The Race (6 page)

“I need them in a fortnight,” Kiwit said. “Will that be okay?” She leaned back against the door frame, digging her right heel into the parquet and twisting her boot slowly in a half circle, hard enough to leave a substantial dent.

I made a scoffing noise, like
ha
. I couldn’t help it. “You are kidding me?” I said. If it had been anyone else I’d have laughed in her face but I knew this contract could really take me places and I didn’t want to lose it – Kiwit wasn’t the only one who would get the exposure, after all. Kiwit kept digging her stiletto heel into my floor and saying nothing. I faced her down for about a minute then named a price that was twenty percent in excess of the usual. It was a fair price, too. Including beading and brocade work, an average pair of runner’s gants takes about three weeks to sew by hand from start to finish. I could do the job in two, probably, but it would call for some serious overtime. Overtime’s part of the business, but both of us were perfectly well aware of Kiwit’s current standing in the league championships.

If she wanted the gloves that badly she could afford to pay me properly for my time.

She made a face, pursing her lips, which were painted the dense, contaminated scarlet of black cherries, or blood blisters. Then she folded her arms across her non-existent breasts and straightened up.

“If you can really get them done in two weeks I’ll go for it. I totally dig those gants you did for Benny Heppler.”

Benny Heppler was a good friend of Del’s. The gloves I made for him were quite plain, just black calf’s leather, but sometimes plain gloves show your skill better because there’s nowhere to hide. Also, Benny’s gloves had some great stitching on the backs, really intricate stuff. That stitching alone had taken me a week to complete, but I wasn’t about to reveal that to Angela Kiwit. I just smiled, told her I was glad she liked Benny’s gloves, that they’d been great to work on. After I’d taken all the preliminary measurements, Kiwit paid her deposit and we said our goodbyes. I told her I would call at the end of the week so we could arrange a time for her to come in and check the fitting. Half an hour later I was on the tramway, on my way out to Romer’s. I was eager to begin work on Kiwit’s gloves straight away, and there were things I needed.

~*~

Romer’s is the biggest track supply store in Sapphire and it’s nationally famous. Not as famous as Gallant’s, maybe, but then Gallant’s is mostly for the tourists. They sell souvenirs, mainly, and the kind of standard issue kit you can buy off the peg from any decent factory outlet.

But if you want custom runner’s gants or boots, or gantiers’ haberdashery or uncut leather then you go to Romer’s.

There’s been a Romer’s in Sapphire for more than a century, since before the war. The current management have photos of the original Romer’s Boot Store hanging on the wall behind the counter, a metal shack on a piece of waste ground with a rusty barbed wire fence marking the perimeter. That piece of waste ground is now the Samphire Industrial Estate, and the rusty tin shack has morphed into a retail outlet covering more square footage than the Sapphire tramway depot.

To get to the fabrics and leather department you go right to the back of the store then down a flight of concrete steps into the basement. The smell down there is amazing – not just the leather but all the other stuff: wax polish and clean jersey fabric, enamelled buttons and silk lining fabric and polished chrome zippers. I love that smell. For me the smell of Romer’s basement sums up everything in life that’s most thrilling: the heat inside the stadium on a summer’s night, crazy evenings in the casino bar at the Ryelands, passionate friendships and secret plans, most of all the scent of dreams in embryo, floating in the mind, not yet fully formed.

The first time I came to Romer’s, all I could afford to buy were some small offcuts of purple kid leather from the remnants bin, and I was so afraid of looking a fool in front of the sales clerk that I didn’t count my change, just stuffed it into my pocket without looking. It wasn’t until I got home that I discovered I’d left a five-shilling note behind on the counter. I still kick myself for losing that money. What an idiot.

I used the purple leather to make a pair of wrist guards, using a pattern I’d come across inside an old racing magazine. It took me ages to complete them because I was scared of making a mistake and wasting the leather. When they were finally finished I thought they were a bit plain, not quite how I’d imagined them, anyway, and so I embroidered a dragon across one of them, using some bright green metallic thread I happened to find in a skip outside a building works on Braybrooke Road. I thought the dragon made the guards look better, more edgy. They were definitely more eye-catching, anyway. I gave them as a present to Sharon Young, who was a friend of Del’s and one of his runners. She had always been very nice to me when I turned up at the yard or at races.

