by Gregory Day
As the horses and sulkies gathered out on the back straight for the beginning of the trot, Leonie and Uncle True stood down on the rail in front of the TTC steward, both with field glasses raised. They were serious about the race, as was everyone else about me. Perhaps, I thought, Lascelles and I were the only ones on the whole track with other things on our minds. A library and a reading room, romantic mercy. I stared with naked eyes at her dress fluttering and buckling in the pent up pre-race breeze. By pairing myself with Lascelles even the delivered phrase – I will love you with the power of two men – seemed as ridiculous as his memorial. Was I too a gusher, a believer, a Pollyanna, a trafficker in hope? Lascelles could be forgiven at least for his altruistic intentions. But I, no, I was irredeemable. A man who war had whittled back to a skeleton key and who still couldn’t find the right door.
Half an hour earlier I would have shucked this off and turned to the race and the Robinsons with a serendipitous irony. But now it was difficult, with her standing down there in front of me.
Vaguely, faintly, I felt a butting, a tapping on my leg just above the knee, a goat’s timeless persistence on a slope above the Libyan Sea. I turned, Rose was leaning across her husband, her purple eye make-up, bright lipstick and the wide planking of her teeth all giving her a ghoulish look as she smiled. ‘They’re about to go, Wes. But they needn’t bother. I’ve got full faith.’
I stared at Rose Robinson as if she was a plaster duck. It could all have taken place on a sideboard. With human figurines, model rails. Tissue paper and green paint for the track. A tousle-haired little boy barracking beside. His horses like charms. The free world.
And then I was nodding with the recognition, re-rolling my programme to emphasise how ready I was for the victory to come. As far as Rose was concerned, we had bonded.
With a shot fired, the trot commenced, six runners, all in a bunch with wheels glazing in motion. I looked out, eyes raised to the middle distance. It was easy. All I had to do was lower them to see her. And lift them up again to the wild spaces of the sky.
The crowd were aroused as the runners passed us for the first time, the sound of the hooves and the jockeys’ encouragements barely audible through the excitement. Our Bonny Cologne was in the box seat on the rails, one behind and with a full lap of the track to find his way clear. As the clump went rattling by, I couldn’t resist. She let the binoculars fall to the side and called out to the race with a curl of hand around her mouth. Uncle True beside her took a deep slug, the close range of the race freeing him up from having to look through the glasses. I remember thinking how impossible it would be to train the binoculars on the pack of sulkies and drink from a bottle at the same time.
‘A perfect sit,’ was how Brian Robinson described Bonny Cologne’s going, and I had to agree. But I wondered which horse, if any, she was on. Combray, perhaps, or the Mower. She seemed definitely to be barracking for someone.
As the horses came out of the back straight for a second time, Brian and Rose, both with glasses trained, couldn’t help but commentate the race. Coming round the turn it was clear that Bonny Cologne needed some luck. The Mower was in front on the rails and didn’t look like budging. The pace was naturally quickening.
At the furlong mark, I watched as True lowered his binoculars again to raise the bottle, and Leonie began to bounce a little on her feet. Rose called: ‘He’s clear!’ and Brian muttered quietly: ‘There it is.’ The Mower had seemed to step aside out of some purely polite impulse and Bonny Cologne was left with only grass between himself and the post. He shot clear, with Combray and a grey horse whose name I don’t remember following. But Bonny Cologne had the sit all along and clearly now would not be beaten. I lowered my eyes again to see Leonie no longer bouncing on her toes. I reckoned she was on the Mower. Uncle True leant over and gave her a cuddle as Bonny Cologne flashed by the post and I was accosted with the Robinsons’ celebrations.
‘War or not, Wes,’ shrilled Rose, leaning over Brian to plant a kiss on my cheek, ‘you’re my bloody hero now! What nous! What a great win!’
I took the slaps on the back, the offers of crème de cacao from the basket. But all the while my eyes were trained on the uncle and his niece on the aftermath rails.
When she finally turned from the track, sighing for her defeat, our eyes met. It was only then that I smiled without actually deciding to, it was only then I felt I’d finally had a win.
