The Race (3 page)

Swift Elin had strange eyes: pale blue, not like dogs’ eyes at all. That’s fairly common in smartdogs because of the gene splicing, but in the case of Swift Elin the crossover was especially pronounced.

When I first met Em’s sister Sybil I saw at once that her eyes were the same colour blue as Swift Elin’s and with the same eerie dreaminess. It made me feel strange at first, to know that Gra Rayner had obviously used his own genetic material in the creation of Swift Elin, but then I thought why not? If you’re going to do it with anyone’s, why not your own?

It was still kind of freaky though. I used to wonder what Em and Sybil’s mother Margrit thought about it, but of course I never asked.

Margrit didn’t go near the dogs much, I did notice that.

Del told me Gra used to get pretty frantic over Roddy’s marsh-gallivanting. Smartdogs are worth a lot of money. The best ones – cup winners and series champions like Swift Elin – are worth many thousands of shillings, especially if they’re still of breeding age. No wonder there are people – greedy, desperate people – who see dog-napping as an easy way of making a quick pile.

“I mean, Rod’s not exactly built like a barn, is he?” Del said. “Gra wants to give him a minder, but Rod won’t hear of it. He says it interferes with their concentration.” He laughed. “Totally mental. And that’s just the dog.”

Gra Rayner was right to be worried, though. If he were attacked in an isolated spot – one of the dirt roads up by Pett Level, for example – Roddy Haskin, who was built more like a wicker lobster pot than a barn, wouldn’t stand a chance. Swift Elin would be easy prey. The thieves wouldn’t bother with Rod – except perhaps to kill him if he got in the way.

Runners, even gifted ones like Roddy, are always expendable.

~*~

I became properly friendly with Em when I was sixteen. In a sense I couldn’t avoid him because he was always around, but as time passed and I came to know him better I found I liked him. He read books for a start, and he was never afraid to talk about things seriously. He was eighteen months older than the morons in my own year, and at that age eighteen months can spell the difference between an outright plonker and an actual human being. Also I didn’t fancy him, which I counted as a good thing. The guys I fancied always turned out to be dorks, and the fact that I could waste so much time thinking about them drove me crazy. With Em it was different because I could be with him without constantly wondering if he wanted to fuck me. It must have worked the same way for Em, too, because we soon got into the habit of hanging out together whenever Del was up at the lunges with Em’s dad.

I thought of Em as a brother, I suppose, only more so. The trouble with Del was that you never knew when he was going to pull a mental on you. Em was always just Em, no added bullshit. I trusted him and I guess I loved him, and I guess I still do.

Em and I first ended up having sex because he was being an idiot over another girl. I didn’t know Lily Zhang all that well because she was in the year above me, but when I found out it was her Em was hooked on, my mood did a nose dive. I don’t mean I was jealous or anything – I just knew he was doomed. We were sitting out on the pier when he told me. It was a late afternoon in July. Em and I were right out at the end of the boardwalk behind the amusement arcade. We had to sit really close together in order to hear each other over the constant racket from the slot machines, and I think that’s what made it easier for me to finally ask him what was going on.

He’d been weird for a couple of weeks and I was getting sick of it.

“Lily Zhang?” I said when he told me. “You have got to be joking.”

“You think I’m fat and ugly,” Em said. He took off his glasses and rubbed at them with the silly piece of yellow cloth he always carried in his pocket. The lenses were covered in smears, a combination of sea salt and sweat. He looked shrunken into himself and lost, a tubby little pier-end manikin trying unsuccessfully to pose as a star-crossed lover.

It was pathetic and sad, and it made me angry to see my friend reduced to this state, especially when his predicament was so obviously hopeless.

Lily Zhang was training to be a dancer. She had a scholarship to some London academy. She spoke in a quavery little girl’s voice, and refused to eat anything unless it had been calorie-counted.

Her face, framed by shiny black hair, was a perfect oval.

It was impossible not to stare at her, but so what? You’d stare at a three-headed cat, but that doesn’t mean you’d want to go out with one.