“No shit, these are awesome,” she said. She insisted on giving me twenty shillings for them, which more than recouped the cost of the leather and made me blush so hard I thought I was going to faint from lack of blood.

I wondered at the time if she was just being kind. When I saw her wearing the guards at the track two weeks later it felt like flying.

~*~

As I was coming away from Romer’s, I saw a magpie. Magpies are common in Sapphire, especially on the edges of town close to the marshes. I always tend to notice magpies if they’re about, not just because of their striking plumage but because of my mother. Mum was terrified of magpies. Not terrified of the birds as such, but terrified of seeing them. She was convinced they brought bad luck. If she happened to see one she’d always pretend not to have noticed it, or else she’d whisper a rhyme under her breath to charm it away.

She wasn’t a superstitious person normally, and so I found her nervousness around magpies rather endearing. I thought of her that day though, outside Romer’s, and just for a moment I too felt afraid.

~*~

I was about halfway home when Claudia’s call came through. The tramway carriage was pretty full by then – it was the middle of the rush hour – and I found it difficult to make out what she was saying. It didn’t help that she was obviously on the verge of tears.

She kept repeating the same three words: Lumey is gone.

At first I thought she meant Lumey had had an accident, that she’d been injured in some way. All kinds of awful images rushed through my head – Lumey being crushed by a block of falling masonry, or caught between the thrusting pistons of a tramway car. Claudia began to cry. The general racket inside the compartment meant I had to shout to make myself heard and people were beginning to stare in my direction.

“Claudia,” I said. “Take it easy. Tell me again.”

“She’s been taken,” Claudia wailed. “Del says I’m not to tell anyone but I had to call.”

“Taken? What are you talking about? Where’s Del now?”

“Lumey disappeared from the backyard. About an hour ago, or perhaps it’s more now. She was playing with her building blocks. When I went out to fetch her in for her nap she was gone. Del’s out looking for her. He says we’re not to call the police, that it could be dangerous for Lumey. He made me swear.”

She choked on the final word and her weeping intensified. As I listened to her sobbing I found I could picture her exactly: pink cheeks shiny with tears, amber hair coming slowly adrift from its army of pins. The idea was exhausting. I couldn’t decide if what she was telling me was real or a false alarm. It didn’t take much to send Claudia into panic mode.

Then out of nowhere I remembered the magpie and went cold inside. I know it sounds ridiculous, but that’s how it was.

“It’s all right, Claudia, I’m coming,” I said. “Just try to keep calm.”

Claudia made a noise, a tear-filled gulping. It was difficult to tell if it meant gratitude or terror. I disconnected the call before she could clarify. I didn’t mean to be cruel – it was just that there was no way I could help her from where I was, and having to listen to her crying down the phone was slowing me down.

Del’s place was on the opposite side of town from Romer’s, half an hour away by tramway at the very least. It would be quicker by taxi, but that would cost me a fortune, and there was no guarantee that I would find one at this time of day. All things considered, it seemed more sensible to stay on the tramway. The immediate shock of Claudia’s phone call had worn off by then, and as we started grinding up West Hill I began to feel the first prickles of genuine anxiety. What if something really had happened to Lumey? It was unthinkable. I tried Del’s mobile several times but it went straight to voicemail. Either he had it switched off or he was busy on another call. My mind was spinning with anxiety and frustration. I didn’t care to imagine the state Del was in. If Lumey was missing he would be frantic, and when my brother was frantic he did stupid things.

It didn’t bear thinking about. By the time I got off the tram I was in panic mode, too. Not as bad as Claudia, but getting there.

Del’s tramway stop was Tackleway, a dusty, unmade road that instantly became a mud chute whenever it rained. Tackleway is over two miles long in its entirety. If you follow it right to its end you’ll come to the marshes. Luckily, Del’s place was much closer, about five minutes’ walk from the tramway stop and just below the West Wickham water tower. I half walked, half ran along the road, almost tripping several times on the uneven surface. When I finally arrived at the Cowshed, Del was standing by the gate waiting for me. He looked more angry than devastated, and for those moments before reaching his side I allowed myself to hope that Claudia had got it wrong after all, that the whole thing was a misunderstanding and Lumey was safe in the living room watching TV.

