by Markus Zusak
“You’re not deaf, are you?”
She was giving him a hiding!
But a small one, a happy one, and one he was willing to answer.
“No.”
“You’re not harboring a mule?”
“No,” he said, “I’m not deaf—we’ve had the mule for a while. We’ve also got a border collie, a cat, a pigeon, and a goldfish.”
“A pigeon?”
He struck back. “You’re not deaf, are you? He’s called Telemachus—our animals have got the worst names you ever heard, except maybe Rosy, or Achilles. Achilles is a beautiful name.”
“Is Achilles the name of the mule?”
He nodded; the girl was closer.
She’d turned outwards, toward the suburbs.
Without thought, they both started walking.
* * *
—
When they got to the mouth of Archer Street, Clay looked at her legs in her jeans; he was a boy, after all, he noticed. He also saw the tapering at her ankles, the worn-out sandshoes—the Volleys. He was aware when she moved, of the singlet she wore, and materials he glimpsed beneath.
“It’s pretty great,” she said at the corner, “to end up living on Archer Street.” She was lit by the glow of the streetlight. “First horse who ever won it: the Race That Stops the Nation.”
Clay then tried to impress her. “Twice. The first and the second.”
It worked, but only to a degree.
“Do you also know who trained him?”
On that one he was no chance.
“De Mestre,” she said. “He won five and no one knows it.”
* * *
—
From there they walked the racing quarter, down streets all named for Thoroughbreds. Poseidon, the horse, was a champion, and there were shops with names they loved, like the Saddle and Trident Café, the Horse Head Haberdashery, and a clear and present winner—the barbershop: the Racing Quarter Shorter.
Near the end, close to Entreaty Avenue, which led up to the cemetery, there was a small right turn beside them; an alley called Bobby’s Lane, where Carey stopped and waited.
“It’s perfect,” she said, and she leaned on the fence, into its sheet of palings. “They called it Bobby’s Lane.”
Clay leaned a few meters next to her.
The girl looked into the sky.
“Phar Lap,” she said, and when he thought she might be teary, her eyes were giving and green. “And look, it’s an alley, not even a street; and they called it after his stable name. How can you not like that?”
For a while there was close to silence, just the air of urban decay. Clay knew, of course, what most of us know, about the iconic horse of our country. He knew about Phar Lap’s winning streaks, how the racing board almost crippled him, from the force of too much weight. He knew about America, how he went there, won a race, and died seemingly the very next day. (It was actually just over two weeks.) He loved, like most of us, what people say, for courage, or trying with everything:
You’ve got a heart as big as Phar Lap.
What he didn’t know was what Carey told him that night, as they leaned, in that nondescript laneway.
“You know, when Phar Lap died, the prime minister was Joseph Lyons, and that same day he’d won a high court decision—no one cares anymore about what—and when he came down the court steps and someone asked him about it, he said, ‘What good is winning a high court decision when Phar Lap is dead?’ ” She looked from the ground to Clay. Then the sky. “It’s a story I really love,” and Clay, he had to ask.
“Do you think he got murdered up there, like people say?”
Carey could only scoff.
“Nah.”
Happy but sad as hell, and adamant.
“He was a great horse,” she went on, “and the perfect story—we wouldn’t love him so much if he’d lived.”
* * *
—
From there, they pushed off from the fence, and walked a long way through the racing quarter, from Tulloch, to Carbine, to Bernborough—“They even named the athletics track after a horse!”—and Carey knew every one of them. She could recite each horse’s record; she could tell you how many hands they were, or what they weighed, or if they led from the front, or waited. At Peter Pan Square she told him how, at the time, Peter Pan was loved every bit as much as Phar Lap, and he was blond and outrageously bragful. In the empty-cobbled square, she put a hand on the statue’s nose, and looked at Darby Munro. She told Clay how this horse had lost a race once, by biting poor old Rogilla, one of his great rivals, as they tussled their way down the straight.
Her favorite race, inevitably, was the Cox Plate (for it was the race that racing purists loved) and she talked of the greats who’d won it: Bonecrusher, Saintly, and colossal Might and Power. The mighty Kingston Town: three years in a row.
Then at last she told him the story, of Ted and the horse, The Spaniard—how he’d smiled and cried, cried and smiled, and they were in the Lonhro Tunnel.
Sometimes I imagine Clay waiting back for a while, as she crossed to the other side. I see the orange lights, I hear the passing trains. There’s even a part of me that has him watch her, and sees her body as a brushstroke, her hair an auburn trail.
But then, I stop, I gather myself, and he catches her easily up.
* * *
—
After that, you can probably guess, they were inseparable.
The first time she climbed the roof was also the first time they went to The Surrounds, and the day she’d met the rest of us, and touched the great Achilles.
It was early new year, and her work routine was established.
