The Race (2 page)

I think the worst part was the feeling of helplessness. Dad’s passive acceptance of everything – Mum leaving, Del’s vileness, carrying on with a job he knew was killing him – made me seize up inside with anger and frustration. Del’s moods were even worse. The way he yelled and swore at Dad made me feel like screaming.

I ended up resenting them both. I was desperate to escape, but I couldn’t see how.

~*~

Dad used to take us to the dogs every weekend when we were kids. It was the one thing he always did with us, without fail, our family time. Del and I used to look forward to it all week. Dad was always after Mum to come with us, but she invariably refused. She claimed it was because she was opposed to genetic engineering but I’m sure that was just an excuse. She knew all about Romney Heights when she was in college, but that didn’t stop her from becoming a race nut and drinking schnapps up at the Ryelands with the dog crowd until all hours. I think her refusal had far more to do with not wanting to be reminded of those times, when she was young and having fun and felt she still had choices.

The dog scene used to be her thing and now it wasn’t – that’s why she hated it. She would have poisoned it for Dad too, if she could have, but for Dad the dogs were sacrosanct, his one remaining pleasure. He wasn’t going to give them up, not even for her.

“It’s not like I even spend much,” he said. “Just the odd couple of shillings now and then. That’s hardly going to bankrupt us, is it?” My father was the kind of man who would rather give way on something than get into an argument, but my mother’s nagging about the track really got on his nerves.

“How can you stand those people?” she would say. “All those tin-pot godfathers and mining millionaires throwing their weight about. You do know that every shilling you spend there goes to line their pockets? The whole thing stinks, if you ask me. I don’t know how you can bear to associate with them.”

“I don’t get within farting distance of those wankers, and you know it. I just want to spend some time with my mates, show the kids a bit of fun for a change. What’s wrong with that?”

“You see enough of your mates down the pub. And I don’t like the children being exposed to gambling.”

“Exposed to gambling? I’ve never heard such bollocks in my life.”

The row would rumble on until my mother became bored with it and slammed out of the room. Dad would take us to the dog track on Saturday, same as usual.

My early memories of going to the dogs all blend into one. Kids younger than ten aren’t supposed to be admitted to the stadium but in practice no one cares, so long as they behave and don’t get in the way. There’s one photo I still have from back then, of me queuing up for treacle toffee at one of the refreshment stands. It’s summer. My bare shoulders are streaked with sunblock and my hair is in plaits. Not the two identical rope-braids I wore for school, but twenty or so little scraggy ones that stuck out from around my head like twists of raffia. I was about seven, and I remember wanting to look like Ruby Challence, who was one of the best new runners that season and only nineteen.

Ruby Challence wore her hair in proper corn rows. Also, she had her nose pierced. I’d never seen anyone cooler in my life.

Sapphire dog track lies out on the coast road, about a mile from the centre of town, three stops on the tramway. It stands on a flat, scrubby outcrop of land that was once, many decades ago, the municipal coach park. The stadium is built from wooden slats, like a giant soup barrel. Everyone goes in the same way – ordinary locals and upmarket corporate and out-of-towners, all of us filing in together through the turnstiles. The out-of-towners especially fascinated me, and I always made a point of watching what they did. Both the men and the women had an odd way of speaking. I don’t mean their London accents, I mean the way they laughed, too often and too loudly, like they were nervous of having their pockets picked. I used to search their faces, wondering what they thought was going to happen to them.

It’s as if they thought the town might be contagious or something. Sad, really.

The out-of-towners mostly stayed at the Ryelands, a large hotel also on the coast road and more or less opposite the dog track. The place was enormous, with over a hundred bedrooms and a swish rooftop restaurant. Del said it used to be an insane asylum. I never knew if he was joking or not, but with its needle-eye windows and red brick towers I had to admit it was kind of spooky-looking, even at the height of the season with people laughing out on the roof and all the lights burning.

