Hands down, p.1
Hands Down, page 1
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My thanks go to Ben Haslam, Middleham racehorse trainer, David ‘Shippy’ Ellis, jockeys’ agent.
And, as always with my love, to Debbie.
At the annual Sir Peter O’Sullevan Award lunch in November 2021, a named character in this book was bought at auction with the proceeds going to the Sir Peter O’Sullevan Charitable Trust to help further its crucial support of animal and racing welfare. However, the anonymous and extremely generous purchaser declined to be included and agreed that the grandson of the Trust administrator, and lunch organizer, Nigel Payne, should be included in his place.
Hence, 11-year-old Henry Payne appears as himself, but is used in a fictional manner.
1
‘Sid, it’s over.’
‘What’s over?’
‘Our marriage.’
I stared at Marina.
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘What I say. There are three of us in this relationship and it’s too crowded. So I’m leaving.’
‘But I love you.’
‘Not as much as you love that!’
Marina pointed at my left hand.
I say ‘my left hand’ but the reality is that it is someone else’s, or at least it was before it was surgically attached to my own forearm below the elbow.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘Ever since that thing arrived, I’ve been shunted down the pecking order and I’ve had enough. Over the last few years, I’ve tried my best to love it, but every time you reach out for me with it, I still feel I’m being touched up by a complete stranger, and it makes me shudder.’
I was stunned. What was she talking about? My new left hand was now fully part of me. It might have once been part of someone else but it was now totally mine, and it was a fully integrated part of my own body.
Only then did I spot the suitcase standing behind her.
‘You mean you’re leaving right now?’
She nodded, choking back tears.
‘Darling, please…’ I took a step towards her, arms outstretched.
‘Don’t!’ She put up her hand, palm facing me, and I stopped. ‘I’ve made my decision. I have to get away. At least for a bit.’
To my ears that sounded a tad more promising than ‘it’s over’.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To my parents. My dad’s not very well and Mamma could do with some help.’ Marina’s parents lived in Fryslân, a northern province of the Netherlands.
Both of us knew it was a valid reason for her to go, but also that it was not the main reason.
‘What about Saskia?’ I asked.
Saskia, or Sassy as she was known, was our nine-year-old daughter.
‘I’m taking her with me. I’ve booked a flight from Heathrow. I’ll pick Sassy up from school on the way. I’ve packed her things.’ She pointed down at the suitcase. ‘I called Mrs Squire. She said it was okay. There’s only a few days left of term anyway.’ Mrs Squire was the head teacher of the school in the next village. ‘I didn’t go into the details. I just said I had to go and look after my father.’
I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of Saskia being taken out of the country, but what could I do? Forcing Marina to leave her here with me would be worse. It would mean having to explain too much to her, and to everyone else.
‘How long for?’ I asked, maybe not wanting to hear the answer.
‘I don’t know. I’m due some leave from work. A while, certainly.’ She paused. ‘Then we’ll see.’
‘Please don’t go.’ I was now also choking back tears.
‘I have to.’
Through the window I could see a white taxi sweep into our driveway.
‘At least let me take you to the airport.’
‘No, Sid,’ Marina said. ‘It’s better this way. I’ll tell Sassy you’re busy.’
‘Why don’t I follow you to the school? To say goodbye.’
‘No, Sid,’ she said again, more firmly this time. ‘I’ll call you when we get to Fryslân.’
She then wheeled her suitcase out to the taxi, climbed in and disappeared through the gateway without so much as a backward glance.
I stood there for quite some time staring down the road, perhaps forlornly hoping she would turn the taxi round and come back. But, of course, she didn’t.
Had I seen this coming?
I knew things hadn’t been perfect between us for the past few months.
When Saskia had turned nine last August, and with no likelihood of a second child on the horizon, Marina had gone back to working four days a week in the Cancer Research UK laboratories in Lincoln’s Inn, staying over with a colleague in London on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights and only taking the train out of town to our home near Banbury on Thursday evenings.
I hadn’t been very keen on the arrangement and that was putting it mildly. I’d argued that Saskia needed her mother at home every night, to say nothing of how much I needed her too. But Marina was totally committed to her work in trying to develop a single blood test to detect multiple cancers. ‘The world has needs too,’ she would say. ‘Hence, you and Sassy will simply have to share me.’
And she wasn’t being arrogant or conceited. She was a major player in an international team of molecular chemists sequencing floating fragments of methylated DNA in the blood as an indicator of a whole range of different cancers, and long before there were any physical symptoms. ‘Early detection is the magic key to successful treatment,’ she would often say. ‘One day, not so far away now, everyone will take a simple blood test and then, if it’s positive, swallow an appropriate pill to empower the person’s own immune system to kill off those particular cancer cells before they can do any damage. It’s the Holy Grail.’
