Greener Pastures - Alyssa Brugman [8]
'But there's no castle, is there?' her dad countered.
Shelby tried to stay calm. She took a deep breath. If she started shouting and crying they would never listen to her. They would roll their eyes and write it off as a 'mood'.
'It's not the travelling that is the problem. I would like to go overseas . . .' she began.
'There, see?' her father said, obviously relieved.
'. . . one day,' she added. 'But I don't want to move house and leave all my friends, and have to start all over again at a new school, and a new riding centre. Isn't there some way we can do it without moving house?'
Her mother sat back and folded her arms. 'Yes, there is. If you can find a way of coming up with about ten thousand dollars.'
Shelby opened her mouth. 'Well, I . . .' And then shut it again.
4 The Crush
On the side of the Gully where Shelby's friend Hayley lived, all the houses were grand Tudor-style homes complete with ivy, or architect-designed buildings of glass and stainless steel, or massive kit homes with wings and six-car garages and a pair of concrete lions by the front gate.
Most of the houses were on two to five acres. They all had lavish pool areas and manicured gardens – some with elaborate bronze statues or ornate water features. Those that were not entirely dedicated to landscaping had horse paddocks, dotted with brightly coloured jump wings, flash show ponies, or striking eventers swathed in rugs – the horses being as ornamental as the bronze statues.
Lydia did not live on Hayley's side of the Gully. Lydia didn't even live on Shelby's side of the Gully.
Lydia lived on the side that used to be farmland – the sort of properties scattered with broken-down tractors and buses without wheels, fenced in rusty barbed-wire with ripped plastic bags caught in it, and the land itself sprinkled in grey patches of blackberry, choked with willow and the browned skeletons of old scotch thistles.
Many of those properties had now given way to industrial blocks – clusters of car mechanic workshops, metal fabricators and self-storage complexes, discount ceramic pot distributors, security-door manufacturers or lumberyards.
It was the sort of place you might find stolen cars burned out, skid-marks and discarded bottles from midnight street races, because no one is around at night, except for the residents living in the handful of little fibro houses that remained.
Lydia lived in one of those.
Shelby knew the area because she had often accompanied her father, an Alfa Romeo enthusiast, to the European car specialist in one of the workshops at the other end of the same street.
'How much further?' Erin asked. She gripped Bandit's reins tightly as another carload of louts shouted out their windows and tooted their horn as they drove past the two horses walking along the grassy verge.
'Why do they do that?' Shelby muttered again. Blue plodded on oblivious to the noise, but Bandit was getting skittish – probably responding to Erin's nervousness.
'We're running out of light. There'll be no time to ride anywhere. We need to be home before dark.'
Bandit spooked at a piece of truck tyre half-buried in the grass and Erin jerked on the reins.
Shelby knew Erin needed distracting. 'So how long have you loved Ethan Agnew?'
Erin put her hand up to her mouth. 'Omigod! How do you know that? Nobody knows that! It is my deepest, darkest secret!'
'You just told me,' Shelby said, laughing. 'If you didn't love him you would have said, "Who? What are you talking about?"'
'You know what, though?' Erin said. 'I can't decide if I love him, or if I actually hate him. He is like my Gilbert Blythe, except Gilbert Blythe was smart and handsome even from the beginning, and Ethan is not smart. He's not good-looking exactly. And Anne and Gilbert talked – well, argued. Ethan and I have never spoken.' She paused. 'That's not true. Two weeks ago he said, "Ta", when I let him go through a doorway before me. But later I was thinking he really should