Something for the Pain

by Gerald Murnane

  Many times, as a young man, I could have wished for no better way of life than was had by the woman punter in Rattigan’s play. I could not imagine, perhaps, how I might be freed from the need to work for a living, but I could readily imagine myself doing without the distractions of a wife and family. In 1957, one of the things that woke me out of my brief daydream of becoming a priest was my realising that a feeling of closeness to a mental image of God would never sustain me through a lifetime as a celibate, and yet I was often confident during the next few years that I could do without a girlfriend or a wife if I was able to devote myself wholly to racing. I sometimes tried to weigh up the matter. I would ask myself what was the worst possible experience I could have as a bachelor-racegoer. My most common answer would be that I could think of nothing worse than arriving home after a day of heavy losses—arriving home to an empty flat and having to prepare some sort of meal. But then I would argue that the misery to be endured in such a situation was by no means worse and probably rather less than the misery of learning that a young woman I had been interested in for some time was not in the least interested in me.

  The horsey woman in Rattigan’s play had not smiled when declaring that she found it easier to forecast races than human behaviour. Nor am I smiling when I write that I got from horse racing during the first twenty-five years of my life more than I ever got from any friendship or courtship. My wife and I were together for a few months less than forty-five years, and I could never doubt today that each of us had a better life than if we had remained single, which had been something of a possibility for both of us when we took up together in our late twenties. Even so, there were weeks and months during those forty-five years when I could not have brought myself to write a sentence such as the previous.

  During most of the countless hours that I’ve spent on racecourses, I’ve been alone. And yet I’ve never once felt awkwardly or conspicuously alone at the races as I used to feel at dances or parties or holiday places. If, as a young man, I found myself in the company of an attractive young woman in a place other than a racecourse, I would be at first distracted and afterwards annoyed that I was prevented by a thousand obstacles from knowing more about her. If I came up against the same young woman on a racecourse, I would barely glance at her before getting on with my business and would feel no less a man for having behaved thus.

  From my earliest years as a racegoer, there were numerous women among the spectators but few among the participants. For many years, all trainers and jockeys were men, as were most owners. I don’t even recall seeing female strappers for many years. Bookmakers were all men and so, too, were most of the throng in the betting ring. No solitary male could ever feel out of place on a racecourse. The men around him might have been lechers or satyrs on other days, but on race days they had the appearance of an order of celibate friars or monks following a religious rule or a motto like that of St Benedict: Work and pray!

  There were also, of course, genuine bachelors, especially among my extended family or other Catholic families of their acquaintance. I was often at the races during my early years with my bachelor-uncle Louis. We sometimes met up with the Goonan brothers, Louis’s cousins on his father’s side. The Goonans were a family in which the majority of the siblings never married. Dan and Louis Goonan raced horses under the colours Pink, gold cap. My father warned me against the Goonans. He said they were mean and narrow-minded. I strongly suspect that they once turned my father down for a loan, which is what anyone in his right mind would have done. The Goonans were stingy, and I disliked them for it, but I admired their stern, celibate way of life.

  On the day before the two-day summer meeting at Warrnambool in, I think, the late 1950s, a car travelling from Melbourne to Warrnambool was struck by a train at one of the level crossings on the Princes Highway. The two people in the car were killed. In those days, such accidents were by no means uncommon. Level crossings, even on the busy highway, were marked only with painted wooden posts or with white markings on the road. I might mention here an accident that happened once near Allansford, at Grauers Crossing, one of the most dangerous. A travelling salesman driving alone was struck by a race train on its way back to Melbourne after a Warrnambool meeting. Perhaps I’ve written sometimes in this book as though racegoers are a mostly virtuous lot or that racing brings out the best in people. If so, then I’ll do well to report here that the salesman’s suitcases full of samples and supplies, whatever they were, were flung along the railway line after the crash. The train, of course, had stopped. The driver of the car died soon afterwards at the scene, but before he died he pleaded in vain with the dozens of home-going punters who had jumped down from the carriages and were picking up and pocketing the scattered goods.

  The first of the two accidents mentioned above was reported in the Warrnambool Standard on the following day, which was the first day of the two-day race meeting. The two persons killed had been a man and a woman, both in their fifties. The man was named Rupert Taylor. I’ve forgotten his middle name. He was described as being a racehorse trainer from Dover Street, Flemington.

  Rupe Taylor, as I once heard my father call him, was one of the numerous small-time trainers who struggled then and still struggle today to earn a living from racing. I can never recall any of Taylor’s small team winning, although he must surely have won some country races during the time while I was aware of him. I found his colours distinctive and pleasing. They were Orange, red hoops and cap, and I would have liked to commend whoever had designed them. I had never seen Taylor, but when I read of his death I formed an image of a smallish grey-haired man. He was smallish because, like so many trainers then and now, he had formerly been a jockey. He was grey-haired, of course, because he was in his fifties, which for someone of my age at the time seemed old. Taylor had two horses engaged at the Warrnambool meeting. Many another small-time trainer might have towed his horses in a two-horse float but Rupe’s horses got safely to Warrnambool, I gather, because they were sent in the care of a horse-transport company. I can’t recall whether the horses were scratched or whether, as sometimes happens in such a situation, another trainer saddled them up or was even asked by the owner to take them into his stable.

