Bridge of Clay

by Markus Zusak

  A delighted kind of defiance.

  The stillness of predawn Archer Street.

  As for Clay, he thought of many things to say to her then, to tell her and have her know, but all he said was “Matador.”

  Even from a distance he could see her not-quite-white, not-quite-straight teeth, as her smile laid open the street; and finally, she held a hand up, and her face was something strange to him—at a loss for what to say.

  When she left, she walked and watched him, then watched a moment longer.

  Bye, Clay.

  Only when he imagined her well down Poseidon Road did he look again into his hand, where the lighter dimly sat. Slow and calm he opened it, and the flame stood straightly up.

  * * *

  —

  And so it was.

  In the dark he came to all of us—from me lying straight in bed, to Henry’s sleepy grin, and Tommy and Rory’s absurdity. As a final act of kindness (to both of them) he pulled Hector from Rory’s chest, and clamped him across his own shoulder, like one more part of his luggage. On the porch he put him down, and the tabby was purring, but he, too, knew Clay was leaving.

  Well?

  First the city, then the mule, now the cat did all the talking.

  Or maybe not.

  “Bye, Hector.”

  But he didn’t leave, not yet.

  No, for a long time, a few minutes at least, he waited for dawn to hit the street, and when it did it was gold and glorious. It climbed the rooves of Archer Street, and a tide came calling with it:

  There, out there, was a mistake maker, and a distant statue of Stalin.

  There was a birthday girl rolling a piano.

  There was the heart of color in all that grey, and floating paper houses.

  All of it came through the city, across The Surrounds and Bernborough. It rose in the streets, and when finally Clay left, there was light and gathering floodwater. First it reached his ankles, then his knees, until, by the time he made the corner, it was up to the height of his waist.

  And Clay looked back, one last time, before diving—in, and outwards—to a bridge, through a past, to a father.

  He swam the gold-lit water.

  So this was where he washed up.

  In the trees.

  For years now, Clay had imagined a moment like this—that he’d be strong, he’d be sure and ready—but those images were swept away; he was a shell of all he was.

  Trying to recapture his resolve, he stood motionless, in this corridor of strapping eucalypts. He felt the pressure in his lungs: a sense of oncoming waves, though they were made now only of air. It took reminding to breathe them in.

  Out here somewhere was where waters led.

  Out here somewhere was where murderers fled.

  * * *

  —

  Behind him, there was sleeping and reading, and the city’s distant subdivisions. A lazy chain of metal, and countless miles of pure, ragged land. In Clay’s ignorance, it was a place of great simplicity. There was train line and earth, and reams of empty space. There was a town called Silver, and no, it wasn’t the town you might think (of dog, TW, and snake)—it was a town halfway between.

  Small houses. Tidy lawns.

  And winding past all of it, dry and cracked, was a broad, misshapen river. It had a strange name, but he liked it:

  The Amahnu.

  In the afternoon, when he arrived, he considered having the river lead him to his father, but opted for the town instead. He bought a foldout map from the petrol station. He walked the rusty street signs, and the drunken, sprawled-out beer cans. He found a road, north and west; he left the town behind.

  Around him, as he walked, the world grew emptier still; it seemed to surge, continuously out, and then there was the other feeling—that it was also coming at him. There was an obvious, slow-approaching quiet, and he felt it, every step. The emptier it became, the closer the way, to our father’s lonely home.

  * * *

  —

  Somewhere, nowhere, there was a right turnoff from the road. A mail drum said the number, and Clay knew it, from the address in the wooden box. He took the dirt road driveway.

  Initially it was stark and open, but after a few hundred meters and a gently sloping hill, he arrived in the corridor of trees. At eye level, the trunks were more like muscled thighs—like giants standing around. On the ground there were knots of bark, and long streaks of shedding, crumbling beneath his feet. Clay stayed; he wouldn’t leave.

  Beyond it, a car was parked, but still on this side:

  A Holden, a long red box.

  Further away, across the dry river, was a gate, in the light. And beyond the gate was a house; a hunchback, with sad eyes and a mouth.

  Out amongst the tall bony weeds, there was life. Crouched in the heather and scrub and the Bernborough-like grass, the air was overrun. There was a teeming noise of insects, electric and erudite. A whole language in a single note. Effortless.

  Clay, on the other hand, was laboring. He’d found in himself a fresh hemorrhage of fear and guilt, and doubt. It weaved through him, triple-tiered.

  How many procrastinations could he work through?

  How many times could he open the small wooden chest, and hold each item within?

  Or rifle through the sports bag?

  How many books could he reach for, and read?

  How many letters to Carey could he formulate, but not yet write?

  Once, his hand fell onto a long belt of late-afternoon sun.

  “Go on.”

  He said it.

  It shocked him that the words came out.

  Even more so a second time.

  “Go on then, boy.”

  Go on, Clay.

  Go and tell him why you came. Look him in his weathered face and sunken murderous eyes. Let the world see you for what you are:

  Ambitious. Stubborn. Traitorous.

