“Best in the world,” Wozza was saying with every evidence of national pride. “Free of disease. Guaranteed syphilis-free, which is hard to find anywhere else. Go like the clappers. Your average OPEC billionaire pays top dollar. But the beast’s gotta perform. No three legged numbers in Jeddah, mate.”
I looked at my companions in prospective crime and didn’t especially relish the odds. I was beginning to regard Share as lethal. It seemed prudent to show willing. “What you’ve got to understand,” I said with all the authority I could muster, “is that the beast—be it horse, camel or anteater—starts to metabolize the sugar as soon as it’s...er...supplied. It can’t store it, not even in its hump. If that animal over there is to be up to speed at eleven o’clock, we shouldn’t give it anything until half past ten at the earliest. Quarter-to would be better still.”
And, I thought, let’s hope the fucking sheikh arrives sooner than expected.
§
Prime racing bloodstock can be skittish, nervy before the jump. You can almost see the adrenaline seething in their arteries, which stand out pulsing on their necks like living ropes. Canned Fish, though, had been tranquil; doping the poor bugger presented few difficulties. The gelding usually took a relaxed view of the sport of kings. He was phlegmatic to fault. That’s what made an injection of pure sugar work on him like a charm, like Seven League Boots.
Camels, they looked likely to be a different story again.
I regarded Nile Fever with a blend of disapproval and sheer fright. The old Canned Fish had been fourteen hands high. This evil-eyed brute was twenty at the shoulder, taller than the top of my head, and her single camelhair coat-colored hump rose over me like a low hill of hairy sand. It wasn’t that big, the hump. I’d always imagined them looking like mountain tops. She met my eye with a rolling, yellowish orb of her own, and her lips peeled back. Teeth like slabs of rock. Coral-red palate that reminded me of one of the gaudier caskets in Ben Crosby’s undertakers’ showroom in Sydney Road. Breath like an open sewer. I coughed, and started taking in the rank air through my mouth instead.
Someone’s going to have to climb up a ladder, I told myself, and whack a bag of Colonial Sugar Refinery’s finest into this brute. Not me, I swore. Nile Fever shuffled on her great padded feet, banging me with one roughly callused knee. The vow was pointless. I knew better, of course. Muggins would get stuck with the job. Again.
“Is it Indian or African?” I asked. Two big fat toes per hoof, spread out in the grass. Not the sort of hoof you could nail an iron shoe to.
“That’s elephants,” Wozza told me in a scornful tone. “What’s happened to you, Tombo, ’roids ruined your brain?”
“She’s an Arabian camel,” Share told me, looking up with satisfaction at the beast, “bred from the finest feral herds of desert Australia.”
“A brumby!”
“You could put it that way. Hybrid vigor, Darwin at his best. Trounce those effete Saudi dancers.”
Maybe so. It was a good selling line, anyway. I reached up and patted the animal’s back.
“Don’t mares have a decent sized hump?”
“Cow,” Wozza said. “It’s ‘cow’, not ‘mare’.”
“Fuck,” I said, “whatever. I don’t want to marry it. I don’t even want to buy it.”
“Just give her some sugar,” Mutton said with a snigger. “Arabic or Bactrian,” Share shared with me.
“Eh?” But it came back to me instantly, then, from Eltham high school, along with a blast of memory, stale banana skins in the hot playground sun, dried white bread sandwiches with Vegemite from the tuck shop, milk that had gone off. “Yeah, right. One hump or two.”
“As the actress said to the bishop,” Mutton said.
“Nile Fever is a young ’un”, Share told me, ignoring him pointedly. “Look at these lean legs, what a beauty. We’re keeping her on a strict diet, you wouldn’t want her overweight.”
I’d heard that camels hissed and spat, but apart from the evil eye Nile Fever was behaving herself like a lady of breeding. I looked at my watch. Getting on for 10:30, the moment of truth.
“Time to saddle up,” Wozza told his mate, checking his own watch.