Ennis McAndrew did it his way, and some trainers called him abnormal. Others said many things worse—they accused him of being human. You had to love racing people, you really did; as many of them said themselves: “Us racing crowd, we’re different.”
She was at Hennessey by four a.m. each day, or the Tri-Colors by five-thirty.
There was horse schooling, and exams, but she couldn’t yet contemplate trackwork. The way Ennis put it, in his usual broomstick manner, you couldn’t mistake patience for softness, or protection for waiting too long. He had his own theories on training, and when to promote the jockey. Those stables, he said, needed shoveling.
Often, in the evening, they made their way through the racing quarter; they walked to Epsom Road. He said, “This is where we found him. How great was Sweeney’s spelling?”
She met Achilles when they got back; he’d brought her quietly through the house. He’d cleared it much earlier with Tommy.
“Was that,” said Henry, “a girl?”
They were laid out watching The Goonies.
Even Rory was taken aback. “Did a woman just walk through our house? What the hell’s going on here?”
We all went bounding out back, and the girl, she looked up from the scrubbing brush; she came over, part solemn, part nervous. “I’m sorry I walked straight past you just now.” She looked us each in our faces. “It’s good to finally meet you,” and the mule came hustling between. He arrived like an unwanted relative, and when she stroked him he in-and-awayed. He eyed us with great severity:
Don’t any of you bastards interrupt, okay?
This is bloody brilliant.
* * *
—
At The Surrounds there’d been a few changes:
The bed had been broken apart.
The base was stolen and burned; just kids who’d wanted a fire, I guess, which more than suited Clay. The mattress was harder to find. When he got there and stood and stayed silent, the girl asked if she might sit, on the edge.
“Sure,” he told her, “of course.”
“Do you mean to say,” she asked, “that sometimes you come and you sleep here?”<
br />
He could have been defensive, but decided with her it was pointless.
“Yeah,” he said, “I do,” and Carey, she put her hand down, like she could rip a piece off if she wanted. Also, had anyone else said what she was about to say next, it would never have come out correctly:
She looked down at her feet.
She spoke directly into the ground.
“It’s the strangest, most beautiful thing I ever heard of,” and then, maybe a few minutes later, “Hey—Clay?” He looked over. “What were their names?”
And it felt like such a long time then, both quiet and calm at the mattress edge, and the dark not too far away.
He said, “Penny and Michael Dunbar.”
* * *
—
On the roof he showed her where he liked to sit down, part hidden amongst the tiles, and Carey listened and looked at the city. She saw those pinpricks of light.
“Look there,” she said, “Bernborough Park.”
“And there,” he said, he couldn’t stop himself, “the cemetery. We can go—if you don’t mind, that is. I’ll show you the way to the gravestone.”
Pulling her into the sadness made him guilty—more guilty than he already was—but Carey was open, oblivious. She’d treated knowing him like some kind of privilege—and she was right to, I’m glad that she did.
* * *
—
There were moments when Clay was torn open—so much he’d kept from the surface. But now it was all flooding outwards; she could see in him what others couldn’t.
It happened that night on the roof.
“Hey, Clay?” She looked out at the city. “What have you got there, in your pocket?”
In months ahead, she would push too soon.
* * *
—
At Bernborough, late March, she raced him.
She ran like a girl who could run the 400, and didn’t mind suffering for doing it.
He chased her freckly outline.
He watched her bony calves.
Only when they passed the discus net did he come round her, and she said, “Don’t you dare take it easy on me,” and he didn’t. He took the turn and accelerated; at the end they were bent and hurting. Their lungs were sore and hopeful, and did what they were there for:
Two pairs of burning breath.
She looked over and said, “Again?”
“No, I think that one’ll do us.”
It was the first time she would reach for him, and link her arm through his. If only she’d known how right she was:
“Thank God,” she said, “I’m dying.”
* * *
—
And then to April, and a race day, which was something she’d been saving.
“Wait’ll you see this horse,” she said, and she spoke, of course, of Matador.
She loved to watch the bookies and the punters, and those spendthrift men in their fifties: all of them unshaven arse-scratchers, their odor of drunken westerlies. Whole ecosystems in their armpits. She watched them with sadness and affection….The sun was setting around them, in many more ways than one.
Her favorite was standing at the fence, the grandstand at her back, while the horses entered the straight:
The turn was the sound of a landslide.
The calls of desperate men.
“Come on, Gobstopper, you bastard!”
It was always a long wide wave—of cheer and jeer, love and loss, and many open mouthfuls. Weight gain was pumped to its limits, of the shirts and jackets that dammed it. Cigarettes at many angles.
“Move your Goddamn arse, Shenanigans! Go, son!”
The wins were won and worshipped.
The losses were all sat down with.
“C’mon,” she said that first time, “there’s someone you should meet.”
