The Race (8 page)

It was one o’clock in the morning and not quite dark. I love the long summer evenings. In winter it’s the thought of those long light evenings that keeps me going.

~*~

The phone woke me just after seven. The caller was Del.

“I’ve just spoken to them,” he said. “We’ve agreed a date for the exchange.” He named a day, the Monday immediately following the Delawarr Triple. “They’ll let me know the location nearer the time.” He sounded okay, buoyed up even, back in control. “See you this afternoon,” he said. For a moment I couldn’t think what he was talking about, then I remembered I’d promised to go over and see Claudia. It wasn’t a prospect I relished, but I knew there was no way I could get out of it.

“Fine,” I said. “See you.” I ended the call, then spent the rest of the morning measuring and cutting out the paper pattern I would use to make the gloves for Angela Kiwit. Pattern-making sounds simple but it’s not. It’s exacting work, and can’t be rushed. It occupied my mind entirely, and the deeper I sank into my work-trance the less I was aware of anything except the sound of my own breathing, steady and deep and reviving and entirely calm.

It was as if my life had split into two separate halves: one mad, one sane.

~*~

Limlasker was Swift Elin’s grandson. Swift Elin was tall, but Lim was taller, a hand’s breadth at least. He had the same light blue eyes and silver coat, but whereas Swift Elin was silver all over, Lim had a black patch, like an inky handprint, on his left hindquarter. Del always used to say it looked as if he’d had his arse slapped.

When Tash first took over Limlasker, Del stayed away from them as much as he could, at first, anyway. He said it was so Tash could get to know the dog without feeling scrutinized, but really it was for Limlasker and himself. Del wanted Lim to understand that their relationship was to change. Later on though, Del began to supervise Tash and Lim’s training sessions. Gra was worried that it wouldn’t work, that the dog would become confused and his performance would be affected but his fears proved groundless.

It was as if Del had told Lim he was giving him to Tash willingly, for a reason, and Lim understood and accepted that.

Greyhounds are different from other dogs, anyway. They hardly ever bark or wag their tails, but in their own quiet way they seem naturally empathic. Most dogs understand the world around them through their sense of smell, but greyhounds are sight hounds – they use their eyes for communication as well as for hunting prey. In other words, they’re more like people – one of the main reasons greyhounds were chosen to be smartdogs in the first place.

It’s weird, watching them train. The younger, less experienced runners tend to talk out loud to their dogs a lot, praising them and encouraging them or urging them on. Either the implant hasn’t been fully assimilated, or they don’t yet trust their ability. All that changes as they become more experienced, and the most naturally gifted runners – runners like Tash, or Roddy Haskin – hardly ever speak to their dogs at all in the normal sense. Everything happens on another level, an invisible, sub-audible level of communication that turns their training sessions into a kind of silent ballet. If you keep quiet and concentrate hard you can sense that communication taking place. It’s hard to explain but you can definitely feel it: a tension in the air, like electricity, the same sensation you get with lightning just before it strikes.

Watching Tash run Limlasker always gave me goosebumps. The two of them were special together – two faces of the same coin.

~*~

I ate a quick lunch then headed over to the Cowshed. I was worried that Claudia would either be in the depths of a catatonic depression or hyped up to the ceiling but she appeared perfectly calm. Thoughtfully, determinedly calm in a way that seemed just about as far from her usual vagaries as it was possible to get.

“I’ve been jotting down some ideas,” she said, more or less the moment I arrived. “I should have done this ages ago. Lumey’s a grown up little girl now, she isn’t a baby.”

She made us some tea, and showed me her diagrams and notes, plans to turn Lumey’s pink-and-white nursery into what Claudia kept calling ‘a proper little girl’s room’. The metal cot she slept in was to be replaced with a full-sized bed, the plush cerise carpet to be taken up and new wooden floorboards fitted. There was a nautical feel to everything. Clean, bright, cheerful. A room from a magazine feature.

“Do you think she’ll like it?” Claudia said.

I said yes at once, without thinking, then realised I meant it, that Lumey, should she ever return to the room, really would be delighted by the blues and whites, the neat little bookcase Claudia had ordered, the wooden dressing table with its circular mirror and secret drawer. Any child would be. We went online and I helped Claudia to pick out a wind chime to hang in the window, an assortment of dangling glass prisms and brightly painted fish made out of tin.

