The Race (5 page)

“That’s what I reckoned,” he said. “Lumey’s bright as anything. It’s just that Cee’s got me scared to pick the kid up in case I drop her.”

“It’s not fair to blame Claudia, Del. You know what she’s like. If anything happened to Lumey I think she’d lose her mind.”

“You think I don’t know that? I’m the one that has to live with it. If she carries on like this she’ll drive us both nuts.”

“Help her, then. Tell her you believe Lumey’s fine and that she should stop worrying.”

“I’ll do that.”

It wasn’t like Del to say thank you for anything, but I could tell our talk had made him feel better. I fetched him a beer from the fridge and he flicked it open with his thumbnail, a trick he’d had off pat since forever.

The cap rolled away across the floor and under my workbench. Del took a swig from the bottle and then asked me a question.

“Who d’you think she looks like? Cee or me?”

His asking took me by surprise, because the answer seemed obvious. Claudia’s like a big pink rose, no one in our family looks remotely like her. Del is angular and kind of scrawny looking. His narrow chest and long arms have always made him look taller than he is. Then there’s that sticking-up crest of yellow curls that first gave him his nickname, those lightning-green eyes.

“She looks like you, of course,” I said. “Who do you think?”

He tipped his beer to me and gave me a rare smile.

“I reckoned that, too,” he said. “Poor little monster.”

~*~

Lumey was wonderful, actually. I’ve never been into kids particularly, but I was into Lumey right from the start. She wasn’t just cute, she was smart, too. It was true that she didn’t say much, but it was obvious she understood what words meant, you could tell that just from the way she started paying attention when you spoke her name. Then sometimes when she heard a new word, she’d grab towards the mouth of the person who had spoken it –as if she saw words as solid objects: living, darting sound-fish that she could catch between her fingers if she were only quick enough.

She was easy to take care of, too, because she never got bored. I could sit her in the corner of my work room with a couple of empty cotton reels and some scraps of patterned lining fabric and she’d be happy for hours just arranging and then rearranging those few things, playing some secret game of her own, all in silence and yet so attentive, as if she were listening to special music that only she could hear.

It was weird and a bit unnerving but beautiful, too. I knew Lumey was different, but I couldn’t see how her being different mattered a damn. There are all kinds of words now for kids who refuse to accept the world as it’s been laid down for them, but I thought that trying to make sense of Lumey was pointless, and might even damage her.

~*~

I will never forget the day she finally spoke. She was three and we were up at the yard. I can’t remember even why I was there – most likely I was just hanging out with Del the way I sometimes still did.

I should explain that the first time I saw a smartdog up close I was totally freaked. I was five or six or thereabouts – at any rate, it was my first time at the track. Dad had already explained to us that smartdogs were different from ordinary street dogs, but I wasn’t expecting to notice the difference as much as I did. Up till then I’d only seen them on TV, and apart from the mangy curs that hung around the municipal rubbish dump the only dogs I’d had any real contact with were my dad’s mate Merle’s brindle Staffie and the overweight spaniel Boris who belonged to Mrs Roberson who ran the fish shop.

The engineered hounds were different because they seemed more aware of you. They gazed at me with open curiosity, as if they were my equal. I wasn’t used to that then, not in a dog, and I suppose it threw me off balance. I expected the dogs in the trackside pens to be pacing about and making a fuss, the way any animal will do if it’s shut up for too long. The smartdogs weren’t doing that, though, they weren’t even barking. They were standing still and staring calmly ahead, as if they were listening for a signal that would tell them what to do and where to go.

As I say, it gave me the willies. That’s just the way the dogs are, of course, and I soon got used to it. But Lumey seemed to get on with the dogs from the moment she was able to toddle across the yard. I know Claudia wasn’t too keen on Del taking Lumey to work – she was afraid Lumey would catch something, most likely – but she was never going to put a stop to it, not just because Del liked having her with him but because Lumey herself was crazy about the dogs. She loved being around them, Limlasker especially, it was amazing to see. On the day it happened, Carson Stringer was just about to head off to the lunges with his dog, Scallion. Scallion was huge, a great red horse-hound of a dog, gentle as piss like all smartdogs but still pretty impressive. When I saw Lumey rushing up to him I felt scared for a moment, just because Scallion was so big and Lumey so small.

