by Wade, Calvin
That line got me. Despite the age gap, despite his looks, despite who his brother was, that line got me. No-one had singled me out as the special one before and I knew he was genuine. There was just one more thing I had to check.
“If you feel as much about me as you say you do, why did you not stick around last night? Why did you leave me with your brother?”
“Richie’s had a rough time recently. He deserves to have someone great in his life. He is the only person in the world I would have left you with last night. If it had been anyone else, I swear on my mother’s life, I would have stuck around and fought tooth and nail for you.”
Jim had bought himself a date. I fully expected it to be only the one date, but it wasn’t. That night, we went to the Saracens Head in Halsall. A quiet pub next to the Leeds-Liverpool canal. Not exactly where you would expect an eighteen and nineteen year old couple to go, but Jim did say he was unique! I found Jim charming and very, very funny, but I did not feel any sort of spark. He just seemed to manage to do enough to get another date. We didn’t kiss until our fifth date and I don’t think I fell in love with Jim until about our twentieth date, but fell in love I did.
Seventeen years later, we are married with four amazing daughters and I have not stopped loving that crazy man for one second in our thirteen years of marriage. Every day is different with Jim, I wake up every morning excited that I get to spend my time with him and the daughters that we have jointly created.
I only regret one thing. That thing being that I ever had feelings for my brother-in-law! Richie was so not my type! I loved him dearly as a brother, but wish I’d gone home with Jim that night in Disraelis and Richie had been the one that had moved on elsewhere! I suppose it was all fate though and everything happened the way it did for a reason. I just found it hard to accept that the best man at my wedding and the godfather of our first daughter, Gracie, saw me naked before my husband!
My Dad was right that night. Jim often tells me he’s the luckiest man alive and I always tell him we are the luckiest couple. I didn’t drop my standards, I raised the bar and no-one in the world could have sailed over it like Jim. The years have been kind to him and he is trimmer now than he was when we first met but he would still not win any competitions based on looks alone. Who cares? Looks fade as personality continues to shine and anyway, these days Jim seems gorgeous to me. He is an entertaining, caring, compassionate, intellectual man and I still burst with pride every time I introduce him as my husband.
Richie
“Richie, you want ME to lend YOU money?” Dad could not contain a smirk. “ME!”
“Dad, I’m just asking whether you could lend me any money, what’s so funny about that?”
“I’ll tell you what’s funny about that! This whole family spends it’s whole together time giving me stick about not being able to look after money and now you are asking me if I will lend you some! Who else in the family have you already asked?”
I looked at him sheepishly.
“Everyone.” I mumbled.
“So no-one else will lend you anything, so as a last resort, you come to your old Dad, eh?”
This conversation was taking place in the garden shed at the bottom of our garden. I had spotted Dad sneaking out there to read his “Racing Post” and thought it would be a good moment to approach him, before the losing bet rather than after. The fact that he was hiding in a shed in late Autumn, to read his Racing Post, indicated that most previous experiences of betting had not proved fruitful.
“Dad, I know you never have any money, but I thought I might as well ask.”
“What do you need it for?”
“I want to go and find Kelly. I know round about where she is?” “Where?”
“Singapore.”
“SINGA-BLOODY-PORE! I thought you were going to say Manchester or somewhere like that! Not SINGA-BLOODY-PORE!”
“It wasn’t my idea for her to go there.”
“Yes, but you’re the daft pillock who’s going to follow her out there, like a lost puppy! How much is that going to cost you to get there?”
“In total, I reckon I’ll need a grand.”
“And how much have you got?”
“I had £300 myself and…..”
Dad interrupted.
“How much have the rest of the family given you?”
“Caroline said she can give me £50.”
“And the rest of them?”
“They’re all skint.”
“So you’d need £650 from me. Hang on whilst I write you a cheque!”
Dad motioned as if he was going to go in search of a chequebook. I started to get excited.
“Really?”
“No, of course not you daft git! Where would I get £650 from?”
“I thought you may have had a win on the horses.”
“The most success I’ve had on the horses recently, Richie, was when Doncaster was waterlogged and I got my stake money back!”
I thought as much. Tramps held on to money longer than Dad.
“Never mind,” I said.
Dad realised I was disconsolate and stopped joking.
“So there’s no way you could get there with £350?”
“I might be able to get a flight, but then there’s food and lodgings to pay for when I’m there. I many not be able to find Kelly straight away.”
“Right.”
Dad had a little goatee beard at this point. He ran his fingers through it.
“What if I were to invest the money for you?”
“Invest it? That would need to be a good investment to go from £350 to £1000 within weeks.”
“It could go from £350 to £1000 in the space of forty minutes. It could also be worth nothing in forty minutes too.”
Now I understood.
“Dad, are you suggesting I put the whole £350 on a horse?”
“Not exactly!”
“Good! You just said you were having no luck and then I thought you were going to try to spread your bad luck to me! I’ve enough of my own, thank you!”
“Not one horse. Two horses! A short priced double!”
“Bloody hell! What sort of father are you?”
