by Markus Zusak
As I said, she loved horses, but not in the way most girls did.
It was atmosphere, not ribbons.
It was stables more than shows.
As she grew older, in school holidays, she and her brothers begged to go to trackwork, and she loved those full dark mornings, of hoofbeats through mist and fog. She loved the way the sun came up, so distantly huge and warm-looking, and the air so close and cold.
Back then they ate toast on the fence line—all white, all rail and no palings—and they loved the trainers, how they swore beneath various breaths, and old jockeys hanging around, like toughened, deep-voiced children. It was funny seeing them in trackwork clothes, in jeans and vests and old skullcaps.
Her brothers were four and five years older, and when they hit the age, they’d also joined the racing game; it was obviously in the blood.
* * *
—
In racing they always talk about blood.
Or more, they talk of bloodlines:
Just as with Clay and the rest of us, there’s much to discover in the past.
According to Carey, her mother, Catherine Novac, was the only member of her family to both mistrust and despise the racing world, subject to her mood. She could be cold and pale-blue water-color; or gingery-blond and fuming. Sure, she loved horses, she enjoyed racing, but she abhorred the racing business; its wastage, its overbreeding. Its greedy girth of underbelly. It was something like a beautiful whore, and she’d seen it void of makeup.
Carey’s brothers had called her Catherine the Great, for she was formidably strict and serious; she was never fooling around. On race days, when she said to come back in one piece, they knew what she really meant:
Don’t count on sympathy if you fall.
Life was hard for jockeys.
It was much, much harder for the horse.
* * *
—
Then Ted.
Trackwork Ted.
Carey knew the story.
Early on in his career, he was likely the most promising apprentice in the country, like a Pike, or a Breasley, or a Demon Darb Munro. At five-foot-seven, he was tall for a jockey and short for a man, but he had the perfect physique for riding, and a metabolism people would die for; he seemed unable to put on weight. The downside was that his face looked hastily assembled, like the manufacturers were in a rush. But that depended who you asked. A girl named Catherine Jamison thought he wasn’t half too bad. She loved his cluttered face and good-green eyes, and that she could carry him in her arms—till tragedy struck, one morning.
He was twenty-three years old.
Overnight, there was a sudden, metabolic change.
Where once he could eat a whole packet of Tim Tams on race day, now he could eat only the wrapper.
* * *
—
They’d been in the city for a while by then; they’d moved to make a real go of it. Catherine had a nursing job, at the Prince of Wales, near Randwick.
There came a week, a good few years into the stint, when Ted started feeling different. Then, a few hours before first light that day, he’d made the ritual trip to the bathroom, and the scales there didn’t lie; and neither did the mirror. He was simultaneously stretched out and filled in, and his face had lost its tardiness. But what was the good of that? Did he want to be handsome, or ride the perfect miler in the Doncaster? The world stopped making sense.
The worst part was his hands.
In their small apartment kitchen, he didn’t even contemplate his breakfast; he sat at the kitchen table, looking at those hands, and they were the meatiest things he’d ever seen.
* * *
—
For five long years, he worked and fasted.
He steam-roomed.
He lettuce-leaved.
When he read the paper he sat in the car in the heat of day, the windows all up, in his newest, warmest tracksuit. He mowed lawns in jacket and jeans, with a wetsuit underneath. He cramped up, he was irritable. He ran with garbage bags strapped to his legs, under winter woolen pants. These were the spoils of the racing game, and a thousand pent-up dreams—of Crunchie bars and chocolate cake, and impure thoughts of cheese.
There was the usual fare of injuries, too—he was thrown, he broke both wrists. He was kicked in the face in the stables. Trampled twice at trackwork. Once, in Race Three at Warwick Farm, a horse in front threw a shoe; it clipped him over the ear. It could have been many times worse.
By the twilight of his career he was like a soldier, or an ancient charioteer; each race was like going into battle. Through the purgatory in his stomach, and the toothaches, headaches, and dizzy spells, the final insult was a raging case of athlete’s foot, caught from the floor of the jockey room—
“And that,” he often joked to Carey, age seven, in the car on their way to trackwork, “is what got me in the end.”
* * *
—
The thing is, though, Ted Novac was lying, because what got him in the end wasn’t athlete’s foot, or hunger pains, or dehydration and deprivation. It was, of course, a horse:
A chestnut giant, The Spaniard.
The Spaniard was just a sensational horse, bighearted, like Kingston Town, or Phar Lap. On top of that, he was entire, which meant his bloodline could carry on.
He was worked by Ennis McAndrew, the noted broomstick trainer.
When the horse came to his stable, McAndrew made a phone call.
“How much do you weigh these days?”
He’d dialed Ted Novac’s number.
* * *
—
The Spaniard raced in almost all the big ones a mile or over.
He could sprint, he could stay, he did everything you could ask.
Running second or third was a failure.