I think Del must have felt the same, because he took a quick step towards her, as if to drag her away, but then at the last minute he backed off. He decided it was better just to let things take their course I reckon, but I could see why he was nervous.

Lumey gazed up at Scallion, stared at him with her eyes wide open as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Then she raised her arms high above her head, and said ‘run’.

We all heard it, clear as anything. Lumey’s first ever word.

The dog bent his great head towards her, swishing its tail.

“Holy fuck,” said Carson Stringer. “She’s going to be a champ, boss. You’d better cover your arse and get her signed up.”

Everyone laughed, Del especially. Del was elated. “I knew she could talk,” he kept saying to me afterwards. “The brainy kids always take longer. Don’t they always say that?”

I told him I’d heard something of the kind, then I made a joke about like father, like daughter, and the way Del’s face lit up at that, it hurt my heart. And I was happy, too. Happy for Del and happy for Claudia, who was going to float right up to the ceiling when she heard the news.

I knew it wasn’t that simple, though. Lumey hadn’t just spoken, she had
heard
as well. Not a sound that I could hear, but something. You could tell just from the way she stood, still as a sentry,
listening
. Something had passed from Scallion and into Lumey and then back again.

Like a silken cord, like a signal along a telegraph wire, like light.

I had no idea what I had seen, only that it had been extraordinary.

If Del noticed it too I didn’t know, and I didn’t ask.

~*~

I always liked the way the runners dressed, even as a kid. Not just the way they stood out from the crowd, but the way the clothes they wore seemed to strengthen their idea of themselves, to help them be what they were, and to be it better.

I’m not saying that a runner can’t be a runner without runner’s gants. It’s not the gloves themselves that are special, it’s the runners thinking they are. I’ve heard it said that strong thoughts can make magic, and a fine pair of gants – like a charm or a curse – is just something that helps strong thoughts take on a definite shape.

This was something that seemed clear to me from the first. I remember one Saturday when I was down at the track as usual with Dad and Del, waiting in line at the kiosks to get a kebab. From where I was standing I could see the dogs that were in the next race being led past on their way to the traps, their runners standing back from the trackside as the gates were closed. The video screen at the far end of the stadium stopped displaying an advert for 7-Up and started to show live footage of the smartdogs instead. The favourite for that race was a three-year-old parti-coloured male called Space Cadet. His runner was Kayleigh dos Santos, and when she went up to receive her start card I had my first clear sight of her.

Her hair was cropped close to her skull in a style I envied but that Mum had already said it was pointless for me even to think about. Dos Santos wore zip-up silver gants with a cerise leather cuff. Instead of the traditional knee-high boots, she wore a tatty pair of hi-top sneakers bought from Ku-dam or Primark. The contrast of the cheap chain store shoes with the designer gants did something peculiar and thrilling to my insides. There was such daring in it, something so unexpected and so
rude
it made my heart flip up in my chest like a bush cricket.

What I didn’t know at the time was that Kayleigh dos Santos had done time in prison for dealing glass. Runners are pretty evasive on the subject of glass. Most who have tried the drug won’t admit to it, those who do talk about their experience often say there are no words to describe it anyway, so why bother trying? The compound makes the implant work better, apparently. It can’t enhance the performance of the hardware – that would be impossible – but what it does do is put your brain into a state where it can engage more fully with the software processes and at a higher level.

The drug glass, like the implant clinics, is something that is supposed not to exist. It was developed by the police and the military as a coercive, to be injected into the brains of prisoners who were about to take a lie detector test. The cops claim a prisoner under the influence of glass is physically unable to lie, that the truth gets hardwired into every brain cell like a piece of computer code. The drug became known as glass because it supposedly enables you to see the world more clearly. Habitual users say that when you’re high on glass the insides of things and even invisible things become revealed to you, clearly in focus, as through the lens of a microscope.

