The Other Half of My Heart by Stephanie Butland

sense of her insides flailing for solid, unmoving ground.
    â€˜But you’re OK when you’re on a horse.’
    â€˜Yes.’ She thinks of Roddy polishing his car on a Sunday afternoon, stripped to the waist if the weather is warm. He must think she’s ridiculous.
    â€˜I’ve seen the colour of you when we get to an event,’ Roddy says, glancing at her. ‘I feel for you.’
    â€˜I’m used to it.’ He feels for her. Tina lets this thought expand; she tastes its sweetness. He has moved to sit next to her; holds her hand. Her fingertips pulse. She wiggles her toes. She smells leather, straw, CK One. Her own perfume – rose oil from the Body Shop – seems too simple against it. She feels like a little girl.
    â€˜I suppose you’ve tried all sorts of things.’
    â€˜Yes,’ Tina says. A homeopathic remedy had worked, briefly; it seemed to take the edge off. She likes to be tightly belted in. It’s easier if there’s no talking. The smell, though not the taste, of mint soothes her. Anti-sickness tablets work, but only if she gets the timing right. Roddy is still holding her hand. Her fingertips are pulsing, but her toes are still and her cheeks cool. Perhaps he’s right and her hands are confident.
    â€˜So if I want to impress you,’ Roddy says, ‘taking you out in the Cosworth isn’t going to work, is it?’
    â€˜I suppose not,’ Tina says. She looks away from his hand and into his face: he’s smiling. She’s smiling.
    â€˜I’ll have to think of something else, then,’ he says.
    He stands up, stretches and walks back out into the afternoon’s activity. Tina sits there in the quiet for a minute or two longer, wondering, absorbing, trying to calm the flutter behind her solar plexus. Roddy Flood wants to impress her. It’s too good to be true, but she likes it.
    There is a joke in the Randolph household that Flora, their sweet and sociable tortoiseshell cat, always knows which family member needs her most, and from the day in October when Roddy asks Tina if she wants to ‘come up to the house for supper on Friday’, a week after their conversation in the tack room, Flora has followed Tina as a seagull follows a plough.
    Katrina says it’s definitely a date. Unsure, Tina asks Sam when he makes his weekly phone call.
    â€˜He’s giving up a Friday night, and he’s inviting you home, and his parents will be there, and no one else has been invited?’ Sam asks.
    â€˜As far as I know, it’s just me, Roddy and his parents.’ You can never quite tell who will be in the Flood farmhouse. But visitors – buyers, sellers, prospective livery clients, trainers, riders – are written up on the blackboard in the yard office; Tina can’t recall anyone in for Friday night.
    â€˜That’s actually a fourth date. Maybe a fifth.’
    Flora jumps into Tina’s lap. Katrina beams and says, ‘We need to decide what you’re going to wear.’ And Tina wishes that she’d kept the whole thing quiet. She refuses to wear heels, but borrows Katrina’s new lilac top to go with her smartest jeans, and consents to mascara. Nervous of taking the wrong wine, instead she bakes a gingerbread with her mother, and in doing so remembers the days when the best treat of the week was to stand on a chair by the kitchen bench and help with mixing and measuring. As Alice was a devotee of teatime, they baked at least twice a week: cut-out biscuits that Tina would decorate when they cooled, tea-loaf, chocolate sponges baked in separate tins and sandwiched together with coffee buttercream icing. This was Tina’s time to have her mother to herself; they talked of everything and nothing, drama group and Flood Farm, the starlings and the fuchsias. As they made the gingerbread for the Floods they talked about holidays, and how, this year, for the first time, Howard and Alice would be