The Race (10 page)

“They’re amazing,” Kiwit repeated. I found her hard to make out, to be honest. If you saw her on the street without her gloves on you’d most likely mistake her for an out-of-towner – she had that strut about her, that sense that not only was she used to having money but that she expected to have even more of it in the future. But in those moments when she forgot herself she had what all runners have: not just the pent up energy, coiled like a snake at the heart of her, but that peculiar absence of being, the sense that what you were seeing was just a foil, that the essential Angela Kiwit resided elsewhere.

On the day she came for her fitting, Kiwit was wearing black jeans and red sneakers and an old grey vest top. Her dyed blonde hair was twisted into a loose knot at the nape of her neck and her roots were showing.

She still looked incredible. Radiant, somehow.

“They’ll be ready on Friday,” I said. “I’ll give you a call.”

She laughed, as if I’d said something funny, then leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek.

“Thanks,” she said. “I knew you could do it. Perhaps you’re my luck.”

I smiled, waving the compliment modestly aside the way you learn to do. It was only later that I realised what she had meant by it: Angela Kiwit was planning on wearing my gloves to run the Delawarr.

Why this had never occurred to me before I had no idea. Why else would she have needed them so urgently? The whole thing was obvious, once you thought about it.

Kiwit’s dog, a brindled bitch named Tou-le-Mar, had run the Delawarr Triple the year before. She’d placed fifth, I thought, and when I checked the stats online I found I was right. Tou-le-Mar was a touch on the small side for running hurdles, but she was clever and very agile and extremely fast. She was in with a chance, no doubt about it, and having made it to the final before, Kiwit had to fancy herself – anyone would.

All I knew was, Del was going to go mental when he found out. I briefly considered withdrawing the gloves from sale, returning Kiwit’s deposit and preparing myself for an industrial-sized delivery of shit.

I discounted the idea almost at once. What would anyone gain by it, least of all me?

~*~

Claudia called to invite me for supper.

“Please come,” she said. “I can’t wait to show you the room. It’s almost finished.”

I couldn’t see a way to refuse. Lumey’s new bedroom gleamed with wood polish and new bedlinen. In a strange way it already looked too young for her, the bedroom of a child who no longer existed. The room sang with cleanliness and colour and good intentions but all the time I was admiring it I could not put away the fear that Lumey would never sleep in that bed or take a book from that bookcase, and that even if she did, whatever had happened to her in the past two weeks would have made it impossible for her to ever be happy in a room like this.

She would never again be the same child, even if on the surface she appeared unharmed.

I told myself not to be an idiot, but it didn’t work.

“We’re having a little party for her on Monday,” Claudia said. “Just Del and me and Hellin. We’d love you to come.”

Hellin Tresow was a friend of Claudia’s. Del couldn’t stand her, for some reason.

“She looks like a backstreet abortionist,” he said to me once. He was very drunk. “She gives me the fucking willies.”

Apparently, Hellin Tresow was some sort of writer. I thanked Claudia for her invitation and said I’d be there. I figured it didn’t matter either way. If Lumey was back then I really would be. If she wasn’t then the stupid party wouldn’t be happening.

I left straight after supper. I felt queasy with nerves, as if the whole oil-slicked, phosphorescent sea were sloshing around inside my stomach.

~*~

The slate of heats for the Delawarr Triple isn’t drawn up until the morning of the race itself, although the list of competitors is made public a month before, with any additions appearing online as and when they register. Limlasker went in as a late entry, with Celia Lilac, one of Del’s younger dogs, also added to the line-up as a blind. Celia Lilac was just twelve months old and still technically a puppy. Her runner, Tommy Hamid, was eighteen and something of a prodigy. The pair were too young and inexperienced to be anything but rank outsiders, but they looked good together and entering them for the race made perfect sense. In a year or two they might be in with a genuine chance, and to any interested spectators it would look like Del was playing canny. Preparing them for the big time, giving them a taste of the action, whatever. No one would expect them to progress beyond the heats, but they’d be watched. More importantly they would help to divert attention from Tash and Limlasker.

