Dad tried to use logic to cope. For him, every attempt at rationalizing what had happened required the need to impart reason into something that would otherwise be too amorphous to handle.
So he sat in his chair and announced my invincibility to no one in particular. ‘He’ll be fine, he’ll be fine, he’ll be fine. He’s young, he’s strong, he’s fit, he’ll be fine,’ he would proclaim, as if, by repeating the same words over and over again, he was willing them to be true.
The games we play …
The first update came at 11.30 p.m., close to nine hours after my accident.
When the phone rang, my sister Geraldine answered it. It was my brother Pat, calling from the hospital in Liverpool.
When he spoke to Geraldine, she could hear the raw emotion in his voice, even as he tried to disguise it. But he didn’t mince his words, ‘I’ve just been in to see him. It’s not looking good. I’m not holding out much hope. Don’t tell Mam. Let me speak to her.’
As soon as Geraldine passed the phone to my mother, Pat’s voice on the other end of the line took on a calm, almost carefree tone. ‘Mammy,’ he said, ‘he’s going to be fine. Don’t listen to what anybody else says. Don’t read the papers and don’t listen to what they say on the news.’
‘Oh, Pat, is he going to live?’ she asked one son, about another.
Pat looked up then at the large, round clock on the hospital wall. It was nearing midnight and he knew his parents would get scant sleep even under the best of circumstances. So he crossed his index and middle fingers down by his leg – a childhood habit – as he lied, ‘He’ll be fine, Mammy. I’m telling you he’ll be OK. He’s bad, but he’ll be fine.’
And for the first time that day, my mother opened her heart and wept.
Following Pat’s call, Geraldine, Kathleen and Laurence began to discuss the logistics of getting Mam and Dad to Liverpool.
This might have seemed straightforward; it was anything but.
My parents were torn in two.
While a part of them felt they had to be at the hospital, another part was too afraid of what unknown beast they were choosing to confront. ‘I’m not sure I can face it,’ Mam kept saying, almost to herself.
My sisters were unanimously against Mam and Dad making the trip across to England, praying silently that they wouldn’t insist. Their motivation was simple: they wanted to protect our parents from as much as they could for as long as they could. Both girls had sons of their own; they understood, like any parent, the monumental burden of being one. There is never a way to temper the trauma of seeing one’s own child at death’s door. Hearing about it is one thing; seeing it in the cold light of day would be another.
And so at four in the morning it was decided, if not by consensus then by some resigned understanding: Laurence and Geraldine were to go and Kathleen was to stay in Ireland with Mam and Dad.
For the next ninety-six hours, friends and strangers across Ireland rallied around my parents in an unprecedented show of solidarity. The response was overwhelming. People were coming in and out of the house constantly to voice their support for my parents, many times, if only to say that I was in their prayers.
Five Bank Place became redolent with the scent of flowers. Cards and letters poured in. Bells tolled as Masses in my name were held in churches across the country.
While 296 miles away, I lay blissfully ignorant in a deep, dark sleep.
Stranger things have been known to happen, but in a small Irish town in Limerick, a sixty-four-year-old Catholic nun was trying to find the God that had found her.
Sister Bridget from the Presentation Convent had taught me at school when I was barely four or five years old, and watched me grow from a child to a man with both great interest and great fondness. Over the years, we had become firm friends and allies. Right from my pony-racing days and into my years as a professional jockey, she followed my career intently, cheering on my successes with heartfelt enthusiasm.
At 4 p.m. on Monday, 2 May, Sister Bridget heard the news of my fall. At 7 a.m. the following morning, she came to the house to pray with my mother. And then she came at that same hour, every single morning, for weeks. She did this to share her faith, to bring peace to my mother’s torment, and more than anything else, to make sure everyone believed that, in this hour of need, her God was on my side. Ave Maria.
On the morning of 3 May, when the newspaper came in, my mother refused to read it. ‘Pat said no,’ she told my father, shaking her head. ‘Pat said no, so I’m not going to.’
