There is a particular kind of silence that only happens in a TAB. Not the absence of noise — the machines still hum, the vision still calls a maiden at Pakenham — but the silence of forty people simultaneously deciding not to breathe.
It was a Tuesday. Ray, seventy-one, retired off the wharves with a crook shoulder and a system he'd never once explained to anyone, was seven legs into an eight-leg multi that had started with five dollars and a grievance against his son-in-law.
The last leg
The last leg was a two-year-old at Canterbury that Ray liked for reasons he took to his grave: something about the way it walked to the gates three starts back. The horse jumped at $9.50. The TAB's printer, Ray said later, was the only thing in the room still working.
It won by a short half head. The photo took four minutes. Ray drank tea through all of it.
The collect was a little over sixty-two thousand dollars. Ray tipped the girl behind the counter fifty, bought the front bar one round, and was home by five because Tuesday was bins night.
