The Race

by Nina Allan

  Things like that are not so much objects as language, a secret language of memory that everyone speaks. You pay a couple of shillings for a crappy tin key ring you know you’re never going to use, and as soon as you get home you chuck it away in a drawer and forget all about it. But months, perhaps years later you find it again, and all at once you catch the aroma of roasting pigeon and cracked lentils, you remember the steadily rising heat of that afternoon, the row you had with your girlfriend because of the money you lost on a rank outsider, the great fuck you had later, to make up.

  It’s as if for those moments while you’re holding the key ring you have that day back again, and it makes you think. It makes you think about the past too, when the town was just a tiny fishing village and there were no smartdogs. It makes you wonder if the future was something we could have changed if we’d tried harder, or if everything that was going to happen would still have happened, whatever. Perhaps even before the universe existed it was already there – the fuel dumps, the tower blocks, the marble casino at the Ryelands, the dog track, all of it.

  Perhaps the past and the future are really the same. Del says it doesn’t matter because sooner or later the sun is going to explode and the Earth will die.

  “The sun’s getting bigger all the time, did you know that?” he told me once. “Bigger and hotter, and when it can’t grow any more the whole thing will go up like an ammo dump. The biggest ammo dump explosion in the whole of history. Anyone who’s still around then will be toast.”

  He tore a bite off his gammon sandwich and began to chew, staring at me all the while, daring me to contradict him.

  I didn’t though. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. I know he’s right in what he says, but I like to hope it won’t be the end, that creatures who were smart enough to put a man on the moon will one day be smart enough to invent a way of getting us out of here before it’s too late.

  To find a new home for us to fly to, where we can start again.

  I have to believe that, even though I’ll be millions of years dead by then, and so will Del and so will Claudia. Lumey will be dead too, wherever she is. I have to believe that it matters, or what’s the point? If you have nothing to believe in, you stop being yourself, and when that happens you might as well be dead anyway.

  Del had no time for fancies like that, and as for the secret language of memory, I don’t think Del bought a single race track souvenir in the whole of his life.

  “Why do you want to waste your dough on that shit?” he would say. “That’s half a race ticket you’ve just splashed away.”

  Del was there for the dogs, and that was it. Right from the beginning the dogs were his life.

  ~*~

  If Mum had had her way, Del would have studied hard and gone to college. He would have graduated with honours, then left this town on the tramway, never to return.

  He could have done it, too, if he had wanted to. Del was every bit as clever as our mother believed he was, cleverer, probably. But the only thing Del ever wanted was to be a runner.

  He was a nightmare at school. He held the teachers and everything they told him in contempt.

  “If those wankers have all the answers, how come the world’s such a fuck-up?”

  There was no answer to that, or at least none that would satisfy Del. By his early teens he was bunking off most of the time anyway.

  The teachers made the usual fuss and sent letters to my mum imploring her to take control of her son but I reckon most of them were glad to be shot of him.

  It drove Mum wild.

  “Do you want to end up like your father?” That was the worst insult she could think of to fire at him, the heavy artillery, but he took less notice of her than he did of the teachers. Instead of going to school, Del would sneak off to the Hawthorne estate to hang with the gang kids, or go fishing for giant crayfish in Filsham reedbeds. Those fuckers were huge. Some of the kids insisted they were mutants, genetic deviations caused by pollution in the water table, but that was all crap I reckon, they were just big crayfish.

  When it was too cold to go to the reservoir, they’d go to Charlotte House. Charlotte House was on Cliff Road, not far from the dog track. In Sapphire’s glory days as a resort it was a seaside hotel, like the Ryelands only not so large. When the hotel business collapsed it became a sanatorium for traumatized war veterans, and when that closed it was boarded up and left to go derelict. A spooky place, but fascinating. There was still furniture in some of the rooms, including a wardrobe full of moth-eaten evening dresses, and a huge black desk with what seemed like hundreds of tiny compartments that wouldn’t open. Del used to take his girlfriend there, Monica Danby. It was no secret that Monica hated the place. She said it was dirty and dangerous and that druggies went there, all of which was true but missed the point.

  I remember Del once made Monica walk across the exposed floor joist on the fourth floor landing. Some of the boards had rotted away up there, so you had to be careful. We used to take it in turns walking across. It made your guts heave if you were stupid enough to look down, but the joist was quite wide and you couldn’t have fallen through, not easily anyway, the gap was too narrow.

  Monica was useless at stuff like that, though. She didn’t fall, thank goodness, but she was in floods of tears.

  I thought Monica would chuck Del after the beam-walk incident, but she didn’t.

  ~*~

  Del started going to school again after Mum left. At first I thought it was just his way of getting back at her, but of course Del wasn’t the type to waste his own time on someone else’s account and as it turned out his reason for returning to class was Emerson Rayner.