But being separated from her for half of every week had certainly put a strain on our relationship. I’d still thought we would get through it okay, and all would be fine. I had no idea it had got so bad that she would leave me.
I looked down at my left hand.
Was it really to blame?
My real left hand, the one I’d been born with, had been severely injured in a racing fall, so much so that it had totally ceased to function. The fall itself had been easy enough – I had simply rolled off my falling mount onto the turf. It had been the horse jumping the fence behind me that had done the damage. In order to save a few pence, the trainer had fitted it with old racing plates, the lightweight aluminium horseshoes used only in races. The edge of one shoe had been worn down so much that it had become as sharp as a razor, and it had landed slap bang onto my outstretched palm, severing muscles, bones and tendons so badly that a team of plastic surgeons had been unable to rebuild it.
Indeed, they had wanted to amputate my hand there and then but I had insisted they sew everything together as best they could, in the expectation I would regain some use of it over time. But that had been a forlorn hope and my race-riding days were suddenly over for good.
However, the final coup de grâce for my by then useless limb had come a couple of years later as a result of the less-than-delicate handiwork of a sadistic villain. He had been trying to compel me to tell him the whereabouts of some incriminating photographic negatives, the location of which I would rather have kept a secret. With his considerable strength, plus the use of an iron poker, he had totally destroyed the surgeons’ former repair job and, this time, the medics had had no choice but to remove my hand altogether.
For many years after that, I had been fitted with a fibreglass, steel and plastic myoelectric hand that, while being very sophisticated and top of the range, was no proper substitute for real flesh. Electrical impulses in my forearm could make the prosthetic wrist rotate and the thumb and fingers move, but there had been no sensations involved and hence I could just as easily let a wine glass slip out of my grasp as crush it into a thousand fragments.
When I’d been selected as a possible recipient of a hand transplant, I’d jumped at the opportunity and, for the most part, my new hand had been a life-changing revelation.
But was it now more life-changing than I had expected, or wanted?
Was this new hand of mine really that of an alien being, capable of causing my wife to shudder from its touch? Or was there something more, some compelling other reason? Was my hand simply the excuse?
I’d had my new hand for almost three years.
In many ways I had been fortunate to be offered it. I’d been asked to be part of a research project to start hand transplants in the UK, after some successes with the treatment in France and the United States. But, since my operation, it was now being offered only to those with a double hand amputation.
According to my surgeon, it was something to do with the risk-benefit ratio. There was not only the immediate risk to life of non-essential major surgery, there was also the risk – and the cost – of lifelong anti-rejection medication, something that reduces the patient’s immune response, making them more susceptible to possible life-threatening infections such as sepsis and Covid-19, or even simple pneumonia and flu.
The medical number crunchers had decided that the benefit from gaining a second hand, if you a lready had one, was not worth the risks. I’m not sure I agreed with them but, so far, I have been happily free of any infection worse than the common cold.
I have seen film of some people born without arms, many of whom can do amazing things using their feet – there is even a professional concert soloist who plays the French horn using the toes on his left foot to control the valves – but there are so many actions that need two hands – actions that most of us take for granted.
You can certainly eat one-handed but you can’t cut up your steak. Shoes can go on one-handed but the laces won’t get tied. You can hold scissors in one hand, but who holds the thing you are cutting? And as for knotting a tie, zipping up the front of a waterproof jacket, uncorking a bottle of wine or playing the violin, forget it. Even drawing a straight line on paper with a pencil and ruler is bimanual.
Although I had never been able to play the violin, I could now do all the other things once again. Indeed, the day I could tie my own shoelaces, twenty months after my transplant, was the day I realized that my post-surgery physiotherapy was complete.
But was it really worth it?
Did the risk-benefit calculation take into account the fact that one’s wife might leave you because she felt she was being touched up by a stranger?
The phone in my pocket rang.
I grabbed at it, thinking it might be Marina having second thoughts, but I didn’t recognize the number displayed on the screen.
I answered it anyway.
‘Is that Sid Halley?’ asked a voice in a rather squeaky northern accent.
‘Who wants to know?’ I responded in my usual bland manner to cold callers.
‘Ah, Sid, it is you. I’d know your voice anywhere.’
‘Who is this?’ I asked.
‘It’s Gary. Gary Bremner.’
A name from my past. We had once been jockeys together. Fierce competitors rather than really firm friends.
‘Hi, Gary. Long time no see.’
‘Too long.’ He paused. ‘Look, Sid, the thing is, I need your help. I’ve been watching you ever since… well, you know why.’
I did know why. Gary had been riding the horse that had destroyed my hand, but it hadn’t been his fault, and we both also knew that.
‘So I’m well aware you do that investigating stuff.’
‘I used to,’ I said, correcting him. ‘I’m retired from all that now.’
