Free Something for the Pain by Gerald Murnane

was aware that Pat Tully might have long since left her convent, might have been twice married and divorced, and might then have moved to an ashram in India. I understood this, but I choose nowadays, whenever I think of Lawrie Quinlan and Pat Tully, to think of the flame-haired young woman as having turned away forever from worldly concerns after her experience as a racegoer at Caulfield on Show Day in 1958.
    Sometimes I suppose that Pat Tully looked around her after the running of the last race of the day and had an insight into the pettiness of what she might have called the material world. She saw the discarded betting tickets littering the ground around her and the dejection on the faces of most of the home-going punters. Even when her escort for the day counted out in front of her the thirty-four pounds he had just then collected from a bookmaker, she felt a sort of pity for the well-meaning young man who could find such satisfaction in a matter so little connected with the salvation of his immortal soul.
    Sometimes, however, I imagine that Pat Tully never afterwards forgot the ecstatic moment when the young man who had spent so much effort and so much money in order to have her entertained for the day and who felt, perhaps, a romantic attraction to her—the ecstatic moment when the young man beside her gripped her hand and pointed her fingers towards one of a dozen and more satin-jacketed horsemen bearing down on her from the far distance, and when the increasing prominence of a red-and-white quartered jacket told her that Miss Valora was about to reach the lead; that her lightly made prayer of a few minutes before was about to be answered emphatically; that it was indeed possible for the agencies of the invisible world to intervene in the workings of the visible.

8. The Two Maikais
    I NEVER MET anyone whose interest in racing matched my own. Both on and off the course, so to speak, I’ve enjoyed the company of many a racing acquaintance. I’ve read books, or parts of books, by persons who might have come close to being true racing friends of mine if ever we had met. For most of my long life, however, my enjoyment of racing has been a solitary thing: something I could never wholly explain to anyone else. I’ve met a few persons with an interest in racing no less intense than mine, but the key word in my opening sentence above is matched . Racing has many sides to it, some of them of great interest to me and others of less interest. I have little interest in breeding or pedigrees, for example, but I take a great interest in racing colours and in the naming of horses. In later sections of this book, I’ll look further into my lifelong obsession with racing. Here, I’ll simply say that I’ve never met, in person or through reading, anyone who responds to racing in quite the way that I respond.
    My first racing acquaintance was Dennis Hanrahan, who sat in the same classroom with me for three years in the early 1950s. In 1957, soon after we had both left school, Dennis and I began going to every Saturday meeting in Melbourne. For several years, we could afford to go only into the cheaper enclosures. We watched every race together from our agreed vantage points on the Hill at Flemington, on the South Hill at Moonee Valley, and in the Guineas at Caulfield. In fact, we graduated to the Guineas at Caulfield after about a year. Before that, we went to the even cheaper Flat, where the patrons were mostly pensioners or persons of modest means or minors such as ourselves. Dennis and I each had a pair of binoculars bought from the first shipment of Japanese optical instruments to reach Australia after the Second World War. We were almost the only persons in the cheap enclosures to have binoculars and to be able to follow each race in detail. We knew the colours carried by every horse at every meeting and we each murmured a rudimentary call as we watched each race. In those days, when the crowd at a Saturday meeting numbered