Free The Race by Nina Allan Page B

parkland but that had been left to run wild, a wide stretch of couch grass and thistle with panoramic views of the coastline and out to sea. If you look east from the lunges you can see the whole of Sapphire spread out beneath you like a toy town. If you look west you’ll see the marshes, stretching all the way to the horizon and beyond.
    To the south lies France, just a short distance away across the Channel. Mum once told me that on a clear day you can see France from the top of the lunges but I’ve never been able to. Perhaps it’s never been clear enough. Mum went to France once, just for a day when she was a student.
    “What was it like?” I asked her.
    She shrugged her shoulders. “We ate sugar buns. In a coffee house. There was a boy there,” she said. I urged her to go on with the story but she wouldn’t. She seemed cross with me for a while after that, but I knew her crossness usually meant she was feeling sad.
    Tash was running Limlasker over hurdles. She was wearing a tatty white vest and a pair of old khaki combats. Her hands lay still at her sides, the nails varnished an opalescent pink and perfectly manicured.
    The vest had patches of yellow under the arm holes.
    Lim was a large dog but when he was running he seemed barely there, an outline of a dog filled with air, a space in the stuff of the world where a dog should be. You could hear him when he passed right by you – a swift pat-pattering where his feet struck the turf – but otherwise he ran more or less silently, a sleek ghost.
    Limlasker means ‘salmon’ in old Hoolish. There are no salmon in England now, or only in the very far north. The rivers and briny lakes to the south of London are home only to roach and gudgeon and oil pike and a few hardy carp. But whenever I saw Lim in full flight I found no problem imagining what a salmon looked like: a magnificent silver superfish charging upstream.
    I knew Tash wouldn’t talk to me or to anyone while she was running. I could see Del in the distance, way off up the slope, marking timings. I sat down in the grass to watch. I didn’t have a stopwatch, of course, so I couldn’t check, but it seemed to me that Lim was running well, better than ever. Del had been easing off on him in recent months, entering him in fewer races, preparing him for retirement. But from where I was sitting he looked to be in peak condition.
    It had already been agreed that when Tash started training with Clearview Princess, Limlasker would go back to the Cowshed to live. If he stayed healthy he’d live another ten years, and have a fine time, but of course Lim was lucky. Retired smartdogs remain valuable because of the implant technology, but they are also a problem. Many people, including some of the scientists who helped create them, don’t like having smartdogs living with them in their homes. The decent yards sell on their dogs where they can, to cognitive research units, or to rich businessmen in London as pets for their kids. But every year there is a surplus – too many too-old smartdogs. Some are turned loose on the streets, or taken out to the marshes and abandoned.
    Most are just shot.
    I often wonder if the out-of-towners who come down to Sapphire for a weekend’s racing know what happens to smartdogs when their careers are over. I don’t suppose they think about it much, any more than they wonder about where the kids who sell them fried dough-balls or racetrack souvenirs go when they clock off for the night. The out-of-towners have never been to Hawthorne or Mallon Way, and they never will.
    Thinking about it makes me angry, but I also know that without the out-of-towners and their money the situation in Sapphire would be much worse. Without the dog track and the boardwalk and the string of posh hotels along the Bulvard, the estate kids would have no jobs and no prospect of jobs. Hawthorne was bad enough anyway because of the chemo seepage, but after the tunnels under London Road subsided things became