Dick Francis - For Kicks

"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.

"Cass said so."

He looked surprised, and also scared.

"No, Clan, 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 Cass had let Jerry know it. It looked as though Cass 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 accumulated 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 realize 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.

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 glass 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, liniments, 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 glasses 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 glass 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 Cass 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 space anailable.

Three dark green filing cabinets, two leather armchairs, and an upright wooden chair with a leather seat stood round the walls.

I opened the unlocked drawers of the filing cabinets 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, analyses of forms, 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. Cass 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 racehorses 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 who had been doped had stayed at Hum- her's longer than four months.