It was just as well. According to the papers, I had died before I had even left the racecourse.
But it didn’t stop my father.
We had an open fire in the kitchen, which he lit himself every morning and every evening religiously, except in the summer months. It was in front of the fire, with a cup of tea and two biscuits – never more, never less – that he always read the morning paper.
He did the same on the day in question. Even as the blood drained from his face, he didn’t stop until he had read it all, every last gruesome detail …
Then he tore it up and fed it to the flames.
It was the same with the television.
Sky News was relentless. My fall off Arcot was replayed as ‘Breaking News’ every hour for days on a never-ending loop, while the words ‘Irish jump jockey fights for his life’ flashed impatiently across the TV screen. Carefully chosen words, words that said everything, while still saying nothing.
The first time she saw it, Mam looked at Dad with fierce resolve in her eyes.
‘If he makes it, he’s never again to sit on a horse.’
After that, no one could bear to have the TV on.
The phone became an object of fear.
Mam became terrorized by it, recoiling every time it rang, refusing to answer it, saying to Dad, ‘You get that, I can’t.’
It became so frightful that she would walk around the sofa in the living room just to avoid walking by the phone, afraid that it was going to ring and say the wrong thing.
On Thursday, 5 May, a neighbour called on Mam and Dad to offer his condolences.
He had been told in the village that I had died and had come right away to make sure that my parents were OK.
‘I’m very sorry to hear about Declan,’ he said as he walked through the door.
Willie Scan Ryan had lived next door to us ever since I could remember, and he and my parents had been very good friends for years and years. In fact, it would be fair to say that he would have been as proud of me as Mam and Dad were, routinely phoning me up to congratulate me after a win, or simply to have a chat.
So it could be stated with absolute certainty that there would have been no trace of malice in his words, only genuine sadness. But it was enough to break Mam.
Our mother was one of the softest, most gentle of people, never one to lose her calm. No one – not even her own children – had ever known Mam to get cross.
That day she lifted her chin bravely, looked the neighbour in the eye and said with a steely anger, ‘Get out. Get out. Enough. He’s not dead. Get out.’
At lunchtime on Friday, 6 May, my brother Laurence rang and asked for my sister Kathleen.
He was brief. ‘It’s going to be a miracle if he survives. Don’t tell Mam and Dad.’
Kathleen didn’t, mostly because she didn’t know how to. Someone else, however, did.
Within an hour of Laurence’s call, the doorbell rang. When my father answered the door, he was greeted with words he never thought he would hear in his lifetime. Standing at his doorstep were two men, who introduced themselves as a reporter and a photographer.
‘Good evening, Mr Murphy. We’ve come to get your reaction to Declan’s death,’ the reporter said, while the photographer clicked photo after photo of my father’s horrified face.
It was a few minutes before my father gathered his wits about him and slammed the door in their faces.
On the same day, a few hours later, a strange
solitude descended over 5 Bank Place. It was that rare window when there were no visitors. Kathleen had gone back home to her young boys for a few hours. Tommy and Maura were alone.
Tommy was trying to read the Irish Independent in a vain attempt to get his mind off the darkness that had enveloped their lives.
When the phone rang, Maura was walking right by it.
She flinched. She had been avoiding the telephone for days, but now she was trapped in a bizarre conundrum of proximity. So she looked over at my father, then, hesitating only slightly, picked up the receiver with a small defiant nod.
‘Hello?’ she said. Followed by, ‘Oh, hello, Pat.’
Tommy sat upright, leaning in to try to hear the conversation, to read Maura’s face. But her face revealed nothing.
When at last she opened her mouth, it was simply to say, ‘Thank you, Pat.’ Then she took the receiver away from her ear.
Tommy could still hear Pat’s voice talking on the other end of the phone line, but Maura put the receiver back on the phone in a slow, deliberate move. Then she picked it up again and left it off the hook.