I became quite caught up in it all, actually, giggling over trifles, searching out new things to waste our money on, and at some point I realised the fiction had taken me over, that on some level at least I’d conned myself into believing my own evasions. The realisation brought it all back to me: Lumey’s gone-ness, the danger, our lies. It was as if a vast hole had opened beneath me, sprawling me backwards into nothingness. I thought of the old mine workings to the north of the town, the way the ground still caved in there sometimes.

People died in those collapses, several dozen every year.

I pictured myself struggling for a handhold in the falling earth, and supposed Claudia felt like that a dozen times already today, a hundred, more. I excused myself then went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. The water from the Cowshed’s taps had a metallic smell, like old coins kept in a shoebox at the bottom of a wardrobe.

The smell always made the water seem colder than it really was.

~*~

I drank a final cup of tea with Claudia and then walked up to the lunges. The lunges was where Del put the dogs through their time trials, a high stretch of what was once parkland but that had been left to run wild, a wide stretch of couch grass and thistle with panoramic views of the coastline and out to sea. If you look east from the lunges you can see the whole of Sapphire spread out beneath you like a toy town. If you look west you’ll see the marshes, stretching all the way to the horizon and beyond.

To the south lies France, just a short distance away across the Channel. Mum once told me that on a clear day you can see France from the top of the lunges but I’ve never been able to. Perhaps it’s never been clear enough. Mum went to France once, just for a day when she was a student.

“What was it like?” I asked her.

She shrugged her shoulders. “We ate sugar buns. In a coffee house. There was a boy there,” she said. I urged her to go on with the story but she wouldn’t. She seemed cross with me for a while after that, but I knew her crossness usually meant she was feeling sad.

Tash was running Limlasker over hurdles. She was wearing a tatty white vest and a pair of old khaki combats. Her hands lay still at her sides, the nails varnished an opalescent pink and perfectly manicured.

The vest had patches of yellow under the arm holes.

Lim was a large dog but when he was running he seemed barely there, an outline of a dog filled with air, a space in the stuff of the world where a dog should be. You could hear him when he passed right by you – a swift pat-pattering where his feet struck the turf – but otherwise he ran more or less silently, a sleek ghost.

Limlasker means ‘salmon’ in old Hoolish. There are no salmon in England now, or only in the very far north. The rivers and briny lakes to the south of London are home only to roach and gudgeon and oil pike and a few hardy carp. But whenever I saw Lim in full flight I found no problem imagining what a salmon looked like: a magnificent silver superfish charging upstream.

I knew Tash wouldn’t talk to me or to anyone while she was running. I could see Del in the distance, way off up the slope, marking timings. I sat down in the grass to watch. I didn’t have a stopwatch, of course, so I couldn’t check, but it seemed to me that Lim was running well, better than ever. Del had been easing off on him in recent months, entering him in fewer races, preparing him for retirement. But from where I was sitting he looked to be in peak condition.

It had already been agreed that when Tash started training with Clearview Princess, Limlasker would go back to the Cowshed to live. If he stayed healthy he’d live another ten years, and have a fine time, but of course Lim was lucky. Retired smartdogs remain valuable because of the implant technology, but they are also a problem. Many people, including some of the scientists who helped create them, don’t like having smartdogs living with them in their homes. The decent yards sell on their dogs where they can, to cognitive research units, or to rich businessmen in London as pets for their kids. But every year there is a surplus – too many too-old smartdogs. Some are turned loose on the streets, or taken out to the marshes and abandoned.

Most are just shot.

I often wonder if the out-of-towners who come down to Sapphire for a weekend’s racing know what happens to smartdogs when their careers are over. I don’t suppose they think about it much, any more than they wonder about where the kids who sell them fried dough-balls or racetrack souvenirs go when they clock off for the night. The out-of-towners have never been to Hawthorne or Mallon Way, and they never will.

