Something for the Pain (27 page)

It was not only among my tertiary-institute colleagues that I felt out of place. I haven't lacked for friends during my life, but I've never belonged in any circle or group. For much of the 1970s, my wife and I mixed from time to time in a group that included a writer or two, a few academics and teachers, and a few people connected with the theatre. They were mostly witty people, and we often fell about laughing. I can't recall ever being bored in their company, but perhaps that's because I always drank a lot. They might have been fun to be with, but I never felt close to them. I'd had two books published by then, and the people I'm talking about seemed to have assumed that because I was a writer I was like them in having left-wing political beliefs, reading the
Age
and tuning in to the ABC. Sometimes, I liked to provoke them. Sometimes, after I had drunk a good deal, I used to argue that horse racing had as much to teach us as had Shakespeare and certainly much more than some of the pretentious films and plays that they were fond of praising and discussing. They mostly assumed I was joking, but sometimes they gave me a hearing, and one night I tried to tell them how I had been affected by what I had seen of the owner-trainer Bill Coffey.

I knew very little about Bill Coffey. I had surmised a few details, and I imagined others. Bill was a New Zealander, but I didn't even know what district he came from. He had first arrived in Australia in the mid-1960s with his horse Straight Irish (Purple, gold band and cap, red sleeves). Bill had brought the horse to Australia at least twice, with moderate success. Straight Irish had won only one race in Melbourne but had earned prize money from several placings in relatively rich races and had run fifth in Polo Prince's Melbourne Cup at odds of two-hundred-to-one. I tried to explain to my not-very-receptive audience how I much preferred to study the career of such as Bill Coffey than to watch, for example, any of the Greek dramas that they, my audience, might have watched and been moved by. I could never, I said, be affected by the sight of some actor's wailing and throwing her arms around after she had killed her children—I should have said her
pretend children
. Nor could I be affected by some actor's long soliloquy after he had copulated with his mother, daughter, whoever. (I had only a vague knowledge of Greek drama, but I thought I knew enough to make my point.) What
did
affect me, I said, and in this I was being wholly sincere, was the sight of a man such as Bill Coffey leading back towards the saddling paddock a horse that had come close to winning a big race but had faded in the straight to earn only a minor prize. Bill, to judge from his dress and his appearance, was a humble man whose horse was his only means of acquiring wealth. The race just run had not ruined him. He was not at all crushed or impoverished. But Fate, through the agency of horse racing, was leading him on, teasing him, seeming to promise what it might never deliver.

I said this and more about Bill Coffey, and whatever my audience said in reply is no part of this story. They were certainly not converted, although I must have at least made sense to one of them.

She was a young woman, the girlfriend or wife of a man I have no recollection of. The pair were newcomers to the circle, having arrived recently from New Zealand. She had dark hair and pale skin, and I found myself looking often at her. She said nothing to me on the night when I preached my sermon about Bill Coffey but many months later, when she and her man and my wife and I happened next to be under the one roof, she took me aside and told me quietly that she had been back to New Zealand since she had last met up with me. She had made enquiries there about Bill Coffey and had learned a little. He had worked for most of his life in timber mills. She named a district of New Zealand but I, being half-drunk, never afterwards remembered it. Bill was a single man, whether a bachelor or a widower or divorced she did not know. His practice for many years had been to work in the timber industry for year after year until he had enough money to buy a horse likely to earn him a modest living. He would then give up his job and would train his horse full-time for as long as it could support him. After Straight Irish had been retired, so my dark-haired informant told me, Bill Coffey had gone back to timber work again.

I never saw the young woman again. Perhaps she went on mixing with the same set of people, but my wife and I drifted away. The 1970s were nearly over; our three sons were no longer children who could be put to bed in someone's spare bedroom while she and I partied on in the lounge room or the barbecue area. I had gone back to full employment, and our weekends were too precious to spend on bandying words with would-be intellectuals. I've never regretted losing touch with Barry Oakley and his court, but I still wish sometimes that I could have met up just once more in later years with the dark-haired young woman. I would not have spoken to her in the hearing of others but would have taken her quietly aside as she had once taken me aside and would have told her the last that I had ever learned of the story of Bill Coffey.

Bill came back to Melbourne one final time towards the end of the 1970s. Perhaps he brought more than one horse, but I recall only Lord Pilate. (His colours were the same as for Straight Irish; all Bill's horses carried the same colours.) Lord Pilate was aged eight or even nine and was a steeplechaser. He had won good races in New Zealand but struggled to find form in Melbourne. I knew that the Great Age of Racing had truly passed when the Victoria Racing Club, a few years ago, abolished jumps races at Flemington; at the time that I'm writing about, hurdle races and steeplechases were still run there. One Saturday at Flemington, a day of drizzling rain in the late 1970s, the horse Lord Pilate fell or was brought down in a steeplechase. The incident took place at a fence early in the straight. The field moved on to the winning post and afterwards slowed down, stopped, and were then walked back by their jockeys towards the mounting yard. Lord Pilate lay on the track where he had fallen. He was alive but unable to get to his feet. Those in the grandstands who were aware of the situation understood that the veterinary surgeon would have been hurrying towards the horse to authorise its being put down, or euthanised, to use the acceptable term of our own times. Not only was the vet hurrying to the stricken horse—a team of track workers was on their way with a canvas screen that they would unfold and would place as a barrier between the horse and the grandstands while the vet was firing his bullet into Lord Pilate's brain.

A number of us in the grandstands stood with binoculars to our eyes, watching all this. We were not ghouls—far from it. We would all have had our own reasons for watching. Probably the most common motive was a wish to assure ourselves that the horse would have been put down as swiftly and mercifully as possible. And then, some of us would have become aware of something untoward appearing within the circumference of our magnified view of the far part of the Flemington straight.

The stricken horse, as I've said, was lying at the top of the straight. This was about four hundred metres from the mounting yard, where trainers, strappers, and owners would have been waiting for the contestants in the steeplechase to return. At some time while the horse, Lord Pilate, was still lying where he had fallen, a man was seen running towards the horse from the direction of the mounting yard. The man was making rather slow progress. He was wearing what my father used to call oilskins: a long, heavy raincoat reaching almost to his ankles. While the man ran, his coat flapped about him and hindered him, making him look like an ungainly or crippled bird. The man reached the fallen horse while the vet was still inspecting it and while the track attendants were still unfolding their screen. The man flung himself down onto the grass of the steeplechase track, beside the horse. The man put his arms around the horse's neck and pressed his face against the horse's head. The man went on lying there. The light rain went on falling. The vet and the track attendants stood without moving. They were not embarrassed. They were merely being respectful. They were horsemen too. They went on standing patiently. They went on waiting until the old man, the timber worker and part-time owner-trainer, had spent the measure of his grief.