Still looking down, she spoke, her voice unnaturally steady. ‘They want to turn the machines off.’
Tommy felt his body crumble beneath him as he slumped into his chair. He felt a sudden wave of nausea sweep over him, followed by pure terror. He shut his eyes. When he opened them, Maura was still standing in the same place, eyes down, fixed on the phone.
When she finally looked up to meet his gaze, there was a faraway look in her eyes, a calm that took Tommy’s breath away.
A ray of sunlight illuminated her short fair curls, framing her face like a halo.
Tommy Murphy had never seen his wife look like that before – how vulnerable she appeared. Angelic almost.
Slowly, he stood up and walked towards her, his face betraying none of the pain that was tearing through his body. He put his arms around her, not so much because he thought she needed it, but because he did. They stood there for a long time, just holding each other.
Two Picassos
We sit down, Ami and I, to ‘do the book’, as she calls our book meetings. She’s uncharacteristically quiet.
‘What’s wrong?’ I ask.
‘I want to do the races today,’ she says.
‘So let’s do them,’ I offer helpfully.
‘I don’t know how to write up races, Dec …’ she says. ‘And you can’t remember them.’
We are both silent for a while. Somehow, in this moment, silence seems most appropriate.
Eventually, I am the one to break it. She won’t, so I must.
‘Right,’ I say cheerily, ‘how about we get all those news clippings and go through them together?’
She sits cross-legged on the floor of her living room. Spread out in front of her is a mountain of newspaper cuttings, arranged in chronological order, grouped by race. On her computer are the YouTube videos of almost every race I have ridden in, all queued up in sequence, from earliest to most recent, ready to play when we are. She is undaunted by the amount of work we have ahead of us – no stone must be left unturned.
Hundreds of hours later, when we’ve been through the lot, she says, ‘I don’t want to feature a race for the sake of featuring a race. I want a race with a story.’
‘A race is a race. How can a race have a story?’ I ask, genuinely perplexed.
‘It must,’ she says, picking up a cushion from the sofa. ‘Even this cushion has a story. Everything has a story. Think.’
And so I do.
I think.
And I pick out for her a few of my races ‘with a story’ – the Tripleprint Gold Cup, the Queen Mother Champion Chase, others that have ‘meaning’ in the way that she expects. Then we reconstruct them like two Picassos, frame by frame, fence by fence. We objectify, analyse and fracture. We disrupt the notion of traditional autobiography, we mock the ‘I’, we take apart the neatly packaged illusion of perspective. And then, once we have adequately destroyed, we proceed to rebuild. We begin to create Centaur. We connect dots, draw lines and take leaps. We reconstruct and reassemble, fusing together past and present, my life, my truth, her perspective, her biases, slowly stitching together the patches of pride that made up those years of glory. Little bits come back to me as I relive the races, but whether it is memory or imagination, I will never know.
Weeks later, when we are finally done, she reads them out loud to me. ‘Be brutal,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry about my feelings.’
I listen, my eyes closed. She’s taken me back. I feel like I’m there, riding.
When she’s done reading, she looks at me expectantly.
‘I think it’s very good,’ I say. ‘Well done, you should be very happy.’
‘You need to be happy,’ she says.
‘I couldn’t be happier,’ I say.
‘That’s what counts,’ she says.
I pause. And then, ‘You know, Ami, I can’t remember the feeling of winning a race.’
Zenith
It was the day of the 1993 Tripleprint Gold Cup. I was riding Fragrant Dawn for Martin Pipe, British jump-racing champion trainer, one of the most successful and influential people in the history of the sport – a man who revolutionized the world of racing in many ways.
The race was being run over 2.5 miles, the horse had never run past 2 miles, and nobody thought he would stay the distance. I had never sat on the horse before, but I’d watched him run, I had even beaten him previously in some good races. Instinctively, I believed this was enough to give me a feel for what he was like, what drove him to win.
