Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

I exhaled jaggedly. I felt small and spent; I didn’t want to think about it any more. ‘How much money does this fellow want anyway?’ I said, gesturing at the heap of notes. Frank did some mental calculations, then started scribbling on a beermat. It would take us all night at this rate, I thought with a sinking heart; and by then she would be gone, gone into the snowy wastes.

The mechanical voice announced the next race. I went to the bar and ordered a Guinness for Frank and a dry martini for myself, with a shot of Calvados while I was waiting. Outside the sky had cleared enough to make room for a brace of stars, which swam about in a comforting way. I returned to the table to find Frank wearing an odd expression. ‘Look,’ he whispered.

His arithmetic had carried him off the beermat and on to a left-behind newspaper, and he was pointing to a line in one corner: something about An Evening of Long Goodbyes, which sounded vaguely familiar.

‘It’s that dog what Bel bet on the last time,’ he said. ‘Remember the one that bit that young lad?’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘So it is. I thought I recognized the name.’

‘Look at the odds, Charlie,’ he whispered. ‘They’re astromonomical.’

‘Hardly surprising, after that last farrago. I’m amazed they’re still letting it race.’

‘But think, right, if we put everything we have on it, we’d have enough for the rent, and the ESB, and the gas, and…’

‘Yes, but you’re forgetting, it wouldn’t win, you see, that’s why the odds are —’

‘But if we put down say two hundred blips, then —’

‘But it wouldn’t win , damn it. If it were the only dog running it wouldn’t win. That dog’s a born loser , can’t you understand that?’

With a hurt look, Frank retreated to his beermats. I sat back splenetically with the form. An Evening of Long Goodbyes, indeed. Put all our money on that? After what happened last time? Funny I hadn’t noticed it earlier, though… With a diversionary cough, I reached for the left-behind newspaper. Now this really was queer. Unless it was a misprint, it appeared that the bookmakers were giving outlandishly long odds not just against proven reprobates like An Evening of Long Goodbyes, but against all of the dogs running in the 2130, bar one. This dog, one Celtic Tiger, was favourite by such a distance that a return on his victory would be minuscule: but his previous times seemed unusually slow.

The prudent thing would be to treat it as a low-risk investment: bet on Celtic Tiger and take the minimal return. And yet — I looked over my shoulder around the bar: business appeared to be proceeding as usual — and yet what if we had stumbled across some kind of gambling anomaly? What if there really were something in the air tonight? What if that something — or someone — were trying to reach us, help us, via the unconventional vehicle of An Evening of Long Goodbyes?

‘What are you thinking, Charlie?’

I ran my eyes over and over the tiny text. But suddenly my gambler’s intuition had deserted me. I had no idea what to do.

I took a deep breath. The prudent thing: generally — although it might at times seem otherwise — I had always done what was prudent. I had clung to things — to people, beliefs, certain modes of living. I had tried to hold them still, I had tried to shore them up against the vicissitudes of fate. Where had it got me? Everything I had tried to hold had escaped me. Perhaps the secret was to do the opposite: perhaps to keep the things one loved one had to gamble them; one had to give all the heart, live in the aleatory moment… I reached for the pencil and filled out the betting slip.

It was obvious as soon as the dogs were led out on to the field that we had made a terrible mistake.

Immediately the stadium erupted. Chants rose up, flags were waved, ne’er-do-wells linked arms and jigged, all for the benefit of Celtic Tiger, aka, we soon learned, The Bookie’s Despair.

‘Bollocks,’ said Frank.

It took two men to squeeze Celtic Tiger into its trap. It must have weighed a hundred pounds, consisting primarily of haunches and gnashing fangs; whatever biological connection it had to the greyhound family, it must have been pretty tenuous. The other dogs, who had evidently encountered it before, looked singularly depressed — apart from An Evening of Long Goodbyes, that is, who was gazing off hopefully at the concession stand. What really struck one was its air of unchecked malevolence. I had never experienced evil of such magnitude at such close proximity, apart from lunches with Mr Appleseed. Yet in spite of this, Celtic Tiger seemed to inspire an almost religious fervour. The punters looked to it with the worshipful, desperate love of a parched country for the annual rains. ‘God bless you, Celtic Tiger,’ said a worn man next to us at the window, his weathered cheeks wet with tears. I realized that for these people, Celtic Tiger must be one of the few certainties in life: aside from death, of course, and nurses. The starter’s gun sounded and the rabbit scooted away.

We cheered on An Evening of Long Goodbyes as best we could, but I doubted he could have heard us. Within seconds, Celtic Tiger was out on its own, prancing along taking the salutes of the crowd, while the other dogs remained behind at a respectful distance. It was like some kind of canine Nuremberg rally.

‘This is a fiasco!’ I cried. ‘Those other dogs aren’t even trying! What’s the point having a race if they’re too afraid to overtake him?’

Just as I said it, a ripple of consternation ran through the stands. All of a sudden one of the dogs had broken away from the pack and was quickly making up ground — which wasn’t hard, considering Celtic Tiger had all the zip of a Panzer tank.

‘That’s a brave dog,’ one of the punters next to us said grudgingly.

‘It’s not so much it’s brave,’ his companion said. ‘It’s more like it’s forgotten what it’s supposed to be doing.’

‘It’s him!’ Frank whispered to me.

I quickly apprehended what had happened. A chap in the front row of the far stand had unwrapped a sandwich, and An Evening of Long Goodbyes had caught sight of it. The spectators could boo and curse him all they wanted now. I knew that all he was thinking about was that sandwich, and he would not be diverted, not by them, nor by the finishing line which loomed up ahead, nor by those intimidating looks the larger dog was giving him as he drew up alongside it –

‘That’s it!’ I pounded encouragingly on the glass, attracting glowers from the punters around me. ‘That’s the stuff!’

— and abandoning all pretence of sportsmanship, Celtic Tiger burst its muzzle as if it were paper and fastened its jaws around its rival’s throat.

‘What!’ howled Frank. ‘Referee!’

It was carnage. At first, some of the more bloodthirsty punters cheered it on: but quickly even they turned pale and went quiet, and the whole stadium was silent except for the yelps of An Evening of Long Goodbyes and the murderous snarls, snaps and tearing noises produced by Celtic Tiger. ‘Why doesn’t somebody do something?’ I appealed. But no one did anything. Celtic Tiger wasn’t even running any more, it was being dragged by the smaller dog, who struggled gamely on towards his sandwich even with Celtic Tiger latched around his neck. The other dogs had backed up into a small uncertain huddle some distance down the track; some lay down or rolled over, their dolorous baying segueing into the groans of Frank and the small minority of unwise men who had bet against the favourite — as An Evening of Long Goodbyes, drenched in blood, froth dripping from his mouth, uttered a long-drawn-out moan and toppled over on his side.