Horsewriting

HORSEWRITING



Breath misted under the cold sun. A gentle haze hung over the turf before them, and dew still clung to the cropped grass. Somewhere, a crowd was buzzing, but here behind the iron gates all was silent save for the sound of a hoof brushing the soft ground, a leather strap creaking in anticipation, a snort and the clink-clink of harnesses. Forty gaudy helmets clashed against bay, chestnut and grey, and forty cold bits left a faint metallic taste on impossibly pink tongues. A breeze blew through them; some shivered, others tightened their grip and their resolve. Most did not notice.

Paddy didn’t hear the shot. He was too busy fingering his last twenty, smoothing out the creases as if lengthening the note would make it go further. His feet ached and his stomach rumbled, but somehow he felt as though spending his last money on food was tempting fate. As if it was symbolic of the cliché his life had become. As if it might be the last meal he ever bought.

A failed writer. It had such a romantic ring to it in the great novels and films, but in reality Paddy felt somewhat short-changed by his situation. Wasn’t this the moment when things would suddenly pick up, when he’d meet the beautiful girl who could inspire him to do glorious things or a vision of God would change his outlook on life? He kicked a stone off the pavement down the deserted street and sighed. At least when Orwell had been down and out he’d been in Paris and London; Paddy was down and out in the suburbs of Dublin.

The shot set them off and with sides heaving they surged down the turf, a beast with a hundred hooves, poetry brought to life as if the fleeting grey surf on the Irish Sea was attacking the grass, devouring it and churning it into a light wintery pulp as they cut through the haze, all that was visible a glimpse of the curve of a jaw, the contour of a shoulder, the sleek sweaty neck straining forward, then back into the beast itself, the throng of heaving muscle that was moving as one. Thousands of years had tamed something ancient that now resurfaced in the mellow February light with a roar and a smell and a weight that had spelt terror and victory for countless ages.

He sighed again and sat down on the side of the pavement. He felt a chill through the seat of his cotton trousers, but Paddy had never been one to be bothered by the cold. He was at least thankful for that, he supposed. A childhood spent in a family of twelve could teach anyone to be hardy, and at first he had put his success down to working like a slave and not taking anything for granted. Then his luck had begun to desert him and so had his inspiration. It was a fickle thing, art. He stopped producing work and there was talk of putting a potential book deal on hold. Funds dried up and eventually people stopped returning his calls. Paddy’s bank balance had dwindled as fast as his appetite for writing, and soon he found himself moving out into the suburbs to save money. Walks through the silent streets, if perhaps a little indulgent, provided his last solace. Nothing seemed worth writing about, and try as he might he could produce nothing of any worth. It was hopeful, but perhaps he’d come across something more inspiring.

They were approaching fever pitch now and nothing mattered any more, not the rolling thunderous hooves, not the flashes of colour nor the frozen air coursing through nostrils and across cheeks, rather it was down to flesh and muscle and bone and teeth and hair and hearts and stomachs, and ancestry, fathers from the swept steppes of Asia, the heartlands of scorched Arabia, the wilds of an undiscovered continent, where the course was long grass and lichen and the only spectator Nature herself.

Paddy continued down the road, his laces dragging on a surface crisscrossed with cracks and tufts of weed. The place was a dump, he mused. Nothing to offer any sort of creative vitality, but perfect if you weren’t keen on meeting anyone. Coming to the end of the road, he turned right and found himself in shadow. Casting his gaze upwards, he slowly formed the words of the heavy red-painted lettering before him aloud.

“L-e-o-p-a-r-d-s-t-o-w-n R-a-c-e-c-o-u-r-s-e.”

Intriguing. Hadn’t Joyce written about racing? And Oscar Wilde? In fact, all the greats of Irish literature, if Paddy wasn’t mistaken. Okay, so perhaps they mentioned it more in passing than in great detail, but that wasn’t the point. There was undeniably a romance associated with the thrill of the race, and perhaps… he could have laughed aloud. There it was, in the same red letters: LAST TICKETS - £20. It was fate. Fate that would cost him, but fate nonetheless. He crossed the road, fingering his money.

They were tiring, snorting, bucking now, and some had suffered too much and had dropped out and others would never run again but those who had strained on through the pain were still free and would be free for another minute, a few more seconds as they remembered what it was like not to have the tang of steel on their own rough tongues, not to have the tight binding leather and nails in their hooves and the air was searing and the light blinding, and others were thinking in lengths and hands, greys and bays but they would only think in strides and bounds and leaps, boiling blood and burning muscle. The roar of those watching, once so distant, had become impossible to ignore.

Paddy’s stomach lurched as he emerged from the concrete staircase of the stands and took in the view before him. His stomach filled with butterflies. Aware of the cliché even as he thought it, he didn’t care. It was the only way to describe the thrill of what he saw. Beyond the row upon row of raked seating that he overlooked from his vantage point near the top of the stand, jackets of every design bounced up and down in contest with one another, soaring in rhythm down the final straight towards a finishing post, but it wasn’t the jackets that he was so entranced by. Under them, the most beautiful creatures he had ever seen were working like nothing else, stretching and gasping, hooves smashing the ground, running against one another but also with one another. Men clutching slips of paper were shouting, urging them on, their breath forming a frantic mist in the morning air and children were bouncing in their mothers’ arms as they watched the race, but Paddy paid them no attention. No, he had found something else, something bigger. Gripping the cold metal bar of the handrail in front of him, a small smile flickered across his face and his eyes shone with renewed vigour. He had found his new muse.