The Horse With My Name Read Online Free PDF Page A

waiter was at my elbow. ‘Can I get you anything else, sir?’ he said, whipping the empty cup out from under me.
    I glanced longingly back down at the pub, then nodded up at him. ‘Another hot chocolate,’ I said. There was a hint of a curl to his lip as he wrote it down. As he turned I said, ‘Oh, and do you have any liqueurs?’
    I spent the next two or three days purging my system of alcohol. It involved copious amounts of health drink Diet Pepsi and a trunkload of chocolate digestives. I bought daily copies of the Racing Post and hung around in bookmakers’ offices trying not to breathe in. They’d brightened up considerably since I’d watched my dad back his losers all those years before; now there was satellite television on a bank of screens, a coffee bar, nice comfortable seats, friendly staff in crisp uniforms ready with a heartfelt good afternoon and good luck; but no matter what, they still stank of smoke and existed in a kind of timeless haze. Any one of them could have been a contender for the annual services to passive smoking award. But they weren’t bad places, just hopeless. They should have suited me fine. I studied the form, I placed bets, I read the news and the profiles and the tipsters and I watched a hundred races from Down Royal to Listowel to Punckestown to Navan, and by the end of it I still didn’t have a clue what it was really all about.
    It was Greek.
    It was half a dozen brown horses jumping over hedges.
    It was munchkins in saddles with whips, and I could rent that from the video store without getting lung cancer.
    I wouldn’t know where to start a conversation about a bloody horse, let alone investigate Geordie McClean’s shady dealings. Two or three times I tried the mobile number Corkery had given me, but it was always out of service. I was going to tell him to forget it. Thank him for the five hundred, tell him it had changed my life, but not my wife, and that I’d pay it back to him from my first pay cheque, because I was going to get a proper job, right away, first thing tomorrow, or maybe the day after. The last person I needed to get involved with was Geordie McClean. I was trying to sort my life out, not complicate it. A court reporter. I could do obituaries. Or the movies. Yeah, the movies. But God protect me from Geordie McClean and his infernal, eternal machinations.
    On the fifth day after my final showdown with Patricia I was feeling fit and thinking positive. I’d given my palace a spring clean. I’d not touched more than a few drops. I dry-cleaned my suit and polished my shoes. I invested in a portable TV and visited a second-hand book shop. Patricia had thrown me out without my books and I’d gotten out of the habit; so I bought something heavy and something light to see me through the long, largely alcohol-free nights; the light for its entertainment value, the heavy in case someone tried to steal my portable TV while I slept. It was that kind of neighbourhood.
    Despite having been out of the loop for some considerable time, I’d absolute confidence that I’d be able to land some work; maybe not staff, immediately, but there was plenty of freelance stuff out there if you didn’t mind looking for it, and I’d never minded that. It wasn’t like I was starting from scratch either; I’d taken a sabbatical from journalism to write my books, so my personal problems would notbe common knowledge amongst my potential employers. Besides, most of the reporters I’d grown up with were now happily ensconced in senior positions as editors, publishers or television producers and therefore ideally placed to give me a leg up. I had my contact book. I started calling.
    It wasn’t the morning to phone.
    The first was out of the office, the second at a funeral, the third had the day off, the fourth was also at a funeral. I thought maybe they were avoiding me, so I stopped giving my name, but it was just the same. Two more had called in sick, six others were at a funeral. I