“Right you are.” We led the camel back to the stables, took her in under cover. This wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted some keen-eyed passer-by to witness. Skipping happily like a kid, Muttonhead disappeared into a side room while I dragged the ladder over from the Cobra. He emerged after a while with the strangest apparatus I’d ever seen outside a bondage brothel, two X-shaped pieces of beautifully grained timber connected by bars. He’d changed out of overalls into somewhat tatty silks in pink and gold, and wore yellow-tinted goggles and what Animal would have called a skid lid in place of the traditional jockey’s cap. Without his nose, he looked like some kind of alien from a horse-drawn UFO.
“Come on, sweetie,” he called up to the beast, “come to poppa.” Strike me pink, the brute lowered herself groaning to her knees, joints flung out sideways like a hairy Transformer toy halfway between robot and Humvee, or maybe a collapsed K-Mart sun chair. Mutt strapped the harness in place, one X in front of the small hump, the other behind. Now I saw that he had a comfortably padded seat at the back, right over Nile’s tail. He gentled the animal with soft words, patting her nose, then ran a thin thread through the nostril peg. He settled himself in the saddle.
“Good Christ,” I said, “is that all you’ve got in the way of reins?”
“It’s the wrists,” he assured me. “A horse, you can pull him up with a jerk. This little beaut, she reads a man’s mind.”
“Just as well,” I said. “That thread would snap the moment you put any pressure on it.”
“No need to. Nile Fever and me, we’re like that.” He raised a hand with two ugly thick-knuckled fingers crossed.
“Let’s get a move on,” Share said, taking charge. “They’ll be here any minute. Can we run the sugar in while she’s down on her knees like this?”
Safer than teetering on the top of a kitchen ladder, I thought, but Wozza was shaking his head.
“Break a leg if she took fright,” he said. He gave me a hard look. “Wouldn’t want another Canned Fish on our hands, and before the race has even been run.”
I said nothing, I was sick of explaining that it hadn’t been my fault. Wozza brought the ladder over. The animal groaned and bawled to its feet at Mutton’s instruction, shuffling suspiciously as it saw me dig into the bag Woz had supplied.
“What you do,” I told Wozza, “is—”
“Not me, mate, I’m scared of heights.”
I looked at Share, holding out the instruments of acceleration.
“In these clothes?” She was pulling a beautifully patterned silk scarf over her head. “Get real, Purdue. I have to talk turkey with the Sheikh.”
It just seemed easier, suddenly, to get it over and done with. Without another word I mixed the sugar in a bowl with a couple of liters of warm water from the thermos Wozza handed me, poured it into a glass drip container that might have been stolen from a hospital ward.
“Hold her steady, for fuck’s sake, Muttonhead,” I said.
“Apples,” he said, and crooned to the beast. I thought I heard him saying something like Ata Allah. God Almighty, the world’s gone mad when old Mutt starts babbling in Arabic. I wondered if he’d converted to Islam. Surely not, there had to be some sort of limit.
I climbed the ladder cautiously, clung to the rough fur, feeling for the arteries in the neck. Nile Fever didn’t feel feverish, she felt cool. She swung her head to inspect me, nearly knocking me off the steps. Little ears that seemed to be lined with fur. Made sense, keeps the blowing sand out. Big doe eyes, with sexy lashes. I caught myself gazing into them. Something—Oh. Double sets of eyelashes in each eye, thick and curly as a supermodel’s. Who would have thought. I gave her a wink, and sank the needle deep into her neck.
Nile Fever flinched but then settled down chewing the cud. At least I think that’
s what she was doing. I didn’t enquire. I stood on the ladder and poured the dissolved sugar into the funnel. In truth, pouring sugar into an animal can become a bit tedious, a bit boring. The solution goes in slowly through the hypodermic and you’ve got to keep topping the level up in the tube. Your arms get tired. In hospitals they have those steel pole things with hooks for the plastic bag: drip stands I think they’re called. Nurses have better things to do than play at being human skyhooks. I tried to distract myself by inventing a snappy one liner about it being harder to get sugar through the eye of the needle than a camel into heaven. The formula escaped me and anyway I didn’t think Mutton had the necessary cultural referents.
I said to Share, “You sure this sheikh snoozer knows the way here?”
“Doubt it,” she said.
“For Christ’s sake,” I said. “What if he gets lost?”
“His chauffeur will know the way. You don’t think he drives himself, do you?”
