Fourth Horseman by Kate Thompson Page A

or twist the limb which can, if done right, bring your attacker to the ground and completely immobilize him. Someone with good aikido skills can subdue an opponent twice their size and weight.
    I think if I’d been forced to choose between them I would have just about given Alex the edge. It wasn’t that he was faster, but he seemed able to wait that fraction longer before he reacted. He looked dozy sometimes, his eyelids drooping halfway down over his eyes. But there was a fierce glint beneath them, and when he did react to a move of Javed’s, it was with explosive speed. On the whole, though, they were well matched, and the most striking thing of all was their mutual respect. They bowed to each other before and after every round, and when they left the rugs at the end of the practice they resumed their everyday relationship exactly where they had left off. Their quiet, undemanding affection for each other was a model of human friendship.
    And more and more that friendship had come to include me. By that time Javed was playing regular matches for the county, and Alex had managed to get himself picked for the second eleven. If either of them were playing a match they invited me, although I rarely went, because of my responsibilities at the lab. We did go mooching around town a couple of times though, shopping for clothes and having a coffee, but what I remember most clearly about those times was the conversations we had. We talked for hours, the three of us, about all kinds of things. Sometimes I think it was because I was lonely that year and had no friends of my own, and that I muscled in on the boys’ friendship. And sometimes I believe it was more than that. I believe that our extraordinary fate was already written on our palms or stamped across our brows. If we hadn’t had such trust in each other, things might have turned out very differently.
    I never understood how they decided when an aikido practice was over. They never said ‘Shall we call it a day?’ or ‘I’m done in.’ They would just look each other in the eye, bow deeply to one another and vacate the practice space. On that day, when they had reached that moment, Alex trotted off upstairs to get changed but Javed flopped down on to the sofa beside me.
    ‘Do you ever analyse your dreams?’ he said.
    ‘Why would I want to do that?’ I asked.
    ‘Just wondered. My mother does it all the time. She tried to get me to do it a couple of times but I could never take it seriously enough. She gave up on me.’ He paused, and picked Randall hair off his white trousers. ‘I just thought it might be an idea to try and analyse what you saw.’
    ‘But the horsemen weren’t a dream,’ I said.
    ‘They might have been a vision, though. They must have been, when you think about it, since there’s no trace of them.’
    I thought about what he was saying and I couldn’t deny it. The riders had been a vision. Dad and I had seen a vision. Like people saw moving statues and the Virgin Mary crying and stuff. Did that make it more significant or less?
    ‘I often get inspiration while I’m doing aikido,’ Javed went on. ‘My mind goes into a kind of meditation. And it came to me, just then. Why not analyse your vision as if it were a dream?’
    ‘How do you do that?’
    ‘Well, you kind of ask questions about things. The symbolism and stuff. You can even talk to the characters if you want to.’
    ‘Can you show me?’
    ‘I can try,’ he said. ‘It’s just a matter of talking about it and seeing what comes up.’
    We went up to my room and I got out the notebook where I had written my lists the night before. Javed glanced over it. ‘You know, we should call Alex as well.’ He sensed my hesitation and went on: ‘Three heads are better than two.’
    We went through my lists, one line at a time. We were lying on the grass at the back of the house. Alex had made sandwiches.
    ‘So the white horseman appeared alone first,’ said Javed. ‘You’ve put that