‘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.
The silence seemed to deepen; the punters buried themselves guiltily in their pints. I couldn’t take any more. I staggered away to the bar, squeezed in beside a silver-haired gent, and with the small sum of money that was now all we had left, ordered myself a triple whiskey. So much for destiny, I thought bitterly; so much for giving all the heart. The world had made suckers of us again. Cousin Benny’s words kept circling through my head: we were cunts, we would always be cunts.
A gasp went up at the window for some fresh outrage on the track. I took a slug from the glass without looking round, wincing pleasurably at the sour familiar kick. To hell with the damned race. I had enough whiskey here to get stinking drunk. At least when I was drunk I knew where I stood: and I didn’t need anybody’s directions to get there. To hell with Frank, and the lousy dinner party; to hell with Bel too. Let her leave if she wanted to leave, let her write off the one person who actually cared about her, who didn’t think of her as an eternal outpatient with impossible dreams…
The punters roared in anguish.
‘Sounds like someone’s taking a beating,’ the silver-haired gent beside me remarked.
‘Someone’s always taking a beating,’ I muttered without looking up.
‘I suppose that’s true,’ the gent agreed.
I turned around. The smoke was making it hard to see, and the room kept spinning, but when I squinted I could make out a well-cut if somewhat vieux jeu worsted suit and a pair of wire-frame spectacles. I wondered what he was doing here with this rabble. He motioned the bargirl to refill our glasses and, as if in answer to my question, said: ‘Still, one has to take one’s chances, doesn’t one?’
‘I don’t see why,’ I said, clinking my ice cubes.
‘Come on, Charles,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘You know why.’
The room seemed to lurch, and a sweltering buzz rose up from my toes to engulf me. At that moment the crowd roared again and the punters at the bar rushed over to the window. I found myself thrown forward: standing on tiptoes, I peered blearily over the mass of heads.
It appeared that Celtic Tiger, having vanquished his foe, had not gone on and finished the race like a sensible dog, but instead had turned his attentions on the dogs grouped miserably together a hundred yards behind.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ the crowd were crying, clutching their heads as the cowardly dogs turned tail and fled with Celtic Tiger now in hot pursuit. ‘The other way, you prick! Run the other way!’
‘Too much PCP,’ a whiskery geezer with defeated eyes observed beside me.
But that was not all. At the other end of the track — far away from where the stewards were trying to fend off Celtic Tiger with a steel pole — An Evening of Long Goodbyes was beginning to stir. At first no one noticed — everyone was too busy trying to convince the renegade favourite to rejoin the race — but then a lone voice cried out, ‘Hey! That thick dog’s not dead yet!’