, as if trying to recall who the hell I was.

“Middle management is shit!” she told me “Bankers are wankers and clients, for the most part, are moronic crap!”

“So………… it’ll be animals then, pets, will it?” I hazarded “Something like a Doggy Shampooing franchise?”

She snorted.

“Dogs are rubbish!” she stated bluntly.

To be honest I’d never seen her in quite such a funny mood as this. Already my own plans for were beginning to look somewhat unlikely I thought, and She’d only been home an hour.

“Cats then?” I suggested helpfully.

“Too many people doing dogs and cats already” she told me “Shampooing, clipping, nail trimming, exercising, no, I am going to do something better than that!”

I thought about hamsters and guinea pigs, white mice and tortoises and ended up, suddenly mortified, considering pot bellied pigs. I even knew someone who had one, as a pet I mean, in a little enclosure in his back garden. Talk about friendly! Why the damn thing would even follow him to the pub when it got the chance. His mates had got it incapably drunk once, on mixed lager from the slop trays, given to it in a bucket. Poor thing! They’d had to take it home in a wheelbarrow.

“Do you realise” she said, shifting excitedly in her chair, “That there are now more horses in this country than there were when they constituted the sole means of transport?”

Actually I did know that but I wasn’t going to say so.

“Horses?” I asked. I knew she’d always liked them but this was too good to be true, surely?

She nodded.

I thought about stud farms and stabling, foodstuff supplying, even shoeing and general farriery. Surely she was not going to get into that!

“Horse and pony grooming!” She proclaimed majestically “That’s what I am going to get into next.

Well dammit! I said to myself. That’s gone and done it and no mistake. Maybe Pete or John, or some other clever bastard had phoned her at work and tipped her the wink. And after all they’d said and all. No I wouldn’t put it past them!

She’d obviously thought about it a lot, even more than I had probably but then Pete and…… no, it must be all a horrible coincidence.

“Small van, an Escort perhaps, fitted out with racking for the brushes and things……..”

“Go on!” I said, “Sounds like a very good idea!”

And so it did, on the face of it. She’d get the van, fit it out, then go round all the people she knew who’d got horses. Many had two or three, often not stabled at all, more often than not just in open fields where they got rough coated and covered in mud. Why you could spend a morning getting a little fourteen hander clean enough to ride again!

She would park in the gateway, she said, Tie the animals head collar to the post and everything would be there to hand. It’d be ideal! And as a sideline she’d offer a cleaning and repairing service for numnahs and New Zealand rugs.

Well we talked about it for a long time, hours in fact, so long that I missed two of my favourite programmes on the telly and it was twenty to eleven by the time she suggested going to bed.

I told her I was very pleased she was being positive for a change, said I thought her equine grooming scheme was a damn good idea. I’m not sure she believed me, even if I was being truthful, ‘cos she did look at me a little bit queer. Unless it was was to do with the amount she’d had to drink.

“It has made me feel much better, telling you about it!” She hiccupped lightly. “Do you really thing it is a good idea?”

“I really do!” I assured her “We can all do with something new in our lives!”

“Yers!” She said, still not really believing me.

Do you know, when I looked, we’d got through two whole bottles of that wine and part of another one. No wonder we were both feeling rather squiffy.

“Come on then!” I said “Let’s go to bed!”

“So you can have your wicked way with me, I suppose?” She challenged.

“Well, if you put it like that!” I said.

I let her go first, rather unsteadily, into the ensuite then, even more unsteadily, get undressed for bed. I got a little thrill from knowing that when She stood naked in front of the dressing table for a moment, one of Pete’s little cameras was hidden just there. She even posed momentarily, almost as if She knew about it………

No it really was a coincidence. Really!

“Leave that off if you like” I hinted when She reached for her nightie.

She giggled, finished her wine, put down the glass and gazed at me.

“All that talk of horses has made me want to ride you!” I told her.

Oh how She giggled again. She likes me when I take the initiative.

“And you know how you’ve often said how much you’d like to try something new and different…….?”

She nodded crookedly as I fitted the leather helmet that Pete had lent me over her head, shivered but made no protest as I tied her hands behind her back and led her to the door.

John had the Shetland pony all ready when I led her into the back bedroom.

“Heres the first client for your new business” I told her succinctly.

She must have known someone else was in the room, must have smelled what the pony had done on the floor but she continued giggling drunkenly anyway. Thank goodness they’d put down polythene sheeting and lots of sawdust.

Oh I didn’t mind the mess really; it will be good for the garden. Pete and John enjoyed themselves immensely. So did She if the truth is known. She went off to work the next morning with quite a spring in her step, leaving Pete John and me with the problem of getting that blasted Shetland pony back down the stairs!

© Aahlu. 14.04.10.

back to top