by Anne Manne
I began to be rather obsessed with pleasing Helga, and winning my golden goat. I would sit in tutorials and while away the time as I listened to the more tedious of my students’ papers by drifting off to contemplate my small field with a golden goat munching the daisies in springtime.
Strike that. Daisies, according to Helga, were extremely poisonous.
On and on it went, for many months.
Finally, by springtime, the hay was stored, the daisies and bracken more or less brought under control (I admit to only telling Helga about the more part) and a new enclosure made, the right bedding installed, while my vigilance on the bat front, I assured her, was second to none. I now felt I knew far more about goats, or at least the hazards facing them, than my thesis topic. I had a new vision of my smallholding, seeing it through the narrowed eyes of suspicion, for only vigilance would prevent it being a goat deathtrap. I wrote to Helga, outlining what seemed to me now a home without blemish.
For a time there was a long silence and I began to wonder if she would ever reply, or whether she had taken Cinn-Ah-Mon back to Switzerland to escape my clutches. Finally Helga’s reply came, sadly acknowledging that I had met all her requirements. But she also wrote that it was a great pity that I did not have other goats because Cinn-Ah-Mon would be lonely without her herd. She had grown up with them after all, and had never been a lone goat before. The phrase ‘lone goat’ stung. This letter had more impact than all the other letters warning of toxic plants and death by strangling. I was about to make a little goat lonely. I could not possibly afford another goat. Nor did I now want one. Goats were high maintenance. I could hear her plaintive cry, bleating its loneliness, crying for her mates, especially when I was away for my job. I was now faced with a question: was owning Cinn-Ah-Mon really fair?
Helga really knew how to hit below the belt. She had me exactly where she wanted me. I was beginning to wonder—was I up to it? Cinn-Ah-Mon was, after all, clearly no ordinary goat.
For all these months the battle for Cinn-Ah-Mon had gone on. The eager, new owner who had paid—me—as supplicant before the disdainful, former owner—Helga—who nonetheless still had possession. Was not possession nine-tenths of the law? Could I form a raiding party with some of my housemates, snaffle Cinn-Ah-Mon and whisk her away? I thought about it. But in reality, although for a long time my stubborn streak was dominant, nonetheless I was determined that I would win this goat but with Helga’s approval.
Then one day, listening to a lecture, my thoughts drifted away to Helga and it suddenly came to me. This was a mother-in-law, daughter-in-law problem. Helga had bred her, birthed her, and reared her. Just as it is in some families, the tangled knots binding a son to their mother are too great ever to be unravelled, so it was with Helga. A great number of unhappy marriages would be avoided if only the prospective daughter-in-law sized up the situation and decided it was time to look elsewhere. Forgiveness and acceptance would never be possible for the interloper taking away The Prized One. The knot of possession in Helga was just as impossible to dissolve. Helga did not ever want to part with Cinn-Ah-Mon, the golden goat with the drooping Anglo-Nubian ears. Enchanted as I was by Cinn-Ah-Mon, I knew she belonged, in a deep way, to Helga. She was the pride and prize of her herd. I could have forced the issue—I had after all paid one hundred dollars in full. But I knew that for the rest of her goatherd life Helga would regret losing her golden goat.
It took the couple of hours required to drive up the mountain to muse upon and come to terms with my loss. When I arrived at the cottage I greeted the hens, gave them the kitchen scraps I had saved from the share house, poured some more pellets and checked the automatic waterer. I lit the stove, settled my cat in front of it, and made a cup of tea. Then I sat down at the kitchen table with my pen and writing paper.
‘Dear Helga’, I began. ‘With great regret I find that my job and university studies mean that at present I do not have the time or means to properly care for Cinn-Ah-Mon.’ Would Helga consider buying her back?
Her reply flashed back by return post, bearing the cheque and a letter sobbing with gratitude: ‘I kiss your hands, thank you, thank you …’, how happy she was and Cinn-Ah-Mon would be. On and on it went. I could not be enthusiastic, but I had made Helga a very happy woman.
