Greenie...

A small part of Me wants to believe that something worse than molestation occurred in that paddock. I know you probably find it hard to believe that I just said that, but I mean it. At least it would have given me a legitimate reason to have gone mental and cracked into five- if He had dragged me out of the car and repeatedly raped me under the power pylon, say, or if it had happened over a long period of time- or from when I was really young. But I don't have any of those excuses. I cracked under hardly any pressure at all.

Some people might find it hard to understand how only a 'little bit' of child abuse- if there is any such thing as that- can hurt someone and affect their life for a long time- while there are others who face much worse adversities and deal with it and then get over it. They don't continue to let it pervade their thoughts when they are having sex with their husband, for instance, lying still and stiff as a board, because it's Him- again- feeling you, and Him- again- in your brain. Why are the thoughts still in my brain? Why do I lay there like a quiet child still? Why don't I just scream out or thrust his hand away?

I feel like a slut if I am enjoying it now. Shut your legs then, Princess; clamp them tight and twist them twice around together and loop the last little bit of boot around and hook it onto your shin almost for the third time around. Let him try and get in there now that you've locked it...

But Hubby's fingers are strong and persistant and even though I know it is my Hubby who is touching me I resist; even though somewhere inside of Me there is also rn_buffoon, the aspiring porn actress, who tries to push the bad thoughts of that pervert away- but it's harder than you might think when you come to realise that even though the abuse has been over for nineteen years and he's dead now that He's still touching my mind.

At least he didn't put me off horses. After I left school I also left behind my part-time job at the Ice-Creamery. You'll see the connection between the two soon...

I loved this job- it is still the only job I have had that I always enjoyed going to. My bosses were fair and generous and used to give us presents at Christmas time. We could also take home all the left over fruit salad and eat any dropped choc-dips that we'd scoop from the warm chocolate mixture and sneak mouthfuls of when the shop was quiet. I dropped seven in a row one hot day because the soft serve was liquid-soft still. I seriously thought I was going to get the sack- my Boss was so cranky at me he went red and a blue vein pulsed in his temple.

I wasn't too fussed on the uniform we had to wear either; it's much more modern now, but in the early days Wendy's girls wore ankle-length pink skirts with pink polo shirts, which came home sticky and smelling of sour milk- and they weren't flattering- especially when you are almost six feet tall and pencil thin with a flat arse and no chest to speak of...

But when I left school I quit working there- and suddenly, from what I can remember. I don't recall telling them I wouldn't be working there any longer and then I avoided their phonecalls until they got the hint that I wouldn't be coming back in anymore. I'm good like that at avoiding responsibility. After a while I started looking at the red-circled paper that my Father leaves on the kitchen bench each morning that is his little push puSH PUSH- like a balloon blowing up- to get a job or go back to school or tech.

So I go and work for the second-best trainer at the local racetrack.

By this stage I hadn't been around horses for a few years- Star was living at the farm- and I was spending much of my free time chasing my future Hubby around pubs and clubs and drinking and sleeping. The first day that I worked at the stables I got there at three thirty in the freezing morning and spent the entire day in wet shoes and an almost dislocated shoulder from the constant dragging of these eager Thoroughbred babies as we took horse after horse from their stall to the track for their morning exercise.

After they had run around in circles for twenty minutes they are returned to their strappers- and we take them to the wash-bay and hose them with warm water that drips cold into our armpits while we scraper their bodies, the rivulets of water somehow coursing their way beneath three layers of warm clothing.

I found out pretty quickly that there were some horses in the stables that most people preferred not to deal with- and these were alloted out to the Newbies such as myself. One such horse was called Best Benny. He was a two year old chestnut colt, and his was the first stable that I was instructed to clean on my first day of work. After I had closed myself into the box I began to realise why the majority of the young stable guys put down their shit-forks and seem to be watching to see what will happen.

