The Water Clock

The losers dropped their betting slips surreptitiously, a snowfall of disappointment settling on the Newmarket terraces.

But they had won. The snapshot proved that. There was more joy in that small square of photographic paper than in most of the rest of her life. A faded souvenir from a day she felt she’d stolen from someone else.

Her writing on the back. ‘Newmarket. August 65. With Gypsy.’ He called her Amber for the earrings she’d worn the first time they’d met. The time she wouldn’t tell him her name. And she called him the one thing only she could get away with: Gypsy.

He was at home at the racecourse, that’s why he’d brought her. But she distrusted him, even there. The cigarette cupped in the hand, the easy charm that got him what he wanted. Why, she thought even then, had she gone this far?

‘Nothing to lose,’ he’d said, taking her money and his own. The horse was High Flyer. He’d studied the form. The Sporting Life rolled into his jacket pocket. She knew his secret only later – that he could read the numbers, but not the words.

‘Nothing to lose,’ he said. All of it – on the one chance.’

He said it again when he got back from the bookie’s stand: ‘All of it.’

She’d loved that. Loved the contrast with her own careful life in the new semi by the golf course. Loved the idea that she too had nothing to lose. The marriage she had was so hollow it echoed when she cried. A routine chore as spiritless as the jangling progress of the milkman’s early morning round.

Gypsy had nothing. No bank account. No address. No worries. Perhaps that’s what she loved. The footloose freedom. But she wanted him as well. He’d taken his shirt off in the queue for a drink before the big race. Wooden brown, boney, and painfully thin. Younger than his eighteen years. His hair looked expensive, blue-black like slate. It was that day, later, in the burnt brown grass he’d played in as a child, that she let him in to what was left of her life.

High Flyer. 33-1. A long shot. But he knew the form. Or knew something. She’d seen him talking to the men by the ring. She knew that way of talking, the sideways mouth, the eyes elsewhere. She didn’t ask.

He’d smuggled her through the crowd to the rail. One man, drunk, picked a fight. Gypsy looked at him, smiled, said he’d fight him if he wanted. She saw his hands then, with the knuckles white and ready.

They got to the front. He told her the colours to watch. Gold and emerald green. But the horses went by in a pack racing for the line, and she’d been too stunned by the noise and the beauty of them moving to spot High Flyer.

Then he was picking her up, kissing her, and she smelt the cheap cigarettes and beer in his hair. They bought the first bottle at the bar on the grass. He’d wrapped his shirt round it and shot the cork over the crowd. That was the joke about the snapshot. It wasn’t rain that soaked them, it was champagne.

Then he’d taken her by the hand, up through the grandstand, to the terrace bar. It was cool and the shade seemed to swallow sound.

‘Dress code,’ said the flunkey on the door. So he’d put the shirt back on.

‘Champagne,’ he’d told the barman, handing over the winnings. Then they sat on the terrace and looked down, for once, on the losers.

The barman took the picture. It was her best day. She never knew if it was his.