Ah Sweet Mystery of Life Read online

  I swear there wasn’t a man alive who knew more about it than Claud did, and ever since we’d got the ringer and decided to pull this job, he’d taken it upon himself to give me an education in the business. By now, in theory at any rate, I suppose I knew nearly as much as him.

  It had starting during the very first strategy conference we’d had in the kitchen. I can remember it was the day after the ringer arrived and we were sitting there watching for customers through the window, and Claud was explaining to me all about what we’d have to do, and I was trying to follow him as best I could until finally there came one question I had to ask.

  ‘What I don’t see,’ I had said, ‘is why you use the ringer at all. Wouldn’t it be safer if we use Jackie all the time and simply stop him the first half dozen races so he comes last? Then when we’re good and ready, we can let him go. Same result in the end, wouldn’t it be, if we do it right? And no danger of being caught.’

  Well, as I say, that did it. Claud looked up at me quickly and said, ‘Hey! None of that! I’d just like you to know “stopping’s” something I never do. What’s come over you, Gordon?’ He seemed genuinely pained and shocked by what I had said.

  ‘I don’t see anything wrong with it.’

  ‘Now listen to me, Gordon. Stopping a good dog breaks his heart. A good dog knows he’s fast, and seeing all the others out there in front and not being able to catch them – it breaks his heart, I tell you. And what’s more, you wouldn’t be making suggestions like that if you knew some of the tricks them fellers do to stop their dogs at the flapping-tracks.’

  ‘Such as what, for example?’ I had asked.

  ‘Such as anything in the world almost, so long as it makes the dog go slower. And it takes a lot of stopping, a good greyhound does. Full of guts and so mad keen you can’t even let them watch a race they’ll tear the leash right out of your hand rearing to go. Many’s the time I’ve seen one with a broken leg insisting on finishing the race.

  He had paused then, looking at me thoughtfully with those large pale eyes, serious as hell and obviously thinking deep. ‘Maybe,’ he had said, ‘if we’re going to do this job properly I’d better tell you a thing or two so’s you’ll know what we’re up against.’

  ‘Go ahead and tell me,’ I had said. ‘I’d like to know.’

  For a moment he stared in silence out the window. ‘The main thing you got to remember,’ he had said darkly, ‘is that all these fellers going to the flapping-tracks with dogs – they’re artful. They’re more artful than you could possibly imagine.’ Again he paused, marshalling his thoughts.

  ‘Now take for example the different ways of stopping a dog. The first, the commonest, is strapping.’

  ‘Strapping?’

  ‘Yes. Strapping ’em up. That’s commonest. Pulling the muzzle-strap tight around their necks so they can’t hardly breathe, see. A clever man knows just which hole on the strap to use and just how many lengths it’ll take off his dog in a race. Usually a couple of notches is good for five or six lengths. Do it up real tight and he’ll come last. I’ve known plenty of dogs collapse and die from being strapped up tight on a hot day. Strangulated, absolutely strangulated, and a very nasty thing it was too. Then again, some of ’em just tie two of the toes together with black cotton. Dog never runs well like that. Unbalances him.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound too bad.’

  ‘Then there’s others that put a piece of fresh-chewed gum up under their tails, right up close where the tail joins the body. And there’s nothing funny about that,’ he had said, indignant. ‘The tail of a running dog goes up and down ever so slightly and the gum on the tail keeps sticking to the hairs on the backside, just where it’s tenderest. No dog likes that, you know. Then there’s sleeping pills. That’s used a lot nowadays. They do it by weight, exactly like a doctor, and they measure the powder according to whether they want to slow him up five or ten or fifteen lengths. Those are just a few of the ordinary ways,’ he had said. ‘Actually they’re nothing. Absolutely nothing compared with some of the other things that’s done to hold a dog back in a race, especially by the gypsies. There’s things the gypsies do that are almost too disgusting to mention, such as when they’re just putting the dog in the trap, things you wouldn’t hardly do to your worst enemies.’

  And when he had told me about those – which were, indeed, terrible things because they had to do with physical injury, quickly, painfully inflicted – then he had gone on to tell me what they did when they wanted the dog to win.

  ‘There’s just as terrible things done to make ’em go fast as to make ’em go slow,’ he had said softly, his face veiled and secret. ‘And perhaps the commonest of all is wintergreen. Whenever you see a dog going around with no hair on his back or little bald patches all over him – that’s wintergreen. Just before the race they rub it hard into the skin. Sometimes it’s Sloans Liniment, but mostly it’s wintergreen. Stings terrible. Stings so bad that all the old dog wants to do is run run run as fast as he possibly can to get away from the pain.

  ‘Then there’s special drugs they give with the needle. Mind you, that’s the modern method and most of the spivs at the track are too ignorant to use it. It’s the fellers coming down from London in the big cars with stadium dogs they’ve borrowed for the day by bribing the trainer – they’re the ones use the needle.’

  I could remember him sitting there at the kitchen table with a cigarette dangling from his mouth and dropping his eyelids to keep out the smoke and looking at me through his wrinkled, nearly closed eyes, and saying, ‘What you’ve got to remember, Gordon, is this. There’s nothing they won’t do to make a dog win if they want him to. On the other hand, no dog can run faster than he’s built, no matter what they do to him. So if we can get Jackie down into bottom grade, then we’re home. No dog in bottom grade can get near him, not even with wintergreen and needles. Not even with ginger.’

  ‘Ginger?’

  ‘Certainly. That’s a common one, ginger is. what they do, they take a piece of raw ginger about the size of a walnut, and about five minutes before the off they slip it into the dog.’

  ‘You mean in his mouth? He eats it?’

  ‘No,’ he had said. ‘Not in his mouth.’

  And so it had gone on. During each of the eight long trips we had subsequently made to the track with the ringer I had heard more and more about this charming sport – more, especially, about the methods of stopping them and making them go (even the names of the drugs and the quantities to use). I heard about ‘the rat treatment’ (for nonchasers, to make them chase the dummy hare), where a rat is placed in a can which is then tied around the dog’s neck. There’s a small hole in the lid of the can just large enough for the rat to poke its head out and nip the dog. But the dog can’t get at the rat, and so naturally he goes half crazy running around and being bitten in the neck, and the more he shakes the can the more the rat bites him. Finally, someone releases the rat, and the dog, who up to then was a nice docile tail-wagging animal who wouldn’t hurt a mouse, pounces on it in a rage and tears it to pieces. Do this a few times, Claud had said – ‘mind you, I don’t hold with it myself’ – and the dog becomes a real killer who will chase anything, even the dummy hare.

  We were over the Chilterns now and running down out of the beechwoods into the flat elm- and oak-tree country south of Oxford. Claud sat quietly beside me, nursing his nervousness and smoking cigarettes, and every two or three minutes he would turn round to see if Jackie was all right. The dog was at last lying down, and each time Claud turned round, he whispered something to him softly, and the dog acknowledged his words with a faint movement of the tail that made the straw rustle.

  Soon we would be coming into Thame, the broad High Street where they penned the pigs and cows and sheep on market day, and where the Fair came once a year with the swings and roundabouts and bumping cars and gypsy caravans right there in the street in the middle of the town. Claud was born in Thame, and we’d never driven through it yet without him