To this day I know I did the right thing, and to this day I regret it. Sometimes in life you have to accept defeat. It is no bad thing, however, to remember about yourself, that you once went crazy with desire, and had a long, unseemly tussle with another woman. Over a goat.
It was pitch black. Before dawn. In the distance you could hear hooves drumming, with the hiss and zing of dew spurting off grass. It was an ominous, urgent sound, hard and rhythmic, looming closer and closer till it swelled up and swept over, spinning past. One sensed more than saw the shadowy forms of two racehorses galloping past, their jockeys crouched in light and perfect balance over powerful withers. They finished their gallop, easing up slowly, the horses’ nostrils forming regular clouds of white steam against the blackness, the jockeys hunched against the early morning chill.
As the first light pricked through, the horses walked warily back to the trainer who stood preoccupied, dissatisfied, leaning on a railing, holding a stopwatch in his hand. If the gallop went well the riders walked boldly back, claiming credit for setting the horse at the perfect pace. If it went badly they rode back with a nonchalant, disinterested air, as if shrugging that the horse’s failure was no fault of theirs. Rather, it was a fault of the trainers, their preparation, the feeding, or the fitness. Strappers threw woollen rugs over wet loins and led the horses away, now placid as puppy dogs, to be washed, rubbed down, to roll in the sand bay, to eat their oats.
I had come to look for work as a racehorse strapper when one year the summer holidays drifted past too slowly. A friend of my sister’s had organised for me to ride track work for a successful local trainer, but by the time I arrived the job had been given to somebody else. The bloke next door, however, they said, was looking for a girl.
The bloke next door was a former used car salesman who never, except on race days, wore shirts. When he saw me his eyes lit up with that peculiar sparkle people have when they are about to take advantage of someone. He was huge. As he waddled towards me across the cobblestones, his enormous, tanned belly shimmered with fine golden hairs. He took me into the ‘office’, which turned out to be a dingy little kitchen swarming with blowflies behind curtains yellow with accumulated grease. I noticed butter coagulating on the plastic tablecloth, and a noisy buzzing coming from a fly-infested meat safe. In a sink there was a stack of dishes encrusted with food.
Among my duties, he said, would be to clean the stables, work the horses on the track and make hot tea and toast for everyone after the morning’s work. The first two duties were fine but, as he spoke of the third, I noticed several black cockroaches skittering over the plates in the
sink. I felt delicately sick. Briefly the thought of galloping thoroughbreds on the track jostled with the less happy thought that I would have to clean up the kitchen. Then the memory of the sound of the hooves in the darkness before dawn flared and the love of speed triumphed. Besides, here was a world I knew nothing about, and I was young and insatiably curious.
The world of the racehorse stable, I was to discover, was a deeply hierarchical one. At the top was the trainer. The owners of the horses had money and thus some power but, lacking expertise, existed in a relationship of considerable dependency on the trainer. Next came the stable ‘foreman’ (invariably it was a he) and then the jockeys, followed by various hangers-on—itinerant gamblers—who wafted about the stable yard with no clear purpose. The status of a strapper—my job—in the Great Chain of Being was somewhere just above a dung beetle.
The boss, I came to appreciate, was a man whose generosity of form was matched only by his meanness of spirit. He extracted work from his poorly paid employees much in the manner of the Egyptian pharaohs. For a sixteen-hour day of backbreaking work beginnin
g at 4 a.m., seven days a week (even on Christmas Day), strappers earned fifty dollars. If a horse won, or the boss backed a winner, there was a small bonus. The boss drove a golden Mercedes, purchased with the proceeds not of winnings but gambling. His entire income seemed to come from betting. Against his own horses. Given the motley collection of equine talents in his stable such a precaution was prudent. If there was one certainty, it was that his own horses would not win.