“Buggered if I know,” I said. “What sort of ride has he got?” “I don’t know. A Roller, something like that.”
I could feel the sugar starting to take effect. I took the needle out, disconnected it from the plastic tubing. You wouldn’t want a needle-stick injury from a camel, God knows what you might contract.
“Get rid of this, would you, Woz?” He took the bloody needle from me, left me the tubing, and with his usual furtive manner emptied the needle into a small plastic bottle, which he wrapped up in a sheet torn from his newspaper. Worried about infection himself, fair enough. He went over to the camel. Mutton leaned down in the saddle, and they put their heads together and murmured. Mutt placed something carefully in one pocket, maybe a rabbit’s foot for luck. I noticed then that Nile’s cud chewing was becoming more determined, a trifle manic, the tempo was increasing.
“Come on, gentlemen, enough farting about.”
We walked her back to the paddock. She was starting to shift her weight around on her feet as she swayed beside us. Keen for a canter.
The air began to vibrate like a sewing machine on speed.
§
The chopper came in low over the trees. You’d think the pilot was doing an evade the way he swung the crate around, tilting it. I looked for the police markings—sorry to disappoint, officers, no funny plants growing here, just a routine veterinary procedure on an ordinary, everyday camel. But the chopper was a private machine and it was about to land.
“The fucking sheikh,” Share shouted above the noise. The downdraft from the landing chopper hurled dust and grass and all manner of crap at us. Nile Fever took off like a shot, Mutton clinging on for dear life. The animal wanted out, but it was a galloper not a jumper, it wasn’t going to attempt the fence, although the brute slammed against it once or twice, knocking a post free of the ground and leaving a bright red streak of blood from the small open wound in its neck. Within a minute it had done a complete circuit of the paddock, rolling and bucking like a ship at sea. As the noise from the chopper abated I could hear Mutton yelling at the beast. His precise words were unclear, but their intent wasn’t: Mutton was trying to rein the beast in with no reins at his disposal other than foul words. Plainly, the single string had snapped instantly. Nothing connected the rider to the animal’s head. Mutton was a steerage passenger on a ship of fools of the desert.
PART 2
The noise from the chopper died. The sheikh emerged. You could tell he was a sheikh by his clobber: head dress, djellaba, the works. He was accompanied by a small man in a standard jockey outfit. The pilot stayed in the machine, talking into his headset. On the perimeter of the paddock Nile Fever was starting her fourth or fifth circuit. Mutton still uttered the occasional indistinct curse but the main sound now was the monotonous drumming of well padded hooves.
“My dear Sharon,” the sheikh said. “How nice to see you again.” American accent. I suspected Harvard or Princeton, something Ivy League.
“My dear sheikh,” Sharon said, “the pleasure is all mine.”
The pair of them shook hands like old friends. Abdul bin Sahal al Din seemed quite at ease in the company of western women with bare faces. And at least Share didn’t call him your royal highness. I realized I was still holding the plastic sugar-water tube. I shook the geezer’s mitt, transferring the plastic tube to my left hand to do so. There was a lot of gold wrapped round the sheikh’s fingers. He nodded at the tube in a genial way and said, “Drenching?”
“Sodden,” I said. I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Beats giving them an enema,” he said. “Ever tried that with a camel?”
I shook my head, shuddering slightly.
“You wouldn’t want to, doctor.”
We all stood and watched the thundering beast.
“She’s fast,” the sheikh said and turned back to me. “Will she go the distance?”
“Depends on the distance,” I said. The sheikh seemed to think I was some sort of expert, presumably a vet.
“Fifteen kilometers,” the sheikh said.
I turned away and coughed convulsively. After a moment, I told him, “No problem.”
The little jockey guy started talking very fast in Arabic.
“Amed is worried that your rider is not in control,” the sheikh said.
“Well, he isn’t,” I said. “He’s got no reins.”
“Reins are unnecessary. The relationship between the camel and its rider is one of psychic communion. It is traditional that all a rider needs is the thinnest strand of silk. The true rider knows his mount’s mind and vice versa.”
“I think you’ll find Mutton is a bit light on when it comes to psychic communion type skills,” I said.