  Dover Street, Flemington, was unknown to me in the 1950s and I would have had no access for some years to a street directory that could have told me the whereabouts of Taylor’s stables. I’ve written earlier about what I think of as Old Flemington. Dover Street is very much a part of Old Flemington. Taylor almost certainly lived in a plain-looking weatherboard house with six or eight horseboxes in the backyard. I can see the yard now. On a wet day, the bluestone paving is sloppy with horse dung. On a hot day, the air is full of yellow chaff specks. A drooping pepper tree completes the image.

  In the brief newspaper report of the level-crossing smash, the information about Rupe Taylor was followed by a single sentence: Also killed in the crash was Mary Christian Murday of the same address.

  Nowadays, of course, people live with their partners or with their fiancés or fiancées, or their boyfriends or girlfriends, or they simply live together. For the umpteenth time in this book, I have to remind the younger reader that things were quite otherwise during the Great Age of Racing. Mary Murday was lucky not to have been described as the de facto wife of Rupe Taylor or as his common-law wife. A decade earlier, the newspaper report would have omitted the addresses of the dead couple so as not to offend a certain sort of reader by reminding him or her that some persons cohabited without benefit of clergy, to use another expression of long ago.

  I was strangely affected by the few words that I read about Mary Christian Murday, and I’ve thought of her from time to time during the sixty years since. I mean that I’ve recalled the image that I formed long ago of a quiet grey-haired woman of no particular distinction: someone who would pass largely unnoticed on a racecourse. Nothing that I wrote in the previous sentence has any justification in fact. For all I know, Mary was a tall, overpowering woman who wore much make-
up and large hats and had a loud, grating voice. And yet, I can never think of her in that way. If I had read that Mary was Rupe’s wife, I would have forgotten her and him a few months later and this book would have had one less section. But Mary and Rupe were not married. Two such persons nowadays would seem to me mere followers of fashion. It takes no special quality to be a follower of fashion—to live nowadays with your boyfriend or to have been sixty years ago a Sunday-school teacher insisting on a church wedding. Mary and Rupe followed no fashion. They acted, as a quaint old expression of my childhood would have put it, according to their lights. By doing so, they and a few others of their kind upended the fashions of their day as a few unknown and unknowing persons may eventually upend our own fashions, unthinkable as it seems to us.

  For whatever reason, I found the courtship and marriage customs of my time cruel, even barbaric. Someone of my nature might say the same about the courtship and marriage customs of any age. Even so, I have sometimes wished I could have met up with Mary Christian Murday before her untimely death. I have sometimes supposed that Mary might have had a daughter of my own age. The young woman’s father would have been not Rupert Taylor but someone, almost certainly a racing man, who was now out of sight and mind. As a result of some unimaginable set of circumstances, I would have been visiting Rupert’s stables on an afternoon in spring, when the pepper tree was waving in the north wind. Mary, in her quiet way, would have introduced me to her daughter, who would have been by no means unlike her mother.

  25. Reward for Effort

  MY WIFE, AS I wrote earlier, took no interest in racing except when she was actually at a meeting. Then, she would become absorbed in the form guide. I considered her selection methods unsystematic and haphazard and was sometimes rude enough to tell her so, but Catherine had her share of successes. Towards the end of the previous century she began taking an interest in horses ridden by the young jockey Luke Nolen. She did this for no other reason than that Nolen was a cousin of one of her girlfriends from way back. If you follow any capable jockey, you’ll get your share of good-priced winners, and Nolen brought Catherine just enough success to justify her sticking with him.

  Early in the present century, Nolen became the jockey of first choice for the up-and-coming trainer Peter Moody and Catherine’s strike rate, as they call it, improved considerably. She and I had been regular racegoers for fifteen years by then, and we could not have known that we had only two or three years left before she would be too frail to get to the races. During those two or three years, however, the combination of Moody and Nolen sent her home in a good mood on many a Saturday.

  Catherine, who had been a heavy smoker for all of her adult life, was found to have untreatable metastatic cancer in May 2008. The cancer would have begun in one of her lungs at least a year before but had moved to a number of other parts of her before it was found. The young doctor who told this news to Catherine and me one afternoon in the Austin Hospital was flushed and trembling from nervousness. I guessed that the other members of the medical team treating Catherine had sent her to Catherine’s bedside as a sort of learning experience. I wonder what the doctor had been expecting. I wonder what she made of Catherine’s and my response to the news. Catherine said, quietly and almost to herself, ‘So, I’ll be dead soon…’ She sounded almost relieved. She had by then lost the use of a leg from nerve degeneration, possibly caused also by her heavy smoking. I said to her, calmly also, ‘Well, at least you’re not going to end up in a nursing home!’ We had been dreading this possibility for some time past.

