For Kicks Part 13

'Dan?'

'Yes.'

'It weren't... it weren't no good in Posset today, without you being there.'

'Wasn't it?'

'No.' He brightened. 'I bought my comic though. Will you read it to me?'

'Tomorrow,' I said tiredly.

There was a short silence while he struggled to organise his thoughts.

'Dan.'

'Mm?'

'I'm sorry, like.'

'What for?'

'Well, for laughing at you, like, this afternoon. It wasn't right... not when you've took me on your motor-bike and all. I do ever so like going on your bike.'

'It's all right, Jerry.'

'The others were ribbing you, see, and it seemed the thing, like, to do what they done. So they would... would let me go with them, see?'

'Yes, Jerry, I see. It doesn't matter, really it doesn't.'

'You never ribbed me, when I done wrong.'

'Forget it.'

'I've been thinking,' he said, wrinkling his forehead, 'about me Mam. She tried scrubbing some floors once. In some offices, it was. She came home fair whacked, she did. She said scrubbing floors was wicked. It made your back ache something chronic, she said, as I remember.'

'Did she?'

'Does your back ache, Dan?'

'Yes, a bit.'

He nodded pleased. 'She knows a thing or two, does my Mam.' He lapsed into one of his mindless silences, rocking himself gently backwards and forwards on the creaking bed.

I was touched by his apology.

'I'll read your comic for you,' I said.

'You ain't too whacked?' he asked eagerly.

I shook my head.

He fetched the comic from the cardboard box in which he kept his few belongings and sat beside me while I read him the captions of Mickey the Monkey, Beryl and Peril, Julius Cheeser, the Bustom Boys, and all the rest. We went through the whole thing at least twice, with him laughing contentedly and repeating the words after me. By the end of the week he would know most of them by heart.

At length I took the comic out of his hands and put it down on the bed.

'Jerry,' I said, 'which of the horses you look after belongs to Mr Adams?'

'Mr Adams?'

'The man whose hunters I've got. The man who was here this morning, with a grey Jaguar, and a scarlet coat.'

'Oh, that Mr Adams.'

'Why, is there another one?'

'No, that's Mr Adams, all right.' Jerry shuddered.

'What do you know about him?' I asked.

'The chap what was here before you came, Dennis, his name was, Mr Adams didn't like him, see? He cheeked Mr Adams, he did.'

'Oh,' I said. I wasn't sure I wanted to hear what had happened to Dennis.

'He weren't here above three weeks,' said Jerry reflectively. 'The last couple of days, he kept on falling down. Funny, it was, really.'

I cut him short. 'Which of your horses belongs to Mr Adams?' I repeated.

'None of them do,' he said positively.

'Ca.s.s said so.'

He looked surprised, and also scared. 'No, Dan, I don't want none of Mr Adams' horses.'

'Well, who do your horses belong to?'

'I don't rightly know. Except of course Pageant. He belongs to Mr Byrd.'

'That's the one you take to the races?'

'Uh huh, that's the one.'

'How about the others?'

'Well, Mickey...' His brow furrowed.

'Mickey is the horse in the box next to Mr Adams' black hunter, which I do?'

'Yeah.' He smiled brilliantly, as if I had made a point.

'Who does Mickey belong to?'

'I dunno.'

'Hasn't his owner ever been to see him?'

He shook his head doubtfully. I wasn't sure whether or not he would remember if an owner had in fact called.

'How about your other horse?' Jerry had only three horses to do, as he was slower than everyone else.

'That's Champ,' said Jerry triumphantly.

'Who owns him?'

'He's a hunter.'

'Yes, but who owns him?'

'Some fellow.' He was trying hard. 'A fat fellow. With sort of sticking out ears.' He pulled his own ears forward to show me.

'You know him well?'

He smiled widely. 'He gave me ten bob for Christmas.'

So it was Mickey, I thought, who belonged to Adams, but neither Adams nor Humber nor Ca.s.s had let Jerry know it. It looked as though Ca.s.s had let it slip out by mistake.