The foreman of our stable was a bow-legged, former champion jockey of uncertain age. He was nicknamed ‘Knockout’, after a deadly brawl somewhere in outback Queensland, after a race. Wizened by the sun, every limb seemed made out of high tensile wire. His moral world was governed by absolute principles of the highest ethics. Towards horses. Any violation of his code of honourable behaviour towards a four-legged creature was repaid by silent, unforgiving contempt. The trainer once offended deeply against his horseman’s moral code. Greedy, he ran a good horse before it was ready, a horse so full of heart it stood in its box, wind-damaged, depressed for days after the race. Knockout reacted with such withering scorn that even the trainer was shamed. Knockout never forgave him. Unhappily his strict code of conduct did not extend to women. There were whispers about his treatment of his wife. She looked as if she had drawn in her breath sharply on her wedding night and, in the following decades, had never dared to exhale in his presence.
The strappers were tough, stringy, little creatures, often in black moods. They chain-smoked, cigarettes dangling precariously as they worked among the straw bales. Existing as they did in the netherworld of the Great Chain of Being, a position from which there was no escape except to marry a jockey, the strappers quickly established a hierarchy among themselves. There was fierce competition over how early they got up, how closely they could clean the straw of droppings, how little straw was wasted, how loyal and devoted they were to their charges, whether they could sweeten a horse that couldn’t be handled, whether they spent the precious few hours off in the middle of the day sleeping or grooming their favourite horses. And whether they would work for love or money. But most of all, the rivalry concerned how they rated in relation to the game of hope, for they were distinguished by grooming a winner, or even just by proximity to a champion. Even by picking up the winner’s droppings.
Galloping the horses on the track was the glorious part and worth all the rest. In the dark before dawn, through wraiths of morning mist and the white clouds of hot breath streaming from the horses’ nostrils, we galloped the horses, knees jammed up into a jockey’s position, thighs aching to breaking point, eyes stinging, ears roaring, dirt flying in the face, hardly able to see. Only the rhythm of the hoofbeats could tell you what pace you were going, the soft, rhythmic sound of the blow of air through the horse’s nostrils in beat to the sound of hooves on wet turf. You were threatened with the sack if you went faster or slower than the pace set. Some horses wanted to gallop so badly you needed a special racehorse grip to slow them—you cross the reins over a little dip in the neck just in front of the wither and let them pull on their own neck, a kind of lever principle. Others were like the fat and lazy hurdler who had to be whacked even to get three-quarter pace. And as you walked away after the gallop you could still hear the steady, regular sound of hoofbeats in the sand—brrdaboom, brrdaboom, brrdaboom—and smell the old leather and new sweat rising. Then, suddenly in the stalls, a ripple of anticipation running through the track as a hot prospect came to run.
After track work the horses had to be washed down, fed and bedded down for the day in fresh straw or put into the day yards. About 10 a.m. the track work and stable work had finished and the hard part began. I had to enter that scrofulous little kitchen and prepare mugs of tea and mountains of buttered toast for everybody with one hand, while sweeping blowflies away with the other. At about twelve we were free for a few hours. For the first week in these hours I simply slept, utterly exhausted from the physical labour, until work started again at two. At the end of my time there I weighed a bare 40 kilos.
The racing world was full of peculiar but highly interesting moral codes, hierarchies, sacreds. It was quite possibly the most male-dominated world I had ever encountered. If women, often shrewd observers of the horses, offered advice, the men simply ignored them, or fended off their remarks as determinedly as they did the myriad bush flies that swarmed about the stable. Then, likely as not, implemented their suggestions without acknowledgement. If a man spoke, they listened attentively, particularly if he was prosperous or likely to confer some advantage—a deal at a bookie, or a part-ownership. In these conversational hierarchies, it was uncommon to find women listened to at all. Perhaps the wife of the most prosperous owner, but even then awkwardness would descend.
Women were even lower in the Great Chain of Being than the hangers-on. The hangers-on were men, often out of a job, whose only activity was to wear pork pie hats, to loiter about the stables looking for tips, and to get free rides in the golden Mercedes. While their manner to the trainers and owners was obsequious, in truth it was not always clear who was taking advantage of whom. The only source of income for the hangers-on seemed to be gambling, for none of them appeared to work. Interestingly, they still benefited from the peculiar hierarchies of time which exist within families to protect the breadwinner’s time. There was a kind of female and male time, with women’s time being at the disposal of others, while men’s time was cordoned off, guarded as if precious. While the legitimacy of such hierarchies was sanctioned by male breadwinning, among the pork pie brigade they persisted even when the men spent their lives loafing. It was not uncommon to hear them sidling away from the threat of domestic incursions into time with the blokes at the track, with an air of scandalous injury, as a busy businessman might avoid such subversions with the rationale that time is money.