Best Benny loses interest in his feed quickly, and becomes interested in me while I muck out the manure with a three-prong. I doubt the stable has been cleared out since yesterday morning there is so much shit in the wood shavings. He starts nuzzling up to me, almost knocking me off balance as I squat, spreading lime in the corner where it seems he likes to urinate. He's only young but he ain't no baby, and is taller than sixteen hands, strong and in racing condition. And little by little it dawns on me, as he increasingly starts to bite at me and is now whuffling under his breath and trying to mount me- that this horse is turned on by me, somehow, and wants to root me.

The guys are cheering him on and jeering at me, saying loud enough for me to hear that I must be on my period and that is what the horse can smell. I gave the horse a smack in his mouth for his trouble- like I would've done to the boys if they were in range- and Best Benny eventually went back to his feed without too much more trouble- but he tried it on again and again the many times I had to clean his stall- always to the mirth of the lads. This went on until the next new person arrived on the scene and they got to do Best Benny's stall instead of me. The guy who took the job from me just happened to be named Flash, who knew nothing at all about horses when he got the job- he didn't even know how to put on a bridle when he first started. The last I heard of him he was really high up in the Strapper World. Good for him. He was such a deadshit.

I was pretty lucky there were only a few incidents of sexual harrassment at that job because I had heard plenty of stories that were far worse. Like the stories that my friend Greenie told me happened to her. Once she was walking a horse past a stable and Fatt Matt, who was cleaning it out told her to tie the horse up and come in and fuck her. Another time she was also locked in a stall with a horny stallion by the Foreman.

Greenie was a nice kid- only fifteen, sweetly naive yet somehow street smart, and had been living away from home since she was ten, when she had run away from home with her then twenty-two year old boyfriend. I'm not even sure if she used her real name but Greenie boarded in a house that she shared with an old Bookie, who was always hitting her up for sex, even though he was well into his eighties. She told me that she locked her bedroom door every night. She was an overly sexual girl, though, and had been to bed and many other places- with just about all of the stablehands and jockeys at one time or another. I'm not having a go at her. I just felt sad for her when they used to give her a hard time for being 'easy' and for having all sorts of venereal diseases that she didn't have. She couldn't even do that much about it- especially when they Bosses treated her the same as the other boys did- and here she was, a fifteen year old kid supporting herself on a pittance of a pay packet when it was obvious that she just wanted someone to love her and to be given a go.

And no- it was never going to be Me.

She was also very good with the horses, and used to spend a lot of time after work with her favourite black gelding, Charlie. She always led him out in the mounting yard on race days, and was the only one who cleaned his stable...

Blah.

Anyway, I didn't work there all that long in the end because I got sick of the Tinea I developed from standing around all morning with wet feet in cold dirty shoes- but before I left I almost got the sack anyway...

It was a cold and windy morning- the sun was only just rising- as I was leading out a nice-looking bay mare, named Curtain Time, down to the track for her workout, when she took me by surprise and reared up- pulling me off my feet before galloping off with her lead rein dangling. Even though it was still early there is still a lot of urban traffic in this area and she's heading straight for it- her shoes sending little sparks of fire from the road as she bolts away. I start running after her, and then notice Nigel- his true name- the smug son-of-a-boss, has managed to grab her by her flailing lead rope and has caught her five hundred metres or so down the road. I know I'm still in Shit for not being able to keep a hold of her because she had won more than six hundred thousand dollars in prizemoney- but at least she hasn't fallen down and broken her knees or gone through a windshield of some car.

Luckily the Big Boss had already left for the day with another horse that was racing somewhere in the City, but I still have to face the Foreman, a fat pig-eyed man who still lives at home with his mother...

That was where I went the day I handed him my fake medical certificate that I got my pink-haired friend's father to write me- he was a Paramedic and strapped me up a fake splinted wrist- real professional like- so I could take a week off work; but I had such a good week off that I never went back, so I never really knew what became of Greenie in the end.

I heard on the grapevine, though, a few years later that she married a horse truck driver and moved away and had a baby girl called Simone. And if she ever reads this maybe she will remember who I am, and remember the day we took The Little Count to Canterbury Races and randy Randolph- again, a real name- tried to root her in the washbay before race three...

In front of Me and the horse.