*
It wasn’t long until Uncle True and Leonie were climbing the hill to join our group. Halfway up True noticed me sitting there with the Robinsons for the first time and called my name enthusiastically. ‘Wesley! Number one on the gurry! Fell asleep at tea, didn’t I? Bloody typical.’
I stood up to shake his liver-spotted hand as they arrived at our perch. His thanks were appreciated, if nothing else they broke the ice.
‘Leonie reckons you gurried like a Fermoy by the end of the day,’ he went on. ‘Filthy work, ain’t it, guts and grease and oil, feathers stuck all over ya, but that’s what ya said, weren’t it? Leonie? You said Wes here was a professional.’
She stood beside her uncle in the grassy makeshift aisle between the seats. ‘Well, I don’t know if I went quite that far,’ she said, ‘but, yes, Wesley was a great help in getting those birds ready for the plane.’
‘Squab in aspic,’ I said, looking down at my feet.
Uncle True let out a snort so boisterous it required a wipe of his suit-cuff across his nose. ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ he cried. ‘For the Yankee cousins. To thank ’em for helpin’ us out in ya stoush. The Septics’d believe anything these days.’
‘Did you back the winner, True?’ asked Brian, lighting his meerschaum. ‘Coz we did. Bonny Cologne, you little ripper. Thanks to Wes.’
Everyone laughed, all eyes on me. The newcomer made welcome, the digger with the ghosts in his kitchen. But the benefits of their kind natures would have been lost to me if it wasn’t for the presence of her. With her I could bask a bit. I felt in fact as if I almost glowed.
‘I did back it, yessir,’ True replied, with a twang of his father’s brogue. ‘But the girl here missed out.’
‘I backed the Moorcroft’s horse,’ Leonie said. ‘The Mower. I’ve ridden that old thing myself and was led to believe –’
‘Led to believe in bulldust!’ Uncle True said plainly.
‘Well come and sit here with us,’ Rose said. ‘There’s room and we’ll have a good look at the next.’
*
We eased our way through the crowd, the banjo and tuba thankfully filling any awkward pause there might have been, as she boldly stepped ahead to lead me, as she had been doing ever since we met. This was her demesne, her people, her race meet on a rock in the ocean. She’d long ago accepted and improvised her role. She also, as I’d already seen, had a secret disdain for mown grass, for cleared landscapes and all the appurtenances and imitative foibles of an anxious society. So she led me through that crowd with something patrician about her, with a subtle scorn in her step, and the way she shouldered through, as if the deeper task of the day was just to humour this childlike annual display, had me pick up the feeling that we were a pair in that deeper task, to front the torrid face of reality head-on, without sentiment, without a need for trivial pheasant hunts, or the monotone of farms.
I still felt unsure but was swept along anyway. Every family’s roots on the island were known and Leonie, with old Nat the whaler still recognisable in her slightly ski-jump nose and Fermoy blue eyes, was allowed her independence. The crowd parted before us as we came towards the bookie, people muttering hellos to her which she very sweetly returned, but no one was in any doubt about the strength of the woman.
The next being the King Island Cup, the main race on the mongrel card of gallops and trots, the queue for Dawson’s tickets and odds and brisk surliness was long. We took our place and, relaxed by the letters DAWSON on the familiar polished leathe
r of the bookie’s bag, I swung from inside to out and simply thanked her in a safe, sardonic tone for being our pilot through the throng.
‘They’re a funny mob,’ she said, smiling in reply. ‘They’d eat you alive given the chance but scatter like kicked dogs if you make yourself plain.’
‘You do that?’
‘Well, it’s not as though I try. But I’m known. Half of them think I’m mad, I s’pose, especially for staying with Dad, the other half quite like me. Like Brian and Rose. They sympathise. They’ve got hearts that wake up every morning with the rest of their bodies. A lot of the people you can see here have battened down long ago. That’s why I don’t mind Lascelles.’
‘And what about me?’