I said, 'How long have you worked here, Jerry?'

'How long?' he echoed vaguely.

'How many weeks were you here before Christmas?'

He put his head on one side and thought. He brightened. 'I came on the day after the Rovers beat the Gunners. My Dad took me to the match, see? Near our house, the Rovers' ground is.'

I asked him more questions, but he had no clearer idea than that about when he had come to Humber's.

'Well,' I said, 'was Mickey here already, when you came?'

'I've never done no other horses since I've been here,' he said. When I asked him no more questions he placidly picked up the comic again and began to look at the pictures. Watching him, I wondered what it was like to have a mind like his, a brain like cotton wool upon which the acc.u.mulated learning of the world could make no dent, in which reason, memory, and awareness were blanketed almost out of existence.

He smiled happily at the comic strips. He was, I reflected, none the worse off for being simple-minded. He was good at heart, and what he did not understand could not hurt him. There was a lot to be said for life on that level. If one didn't realise one was an object of calculated humiliations, there would be no need to try to make oneself be insensitive to them. If I had his simplicity, I thought, I would find life at Humber's very much easier.

He looked up suddenly and saw me watching him, and gave me a warm, contented, trusting smile.

'I like you,' he said; and turned his attention back to the paper.

There was a raucous noise from downstairs and the other lads erupted up the ladder, pushing Cecil among them as he was practically unable to walk. Jerry scuttled back to his own bed and put his comic carefully away; and I, like all the rest, wrapped myself in two grey blankets and lay down, boots and all, on the inhospitable canvas. I tried to find a comfortable position for my excessively weary limbs, but unfortunately failed.

Chapter 11.

The office was as cold and unwelcoming as Humber's personality, with none of the ostentation of his car. It consisted of a long narrow room with the door and the single smallish window both in the long wall facing down the yard. At the far end, away to the left as one entered, there was a door which opened into a washroom: this was whitewashed and lit by three slit-like, frosted gla.s.s windows, and led through an inner door into a lavatory. In the washroom itself there was a sink, a plastic topped table, a refrigerator, and two wall cupboards. The first of these on investigation proved to hold all the bandages, linaments and medicines in common use with horses.

Careful not to move anything from its original position I looked at every bottle, packet, and tin. As far as I could see there was nothing of a stimulating nature among them.

The second cupboard however held plenty of stimulant in the shape of alcohol for human consumption, an impressive collection of bottles with a well stocked shelf of gla.s.ses above them. For the entertainment of owners, not the quickening of their horses. I shut the door.

There was nothing in the refrigerator except four bottles of beer, some milk, and a couple of trays of ice cubes.

I went back into the office.

Humber's desk stood under the window, so that when he was sitting at it he could look straight out down the yard. It was a heavy flat-topped knee-hole desk with drawers at each side, and it was almost aggressively tidy. Granted Humber was away at Nottingham races and had not spent long in the office in the morning, but the tidiness was basic, not temporary. None of the drawers was locked, and their contents (stationery, tax tables and so on) could be seen at a glance. On top of the desk there was only a telephone, an adjustable reading lamp, a tray of pens and pencils, and a green gla.s.s paper weight the size of a cricket ball. Trapped air bubbles rose in a frozen spray in its depths.

The single sheet of paper which it held down bore only a list of duties for the day and had clearly been drawn up for Ca.s.s to work from. I saw disconsolately that I would be cleaning tack that afternoon with baby-voiced Kenneth, who never stopped talking, and doing five horses at evening stables, this last because the horses normally done by Bert, who had gone racing, had to be shared out among those left behind.

Apart from the desk the office contained a large floor-to-ceiling cupboard in which form books and racing colours were kept; too few of those for the s.p.a.ce available. Three dark green filing cabinets, two leather arm-chairs, and an upright wooden chair with a leather seat stood round the walls.

I opened the unlocked drawers of the filing cabinet one by one and searched quickly through the contents. They contained racing calendars, old accounts, receipts, press cuttings, photographs, papers to do with the horses currently in training, a.n.a.lyses of form, letters from owners, records of saddlery and fodder transactions; everything that could be found in the office of nearly every trainer in the country.

