He was only ten then, and it was bad enough we’d had Clay disappearing, though at least Tommy actually called. He was in a phone booth many miles away, and we drove there to pick him up.
“Hey, Tommy!” Henry called. “I didn’t know you knew what a phone booth was,” and it was great, that afternoon. We drove for a few good hours, through the city and by the coast. We promised we’d take him another day.
* * *
—
As for Clay, and for me, the training started one morning.
I’d caught him, midescape.
It was first light, and he came out front, and if he was surprised to see me by the letterbox, he was able not to show it; he only walked casually on. At least, by then, he wore shoes.
“You want some company?” I asked.
He shrugged, looked away, and we ran.
We ran together each morning, and me, I came back to the kitchen, I drank coffee, and Clay came back to the roof—and honestly, I saw the attraction: First, the legs, they lit with pain.
Then the throat and lungs.
You knew you were running hard when you felt it in your arms.
We ran up to the cemetery. We ran Poseidon Road. On Carbine we ran the middle; a car once blew its horn at us, and we parted, we veered, each side. We pounded the rotten frangipanis. From the cemetery, we watched the city.
Then there were the other great mornings, seeing boxers from up at the Tri-Colors, as they ran their early roadwork.
“Hey, boys,” they’d say, “hey, boys.”
Hunched backs and healing cheekbones.
The steps of broken-nosed boxers.
Of course, one of them was Jimmy Hartnell, and once he ran backwards and called to me. Like most of them he wore a lake there, of sweat round the rim of his T-shirt. “Hey, Piano!” he called. “Hey, Dunbar!” Then waved, and carried on. Other times when we crossed, we tapped hands like replacement footballers; one of us on, one off. We ran through all our problems.
Sometimes there were extras, too—young jockeys apprenticed to McAndrew. That was one of his requirements: in the first year of your jockey trade, you ran with the Tri-Colors boys, alternate days of the week. There wouldn’t be any exceptions.
I remember when we first ran to Bernborough, too: It was a Sunday, an arsonist sunrise.
The grandstand burned like a tenement—like the criminals had lit the place up—and the track was already awash: with weeds, and bedsores and eczema. The infield not quite a jungle, but certainly well on its way.
We did eight 400 meters.
Thirty seconds of rest.
“Again?” I asked.
Clay nodded.
That world in his stomach was gone from him, and the suffering a perfect beauty. At Bernborough, he switched back to barefoot, too, with the peg in the pocket of his shorts…and sometimes I think he planned it. Sometimes I think he knew:
We would run through the streets of the racing quarter.
He would search for him up from on the roof.
In the guise of looking for our father, I think Clay knew something was out there, and now I know it, too—because in there, out in the suburbs-world, we trained our way toward him: We ran and we searched to a mule.
On the weekend that Cootamundra ran in the racing capital down south, Ennis McAndrew made a decision, a shrewd one: Carey wouldn’t ride at all.
She’d been robbed of a ride in the Sunline-Northerly Stakes—her first Group One—and she was still just seventeen. He wouldn’t be here in the city for her, and he wouldn’t be taking her along. That surely would have killed her; watching the big bay horse hit the turn.
No, instead he told her simply.
“I think you’ve earned a weekend off.”
He wasn’t your average trainer.
* * *
—
Clay made a special point of coming back that Saturday, and there’d been talk in the week on the radio, of the horse and replacement rider.
On Friday night, when he left, Michael Dunbar surprised him.
He drove him into town, and they were their usual silent selves, but when they made it to the railway, he pulled an envelope from out of the glove box; he placed it on Clay’s lap. On top it said Carey Novac.
“What’s—”
“Just give it to her, okay? She’ll like it. I promise.”
There was no thought of think that one over, just a nod, just barely, across. The lights of the station felt miles away, and the town was mostly quiet. Only murmurs from a distant pub. He looked something like he once had, and Clay gave something back.
In plain sight, he pulled out The Quarryman.
He slid the envelope gently inside.
* * *
—
On Archer Street, next day, Ted and Catherine were both out working, so it was Carey and Clay in her kitchen.
They’d set up the scrappy black radio.
There was a nice small stereo in the lounge room, with digital and all the rest, but they chose to hear it on his. As he sat he realized quickly—this kitchen was amazingly clean.
Between them they exchanged short glances.
Neither of them wanted to speak.
The rider was a consummate professional, Jack Bird, and when the race was run, close to three o’clock, he didn’t let the horse out early, and the lead wasn’t quite enough; he was pocketed on the turn. When he asked him to give there was nothing left, and Clay listened but mostly watched her. He watched her distance of mile-long hair, the forearms above the table, and her face cupped tight in her palms; she was caught between wistful and miserable, but all she said was “Damn.”
* * *
—
They went to a movie not long after.
She reached over, she held his hand.
When he looked at her, she was watching the screen, but a tear was down her face.
It was such a strange thing that happened.
He leaned over and kissed her cheek.
It wasn’t a breach of the rules, though, and both of them somehow knew. He could taste its hurt and saltiness, then looked at her hand in his.
* * *
—
Later, they went to The Surrounds, and she lay down close beside him. She was ready to say some more now, a number she spoke like a grievance: “Seventh.”
Seventh, an abject failure.
At one point he counted her freckles, and there were fifteen on her face, but so tiny you had to search. There was a sixteenth down on her neck. They were so much redder than her hair, that blood against bronzy sunshine.
“I know,” she said, “there are worse things,” and there were, there definitely were.
For a while she lay with her head on him.
As always, Clay felt her breathing; the warmth of it, the gait.
It seems silly to talk about breath that way—like stride, like length in a race—but that was how he described it.
For a moment he looked down.
Again, that sixteenth blood spot—he wanted to touch it, to let his hand fall, but found himself suddenly speaking. What only she could understand.
“Bonecrusher,” he told her, “Our Waverley Star,” and expected the girl to stir. “That was a two-horse war.” Then, “Saintly,” he said, “and Carbine…” He was talking about a certain race, and horses who had won it. She’d told him only once of it—the first time they’d walked the racing quarter. “And Phar Lap, the greatest of them all.” Then he swallowed and said, “The Spaniard,” and that one almost hurt; The Spaniard, the bloodline of Matador—but still, he had to go further. “Hey,” he said, and he held her; he brought her closer, briefly. He clenched her flannelette arm. “But your favorite’s never changed, I think—it’s always Kingston Town.”
And finally, a last beat longer.
He felt the checkered squares.
“God,” she said, “you remember.”
With her he remembered everything. And he would always know how she’d quickened, when she answered about the Cox Plate, in 1982. How fitting to be in that period, when Penelope came to live here—and Carey now said what the commentary said, which was “Kingston Town can’t win.”
He held her, parceled up there.
His voice, part-voice, part-whisper:
“I always hear the crowd,” he said, “going crazy as he came from nowhere.”
* * *
—
Soon he got up, and he got her up, too, and they made the mattress bed; they shoved the heavy plastic down and tucked it into the ground.