‘Then Dad found that the man who’d bought Indian Silk hadn’t put him in any field, he’d sent him straight down the road to Calder Jackson.’
‘Ah,’ I said.
‘And there was this man saying Calder Jackson had the gift of healing, some sort of magic, and had simply touched Indian Silk and made him well. I ask you... And Dad was in a frightful state because someone had suggested he should send the horse there, to Calder Jackson, while he was so bad, of course, and Dad had said don’t be so ridiculous it was all a lot of rubbish. And then Mum was saying he should have listened to her, because she’d said why not try it, it couldn’t do any harm, and he wouldn’t do it, and they were having rows, and she was crying...’ He gulped for air, the story now pouring out faster almost than he could speak. ‘And I wasn’t getting any work done with it all going on, they weren’t ever talking about anything else, and I took the first exam and just sat there and couldn’t do it, and I knew I’d failed and I was going to fail them all because I couldn’t concentrate... and then there was Calder Jackson one evening talking on television, saying he’d got a friend of his to buy a dying horse, because the people who owned it would just have let it die because they didn’t believe in healers, like a lot of people, and he hoped the horse would be great again some day, like before, thanks to him, and I knew he was talking about Indian Silk. And he said he was going to Ascot on that Thursday... and there was Dad screaming that Calder Jackson had stolen the horse away, it was all a filthy swindle, which of course it wasn’t, but at the time I believed him... and it all got so that I hated Calder Jackson so much that I couldn’t think straight. I mean, I thought he was the reason Mum was crying and I was failing my exams and Dad had lost the only really top horse he’d have in his whole life, and I just wanted to kill him.’
The bed-rock words were out, and the flood suddenly stopped, leaving the echo of them on the October air.
‘And did you fail your exams?’ I asked, after a moment.
‘Yeah. Most of them. But I took them again at Christmas and got good passes.’ He shook his head, speaking more slowly, more quietly. ‘I was glad even that night that you’d stopped me stabbing him. I mean... I’d have thrown my whole life away, I could see it afterwards, and all for nothing, because Dad wasn’t going to get the horse back whatever I did, because it was a legal sale, like.’
I thought over what he’d told me while in the distance the horses lined up and set off on their three mile steeplechase.
‘I was sort of mad,’ he said. ‘I can’t really understand it now. I mean, I wouldn’t go around trying to kill people. I really wouldn’t. It seems like I was a different person.’
Adolescence, I thought, and not for the first time, could be hell.
‘I took Mum’s knife out of the kitchen,’ he said. ‘She never could think where it had gone.’
I wondered if the police still had it; with Ricky’s fingerprints on file.
‘I didn’t know there would be so many people at Ascot,’ he said. ‘And so many gates into the course. Much more than Newmarket. I was getting frantic because I thought I wouldn’t find him. I meant to do it earlier, see, when he arrived. I was out on the road, running up and down the pavement, mad, you know, really, looking for him and feeling the knife kind of burning in my sleeve, like I was burning in my mind... and I saw his head, all those curls, crossing the road, and I ran, but I was too late, he’d gone inside, through the gate.’
‘And then,’ I suggested. ‘You simply waited for him to come out?’
He nodded. ‘There were lots of people around. No one took any notice. I reckoned he’d come up that path from the station, and that was the way he would go back. It didn’t seem long, the waiting. Went in a flash.’
The horses came over the next fence down the course like a multi-coloured wave and thundered towards the one where we were standing. The ground trembled from the thud of the hooves, the air rang with the curses of jockeys, the half-ton equine bodies brushed through the birch, the sweat and the effort and the speed filled eyes and ears and mind with pounding wonder and then were gone, flying away, leaving the silence. I had walked down several times before to watch from the fences, both there and on other tracks, and the fierce fast excitement had never grown stale.
‘Who is it who owns Indian Silk now?’ I asked.
‘A Mr Chacksworth, comes from Birmingham,’ Ricky answered. ‘You see him at the races sometimes, slobbering all over Indian Silk. But it wasn’t him that bought him from Dad. He bought him later, when he was all right again. Paid a proper price for him, so we heard. Made it all the worse.’
A sad and miserable tale, all of it.
‘Who bought the horse from your father?’ I said.
‘I never met him... his name was Smith. Some funny first name. Can’t remember.’
Smith. Friend of Calder’s.
‘Could it,’ I asked, surprised, ‘have been Dissdale Smith?’
‘Yeah. That sounds like it. How do you know?’
‘He was there that day at Ascot,’ I said. ‘There on the pavement, right beside Calder Jackson.’
‘Was he?’ Ricky looked disconcerted. ‘He was a dead liar, you know, all that talk about nice fields.’
‘Who tells the truth,’ I said, ‘when buying or selling horses?’
The runners were round again on the far side of the track, racing hard now on the second circuit.
‘What are you going to do?’ Ricky said. ‘About me, like? You won’t tell Mum and Dad. You won’t, will you?’
I looked directly at the boy-man, seeing the continuing anxiety but no longer the first panic-stricken fear. He seemed to sense now that I would very likely not drag him into court, but he wasn’t sure of much else.
‘Perhaps they should know,’ I said.
‘No!’ His agitation rose quickly. ‘They’ve had so much trouble and I would have made it so much worse if you hadn’t stopped me, and afterwards I used to wake up sweating at what it would have done to them; and the only good thing was that I did learn that you can’t put things right by killing people, you can only make things terrible for your family.’
After a long pause I said ‘All right. I won’t tell them.’ And heaven help me, I thought, if he ever attacked anyone again because he thought he could always get away with it.
The relief seemed to affect him almost as much as the anxiety. He blinked several times and turned his head away to where the race was again coming round into the straight with this time an all-out effort to the winning post. There was again the rise and fall of the field over the distant fences but now the one wave had split into separate components, the runners coming home not in a bunch but a procession.
I watched again the fierce surprising speed of horse and jockey jumping at close quarters and wished with some regret that I could have ridden like that: but like Alec I was wishing too late, even strong and healthy and thirty-three.
The horses galloped off towards the cheers on the grandstand and Ricky and I began a slow walk in their wake. He seemed quiet and composed in the aftermath of confession, the soul’s evacuation giving him ease.
‘What do you feel nowadays about Calder Jackson?’ I asked.
He produced a lop-sided smile. ‘Nothing much. That’s what’s so crazy. I mean, it wasn’t his fault Dad was so stubborn.’
I digested this. ‘You mean,’ I said. ‘That you think your father should have sent him the horse himself?’
‘Yes, I reckon he should’ve, like Mum wanted. But he said it was rubbish and too expensive, and you don’t know my Dad but when he makes his mind up he just gets fighting angry if anyone tries to argue, and he shouts at her, and it isn’t fair.’