Clay turned.
“You have no idea what I’ve seen jockeys get up to over the years, and they did it”—he was suddenly so empathetic—“for things worth much less than you.” He even came down the steps; he met him at the gate. He said, “Listen to me, son.” For the first time, Clay noticed a silver tooth in McAndrew’s mouth, deep and leaning on the right. “I can’t imagine what it took to come and tell me that.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Come back in, won’t you?”
“I’d better get home.”
“Okay, but if there’s ever anything—anything—I can do for you, let me know.”
“Mr. McAndrew?”
Now the old man stopped, and the paper was under his arm. He raised his head just a touch.
Clay nearly asked just how good Carey was, or might have been, but knew that neither of them could bear it—so he tried for something else. “Could you carry on training?” he asked. “It wouldn’t be right if you didn’t. It wasn’t your—”
And Ennis McAndrew propped, readjusted the paper, and walked back up the path. He said to himself, “Clay Dunbar,” but I wish he’d been more obvious.
He should have said something of Phar Lap.
(In waters so soon to come.)
* * *
—
At Ted and Catherine Novac’s house, the last could only be finding them: The lighter, the box and Clay’s letter.
They didn’t know because they hadn’t touched her bed yet, and it lay on the floor, beneath.
Matador in the fifth.
Carey Novac in the eighth.
Kingston Town can’t win.
Ted touched the words.
For Clay, though, what puzzled him most, and ultimately gave him something, was the second of two more items now that lay inside the box. The first was the photo his father had sent, of the boy on top of the bridge—but the second he’d never given her; it was something she’d actually stolen, and he would never know exactly when.
It was pale but green and elongated.
She’d been here, 18 Archer Street.
She’d stolen a Goddamn peg.
For Ted and Catherine Novac, the choice would make itself. If she wasn’t apprenticed to McAndrew, it would only be someone else; it might as well be the best.
When they told her, there was kitchen and coffee cups.
The clock ticked loudly behind them.
The girl stared down and smiled.
She was pretty much sixteen, early December, when she stood on a lawn in the city, in the racing quarter, with the toaster plug at her feet. She stopped, looked harder, and spoke.
“Look,” she said, “up there….”
* * *
—
The next time, of course, was evening, when she came across the road.
“And? You don’t want to know my name?”
The third was a Tuesday, at dawn.
Her apprenticeship didn’t start till the beginning of next year, but she was already running with the Tri-Colors boys, weeks earlier than instructed by McAndrew.
“Jockeys and boxers,” he was known to say, “they’re almost the bloody same.” Both had obsessions with weight. Both had to fight to survive; and there was danger, and death, close at hand.
That Tuesday, mid-December, she was running with those lake-necked boxers. Her hair was out—she almost always wore it out—and she fought to hold ground behind them. They came down Poseidon Road. There were the usual fumes, of baking bread and metalworks, and at the corner of Nightmarch Avenue, it was Clay who first saw her. At that time he trained alone. He’d quit the athletics club altogether. She was in shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. When she looked up, she saw him see her.
Her T-shirt was faded blue.
Her shorts were cut from jeans.
For a moment she turned and watched him.
“Hey, boy!” called one of the boxers.
“Hey, boys,” but quiet, to Carey.
* * *
—
The next time he was on the roof, it was warm and close to darkness, and he climbed back down to meet her; she was standing alone on the footpath.
“Hey, Carey.”
“Hi, Clay Dunbar.”
The air twitched.
“You know my last name?”
Again, he noted the teeth of her; the not-quite-straight and sea glass.
“Oh yeah, people know you Dunbar boys, you know.” She almost laughed. “Is it true you’re harboring a mule?”
“Harboring?”
“You’re not deaf, are you?”
She was giving him a hiding!
But a small one, a happy one, and one he was willing to answer.
“No.”
“You’re not harboring a mule?”
“No,” he said, “I’m not deaf—we’ve had the mule for a while. We’ve also got a border collie, a cat, a pigeon, and a goldfish.”
“A pigeon?”
He struck back. “You’re not deaf, are you? He’s called Telemachus—our animals have got the worst names you ever heard, except maybe Rosy, or Achilles. Achilles is a beautiful name.”
“Is Achilles the name of the mule?”
He nodded; the girl was closer.
She’d turned outwards, toward the suburbs.
Without thought, they both started walking.
* * *
—
When they got to the mouth of Archer Street, Clay looked at her legs in her jeans; he was a boy, after all, he noticed. He also saw the tapering at her ankles, the worn-out sandshoes—the Volleys. He was aware when she moved, of the singlet she wore, and materials he glimpsed beneath.
“It’s pretty great,” she said at the corner, “to end up living on Archer Street.” She was lit by the glow of the streetlight. “First horse who ever won it: the Race That Stops the Nation.”
Clay then tried to impress her. “Twice. The first and the second.”
It worked, but only to a degree.
“Do you also know who trained him?”
On that one he was no chance.
“De Mestre,” she said. “He won five and no one knows it.”
* * *
—
From there they walked the racing quarter, down streets all named for Thoroughbreds. Poseidon, the horse, was a champion, and there were shops with names they loved, like the Saddle and Trident Café, the Horse Head Haberdashery, and a clear and present winner—the barbershop: the Racing Quarter Shorter.
Near the end, close to Entreaty Avenue, which led up to the cemetery, there was a small right turn beside them; an alley called Bobby’s Lane, where Carey stopped and waited.
“It’s perfect,” she said, and she leaned on the fence, into its sheet of palings. “They called it Bobby’s Lane.”
Clay leaned a few meters next to her.
The girl looked into the sky.
“Phar Lap,” she said, and when he thought she might be teary, her eyes were giving and green. “And look, it’s an alley, not even a street; and they called it after his stable name. How can you not like that?”
For a while there was close to silence, just the air of urban decay. Clay knew, of course, what most of us know, about the iconic horse of our country. He knew about Phar Lap’s winning streaks, how the racing board almost crippled him, from the force of too much weight. He knew about America, how he went there, won a race, and died seemingly the very next day. (It was actually just over two weeks.) He loved, like most of us, what people say, for courage, or trying with everything: You’ve got a heart as big as Phar Lap.
What he didn’t know was what Carey told him that night, as they leaned, in that nondescript laneway.
“You know, when Phar Lap died, the prime minister was Joseph Lyons, and that same day he’d won a high court decision—no one cares anymore about what—and when he came down the court steps and someone asked him about it, he said, ‘What good is winning a high court decision when Phar Lap is dead?’?” She looked from the ground to Clay. Then the sky. “It’s a story I really love,” and Clay, he had to ask.
“Do you think he got murdered up there, like people say?”
Carey could only scoff.
“Nah.”
Happy but sad as hell, and adamant.
“He was a great horse,” she went on, “and the perfect story—we wouldn’t love him so much if he’d lived.”
* * *