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them has the self-belief to actually win. Take a look at Meet the Wife, on the other hand. Note the calm gait, the proud, lofty bearing. A regal dog. That’s where I’d put my money. If you ask me, he’s already won it.’
    ‘Right – here, Bel, you’ll have a flutter, won’t you?’
    ‘I don’t have any money,’ came the icy response.
    ‘I’ll spot you, come on.’
    ‘It’s all right,’ she said flatly, not looking up.
    ‘Ah, go on, look, I’ll put a bet on for you. Meet the Wife is Charlie’s tip, I’ll put a fiver on him –’
    ‘No!’ she exclaimed, suddenly animated. ‘I don’t want Charles’s tip.’ She unfolded her track sheet and studied it, white-fingered in the frosty light of the floods. ‘I want to bet on this one. Number Four.’
    ‘An Evening of Long Goodbyes,’ Frank read over her shoulder. ‘I dunno, what d’you think, Charlie?’
    ‘Well,’ I said even-handedly, ‘they’re nice odds if he’s any good at all – Number Four, where is he anyway?’
    We scanned the track. The trainers had brought the dogs out and were leading them up and down the grassy area in the middle; sleek coats gleamed, pink tongues quivered athletically as they went through their paces. ‘I don’t see Number Four though – oh.’
    Number Four, wearing an unflattering chartreuse jacket, was sitting alone on the chewed-up grass, despondently licking his testicles. ‘Hmm, I don’t know, Bel…’
    ‘That’s the one I’m betting on,’ Bel said adamantly.
    ‘Would you not listen to Charlie, Bel, he always wins.’
    ‘You’re here with me, not Charles, and anyway I thought you were going to spot me, why are you so concerned who I bet on?’ Her jaw thrust out palely against the first flecks of rain blowing down and backward from the roof of the stand.
    ‘It’s just it has such a stupid name…’
    ‘They all have stupid names, Charles.’
    A barrage of noise from the loudspeaker signalled that the race would be commencing shortly. The dogs were locked into their traps.
    ‘Yes, but names are important, you have to pay attention to them.’ I said this with a curious certainty: for here at the dog-track, I was finding my senses awakening to the resonances of seemingly superficial things, the intricate spectral machinery of Luck…
    ‘Here youse, the race is startin,’ Frank said. ‘I’ll put a fiver on him anyway, all right?’
    ‘I don’t think it is a stupid name,’ Bel said, ignoring him. ‘I think it’s romantic.’
    ‘It’s a dog , that’s why it’s stupid. I mean, if it was a song or a book or something, that’d be different, but who on earth names their dog An Evening of Long Goodbyes?’
    ‘Ponces,’ Frank chipped in. ‘You get some posh benders down here fancyin themselves as trainers, as a hobby, like, prob’ly cos they can’t afford a horse. Their dogs are always crap.’
    ‘Exactly. There’s a time and a place, Bel. Not everything can be theatre –’
    ‘Why not?’ she said, colouring. ‘Anyway, there’s more to it than winning.’
    ‘Depends who’s paying for it,’ I returned.
    Frank sighed and shrugged and went off to the plate-glass hatch to place the bets – perhaps with a forlorn glance over to the far side of the stand, where his down-at-heel pals merrily drank their cans – leaving us to stare furiously into the thickening sheets of rain, starting as the gun went off and the electric rabbit began another lonely circuit…
    After Meet the Wife’s storming victory, Frank took us to a local inn to celebrate. Bel’s mood improved once we had left the track. None of us mentioned An Evening of Long Goodbyes, whose race had been so catastrophic that, by the end, neither Frank nor I could summon the will to gloat. He had begun badly, getting his head stuck in the gate and having to be extricated by the stewards, and continued with a series of humiliating and distinctly uncanine trips and stumbles; disgracing himself beyond redemption in the third lap,