Thinking about it makes me angry, but I also know that without the out-of-towners and their money the situation in Sapphire would be much worse. Without the dog track and the boardwalk and the string of posh hotels along the Bulvard, the estate kids would have no jobs and no prospect of jobs. Hawthorne was bad enough anyway because of the chemo seepage, but after the tunnels under London Road subsided things became even worse. The road is so unstable now that only the army can navigate it, using those big caterpillar trucks of theirs, and you can guess how high up Hawthorne comes in their list of priorities. In summer you can smell the rubbish tips all the way from the Bulvard, if the wind happens to be blowing in the right direction.

Hawthorne is where you live if you have nowhere else. Del once told me that Tash lived up there for a while with her grandmother when she was a kid. I’ve never dared ask her about it, though there are abandoned smartdogs up on the estate, I do know that. Skinny as reeds and left to run wild.

When Del saw I was there he pocketed his stopwatch and came over.

“How’s she doing?” he said. I knew he meant Claudia. He sat down beside me on the grass, his long legs bunched up, his green eyes watchful, a rangy yellow dog with scrawny limbs.

“She seems okay,” I said. “Better.”

“Thanks for helping out, Jen.” He gazed out across the lunges, to where Lim was still running the hurdles. Tash stood immobile, lean and supple as a young tree, her eyes half closed against the sun, which was sinking over the marshes in a fissile incandescence of soap-coloured light. “Lim took two seconds off his PB today. I mean, two whole seconds.”

“That’s not possible, Del. Not at his age. It must be a fluke.”

“It’s not, though. Lim knows what’s at stake and he’s going all out. He’s going to win for us, Jen. He knows he has to win, because of Lumey.”

“What’s Tash told him?” I knew that for all practical purposes the question was meaningless. What Tash knew, Lim would know too, automatically – that’s just a natural part of being a runner. What I was asking, I suppose, was what Del had told Tash.

“Everything,” Del said. “It’s the safest way.”

I thought he was taking a risk but it was too late to worry about that now. I sat side by side with my brother, watching the great silver dog course across the wide green sward and thinking for no reason at all about the old days, before Mum ran out on us and when Del and I were still kids. We had been close then, in a way that quickly receded after our mother left. That would probably have happened anyway, of course. Kids grow up, go their separate ways. Back then though it was just Del and me against the world, and we were fearless with it. We’d slink off and kick around the old waste dumps where our father worked, or else bunk off to Hawthorne to hang out with this kid Del knew who lived up there. Rico, his name was, Rico Chavez. Rico had this dog, Saltash. We used to nick stuff out of the abandoned flats.

I still have something from there, a brass button with a crown on it. From an old army uniform, it looked like. I found it on the floor, under a table. There were a fair few war vets living on the estates then. Most of those old coves are dead now. Sometimes when we were up there gallivanting one of them would come out on to his balcony and yell at us.

We’d run away laughing but some of them were scary as fuck.

Del was such a bright kid, but something nagged at him, deep down. A constant anger at the world that made him restless and wouldn’t heal.

Em reckons it was that restless anger that got Del into dealing glass.

Tash let Lim complete one final circuit and then called him to her, silently and without a gesture. They came unhurriedly down the field to where we were sitting.

“Timings are great,” Del said.

Tash nodded. She looked down at Limlasker, who immediately drew closer to her, leaning his silky body against her legs. Tash rested her hand lightly on the top of his head. “He’s in good shape,” she said. “He’ll do okay.” I could smell her sweat, a bitter scent, rough as tree bark. Runners tend to perspire a lot during a training session, even though they barely move a muscle.

“Stay for supper, Tash?” Del said.

Tash shook her head. “We should get back.” I thought of the house she shared with Brit Engstrom, a shack built from breeze blocks and corrugated iron, about three miles out on the Fairlight Road, at the edge of the marshes. Brit used a bicycle to get to and from town, but Tash liked to use the pitted lane as a running track, Limlasker trotting along by her side with his tongue hanging out.

Brit Engstrom’s hair was very blonde and cut very short. She had a sharp, beaky face, and a scattering of powder-fine freckles across the bridge of her nose. She liked to cook using wild roots and herbs she gathered in the marshes. Claudia thought she was mad, that the plants she used in her recipes would be toxic from seepage, but Brit insisted that so long as you knew where to forage there was no real danger.