Someone Like You Read online

  It was the same ceremony I’d seen performed each morning for the past five months, but never with such intense and breathless concentration as this. There was no talk, not even a glance my way, and when he turned and went out again to fetch the dogs, even the back of his neck and the shoulders seemed to be whispering. ‘Oh, Jesus, don’t let anything go wrong, and especially don’t let me do anything wrong today.’

  I heard him talking softly to the dogs in the pen as he put the leashes on them, and when he brought them around into the kitchen, they came in prancing and pulling to get at the breakfast, treading up and down with their front feet and waving their enormous tails from side to side, like whips.

  ‘All right,’ Claud said, speaking at last. ‘Which is it?’

  Most mornings he’d offer to bet me a pack of cigarettes, but there were bigger things at stake today and I knew all he wanted for the moment was a little extra reassurance.

  He watched me as I walked once around the two beautiful, identical, tall, velvety-black dogs, and he moved aside, holding the leashes at arms’ length to give me a better view.

  ‘Jackie!’ I said, trying the old trick that never worked. ‘Hey, Jackie!’ Two identical heads with identical expressions flicked around to look at me, four bright, identical, deep-yellow eyes stared into mine. There’d been a time when I fancied the eyes of one were slightly darker yellow than those of the other. There’d also been a time when I thought I could recognize Jackie because of a deeper brisket and a shade more muscle on the hindquarters. But it wasn’t so.

  ‘Come on,’ Claud said. He was hoping that today of all days I would make a bad guess.

  ‘This one,’ I said. ‘This is Jackie.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘This one on the left.’

  ‘There!’ he cried, his whole face suddenly beaming. ‘You’re wrong again!’

  ‘I don’t think I’m wrong.’

  ‘You’re about as wrong as you could possibly be. And now listen, Gordon, and I’ll tell you something. All these last weeks, every morning while you’ve been trying to pick him out – you know what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve been keeping count. And the result is you haven’t been right even one-half the time! You’d have done better tossing a coin!’

  What he meant was that if I (who saw them every day and side by side) couldn’t do it, why the hell should we be frightened of Mr Feasey? Claud knew Mr Feasey was famous for spotting ringers, but he knew also that it could be very difficult to tell the difference between two dogs when there wasn’t any.

  He put the bowls of food on the floor, giving Jackie the one with the least meat because he was running today. When he stood back to watch them eat, the shadow of deep concern was back again on his face and the large pale eyes were staring at Jackie with the same rapt and melting look of love that up till recently had been reserved only for Clarice.

  ‘You see, Gordon,’ he said. ‘It’s just what I’ve always told you. For the last hundred years there’s been all manner of ringers, some good and some bad, but in the whole history of dog-racing there’s never been a ringer like this.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ I said, and my mind began travelling back to that freezing afternoon just before Christmas, four months ago, when Claud had asked to borrow the van and had driven away in the direction of Aylesbury without saying where he was going. I had assumed he was off to see Clarice, but late in the afternoon he had returned bringing with him this dog he said he’d bought off a man for thirty-five shillings.

  ‘Is he fast?’ I had said. We were standing out by the pumps and Claud was holding the dog on a leash and looking at him, and a few snowflakes were falling and settling on the dog’s back. The motor of the van was still running.

  ‘Fast!’ Claud had said. ‘He’s just about the slowest dog you ever saw in your whole life!’

  ‘Then what you buy him for?’

  ‘Well,’ he had said, the big bovine face secret and cunning, ‘it occurred to me that maybe he might possibly look a little bit like Jackie. What d’you think?’

  ‘I suppose he does a bit, now you come to mention it.’

  He had handed me the leash and I had taken the new dog inside to dry him off while Claud had gone round to the pen to fetch his beloved. And when he returned and we put the two of them together for the first time, I can remember him stepping back and saying, ‘Oh, Jesus!’ and standing dead still in front of them like he was seeing a phantom. Then he became very quick and quiet. He got down on his knees and began comparing them carefully point by point, and it was almost like the room was getting warmer and warmer the way I could feel his excitement growing every second through this long silent examination in which even the toenails and the dewclaws, eighteen on each dog, were matched alongside one another for colour.

  ‘Look,’ he said at last, standing up. ‘Walk them up and down the room a few times, will you?’ And then he had stayed there for quite five or six minutes leaning against the stove with his eyes half closed and his head on one side, watching them and frowning and chewing his lips. After that, as though he didn’t believe what he had seen the first time, he had gone down again on his knees to recheck everything once more; but suddenly, in the middle of it, he had jumped up and looked at me, his face fixed and tense, with a curious whiteness around the nostrils and the eyes. ‘All right,’ he had said, a little tremor in his voice. ‘You know what? We’re home. We’re rich.’

  And then the secret conferences between us in the kitchen, the detailed planning, the selection of the most suitable track, and finally every other Saturday, eight times in all, locking up my filling-station (losing a whole afternoon’s custom) and driving the ringer all the way up to Oxford to a scruffy little track out in the fields near Headington where the big money was played but which was actually nothing except a line of old posts and cord to mark the course, an upturned bicycle for pulling the dummy hare, and at the far end, in the distance, six traps and the starter. We had driven this ringer up there eight times over a period of sixteen weeks and entered him with Mr Feasey and stood around on the edge of the crowd in freezing raining cold, waiting for his name to go up on the blackboard in chalk. The Black Panther we called him. And when his time came, Claud would always lead him down to the traps and I would stand at the finish to catch him and keep him clear of the fighters, the gipsy dogs that the gipsies so often slipped in specially to tear another one to pieces at the end of a race.

  But you know, there was something rather sad about taking this dog all the way up there so many times and letting him run and watching him and hoping and praying that whatever happened he would always come last. Of course the praying wasn’t necessary and we never really had a moment’s worry because the old fellow simply couldn’t gallop and that’s all there was to it. He ran exactly like a crab. The only time he didn’t come last was when a big fawn dog by the name of Amber Flash put his foot in a hole and broke a hock and finished on three legs. But even then ours only just beat him. So this way we got him right down to bottom grade with the scrubbers, and the last time we were there all the bookies were laying him twenty or thirty to one and calling his name and begging people to back him.

  Now at last, on this sunny April day, it was Jackie’s turn to go instead. Claud said we mustn’t run the ringer any more or Mr Feasey might begin to get tired of him and throw him out altogether, he was so slow. Claud said this was the exact psychological time to have it off, and that Jackie would win it anything between thirty and fifty lengths.

  He had raised Jackie from a pup and the dog was only fifteen months now, but he was a good fast runner. He’d never raced yet, but we knew he was fast from clocking him round the little private schooling track at Uxbridge where Claud had taken him every Sunday since he was seven months old – except once when he was having some inoculations, Claud said he probably wasn’t fast enough to win top grade at Mr Feasey’s, but where we’d got him now, in bottom grade with the scrubbers, he could fall over