LITMIR.BIZ

       7

      Red was straight away in harmony with Tipper and making good progress, until the day she had to re-acquaint herself with the starting stalls. This is always an ordeal for temperamental animals. Each stall is fitted with two sets of gates. The back gates are shut individually behind the horses as the handlers load them; the ones in front are instantaneously flipped open by the starter, to release an explosion of horseflesh as the race begins. The practice drill should have involved Red merely walking up to, into and through the stalls, with both sets of gates open. It looked like a simple task, but it wasn’t for her. Tipper presented her to the stalls and a group of handlers—the same handlers that assist at every course on race day—crowded round her back end to heave her in, while one of them led her by a rope threaded through the bridle. They got her half way in and then she baulked.

      ‘Go gentle, go gentle lads!’ pleaded Tipper, perched up on her back.

      Like hell they would. The handler at her head, Eamonn, yanked hard, while one of the others gave her a whack on the quarters. She immediately plunged backwards out of the stall, then reared, pulling the rope from Eamonn’s hand and almost flipping over backwards. Tipper slithered perilously to the ground beneath her. As he lay there, expecting any moment to be trodden on, he heard the men’s curses.

      ‘The dirty cow,’ snarled Eamonn. ‘Gimme that fuckin’ hood.’

      Picking himself up, Tipper saw him brandishing the blindfold that would go over Red’s eyes, and prevent her from seeing where she was going.

      ‘Leave off that!’ Tipper yelled. ‘Let me do this. Give us some space, lads.’

      When it came to dealing with Red, Tipper could assert himself in a way he would have never have done in any other situation. Momentarily abashed the men shuffled backwards and ducked under the rails that enclosed the loading area. Tipper removed Red’s bridle and took a length of leading-rope, which he looped around the horse’s neck. He attached this to the end of a ball of string he got out of his pocket. The handlers, leaning on the rails to watch, sniggered.

      ‘If this one gets loose, boy,’ called Eamonn, ‘you’ll be stacking fuckin’ shelves at the supermarket for the rest of your life.’

      Tipper paid no heed. He allowed Red to go back as far away as she liked from the line of stalls. Then he went into one of them and knelt down. Oblivious to the derisive snorts of his audience, he reeled in the string and, slowly and hesitantly, Red began moving towards him. It was like that time in the barn at Fethard when he’d first won her confidence. A couple of times, as she got to within ten feet of him, she spun away in panic and he had to start all over again. The handlers grew bored with taking the piss. They left the rail and, sitting down in a ring on the turf, got a card school going.

      Six hands of brag later, they didn’t notice that Red had found the courage to get her nose into the stall, where she was nibbling Tipper’s coat. Tipper now turned and carefully slid out of the front of the stall. He sat on his heels ten feet away, with his back to his filly. His eyes remained fixed on a spot down the track, where by the trick of perspective the two white rails seemed to intersect. But all the time his mind was on what Red was doing behind him. At first she did nothing. A long time passed. The laughter and curses of the card players drifted towards them on the wind. Then, infinitesimally at first, Tipper felt the horse’s warm breath on the nape of his neck, and the hesitant prod of her velvet nose.

      Eamonn looked up from his hand of cards.

      ‘Christ Jesus, will you look at that, lads?’ he shouted. ‘The kid’s only bloody done it. She’s walked all the way through by herself.’

      The others swung round to look.

      ‘It must be love,’ said one of the others.

      ‘Well if it is, that’s the only fuckin’ pull he’ll be making,’ Eamonn retorted.

      But the second man might almost have been right. Red had done this difficult thing of her own free will, because she trusted Tipper, and she wanted to be with him.

      When the time came to try her at last on the race track, Thaddeus Doyle was in a quandary. He wanted to put up his retained stable jockey, his son-in-law Dermot Quigley, who’d been champion jockey five times. Doyle had seen Stella Maris on the gallops, ridden by Tipper, make mincemeat of prized members of his string, and he asked himself what on earth she would do with a real jock on her back. In the event, he never found out. When they tried working Red with Quigley up, she carted him three times round the yard and threw him sprawling to the ground. As he picked himself up in front of Doyle’s staff Quigley tried to hide his humiliation with anger.

      ‘That one’s not temperamental. She’s mental. I’d rather ride a barrel over the Niagara bloody Falls.’

      So it had to be Tipper on Stella Maris; no one else could get near her.