Limlasker was a famous champion and well respected. His late entry into the Delawarr would raise a few eyebrows, but with Tommy and Celia also in the running, most would assume that Del had chosen the Delawarr Triple to be Lim’s farewell race, his final lap of honour, if you will. It was a fair enough assumption. No one would be expecting him to place.

I had to admit it was a strong plan. On the night before the race, Del phoned to tell me that Lim had run down the previous year’s winning time three times that week in practice sessions.

“And he’ll go faster during the race, he always does,” Del said. He sounded high as a kite.

“I hope you haven’t been overdoing things. You don’t want him to peak too soon.”

“That dog loves to race, you know that. He thrives on it. Why don’t you trust me?”

An edge of irritation had crept into his voice, that tone, so familiar from when we were younger, that said I was a moron and what the hell was the use in him trying to explain anything to me anyway.

I knew he’d get next to no sleep that night, an hour or two around sunrise at the most.

“I do trust you,” I said. “I’m just nervous, I suppose.”

“Well don’t be, and shut the frig up. This thing’s a done deal.”

“Get some sleep,” I said. I wished I could say something more helpful, something that might break through his bravado, not to damage his confidence but to comfort him. I could barely imagine how lonely he must be feeling. He couldn’t even talk to Limlasker, because Lim was with Tash.

~*~

The heats for the Delawarr used to be seeded, but there was always some controversy raging about how the rankings were arrived at, and so the system was dropped in favour of random computer selection. That seemed to work okay for a while, then someone accused someone else of hacking the program and loading the draw. Whichever system was used, the only certainty was that somebody somewhere would object to it. That’s why the race board finally brought in the Rooster.

The Rooster is basically the same as the machine that’s used for selecting the National Lottery, with the added attraction of it letting out a deafening claxon blast at the end of each cycle – hence the name.

The name of each competitor is printed on to a plastic ball, and to avoid any accusations of ball-tampering, each ball is weighed in public on an electronic scale. Once they’ve been weighed, the balls are loaded into the Rooster. The machine is operated by pulling a lever – the name of the person who gets to do that is decided by a prize draw. The balls speed round and round inside a transparent plastic drum. At the end of sixty seconds, balls are released into a drawer at the bottom in batches of six. The drawer is opened and the names read out. The prelim heats go up on the board in the order they are called.

The whole process takes about two hours, which sounds a lot but it’s become part of the ritual now, people look forward to it. The dogs themselves stay out of sight in their pens until their heat is called. As the race day dawned, there were one hundred and eighty registered participants for the Delawarr Triple. That made thirty preliminary heats, ten hurdles each over eight hundred metres. The first two from each heat would go through to the quarters – ten heats of six, again over eight hundred metres. The winner of each quarter, plus the two fastest losers overall, would then progress to the semis. The final field would be made up of the first- second- and third-placers from each semi.

Every year you get someone calling for the system to be changed, because it’s inevitable that one semi is slower than the other. But the public prefer a straight race over clocked times any day, not just because it avoids any allegations of clock-fixing but because it’s more exciting.

The first prelim heats normally kick off around eleven. The quarters run from three till five, with the two semis lining up at six and six-thirty. The Delawarr Triple runs off at seven-thirty on the dot.

It’s a huge day. As a kid I used to love it, the atmosphere most of all, that sense of being a part of something big. The end of June is often claggy and sulphurous, but not always. I remember race days during my childhood when the sky was a high pale blue and more or less cloudless. Dad was still a fit and healthy man back then. He’d give Del and me money for cracknels and raceday souvenirs and when we were a little older he’d let us place a bet on the race itself. Normally we weren’t allowed to gamble but the Delawarr was an exception, a special occasion. Mum never came to the race, but she didn’t harp on about the dogs the way she did most Saturdays, and she’d always have a late supper waiting for us when we got back.

She’d even tell us stories about her own first race day, before she met my dad and got pregnant with Del.

“I was crazy about one of the runners,” she said. “Melton Craigh was his name.” It was the same story every year but I still loved to hear it. I found a photo of Melton Craigh in one of the old racing magazines. He ran the Delawarr two years running but didn’t place. He died aged thirty, from a degenerative condition of the spine. I wondered if my mother knew this – I never asked her. Melton Craigh in the photo had sticking-out elbows and very straight, very pale blond hair, as pale as Brit Engstrom’s. He looked exactly the kind of person who would die young.

