The Race

by Nina Allan

  I should have been worried about Phoolan Devi but I wasn’t. I had another of those hunches I sometimes get, the same as with Lamborghini only stronger, a piercing certainty that came out of nowhere and struck like lightning. Some might say this is my Hoolishness coming out in me, but I don’t know about that, I prefer not to analyse it. All I know is that these are feelings I never ignore. I sensed it in my gut, that Phoolan Devi would run like the devil but Lim would run faster. He would beat her easily, as easily as he’d beaten Trudi-Delaney in the prelim, and the stands would go wild.

  It was as clear to me as if someone had walked up and handed me the next day’s newspaper.

  But that was all still to come. Before that was Celia’s heat, Tommy Hamid lined up against Melrose and Kris Kruger. Celia seemed nervous going into the race, very jumpy, which was Tommy’s fault mainly, and Celia was behind from the start. The race turned out to be mostly between Melrose and Saint Aquila, a dirt-coloured, rail-thin dog out of prelim fifteen. Melrose won, putting in a time not quite as fast as in his prelim but still a quarter-second faster than Limlasker’s.

  “What d’you reckon?” Del said to me as the placings went up on the electronic scoreboard. I knew what he meant without having to ask – was Kris Kruger on glass?

  I shook my head. “Not him,” I said. “He’s clean.” Glass users give off loose energy like static. Kruger seemed cold as iron, battle-hardened but not hyped, not at all. He was good at what he did, simple as that. Barring some freak accident, Melrose was going to end up in the final. All we could hope was that Lim wouldn’t be drawn to run against him in the semis as well.

  Tash seemed a bit on edge before her quarter, but no more than you’d expect, given the circumstances. Limlasker himself seemed perfectly calm. There was a slight delay in raising the gates – someone forgot to reset the clock, apparently – but once they were away the result was more or less decided in the first hundred metres. Phoolan Devi seemed slow and heavy beside Lim, who beat her by a full second and exceeded his own time for the prelim.

  The crowd, as I had predicted, went berserk.

  Angela Kiwit won her heat also, beating Gray’s Inn from Lamborghini by a quarter-second.

  ~*~

  The semis are time-selected, the fastest dog running in the first semi, the second-fastest running in the second, and so on. Melrose and Kruger had the fastest time overall, just one-tenth of a second faster than Limlasker and Tash. This worked to our advantage of course, because it meant that Melrose and Lim would be in different semi finals. Angela Kiwit, who had the third-fastest time in the quarters, would run against Kruger.

  Melrose was the bookie’s favourite but the odds against Tou-le-Mar had shortened considerably. The second semi was less easy to call. Limlasker had clocked the fastest time overall, but the other five dogs were so evenly matched it was difficult to draw a marker between them. One of the bitches, Empress of Ice Cream, was a previous Delawarr winner. She’d missed out on the early part of the season because of a hamstring injury but she’d been back at the track the last three weekends for warm-up races and won everything in sight.

  Tash had fallen into a deep silence. That was normal before a race, but there was always something unnerving about seeing her in that state, so sheathed against the outside world it was almost as if she’d gone into a trance. It was just her and Lim now. Even after the dog was placed in the trap and the gate closed the two of them would remain a single entity, their thoughts shifting between them like spirals of drifting gas.

  The idea of victory in the abstract is foreign to dogs. They understand about winning food, about winning love, but winning just for itself has no meaning for them. When dogs run for themselves they run together. They do not keep an account of which runs fastest. Much of the runner’s skill lies in filling their dog with the human lust for being best.

  The task for Tash was to fill Limlasker’s heart and mind with the thought of Lumey.

  ~*~

  The first semi turned out to be a record breaker, Melrose and Tou-le-Mar in a photo finish, followed by Chacqu’un a son Gout just a tenth of a second behind. The crowd was on its feet. I saw Kiwit, down by the finish-line, turning cartwheels.

  Lim came third in his semi. The first place was taken by Empress of Ice Cream, with Betty Talbot following in second. It was a slower race than the first semi, with the Empress’s time half a second down on Melrose and Kruger’s.

