Дик Фрэнсис - Reflex

Cheat the horse. Cheat the public.

Cheat.

Damn it, I thought. Damn and damn and damn.

I did it at the third fence, on the decline from the top of the hill, round the sharpish bend, going away from the stands. It was the best from the credibility angle as it was the least visible to the massed watchers, and it had a sharp downhill slope on the approach side: a fence that claimed many a victim during the year.

Daylight, confused by getting the wrong signals from me, and perhaps feeling some of my turmoil and fury in the telepathic way that horses do, began to waver in the stride before take-off, putting in a small jerky extra stride where none was needed.

God, boy, I thought, I’m bloody sorry, but down you go, if I can make you: and I kicked him at the wrong moment and twitched hard on the bit in his mouth while he was in mid-air, and shifted my weight forward in front of his shoulder.

He landed awkwardly and stumbled slightly, dipping his head down to recover his balance. It wasn’t really enough... but it would have to do. I whisked my right foot out of the stirrup and over his back, so that I was entirely on his left side, out of the saddle, clinging onto his neck.

It’s almost impossible to stay on, from that position. I clung to him for about three bucking strides and then slid down his chest, irrevocably losing my grip and bouncing onto the grass under his feet. A flurry of thuds from his hooves, and a roll or two, and the noise and the galloping horses were gone.

I sat on the quiet ground and unbuckled my helmet, and felt absolutely wretched.

‘Bad luck,’ they said briefly in the weighing room. ‘Rotten luck’: and got on with the rest of the day. I wondered if any of them guessed, but maybe they didn’t. No one nudged or winked or looked sardonic. It was my own embarrassed sense of shame which kept me staring mostly at the floor.

‘Cheer up,’ Steve Millace said, buttoning some orange and blue colours. ‘It’s not the end of the world.’ He picked up his whip and his helmet. ‘Always another day.’

‘Yeah.’

He went off to ride and I changed gloomily back into street clothes. So much, I thought, for the sense of excitement in which I’d arrived. So much for winning, for half a dozen mythical trainers climbing over themselves to secure my services for the Gold Cup. So much for a nice boost to the finances, which were wilting a bit after buying a new car. On all fronts, depression.

I went out to watch the race.

Steve Millace, with more courage than sense, drove his horse at leg-tangling pace into the second last fence and crashed on landing. It was the sort of hard fast fall which cracked bones, and one could see straight away that Steve was in trouble. He struggled up as far as his knees, and then sat on his heels with his head bent forward and his arms wrapped round his body, as if he was hugging himself. Arm, shoulder, ribs... something had gone.

His horse, unhurt, got up and galloped away, and I stood for a while watching while two first aid men gingerly helped Steve into an ambulance. A bad day for him, too, I thought, on top of all his family troubles. What on earth made us do it? Whatever drove us to persist, disregarding injury and risk and disappointment? What lured us continually to speed, when we could earn as much sitting in an office?

I walked back to the weighing room feeling the bits of me that Daylight had trodden on beginning to stiffen with bruises. I’d be crimson and black the next day, which was nothing but usual. The biffs and bangs of the trade had never bothered me much and nothing I’d so far broken had made me frightened about the next lot. I normally had, in fact, a great feeling of physical well-being, of living in a strong and supple body, of existing as an efficient coordinated athletic whole. Nothing obtrusive. It was there. It was health.

Disillusion, I thought, would be the killer. If the job no longer seemed worth it, if people like Victor Briggs soured it beyond acceptance, at that point one would give up. But not yet. It was still the life I wanted; still the life I was far from ready to leave.

Steve came into the changing room in boots, breeches, under-vest, clavicle rings, bandage and sling, with his head inclined stiffly to one side.

‘Collar bone,’ he said crossly. ‘Bloody nuisance.’ Discomfort was making his thin face gaunt, digging hollows in his cheeks and round his eyes, but what he clearly felt most was annoyance.

His valet helped him to change and dress, touching him with the gentleness of long practice, and pulling off his boots smoothly so as not to jar the shoulder. A crowd of other jockeys around us jostled and sang and made jokes, drank tea and ate fruit cake, slid out of colours and pulled on trousers, laughed and cursed and hurried. Knocking-off time, the end of the working week, back again Monday.

‘I suppose,’ Steve said to me, ‘You couldn’t possibly drive me home?’ He sounded tentative, as if not sure if our friendship stretched that far.

‘Yes, I should think so,’ I said.

‘To my mother’s house? Near Ascot.’

‘OK.’

‘I’ll get someone to fetch my car tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Sodding nuisance.’

I took a photograph of him and his valet, who was pulling off the second boot.

‘What do you ever do with all them snaps?’ the valet said.

‘Put them in a drawer.’

He gave a heaven-help-us jerk of the head. ‘Waste of time.’

Steve glanced at the Nikon. ‘Dad said once he’d seen some of your pics. You would put him out of business one of these days, he said.’

‘He was laughing at me.’

‘Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know.’ He inched one arm into his shirt and let the valet fasten the buttons over the other. ‘Ouch,’ he said, wincing.

George Millace had seen some pictures I’d had in my car, catching me looking through them as I sat in the car park at the end of a sunny spring day, waiting for the friend I’d given a lift to, to come out of the racecourse.

‘Proper little Cartier Bresson,’ George had said, faintly smiling. ‘Let’s have a look.’ He’d put his arm through the open window and grasped the stack, and short of a tug-o’-war I couldn’t have prevented him. ‘Well, well,’ he said, going through them methodically. ‘Horses on the Downs, coming out of a mist. Romantic muck.’ He handed them back. ‘Keep it up, kid. One of these days you might take a photograph.’

He’d gone off across the car park, the heavy camera bag hanging from his shoulder, with him hitching it from time to time to ease its weight: the only photographer I knew with whom I didn’t feel at home.

Duncan and Charlie, in the three years I’d lived with them, had patiently taught me all I could learn. No matter that when I was first dumped on them I was only twelve: Charlie had said from the start that as I was there I could sweep the floors and clean up in the darkroom, and I’d been glad to. The rest had come gradually and thoroughly, and I’d finished by regularly doing all of Duncan’s printing, and the routine half of Charlie’s. ‘Our lab assistant’ Charlie called me. ‘He mixes our chemicals,’ he would say. ‘A dab hand with a hypodermic. Mind now, Philip, only one point four millilitres of benzol alcohol.’ And I’d suck the tiny amounts accurately into the syringe and add them to the developer, and feel as if I were perhaps of some use in the world after all.

The valet helped Steve into his jacket and gave him his watch and wallet, and we went at Steve’s tender pace out to my car.

‘I promised to give Mum a hand with clearing up that mess, when I got back. What a bloody hope.’

‘She’s probably got neighbours.’ I eased him into the modern Ford and went round to the driving seat. Started up in the closing dusk, switched on the lights and drove off in the direction of Ascot.