BY THE TIME I had lined up at the tote window, they had announced the ‘all clear to pay’ on the Brisbane Handicap. The totalisator declared a dividend of $4376.85 for the trifecta, which made my total collect from the tote just shy of twenty grand. They paid $18,000 of this with a cheque.
As I expected, the bookies asked me to come back after the last race, and they too wanted to pay me most of my winnings by cheque. After some hostile negotiations, I was ready to leave the course with about twenty grand in cash and another fifty in cheques. I asked two bookies if they could tee up a security guard to escort me to the car. They both told me to fuck off.
The leggy blonde, in her mid-twenties, who I had heard someone call Crystal, came up beside me. ‘Looks like you’ve had a good day. Need someone to help you celebrate?’
‘Shouldn’t you be out commiserating with Jim Mecklam?’
‘Who?’
‘How quickly they forget.’
‘Life’s too short to hang about with losers,’ she said.
‘Life’s too short for winners, too.’ I was thinking of Mick Clarence. ‘I’ll give your kind invitation a swerve, Crystal, because My Cucumber awaits at home, and a pregnant friend is holed up in a hotel room.’
Only one part of my info got through. ‘You know my name?’
‘Only your first, but I would imagine your second is “Trouble”.’
‘Only for the slow coaches who can’t keep up with me. See you around, Winner.’
Crystal slinked across the racecourse. She called out to a fifty-something man by name and told him to wait up. I looked around at the faces of the other stragglers leaving the course, but I couldn’t see Bill Smith or anyone else I knew.
Shoving notes from my pockets into the glove box, I started the EH’s engine, turned on the radio and headed to the city. I stopped in a quiet corner of King George Square car park and counted out $10,000. I put this into a plastic bag and shoved the bag down my shirt.
The woman at the front desk of the Sheraton paged Flick Sailor’s room. The pregnant woman must have been near the door, for she flung it open as soon as I knocked and before I could announce myself.
‘I’m bored, Steele. Can I go home now?’
‘Not just yet, Felicity.’
I looked up and down, round and round the corridor before I closed the door and locked it.
‘Did you listen to the radio?’
‘Yes, I did, but you have to dial ‘0’ before the number from this stupid room phone, and I was always too late. I knew almost every song, too.’
She had been playing contests on FM radio rather than listening to the exploits of her father and husband on the racing channel.
I took the plastic bag from my shirt.
‘Those Fun Guys from 1SquillionFM Radio told me to give you all this, as they reckon you were deadest robbed.’
Flick looked inside the bag, and asked me where I had got all the money. I told her that her Dad’s horse had won.
‘Don’t tell me that, Steele. I wanted to watch the race on the six o’clock news. That looks like a lot of money; what are you going to do with it all?’
‘It’s all yours. It’s a long story, but some bloke you don’t know gave me some money to put on Who Loves Yer Baby, and he said to give you $10,000 if it won. It’s all yours, and your husband knows nothing about it. But just stay here a couple of days more. Then I’ll tell Bill where you are, and you and he can work out what you’re doing.’
She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me on the cheek. ‘I’ve never had so much money of my own in my life, not even after Greg won the Stradbroke.’
Flick took the bag to the double bed, and emptied all the money onto the quilt. ‘But why do I need to stay here? I’ll go home to Greg now that he’s promised to mend his ways. Our baby needs a mum and a dad. Not like our family was.’
‘That’s fine, but Greg will be in a foul mood for a couple of days. He could be a more popular bloke right now with a certain owner after he won on your Dad’s horse.’
Flick started into a speech about sharing her husband’s happiness and his disappointments, and about how Sailor would be starting to really worry. I cut her short.
‘It could be dangerous, awlright? It’ll blow over in a few days, but right now, it could be dangerous. Stay in the hotel, have a bit of a splurge, and wait until your Dad or I, or even Greg, say it’s awlright to leave.’
‘Does Greg know where I am?’
‘Not at the moment, but when he does, it’ll mean it’s awlright to go home.’
