Canned,” I said. “He broke a leg a year later. He was a little battler, but there was nothing we could do. The bullet was a kindness.”
“Cut the crap. About the 3.30 at Flemo. Before the nag got turned into Cat-O-Meat.”
“Just who are you, Share?”
“I’m someone who wants to know about tanking a horse up with sugar. That’s what you used, isn’t it? Just sugar. Nothing detectable by sophisticated methodology. No fancy drugs, no steroids, no growth hormones. Just the old CSR table sugar.” CSR was Colonial Sugar Refinery, the Australian byword for white sugar since my parents’ childhoods, and their parents. I wondered for a moment if the company had changed its name to Postcolonial. “The poor animal went hyperactive, it had to run like stink to burn up the sugar.”
I looked out the large window at the large grassy back garden. Tall native trees blocked out the neighbors. “All horses like sugar lumps,” I said. “You want to hold your hand very flat, though. Just let the lump sit on the palm of your hand. Don’t curl your fingers or you’ll get nipped.”
She regarded me with scorn. “My understanding is that the horse had half a sack of sugar in it. I don’t think it ate that off some guy’s hand.”
“All right,” I said. Her hair was wild and uncombed, a look I approved of, and I still couldn’t remember, but it would have been a good idea. “I’ll tell you. You get a jug and you put some water in it. Then you put some sugar in the water and stir it with a stick.”
“And the horse drinks it?”
“No. You get a plastic tube, a funnel and the bottom half of a hypodermic. You connect them all up and jam the hypodermic into a vein in the nag’s neck. Blood spurts out through the needle and into the tube, so you’ve got to raise the tube to a height greater than the animal’s heart can pump the blood.” The roof of my mouth felt dry, all the wine and vodka presumably. “Are you sure you don’t want to take notes? I could help you draw a diagram.”
“I think I can remember all this, Purdue.”
“So you need a chair. It’s very important to have the chair ready before you start. Otherwise blood goes everywhere. You stand on the chair and hold the tube with the funnel above your head with one hand and pour the sugar solution from the jug with the other. Gravity does the rest. The solution pushes the blood back into the horse and then trickles in after it.”
“Shit, really, you just pour the stuff straight into the bloodstream, no digestion necessary.”
“That’s about right,” I said. “You want to know this why?” “We might have forgotten the chair.” She got to her feet, stepped into the pantry, came out with a half-height aluminum stepladder she lifted easily in one hand. “I assume this’d do the trick.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“You and me, Mr. Purdue. After I’ve made a phone call or two to line up the equipment, we’re going for a little drive into the country.”
“No need to be formal, Share,” I said. “Call me Tom.”
§
I blame my name for leading me into a life of crime. What I told Share was true, as far as it went, but it didn’t go all the way, not by a long chalk. My mad parents were flower children years before Rupert Murdoch and his yellow press mates ever heard of the term. With a handful of their arty mates, they raised us kids in a pile of dirty mud brick mansions and hovels out Eltham way, miles north of Melbourne, still the edge of the scrub when I was a boy. Other artist colonies had the same idea, but my mob was the weirdest of the lot. From the beginning none of the men had shaved, and none of the women either, and this had started before Women’s Lib or third stage feminism had ever been heard of. These hirsute seekers after truth wove their own cloth, milked their own scrawny goats, and taught us in a kind of Steiner curriculum designed by Martin Kundalini Richardson, king of the loonies, a sort of unsuccessful mix of L. Ron Hubbard, George Adamski and ancient aboriginal myths as interpreted on the back of a Corn Flakes’ packet.
You wouldn’t credit the extent of the brain-damaging crap they shoveled down our gullets. Transforming into bandicoots by the light of the full moon. A tunnel reached from the depths of Ayers Rock to the lair of the Hidden Masters in Tibet. “Ayers Rock” is what we whites used to call Uluru, that big slab of red stone in the middle of the Australian continent that the aborigines revere. The navel of the universe, we were taught. Joe Bannister and I used to snigger and wonder if the arse of the world would fall off if you got a really big fucking Phillips head and unscrewed it. That earned us gentle reprimands and extra hours churning up the slurry for the mud bricks. I didn’t mind that one bit, although it could get cold sloshing in the wet; it was better than learning the sixteen portals of the reptile mutants who secretly ran the world. The Queen of England and the rest of the royal family were among their number. In fact, they and certain other leading Jewish dynasties were the world’s leading reptile invaders. I swallowed it all until I was about fourteen, when I was already a bad kid, and then one day I woke up and looked around me at the real world and started shaking my head. I suppose I can’t complain; it gave me a rich line of bullshit for my future careers.
None of this is what turned me to crime, not directly. That happened when I was twelve and three badly dressed State education department heavies, one male and two females, visited our classroom and sent in a report that eventually reached the Minister. “Damned jackbooted busybodies!” thundered Kundalini Richardson, but it was too late, we were pinched. I spent the next six years at Eltham High, going through culture shock roughly equivalent to a Stone Age Papuan being hijacked and put to work for Amway.
“Children, we have three new students joining us for class today. Stand up, boys. I’ll ask you each to tell us your name, then sit down and open your geography book at page 121, the Principal Imports of Peru. You there, son.”
I jumped up breezily, grinned around at the class. The other kids had been nervous, scared even. I’m the extroverted type, I knew I was in for heaps of fun.
“Recherché,” I said loudly.
Ears pricked up. A ripple of manic joy passed across the classroom, but I was too dumb to understand what it was that had happened.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m Recherché,” I said, “and this here is my cousin Con, that’s short for Contrapuntal, and this bloke’s—”
The ripple had became a haze of muttering. Some residue of survival instinct made me stumble into silence. The teacher was a burly youth with hair parted firmly on the left, some hapless bonded victim of the Education Department fated by his contract to penal servitude in the sticks, or near enough. He stepped forward and his fists clenched.
“Are you taking the piss, son? You having a lend of me?”
I blinked at him. “Eh?”
“I asked for your name. Just tell us your name.” He consulted a list. “If he’s Con, you’d be Tom, is that right?”
Triumphant glances were being exchanged across the rows of desks, and a soggy spitball hit me behind the ear. I flinched, rubbed at it, stared around. A fat kid with boils stared at me with hatred. I looked back at the teacher.
“My name is Recherché Doubting Thomas Purdue,” I said carefully. “Sometimes Outsiders just call me Tom....” But the