Del walked slowly forward to meet me. His yard boots scrunched on the gravel. There was a rip in his sleeve.

“There was no need for you to come,” he said. “I was going to call you.”

“Where’s Lumey, Del?” I said. “Claudia seems to think she’s gone missing. She sounded beside herself on the phone. How could I not come?”

I glared at him, waiting for answers. The breeze, drifting up from the shoreline, smelled of bladder wrack and sump oil. It tugged at Del’s hair, tugging it back from his forehead like twists of frayed rope. I realised I was holding something in my hands, the parcel of trimmings and the blue leather I had bought at Romer’s. Romer’s seemed an age ago, something that had happened in another life.

“Not out here,” Del said. He sighed with what sounded like irritation. “Come inside.”

~*~

Del rebuilt the Cowshed more or less from scratch. At the time Gra sold him the place, it was a half-derelict barn on an overgrown patch of waste land backing on to the yard. The barn itself was barely habitable – the windows were boarded over, and there was a birch sapling pushing up through the floorboards in the downstairs hallway. Also the roof leaked. Gra offered to have the barn torn down free of charge so Del could put up one of the new prefabs, but Del said no, he preferred to do up the barn, that he’d work on it evenings and off shifts, get the old shack watertight.

It took him a year and a half, but he did a good job. Once it was finished, the Cowshed made a lovely home, filled with the smells of new wood and old stone, the greenish, liquid light of the surrounding trees. Claudia once told me she found the place creepy, especially at night, and I had the feeling she would have preferred a nice new prefab but Del was crazy about the Cowshed and I could understand why.

When I arrived there in the late pink-tinged light of that dreadful afternoon I expected the place to be buzzing, but the lot seemed deserted. Del strode ahead of me up the path. As he put the key in the lock the front door was snatched open from the inside and Claudia appeared, her face all puffy from crying and pale as goat’s cheese. Her right cheek bore dark streaks of what looked like mascara.

“Get back in the house, Cee,” Del said. “It’s only Jen.”

Claudia stepped backwards and away from the door. Her arms hung limply by her sides. She looked from Del to me and then back to Del again. Clearly she was trying to work out if anything new had happened, if there was something we weren’t telling her. She knew how close Del and I were. There are plenty of women who would have resented that but not Claudia. Or at least she never seemed to.

“There’s no news, Cee,” Del said quietly. “You’d be the first to know if there were.” He touched her shoulder briefly but I could tell from the way his eyes slid off her that he was feeling impatient with her. For the moment at least she was an encumbrance. “Could you fix us some drinks, do you reckon?” he added. “I want to talk to Jen in the office, just for a bit.”

Claudia bowed her head and walked away, to the kitchen presumably. I felt a bright flash of anger, not just for her but at her. How could she let Del talk to her like that? She should have refused, she should have said
whatever it is you’re telling that bitch I have a right to hear it.
She let him treat her like a servant. I felt angry with myself too, for not insisting that Claudia be included in our conversation. But the truth was I didn’t want her there. I still thought of her as a child, a habit I’d picked up from Del, I suppose. I know that doesn’t excuse it. I guess we thought we were protecting her.

Del led me towards the narrow, L-shaped room that wrapped itself around the most northerly corner of the house, an offshoot of the main living room that served Del as his office and general dossing area. It was the place he went to watch the racing results and the late-night cop shows he liked, porn too probably, I never enquired. The living room itself was huge, taking up more than half the ground floor and with a long, covered veranda overlooking the garden. Claudia normally kept the place super-neat but on that day it looked vaguely dishevelled, as if the house had been slapped in the face and was still recovering from the shock.

Some of Lumey’s toys lay scattered on the floor – a wind-up mechanical rooster Del had picked up in some junk shop or other, and a selection of the ceramic tiles with pictures of farmyard animals and household utensils on one side and letters of the alphabet on the other. Lumey loved those tiles. Until she was about two it was always the picture side she liked best, but more recently I’d noticed letters cropping up more and more often in her little arrangements, and as we crossed the room to get to Del’s den I saw that some of the tiles had been placed together to spell out whole words.