“Fuck Em, no,” I said. “I’m just wondering what on Earth you’d find to talk to her about.” I tried not to imagine them actually doing it. That was too revolting and ridiculous to contemplate.

“She smiled at me the other day.” He looked as doleful and dejected as a rained-on badger.

“You’re worth ten of her,” I said. That raised a smile at least. He peered at me with his beautiful tea-coloured eyes and then replaced his glasses.

“Do you think anyone will ever want to do it with me?” he said.

“Don’t be a nutter, of course they will.” I placed my hand over his. It was the first time we’d ever touched except by accident, but it felt natural and it felt nice. We went back to my place. I knew Del was up at the lunges and probably wouldn’t be home before it got dark. Dad was still at work – he never normally got in till well after seven on weekdays.

I’d never had sex before, but I’d sneaked plenty of looks at Del’s secret webcam footage of him doing it with Monica, so I had a pretty good idea of what went on. I closed the curtains and we took our clothes off under the bedcovers. We took a while to get the hang of things but in the end we managed. What with the curtains and the bedcovers we couldn’t really see each other’s faces and that helped a lot, plus we were giggling the whole time and that helped, too. Em’s stomach was big under his blazer and his dick was a funny upright thing, an indignant little schoolmaster of a dick, jabbing his finger at me, over and over, like he had a point to prove and was determined to prove it. But Em had lovely smooth shoulders and his hands, with his grandfather’s onyx signet ring on his left index finger, were the hands of a genius who spends his whole life dreaming of unreachable lands.

It wasn’t amazing, it was just a relief. Suddenly all the fear and half-truth, that sense of the world being one up on me – all that lifted away and it was as if I could finally get on with things. I reckon Em felt that way, too. Afterwards we lay there chatting, the same as always only more manic. Everything was exciting suddenly, or funny. I couldn’t stop grinning.

“What do you want to do, when you leave school, I mean?” I asked him at one point. It was Em’s final year and everyone knew the teachers at our school were banking on him. He was their prize cow, their best hope of exam glory. Being under that kind of pressure would have driven me crazy, but Em didn’t seem to mind and I reckon there was even a part of him that enjoyed it, that liked being liked for something. I suppose that’s fair enough.

“I want to go to Imperial College and study aeronautical mathematics,” Em said at once. Imperial College was in London, I knew that, which meant Em would be leaving town, for good, probably.
What did you expect, you idiot?
I thought to myself.
That he’d stay here for you? Get real.

“Eventually I’d like to work on the space programme,” Em said. “How about you?”

“I haven’t a clue. I haven’t really thought about it.” It was true and I hadn’t. The end of school seemed like a myth to me, a gateway you constantly walk towards but never reach. I had no idea what lay beyond that and I didn’t want to know. What I wanted was to get away from Del and Dad and their constant fighting, the house with its grubby curtains and septic kitchen, the sense that everything was breaking down and falling apart. We’d become used to the day-to-day reality of my mother’s absence but that didn’t mean we were any closer to understanding what we should make of our lives now that she wasn’t there to provide a context.

When Em asked me what I wanted to do my mind went blank. It was just like Em, to have a proper future planned out for himself already. Compared with him I felt incompetent and juvenile. Seeing myself through his eyes made me feel scared suddenly and I shifted slightly away from him under the covers.

Em reached for my hand.

“I like all that stuff you collect,” he said. “You should do something with that.”

“Stuff? What stuff?”

“You know. The stuff. Over there.” He pointed with his free hand towards the corner of my bedroom where my desk was, with my crummy old laptop and my collection of shoeboxes. Some of the boxes still had their lids, some didn’t. I used the boxes as containers for the junk I collected, flotsam and jetsam I came across in the street or on the beach: girls’ hair slides, stray buttons, empty matchboxes. Odd things and shiny things. Magpie treasure. There was a piece of gold ribbon I found near the dog track, a wax doll’s head with blue china eyes. None of it was worth anything – I suppose you’d call it rubbish, really. But I liked these things because I thought they were beautiful, and I wanted them to have a home somewhere.

It never occurred to me that the stuff might have a use.