Fourth was a disaster.
Up top, every time, was Ted Novac, his name in the paper, and his smile caught napping on his face—or was it a grimace to scratch the itch? No. On The Spaniard he never felt it; he’d put him to sleep for half the race, stoke him slowly for a furlong, and then he’d bring him home.
By the end of the horse’s career, Ted was looking to get out, too.
Only one race had eluded them, and no, it wasn’t the Race That Stops the Nation. Neither McAndrew nor Ted nor the owners cared about that one; it was the Cox Plate that they coveted. In the minds of the true experts, that was the greatest race.
For Ted it was a travesty.
He couldn’t make the weight.
* * *
—
Even at weight-for-age, where he knew the mark well in advance, Ted was too far gone. He’d done everything he’d always done. He’d mowed a hundred lawns. At home he collapsed in the shower. The decision was made a week in advance, a scarecrow hand on his shoulder—and, of course, The Spaniard won.
In later years, it was still hard for him when he told her. Another jockey—the ever-affable, mustachioed Max McKeon—brought the horse round the lot of them, on the vanishing Moonee Valley straight, and The Spaniard won by a length.
As for Ted Novac, he listened in the car, on his driveway.
They lived in a different racing quarter by then—at number eleven, here on Archer Street, years before Penny and Michael—and he’d smiled and cried, cried and smiled.
He itched but didn’t scratch it.
He was a man with burning feet.
* * *
—
For a time, after retirement, he still rode trackwork, and was one of the most popular morning riders in the city. But they soon moved back to the land. Catherine liked the country, and the worst and wisest decision they made was to keep the old house on Archer Street. The game, at least, gave them that.
As the years climbed by, they had kids out there. Ted grew to his natural weight—or a few
kilos heavier, if he went too hard on the cake. He felt by then he’d earned it.
He worked many jobs, from shoe salesman to video shop assistant to cattle hand on farmland, and some of them he did well. It was mornings were his favorite, though; he rode trackwork at the track out there. They called it Gallery Road.
By then he got the nickname: Trackwork Ted.
Two incidents defined him.
The first was when the trainer, McAndrew, brought two promising jockeys out to watch. It was a Tuesday. The sky was blond and beaming.
“See that?”
The trainer had barely changed.
Just the whitening of his hair.
He pointed to the rider rifling past them.
“See his heels? And those hands? He’s on that horse like he’s not even riding him.”
The two kids were standard arrogance.
“He’s fat,” said one, and the other one laughed, and McAndrew slapped them hard. Twice to the chin and cheeks.
“Here,” he said, “he’s coming again.” He spoke like all trainers everywhere. Looking outwards. “And for the record, that guy’s ridden more winners than you two bastards’ll ride your whole life. He’ll have more wins at trackwork.”
Just then, Ted arrived on foot.
“McAndrew!”
And McAndrew grinned, quite broadly. “Hey, Ted.”
“How do I look?”
“I thought, what’s Pavarotti doin’ all the way out here bein’ a jockey?”
They hugged each other warmly, a few good hits, each back.
They thought about The Spaniard.
* * *
—
The second moment came a few years later, when the Novac boys were thirteen and twelve, and Carey, the girl, still eight. It would be Trackwork Ted’s last trackwork.
It was spring, school holidays, there’d been rain, and the grass was green and long (it’s always surprising how long the grass gets grown for Thoroughbreds), and the horse bucked, Ted was thrown, and everyone saw him fall. The trainers kept the boys away, but Carey somehow got there; she weaved her way through, she parted the legs—and first she saw the sweat, and the blood mixed up with skin, then his collarbone, snapped and bent.
When he saw her, he forced a grin.
“Hey, kid.”
That bone, so bony-white.
So raw and pure, like sunlight.
He was flat on his back, and men in overalls, men in boots, men of cigarettes, agreed that they shouldn’t move him. They formed a scrum and showed respect. At first he wondered if he’d broken his neck, for he couldn’t feel his legs.
“Carey,” he said.
The sweat.
A rising, wobbling sun.
It rolled down through the straight.
And still, she couldn’t stop looking, as she kneeled there, closely, next to him. She watched the blood and dirt, merged like traffic on his lips. It caked his jeans and flannel shirt. It caught the zipper down his vest. There was a wildness clawing out of him.
“Carey,” he said again, but this time he followed with something else. “Can you go down and scratch my toes?”
Yes, of course.
The delirium.
He thought he was back there, in the halcyon athlete’s foot days, and hoped he might distract her. “Never mind the collarbone…that itch is Goddamn killing me!”
When he smiled, though, he couldn’t hold it.
She went to his boots to loosen them, and now he screamed in pain.
The sun flopped down and swallowed him.
* * *
—
In the hospital, a few days later, a doctor came in on his rounds.
He shook the boys’ hands.
He ruffled Carey’s hair:
A tangled, boyish auburn thing.
