The Horse With My Name

by Bateman

  I would tell her about it, one day, when we were back together. We’d laugh about it. She’d say, ‘You silly fool,’ and tweak my cheek, then kiss me. Admittedly the look she gave me when I sauntered confidently through the door of La Belle Epoque owed more to dismemberment than tweaks or kisses. I slipped into the chair opposite and smiled at her. A waiter came by before we had a chance to fire the opening salvos and I ordered a hot chocolate to complement her own.

  When he’d gone I said, ‘There’s no use begging me to come home, I have my own life now.’

  She looked at me steadily. ‘Wise up, Dan,’ she said.

  I shrugged. ‘So who’s the new guy? He looks like a psycho.’

  ‘It’s none of your business.’

  ‘Oh you think not?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You do think not or you don’t think not?’

  ‘I . . . oh shut up, Dan. You’re so fucking annoying. I want to be angry with you but you just . . . oh nothing.’ She sighed, then took a sip of her chocolate. There was a spot of fresh cream on the end of her nose when she looked up again, but I decided not to mention it. It was probably a fashion thing. She’d always followed the latest trends. Perhaps creamy noses were in. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  ‘Do I look okay?’

  ‘You look okay. Are you eating?’

  ‘Occasionally.’

  ‘Dan . . .’

  ‘I missed you at Weight Watchers the other d–– I mean, marriage guidance. You might have called me.’

  ‘I . . . look, I was going to . . . then . . . Why did you say Weight Watchers?’

  ‘No reason, just a slip . . .’

  ‘You think I’ve put on weight.’

  ‘No I don’t. Besides, you suit a little . . .’

  ‘I have not put on weight. I’m on a diet. I go to the gym every––’

  ‘Only joking, kiddo. Lighten up. You look great.’ My own hot chocolate arrived and I took a sip, being careful to keep my nose out of it. We smiled pleasantly at each other for half a minute. It was too good to last. ‘What’s he like in bed, then? Does he take his glasses off? Or his beard?’

  ‘Dan . . .’

  ‘I think it’s fascinating when you get a new man. Of course they never last long. No one measures up.’

  ‘Dan, they all measure up.’

  ‘So how come they don’t stay?’

  ‘Maybe I don’t measure up.’

  ‘Maybe you don’t.’

  She sat back. She stirred her chocolate with a spoon. ‘If you’re trying to undermine my self-confidence, you’re doing a good job.’

  ‘Good. Come home. Or let me come home.’

  ‘Dan, I don’t love you any more.’

  ‘Yes you do.’

  ‘I think I would know best.’

  ‘It’s the baby, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s everything.’

  ‘But it’s mostly the baby.’

  She shrugged. ‘Please don’t come around to the house any more. I’m trying to make things work with Clive . . .’

  ‘Clive?’ She nodded. I burst out laughing.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I sucked in, quelled it. ‘Sorry. Clive.’

  ‘Dan, just don’t take the piss any more, okay? I’ve met a new man, you’re not going to like him, but that’s tough shit. I love him. We’re going to make it work. But it doesn’t help having you hanging around like a sore head. Just leave us alone. We’re over. We’re finished. I don’t want to end up despising you. I loved you once, it was good, then it went bad. There are too many bad things, Dan, things I can’t forget. So let’s leave it, okay? Get on with your life. You’ll meet someone. You’ll be fine if you give yourself a chance, but you need to get me out of your system.’

  I looked at her. And unheralded, a tear sprang from my eye. I wiped it. I didn’t look at her. When I spoke, I spoke quietly. ‘But what am I supposed to do?’

  ‘It’s your life. You’re a free agent. Do anything you want to do.’

  ‘Eddie and the Hot Rods.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I sighed again. She pushed her chair back and stood up. She looked at me for several moments, then extended her hand. I looked at it. ‘Please don’t do that to me,’ I said.

  She withdrew it quickly. ‘Sorry,’ she said. There was a hint of a nod, then she turned and headed for the door.

