and that there were probably other worlds out there amongst the twinkling stars and planets, as yet undiscovered.
As time went by, the previously shy, wild animals grew ever braver and eventually accepted the girl who sat amidst their natural abodes. Rabbits and hares stood on their hind legs and curiously observed me, and mice and voles scurried around, their noses inquisitively twitching. On several occasions, a hunting kestrel hovering overhead landed beside me. It became quite a game and sometimes she would swoop low over my head, making me duck.
I often returned to the house long after dark, slipping in quietly through the back door. My parents rarely worried about my long absences and I wasn’t reprimanded for staying out late. I wondered if they even noticed.
Shannon and I exchanged a few letters, but as she made new friends her correspondence eventually dried up. I drifted through school, daydreaming of the sun, the moon, the wind and the stars, with the intoxicating whisper of a different land and a distant shore forever teasing me, and barely participating in the school curriculum, I was fortunate to scrape through my exams. But always there were the ponies speaking to me of unconditional love and I watched the dynamics within the herd, fascinated by their interaction. I examined their pecking order – sometimes brutal, but always honest – whilst trying to make sense of my own family set-up. What role did I play in my parents’ life?
One day, the ponies were loaded into lorries and taken away. I waited patiently for their return, pausing at the gate each time I passed on my way to and from school, but the fields remained stubbornly empty. When the planning notice went up everyone in the road was outraged, but despite the many objections and highly charged meetings, the views of those who lived in the neighbourhood went unheeded. The council approved the developer’s planning application and within a few short weeks the builders moved in, and it wasn’t long before that once-open landscape was indelibly altered and the fields became an estate of executive homes. Each property mirrored the other with only the subtlest difference, but all had the obligatory manicured patch of lawn and herringbone driveway, on which would sit the latest model of car. All too soon, a new breed of people moved in.
And then one rainy day, a few months after my seventeenth birthday, my life changed forever.
My parents had treated me to lunch at the local pub – an unusual occurrence in itself. The weather was awful and as my father drove home, I grew mesmerised by the momentum of the wipers gliding across the wet windscreen. My parents’ banter faded into the background as I concentrated on the manic swish of the rubber blades valiantly attempting to combat the driving rain. A squeal of brakes was the only precursor to mayhem. Suddenly, we were propelled sideways and the car planed across the road, clipping the pavement before rolling over and over.
They say tragic accidents occur in slow motion and it was certainly true of that day. As we somersaulted across the road and down the embankment, eventually coming to rest in the muddy field below, I had time to coolly reflect that this must be what it’s like trapped inside a washing machine. All at once the shocking commotion was replaced by an unsettling stillness. Thick, penetrating quiet filled the air and even the rain was horrified into momentarily abating.
I tried to move my head, but a searing pain shot through my neck and shoulders. Uncomprehendingly, I watched banks of dark clouds scud across the grey sky through an opening where the windscreen should have been. I tried calling out to my parents but I couldn’t find my voice, and I noticed how the now-motionless wipers protruded at an odd angle, like broken limbs. And then suddenly he was there, peering in over the smashed bonnet through the open windscreen, and I watched as his stunningly handsome face registered shock and then horror, swiftly followed by anguish. I will never forget that look.
‘Shit!’ He ran a hand across his forehead, sweeping a long, wet fringe out of his eyes.
My eyes followed him as he moved around the car, and when he looked in through my shattered window his face was ashen.
‘Can you move?’
I tried but pain flooded my body. ‘No,’ I mouthed.
‘OK, stay put.’
As if I could have gone anywhere anyway…
He called the emergency services on his mobile phone and