Muck (3 page)

C
HURCHILL IS HERE TO
break in The Duke’s two yearlings. His blue Morris Minor gurgles up the drive, over the zebra crossing of shadows the Monkey Puzzle tree lays down. He slaps a whip against his chaps. He straps his skullcap to his chin just loose enough so it tips in that debonair way of his.

He complains proudly that he’s a very busy man and stoop-jogs to the stables. They are not really stables, though we call them that. Not the big garage kind with dozens of stalls either side. They’re two horse boxes with a shared wall and new post and rail yard for a horse to look out on.

Yes, he’s very busy because he has a little team of his own now—four young horses he’s breaking in for locals, all under the one roof in an eight-stall stable he’s renting just like a real trainer. “One or two of them show a good turn of foot in the paddock,” he boasts, threading long reins like trotter’s reins across the body of the first yearling, a black Denovo colt with an all white eye, a poached-egg eye, which means its temperament will be bad and must be fixed, beaten, broken. The Duke wants Churchill to work
around
the horse, not
through
him. If there’s any beating to be done, it’ll be The Duke who’ll do it. That’s his right—he owns the horse. Buy your own horse then it’s you with the rights.

Churchill threads the reins from Poached Eye’s bit through the saddle stirrups which are pulled down to full length to knock emptily against the creature’s ribs and get it used to stirrups. He wants The Duke to know this: “If I can keep my team together, all under the one roof, instead of seeing them moved on to other trainers with a name, then I’ll be set.’’

By
set
he means he too will get a name. He too will be someone they say has
reputation.
He flicks the reins against Poached Eye’s flanks. He walks behind, steering like a man driving a plough.

Churchill makes the sucking, click-click speech that’s Horse for “Walk.”

“Come on, my darling,’’ he quietly, tenderly commands.“That’s my darling. There we are. There’s a love. Good boy.”

Poached Eye shudders and hops. His teeth crunch down on the bit as if eating a rock food. He doesn’t stride smoothly but bucks and jabs with his hind hooves. The kinds of kicks The Duke calls “punching holes in the air.” Churchill flicks the reins at this disobedience.

The Duke nods that he’ll leave him to it. There are rails to be nailed to posts and then stained red-brown with a paintbrush. Feet’s choice of colour because if it’s good enough for the Queen in those magazine pictures of her riding, it’s good enough for her.

I always step off in time with The Duke when he strides away, walking. I go in the same direction, at the same pace,a little to his side and a little behind. I expect this is what you do when you’re next in line in a dynasty. Prince Charles does it with the Queen. He holds his hands behind his back which I have taken to doing though it’s hard to keep my balance when travelling at speed. I hold them there until told to mind a hammer for a second, or help lift a rail when The Duke says “heave.” I keep them there when he tells me to stand in front of the sun a while to block the glare for his better seeing of the work at hand.

But if I hang back at this moment I know what’s to become of Churchill’s darling-talk as soon as The Duke is out of earshot. I’ve heard him before. His darling-talk doesn’t endear him to horses—Poached Eye kicks and head-butts the air regardless. Hate-talk at least enfears him: “ Mongrel cunt.Mongrel fucking bastard. I’ll teach you a lesson you’ll never fucking forget.”

When I tell The Duke that Churchill is talking about teaching lessons, he shakes his head, mumbles a curse and marches off to make sure hate-talk has not turned to whip-hate, to harming. But by the time he catches up, Churchill has always seen him coming. The darling-talk returns. The soothing, the fake-kindness commanding.

When the work is done, Churchill stands at the back door to collect his pay, skullcap under his arm like a military gentleman, something Feet says she approves of. He clicks his heels together when he talks to her which she also approves of. He calls her madam, which makes her give a polite bow of her head and which The Duke derides as “smarmy.” As for that accent of his, his speaking in a toffy English way, it’s got toffier since we’ve known him. That’s why we dubbed him
Churchill.

What Feet definitely does not approve of is letting him in the house. “We’d never get rid of him,” she says with an eye roll. The one time he was allowed in he drank tea with his pinkie out, which is all very amusing and English to her. Then he asked if we had a nip of brandy. A nip of brandy in his tea to take the nip out of the air. Again, all very amusing and English. But she draws the line at his insulting us which, brandy or no brandy, he did last spring holidays. As if he being English automatically made
us
the lesser. As if a man who breaks horses was in fact too clever for the man who owns them, and for the woman married to the man who owns them. A woman more used to conversing with the better folk of Sydney, from judges to Cummingses, and whose son goes to a school we call The Mansions.

“The cheek,” she grunts with a dismissive wave of her hand each time she thinks about the episode.
No-one
speaks to her like that, she waves. No-one says to her that he’s mysti-fied and appalled that we obviously have more money than brains. That if we can’t see our way clear to trust him as trainer of the horses we breed, then we must be stupid.

“As if we’d give him horses of ours,” Feet scoffs.