  I shouted after her and she turned. I pointed to the end of my nose. Her brow furrowed. I pointed again, then the penny dropped and she glanced at herself in the mirror behind the cash desk. Then she turned and glared back at me. The word she mouthed might have been bastard, but it might not. She followed it with a slim little smile, and then she was gone. Out of the restaurant, out of my life.

  I sat in that window seat for half an hour. The waiter looked at me once in a while, but every time he did I took a little sip of my cold chocolate. I was in the frame of mind to make it last for days. My favourite pub’s side door was just visible a couple of hundred yards up to the right. I watched a pair of young girls, laughing between them, pull the door open and enter it. I could almost smell the alcohol.

  But no.

  Dan the Man.

  Damascus.

  Things were going to change.

  I was going to turn my life around. I would win her back. She would see me on stage accepting a massive cheque for Brown Beauty, my literary novel on the life of a thoroughbred horse, and come running to me. She just needed to see that I could do it, that they weren’t the usual hollow promises.

  Things were going to change.

  The waiter was at my elbow. ‘Can I get you anything else, sir?’ he said, whipping the empty cup out from under me.

  I glanced longingly back down at the pub, then nodded up at him. ‘Another hot chocolate,’ I said. There was a hint of a curl to his lip as he wrote it down. As he turned I said, ‘Oh, and do you have any liqueurs?’

  I spent the next two or three days purging my system of alcohol. It involved copious amounts of health drink Diet Pepsi and a trunkload of chocolate digestives. I bought daily copies of the Racing Post and hung around in bookmakers’ offices trying not to breathe in. They’d brightened up considerably since I’d watched my dad back his losers all those years before; now there was satellite television on a bank of screens, a coffee bar, nice comfortable seats, friendly staff in crisp uniforms ready with a heartfelt good afternoon and good luck; but no matter what, they still stank of smoke and existed in a kind of timeless haze. Any one of them could have been a contender for the annual services to passive smoking award. But they weren’t bad places, just hopeless. They should have suited me fine. I studied the form, I placed bets, I read the news and the profiles and the tipsters and I watched a hundred races from Down Royal to Listowel to Punckestown to Navan, and by the end of it I still didn’t have a clue what it was really all about.

  It was Greek.

  It was half a dozen brown horses jumping over hedges.

  It was munchkins in saddles with whips, and I could rent that from the video store without getting lung cancer.

  I wouldn’t know where to start a conversation about a bloody horse, let alone investigate Geordie McClean’s shady dealings. Two or three times I tried the mobile number Corkery had given me, but it was always out of service. I was going to tell him to forget it. Thank him for the five hundred, tell him it had changed my life, but not my wife, and that I’d pay it back to him from my first pay cheque, because I was going to get a proper job, right away, first thing tomorrow, or maybe the day after. The last person I needed to get involved with was Geordie McClean. I was trying to sort my life out, not complicate it. A court reporter. I could do obituaries. Or the movies. Yeah, the movies. But God protect me from Geordie McClean and his infernal, eternal machinations.

  On the fifth day after my final showdown with Patricia I was feeling fit and thinking positive. I’d given my palace a spring clean. I’d not touched more than a few drops. I dr
y-cleaned my suit and polished my shoes. I invested in a portable TV and visited a second-hand book shop. Patricia had thrown me out without my books and I’d gotten out of the habit; so I bought something heavy and something light to see me through the long, largely alcohol-free nights; the light for its entertainment value, the heavy in case someone tried to steal my portable TV while I slept. It was that kind of neighbourhood.

  Despite having been out of the loop for some considerable time, I’d absolute confidence that I’d be able to land some work; maybe not staff, immediately, but there was plenty of freelance stuff out there if you didn’t mind looking for it, and I’d never minded that. It wasn’t like I was starting from scratch either; I’d taken a sabbatical from journalism to write my books, so my personal problems would not be common knowledge amongst my potential employers. Besides, most of the reporters I’d grown up with were now happily ensconced in senior positions as editors, publishers or television producers and therefore ideally placed to give me a leg up. I had my contact book. I started calling.