The words came out like a squirt of ink, before I could do anything at all about it. I couldn’t throw my hand out to clutch them back as they went. It was too late. Something was happening to me. I felt like I had no guard anymore, no protection against exposure. It was the writing that had done it. And she didn’t bat an eye.
‘Well, I want to know what happened when you left the monastery.’
This was confusing. Was her opinion of me to be conditional on such information?
‘Yes, but you also need to tell me how you got that black eye.’
We might as well have been deep in shrubbery at that point, shrouded and sheltered, inured to the winds by flaky paperbarks, a candle flame cupped in a scented protective hand. The band plucked on, not forty yards from where we stood in the queue, people darting and cajoling each other all about, but we knew nothing of it. We had decamped to the truth of the matter. ‘Society’ was finally, as I’d long wished, in suspension.
She looked straight into me then, and said: ‘You don’t have an opinion on how I got it?’
‘I’ve no right.’
‘You back horses?’
‘That’s all a parade.’
‘So you don’t like to guess.’
‘Sometimes. But nowadays . . . well, you can read. Nowadays I prefer to know.’
‘When it counts.’
‘Yair.’
‘Me also.’
‘I know.’
I fished out my cigarettes, lit one, offered her one, which she refused, and then stood as if waiting for a train.
In my bottomless vulnerability what I wanted her to say was whether she trusted me, whether she would let down her guard. Would that be dependent on what happened after I left Agio Dormiton? I wondered. Could it be as simple as what I’d done for the rest of the war?
There were two strands that needed braiding: one for who you are, the other for what you’ll become.
I let it be.
*
By the time we got back to our seats on the hill the horses were on the line and the population of the island, bar the infirm and the reluctant, was poised. It was only seconds later that the starter gun was fired and the horses sprung forward out on the back straight with a cry from the crowd and all field glasses trained. I looked across Brian, Rose and True and saw her profile, her elbows crooked, the binoculars up to her eyes. The things we don’t see, I thought to myself. Things in the distance brought suddenly close. She was a woman watching a horse race. On an island. That was all, but there was so much more.
It was a two mile race and, as they came down past us the first time, they were in a long ragged line. True’s tip, New Moon, was in the lead, mine, King Ballyee, was midfield and running rough, and Hatstand, who Leonie had chosen on account of it not being local, was already sweaty at the tail of the field. In short, none of them looked like winning. But by the time they’d galloped away from us and far out along the back straight New Moon had settled into a steady clip and was stretching his lead. As they came round the turn to head for home, the grey was doing it easy and eight lengths out in front. No one else looked like catching him.
And so it was that Leonie’s Uncle True had the biggest win by far he’d ever had on the King Island Cup. Dawson set New Moon at 25–1 and by the time Leonie and I had got to him there’d been no takers and he’d drifted to thirties. And that’s the odds True got him on, the fist of coins he’d poured into Leonie’s hand amounting to over four pounds, which he’d instructed to be outlaid on the nose. He’d won over a hundred, which made a week’s worth of catching, gurrying and packing muttonbirds look like punishment for some prior will. True had struck gold, from memory his winnings were even greater than the prize money for the winning horse.
Immediately he was on his feet demanding the betting ticket from his niece, who admittedly seemed rather reluctant to hand it over. She knew him well. One hundred pounds in the hands of True could lead absolutely anywhere. But what choice did she have? I could see the hypotheticals racing behind her eyes before she coughed up, rising from her pew to accompany him down to Dawson and whatever lay beyond.
King Ballyee was apt. Not only had my former lustre as a judge of horseflesh suddenly vanished in the eyes of Annie and Rose, but now I was losing Leonie to her chaperoning duties as well. With True now set for a hundred pound spree I feared she’d never return. For god’s sake he could buy the whole of Surprise Bay with that type of money, but everyone knew he wasn’t about to. At the very best the windfall would be a sinecure for twelve months or so, allowing him to sleep late in the house at Yellow Rock, drink hard, set his nets, and drive his already wiry body into the ground. There’d be no need for industrious ventures with deadlines such as the Moynihan job. He could relax, and that, by the look on Leonie’s face as she moved to follow him down off the hill, was a worry.
