usually took a relaxed view of the sport of kings. He was phlegmatic to fault. That’s what made an injection of pure sugar work on him like a charm, like Seven League Boots.
Camels, they looked likely to be a different story again.
I regarded Nile Fever with a blend of disapproval and sheer fright. The old Canned Fish had been fourteen hands high. This evil-eyed brute was twenty at the shoulder, taller than the top of my head, and her single camelhair coat-colored hump rose over me like a low hill of hairy sand. It wasn’t that big, the hump. I’d always imagined them looking like mountain tops. She met my eye with a rolling, yellowish orb of her own, and her lips peeled back. Teeth like slabs of rock. Coral-red palate that reminded me of one of the gaudier caskets in Ben Crosby’s undertakers’ showroom in Sydney Road. Breath like an open sewer. I coughed, and started taking in the rank air through my mouth instead.
Someone’s going to have to climb up a ladder, I told myself, and whack a bag of Colonial Sugar Refinery’s finest into this brute. Not me, I swore. Nile Fever shuffled on her great padded feet, banging me with one roughly callused knee. The vow was pointless. I knew better, of course. Muggins would get stuck with the job. Again.
“Is it Indian or African?” I asked. Two big fat toes per hoof, spread out in the grass. Not the sort of hoof you could nail an iron shoe to.
“That’s elephants,” Wozza told me in a scornful tone. “What’s happened to you, Tombo, ’roids ruined your brain?”
“She’s an Arabian camel,” Share told me, looking up with satisfaction at the beast, “bred from the finest feral herds of desert Australia.”
“A brumby!”
“You could put it that way. Hybrid vigor, Darwin at his best. Trounce those effete Saudi dancers.”
Maybe so. It was a good selling line, anyway. I reached up and patted the animal’s back.
“Don’t mares have a decent sized hump?”
“Cow,” Wozza said. “It’s ‘cow’, not ‘mare’.”
“Fuck,” I said, “whatever. I don’t want to marry it. I don’t even want to buy it.”
“Just give her some sugar,” Mutton said with a snigger. “Arabic or Bactrian,” Share shared with me.
“Eh?” But it came back to me instantly, then, from Eltham high school, along with a blast of memory, stale banana skins in the hot playground sun, dried white bread sandwiches with Vegemite from the tuck shop, milk that had gone off. “Yeah, right. One hump or two.”
“As the actress said to the bishop,” Mutton said.
“Nile Fever is a young ’un”, Share told me, ignoring him pointedly. “Look at these lean legs, what a beauty. We’re keeping her on a strict diet, you wouldn’t want her overweight.”
I’d heard that camels hissed and spat, but apart from the evil eye Nile Fever was behaving herself like a lady of breeding. I looked at my watch. Getting on for 10:30, the moment of truth.
“Time to saddle up,” Wozza told his mate, checking his own watch.
“Right you are.” We led the camel back to the stables, took her in under cover. This wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted some keen-eyed passer-by to witness. Skipping happily like a kid, Muttonhead disappeared into a side room while I dragged the ladder over from the Cobra. He emerged after a while with the strangest apparatus I’d ever seen outside a bondage brothel, two X-shaped pieces of beautifully grained timber connected by bars. He’d changed out of overalls into somewhat tatty silks in pink and gold, and wore yellow-tinted goggles and what Animal would have called a skid lid in place of the traditional jockey’s cap. Without his nose, he looked like some kind of alien from a horse-drawn UFO.
“Come on, sweetie,” he called up to the beast, “come to poppa.” Strike me pink, the brute lowered herself groaning to her knees, joints flung out sideways like a hairy Transformer toy halfway between robot and Humvee, or maybe a collapsed K-Mart sun chair. Mutt strapped the harness in place, one X in front of the small hump, the other behind. Now I saw that he had a comfortably padded seat at the back, right over Nile’s tail. He gentled the animal with soft words, patting her nose, then ran a thin thread through the nostril peg. He settled himself in the saddle.
“Good Christ,” I said, “is that all you’ve got in the way of reins?”
“It’s the wrists,” he assured me. “A horse, you can pull him up with a jerk. This little beaut, she reads a man’s mind.”
“Just as well,” I said. “That thread would snap the moment you put any pressure on it.”
“No need to. Nile Fever and me, we’re like that.” He raised a hand with two ugly thick-knuckled fingers crossed.
“Let’s get a move on,” Share said, taking charge. “They’ll be here any minute. Can we run the sugar in while she’s down on her knees like this?”
Safer than teetering on the top of a kitchen ladder, I thought, but Wozza was shaking his head.
“Break a leg if she took fright,” he said. He gave me a hard look. “Wouldn’t want another Canned Fish on our hands, and before the race has even been run.”
I said nothing, I was sick of explaining that it hadn’t been my fault. Wozza brought the ladder over. The animal groaned and bawled to its feet at Mutton’s instruction, shuffling suspiciously as it saw me dig into the bag Woz had supplied.
“What you do,” I told Wozza, “is—”
“Not me, mate, I’m scared of heights.”
I looked at Share, holding out the instruments of acceleration.
“In these clothes?” She was pulling a beautifully patterned silk scarf over her head. “Get real, Purdue. I have to talk turkey with the Sheikh.”
It just seemed easier, suddenly, to get it over and done with. Without another word I mixed the sugar in a bowl with a couple of liters of warm water from the thermos Wozza handed me, poured it into a glass drip container that might have been stolen from a hospital ward.
“Hold her steady, for fuck’s sake, Muttonhead,” I said.
“Apples,” he said, and crooned to the beast. I thought I heard him saying something like Ata Allah. God Almighty, the world’s gone mad when old Mutt starts babbling in Arabic. I wondered if he’d converted to Islam. Surely not, there had to be some sort of limit.
I climbed the ladder cautiously, clung to the rough fur, feeling for the arteries in the neck. Nile Fever didn’t feel feverish, she felt cool. She swung her head to inspect me, nearly knocking me off the steps. Little ears that seemed to be lined with fur. Made sense, keeps the blowing sand out. Big doe eyes, with sexy lashes. I caught myself gazing into them. Something—Oh. Double sets of eyelashes in each eye, thick and curly as a supermodel’s. Who would have thought. I gave her a wink, and sank the needle deep into her neck.
Nile Fever flinched but then settled down chewing the cud. At least I think that’s what she was doing. I didn’t enquire. I stood on the ladder and poured the dissolved sugar into the funnel. In truth, pouring sugar into an animal can become a bit
