Page 79 of A Home Among the Snow Gums
‘Mmm. Not quite two years old. Only been racing a couple of months and no wins or places yet.’
‘Is that a bad sign?’
‘Maybe her trainer’s easing her in.’
‘Maybe she’s a stay-at-home kind of horse, not interested in making a splash out in the big world.’
Tom stopped walking and looked at her. ‘Wait, are we talking about the horse now or you?’
Good question. ‘The horse, of course.’
‘Are you sure you’re okay being here, Hannah?’
She shrugged, a whole heap of lying words forming in her head, before stumbling out with the truth. ‘I want to be okay with being here.’
They’d walked to the furthest end of the track, to an old-fashioned grandstand with lacy ironwork. The seating was maybe a quarter full, and the crowd had migrated to the northern end, where the sun was slanting in and lighting up everyone’s faces.
‘Let’s go join them,’ she said.
She picked a fullish row and they excused their way past knees and boots and handbags until they found a gap and Hannah plonked her bum on the planked seating.
Tom pulled off his jacket and laid it along the bench next to her. ‘You want to share my cushion?’
‘What, your pants are too precious to sit on timber?’
He tweaked her ponytail then sat down next to her. ‘It’s my buns I’m looking out for. When your arse is as good looking as mine, you don’t want to risk a splinter.’ He shook out the program and held it on his knee so they could both read it.
Tom had lost his summer tan and his cheeks were pale above the stubble he hadn’t shaved that morning. It was an effort to drag her thoughts away from how comforting it felt to be shoulder to shoulder. A race was about to start. Horses, their bright-silked jockeys perched hunched and focused above them, milled behind the gates.
She checked her watch then looked at the program. ‘Which one’s this, do you reckon?’
‘Two thousand metre handicap. Endurance will count, but a little pace at the start will count more. The maiden race should be next.’
The blare of the starting horn sounded and it was a wrench to drag her eyes away from him.The horses, she reminded herself.The races.
They should have brought binoculars with them.
‘Welcome to the third race at the Adaminaby Picnic Races! They’re lined up at the gate, and they’re off! Jumping to the lead is Parlay and Coco Loco—’
‘Nice stride on the lead,’ she said, ignoring the announcer and concentrating on the horse with the rider in a butter-yellow shirt. ‘Maybe we should have put money down on all the races.’
‘It’s beyond nice. Long, measured.’
‘Falling off the back is Pandemonium, and here’s the turn, here’s the back stretch, Parlay’s lost the lead to—’
‘That last one looks like a slug compared with the rest of them.’
‘Got spooked at the starting line, maybe? This race isn’t a maiden.’
‘—and challenging for the lead in the home stretch it’s Mackadaddy tearing up the field from the outside, it’s Mackadaddy and Coco Loco neck and neck, it’s down to the wire and it’s … Coco Loco.’
Whoever in the crowd had bet on Coco Loco let out a roar, but mostly there was just a lot of tickets being torn up. ‘Winner must have had long odds,’ she said.
‘It’s nice when the unexpected one wins, don’t you think?’
‘Sure.’ It depended on your interpretation of the word ‘win’. For people like Tom and her brother, who had always been great at everything they tried in life, winning meant competition and coming out ahead of other people and having their already healthy egos swell up even more.
For her, winning meant something totally different. It meant being safe, being competent, being sure.
