last race for the day, watching as on the big screen the barriers were opened and the horses were away. He was alone, absorbed by the sight, his whole attention focused on the race, his body tense with excitement. ‘Yes!’ he was saying as the horses came in, hitting one fist into his palm. Then he turned and saw her there watching him.
‘Do you bet?’ she asked, caught out.
‘I don’t bet that much as it happens, Grace. I just like to pick them.
What about you?’
He picked up his drink from a nearby table and walked out to join her.
‘I don’t even know how to read the form guide,’ she replied.
‘No? In this business, that could be a serious deficiency. A lot of things go on down at the track.’
‘But do you need to know how to read the form guide to work them out?’
‘Not always. It depends on what your interest is. How the horses are running. How they ought to run. Who’s betting.’ He was smiling as he spoke to her, relaxed in a way that he usually was not. ‘Haven’t you ever been to the races? Racing’s life.’
‘Is it? Why?’
‘It’s a magic moment watching them come down the straight just before the finish. Just the sound they make when their hooves hit the ground. It is, it’s magic. There’s nothing like it. Horses are beautiful to watch when they’re racing well.’
Harrigan had been going to the track since he was a boy, it had been his passion ever since. On race day, his mother used to get out her good dress with the shoes and the hat and the make-up. And those heavy clip-on earrings that made her ears throb by the end of the day, which she would slip off on the bus home and drop into her handbag with a sigh of relief. She would dress him up as well and they would go out together for the day. It was her indulgence; he thought she was happiest there. Her favourite bookies always greeted her by name. Hello, Helen, how are you betting today? How’s your boy? To a couple of the old-timers out at Royal Randwick, he was still Helen Harrigan’s boy, even if these days he frequented the Members’ Bar as well as the track side.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever put a bet on in my life. Not even on Melbourne Cup Day,’ Grace was saying, an odd tone in her voice. ‘My father used to, though. He used to take my mother to the races.’
She was somewhere else, remembering a childhood in New Guinea, a place dreamlike and beautiful in her memory. A road in the highlands one hot day, sitting beside her father as the Land Rover made its slow way along the dirt road, through its stream of villagers going about their business. An ancient, worked landscape stretching up into the hills, thin, sharp, irregular picket fences surrounding thatched houses. An intricate pattern of vivid greens; she had not realised how vivid until she again saw the parched and bled out grasslands when she was on her way back to Brisbane for the start of the school year. Another world. Yes, it was magic.
‘You should come along sometime during the Spring Carnival. You might enjoy it,’ Harrigan was saying to her.
‘I should. I might need the relaxation if I get to deal with any more people like Ria Allard.’
‘Yeah, you might,’ he said, looking at her. ‘Glad you found me, Grace. Come and talk to me.’
‘What about?’ she asked.
‘Nothing dramatic,’ he replied as they walked back into the bar.
‘Just the way you did that interview today.’
‘Yeah, I wanted to ask — have we got hold of the Preacher Graeme Fredericksen yet?’
She spoke lightly, full of foreboding for what he might want to say to her.
‘No, we haven’t. He’s too elusive for my taste. He should have been knocking on our door first thing, not the other way around. I’ll be glad when we run him to earth. That wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about. Did you know that Greg Smith’s not available until the Department does its own psychiatric assessment?’
He was sipping whisky. She smelled the odour of the spirit as something almost sweetish, all pervasive, bringing back to her the memory of a stale alcoholic sweat on her numbed skin, a counterpart to liquid the colour of caramelised onions in the glass. She lit a cigarette to cover the smell, he stepped back a little from her smoke.
‘Is that a problem?’ she said. ‘Like you said, we can’t talk to him if he’s dead.’
‘No,’ he said, not quite grinning at her reply. ‘No, it’s not a problem. It just adds to the time, that’s all. What I want to know is, what did you think you were doing in there today? Can you keep that up, putting yourself out the way you did for that boy?’
‘I wasn’t putting myself out,’ she said. ‘As far as I was concerned, it was just him and me talking to each other.’
‘Yeah, that got to be pretty obvious. But it’s not just him and you.
There’s a whole apparatus out there that you can’t ignore and the only place it’s going to take him in the end is Silverwater. And one day, it could be your business to put him there. He knows that, he told you so. So do you want the information he’s got? Or do you want to save his life? What makes you think the two go together in the first place?’
‘Then what do I do?’ she asked. ‘Isn’t this Catch-22? You say to me, coax it out of him. So I do. I go and talk to him from where he’s coming from, because that’s the only way I can do that. But now you say I’m putting myself out too much. That doesn’t leave me any room.’
‘You weren’t talking to him from where he was coming from. You were talking to him from some place in your own mind. And you wanted him in there with you, that’s what you were doing.’
‘That boy’s on the edge. He’s not going to talk to me if I don’t get down there with him.’
He looked past her to the crowd behind her.
‘That’s what you have to learn, Grace. To make him open up without doing that. Because you’ve got no business getting down there with him. You don’t take on what other people bring into the interview room. That’s the road to hell. You don’t go where they are.
What you do is draw a line.’
‘Maybe it’s not like that for me,’ she replied. ‘Maybe I am just talking to people one on one, without taking it on the way you say I am. I can do that without it hurting me, I can meet them there. Maybe that’s a difference between us.’
He looked down into his drink, smiling in an odd way.
‘Do you know you get to people? You’re good at it. I think that every time I see you talk to someone. You let that woman bait you today and then five minutes later you got right back into her.’
Without even trying, you can pick on all the right nerve points just like you know exactly where they are, he could have said to her. You must have x-ray vision.
‘People say I get to them,’ she replied, shaking her head and moving her plait of thick brown hair from one shoulder to the other. ‘I don’t try to do it.’
‘You don’t have to. I’ve got a son, you know,’ he said suddenly,
‘there’s only me to look after him, his mother dumped him. He’s got cerebral palsy. Can’t walk, can’t talk. He’s got a really good mind but he’s stuck in a wheelchair. He will be all his life. He just wants to live.
You have that kid there, and even with everything that’s against him, he could still do something with his life. He just wants to throw it away. I don’t like seeing people dead, Grace. But some people — you can’t save them, they don’t want to be saved. If you go after them, they just want to take you with them. That kid is one of them, he doesn’t want to be saved. He told you that too.’
‘I heard him say that. I don’t like throwing people away. I get stubborn.’
She was embarrassed by his confidence, moved by his description of his son. She threw her cigarette butt into a nearby ashtray. Harrigan put his empty glass on a table.
‘I didn’t know any of that about your son,’ she said, feeling that she owed Harrigan this courtesy at the least. ‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to find anything out. I don’t do that.’
‘I didn’t think you were. I don’t usually talk about it. No one talks about it,’ he replied, looking past her, avoiding her gaze. They might have thought, mutually, that it was the sole thing not discussed exhaustively by the team.
‘Well, I won’t say anything to anyone,’ she said quickly, wanting to move on. ‘So — are you in this job to draw that line? Is that what you do every day?’
‘Me?’ It was unusual to find himself on the other end of the question. He grinned. ‘No, I’m here because I couldn’t think of anything else to do with my life. I needed a job to support my son and this was the only thing I
