Race Girl Read Online Free Page B

next to him and stroking his smooth coat.
    A cane toad belched outside her window and for a terrifying moment, Tully imagined it was a gunshot. She sat bolt upright, fear spiking through her veins, her eyes like saucers as she stared out her window, down the valley and over Avalon Downs. Her room was small, showing the age of the 100-year-old Queenslander, the floors uneven from the rotting stumps beneath the house, the walls cracking and separating from the age and neglect of the paint-stripped tongue and groove vertical joint (VJ) boards. There was no door, just a black sheet nailed across the doorframe after white ants had eaten out the bottom. The floorboards were worn and grubby, the daisy-flower mat from when she was a child now tatty and stained from Bear’s accidents when he was a pup. Her posters on the walls always brought her some comfort, from the Horsewyse poster books with images of towering Clydesdales, striking Friesians and cute mares with foals, along with the front cover of the Courier-Mail the day after Makybe Diva won her third Melbourne Cup. A tattered black and white photograph of her grandmother also held a place of honour on Tully’s wall. One of the country’s first female jockeys, she sat atop a stunning grey thoroughbred, a winner’s sash around the horse’s neck, a trophy in her hands, and a triumphant grin on her face. Her nana wearing the Athens colours; her grandfather standing a safe distance from the grey’s head. For good reason. Her mother had told Tully the stories of this colt, of how he’d only ever warmed to her nana and one other female strapper, and would bite and kick at any bloke who got near him.
    Next to this image were more black and white photographs of Tully’s mother’s heroes. There was New Zealander Maree Lyndon – the first woman to race in the country’s biggest race, the Melbourne Cup, the race Tully’s mother had always wanted to ride – and next to her, a photo of Queenslander Wilhemina Smith. Her mum used to put Tully to sleep at night with stories of Lyndon’s triumphs, but even more memorable was the brazen Wilhemina, who hid her hair and female figure to ride up in north Queensland as ‘Bill Smith’, back in the mid 20th century when women were still banned from professional competition. These days, with more women becoming jockeys, competition for rides was fiercer. Tully knew she would have to work twice as hard if she wanted to make it to the top, as her personal hero, the incredible female Melbourne Cup winner, Michelle Payne, had.
    Tully had printed out and stuck a few pics of Payne up, alongside a few selfies with her own horses, on her walls and on the cracked mirror atop her white dresser in the corner. Pics she’d posted on her @thoroughbred_gurl_01 Instagram account. Some were images of Greg and Frangi, some of Tam and her Quarter Horses, others with Diamond Someday (aka Diva, as she was known around the barn), and Rosie and Gally (Gallipoli). The picture, though, which held prime place, sticky-taped up in the middle of her wall, was of Tully with her mother in the original Athens Racing white and purple-star colours and her matching silks. There Tully stood, two tears old, with a huge smile, proudly holding the trophy after Dahlia had won her first big race. Gerald had demanded the colours be switched to red and white after Dahlia’s death.
    Tully still used the same curtain rod her mother had as a girl in this very room, with a sheet hanging from it above her single bed, with its horse doona pushed up against the window. The only other furniture in the room was a plastic table used as a desk with a haphazard pile of textbooks, notebooks, magazines and papers spilling off it. Texters, pencils and biros were stuck in a cut-off soft drink can, with a plastic deck chair spun around the wrong way and pushed up against it.
    The moon hung low and full outside Tully’s window, beaming its