He hadn’t seen it happen. He’d been in the warm-up arena, walking Meridian through a final set of transitions, when the crowd noise changed. It made a sound that pulled the arena inward. There was the collective gasp of thousands of people watching something go very wrong very fast, and then the stunned silence that followed it.
By the time Barnaby got to the fence line, Wes was already on the ground. He was on his back with his helmet cracked and one arm at an angle that arms were not supposed to achieve. Three medics were around him. A fourth was running towards them. Dorado was standing six metres away with his near foreleg dangling, bearing no weight, his cannon bone shattered so completely that the limb swung loose below the knee.
Barnaby had seen horses break down before. It was the thing that lived underneath the sport. The thing you trained around and planned for and never,everlet yourself think about in the minutes before you left the start box. You knew the risk. You accepted it. Then you sat on twelve hundred pounds of animal, pointed it at solid timber at thirty miles an hour, and trusted that the partnership would hold.
The screens went to a holding graphic. A green tarpaulin was brought across the fence, and behind it the veterinary team did what needed doing. Barnaby didn’t watch that either.
He had ridden his own round forty minutes later, and he had been perfect.
Every distance was right. Every line was clean. Meridian jumped like he’d been spring-loaded, ears pricked, attacking the fences with the joy that made him worth every penny of his six-figure price tag. Barnaby sat still and let it happen underneath him, his body making the hundreds of micro-adjustments thatkept the rhythm alive, and his mind…his mind stayed behind the tarpaulin.
He finished on his dressage score. No penalties. No time faults. And he came away with the individual gold. The scoreboard confirmed it, and the British contingent erupted. Barnaby dismounted and pressed his face into Meridian’s neck, fingers twisted in his mane.Never you, he’d told himself and Meridian,that’ll never be you, boy.
They’d taken Wes to hospital in an ambulance with lights but no siren, which Barnaby had been told was a good sign. The American team had gone quiet, and the Brits had followed suit, because you didn’t celebrate a gold while another team’s rider was being loaded into an ambulance. The podium ceremony had been brief, formal, and stilted.
Now his gold medal was in the drawer of his bedside table. He hadn’t looked at it since he’d put it there.
Small circles. Let the leather take what it needs.
Barnaby buffed the toe of the left boot until it reflected the overhead light. Then he set it down, picked up the right, and started again.
His mobile had been buzzing all evening. James had called twice. Barnaby had sent a text.Won. Wes fell. Horse put down. I’m fine. Then he turned the phone face-down, because James would see the lie in those last two words even through a screen, and Barnaby didn’t have the energy for the aggressive caretaking that would follow.
He finished the right boot and held it up. He squinted, then turned it, and found a smudge near the spur rest, so he went over it again with his rag.
At half past two, he put the boots away, lightheaded from the smell of the boot polish in his stuffy room.
At a quarter to three, he accepted that sleep was not coming.
? ? ?
Thecommon room on the third floor was supposed to be closed after midnight, but the lock was broken and nobody had fixed it because the Olympic Village operated on the principle that elite athletes could be trusted to self-govern after hours. This was, by any objective measure, a catastrophically naïve position for an organising committee to take, but it worked in Barnaby’s favour tonight.
The room was small, and lit by the blue wash of a television that was far too large for the space. There were two sofas, a low table, and a vending machine in the corner that sold canned coffee and something called Pocari Sweat. Barnaby had been avoiding on principle in spite of it appearing to be a staple of Japanese sporting events.
Lex Murphy was on the nearest sofa to the door.
He was barefoot, in shorts and a vest, his legs stretched across the cushions. He was so busy laughing at a Japanese game show where a man in a silver bodysuit was being chased across an obstacle course by an enormous foam hammer on hydraulics, that he failed to notice Barnaby’s approach.
The hammer connected. The man in the bodysuit cartwheeled off a platform into what looked like a pool of green slime. Lex howled. He slapped the arm of the sofa with an open palm, the sound cracking through the room, and wheezed something incoherent that might have been “get in” or “have that”. Then he looked up, wiping tears from his eyes, and saw Barnaby in the doorway.
His laughter stopped, draining out of him in stages. His grin softened, his eyes going still.
Lex clearly knew what was keeping him up tonight. A horse couldn’t be put down behind a tarpaulin at an Olympic venue without every athlete in every sport hearing about it by dinner. And Wes; his spinal injury, the ambulance… That was the fear that sat in the chest of every athlete who put their body on the line for the sake of their sport.
Barnaby stood in the doorway and considered leaving. His body was already angled for it, weight shifting back towards the corridor, one hand on the frame. He should go. He should walk back to his room and polish his boots again, or stare at the ceiling. Instead Barnaby crossed the room and sat down at the far end of the sofa.
There was a full cushion of space between them. The television filled the room with colour and noise. On screen, a new contestant in a gold bodysuit was approaching an obstacle that appeared to involve a rotating log suspended over a pit of something foamy. The studio audience was already screaming.
Lex moved fast.
Two wet fingers, deliberately, disgustingly slobbered on, drove into both of Barnaby’s ears simultaneously.
“CONGRATULATIONS!” Lex bellowed, right in his face, grinning like a maniac, twisting his fingers repeatedly into his ear.
Every nerve in Barnaby’s body lurched with disgust. He couldn’t even bring himself to share cutlery with his own family members, and now this man’s saliva was in his ears. He ripped sideways, his shoulder driving into the sofa back, and threw a punch.
His fist came around in a looping arc with no guard, no hip rotation, no real force behind it whatsoever. It was, objectively, the most pathetic physical act he had ever performed in his adultlife, and that included the time he’d fallen off Meridian at a water complex in front of Princess Caroline.