The light was collarbone-white.
After he’d checked on Ted’s progress, the doctor looked amiably at the children.
“And what are you three going to be when you grow up?” he asked, but the boys didn’t even get a word in—for it was Carey who looked, it was Carey who grinned, as she squinted through the glare in the window. She pointed, casually over, at her roughed-up trampled-down dad, and already she was on her way:
To here and Clay, and Archer Street.
She said, “I’m gonna be just like him.”
So this is where I washed up—in the trees—on the day beyond Cootamundra.
I stood there, alone in the eucalypts, my feet amongst the bark.
The long belt of sun in front of me.
I heard that single note, and for now I couldn’t move. There was music from out of his radio, which meant he didn’t know.
* * *
—
I watched them in the riverbed.
I can’t even tell you how long—and the bridge, even in pieces, was more beautiful than I could believe.
The arches were going to be glorious.
The curvature of stone.
Just like Pont du Gard, there wouldn’t be any mortar; it was fit to exactness and form. It glowed in the open like a church.
I could tell by the way he leaned on it, too, and ran his hand across.
How he spoke to it and fastened it; and fashioned and stood alongside it:
That bridge was made of him.
* * *
—
But by then I had to commit to it.
My station wagon, behind me.
Slowly, I left the trees, I walked out all the way. I stood in the afternoon, and the figures in the river, they stopped. I’ll always remember their arms; they were tired but hardened with life.
They looked up, and Clay said, “Matthew?”
And nothing could ever prepare me, as I made my way down toward them. I was nothing but a shell of what I needed to be, for I wasn’t expecting this—such buoyancy and life in the tilt of his face—or such a wondrous bridge.
And it was me, not him, who fell down first, my knees in the earth of the riverbed.
“It’s Carey,” I said. “She’s dead.”
What if they hadn’t kept the place?
The house at 11 Archer Street.
If only they hadn’t come back.
Why didn’t they just sell it and move on, instead of prudence, collecting the rent?
But no—I can’t go thinking like that.
Once again, I can only tell it.
She arrived at nearly sixteen—to a street of boys and animals, who now included a mule.
* * *
—
In the beginning, it was the night of the day in March, when Clay had run and won State.
It was back at E. S. Marks.
I’d lovingly taped his feet.
The closest kid was a farm boy from Bega.
It took a while to convince Clay to stay.
He didn’t want the dais, or the medal; he only wanted Achilles.
* * *
—
He’d broken the state record by just over a second, which they said, at that level, was ludicrous. Officials had shaken his hand. Clay was thinking of Epsom Road.
As we pulled out of the car park, and joined the late-afternoon traffic, he watched me in the rearview, and I looked, briefly, at him. Fair’s fair, he seemed to be intimating, the gold medal round Goddamn Rosy. She was panting in Tommy’s lap. I glanced back and silently said it:
You’re lucky you’re refusing to wear it—I’d use it to wring your neck.
Back home we dropped Rory and Henry off.
We also dropped off the dog.
As Tommy got out of the car, Clay put a hand on his arm.
“Tommy, you’re coming with us.”
* * *
—
W
hen we got there, in the evening, he was waiting at the fence, and he called and cried at the sky. I remembered the ad from the classifieds: “Doesn’t buck,” I said, “doesn’t bray,” but Clay had flatly ignored me, and Tommy had fallen in love. The fifth of the undangerous bunch.
This time when we’d stood for a while, the caravan shifted and shook, and a man came pouring outwards. He wore tired old pants and a shirt, and a smile of camaraderie. He walked over as fast as he could, like pushing a lorry with a limp, uphill.
“Are you the bastards who’ve been feeding this miserable old bastard?” he asked, but he was grinning the grin of a kid. Was he the groom Penelope had met that first time, over the fence at 18 Archer Street? We’ll never know.
By then the evening was fading.
The man was Malcolm Sweeney.
He had the physique of a dressed-up doughnut.
He’d been a jockey once, then a groom, then a certified stable shit-shoveler. His nose was alcoholic. Despite the boyish outlook, you could swim in the sorrows of his face. He was moving up north, to his sister’s.
“Can we let the kid in, to give him a pat?” I asked, and Malcolm Sweeney was happy to oblige. He reminded me of a character in a book I’d once read, called The Sad Glad Mad Bad Glad Man—full of kindness but also regret.
“You’ve seen the Tribune?” he said. “And the ad?”
Clay and I nodded, and Tommy was already over there; over and patting his head.
Malcolm spoke again.
“His name’s—”
“We don’t need to know the name,” Clay informed him, but he was watching only Tommy.
I smiled at Malcolm Sweeney, as encouragingly as I could, then motioned across to Clay. “He’ll give you two hundred dollars to change it,” and I felt myself almost scowling. “But feel free to charge him three.”
There was a laugh like something-once-had-been.
“Two hundred,” he said, “it is.”