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.
* * *
—