I looked at my watch. Ca.s.s usually took an hour off for lunch. I had waited five minutes after he had driven out of the yard, and I intended to be out of the office ten minutes before he could be expected back. This had given me a working time of three-quarters of an hour, of which nearly half had already gone.

Borrowing a pencil from the desk and taking a sheet of writing paper from a drawer, I applied myself to the drawer full of current accounts. For each of seventeen race-horses there was a separate hard-covered blue ledger, in which was listed every major and minor expense incurred in its training. I wrote a list of their names, few of which were familiar to me, together with their owners and the dates when they had come into the yard. Some had been there for years, but three had arrived during the past three months, and it was only these, I thought, which were of any real interest. None of the horses which had been doped had stayed at Humber's longer than four months.

The names of the three newest horses were Chin-Chin, Kandersteg and Starlamp. The first was owned by Humber himself and the other two by Adams.

I put the account books back where I had found them and looked at my watch. Seventeen minutes left. Putting the pencil back on the desk I folded the list of horses and stowed it away in my money belt. The webbing pockets were filling up again with fivers, as I had spent little of my pay, but the belt still lay flat and invisible below my waist under my jeans: and I had been careful not to let any of the lads know it was there, so as not to be robbed.

I riffled quickly through the drawers of press cuttings and photographs, but found no reference to the eleven horses or their successes. The racing calendars bore more fruit in the shape of a pencilled cross against the name of Superman in the Boxing Day selling chase, but there was no mark against the selling chase scheduled for a coming meeting at Sedgefield.

It was at the back of the receipts drawer that I struck most gold. There was another blue accounts ledger there, with a double page devoted to each of the eleven horses. Among these eleven were interspersed nine others who had in various ways failed in their purpose. One of these was Superman and another Old Etonian.

In the left hand page of each double spread had been recorded the entire racing career of the horse in question, and on the right hand pages of my eleven old friends were details of the race they each won with a.s.sistance. Beneath were sums of money which I judged must be Humber's winnings on them. His winnings had run into thousands on every successful race. On Superman's page he had written 'Lost: three hundred pounds.' On Old Etonian's right hand page there was no race record: only the single word 'Destroyed.'

A cross-out line had been drawn diagonally across all the pages except those concerning a horse called Six-Ply; and two new double pages had been prepared at the end, one for Kandersteg, and one for Starlamp. The left-hand pages for these three horses were written up: the right-hand pages were blank.

I shut the book and put it back. It was high time to go, and with a last look round to make sure that everything was exactly as it had been when I came in, I let myself quietly, unnoticed, out of the door, and went back to the kitchen to see if by some miracle the lads had left me any crumbs of lunch. Naturally, they had not.

The next morning Jerry's horse Mickey disappeared from the yard while we were out at second exercise, but Ca.s.s told him Jud had run him down to a friend of Humber's on the coast, for Mickey to paddle in the sea water to strengthen his legs, and that he would be back that evening. But the evening came, and Mickey did not.

On Wednesday Humber ran another horse, and I missed my lunch to have a look inside his house while he was away. Entry was easy through an open ventilator, but I could find nothing whatever to give me any clue as to how the doping was carried out.

All day Thursday I fretted about Mickey being still away at the coast. It sounded perfectly reasonable. It was what a trainer about twelve miles from the sea could be expected to arrange. Sea water was good for horses' legs. But something happened to horses sometimes at Humber's which made it possible for them to be doped later, and I had a deeply disturbing suspicion that whatever it was was happening to Mickey at this moment, and that I was missing my only chance of finding it out.

According to the accounts books Adams owned four of the racehorses in the yard, in addition to his two hunters. None of his racehorses was known in the yard by its real name: therefore Mickey could be any one of the four. He could in fact be Kandersteg or Starlamp. It was an even chance that he was one or the other, and was due to follow in Superman's footsteps. So I fretted.