She didn’t even look at me as she went off in pursuit of the cock-a-hoop True, not even a glance did she give as she passed right by my seat. We had come so close, in our frank exchange, but once again I felt thwarted.
For even on this island, the simplicity of being was tangled in the difficult knots of family and society I’d determined to be free of. I had come here to let my own knots stew, but it would take more than the amorality of gales, and the careless brutalities of stinging southern sleet, to wear away what held me. It would take another person. The love of another person.
All I could ask for, in that moment as she hurried off in her assiduous love of True, was to be assisted in my new helplessness. I could sense my salvation out there. This time it wasn’t an ambition of a boy who was otherwise good with machines, this time it was real and the heart was the only equipment I had an interest in.
The afternoon scattered then, Brian and Rose and Annie leaving their perch on the hill to socialise amongst the increasingly shickered throng gathered in front of the podium for the cup presentation. I sat alone, conspicuous to no one but myself, wondering if I should stay or go.
The presentations were made and afterwards Lascelles was given the podium for a brief spruik on his mission, to weighty applause. As he spoke he caught sight of me alone, like a sad bird of prey on the hill. I saw his shoulder ride up in momentary tension but he brought it down. And soon he was stepping off his soapbox and back onto the grass, with drunks and sentimentals and Presbyterians no doubt chucking coins into his bucket. I thought how much he would have liked at that moment to be on the right side of True. It amused me that the man with the freshest cache of money in his pockets on the track thought the memorial cause a dodgy one. But nevertheless, Lascelles had a crowd around him and was not short of takers.
Before anyone was ready, the next trot was due, the starter’s gun fired, and the Robinsons did not return to their seats. This suited me now, and if anyone was wondering, I’m sure they could put my solitude down to the drink and, therefore, an inability to walk. I watched the rest of the island descend that way, the loosening of annual ties, the staining of frocks; one bloke, whose name I didn’t know but who I recognised from shopping in Currie, taking it upon himself to piss on the hallowed finishing post. Which only brought sniggers from those around, even from the steward who
by this time had a beer glass in his hand. I saw the Robinsons, their heads back in laughter, Rose beginning to lean heavily on Brian’s arm, and as the runners for the second last race of the day – all of whom had run before in earlier events – lined up on the back straight, I saw True and Leonie talking to the musicians by the bandstand. When the race commenced True looked to the track and Leonie turned to look opposite, directly at me. She smiled, and in the most unexpected of gestures, held up two fingers in the Victory sign. Then she turned her head to starboard, said something to her uncle, who seemed to take no notice, and slowly she began walking away from him and through the shambolic crowd towards me.
She arrived in the seat to the sound of thundering hooves and immediately took my hand in hers.
‘When I was a kid,’ she said, ‘after the first war, the north of this island was full with diggers granted settler’s land wandering about the roads. They used to give me things, Egyptian coins, bottle tops, cigarette cards, lollies. My old man warned me off ’em but Uncle True used to say the things they gave were for all the children they’d seen die. One day he said this in front of Dad, who told him to shut up, that he was talkin’ nonsense, that the war was between soldiers not civilians. Obviously he was saying it to shelter me. But True pressed on and explained himself. “I don’t mean little kids like her, Nat, I mean the innocence the war has taken away.” Nat went straight out the kitchen door. And I was left there, with True. He made me put those bottle tops and cards and coins and things on the kitchen table and tell him about them, which was my favourite and so on. By the time Dad came back in from outside we’d polished off a tin of biscuits and catalogued the things from the soldiers and put them in the tin. Uncle True got up and kissed me and left through the kitchen door without saying a word.’
She stopped there and let go of my hand. We looked out at the race. She had begun again, like back at the ten sheoaks, to tell her tale. As the horses straggled towards the finishing post for the sixth time that day we saw True down below, ripping up his betting ticket and throwing it on the ground in disgust. He took a long draught of his beer and gesticulated at the musicians. Then Leonie said: ‘I hope he lost the bloody lot.’