  Emerson Rayner was what you’d call a classic nerd – a fat kid with bad acne, a near-genius at maths and just about the last person you’d have thought Del would hang out with. In fact it wasn’t Em so much as his dad that my brother was courting. Em’s dad Graeme was in the racing business – the manager of a medium-sized yard who also owned and trained dogs of his own. He was so unlike his son it was almost funny – a heavyset, barrel-chested guy with powerful shoulders and his long hair tied back with a bootlace like a motorcycle jockey’s. He always wore the same pair of red leather Kuprow runner’s gloves: engraved silver knuckle caps and styled short to the wrist. They were off the peg and not really old enough to class as retro but I loved them anyway because they had style. Only real pros can wear gloves like that and get away with it, and Graeme Rayner was a pro, no doubt about it.

  Of course, Del started out seeing Em as nothing more than his entrance pass to the Rayner yard. But one of the oddest things in this whole story is that the two of them ended up becoming actual friends.

  Gra Rayner’s best dog was Swift Elin. She was a silver tip, so tall and light and skinny she could rest her front paws on your shoulders and you would hardly feel them. She was a multiple cup winner, and placed fourth in the league championships three years running. Swift Elin was very gentle off the track, but when she was racing she’d get her head down and give everything. She was so fast it was uncanny. It was as if her soul was charged by lightning.

  Her runner, Roddy Haskin, was a dry old stick. I say old because that’s how he seemed – burned out and way off beam and mostly silent. In fact he was probably around forty-five at the time I knew him. That’s old for a runner, yes, but by no means extreme. He was as skinny as Swift Elin herself, but instead of looking like a silver ghost he had the appearance of a string of dried bacon rind. He spent most of the time he wasn’t actually training roaming around the marshes with Swift Elin.

  “Have you seen them?” Del said to me once. “Like fucking Siamese twins, the pair of them. I swear if you kicked one of them in the mouth the other would bite you.”

  They say a dog and its runner are like one tank of water that happens to get divided between two separate containers. It’s unsettling to see at first but you soon get used to it, the same way you do with identical twins who are always together.

&nbs
p; Swift Elin had strange eyes: pale blue, not like dogs’ eyes at all. That’s fairly common in smartdogs because of the gene splicing, but in the case of Swift Elin the crossover was especially pronounced.

  When I first met Em’s sister Sybil I saw at once that her eyes were the same colour blue as Swift Elin’s and with the same eerie dreaminess. It made me feel strange at first, to know that Gra Rayner had obviously used his own genetic material in the creation of Swift Elin, but then I thought why not? If you’re going to do it with anyone’s, why not your own?

  It was still kind of freaky though. I used to wonder what Em and Sybil’s mother Margrit thought about it, but of course I never asked.

  Margrit didn’t go near the dogs much, I did notice that.

  Del told me Gra used to get pretty frantic over Roddy’s marsh-gallivanting. Smartdogs are worth a lot of money. The best ones – cup winners and series champions like Swift Elin – are worth many thousands of shillings, especially if they’re still of breeding age. No wonder there are people – greedy, desperate people – who see dog-napping as an easy way of making a quick pile.

  “I mean, Rod’s not exactly built like a barn, is he?” Del said. “Gra wants to give him a minder, but Rod won’t hear of it. He says it interferes with their concentration.” He laughed. “Totally mental. And that’s just the dog.”

  Gra Rayner was right to be worried, though. If he were attacked in an isolated spot – one of the dirt roads up by Pett Level, for example – Roddy Haskin, who was built more like a wicker lobster pot than a barn, wouldn’t stand a chance. Swift Elin would be easy prey. The thieves wouldn’t bother with Rod – except perhaps to kill him if he got in the way.

  Runners, even gifted ones like Roddy, are always expendable.

  ~*~

  I became properly friendly with Em when I was sixteen. In a sense I couldn’t avoid him because he was always around, but as time passed and I came to know him better I found I liked him. He read books for a start, and he was never afraid to talk about things seriously. He was eighteen months older than the morons in my own year, and at that age eighteen months can spell the difference between an outright plonker and an actual human being. Also I didn’t fancy him, which I counted as a good thing. The guys I fancied always turned out to be dorks, and the fact that I could waste so much time thinking about them drove me crazy. With Em it was different because I could be with him without constantly wondering if he wanted to fuck me. It must have worked the same way for Em, too, because we soon got into the habit of hanging out together whenever Del was up at the lunges with Em’s dad.

  I thought of Em as a brother, I suppose, only more so. The trouble with Del was that you never knew when he was going to pull a mental on you. Em was always just Em, no added bullshit. I trusted him and I guess I loved him, and I guess I still do.

  Em and I first ended up having sex because he was being an idiot over another girl. I didn’t know Lily Zhang all that well because she was in the year above me, but when I found out it was her Em was hooked on, my mood did a nose dive. I don’t mean I was jealous or anything – I just knew he was doomed. We were sitting out on the pier when he told me. It was a late afternoon in July. Em and I were right out at the end of the boardwalk behind the amusement arcade. We had to sit really close together in order to hear each other over the constant racket from the slot machines, and I think that’s what made it easier for me to finally ask him what was going on.

  He’d been weird for a couple of weeks and I was getting sick of it.