Despite women’s place in the Great Chain of Being, most men, however, spoke of their own wives reverentially, as ‘Mum’. She was to be escaped from at every opportunity. The game was for men to preserve a male-only world of activities belonging to mates, while the women tried to inveigle them into social gatherings with both sexes. Occasionally the women would succeed and an awkward barbecue would take place with reluctant men and over-eager, over-dressed women, looking to relieve the dreariness of their days. The clearest realm of the sacred, however, had to do with the guarding of race day as a men-only preserve. This preservation of the sacred took constant vigilance, guile, cunning and, sometimes, a helicopter.
On one occasion when the womenfolk, after weeks of threatening to attend a local race meeting, finally succeeded, a helicopter mysteriously landed and spirited the trainer, the owner, his partner and various hangers-on to a different racetrack. Knockout and I were left in charge of the runners that day who raced and failed in front of the lonely wives. The men came home chortling, flushed with beer and success, with wads of twenty-dollar bills bulging in pockets. When the trainer handed me a bonus of twenty dollars with a great flourish, he was offended when I looked amused rather than impressed. He went away muttering ‘Who does she think she is? Lady Higgins?’ Higgins after the famous jockey Roy Higgins, because I was a confident rider; Lady because I was snooty. Haughtiness was considered unbecoming in one of such lowly status, from whom submission was expected. The nickname ‘Lady Higgins’ stuck.
The deepest lore, and law, however, was The Possibility. Visit a poor country town in those times and you would find, tethered to a tree in front of a tiny, run-down bungalow, a scrawny greyhound, a gangly trotter, something, anything that could allow the illusion of hope that one’s fortunes would not just improve but transform. A win by The Possibility would change forever these mean circumstances into something else, a life of grace and ease. Life now dealt out in harsh doses by a pitiless fate would suddenly shower blessings, lift them up out of the small, tight pettiness of endless calculations, of the constant, wearying, daily efforts of making ends meet. In the butcher’s shop a local bigwig might step backwards instead of in front of y
ou, creating a brief moment on the dirt floor when you were someone.
I was an outsider because I had a future elsewhere. At university. University was a wank. Students were wankers who smoked dope. The outside world was full of wankers. So who were not wankers? Those inside the charmed circle of hope. Those who lived, dreamed, breathed racing. The trainers, the foreman, the jockeys, the owners, and even the hangers-on. While some of the trainers and owners seemed to live in a perpetual childhood, the characters of the hangers-on seemed so amorphous and depressed underneath, that one had the sense that it was this perpetual roller-coaster of hope which pulled their floating souls into shape each morning. Particularly race morning.
If a horse was untried but showed promise it was of more interest, because still a possibility, than something proven but moderately performed. A known quantity was like a small death. Better to hope for a future champion than be content with a modest but proven record. The known quantity, however respectable, banished hope. And it was all about hope. The ignition, suspension, maintenance, the perpetual flaring of hope, was the mainstay of their lives to which they returned, like addicts to the pleasure of a fix. It was not real, present performances they needed but hope of a future one. That was what kept them going; it was the chief source of meaning keeping them afloat. It was not about reality but about dreams.
It was difficult to extinguish these dreams. No amount of poor form seemed to dint the expectation of imminent winnings. Even from old Lady Tick Tock who had, I believe, never won a race but whose grand dam had won the Oaks. The night before one race I saw the trainer and foreman crossing the stable yard with such a conspicuous air of conspiracy it seemed they were hopeful someone might notice. Curious, I followed, as they slipped silently into the box, full of portent, then plunged a full syringe into the mare’s neck. God knows why, since nothing short of elephant juice would have got old Lady Tick Tock to win. But hope springs eternal.