The Race (11 page)

~*~

The remaining heats seemed to flash by. I’d more or less forgotten about Angela Kiwit until I saw her, coming out of the tunnel and taking her place at the trackside with the other runners from her heat, the twenty-sixth, which would have been a tough call for anyone.

Lowell Baker was the favourite in that one, with Lamborghini, but Kiwit seemed relaxed and I could tell by the way Baker kept glancing at her that he considered her his main rival.

As I’d predicted, she was wearing my gloves. Teamed with patent black knee-high lace-up Doctor Martens and a skin-tight black body stocking they looked incredible, and as Kiwit raised her right hand to the crowd I felt a shiver of pure pride slide down between my shoulder blades like melting ice cubes. As they released the dogs from the traps I suddenly knew that Tou-le-Mar was going to win the heat, that she would beat Baker’s Lamborghini by a mile, and that’s what happened. The crowd went insane. Lamborghini came in second, so he was through to the quarters, but it wasn’t Lamborghini people were cheering for. He was an old dog now, after all, and there were already rumours that Lowell Baker was planning to retire at the end of the season.

Angela Kiwit on the other hand was a rising star. She loved her public and her public loved her.

She had what you might call watchability. A regular little People’s Princess.

~*~

It wasn’t until after lunch that things started getting tense. The running order of the prelim heats decides the line-up for the quarters. The field is divided equally in three, with the first- and second-placers from the first heat being matched with the firsts and seconds from heats eleven and twenty-one, and so on down the line. This meant that Celia Lilac would be running against Melrose again and this time she would almost certainly go out. Del wasn’t bothered about that so much, but I could see he was worried about Melrose, the same as I was.

“That’s a good dog,” he said. The heat winners were being paraded around the track by their runners ahead of the official announcement of the quarter line-ups, as was the custom, and I saw the way Del was watching not just Melrose, but Kris Kruger too. The man was over fifty. He was wearing a pair of distinctly ordinary charcoal grey gants, bought off-the-peg from Gallant’s most likely, and with his shaven head and untidy stubble he looked like one of the drunks you’ll see sometimes on the quayside at Folkestone, repatriated POWs straight off the boat from Argentina. They have a haunted look about them, those guys. It’s as if they don’t believe the war is really over, even though the rest of the world insists upon it.

Kruger was a bit like that – scary.

The running order for the quarters is reversed, to make things fairer, which meant that Limlasker, who’d run in the third prelim, would now be running in the eighth quarter-final. Celia Lilac and Melrose would run in the sixth. Lim’s heat didn’t look too bad on paper. There was Trudi-Delaney, who he’d already beaten by a mile in the prelims, and of the other four dogs he would be running against only one looked dangerous, a bitch named Phoolan Devi who had beaten Lim once before, three years or so back in the Keel Sweepstake. Phoolan Devi was very tall for a bitch, almost half a hand taller than Lim in fact. She was fawn in colour, with liquid brown gold-flecked eyes, the same eyes as her runner, Adriana Welitsch.

I’d wanted to make gloves for Adi Welitsch since forever. I kept hoping someone would recommend her but for some weird reason of her own she preferred to wear off-the-peg, like Kris Kruger only not so appalling. For the Delawarr, Welitsch was wearing elbow-length Plascars in vermilion red, which were okay really for readymades, but I couldn’t help thinking about what I could do for her if only she’d let me.

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 Kris 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.