She promised to do as I asked, telling me I was the best and I knew what was what. I agreed with her, to keep up her confidence. The truth be known, all I knew was that you could get an honest but not brilliant racehorse to run a race record under the effects of psilocybin. For the rest of it, I had no idea what demons you let loose when you did it.
Why I felt an obligation to Flick’s father, I will never know. But I rang Nat to tell her I was going to be a little late home, and went searching for Bill Smith to reassure him I had his winnings. As luck would have it, he was at the third place I went to, the bowls club just down the road from the racecourse.
He was sitting next to Who Loves Yer Baby’s owner, a schoolteacher on the verge of a retirement, which would be enriched with her ability to tell the saga of winning the 1986 Brisbane Handicap. The trainer and the owner had their backs to me. They were speaking loudly above the din of the punters swapping post mortems on the day’s races.
‘I don’t know what happened to the price, Bill,’ owner Claire Levy was saying. ‘I know you said it had a chance and you did get Sailor to ride, but it still should have been twenty-to-one and the best I got was twelves.’
‘Who knows how it happens, Claire?’ said the ever-honest Bill Smith. ‘Someone might have read about it in the paper. Someone having a big win decides to put a few hundred on as an omen bet and it snowballs from there. I’m sorry you missed your price.’
‘I’m not, because I saw the price and put on three times as much as I planned. To tell you the truth, Bill, I thought you were pulling a swiftie.’
‘Would I do that?’ said Bill, feigning innocence.
I interrupted, tapping Bill on the shoulder and nodding to Ms Levy. Bill smiled at me, slapped me on the back and introduced me to his companion. She was the best owner any Brisbane trainer ever had, apparently. He offered to shout me a wine, but Ms Levy swore she was buying while any of us were drinking. She pressed a $10 note in my hand and requested a gin squash for herself and a vodka and ice for Smith. Bill said he had to go to the loo, and followed me to the bar.
‘How’d you go, Steele?’ he asked.
I replied in a flat voice. ‘I owe you about forty-two-and-a-half grand, but most of it’s in cheques.’
‘I’m sweet about my share, Steele. I was hoping you had a good go at it, but I can always give you some of mine.’
‘I’m awlright, Bill. If you want to look after anyone, give Flick a bit of a sling. You were out of line with what you put her through. By the way, I hear she’s fine and she’ll ring you soon. As for that husband of hers – was it my imagination, or did he try to throw the race on the home turn?’
‘You saw it, too, Steele? That cheating bastard will never put his leg over one of mine again.’
I had to smile, because Sailor would be the most relieved man in Australia had he heard the trainer’s threat. I reached into a pocket to grab a wad of money, which I passed to Bill.
‘We’ll settle up for the rest towards the end of the week,’ I said.
‘Sure, but we should both go around to see Mick Clarence tomorrow. I half expected to see him with you today, but he told me about his medical condition. I bet he’s as happy as a pig in mud right now.’
I was not up to telling Bill that Mick was as dead as a pig in a pork pie, and I refused to answer his questions about who had told me Felicity was all right. All I said was I would pick the trainer up on Tuesday morning and we would go around to Mick’s Spring Hill unit. Tuesday seemed a long way away, and I expected any number of humourless authorities would be grilling us both before then. I toasted the victory of Who Loves Yer Baby with two glasses of red, left the winning connections to party into the night and drove home to Hendra.
When I put $5000 in Natalie’s hand, she asked me what I had done, and I told her I backed a winner. I could have looked more excited, she said, but I declined to offer any more details. It had been a long day.
The truth is that I didn’t feel any satisfaction from winning a big bundle. A gambler can never win enough, but they can lose the lot, as Mick Clarence did. Gambling is a beautiful tragedy, which is why it attracts the glamorous and the self-destructive. I think that’s why I threw all that money in the river. I was not making an audacious gesture, or shaking my fist at the gods; I was just admitting to myself that money is a lousy way to keep score.