That afternoon, before the start of the race, Martin Pipe wandered up to me in the paddock and asked me if I thought Fragrant Dawn would stay the distance. I turned to Martin Pipe, the trainer who devoted himself to training this horse – this man who knew the animal’s personality, his character, his capability, more intimately than anybody else in the world – and I said to him with quiet confidence, ‘If you let me ride him how I think he’s best ridden, the trip will not beat him.’
Martin Pipe didn’t say anything more. He didn’t give me any instructions. He only smiled.
As I was cantering down to the start, I focused my mind on trying to read the horse underneath me – the minutest of movements told a story, and I learnt everything I needed to about Fragrant Dawn just in those few minutes. He was a fervent horse, a veritable bundle of flames, and I thought to myself, I need to contain this horse’s energy, get him to travel comfortably within himself and try to keep a lid on his enthusiasm as much as I can, so as to get the best out of him when I most need it.
So I jumped off on Fragrant Dawn, level with all the other runners, but by the time they had cleared the second fence, I was trailing close to a hundred yards behind the rest. People seemed amazed that I was letting the field get that far away from me. As if he was reading my mind, at this precise moment, Sir Peter O’Sullevan, racing commentator for the BBC, announced, as we jumped, ‘It’s Young Hustler, Second Schedual and General Pershing … and all safely over it … with Fragrant Dawn just the back marker.’
But that didn’t bother me in the least. I knew what I was doing. I knew exactly what I was doing.
The most important thing for a jockey is to never give start in a race. It doesn’t matter if you’re going to drop your horse in, you always break level with all the other horses until you’ve got into a rhythm with your horse’s stride pattern, until you’ve obtained the horse’s cruising speed. You might find the other horses getting away from you because the pace of the race is very fast, but the crucial thing is to stay confident in your own pace.
In this case, contrary to outside perception, the inside reality was that I was fully in control of my position. In fact, I wasn’t letting the field run away from me, I was merely maintaining a pace that I knew my horse could sustain. And Fragrant Dawn and I had the perfect stride at every fence. Then, just as I had predicted, by the time we had jumped ten fences, halfway down the
far side, the horses that mattered started to take position and the dynamic began to shift.
As we approached the top of the hill at Cheltenham, five fences from home, I had crept into fifth position. But I still hadn’t changed gear – I was relaxed, in complete cruise control. Then, at that point on the track, just before you start racing downhill towards the third last fence, I found myself getting back into the game. And, as was characteristic of my riding style, I did this with apparent effortlessness. People said I made it look easy. Here’s a secret, though – there was none. There was never any deep, dark secret. It looked easy because it was easy. It was easy because I simplified it. The art of my race-riding was the ability to ride the race to suit my horse and not my horse to suit the race. This remained the defining characteristic of my riding style, the one constant that set me apart; my trump card.
In that race like any other, all I was doing was maintaining my horse’s cruising speed. And at that pace, I turned into the straight with two fences to jump. There were three horses ahead of me but I looked over my shoulder to see if there was any danger behind me, such was my confidence that I would beat all three in front of me.
And then, for the first time in the race, I changed gear – I quickened half a stride. My move was subtle, but Sir Peter O’Sullevan, brilliant and shrewd as ever, clearly picked up on this, as he announced, ‘Coming down to the second last now in the Tripleprint Gold Cup, and as they do so, it’s Young Hustler and Second Schedual, but Fragrant Dawn is still breathing down their necks, a very close third.’
And so I jumped the second last, moving (according to the commentary) ‘threateningly’ into second place, still four lengths down on the leader ridden by Carl Llewellyn. But I was somebody so in control of my environment that I remained unfazed; I knew Fragrant Dawn had more to give. The leader, Young Hustler, was a horse with a big reputation, and yet I had the pluck to sit four lengths off him and take a bold leap at the last. I won by a length and the horse never came off the bridle.
Centaur Page 7