“No matter,” the sheikh told me in a tranquil tone. “It is the animal we are interested in. She obviously has the temperament of a stayer.”
That, indeed, was all too clear. The sugar was working wonders. I had visions of Nile Fever running flat out for another hour and then falling down dead. There’d be no stopping her. Mutton was useless, but you could hardly blame him, stuck up the arse end of the brute with no control mechanism save his own powers of telepathy. Amed began carrying on in Arabic again, a fraught edge to his complaint. I looked at the sheikh. The sheikh looked at the thundering duo and then at me.
“What is your rider doing now?”
“He’s not mine,” I said. “He’s Share’s. Her secretary.”
“But what’s he doing?”
Certainly it was a good question. We stood together and watched as Mutton lay down flat on the animal’s back—or as flat as the hump would allow him. His right hand was clamped firmly to the lower bar of the saddle. He appeared to be doing something with his left hand, but it was impossible to see what since the left side of the charging camel was permanently out of the line of sight.
Mutton sat sharply upright. In his hand he brandished the other wooden bar. The little guy, Amed, swore.
The sheikh said, “Good grief!”
Mutton raised the bar, holding it with two hands, and brought it down with a mighty crack on the top of Nile Fever’s head. The camel faltered, began to collapse like a slow wave at Bondi beach, rolled over in a cloud of dust. Mutton was thrown free. The camel scrambled to her feet, bellowing like a zoo, galloped off. Without a rider to cramp her style she picked up a turn of speed. The fool of a thing ran in every possible direction, swerving and jinking. Wild eyes rolled in her head, crazed, deranged, stunned; there was no purpose in her madness. The chopper pilot revved up his engine, and who could blame him. As the noise level rose Nile Fever sensed her opponent and charged straight at the roaring machine. The gale of dust and twigs failed to stem the charge and Nile reached the chopper as it lifted. Blades flashed above her head. The machine swayed. Nile went for the open door, missed, got her head through the gap between the skids and the body of the chopper.
“Jesus, it’s like a bloody Honda ad!” Wozza was agog. “Oh what a feeling!”
For a moment beast and mach
ine remained locked in a violent, roaring tug of war, dust hurtling away from the conflict like a meteorite shower. If Nile Fever had been centrally placed, things might have been stable, but she wasn’t, she was off to one side. The machine tilted wildly. A rotor hit the dirt. The machine crashed in an explosion of flying bits of metal. We all ducked, covering our faces with our arms.
§
Everything was silent, with the silence that rings in your ears. A crazed roar, then, and Nile Fever was hurtling away from the wreck. Blood flowed from the lengthened gash in her neck, but otherwise she appeared full of beans. This time she wasn’t content with a stampede around the perimeter. She charged the gate, smashed it open, vanished in the direction of the house called Shangri La.
§
The pilot climbed slowly from the pile of twisted metal. He was covered in blood and one arm hung down, apparently useless. After a moment he flexed it, but his mouth said some terrible words. I decided against running forward to help him. He didn’t look too friendly and there was a strong smell of aviation fuel in the air. Slowly he walked towards us, a high-tech zombie. His face was dead white. From the far side of the paddock Mutton was also starting his walk. Unlike the pilot he was limping badly and he still carried the piece of wood with which he had belabored the camel. I saw blood leaking into his silks.
“I suppose there’s no chance of snifter,” I said.
“Shut up,” Share said.
But the sheikh silently produced a silver hip flask from his robes and handed it to me. “Double malt,” he said.
The fuel exploded. The air was thick with sound. The shambling pilot was silhouetted against the flames. A black cloud billowed and made for the heavens. The whisky was as smooth as milk and I realized that my headache had completely cleared. I was feeling quite chipper.
§
I sat in the back of my own Cobra as Sharon Lesser drove me and our fabulously wealthy guest back to Melbourne. Let her talk to the bugger, it was her mess. Over my shoulder I saw the chopper pilot waiting beside his ruined vehicle for the Air Traffic Authority inspectorate to arrive in their own helicopter. Silk-clad Amed looked crestfallen and faintly comical beside him. Wozza had taken the Mutt haring off in their van to the nearest hospital. Nobody seemed especially concerned about retrieving Nile Fever.
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