  It wasn’t the morning to phone.

  The first was out of the office, the second at a funeral, the third had the day off, the fourth was also at a funeral. I thought maybe they were avoiding me, so I stopped giving my name, but it was just the same. Two more had called in sick, six others were at a funeral. I began to doubt that any newspaper or television programme would make an appearance that day. I didn’t want to phone Mouse. He was my oldest friend, and arguably the best placed of all of them to give me some work, but he’d been giving me a wide berth for months; he’d pulled me out of the deep end once too often. My problem was, every time somebody threw me inflatable armbands I ended up putting them on my feet and going straight back to the bottom. I suppose eventually we all have to sink or swim by our own efforts.

  It could be avoided no longer. His name was the only one I hadn’t tried. If I was to get anywhere that day, and it felt important that I did, there, then, before something else knocked me back, then I had to call him. I paced the room for a while, wondering what to say, how to approach him, whether to apologise or pretend that nothing had happened. I knew why he’d dropped me and he’d every justification, but still. He was Mouse. My friend. He knew what I was like. You expect a little loyalty, or, indeed, a lot. Had I not been there for him, every single time? Well, I would have been if there’d ever been any need. But he was as solid and dependable and unadventurous as a rock. He should have been called Rock. My friend Rock. If only Hudson hadn’t gone and spoilt the name for all time.

  I punched in the numbers. He was now editor of the Belfast Evening News. ‘I’m sorry,’ his secretary said, ‘he’s at a––’

  ‘Funeral.’

  ‘At a funeral. Yes. He won’t be back until––’

  ‘Just answer me one thing. Who the hell is so important every friggin’ journalist in the city is going to make sure he’s dead?’

  There was a little bit of a giggle at the other end. ‘Do you know, I said exactly the same thing. I’ve been working here for five years and I’ve never heard of this fella Corkery.’

  4

  It’s usually bad manners to read a book at a funeral, but I had my reasons.

  I arrived late, of course, though not as late as Corkery. In keeping with most of the past year, and more specifically with the manner in which he had met his death, the hearse had managed to impale itself on the back of a trailer as it turned out of the funeral home and it had taken an hour and a half to first free it, then repair the damage. Nor was it simply a case of transferring the coffin to another vehicle. It was a small family firm and their only other car was on duty elsewhere. It would doubtless have tickled us all if Corkery’s last ride had been in the back of a newspaper delivery van, as some had seriously suggested. I heard subsequently that enquiries were made but foundered on the lack of insurance cover, for the van, rather than Corkery, who was a bit beyond it.

  It turned out to be one of the biggest funerals I’d ever attended, the cars spilling out of the car park at Roselawn Crematorium to sit two abreast on the grass all the way back down the lane to the Saintfield Road. The taxi driver dropped me at the gates, said he had a thing about going through them. I had a thing about not giving tips to drivers who stop halfway there; he cursed me, I cursed him, and I hurried through the gates in the rain with a shouted threat not to visit a certain part of Belfast in the near future ringing in my ears. I charged down towards the crematorium, and managed to make it just as they lifted the coffin from the hearse and hurried it through the doors. I stood at the back, looking for a spare seat, but there was none, but I saw Mouse and knew he’d manage to make some space if he saw me coming. There was the usual doomy music playing as I hurried down and across, then backed into the slimmest of gaps. Mouse didn’t bat an eyelid. Just his usual ‘HIYA, DAN,’ impervious to the half-dozen mourners who nearly jumped out of their seats as his voice boomed around the echo chamber that was the setting for Mark Corkery’s final shift.

  ‘Big turn-out,’ I said.

  ‘Give the public what they want . . .’ he whispered. We grinned conspiratorially. ‘So how’re you doin’?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘I was speaking to Trish the other day.’

  ‘All good, I trust?’