  Today, you’re not a brother, he thought.

  Not a brother and not a son.

  Do it, do it now.

  And he did.

  Yes, Clay walked out and on, but who exactly was he walking to that afternoon? Who was he really, and where did he come from, and what decisions and indecisions had he made to become the man he was, and wasn’t? If we imagine Clay’s past coming in on the tide, then the Murderer had traveled toward it from a constant, distant dry land, and he was never the strongest swimmer. Maybe it’s best summed up like this:

  In the present, there was a boy walking toward what was so far only a wondrous, imagined bridge.

  In the past, there was another boy, whose path—across longer distance and further years—had also ended here, but in adulthood.

  Sometimes I have to remind myself.

  The Murderer wasn’t always the Murderer.

  * * *

  —

  Like Penelope, he also came from far away, but it was a place in this place, where the streets were hot and wide, and the land was yellow and dry. Around it, a wilderness of low scrub and gum trees stood close by, and the people sloped and slouched; they lived in constant states of sweat.

  Most of what it had, it had one:

  One primary school, one high school.

  One river, one doctor.

  One Chinese restaurant, one supermarket.

  And four pubs.

  At the far end of town, a church hung in the air, and the people simmered inside it: men in suits, women in flower-patterned dresses, kids in shirts, shorts, and buttons, all dying to take their shoes off.

  As for the Murderer, when he was a boy he wanted to be a typist, like his mother. She’d worked for the town’s one doctor and spent her days punching away in the surgery, on the old Remington, bullet-grey. Sometimes she took it home with her, too, to write letters, and a
sked her son to carry it. “Here, show us your muscles,” she’d tell him. “Can you help with the ol’ TW?” The boy smiled as he lugged it away.

  Her glasses were receptionist-red.

  Her body was plump at the desk.

  She had a prim voice, and her collars were stout and starched. Around her, patients sat with their sweat and their hats, their sweat and printed flowers, their sweat and sniffling children; they sat with their sweat in their laps. They listened to Adelle Dunbar’s jabs and left hooks, as she worked that typewriter into a corner. Patient for patient, old Dr. Weinrauch emerged, like the pitchforked farmer in that painting American Gothic, then beamed to them, every time. “Who’s next on the chopping block, Adelle?”

  Out of habit, she looked at her chart. “That’d be Mrs. Elder,” and whoever it was—whether a limping woman with a bum thyroid, a pub-drenched old man with a pickled liver, or a scab-kneed kid with a mystery rash in his pants—they each rose and sweated their way in, they lodged their various complaints…and sitting amongst the lot of them, on the floor, was the secretary’s young boy. On the threadbare carpet, he built towers, he careered through countless comic books, and their crimes and chaos and kapows. He warded off the scowls of each freckle-faced tormentor from school, and flew spaceships around the waiting room: a giant, miniature solar system, in a giant, miniature town.

  * * *

  —

  The town was called Featherton, though it was no more bird-like than any other place. Certainly, since he lived on Miller Street, near the river, his bedroom was filled—at least during times of rain—with the sound of flocking birds, and their various shrieks and laughters. At midday, crows made lunchtimes out of roadkill, hopping away for the semitrailers. In late afternoon, the cockatoos screeched—black-eyed and yellow-headed, and white in the blistering sky.

  Still, birds or no birds, Featherton was famous for something else.

  It was a place of farms and livestock.

  A series of deep-holed mines.

  More than anything, though, it was a place of fire:

  It was a town where sirens howled and men of all descriptions, and a few women, zipped up orange overalls and walked out into the flames. Mostly, with the landscape stripped and stiffened black, they all returned, but every once in a while, when the fire roared that extra piece more, thirty-odd people would go in, and twenty-eight or twenty-nine would stagger back out; all sad-eyed, cough-ridden, but quiet. That’s when boys and girls with skinny arms and legs, and old faces, were told, “I’m sorry, son” or “I’m sorry, darl.”

  Before he was the Murderer, he was Michael Dunbar.

  His mother was an only parent, and he was an only child.

  * * *

  —

  As you can see, in many ways, he was almost the perfect other half of Penelope; they were identical and opposite, like designed or destined symmetry. Where she came from a far-off watery place, his was remote and dry. Where he was the single son of an only mother, she was the only daughter of a single man. And lastly, as we’re about to see—and this was the greatest mirror, the surest parallel of fate—while she was practicing Bach, Mozart, and Chopin, he was obsessing on an art form of his own.

  * * *

  —

  One morning, spring holidays, when Michael was eight, he sat in the surgery waiting room and it was 39 degrees Celsius; the thermometer on the door frame said so.

  Close by, old Mr. Franks smelt like toast.

  His mustache still had jam in it.

  Next was a girl from school named Abbey Hanley:

  She had limp black hair and powerful arms.

  The boy had just fixed a spaceship.

  The postman, Mr. Harty, was struggling at the door, and Michael left the small grey toy near the girl’s feet and helped the ailing postie, who stood like a hapless messiah, with the hellish light behind him.

