Every single horse ran immediately, except
one. Alex, named like that after the leading character in A Clockwork Orange,
had stayed exactly were he was and no matter how much the jockey on top of him
kicked him, he didn’t move a single millimeter. Everyone in the team was
seriously pissed. They had all invested something in the race and now it was
all in the trash can just because a horse had decided to show his opinion
during a very important event.
To be fair, it wasn’t that Alex was especially
bright or anything, the point was he had been well trained by his former
master. Lady Claire had been only ten years old when her parents had gave her
that horse as a present for her birthday. It wasn’t exactly a surprise,
considering the family had strong connections with horse that went for years.
They had even provided the police and the army with horses and won several
contests and shows with their best stallions.
Alex was, nevertheless, Claire’s pet. He was
never supposed to run in any race or to be under scrutiny of any person ever.
Yet, when he grew up and transformed into a very well formed horse, more than
one person started telling Lady Claire’s father that he was wasting a great
horse by letting his daughter have him just running around his premises every
day. They saw how he played with the girl and how he ran when she asked for a
mount and all the other instruments.
Those men were always around the house,
normally just overlooking the training process for the horses that had been
specifically raised to enter competitions or to serve certain institutions. But
one of them, called David Byrne, got obsessed with the idea of seeing Alex run
in a real race. The man insisted daily to Claire’s father that he had to make
that horse run and that he could make a lot of money with him. He also proposed
him to sell the horse to him and he would be the one to train him in the best
conditions possible.
But of course, as soon as Claire heard someone
wanted to take her away from her pet, she insisted to her father that he
couldn’t simply take something he had given to her as a preset. The horse was
hers and only Clair could be the one to decide if he ran or if he just walked
around their estate. And she had no intention of selling or training Alex for
anything, so the answer was always a negative one to Mr. Byrne.
Annoyed by the fact that a girl was on his way
and that her father was a man that couldn’t even control his own daughter, he
decided to do what he knew most: manipulate the context. He decided to end various
deals he had reached with Claire’s father, which put him in very serious
problems with a lot of people, like the government and a large amount of
private investors that had invested their money in the very large and modern
stables in which all of the horses trained and maintained by Claire’s father
lived. Although the hit was not very strong at first, it became a problem after
some months.
Byrne was a very bitter human being and he
didn’t like to loose at all. He hated the idea of even stepping aside to make
someone’s life easier. The moment he had the idea of making Alex his horse and
making him run in various competitive events, he had decided in his head that
it needed to happen and he wasn’t going to stop for details, like the horse not
being his or the opposition of the real owner. Besides, he was rather
accustomed to winning his arguments so he knew it was a thing of time until he
had his way.
Claire’s Father, who she called Daddy even
when she got older, came to her room one day and decided to ask her for Alex in
the nicest tone possible. She was already a woman, almost off to college. She
visited Alex every day in the stables and treated him more like a dog than like
a horse. She even had the idea of going to study to a school where she could have
him around in order to make some exercise and not to loose her connection to
the horse. And it was then that her father realized what he had to do:
promising something he wasn’t going to do, like taking good care of the horse.
The girl trusted her father because he was who
he was. She left for college months later and once she was out of the picture,
her dad attempted to deal with Byrne. The man was obviously beaming with
pleasure when he received the call and he even decided to play dumb and not accept
the man’s calls for a while. But he eventually went to the stables and talked
to him, hearing his proposal. Claire’s father was not ready to sell the horse
as, legally; the horse was his daughter’s property. However, he would let Mr.
Byrne trained the horse and earn money that way.
The man accepted. Claire’s father was very
glad because it meant they could do business again and he could access all of
his former clients again. The money made from the horses was very important to
him and his wealth. So Alex begun training under a very harsh woman hired by
Byrne, who was supposed to be one of the best in the field. She was a very
harsh person and used a whip to make her results even better.
She made Alex work a lot more than he had ever
worked. Called Françoise, the woman was as big as a small horse and cracked the
whip every time she thought the creature was not doing what she was asking or
had been doing it wrong for a while. She made him run and jump for hours, until
Alex was exhausted.
Even the other trainers, the ones supervising
the horses that would go to other owners, seemed appalled by the way Françoise
treated Alex and her energy around the stables. Every single horse got quite
restless when she appeared and would only calm down after a while. Alex would
always respond to her arrival by kicking the wall of his small room with his
hind legs. He kicked so hard, he broke the wood once and that had to be mend by
Claire’s father.
He witnessed one day how the woman did the job
and was horrified by it but he didn’t say anything because it seemed Byrne was
very happy with the results. Françoise stated that the horse would be ready for
a race in just a month and Byrne had already booked him for three different
events taking place just within days of each other. The only thing Claire’s father did was
checking his calendar and making sure his daughter wasn’t going to be around
for those dates.
He had dodged any questions about her horse
for days now. He would always answer to her vaguely over the phone and change
the subject abruptly to her studies and she didn’t say anything because she was
grateful to her father that he had understood her choices in life and that she
had chosen to study a liberal art and not the career he had always wanted for
her. So she went along and never insisted on speaking about her horse or
anything else really.
The last month of training was simply brutal.
Françoise cracked her whip more times in those days that in all the others days
combined. Her trained was becoming so intense, that some of the stable workers
decided to ask her to relax a little and let the horse rest for at least a day
or she would kill him from exhaustion. But she simply cracked her whip at him
and they never insisted again.
The day of the race, Byrne and the whip women
were really confident that Alex was going to win. They had run tests with him
against other horses and he had won every single one of those. So there was no
doubt they had a winner in their hands. So it was baffling, to say the least,
when Alex stood still and didn’t budge one bit.
What they didn’t know was that Claire had
found out some days earlier about the whole thing and she had visited her pet
in secret. Having spent her life with him, enable her to just tell him what he
had to do when he heard the gun going off at the racetrack. She claimed her
horse back after that and decided not to forgive her father for his behavior.
Claire just took Alex and moved him closer to her and away from betrayal.
