Dick Francis: For Kicks

"You're new, aren't you?" said a challenging voice in my ear.

I turned my head and looked up at him.

"Yeah," I said languidly.

These were the only eyes I had seen in Yorkshire which held anything of the sort of guile I was looking for. I gave him back his stare until his lips curled in recognition that I was one of his kind.

"What's your name?"

"Clan," I said, 'and yours? "

"Thomas Nathaniel Tarleton." He waited for some reaction, but I didn't know what it ought to be.

"TNT.," said Paddy obligingly, looking up from his dominoes.

"Soupy." His quick gaze flickered over both of us.

"The high explosive kid himself," I murmured.

Soupy Tarleton smiled a small, carefully dangerous smile: to impress me, I gathered. He was about my own age and build, but much fairer, with the reddish skin which I had noticed so many Englishmen had. His light hazel eyes protruded slightly in their sockets, and he had grown a narrow moustache on the upper lip of his full, moist-looking mouth. On the little finger of his right hand he wore a heavy gold ring, and on his left wrist, an expensive wrist watch. His clothes were of good material, though distinctly sharp in cut, and the enviable fleece-lined quilted jacket he carried over his arm would have cost him three weeks' pay.

He showed no signs of wanting to be friendly. After looking me over as thoroughly as I had him, he merely nodded, said "See you', and detached himself to go over and watch the bar billiards.

Grits brought a fresh half pint from the bar and settled himself on the bench next to Paddy.

"You don't want to trust Soupy," he told me confidentially, his raw boned unintelligent face full of kindness.

Paddy put down a double three, and looking round at us gave me a long, unsmiling scrutiny.

"There's no need to worry about Clan, Grits," he said.

"He and Soupy, they're alike. They'd go well in double harness. Birds of a feather, that's what they are."

"But you said I wasn't to trust Soupy," objected Grits, looking from one to the other of us with troubled eyes.

"That's right," said Paddy flatly. He put down a three- four and concentrated on his game.

Grits shifted six inches towards Paddy and gave me one puzzled, embarrassed glance. Then he found the inside of his beer mug suddenly intensely interesting and didn't raise his eyes to mine again.

I think it was at that exact moment that the charade began to lose its lightheartedness I liked Paddy and Grits, and for three days they had accepted me with casual good humour. I was not prepared for Paddy's instant recognition that it was with Soupy that my real interest lay, nor for his immediate rejection of me on that account.

It was a shock which I ought to have foreseen, and hadn't: and it should have warned me what to expect in the future, but it didn't.

Colonel Beckett's staff work continued to be of the highest possible kind. Having committed himself to the offensive, he was prepared to back the attack with massive and immediate reinforcements: which is to say that as soon as he had heard from October that I was immobilized in the stable with three useless horses, he set about liberating me.

On Tuesday afternoon, when I had been with the stable for a week, Wally, the head lad, stopped me as I carried two buckets of water across the yard.

"That horse of yours in number seventeen is going tomorrow," he said.

"You'll have to look sharp in the morning with your work, because you are to be ready to go with it at twelve-thirty. The horse box will take you to another racing stables, down near Nottingham.

You are to leave this horse there and bring a new one back. Right? "

"Right," I said. Wally's manner was cool with me; but over the weekend I had made myself be reconciled to the knowledge that I had to go on inspiring a faint mistrust all round, even if I no longer much liked it when I succeeded.

Most of Sunday I had spent reading the form books, which the others in the cottage regarded as a perfectly natural activity; and in the evening, when they all went down to the pub, I did some pretty concentrated work with a pencil, making analyses of the eleven horses and their assisted wins. It was true, as I had discovered from the newspaper cuttings in London, that they all had different owners, trainers, and jockeys: but it was not true that they had absolutely nothing in common. By the time I had sealed my notes into an envelope and put it with October's notebook into the game bag under some form books, away from the inquiring gaze of the beer-happy returning lads, I was in possession of four unhelpful points of similarity.

First, the horses had all won selling 'chases races where the winner was subsequently put up for auction. In the auctions three horses had been bought back by their owners, and the rest had been sold for modest sums.

Second, in all their racing lives all the horses had proved themselves to be capable of making a show in a race, but had either no strength or no guts when it came to a finish.

Third, none of them had won any races except the ones for which they were doped, though they had occasionally been placed on other occasions.

Fourth, none of them had won at odds of less than ten to one.

I learned both from October's notes and from the form books that several of the horses had changed trainers more than once, but they were such moderate, unrewarding animals that this was only to be expected. I was also in possession of the useless information that the horses were all by different sires out of different dams, that they varied in age from five to eleven, and that they were not all of the same colour. Neither had they all won on the same course, though in this case they had not all won on different courses either; and geographically I had a vague idea that the courses concerned were all in the northern half of the country Kelso, Haydock, Sedgefield, Stafford, and Ludlow. I decided to check them on a map, to see if this was right, but there wasn't one to be found chez Mrs. Allnut.

I went to bed in the crowded little dormitory with the other lads' beery breaths gradually overwhelming the usual mixed clean smells of boot polish and hair oil, and lost an argument about having the small sash window open more than four inches at the top. The lads all seemed to take their cue from Paddy, who was undoubtedly the most aware of them, and if Paddy declined to treat me as a friend, so would they: I realized that if I had insisted on having the window tight shut they would probably have opened it wide and given me all the air I wanted. Grinning ruefully in the dark I listened to the squeaking bed springs and their sleepy, gossiping giggles as they thumbed over the evening's talk; and as I shifted to find a comfortable spot on the lumpy mattress I began to wonder what life was really like from the inside for the hands who lived in my own bunk-house, back home.

Wednesday morning gave me my first taste of the biting Yorkshire wind, and one of the lads, as we scurried round the yard with shaking hands and running noses, cheerfully assured me that it could blow for six months solid, if it tried. I did my three horses at the double, but by the time the horse box took me and one of them out of the yard at twelve-thirty I had decided that if the gaps in my wardrobe were anything to go by, October's big square house up the drive must have very efficient central heating.

About four miles up the road I pressed the bell which in most horse boxes connects the back compartment to the cab. The driver stopped obediently, and looked inquiringly at me when I walked along and climbed up into the cab beside him.

"The horse is quiet," I said, 'and it's warmer here. "

He grinned and started off again, shouting over the noise of the engine.

"I didn't have you figured for the conscientious type, and I was damn right. That horse is going to be sold and has got to arrive in good condition… the boss would have a fit if he knew you were up in front."