“Look son! Can you get to Singapore and stay there for £350? No, you can’t. So, as things stand, that three hundred and fifty quid of yours is pretty worthless. Now if you gamble it, you’ll either win and everyone is happy or alternatively you will lose and you won’t be able to afford to go, which is pretty much the position you are already in!”
“Who’s picked the horses?”
“I’ve had a couple of tips from a reliable source.”
“Who?”
“Dave at the Dog & Gun.”
“Dave at the Dog & Gun! How is he a reliable source, Dad? He’s not exactly Lester Piggott!”
“His son is a stable lad at an up and coming trainers down in Shepton Mallet. His son’s called Joe and Joe reckons they have two really smart horses that are going to have their first outings for the yard this week. The whole yard are really, really confident that both horses will win. Their star jockey, “Fingers” Marling, who rides mainly in Ireland, is coming over just for these two rides.”
“He sounds like a safebreaker not a jockey. When are they running?”
“Tomorrow afternoon at Wincanton. I’m putting a hundred quid on the double myself!”
“I thought you just said you had no money!”
“I haven’t! I’ve borrowed it off Dave! I’ll pay him back out the winnings!”
“Dad, you are just a complete nightmare!”
“Don’t tell your mother!”
“As if I would!”
Richie
I spent the whole evening in my bedroom debating whether I should gamble everything I had on two horses that Dad had recommended. Dad had spent my entire life skint, so it was not as though he had a history of tips that had made him a small fortune. If Dad was backing them, they were more than likely doomed to failure. Nevertheless, what choi
ce did I have? As Dad rightly said, £350 was getting me nowhere, so why not gamble? Should I just pick my own horse though rather than rely on two of Dad’s? I thought the best thing to do was sleep on it, see how I felt the following morning and hope that I woke up feeling lucky.
That fateful Thursday morning I woke up feeling desperate rather than lucky. Desperate to find Kelly. I needed that extra money and I knew I was going to have to take the risk. I just hoped fortune did favour the brave. I came down the stairs for breakfast, to find Dad at the kitchen table, not surprisingly, his Daily Express was open on the racing page. Dad was always one of those blokes who read his newspaper from the back page to the front and unless something was happening at Bolton Wanderers, he would skim through the football, cricket and rugby headlines and keep moving inside until he got to the racecards.
“Morning!” Dad greeted me cheerily. “It looks like Paul Mullins horses are both running!”
I could tell Dad was excited, he had managed to convert Jim to the joys of horseracing, now I’m sure it felt like an opportunity to convert me too.
“What are they called?”
“Quartz Starr and Florida Diamond.”
I must admit, I liked the names. They sounded like winners.
“So, if I decide to put my money on them. What do I do?”
“I’ll juggle my appointments and make sure I’m in Ormskirk this afternoon. I’ll show you how to put the bet on and guide you through the world of gambling. Now let me see, the races are the third and fourth races on the card. Florida Diamond goes first in the novice hurdle and then Quartz Starr goes next in the novice chase….”
I had to interrupt!
“Dad, if you’ll excuse the pun, can you just hold your horses! Slow down a bit, will you! I can hear the words coming out of your mouth, but they mean nothing to me, you might as well be speaking Cantonese!”
“What bit did you not understand?”
“Novice hurdle. Novice chase. There’s no point going into detail , Dad, it doesn’t mean anything to me and I’m sure, win or lose, this will be a one-off. I will not spend every weekend for the rest of my life trying to sneak off to the bookies.”
Despite saying I did not want specific details, Dad decided he would tell me anyway.
“OK. Novice just means they are new at it or crap at it, the horse can’t have won a race in that sphere before the start of that season. Chase races are over big fences, like the Grand National and hurdles are just little baby hurdles that they skip over. The hurdles are probably not as high as the ones the sprinters leap over in the Olympics.”
“What happens if one of my horses falls?”
“Then you lose. It’s a double, Richie, they both need to win. If one wins and one comes second, you’ve lost.”
This sounded like a long shot to me. Both horses had to get around the whole course without falling and even if they managed that, they had to win. I had seen the Grand National on the tv, horses fell pretty often!
“Is that not a bit hopeful, Dad? You hardly ever get one winner, let alone two!”
“These horses are really good horses though. Something a bit special, by all accounts. They’ll both go off as favourites.”
“Which means people like them?” I guessed.
“Sort of. It means the bookmakers and the punters think they are more likely to win than anything else in the race, so they pay worse odds on that horse than the rest of the horses in the field. They are both evens favourites.”
He’d lost me again. ‘Worse odds’, ‘horses in a field’, ‘evens favourites’, I was pretty sure Dad was talking in jargon just to confuse me.
“Are you doing this deliberately, Dad?”
“What?”
“Speaking in tongues!”
“Every Tom, Dick and Harry in any bookies up and down the country would understand what I’ve just said, it’s basics.”
“I’m not a Thomas, Richard or Harold that lives in the bookies though, am I? I’m a Richard who watches Everton and listens to music and falls in love with good looking girls. Horses and ponies are for girls and idiots with even less money than sense.”