After the disastrous encounter with the over-sharpened horseshoe had destroyed my racing career, I had spent many years earning a living as a private investigator, first at a London detective agency called Hunt Radnor Associates, and then as a freelance. But that was all in the past.
‘Look, Sid, I’m worried,’ Gary said, ignoring me. ‘Someone’s threatening me.’
‘Threatening you? How?’
‘I can’t talk about it over the phone but, to be honest, Sid, I’m shit-scared.’
His voice quivered.
Jump jockeys are a breed apart from the norm. Almost every day, sometimes six or more times, they take their lives in their hands sitting atop half a ton of racehorse galloping at thirty miles per hour over huge obstacles. When the horses fall, as they invariably do at some stage, the jockeys tend to break things – collarbones in particular. If they don’t have the courage to get back up on the next horse in the next race, they might as well quit there and then.
In his youth, Gary had been a jockey for more than ten years – never quite the champion but always fairly near the top of the list. He wasn’t short of courage but here he was with his voice trembling with fear.
‘Can you come and see me?’ he said in a rush, his voice now a tone higher.
Gary was a trainer at Middleham in Yorkshire, two hundred miles away.
‘Sorry, mate. No way. Like I told you, I’m retired from investigating. Anyway, I have to be at home for family reasons.’
‘Come on, Sid. I need to see you. Just to get some advice.’
I sighed. ‘Okay. But, if you won’t talk on the phone, you’ll have to come here.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘I can’t leave the yard. I need to be here to look after the horses.’
I thought it was a poor excuse. He could surely leave his horses for a day if he really wanted to. His stable staff could tend to them.
‘In that case, Gary,’ I said. ‘I can’t help you.’
There was a little whimper from the other end of the line.
‘Please, Sid,’ he pleaded.
How could I tell him that I had my problems too? The last thing I wanted was to be two hundred miles away if Marina and Saskia came back.
‘No. Not at the moment.’
He hung up abruptly, without even saying goodbye.
I stood staring into space, wondering what that was all about, when the phone suddenly rang again in my hand.
‘Look, Gary—’
‘Who’s Gary?’ asked a different voice, one I recognized.
‘Oh, hello, Charles. I’m sorry about that, I thought you were someone else.’
‘Clearly,’ he said. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Marina just called me.’
‘Oh.’
‘Do you fancy a tot of whisky?’
‘What? Now? It’s not even midday.’
‘The sun will be over the yardarm somewhere. I thought you might need one.’
‘What did she tell you?’
‘Not much. Just that she’s gone home to her mother. And she’s worried about you.’
That was something, I suppose.
‘Come on over. I have a new bottle of single malt for you to try.’
I didn’t really feel like going. Getting drunk on single malt whisky was hardly going to make things any better in the long run.
‘Do I have to come and collect you?’ Charles asked in a mock stern tone.
‘No, Charles. You do not.’ I sighed. ‘Okay. Give me about half an hour. I’ll come on my bike.’
‘Good. I’ll be waiting.’
2
Just over an hour later, I rode my aged Raleigh the two miles over the hill to Charles’s house at Aynsford, all the while worried that I wouldn’t be at home if Marina returned.
But she wouldn’t return.
By now she and Saskia would be at Heathrow, waiting for their flight to Amsterdam.
I felt wretched. How could it have come to this?
‘I was beginning to think you weren’t coming,’ Charles said, meeting me at his front door, glass in hand.
‘I nearly didn’t.’
‘But it was an order.’
Charles Roland, retired Royal Naval admiral, was well used to giving orders, and he expected them to be carried out.
My ex-father-in-law from a former marriage to his daughter, he was my muse, my best friend and my mentor, and now, it seemed, also my commanding officer. In his mid-eighties, he had finally started to slow down a bit, not least due to the unwanted attentions of a particularly nasty former Northern Irish terrorist who had fractured his skull while trying unsuccessfully to beat some information out of him.
I followed him across the hallway into his drawing room where he handed me a cut-glass tumbler containing at least three fingers of malt whisky.
‘From Dalwhinnie, in the Highlands,’ he said, lowering himself into his favourite armchair with his own glass. ‘One of my favourites.’ He took a sip. ‘Now, tell me what’s going on.’
‘I wish I knew.’
‘Is there anyone else?’
I looked across the room at him. The same question had, of course, crossed my mind.
‘I don’t think so but… I don’t know. I didn’t even see that she was so unhappy with me until it was too late.’
‘Is it too late?’
I could feel the emotion building up in me again, with tears welling in my eyes. I turned away. In spite of not being a blood relation, Charles was the nearest I had ever had to a father, my biological one having carelessly fallen to his death from a ladder eight months before I was born. But even Charles would have had difficulty coping with a surrogate son in tears. All those years in the Navy had taught him to keep his upper lip very stiff, and he would expect the same from me.
I gathered myself and turned back.
‘I hope it’s not too late.’
‘What did she say?’