  Del’s hands were clenched into fists.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s okay. They’re going to make it.” I put my hand on his arm. I could feel the tension in his body, the taut hum of it, like electricity inside a wire. We never touch each other much, Del and I, and I thought he might shrug me off, but he didn’t. It was as if he had finally gained a true awareness of what was at stake.

  I should have been afraid too, but I felt calm inside, calm as still water. I knew with certainty that Lim had not been outrun, that he’d been holding back, saving himself for the final. I knew this like I knew my own name. Restraint of this kind would not come naturally to an ordinary dog, but Lim was a smartdog and he had Tash to guide him. I had the feeling Tash knew pretty much all there was to know about restraint, that there had been times in her life when her survival had depended on it.

  “They’re going to make it,” I said again. I spoke softly, so that only Del could hear me, and little by little I felt him begin to relax.

  I had become the strong one, the fierce one. I think at that moment Del felt convinced that I could save Lumey simply by the power of my own belief.

  ~*~

  When I look back on it now, the thing I remember most clearly was that woman in the baseball cap, shrieking as if she’d been shot. The sound of her screams, muffled and heavy, floating up towards me like weed through water.

  What was done took less than a second and by the time we realised what had happened it was already over. There was a token effort to find the criminal, to search the ground, but of course it proved fruitless. Whoever committed the crime had the advantage of foreknowledge. They also knew how to blend into the crowd, to cancel their existence in that place, to emerge again through the turnstiles as somebody else.

  Just another innocent bystander going about their business, melting away into the blurry purple light of a summer evening.

  ~*~

  The gates went up. Melrose and Tou-le-Mar were first away, both running flat out. They stayed pretty much level at first, but after two hundred metres or so Melrose began to flag. It was possible that he’d suffered a tendon strain – greyhounds are susceptible to leg injuries – but most likely he was just tired. He’d run four top-flight races in under four hours and he was not a young dog. He’d given all he had to give. He was worn out.

  Tou-le-Mar by contrast still looked fresh as paint. More than that, she looked confident and it was easy to see she had power in reserve. Lim was hanging back just a little, loping along in the fourth lane and keeping in line with Betty Talbot, pace for pace. Betty had won a couple of high profile races both this season and last, she was what you might call a promising newcomer, although I don’t think anyone would have predicted her making it into the final of the Delawarr, not this year, anyway. She was a pretty dog, too, a bright, almost yellowish fawn with a dappling of lighter spots across her hindquarters. I bet Rudy Shlos is pleased as piss, I thought. Rudy was Betty’s yardmaster, a drinking buddy of Del’s and, as Del himself once put it, a moody bugger, but bloody talented. He’d been a runner himself in his youth, which probably accounted for his unpredictable temperament.

  The Empress of Ice Cream and Chaqu’un a son Gout were running fifth and sixth. As they took the third set of hurdles I saw that the Empress had overreached herself. As she steadied herself on the farther side of the jump she was already half a length behind Chaqu’un and still losing ground.

  Melrose too was weakening, the liquid, weightless glide-flight of his earlier heats steadily giving way to an effortful gallop. The strain on K
ris Kruger was clear just from looking at him – the sheen of sweat on his brow, the rigid set of his shoulders, the way he kept chewing at his lower lip. I guessed this was probably his last race and I almost felt sorry for him.

  As they reached the six hundred mark, Tou-le-Mar had begun to nose ahead, imperceptibly at first, then by a couple of inches. By the time they took the next set of hurdles, Melrose was running third behind Betty Talbot. That was when Limlasker made his move, diving past Melrose and snaking in alongside Betty. Then suddenly he was past her, chasing down Tou-le-Mar, the younger dog skittish and wild, feasting on Kiwit’s energy like a brumby on sweetcorn. For the breadth of a heartbeat it seemed as if she might hold her lead, then Limlasker, brave Limlasker, soared up out of second place and drew level.

  As they reached the last set of hurdles it was a two-dog race, Tou-le-Mar and Limlasker, the dancing girl and the ghost dog, heading for the final straight with less than an inch between them.