  “Hey, Mikey.”

  For some reason he hated to be called Mikey, but the young murderer-to-be squashed himself to the door frame and let him in. He turned back just in time to witness Abbey Hanley stand for her appointment, and crush the spaceship underfoot. She had a mighty pair of flip-flops.

  “Abbey!” laughed her mother. A few embarrassed notes. “That wasn’t very nice.”

  The boy, watching the whole sad event, closed his eyes. Even at eight he knew what fucking bitch meant, and he wasn’t afraid to think it. Then again, thinking it was no accomplishment, and he knew what that meant, too. The girl smiled out a pretty shameless “Sorry” and trudged toward old Weinrauch.

  A meter away, the postman shrugged. A button was missing where his guts surged forward with great determination. “Girl trouble already, huh?”

  Bloody hilarious.

  Michael smiled, he spoke quietly. “Not really. I don’t think she meant it.” The fucking bitch.

  Harty pressed him. “Oh, she meant it, all right.”

  Toast-and-Jam Franks coughed up a smirk of agreement, and Michael tried to move on. “What’s in the box?”

  “I just deliver, kid. How ’bout I put it down here and you do the honors? It’s addressed to your mother, at home, but I figured I’d just bring it here. Go ahead.”

  * * *

  —

  When the door closed, Michael took another look.

  He circled the box with suspicion, for it dawned on him what it was—he’d seen these boxes before:

  The first year it was delivered in person, with condolences, and a stale pile of scones.

  The second year it was left on the front porch.

  Now they just shoved it in the post.

  Charity for charred children.

  * * *

  —

  Of course, Michael Dunbar himself wasn’t charred at all, but his life, supposedly, was. Each year, start of spring, when rogue bushfires often began, a local philanthropy mob called the Last Supper Club took it upon themselves to prop up the lives of fire victims, whether they were physically burnt or not. Adelle and Michael Dunbar qualified, and this year all was typical—it seemed almost tradition that the box be both well-meaning and full to the brim with absolute shit. Soft toys were always despicably maimed. Jigsaw puzzles were guaranteed to be a few pieces short. Lego men were missing legs, arms, or heads.

  This time around, when Michael went for a pair of scissors, he did so without enthusiasm, but when he returned and cut the box open, even Mr. Franks couldn’t help peering in. The boy pulled out a sort of plastic roller coaster with abacus beads at one end, then some Lego—the giant kind, for two-year-olds.

  “What, did they rob the bloody bank?” said Franks. He’d finally cleared out the jam.

  Next was a teddy bear with one eye and half a nose. See? Brutalized. Beaten up in some kid’s dark alleyway between bedroom and kitchen.

  Then came a collection of Mad magazines. (Okay, fair enough, that was pretty good, even if the final fold-over page was already done, on every single one.)

  And lastly, strangely—what was this?

  What the hell was this?

  Were these people having a laugh?

  Because there, at the very bottom of the box, keeping the foundations together, was a calendar, and it was titled Men Who Changed the World. Was Michael Dunbar to choose a new father figure here?

  Sure, he could go straight to January and John F. Kennedy.

  Or April: Emil Zátopek.

  May: William Shakespeare.

  July: Ferdinand Magellan.

  September: Albert Einstein.

  Or December—where the page turned to a brief history and the work of a small, broken-nosed man, who would become, through time, everything the murderer-to-be admired.

  Of course it was Michelangelo.

  The fourth Buonarroti.

  * * *

  —

  The od
dest part about the calendar wasn’t so much the contents but the fact that it was outdated; it was last year’s. It most likely was just there to give added support to the box, and clearly it was well used: when each page opened to a photo or sketch of the man of the month, the dates were often scrawled with events, or things to do.

  February 4: Car registration due.

  March 19: Maria M.—Birthday.

  May 27: Dinner with Walt.

  Whoever owned the calendar had dinner with Walt on the last Friday of every month.

  * * *

  —

  Now a small note about Adelle Dunbar, the red-rimmed receptionist:

  She was a practical woman.

  When Michael showed her the box of Lego and the calendar, she frowned and tilted her glasses. “Is that calendar…used?”

  “Yep.” Suddenly there was a kind of pleasure in it. “Can I keep it?”

  “But it’s last year’s—here, give us a look.” She flipped through the pages. She didn’t overreact. It may have crossed her mind to march down to the woman responsible for sending this charity shitbox, but she didn’t. She swallowed the glint of anger. She packed it into her prim-and-proper voice and, like her son, moved on. “You think there’s a calendar of women who changed the world?”

  The boy was at a loss. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, do you think there should be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know, isn’t there?” But she softened. “Tell you what. You really want this thing?”

  Now that there was a chance he might lose it, he wanted it more than anything. He nodded on fresh batteries.

  “Okay.” Here came the rules. “How about you come up with twenty-four women who changed the world as well? Tell me who they are and what they did. Then you can keep it.”

  “Twenty-four?” The boy was outraged.

  “There’s a problem?”