Paolo spun on his heel. “They were your horses?” He gaped at Ru.
“Not mine, but I looked after them.”
Paolo’s forehead furrowed. “By all means.” He turned and shouted, “Poppy!”
A young woman with a ponytail poked her head out of a nearby stall.
“You can forget the two nags. He’ll do them.”
“Great.” She smiled.
“They’re not nags,” Ru said quietly.
“What?”
For a smaller guy, Paolo suddenly seemed taller and broader.
“What did you say?” Paolo hissed.
Ru swallowed hard. “They’re not nags. They’re neither old nor useless. They could still be used for breeding. Joni’s sire was an Irish Sport horse. Cookie’s part Connemara and part thoroughbred. She’s a gentle calm horse who keeps going and going and…”
Ru took in the expression on Paolo’s face and pressed his lips together.
“Then you can take complete responsibility for them. Along with the rest of your work which will be to do whateveranyof the other stable hands tell you to do. Mucking out and putting down new bedding, cleaning saddles, bridles and any other tack you’re told to clean. We start at five and you finish when you’re told you can finish. Not before. Have I made myself clear?”
“Yes.”
Paolo stepped right into Ru’s space, but Ru stood his ground. “You are the lowest rung on the ladder. There is no one lower than you. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t even think about riding a horse without permission. Now go and sort thosenagsout, then find Georgia. And when you’re fit to be seen, come back here and ask Mike for work.”
As Ru stepped away, Paolo caught hold of his shoulder. “I don’t want to hear another word from you unless it’sYes, boss.Understand?”
“Yes, boss.”
Ru left the stables with his stomach churning and went down to the isolation block. That hadn’t gone well. Mike already didn’t like him and now Paolo didn’t either. But there was no way Ru had been able to let that go. Cookie and Joni weren’t nags. It wasn’t fair to call them that. There were no instructions hanging on their stalls, but Ru had been looking after these two for five years. He knew them inside out.
“Good morning, Cookie. Good morning, Joni.”
The horses nickered back at him and Ru scratched Cookie on her nose, Joni on her neck, just as they liked. He used a hose to fill up the reservoirs on the automatic waterers, then fed them hay. While they were eating, he checked out the rest of the barn. It was spotless. There was a room at the end with a table and chairs, and tack hanging on hooks. Cookie and Joni’s saddles were in there too, hung on supports. Ru could tell they’d not been cleaned recently. He’d find time to do that. Everything that he’d need was in there. He was very impressed. There was a washing facility and a place where he guessed the vet would work. He tried to imagine himself there as a vet and he couldn’t, which made him sad.
Once the pair had eaten, he led them out to the paddock and smiled as they ran around. He watched them for a while, then went back to muck out the two stalls. He could do this work in his sleep. Sometimes hediddo it in his sleep. A thought that made him smile. It had been part of his daily routine for so many years, he dreamt he was doing it too.
He moved the remainder of the food out first, then found a cover for the water container because that didn’t seem to be moveable. He wouldn’t usually be doing this in decent clothes or his trainers, but he didn’t want to leave the stalls untouched and get told off. He’d not seen this sort of pelleted bedding before. Ru scraped up the dark areas where Cookie had peed, and realised there was a rubber floor underneath. Not matting, a floor that had been laid when the barn was built.
Once he’d used the shavings fork to collect the poop and put it in a wheelbarrow, he sifted through the rest of the bedding to make sure he’d found everything that was dirty. Bedding wasn’t cheap, this stuff was probably the most expensive you could get and there was no reason to replace it all every day. He did the same with the other stall and wheeled the muck outside to look for a place to leave it. He found it tucked away around the corner.
Back in the stable, he lifted a bag of the bedding from a pile by the door and read what to do. It came dry and needed water adding which seemed weird, but Ru followed the instructions and left the opened bag to soak up the water. It said it only took a few minutes, but rather than stand and watch it, he checked again that he’d not missed any peed-on areas or lumps of poop before he scattered the contents of the sack in the two stalls and brushed over it to make it flat.
He thought he’d done a good job and he made sure to clean up after himself, aware that Paolo would be looking for reasons to criticise. He swept the floor until it was spotless, then washed his hands and disinfected the soles of his trainers. One last check that the horses were happy in the paddock, before he went back to his room to get his national insurance number.
There was a chalet building similar to the accommodation block that sat a little closer to the house than the stables and Ru wondered if that was where the admin was done.
He knocked on the door and heard a woman say, “Come in.”
Ru went in to see a tall, slender woman in her late twenties with blonde hair pulled up into a loose bun.
