Bolt - By Dick Francis Page 0,57

heavily on the coats and rolled and slid off them and ended with his head on one coat and his body on the tarmac, sprawling on his side, limp as a rag.

I sprang to kneel beside him and saw immediately that although he was dazed, he was truly alive. Hands stretched to help him up, but he wasn’t ready for that, and I said, ‘Don’t move him … let him move first … you have to be careful.’

Everyone who went racing knew about spinal injuries and not moving jockeys until it was safe, and there I was, in my jockey’s colours, to remind them. The hands were ready, but they didn’t touch.

I looked up at that crowd, all in shirt-sleeves, all shivering with cold, all saints. Some were in tears, particularly the woman who’d laid her mink on the line.

‘Litsi,’ I said, looking down and seeing some sort of order return to his eyes. ‘Litsi, how are you doing?’

‘I … Did I fall?’ He moved a hand, and then his feet, just a little, and the crowd murmured with relief.

‘Yes, you fell,’ I said. ‘Just stay there for a minute. Everything’s fine.’

Somebody above was calling down, ‘Is he all right?’ and there, up on the balcony, were the two men who’d apparently gone up to save him.

The crowd shouted, ‘Yes,’ and started clapping, and in almost gala mood began collecting their coats from the pile. There must have been almost two hundred of them, I thought, watching. Anoraks, huskies, tweeds, raincoats, furs, suit jackets, sweaters, even a horse rug. It was taking much longer to disentangle the huge heap than it had to collect it.

The little boy with big eyes picked up his blue anorak and zipped it on over his jersey, staring at me. I hugged him. ‘What’s your name?’ I said.

‘Matthew.’

‘You’re a great guy.’

‘That’s my daddy’s coat,’ he said, ‘under the man’s head.’

‘Ask him to leave it there just another minute.’

Someone had run to fetch the first-aid men, who arrived with a stretcher.

‘I’m all right,’ Litsi said weakly, but he was still winded and disorientated, and made no demur when they made preparations for transporting him.

Danielle was suddenly there beside him, her face white.

‘Litsi,’ she was saying, ‘Oh, God …’ She looked at me. ‘I was waiting for him … someone said a man fell … is he all right?’

‘He’s going to be,’ I said. ‘He’ll be fine.’

‘Oh …’

I put my arms round her. ‘It’s all right. Really it is. Nothing seems to be hurting him, he’s just had his breath knocked out.’

She slowly disengaged herself and walked away beside the stretcher when they lifted it onto a rolling platform, a gurney.

‘Are you his wife?’ I heard a first-aid man say.

‘No … a friend.’

The little boy’s father picked up his coat and shook my hand. The woman picked up her squashed mink, brushed dust off it and gave me a kiss. A Steward came out and said would I now please get on my horse and go down to the start, as the race would already be off late, and I looked at the racecourse clock and saw in amazement that it was barely fifteen minutes since I’d walked out of the weighing room.

All the horses, all the owners and trainers were still in the parade ring, as if time had stopped, but now the jockeys were mounting; death had been averted, life could thankfully go on.

I picked up my anorak. All the coats had been reclaimed, and it lay there alone on the tarmac, with my whip underneath. I looked up at the balcony, so far above, so deserted and unremarkable. Nothing suddenly seemed real, yet the questions hadn’t even begun to be asked. Why had he been up there? How had he come to be clinging to life by his fingertips? In what way had he not been careful?

Litsi lay on a bed in the first-aid room until the races were over, but insisted then that he had entirely recovered and was ready to return to London.

He apologised to the racecourse executive for having been so foolish as to go up to the balcony to look at the new, much-vaunted view, and said that it was entirely his own clumsiness which had caused him to stumble over some builders’ materials and lose his balance.

When asked for his name, he’d given a shortened version of his surname without the ‘prince’ in front, and he hoped there wouldn’t be too much public fuss over his stupidity.

He was sitting