  “Lily Zhang?” I said when he told me. “You have got to be joking.”

  “You think I’m fat and ugly,” Em said. He took off his glasses and rubbed at them with the silly piece of yellow cloth he always carried in his pocket. The lenses were covered in smears, a combination of sea salt and sweat. He looked shrunken into himself and lost, a tubby little pier-end manikin trying unsuccessfully to pose as a star-crossed lover.

  It was pathetic and sad, and it made me angry to see my friend reduced to this state, especially when his predicament was so obviously hopeless.

  Lily Zhang was training to be a dancer. She had a scholarship to some London academy. She spoke in a quavery little girl’s voice, and refused to eat anything unless it had been calorie-counted.

  Her face, framed by shiny black hair, was a perfect oval.

  It was impossible not to stare at her, but so what? You’d stare at a three-headed cat, but that doesn’t mean you’d want to go out with one.

  “Fuck Em, no,” I said. “I’m just wondering what on Earth you’d find to talk to her about.” I tried not to imagine them actually doing it. That was too revolting and ridiculous to contemplate.

  “She smiled at me the other day.” He looked as doleful and dejected as a rained-on badger.

  “You’re worth ten of her,” I said. That raised a smile at least. He peered at me with his beautiful tea-coloured eyes and then replaced his glasses.

  “Do you think anyone will ever want to do it with me?” he said.

  “Don’t be a nutter, of course they will.” I placed my hand over his. It was the first time we’d ever touched except by accident, but it felt natural and it felt nice. We went back to my place. I knew Del was up at the lunges and probably wouldn’t be home before it got dark. Dad was still at work – he never normally got in till well after seven on weekdays.

  I’d never had sex before, but I’d sneaked plenty of looks at Del’s secret webcam footage of him doing it with Monica, so I had a pretty good idea of what went on. I closed the curtains and we took our clothes off under the bedcovers. We took a while to get the hang of things but in the end we managed. What with the curtains and the bedcovers we couldn’t really see each other’s faces and that helped a lot, plus we were giggling the whole time and that helped, too. Em’s stomach was big under his blazer and his dick was a funny upright thing, an indignant little schoolmaster of a dick, jabbing his finger at me, over and over, like he had a point to prove and was determined to prove it. But Em had lovely smooth shoulders and his hands, with his grandfather’s onyx signet ring on his left index finger, were the hands of a genius who spends his whole life dreaming of unreachable lands.

  It wasn’t amazing, it was just a relief. Suddenly all the fear and half-truth, that sense of the world being one up on me – all that lifted away and it was as if I could finally get on with things. I reckon Em felt that way, too. Afterwards we lay there chatting, the same as always only more manic. Everything was exciting suddenly, or funny. I couldn’t stop grinning.

  “What do you want to do, when you leave school, I mean?” I asked him at one point. It was Em’s final year and everyone knew the teachers at our school were banking on him. He was their prize cow, their best hope of exam glory. Being under that kind of pressure would have driven me crazy, but Em didn’t seem to mind and I reckon there was even a part of him that enjoyed it, that liked being liked for something. I suppose that’s fair enough.

  “I want to go to Imperial College and study aeronautical mathematics,” Em said at once. Imperial College was in London, I knew that, which meant Em would be leaving town, for good, probably. What did you expect, you idiot? I thought to myself. That he’d stay here for you? Get real.

  “Eventually I’d like to work on the space programme,” Em said. “How about you?”

  “I haven’t a clue. I haven’t really thought about it.” It was true and I hadn’t. The end of school seemed like a myth to me, a gateway you constantly walk towards but never reach. I had no idea what lay beyond that and I didn’t want to know. What I wanted was to get away from Del and Dad and their constant fighting, the house with its grubby curtains and septic kitchen, the sense that everything was breaking down and falling apart. We’d become used to the day-to-day reality of my mother’s absence but that didn’t mean we were any closer to understanding what we should make of our lives now that she wasn’t there to provide a context.

  When Em asked me what I wanted to do my mind went blank
. It was just like Em, to have a proper future planned out for himself already. Compared with him I felt incompetent and juvenile. Seeing myself through his eyes made me feel scared suddenly and I shifted slightly away from him under the covers.

  Em reached for my hand.

  “I like all that stuff you collect,” he said. “You should do something with that.”

  “Stuff? What stuff?”

  “You know. The stuff. Over there.” He pointed with his free hand towards the corner of my bedroom where my desk was, with my crummy old laptop and my collection of shoeboxes. Some of the boxes still had their lids, some didn’t. I used the boxes as containers for the junk I collected, flotsam and jetsam I came across in the street or on the beach: girls’ hair slides, stray buttons, empty matchboxes. Odd things and shiny things. Magpie treasure. There was a piece of gold ribbon I found near the dog track, a wax doll’s head with blue china eyes. None of it was worth anything – I suppose you’d call it rubbish, really. But I liked these things because I thought they were beautiful, and I wanted them to have a home somewhere.

  It never occurred to me that the stuff might have a use.

  “I like the colours, that’s all,” I said to Em. “I like lost things.”