The downside of glass is that it soon begins to erode brain function rather than enhance it. Use glass long enough and hard enough and your mind gets cut to pieces from the inside. People have died raving in police cells through being overdosed on glass. Not that the cops would admit culpability in a hundred years.

Del always said that glass was shit in capsule form, that he’d known good runners ruined forever with just a single hit. Any of his runners caught in possession were sacked on the spot.

Like all the Class A Classifieds, glass has a high street value. For those of a criminal persuasion, dealing glass can generate a lucrative income.

“The dopeheads say glass takes them to the magic mountain, “Del said to me once. “Too bad when they can’t come down again. More fools them.”

~*~

All runners are funny about their gloves, but in different ways. For some it’s a trophy thing, a way of showing off how much money they’ve won. Jocks like that get a kick out of being photographed in a new pair of gants every week of the year – they collect them the same way they collect winning tickets. Others are just the opposite: they get fixated on one pair of gloves and won’t race without them. I heard of one guy who had his gloves stolen or lost them or something and went completely berserk. He began losing races after that, one duff run after another, and ended up shooting himself. His case was extreme but not unique. All runners are natural obsessives, it’s part of the temperament. What some people call the allure.

I was drawn to that, right from the beginning, the queasy excitement of it all, but it was Em who helped me find my vocation. Until he told me he liked it, the old junk I collected was just that – junk. Stuff I hung on to because I found it interesting but nothing more. But when Em said what he said about artistic talent it set me thinking. Perhaps other people might find the junk interesting, too. Perhaps seeing the specialness inside a thing, that secret store of memories contained inside even the cheapest and most commonplace of objects, was as much a gift as being good at maths, or having the natural empathy to be a smartdog runner.

Something clicked inside my head, it was as simple as that. As if the different parts of my brain were like a jigsaw puzzle: for ages they’d been all mixed up, now everything started falling into place.

I taught myself to sew from books I turned up in dumpsters, from printed patterns I found in old colour supplements or on the internet, many of them so out of date that by the time I got my hands on them they were in fashion again. At some point I learned that the making of bespoke racing gauntlets was a specialist art I could earn a good living from, so long as I worked hard and learned to be choosy about my clients.

There are other glove makers in Sapphire, but I’ve never had any problem getting work.

~*~

For standard-model racing gauntlets I normally use buck hide. For Angela Kiwit’s I used kid leather. Kid is expensive but it’s softer and more pliable, plus the molecular strengthening treatments used at the tanning stage make kid almost as strong as buck these days in any case.

Angela Kiwit’s specifications regarding the colour were pretty exact.

“You know those blue snake things on that TV ad?” Kiwit said when she came for her fitting. “That’s the colour I want.”

Oddly enough I had seen the advert she was referring to. I forget what the ad was for now, but it featured a massive shoal of electric eels, all rippling and waving in unison like an underwater flag. I didn’t know if the eels were real or CGI, but I remembered the colour exactly: a strident neon blue, intense and translucent at the same time. Angela Kiwit had brought along a strip of cardboard torn from a cereal packet that approximated the colour pretty well but I didn’t need it. I knew what she wanted – now it was simply a matter of tracking it down.

Angela Kiwit was on the up, one of those clients I knew could be important for me, not only because she was so talented but also because she had a great look, coupled with a natural knack for understanding what suited her. She was tall – about six feet, and that was without the four-inch stiletto knee boots. She wore decorative gaiters over the boots, silver lycra in imitation of the gang kids down on the Stade. Kit like that usually looks ridiculous on anyone past the age of twenty but on Kiwit it looked magnificent and the electric blue gauntlets she wanted me to make for her would be the final masterstroke.

I could see at once what she was getting at – she wanted the gloves to be a cheeky rip-off of the ultramarine elbow-length gants made famous by Leesa Muttola in the early 90s. The imitation was pretty brazen – you needed chutzpah as well as style to carry it off. Luckily for her, Kiwit had both. The gloves would be worth the outlay in TV exposure alone.