Most of the ground floor of the Ryelands was taken up by a casino – black-and-white marble floors, and a crystal chandelier so large that when I was a kid I used to worry about it coming loose from its support bracket and crashing down on the upturned faces of the crowd below. When I was older I had a summer job at the Ryelands for a while, serving behind the bar and waiting tables. It was hard work, but a laugh. Most guests came for the racing, so the casino only really got going once the stadium had closed for the night. I liked working at the Ryelands. It meant I had some money of my own, plus I enjoyed the gossip, the sense of belonging, the hot purple nights. I would have stayed longer, but the management found out I wasn’t eighteen and asked me to leave.

You can go to the dogs every night of the week during the season if you want to, but the big races, the ones that attract all the smartest money and the fastest smartdogs, take place at the weekend. Friday nights are the biggest usually, unless it’s a cup race, which are always held on Saturdays. The stadium’s packed then. I know some people get nervous in crowds, but right from my first visit I found it thrilling, not just the racing itself but the whole atmosphere of the stadium – the shouting and swearing, the smell of frying onions and chargrilled meat, the row of kiosks by the turnstiles that sold souvenir programmes and plastic key rings and novelty pens. I was always on at my dad to buy me something or other from the souvenir stands, and usually he would. I still have some of those trinkets, stashed away in boxes with other rubbish, the kind of stuff you no longer need but can’t bear to get rid of.

Things like that are not so much objects as language, a secret language of memory that everyone speaks. You pay a couple of shillings for a crappy tin key ring you know you’re never going to use, and as soon as you get home you chuck it away in a drawer and forget all about it. But months, perhaps years later you find it again, and all at once you catch the aroma of roasting pigeon and cracked lentils, you remember the steadily rising heat of that afternoon, the row you had with your girlfriend because of the money you lost on a rank outsider, the great fuck you had later, to make up.

It’s as if for those moments while you’re holding the key ring you have that day back again, and it makes you think. It makes you think about the past too, when the town was just a tiny fishing village and there were no smartdogs. It makes you wonder if the future was something we could have changed if we’d tried harder, or if everything that was going to happen would still have happened, whatever. Perhaps even before the universe existed it was already there – the fuel dumps, the tower blocks, the marble casino at the Ryelands, the dog track, all of it.

Perhaps the past and the future are really the same. Del says it doesn’t matter because sooner or later the sun is going to explode and the Earth will die.

“The sun’s getting bigger all the time, did you know that?” he told me once. “Bigger and hotter, and when it can’t grow any more the whole thing will go up like an ammo dump. The biggest ammo dump explosion in the whole of history. Anyone who’s still around then will be toast.”

He tore a bite off his gammon sandwich and began to chew, staring at me all the while, daring me to contradict him.

I didn’t though. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. I know he’s right in what he says, but I like to hope it won’t be the end, that creatures who were smart enough to put a man on the moon will one day be smart enough to invent a way of getting us out of here before it’s too late.

To find a new home for us to fly to, where we can start again.

I have to believe that, even though I’ll be millions of years dead by then, and so will Del and so will Claudia. Lumey will be dead too, wherever she is. I have to believe that it matters, or what’s the point? If you have nothing to believe in, you stop being yourself, and when that happens you might as well be dead anyway.

Del had no time for fancies like that, and as for the secret language of memory, I don’t think Del bought a single race track souvenir in the whole of his life.

“Why do you want to waste your dough on that shit?” he would say. “That’s half a race ticket you’ve just splashed away.”

Del was there for the dogs, and that was it. Right from the beginning the dogs were his life.

~*~

If Mum had had her way, Del would have studied hard and gone to college. He would have graduated with honours, then left this town on the tramway, never to return.

He could have done it, too, if he had wanted to. Del was every bit as clever as our mother believed he was, cleverer, probably. But the only thing Del ever wanted was to be a runner.

He was a nightmare at school. He held the teachers and everything they told him in contempt.

“If those wankers have all the answers, how come the world’s such a fuck-up?”

There was no answer to that, or at least none that would satisfy Del. By his early teens he was bunking off most of the time anyway.