* * *
—
Behind the two grandstands were the stables; a length and breadth of shed rows, and horses all within them—either waiting for their races, or recovering.
At number thirty-eight, he stood enormously, unblinking. A digital sign said Matador, but Carey called him Wally. A groom, Petey Simms, wore jeans and a tattered polo shirt, cross-sectioned by a belt. A smoke was erected upwards, at the platform of his lip. He grinned when he saw the girl.
“Hey, Carey kid.”
“Hey, Pete.”
Clay got a better look now, and the horse was bright chestnut; a white blaze, like a crack, down his face. He flicked the flies off his ears, and he was smooth but rich with veins. His legs, like branches, were locked. The mane was cut back, a little shorter than most, for he somehow attracted more filth than any other horse in the stable. “Even the dirt loves him!” That’s what Petey used to say.
Finally, the horse blinked, when Clay came closer, his eyes so big and deep; an equine kind of kind.
“Go on,” said Petey, “give the big bugger a pat.”
Clay looked at Carey, for permission.
“Go on,” she said, “it’s okay.”
She did it herself first, to show him to be unafraid; even touching him was a front-on tackle.
“Bloody ’orse bloody loves her,” said Petey.
It was different from patting Achilles.
* * *
—
“How’s the big fella?”
The voice from behind was desert-like.
McAndrew.
Dark suit, pale shirt.
A tie he’d been wearing since the Bronze Age.
Petey didn’t answer, though, because he knew the old man didn’t want one; he was talking only to himself. He wandered in and ran his hands along the horse, he went lower for a look at the hooves.
“Spot-on.”
He stood and watched Carey, then Clay.
“Who the hell is this?”
The girl was sweet but defiant.
“Mr. McAndrew, this is Clay Dunbar.”
McAndrew smiled, a scarecrow smile, but something nonetheless. “Well,” he said, “enjoy yourselves, kids, because this right here is it. Next year—” and he spoke more gravely now, and motioned to Carey, about Clay. “Next year he gets the chop. You have to cut the dead wood out.”
Clay would never forget.
* * *
—
The race that day was a Group Two called the Plymouth. For most horses, a Group Two race was massive; for Matador it was only a warm-up. His odds were 2-1.
His colors were black and gold.
Black silks. Gold arms.
Carey and Clay sat in the stand, the first time all day she’d been nervous. When the jockey was aboard, she looked down into the mounting yard, and saw Petey waving her toward him—he was standing with McAndrew, at the fence—and they made their way through the crowd. When the gates opened, Clay watched, and McAndrew wrung his hands. He looked at his shoes and spoke.
“Where?” he said, and Petey answered.
“Third last.”
“Good.” Next question. “Leader?”
“Kansas City.”
“Shit! That plodder. That means it’s slow.”
Now the announcer confirmed it:
“Kansas City from Glass Half Full and a length to Woodwork Blue…”
Now McAndrew again. “How’s he look?”
“He’s fighting him.”
“That fucking pilot!”
“He’s handling him, though.”
“Bloody better.”
At the turn there was no need to worry.
“Here. Comes. Matador!”
(The announcer knew his punctuation.)
And just like that, the horse hit the front. He opened up, and extended the lead. The jockey, Errol Barnaby, glowed up high in the saddle:
&n
bsp; The relief of old McAndrew.
Next was something Petey said, more ember than cigarette:
“He ready for the Queen, you think?” and McAndrew grimaced and left.
The last note, though, belonged to Carey.
She’d somehow put a dollar on, and given the winnings to Clay—well spent on the way back home:
Two dollars and change put together.
Hot chips and a mound of salt.
* * *
—
As it turned out, it would be Matador’s last year of racing, and he won everything he ran in, except the ones that counted.
The Group Ones.
In each Group One he was up against one of the greatest horses of this or any era, and she was big and dark and stately, and all of the country loved her. They called her every everything, and compared her to the lot of them:
Kingston Town to Lonhro.
Black Caviar to Phar Lap.
Her stable name was Jackie.
At the track she was Queen of Hearts.
* * *
—
Sure, Matador was an exceptional horse, but he was likened to another one: a powerhouse bay called Hay List, who lost all the time to Black Caviar.
For Ennis McAndrew and the owner, they had no choice but to run him. There were only so many Group Ones at the right distance, and Queen of Hearts would always be in them. She, too, was unbeaten, and unbeatable. She’d conquer other horses by six or seven lengths—two if she was eased to the line. Matador she would beat by a single length, or once, by half a head.
Her colors were like a card game:
White with red and black hearts.
Up close, she made Matador look boy-like, or at best, an ungainly young adult; she was the darkest brown you could imagine, you could be fooled she was actually black.
On TV there were close-ups in the barriers.
She towered over other horses.
She was ever-alert and wakeful.