  No one would tell us what Catherine’s life expectancy was. She and I suspected that she had about four months after the first diagnosis, meaning that she should have died in September 2008. In fact, she lived for twice that length of time, and was in and out of hospital half a dozen times. When Catherine was first in hospital, the social worker predicted that my wife would have to spend the remainder of her life either in hospital or in a nursing home with special facilities for caring for the terminally ill. Catherine certainly spent much of her remaining time in hospital, but during the rest of the time she was at home, with me for her nurse. She had regular visits from palliative-care nurses, but mostly I did everything for her. Why wouldn’t I? I was fit and healthy myself, and I knew more about her medical history than any of her many doctors and nurses.

  I kept a detailed diary of everything that happened to Catherine during her last eight months. I learned from that diary, after everything was over, that I had spoken during those months with more than thirty doctors and more than a hundred nurses. I’ve forgotten most of them by now, but when I last looked through my diary I did a rough tally and estimated that about a quarter of both the doctors and the nurses had seemed either lazy or incompetent. Two doctors and a few nurses seemed to be halfwits. At the other end of the scale, I met a few doctors and not a few nurses that I would have trusted with the care of my own life.

  The best nurses were from the Royal District Nursing Service. Not one of them could be faulted. They visited Catherine every few days, not just to wash her but to check out numerous matters. Most of them said little to me or even to Catherine. One was an exception. While she was washing Catherine one day in the bathroom with the door closed, I thought I heard her, the nurse, telling Catherine something about the spiritual world. Afterwards, I asked the woman directly: had she been preaching some kind of sermon to my wife?

  She was an interesting woman, this nurse. She had no rings on her fingers and seemed to be the sort of person who had never been interested in men. In answer to my question, she was immediately on the front foot. Too many doctors and nurses, she said, treated their patients as though they were bodies only. She, this aggressive nurse, was ready, unless her patients objected, to offer them comfort by talking of the spiritual world that surrounded the material world. She was even ready to assure them that the spiritual part of them would survive their bodily death.

  I let her talk. I was more intrigued than she could have known. She had not much more to tell me. It concerned a dear friend of hers who had died of cancer. The friend had been a woman, and had promised to send a sign from the spiritual world, if such a thing turned out to exist. The dying woman and her dear friend, my informant, had agreed on what the sign should be. My informant was no idle gossiper. While she was telling me this she was making entries in her diary and completing other paper work. She was at my front door when she delivered her punch line. ‘I got my sign,’ she said. She was already on her way to the front gate when she gave me her parting message: ‘I got exactly the sign I had asked for,’ she said. ‘The spirit world is out there. It’s all around us.’

  If the woman had not been a non-stop nurse and teacher, I might have had an opportunity to tell her that my wife and I had already made the sort of pact that she, the nurse, and her dear friend had made. Catherine and I had both been brought up in the Catholic Church but had later lapsed, as they say. I had lapsed many years before she, and yet by the time when she was dying she seemed to believe in nothing, whereas I would have shared the beliefs of the outspoken nurse.

  I wrote in an essay that was later published in my book Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs that a writer such as myself would probably cause less offence to readers and scholars if he confessed to being a sexual deviant than if he confessed to believing in a world of the spirit—to being other than a materialist. I hereby confess that I have never been a materialist. I have no belief in any gods or angels or demons, but I have believed all my life in an invisible world of the spirit.

  I mentioned a pact between my wife and myself. It should probably not be called a pact, because Catherine never actually agreed to it. I suggested it to her often, and long before she was diagnosed with cancer. She always responded with silence. I took this to mean that she would take part in the pact if it proved to be possible but that she would prefer to wait and see. The terms of the pact, or whatever it should be called, required the first of us to die to arrange for the survivor to
back, on the first Saturday after the other’s death, a winner at odds of twenty-to-one. When devising the terms of the pact, I had given much thought to the matter of what the winner’s odds should be. To have asked simply for a winner would have proved nothing. To have asked for a winner at twenty-five-to-one or even longer odds seemed to be asking too much. I had never kept statistics, but I would have estimated that a twenty-to-one winner occurred about once in every month at a Saturday meeting, or once in every thirty races. Of the horses that contested those races, about sixty might have been at odds of twenty-to-one. But the person who had to fulfil the pact from the spirit-world was not only required to arrange for a once-a-month event to take place in a particular week—he or she had to make sure that the twenty-to-one winner was a selection of the survivor.