“I like the colours, that’s all,” I said to Em. “I like lost things.”

“Was I a lost thing?”

“A lost idiot, more like.” I snatched the pillow from beneath his head and began beating him with it. He grabbed both my wrists and rolled on top of me and a moment later we were making love again. This time we were both more confident and it was better.

“Seriously though, Jen,” he said later. “You’re artistic – really talented, I reckon. You should give that some thought.”

It’s strange. If a teacher told me that I’d have run a mile, not because I didn’t like what they said but because it would have scared me. The idea of someone thinking I had a gift for something then looking on while I cocked things up, I suppose. That. But having Em say it was different. I knew he meant what he said, that he was serious, but I also knew he didn’t expect me to perform for him, that we’d stay friends whether I turned out to be good at anything or not.

If it hadn’t been for Em, I might have sailed on and on doing nothing. Doing nothing until the sun exploded and we were all toast.

I owe Em everything, I reckon. He woke me up.

Em and I became an item after that. We didn’t make a big thing of it – we were spending so much time together anyway that apart from us having sex our lives carried on pretty much as usual. Only instead of going off to college and becoming a rocket scientist like he wanted to, Em stayed in Sapphire and did accountancy training. He set himself up as a freelance, and was soon making a lot of money. Most people would have said he’d done very well for himself, but I knew it was not the life he had once dreamed of.

He stayed for me, after all. And I could never bring myself to tell him to go.

We lived together for a while, but it didn’t work out. I don’t know why, not fully, only that it was my fault, not his. I was afraid to risk my feelings, I guess – afraid to love someone so much that it would hurt me, hurt me badly, if it ended. I think now that one of the main reasons I started my affair with Ali Kuzman was so Em would feel he had to move out – it was the only way I could think of to tell him to go. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I think it’s so, even though I was in love with Ali, for a time anyway, far more than I wanted to be. Enough to think I was going to lose it when he went back to Pia.

I don’t need to tell you who picked up the pieces from that shitty episode.

When Em packed up his apartment and left town it was a total sideswipe. I thought it was me, that he’d finally got sick of being pissed about, but when I asked him what was going on, all he would say was that he’d had a disagreement with Del.

“But you’re always rowing with Del, Em, what’s the big deal?”

“There’s no deal. I need a change from this place, that’s all.”

I sensed there was more to it, but Em wouldn’t spill and after a while I stopped pestering him. I knew he must have his reasons, but I didn’t like it. Em and I had never had secrets before, not even during the Ali episode, and all I could think was that Del was up to something, something dodgy that Em wanted out of. I wouldn’t have put anything past my brother.

I still feel guilty sometimes. I tell myself that if only I’d tried harder to find out what going on I could have talked to Del, persuaded him, opened his eyes to the risks. That’s all bollocks though, isn’t it? Apart from anything else, since when has my brother Yellow ever listened to anyone?

He wouldn’t have heard a word I said. He’d have told me to fuck off and mind my own business.

Knowing that should make me feel better, but it doesn’t.

~*~

To understand how Sapphire works, you have to understand the smartdogs, and to understand the smartdogs you have to understand the panic that was first caused by them.

The engineered greyhounds now known as smartdogs were the product of illegal experiments in stem cell research. The experiments originally took place at what was then a large governmental agricultural centre called Romney Heights. The nearest town of any real size was of course Sapphire, which was why most of the support workers – the lab staff and cleaning staff and technicians – came from here. The security was pretty tight – anyone found to be in breach of the lab’s confidentiality agreement was fired on the spot – but the pay was good, and once you have a job like that you do your best to hang on to it. For the most part people were more than happy to stick to the rules.

There’s a lot of hard science stuff I don’t understand fully, but what it comes down to is that the government boffins at Romney Heights took eggs from a canine ovary and replaced some of the canine genetic material with human DNA. They fertilized those doctored eggs with dog sperm, and let them go on to become living dog embryos. Those embryos were then implanted back into the wombs of female greyhounds.

The scientists used greyhounds for their experiments because they are docile and easy to train. They are also naturally hardy and highly intelligent.