“You won’t be saying that when you’re counting your wedge later on.” I started to laugh. “I hope you’re right, Dad!”
Dad closed his paper, took a slurp of his tea and stood up.
“Richie, I’m going to have to get ready for work. Meet me outside the Brahms at one thirty and I’ll take you over to Stanley Racing and show you how to put the bet on.”
“OK.”
“How much money have you got again?”
“Three hundred and fifty quid.”
“Right, two evens favourites in a double means that if you put £350 on, when the first one wins, you have £700 going on to the second one. If the second one wins too, you double up again, which means you have £1400 in total, including the £350 you started with. So you wouldn’t just have a grand to get you to Singapore and get you somewhere to stay, you would have four hundred quid left over to buy Kelly some flowers and take her to Raffles Hotel for a Singapore sling and even book a room there! See you later, son! It’s going to be one hell of a day!”
Dad slapped both my cheeks simultaneously and then ran up the stairs like an excited teenager.
What did I have to lose? I could have continued trying to save some money and I’m sure eventually I would have raised enough money to fund a plane trip through hard graft, but by the time that day came, Kelly may have moved on to Australia or New Zealand or Japan or anywhere else. Amy’s lead was a hot one and I needed to get to Singapore sooner rather than later. The more I thought about it, the more I persuaded myself that this bet was the right thing to do. One way or the other it would seal my fate.
I can understand why gamblers gamble. The adrenalin that pumped through my veins that morning was not something I was used to experiencing. In a way, it reminded me of the euphoria I had felt when I had been told my cancer appeared to have been removed. This time the feeling was not euphoric though, it was excitement and fear all rolled into one. I had fallen in love with someone so beautiful and she had become so precious to me, that to lose the opportunity to see her again based on certain horses not running around the field as fast as others was just plain daft, but I was not in a position to look for logical and practical solutions. Within nine hours. I knew I would be buying a plane ticket to Singapore or cursing my idiotic decision and my idiotic father! Florida Diamond and Quartz Starr were probably in their horseboxes now, I thought, totally oblivious to the fact that their performance that afternoon would decide the future direction of my life. “Fingers” Marling probably didn’t give a second thought either to how his performance could impact on the punters who funded his sport. I knew there was no such thing as a cert, bookmakers shops managed to pay their rent, their staff wages, their electricity, their satellite televisions and their race sponsorships from the money they took off people like Dad, but I felt I was going to be different. My share of bad luck had been used up, it was good luck’s turn. I kept picturing myself in Stanley Racing after the second winner, counting my huge wad of cash. All £1400!
I was at a loss what to do that morning. I distracted myself by watching a Laurel and Hardy film of Dad’s called “Sons Of The Desert”. I laughed hysterically at anything remotely funny as my nerves were taking me to the edge of insanity. I took my mind off things a little, but not a lot and throughout the film I must have wound my watch up half a dozen times as it felt like it had stopped. Eventually time consented to pass. Funny how when you want time to stand still, it is swallowed up like doughnuts but when you want it to proceed, it was almost statuesque.
At about half past twelve, I was gathering my things together, I had dug out my jacket and was searching for my scarf and gloves when I heard the front door slam. I tucked my wallet into my jeans pocket and went to investigate. I met Caroline in the hallway looking cold and flustered. She was supposed to have been in Durham for a week’s holiday, but after t
wenty four hours, she had returned.
“What’s up with you, Cal?”
“Are you the only one in?” she wanted to check before providing details.
“It’s all over between Donna and I. We’re finished!”
“Why?”
“She’s too possessive. It seemed fun having an intense relationship at first, but I can’t even get stuck in traffic without her thinking I’m off screwing another woman. I’ve had enough of it, I’ve told her we’re finished. Where are you going?”
“Ormskirk.”
“What for?”
“I’m meeting Dad.”
“Does he know?”
“Of course he knows!”
“Why are you meeting him?”
“To put a bet on a horse. Two horses in fact.”
“Jim, give Richie his body back!”
“Funny!”
“You don’t bet on horses!”
“It’s a one-off. I need the money to get to Singapore to track down Kelly.” “How do you know she’s in Singapore?”
“Amy Perkins told me. She had a phone call from Kelly.”
The revelation of my good news did not seem to act as a fillip for Caroline. If anything, it turned her mood even more sour. The puss felt threatened.
“I wouldn’t bother if I were you, Richie. If she’d phoned you, then maybe, but if she’s phoning Amy rather than you, what does that tell you? It tells me, she’s moved on, Richie. No offence, but you’ve had cancer, make the most of your life, don’t go chasing cute fannies in Singapore when there’s plenty to be found round here.”
“Don’t hold back Caroline, say what you think, sis!”
“The truth hurts sometimes, Richie.”
“I know that. It’s just my head is saying ‘Forget Kelly’ but my heart is telling me that I still love her and I need to go to Singapore to find her and see how she feels about me. I’m about to put every penny I own on Dad’s tips and if I win, I’m booking a flight to Singapore straight after.”