paddock behind the estate where most of them lived, or even when they were hobbled and grazing on the grass around the flats; but if they broke free and ran off, then they could be straight out onto the open road and in amongst the cars. We’d had a lot of horses knocked over like that, and I wasn’t going to let it happen to Dasher.
He was in a bit of a panic, so it took me a while to sweeten him in, catch him and calm him down. Barry thanked me as he mounted up again, and said I could groom Dasher tomorrow if I liked. Big deal, I thought. But I didn’t dare say anything. If I upset Barry too much he wouldn’t even let me do that. One day Barry, I thought, one day I’m going to ride in the races myself and I’ll leave you standing, you and your stupid Crazy Cossacks. I’ll beat the lot of you, you see if I don’t.
As I made my way home later in the gathering dusk I was still angry, still dreaming of having my very own horse, and talking to myself out loud as I often did. “There won’t be another like him,” I was saying. “He’ll be the fastest on the estate, the fastest in all Ireland, the fastest in the world. And I’ll be riding into the winner’s enclosure at the Irish Derby, and I’ll leap out of my stirrups like Frankie Dettori. I’ll be the greatest.”
I was still talking to myself as I came past the skip. That was when I remembered about the car backing up, and that man chucking something in. I thought I might as well have a look. I made sure there was no-one about, then hoisted myself up and into the skip. I couldn’t see all that well, and at first there didn’t seem to be much that was new. In fact it was almost empty.
Then I saw him. He was lying there on an old mattress at the bottom of the skip, and he was looking up at me. Well his head was, his face was, but the top part of him was separated from the rest. The other half of him, a very round pot belly and stubby little legs with pointed boots on the end of them, and the toadstool he was sitting on, lay inside a discarded pushchair. In my mind I put the two halves of him together, and recognised him for what he was – a gnome, a battered old garden gnome.
I felt suddenly very sad, very sorry for him, lying there all broken and abandoned and unloved in the bottom of a dirty old skip. I couldn’t leave him there like that. I just couldn’t. And then I had this totally brilliant idea. I’d fix him up, I’d give him to Mum for her birthday in a fortnight’s time. She’d love him, she’d love him to bits.
So, crouching over him and picking up his head I told him my plan. “I’m going to save you,” I said. The moonlight fell on his face, and I could see he was a happy smiling sort of gnome. I thought of his name just like that. “Mister Skip. I’m going to call you Mister Skip, and you’ll be coming home with me. I’ll put you together again. And Mum and me, we’ll look after you, alright?” As I was speaking, his eyes twinkled at me, I was certain of it. It was like he was trying to show me he was happy, as if he was saying thank you. It gave me the shivers to think that this plaster gnome could actually be listening to me, that he could really understand, that he had feelings. But they were nice shivers.
I couldn’t be sure of it, but as I walked away with a half of him under each arm, I honestly thought I heard him chuckling – the top half of him and the bottom half at the same time. It was weird, but I liked it.
I had to keep Mister Skip a secret. I didn’t want Mum knowing anything about him, not until I’d put him together, not until her birthday. So I used the lock-up garage. We didn’t have a car, but we did have a leaky lock-up where Mum never went, but I did. I went there whenever I wanted to be alone. It was my secret den, a bit smelly and dark and damp, but one end of it stayed dry, mostly. I’d made it as comfy as I could. I had a table in there under the window at the back and a chair and a bit of old carpet – all scrounged from the skip of course. So that’s where I hid Mister Skip. That’s where I planned to fix him up, and he needed an awful lot of fixing.
For a start there were some bits of him missing completely – one of his little hands and the top of his red bobble hat. I found the missing hand in the skip, in amongst someone’s disgustingly slimy rubbish bags. I looked and looked, but I never did find the bit of his hat. It took me a couple of days, but in the end I managed to borrow some glue from the art cupboard at school, and some paints and some brushes. I told my teacher, Miss Munroe, that they were for a project I was working on at home. She seemed a little surprised at my sudden enthusiasm for art, and asked if she could see whatever it was I was working on when it was finished. “Maybe we could have it in the art exhibition for Parents’ Evening, Jackie,” she said. But she soon forgot all about it – thank goodness.
So now I had all I needed to put Mister Skip back together again. But I had to work fast. It was now only twelve days till Mum’s birthday, and I wanted to make him perfect for her. I wanted him to look just how he must have done before he became all neglected and battered and broken in half.
First of all I scrubbed him down with a nailbrush. Then, when he was dry, I glued him back together, top half to bottom half, and I gave him back his missing hand. I filled his holes and cracks with Polyfilla and sanded down all his chips and scratches. Then I began to paint him, trying as best as I could to match the colours that were already there. His chubby cheeks had to be bright pink and his beard had to be white as white. He looked a bit like a mini Father Christmas, I thought, on a toadstool. His hat I painted bright red, his little boots too; and all his buttons had to be sparkling silver. I pinched some of Mum’s special nail varnish for that – she didn’t miss it. As for his trousers they should have been blue, but I couldn’t find any blue paint in the art cupboard, so I made them green instead. And I made the toadstool look more like a toadstool again. Then I varnished him all over so that the paint would never come off.
By the time I was finished he was without any doubt the smartest shiniest garden gnome in all the world. All that had to be fixed now was the missing bit of his bobble hat. In the end I decided the best thing to do was to cover it up with a real hat. I did a swap with Barry: my Harry Potter sweatshirt – the one Gran gave to me for Christmas that had a hole in it – for his Liverpool red woolly hat, also with a hole in it. It fitted Mister Skip perfectly, and he looked really pleased with it too.
That was the strange thing about Mister Skip. Every day I worked on him he seemed to look happier and happier, so happy sometimes that I thought he really might burst out laughing. He never did. I mean he couldn’t, could he? After all he was only plaster, I knew that. But sometimes after we’d been alone together in the lock-up for a while, I came to think of him almost as a real, live person. I suppose that was why I began talking to him – it just seemed natural somehow.
I told him all about Mum and me, our whole life story, about school, about Barry and Marty, about the Crazy Cossacks, about everything. He knew things about me I’d never even told Mum. He’d never say anything back of course. But once or twice I thought I heard a chuckling inside the lock-up when I left it to go home.
There were a couple of days still before Mum’s birthday, and after school I’d spend all the time I could in the lock-up with Mister Skip. I’d just sit there admiring him, admiring my amazing handiwork, and looking forward to seeing the look on Mum’s face when I gave him to her on her birthday. But then I began to think about him, about what was going on inside his head. I couldn’t help wondering how lonely and miserable he must be left alone in the lock-up most of the day and all night without me. I realised I was beginning to think of him not as a painted garden gnome at all, but as a friend who I liked to be with and who seemed to like being with me. Silly, I know, but that’s how I felt.
It was on the last evening before Mum’s birthday, and I was sitting there with Mister Skip in the lock-up just chatting away like I did, about how one day I would beat Barry and all the rest of the Crazy Cossacks out of sight, how I was going to wipe the floor with them. “I’ll show them,” I was saying.