Years later and long after she left us, Del told me that Mum’s famous crush on Melton Craigh had all been a lie.

“Craigh’s career was over before she even arrived here,” he said. “The first time she was ever at the track, Craigh was already bent double in a hospital bed.”

“Why would she lie, though?” I asked him. Del just shrugged. I checked up on what he’d said and found he was right. Melton Craigh died before we were born.

~*~

After my telephone conversation with Del I thought I’d have trouble getting to sleep but I didn’t. I remember putting the radio on. The next thing I knew it was morning and I was awake. I went to the window and looked out at the dawn sky, blooming with pale-bellied clouds, blotched silver-white and slightly glistening, like the skins of fishes.

It would be a fine day.

I arrived at the track just after eight. There was already a queue at the turnstiles. I stood in line and waited. The early clouds had mostly vanished and the heat was rising. Eventually I reached the head of the line. I could tell from the cheers inside the stadium that they’d already started weighing the balls for the Rooster. I wondered if Lim’s name had been loaded yet. I knew Del would have been at the track since before seven, getting the dogs booked in and settled in their pens.

Behind me in the queue a small group of out-of-towners were exchanging animated remarks about the breakfast they’d eaten in one of the expensive cafes along the Bulvard.

“Delicious,” said one of the women, a shiny blonde with a diamond nose stud and elaborate eye makeup. “It’s perfectly safe here. Clive clearly didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.”

I wondered. For a moment I tried to imagine what it might feel like to change places with her, to run away like my mother in nothing but the clothes I stood up in.

A whole new life on the toss of a coin. I wondered what Clive would have to say about that.

~*~

Limlasker was slated to run in the third heat, Celia Lilac in the eighth, both good draws in that they were early. The thing with unseeded heats is that they’re totally random, and obviously this can go either way. As it turned out, Lim was drawn against five novices – three pups in their first year of competition, and two three-year-olds, a dog and a bitch, both owned by out-of-town syndicates and running in the Delawarr Triple for the first time.

Lim galloped home, more than two full seconds ahead of the second-placer, the parti-coloured three-year-old bitch Trudi-Delaney.

“He was confused, I reckon,” Tash said when I went down to the kennels to see them after their heat. “He wondered where the hell the rest of them had got to.” She smiled, her long, slightly crooked teeth flashing in her dark face. The gear she was wearing could have been her training togs – black leather shorts and Adidas plimsolls, an ancient pair of gants in deep burgundy that Del told me had been a gift from her grandmother but she looked powerful as a raincloud and taut with energy. Her hair was pulled back from her face in a gold bandeau. She was spectacular. I began to feel excited, to relax even. There was still a long way to go but the omens seemed good.

Of the two, Celia Lilac’s heat turned out to be the tough one. Only two complete novices, and of the other three in the heat the dog, Melrose, was a former silver medallist. He was a stunning beast, pure black, still very leggy, and two hands taller at least than Celia Lilac. Even I could tell that Tommy was bricking it. It was a fast heat, one of the fastest of the morning, a three-way race between Melrose, Celia Lilac and a four-year-old bitch named Rachel Slim-Rachel. Melrose won the heat, but Celia Lilac finished second, just half a nose in front of Rachel Slim-Rachel.

Tommy was ecstatic and showing it. Del was not pleased.

“Cool it, will you, Tommy? You’re going to wear the dog out. Calm down.”

Celia Lilac was back in her pen by then, but Tommy was so high on adrenalin even I could feel it, all that loose energy pouring off him like sweat off a racehorse. Celia would be feeling that tenfold, perhaps more. Tommy might as well inject her with raw amphetamine.

Watching the heat made my heart race, but afterwards I felt more subdued. I wasn’t thinking about Celia or Tommy but about Melrose, the one-time silver-medallist with the coat like black satin. He’d taken his heat with the same ease as Limlasker and with half a second in hand. I knew it was pointless to compare times between heats – a good dog will always come out faster in a fast heat, it stands to reason – but it was still a worry. Melrose’s runner, the veteran Kris Kruger, looked cool as November. Melrose hadn’t won big for a while but he was looking superb.