  He rolled his eyes. We settled for a minute while a small, impoverished-looking minister appeared through a side door and took his place behind a lectern that was a little too high for him. There was a microphone which he had to bend down to his level, which resulted in a wave of feedback that had everyone wincing. He cleared his throat then and began to address us on the life and times of Mark Corkery. There were too many people in the place for me to see clearly who was sitting on the front row, if there were any obvious family members present. For some reason I had assumed that he didn’t have any family, that he’d been an only orphan married to his job. Mouse wasn’t aware of any either, and I had only Corkery’s assertion that he’d been hit by the Shorts landing gear while making love to a girlfriend to suggest any kind of relationship with another human being, but any or all of that story could have been fabricated, he had the perfect track record for it.

  The minister was whittering on. What he said bore little or no resemblance to the man we knew, the King of Crap, but that was pretty standard for funerals. I whispered, ‘I hear he got hit by a car.’

  Mouse shook his head. ‘A car fell on him.’

  ‘Fell? You mean he was walking down the street and a car fell outta the sky?’

  ‘Don’t be daft. He was fixing his car. Had it jacked up, working underneath, jack gave way. Result, one flat Corkery. The car was fixed, if that’s any consolation.’

  We grinned into the palms of our hands, then sang ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’. Not just us, the whole congregation. I watched as the minister, still leading the singing, moved several yards across to his left, stopping by the large counter on which sat Corkery’s coffin. With a dramatic flourish he lifted his index finger into the air, held it there for a moment, then plunged it down towards a red button set into the side of the counter. A moment later the plain wooden box juddered once, then began to descend, the minister with his hymn book in one hand and his finger still stuck on the button. There was something about the way he did it that reminded me of the National Lottery, and I suppose in a way it was.

  As the service drew to a close I whispered to Mouse that I’d see him later, then edged along the row to accompanying tuts and hurried up the aisle. I went through the door, then looked about me for a few moments before I picked my place. There was a mock marble column just to the left of the exit which was ideal. I leant up against it, as lazy-looking as I could, then removed the lighter of the two books I’d bought in the second-hand shop and opened it at Chapter One. I started reading.

  I probably wasn’t doing my chances of employment much good, judging by the glares and stares of the mourners as they filed out, but I persevered. Mouse came past with an exaggerated tut; he knew I wa
s up to something.

  ‘We’re having a few drinks, down in the King’s Head,’ he said.

  ‘We?’

  ‘The cream of Belfast journalism. But you can come as well. There’ll be crisps.’

  ‘Well if there’s crisps . . .’

  ‘Can I give you a lift?’

  ‘I’m not finished here yet.’

  He nodded. I winked back. He walked on. I smiled after him. Six months, and no hint of the fissure that had opened up in our friendship.

  ‘The Horse Whisperer. Is that good?’ I looked round. There was a silver-haired woman, red-eyed, black-dressed, medium heels, looking at the front of my book. Mid forties, possibly older, but knew how to look after herself. Her voice was South Belfast, cultivated without being plummy.

  I shrugged. ‘Only started.’

  She nodded thoughtfully for several moments. She was looking me over. I wasn’t sure I liked it much. She pursed her lips. ‘You’re either here to rub salt in, or you’re Starkey.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘You’re Starkey.’

  ‘Bingo. You’ll be the girlfriend.’

  She smiled. ‘I’m hardly a girl.’

  ‘You’re all girls.’

  ‘Does that charm get you far?’

  ‘As far as the divorce court.’ I put my hand out. She grasped it. ‘I’m sorry for . . . y’know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I heard a car fell on him, that right?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Accident?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think he never worked under a car in his life. I’m thinking the only time he’d ever get under a car was if one of his betting slips blew under it. That’s what I’m thinking.’ She nodded. ‘What’d the police say?’

  ‘They’d rather believe suicide than murder, and they don’t believe suicide.’

  ‘Maybe we should have a cup of coffee.’

  ‘I’m having some people back to the house, you’re welcome to come along. But it may be a while before we can have a chat.’