Churchill kept sipping his tea-brandy that day, wiping his moustache with the back of his index finger. “Don’t you trust me?” he asked in an offended manner that made him bite his top lip.

The Duke replied that, yes, he was trusted, and got up from his seat to signal it was time for work not for more brandy and the prospect of heated talk.

“I always show up on time,” Churchill said, and stayed seated. “I’m a drinker, yes. But so is everyone in this Godforsaken game. Give me your horses, damn it!” His small fist thumped on the table rattling the crockery’s nerves.

Feet removed his cup though there was still a quantity to drink left at the bottom. Churchill reached out to retrieve it, but Feet was too quick.

The Duke spoke in the low, friendly but firm way he uses for staff, his business-is-business way. “You have to prove yourself first. Get a name.”

“How can I do that if people like you don’t give me your horses?”

The Duke said he’d think about it, which means No.

Churchill is what is called a Gunna. The Duke wants me to know this because I’ll come across many such men in my life:Gunnas. Gunna be a great trainer. Gunna train a champion.Gunna do this, gunna be that. You find a Gunna in all walks of life. What do they have to show for their years on this earth? Nothing. Yet they think life owed them more for their efforts. They’re what happens when you don’t have an education. You end up a disappointed man, and die the death of a disappointed man, the death of too many racing men.

The Duke himself might be a racing man but he is an exception, he says. He himself may have little education but he has what is called
nous
and
savvy
. Old-fashioned get up and go in his bones.

This is not the sort of talk we have ever had—death-talk. I had no idea The Duke knew about death. He’s the sort of man they call a doer, not a thinker. Not a contemplator on a topic for the poets. One designed for Keats, for Donne, not doers.

Like all men, I say excitedly, all men racing or not, they’ll see their fortune in it, in death. The Duke is digging a post hole with a long-handled spade but stops his grunting and his stabbing at the soil and shakes his head at me, dismissive: “What do you know about death?”

I tell him I’ve read
Ode to a Nightingale
for school, and when John Keats says “Many a time I have been half in love with easeful death” and “Now more than ever it seems rich to die,” I take it that he means he actually sees his fortune in death when most men strive for a fortune in life. I’m going to say as much for a class essay:

The wealth of no more need of money. The relief of no more
hope or pride. No little emergencies of getting older, of continuing
on alive.

The “pride” and “alive” are what are called assonance because I made the lines scan like a poem.

“What kind of stupid talk is that?” The Duke frowns. “Rich to die. No more hope or pride. That’s … that’s … defeatist talk is what that is. What kind of bullshit are they filling your head with?” he says, digging again, his voice juddering with the effort.

I tell him
they
didn’t fill my head with it. I composed those words myself. They’re my own. No hand-me-down scripture, no second-hand philosophy, but my words to have all my life.

He says he is not sending me to that flash bloody school for composing words of my own. For defeatist talk and poetry. “Where’s defeatist talk and poetry going to get you in life? Where’s it going to get you in business? Just as well we’ve got Tudor Park for you to fall back on. You’ll need something to fall back on at this rate.”

He stops digging and holds up the spade. “Here,” he orders. “You can have too much of the wrong education. Let’s sweat it out of you. Let’s see you get your hands dirty with some good hard, pure work. None of your defeatist and poetry work.
This
type of work was what the word was invented for.”

I take the spade and stomp its blade into the soil’s soft black. Stomp repeatedly so the shiny edge is sent deep, deeper than The Duke has stomped it down, to prove I don’t need the wrong education sweated out of me at all to do hard, pure work.

I’m going to say it to Churchill to his face if he’s not careful: “You’re a Gunna. Gunna go nowhere.”

He is darling-talking Poached Eye, flicking the horse into a rocking, head-flinging walk. The breaking-in route passes behind the stable. Down the hill and alongside the pit gouged out by the front-end loader for burning rubbish to stop rats scavenging. When he reaches the pit he knows he is far enough off, and behind pit-smoke mist, to switch to hate-talk when Poached Eye bucks: “I’ll show you a kicking in a minute you mongrel cunt. I’ll kick your fucking guts out.”

I’m going to catch him doing it. I’m going to tell him he better not move onto the next stage, the whip-hate stage, hate that sends a fist into horse ribs while the other fist grabs its ear and squeezes. I march over the straw-manure pile that spills down the pit’s face. I stand a short distance behind Churchill, easily in earshot.

The Duke says a disappointed man, a man who has fallen short of his ambitions, takes the disappointment out on others —on wives, on children. Trackwork cowboys also have horses. I know this from watching Churchill. Cowboys may have no education but they know that to a horse a yelling, angry, disappointed man can be king of all its world. Such a king rules by forcing a steel bar in its mouth, he has a whip to punish its hide. He has straps that tighten around its belly, ropes to hitch up a fetlock behind the knee so the horse stands helpless on three legs instead of running away on four.