The teachers made the usual fuss and sent letters to my mum imploring her to take control of her son but I reckon most of them were glad to be shot of him.

It drove Mum wild.

“Do you want to end up like your father?” That was the worst insult she could think of to fire at him, the heavy artillery, but he took less notice of her than he did of the teachers. Instead of going to school, Del would sneak off to the Hawthorne estate to hang with the gang kids, or go fishing for giant crayfish in Filsham reedbeds. Those fuckers were huge. Some of the kids insisted they were mutants, genetic deviations caused by pollution in the water table, but that was all crap I reckon, they were just big crayfish.

When it was too cold to go to the reservoir, they’d go to Charlotte House. Charlotte House was on Cliff Road, not far from the dog track. In Sapphire’s glory days as a resort it was a seaside hotel, like the Ryelands only not so large. When the hotel business collapsed it became a sanatorium for traumatized war veterans, and when that closed it was boarded up and left to go derelict. A spooky place, but fascinating. There was still furniture in some of the rooms, including a wardrobe full of moth-eaten evening dresses, and a huge black desk with what seemed like hundreds of tiny compartments that wouldn’t open. Del used to take his girlfriend there, Monica Danby. It was no secret that Monica hated the place. She said it was dirty and dangerous and that druggies went there, all of which was true but missed the point.

I remember Del once made Monica walk across the exposed floor joist on the fourth floor landing. Some of the boards had rotted away up there, so you had to be careful. We used to take it in turns walking across. It made your guts heave if you were stupid enough to look down, but the joist was quite wide and you couldn’t have fallen through, not easily anyway, the gap was too narrow.

Monica was useless at stuff like that, though. She didn’t fall, thank goodness, but she was in floods of tears.

I thought Monica would chuck Del after the beam-walk incident, but she didn’t.

~*~

Del started going to school again after Mum left. At first I thought it was just his way of getting back at her, but of course Del wasn’t the type to waste his own time on someone else’s account and as it turned out his reason for returning to class was Emerson Rayner.

Emerson Rayner was what you’d call a classic nerd – a fat kid with bad acne, a near-genius at maths and just about the last person you’d have thought Del would hang out with. In fact it wasn’t Em so much as his dad that my brother was courting. Em’s dad Graeme was in the racing business – the manager of a medium-sized yard who also owned and trained dogs of his own. He was so unlike his son it was almost funny – a heavyset, barrel-chested guy with powerful shoulders and his long hair tied back with a bootlace like a motorcycle jockey’s. He always wore the same pair of red leather Kuprow runner’s gloves: engraved silver knuckle caps and styled short to the wrist. They were off the peg and not really old enough to class as retro but I loved them anyway because they had style. Only real pros can wear gloves like that and get away with it, and Graeme Rayner was a pro, no doubt about it.

Of course, Del started out seeing Em as nothing more than his entrance pass to the Rayner yard. But one of the oddest things in this whole story is that the two of them ended up becoming actual friends.

Gra Rayner’s best dog was Swift Elin. She was a silver tip, so tall and light and skinny she could rest her front paws on your shoulders and you would hardly feel them. She was a multiple cup winner, and placed fourth in the league championships three years running. Swift Elin was very gentle off the track, but when she was racing she’d get her head down and give everything. She was so fast it was uncanny. It was as if her soul was charged by lightning.

Her runner, Roddy Haskin, was a dry old stick. I say old because that’s how he seemed – burned out and way off beam and mostly silent. In fact he was probably around forty-five at the time I knew him. That’s old for a runner, yes, but by no means extreme. He was as skinny as Swift Elin herself, but instead of looking like a silver ghost he had the appearance of a string of dried bacon rind. He spent most of the time he wasn’t actually training roaming around the marshes with Swift Elin.

“Have you seen them?” Del said to me once. “Like fucking Siamese twins, the pair of them. I swear if you kicked one of them in the mouth the other would bite you.”

They say a dog and its runner are like one tank of water that happens to get divided between two separate containers. It’s unsettling to see at first but you soon get used to it, the same way you do with identical twins who are always together.