Ian C Smith writes in the Gippsland Lakes region of Victoria, and on Flinders Island. His work has appeared in Antipodes, Authora Australis, be:longing, cordite, Griffith Review, Journal of Working Class Studies, Meniscus, and So Fi Zine. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra Press.
LUCK
Pocketing meagre hard-earned savings and my invented betting system, high on hope, I leave my stark rented room to catch a racetrack train. A fourteen year-old boy fled from school and home to the Big Smoke, attracted to form guides, gambling’s formulae, I decode newspaper sports pages. Before the first race I sidle close, eavesdropping on bookmakers and punters, translating their staccato vernacular, a student of language. Slang memorised, heart hammering, I bet each way for the first time, then, confidence blossoming, on every other race, a novice’s recipe for financial disillusionment.
Half my then lifetime later, my pal and boss, a surveyor, sights my range pole through his theodolite. Tanned, wearing shorts, boots, and a belted nail bag, I await his directional hand signals in sighing fragrant grassland where a freeway shall represent progress. Peg sledge-hammered in firm soil, nail then tapped in, I tape-measure forth, pole over shoulder, hammers in hand and belt, beyond the worst of youthful trauma, as yet uneducated but with a reading habit, in my demesne, so I believe, avoiding fierce nesting plovers.
Much later, hard lessons learned, I raise my glass alone to a shadowed Southern Cross, grass and native trees on these plains glittering in soft rain greedy to drink their fill before heat again. This landscape evokes those rural fragrances encountered beyond the school bike shed after emigrating with my parents on a slow strange voyage halfway across the world from war-savaged Europe to Australia, a pale interloper intending to bronze my skin to acclimatise, a child of opportunity learning about explorers traversing deserts.
In town for our lunchbreak, that surveyor and I park the land rover outside a shopping mall. Wolfing burgers, grading unwary lunchtime girls’ sexiness, we spot a distressed mother, her toddler suddenly gone. Latent decency kicking in, we abandon chauvinism, separate, jogtrot remembering the boy’s name, age, and clothing. A flutter of failure worrying, I get lucky, find him, a wee jockey astride a motionless coin-in-slot horse riding a winner in his imagination.
Longing to take a chance with a woman wild enough to share my crude bush hut I would show her where native orchids grow, banish the terrible face of loneliness where hope fades. Tossing her hair she would laugh at my juvenile racetrack account: how three of my horses’ names began with ‘Lady’ or ‘Miss’, three wore number three, and three had the same jockey, how I won enough to cover fares, admission, lunch, and cigarettes. Boyhood bliss.
I would also share the episode of that lost boy accepting my hand, coming quietly when I approached softly softly past shoppers, his mother’s emotional relief, her bestowal of heroic status on us undeserved, my heart swollen with achievement nonetheless, before we hurried back to work, sobered, behind schedule, time racing away with my life then and ever since, surging around memory’s track like today’s clamouring vehicles crossing what were once my fragrant paddocks blest.
© Ian C Smith, 2023
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