“Even better!” shouted Rory, and just as I started to admonish him, it was Clay who cut through everything—the field, the grass, the TV. The lonesome carcass of washing machine. His voice directed away: “No.”
“What?”
We all said it at once, and the wind blew even harder.
“What’d you say, Clay?”
He looked cold in the warmth of the field. His short dark hair was flat on his head, and that fire inside him was lit; he said it, quietly, again.
A firm and final “No.”
And we knew.
We would leave things exactly like this. We’d let the thing die its own death here—or at least that’s what we believed—for how could we ever foresee it?
That Clay would come back and he’d lie here.
He’d squeeze the peg till it bit through his hand.
The first time was the night before State, once we’d sat for a while in the kitchen; him and me. He laid the truth down in between us: He’d win State, then go for Achilles.
He had the two hundred dollars—probably his whole life savings.
He didn’t even wait for an answer.
What he did do was go out the front, run a light run through the racing quarter, feed a few of our carrots to the mule—and end up back on the roof.
Then, later, much later, while the rest of us slept, he got out of bed and wandered there; he picked out a brand-new peg. He climbed up onto the fence, then walked the width of the laneway. It was dark and there wasn’t a moon out, but he found his way easily through.
He wandered and climbed over onto it.
The bed lay down in the gloom.
He curled himself up like a boy.
He lay down in the dark and he dreamed there, and cared nothing for winning or State. No, he spoke only to another boy, from a small country town, and a woman who’d crossed the oceans.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to both of them, “I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” The peg was clenched tight in his hand, and he addressed them, lastly, again. “I promise, I’ll tell you the story,” he said, “how I brought you both home Achilles.”
That mule was never for Tommy.
Once, in the tide of Dunbar past, there was a girl who knew a Dunbar boy, and what a girl she was.
She had auburn hair and good-green eyes.
She had a puzzle of blood-colored freckles.
She was famous for winning a Group One race, and dying the very next day—and Clay was the one to blame.
He lived and breathed and became it.
He eventually told them everything.
In the beginning, though, and quite fittingly, when Carey first had seen him, she’d seen him up on the roof.
* * *
—
She grew up in a town called Calamia.
Her father was a jockey.
Her father’s father, too.
Before that, she didn’t know.
She loved horses, trackwork, and trackwork riding, and records and stories of Thoroughbreds.
Calamia was seven hours away, and her first memories were of her dad. He’d come home from trackwork in the mornings, and she’d ask him how it had been. Sometimes she’d wake up when he left the house, at 3:45 a.m. She’d rub her eyes and say to him, “Hey, Ted, can I come, too?”
For some reason, whenever she woke in darkness, she called her mother Catherine, she called her father Ted. In the daytime it disappeared; they were simply Mum and Dad. That was one of many things not written or spoken about, years later, when they found her fallen, and dead.
* * *
—
As I said, she loved horses, but not in the way most girls did.
It was atmosphere, not ribbons.
It was stables more than shows.
As she grew older, in school holidays, she and her brothers begged to go to trackwork, and she loved those full dark mornings, of hoofbeats through mist and fog. She loved the way the sun came up, so distantly huge and warm-looking, and the air so close and cold.
Back then they ate toast on the fence line—all white, all rail and no palings—and they loved the trainers, how they swore beneath various breaths, and old jockeys hanging around, like toughened, deep-voiced children. It was funny seeing them in trackwork clothes, in jeans and vests and old skullcaps.
Her brothers were four and five years older, and when they hit the age, they’d also joined the racing game; it was obviously in the blood.
* * *
—
In racing they always talk about blood.
Or more, they talk of bloodlines:
Just as with Clay and the rest of us, there’s much to discover in the past.
According to Carey, her mother, Catherine Novac, was the only member of her family to both mistrust and despise the racing world, subject to her mood. She could be cold and pale-blue water-color; or gingery-blond and fuming. Sure, she loved horses, she enjoyed racing, but she abhorred the racing business; its wastage, its overbreeding. Its greedy girth of underbelly. It was something like a beautiful whore, and she’d seen it void of makeup.
Carey’s brothers had called her Catherine the Great, for she was formidably strict and serious; she was never fooling around. On race days, when she said to come back in one piece, they knew what she really meant: Don’t count on sympathy if you fall.
Life was hard for jockeys.
It was much, much harder for the horse.
* * *
—
Then Ted.
Trackwork Ted.
Carey knew the story.
Early on in his career, he was likely the most promising apprentice in the country, like a Pike, or a Breasley, or a Demon Darb Munro. At five-foot-seven, he was tall for a jockey and short for a man, but he had the perfect physique for riding, and a metabolism people would die for; he seemed unable to put on weight. The downside was that his face looked hastily assembled, like the manufacturers were in a rush. But that depended who you asked. A girl named Catherine Jamison thought he wasn’t half too bad. She loved his cluttered face and good-green eyes, and that she could carry him in her arms—till tragedy struck, one morning.
He was twenty-three years old.
Overnight, there was a sudden, metabolic change.
Where once he could eat a whole packet of Tim Tams on race day, now he could eat only the wrapper.
* * *
—
They’d been in the city for a while by then; they’d moved to make a real go of it. Catherine had a nursing job, at the Prince of Wales, near Randwick.
There came a week, a good few years into the stint, when Ted started feeling different. Then, a few hours before first light that day, he’d made the ritual trip to the bathroom, and the scales there didn’t lie; and neither did the mirror. He was simultaneously stretched out and filled in, and his face had lost its tardiness. But what was the good of that? Did he want to be handsome, or ride the perfect miler in the Doncaster? The world stopped making sense.
The worst part was his hands.
In their small apartment kitchen, he didn’t even contemplate his breakfast; he sat at the kitchen table, looking at those hands, and they were the meatiest things he’d ever seen.
* * *
—
For five long years, he worked and fasted.
He steam-roomed.
He lettuce-leaved.
When he read the paper he sat in the car in the heat of day, the windows all up, in his newest, warmest tracksuit. He mowed lawns in jacket and jeans, with a wetsuit underneath. He cramped up, he was irritable. He ran with garbage bags strapped to his legs, under winter woolen pants. These were the spoils of the racing game, and a thousand pent-up dreams—of Crunchie bars and chocolate cake, and impure thoughts of cheese.
There was the usual fare of injuries, too—he was thrown, he broke both wrists. He was kicked in the face in the stables. Trampled twice at trackwork. Once, in Race Three at Warwick Farm, a horse in front threw a shoe; it clipped him over the ear. It could have been many times worse.
By the twilight of his career he was like a soldier, or an ancient charioteer; each race was like going into battle. Through the purgatory in his stomach, and the toothaches, headaches, and dizzy spells, the final insult was a raging case of athlete’s foot, caught from the floor of the jockey room— “And that,” he often joked to Carey, age seven, in the car on their way to trackwork, “is what got me in the end.”
* * *