Free Star Dancer by Morgan Llywelyn Page A

showjumping team. Or the eventing team.’ She raised her eyes and met his. ‘Now that I have the magic and
can
jump,’ she said with a warm smile. ‘Oh Ger, just imagine! It’d mean years and years and years of work, of course. But I don’t mind about that. Just to have the chance!’
    Ger stared at her. He had never imagined such a dream. But this was one that could come true. Suzanne believed it could, and she didn’t make up stories.
    A boy or girl could work hard and someday, if they were very lucky, ride a horse in the Olympic Games.
    It seemed incredible.
    But Ger believed her.
    ‘I’ll have to find a sponsor at some stage,’ Suzanne was saying. ‘When I’m older. If I’ve been doing well. Sometimes a person or a company will sponsor a really good rider, help pay their expenses and all. If I could find a sponsor it wouldn’t matter that we don’t have much money. But I’ll have to get to be really good first anddo a lot of winning, so someone will be willing to sponsor me.’
    ‘You can do it, Suzanne O,’ Ger said eagerly. ‘I know you can, like I knew you could jump.’
    And if you can do it, he thought to himself, maybe even I could do it. If I got really good. If I found a sponsor, whatever that is … Ger felt as if a balloon was swelling inside his chest. Suddenly the world was full of possibilities. Until he met Star Dancer, he had thought his world was bounded by derelict houses and his future was probably prison.
    But now …! Now he was beginning to think anything was possible.
    I am really sitting here, he thought, under these trees, eating a meal off unchipped plates, thinking about riding in the Olympics.
    And it could happen.
    It could.
    Someday …
    ‘What are you children so serious about?’ Mrs O’Gorman said, bringing out the dessert. Cream cakes, Ger noticed hungrily.
    ‘Talking about me riding in the Olympics someday, maybe,’ Suzanne said.
    Ger saw the shadow cross Mrs O’Gorman’s face. ‘That’s a nice dream, dear,’ she said gently. ‘But there are years and years before you need to think about that. You’ll grow and change and be interested in other things.’ She said it as if she hoped that was what would happen.
    ‘Your mam doesn’t like to think about you riding in the Olympics,’ Ger remarked to Suzanne when they had finished their lunch and were walking back down the road to the stables.
    ‘She doesn’t mind, she just thinks I’ll grow out of it. But Iwon’t!’
    ‘You’d think she’d want you to do it. She used to ride, you said.’
    ‘She did. She gave it up before I was born, though.’
    How could anyone give up riding? Ger wondered. He didn’t think Suzanne would grow out of it. He didn’t think he would, either. Not now that he knew there was a chance. A very slim chance, if you were very very good.
    I’ll be that good, Ger promised himself.
    He began trying to be nearby whenever anyone was having a riding lesson, and listening very carefully to what they were told. He read all the horse magazines he found lying around the stables, although he had to puzzle out a lot of the harder words. But it got easier with practice, just like riding.
    ‘It’s hard to get that boy to go home at night,’ Brendan Walsh said, laughing, to Anne Fitzpatrick. ‘After he’s done all his work he still hangs around here, asking questions, looking for more to do. You’d think he had no home to go to.’
    Then came the weekend of Suzanne’s next dressage show. It was being held some distance away, far down in Wicklow, and Mr O’Gorman was going to drive Suzanne and her mother down in his car. Star Dancer would go in the big horse box with some other horses from the stables.
    ‘Would you like to go with us and be my groom?’ Suzanne asked.
    ‘I would, of course!’ Ger assured her.
    On the morning of the show, Ger hitchhiked out to the stables. No buses ran early enough to get him there in time to leave with the O’Gormans. He would really have liked to