  The final hurdles are at one thousand metres. After that it’s a hundred-and-fifty-metre flat race to the finish. I gazed at Lim, the three-seasons champion flat racer, and realised he’d saved it all for this moment, for the moment he knew he’d be in his element, when he could chase down anything still in his sights and not even feel winded. As Lim took the final hurdle I glanced at Tash. Her arms were bunched at her sides as if she were running, but there was no stiffness in her stance, only alertness, and her expression, which before the race had been like stone, now seemed exalted. There was no smile on her lips, but the certainty of victory, the sheer joyous knowing, lay so clearly upon her face it was as if it had been painted there.

  As his front feet touched the ground, Lim went down. The sight was so crazily unexpected my mind refused at first to acknowledge that it was real. I started forward, trying to see what had happened, and only then did I realise that Limlasker had fallen, that he was lying sprawled across the track in a tangle of his own limbs.

  He was lying so still.

  Still as an eiderdown, still as twigs.

  Somewhere off to my left a woman screamed. I turned towards her instinctively. She was wearing jeans that were too tight for her and a red baseball cap and too much make up. Whoever told her she looked good as a bike bunny had been sadly mistaken.

  Then I saw Tash. She was lying on her side in the grass, her long feet in their tatty hi-tops pointed uselessly towards the track. Someone was kneeling beside her, one of the track jerries.

  Somewhere in another world Tou-le-Mar was crossing the finish line. Angela Kiwit glanced up at the time clock then fell to her knees. Melrose put on a late spurt to snatch a surprise second from Betty Talbot. Chaqu’un and the Empress brought up the rear.

  “He’s been shot,” Del cried, and he really was crying, though I don’t think he knew it, hard little splinter-tears, forcing themselves out of his eyes like slivers of light. His face was ghastly, pale with an emotion I could not identify, fury and terror crumpled together like shredded paper. “They’ve killed him, Jen, those bastards.”

  Then he was shoving past the barrier and on to the track and so was I. I was horrified by the thought of what I might see, but I knew I couldn’t let my brother face it alone.

  The track was in chaos. There were track jerries everywhere, some standing in a line with their arms linked trying to keep back the gawkers, others huddled together in a group around the fallen Limlasker. Off to one side I could see two medics lifting Tash on to a stretcher. From what I could make out she was awake, beginning to regain consciousness anyway. I wondered where Brit was, if anyone had called her. She didn’t usually come to races, it wasn’t her thing.

  The overhead TV screens had all gone dark.

  Del dashed across the track to where Lim was lying. One of the jerries stepped forward to try and restrain him but Del just pushed him aside without a word. The man staggered and almost went flying. Hot colour was rising in his cheeks and I saw him reach for his tazer. I shot out a hand and grabbed his arm.

  “Don’t,” I said. “He’s the dog’s owner.” My head was swimming. Inside my mind my words seemed unreal, lines from a soap script. They must have made sense to the jerry though, because he let us go past. I hurried to where Del was – on his knees in the dirt beside Limlasker. There was someone else there too, one of the blue-coated veterinarians who normally spend most of a race day hanging out in the drinks tent. He had a stethoscope pressed to Lim’s chest.

  As I came to a standstill beside Del, the vet shook his head.

  “The dog’s dead, I’m afraid,” he said. “A great pity.” He was stroking Lim’s sides and back, patting his fur with neat, swift touches, and I wondered if I’d misunderstood somehow, if Lim was alive after all and the vet was trying to bring him round. But then the vet suddenly stopped what he was doing and straightened up.

  “There,” he said. He was holding something between his fingers, something that glimmered. “It went in at the belly. Whoever managed a shot like that was no amateur, I can tell you.” He held the thing up to the light, a tiny shard of plastic, or perhaps glass, it was hard to tell just by looking. Whatever it was, the vet was saying it had killed Limlasker. I was still finding it all but impossible to grasp what had happened.

  My throat filled up with tears.

  “We’ll initiate an investigation, of course,” the vet was saying. He opened his bag and took out a small plastic screw-topped container, the kind of thing normally used for storing medicines. He undid the lid and dropped the plastic dart inside. “I really am very sorry,” he said. He started to walk away then, but Del grabbed his arm.

