The View from Mount Dog by James Hamilton-Paterson Page A

obviously not used to mockery.
    ‘You’re put out, I can tell. Don’t worry; I shall know what to do if anybody with an old school tie offers me coffee.’
    ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Like it or not, Sunshine, you are currently our lead husky. But even huskies get a going-over from the vet before long journeys.’
    ‘I’ll think about it,’ Carney said.
    ‘Dope tests are perfectly standard practice,’ urged the ex-athlete. ‘With the sort of publicity you’ve got there’s not a cat in hell’s chance they’ll allow any record you set without one. In fact, the faster you run or the farther you throw, the more suspicious they’ll be.’
    ‘OK, Bob,’ said Carney wearily, ‘I’ll have to concede, I suppose. Set it up, if you would, please. As from next week, though. Until then I’m going to be a bit busy.’
    The nature of that ‘busyness’ did not emerge until early Sunday morning, European time, when the first satellite pictures began arriving of extraordinary goings-on in California. The scene was an Olympic pool on the outskirts of Los Angeles where a major international games was in progress. The actual event was the final of the men’s 200 metres freestyle. The swimmers had just left their blocks when a naked man streaked from the competitors’ entrance, plunged into a spare lane of the pool in the swimmers’ wake and ploughed after them doing a species of crawl. Amusement and head-shaking greeted this piece of light relief until a word began to be heard around the pool, becoming louder and louder as more and more voices took it up: ‘Carney!’
    At the first turn the naked swimmer was nearly up with the two trailing competitors. The television cameras, torn between capturing a real news event and preserving their viewers’ modesty, tried to go into long focus whenever Carney Palafox crossed their viewfinders; but as he began to overhaul the leading swimmers they found him increasingly difficult to censor. Somehow his glistening buttocks rolling in the swirl of chlorinated water exercised a magnetic attraction. In all their glory they crossed a million screens as their owner concentratedon catching an amphibious bus whose image some distance away he had firmly fixed in his mind as it chugged along with its passenger platform awash. On the third length he took the lead and began opening up a prodigious distance between himself and the nearest swimmer, whose rubber cap fell bobbing away behind him like an abandoned fishnet-float. On the third and final turn the cheering became louder still, for it was quickly noticed that Carney had changed his stroke for an inelegant but highly effective back butterfly. Now it was no longer his buttocks which rose and fell mesmerically on a million screens, and station switchboards were jammed long before he touched the end of the pool, scrambled out, slithered like a pale eel through the combined grasp of a stern-faced reception committee and vanished from sight.
    His return from America was slightly delayed by the time it took to engage a lawyer and negotiate his television company’s going bail for him. He was greeted at Heathrow Airport with scenes reminiscent of the sixties. ‘We love you, Carney,’ said placards jiggled by bands of teenagers screaming on the terminal roof. It was a declaration not shared by serious-minded people, of which the world suddenly seemed abnormally full.
    In the next few weeks Carney Palafox put in a few comparatively sober appearances at prearranged attempts on official world records. They were sober only in that he turned up and did what he said he would. His every appearance was greeted with hysteria by the spectators who jammed the stadiums. It did not escape the notice of professional sportsmen that whenever a Carney Palafox display coincided with a regular event that event drew small crowds consisting mainly of a core of hardline traditional sports enthusiasts who would have nothing to do with this middle-aged