  “Hold it right there,” he bellowed. “I don’t even know your name.”

  The man started backwards in Del’s grip. He looked wary, but not scared, and I guessed he’d had to deal with situations like this before.

  “Ezra Forrest,” he said. He took what looked like a business card from the top pocket of his blue overall and handed it to Del. “We should have the results for you by Monday. If you’ve not heard from us by three o’clock, please feel free to call.”

  Monday, I thought. I had the feeling I was supposed to be doing something on Monday, but I couldn’t for the life of me think what it was. Then I remembered that Monday was the day of the party Claudia was meant to be throwing for Lumey’s homecoming.

  Del stood holding the veterinarian’s business card and saying nothing. There was a bewildered look on his face, as if he was struggling to remember where he was, and there was something in the sight of him that broke me in two.

  I knew a part of my brother had died with Limlasker, that the person I had known was gone for good.

  ~*~

  The shard of high-density Perspex the vet removed from Limlasker’s dead body was soon identified as a dart from a Wiskop gun. Lightweight and easily concealed, the Wiskop had long been the weapon of choice for many mercenaries, insurgents and contract killers, and whoever fired the fatal shot, as the vet had suggested, was most likely a professional – Lim had been travelling at close to seventy miles an hour when the dart went in.

  The Wiskop fires on compressed air, which makes it virtually soundless. The poison contained in the dart – a nerve agent – acts more or less instantaneously.

  Tash was okay. At the time the attack happened she was so wired into Lim’s thoughts, so much a part of him that the suddenness of his death gave her a kind of mental whiplash. There was no lasting injury though, and three months after the Delawarr she started regular training with Clearview Princess. She never talked about what happened to Limlasker but then she never talked that much anyway. She told Del she didn’t want to compete in any races for a year.

  “I need some time and so does Princess,” she said. Del agreed on the spot.

  ~*~

  We never discovered who fired the shot or who had hired them. Kris Kruger sent Tash flowers when she was in the hospital. Some months later – after Brit left, that was – they started dating.

  ~*~

  Th
e track jerries removed Lim’s body from the track and took it away. One of them gave me a number I could call to reclaim it after the post mortem. The cops took a note of our names and addresses and then buggered off. Del kept asking me where Tash was, and I kept telling him she’d been taken to the meds tent. He was clearly in shock, which made me feel panicky, because losing it was not an option. We had things to do.

  “Listen, Del,” I said. “I think we’d better ring Em.”

  “What the hell for?” Del said. He sounded as if he’d been drugged.

  “The money, Del, remember? We have to get the money by Monday.” I spoke as gently as I could, but I felt like shaking him. My brother was in deep trouble, the deepest. Fortunately we still had an escape route. Or so I thought at the time.

  Del’s face seemed to darken. His expression changed from baffled to enraged. “I’m not taking coin from that bastard.”

  “If you have any other suggestions to make then now would be a good time to share them.”

  He stared at me speechlessly for several seconds and then waved his hand in front of his face as if batting away a fly. Stuff it, he was saying. Do what you want, see if I care. Go to the devil.

  It took us ages to get away from the ground. The cops were everywhere by then, pulling people over, asking their questions, conducting random searches for weapons. Every time we got through one lot we seemed to come face to face with another. Fat lot of good they did, any of them. It was almost as bad outside the stadium – great crowds of people scurrying around like headless chickens, tweeting and snapping photos, speculating noisily about the identity and current whereabouts of the gunman. The bookies were besieged – no bets could be paid out until the track stewards were able to confirm that the race result would be allowed to stand, and that didn’t look like happening any time soon. There were journos everywhere too, suddenly. It was total chaos.

  Del and I ended up at a cafe just around the corner from the Ryelands, a place I remembered from when I worked there and where some of us liked to go for a late evening snack when we finished our shift. I sat Del down at a corner table and fetched him a coffee, then went back outside to call Em. The signal was better outside. Also I didn’t fancy anyone eavesdropping.