by Markus Zusak
“Are you two quite bloody finished?”
Henry ignored me completely. “Better than pizzas,” he said. It was a private conversation between him and Rory, for Christ’s sake. “Or doughnuts.”
Rory laughed, then serious. “Hamburgers.”
“You want fries with that?”
“And a Coke.” Rory giggled; he giggled.
“Calzones.”
“What’s a calzone?”
“Je-sus Christ!”
Still they both grinned, and blood ran to Henry’s chin, but at least I’d gotten their attention.
“Are you right, Matthew?” said Rory. “That’s the best bloody talk Henry and I have had in years!”
“Probably ever.”
Rory looked at Clay. “That was quality heart-to-heart.”
“Well”—I pointed between them—“I’m sorry to interrupt the pizzas, burgers and calzones debate, and you two bonding over a floury pair of—”
“See?! Floury! Even Matthew can’t resist ’em!”
“—but I wouldn’t mind knowing what the hell happened out there.”
Now Henry looked dreamily in the general direction of the sink.
“And?”
He blinked himself back. “And what?”
“What happened?”
“Oh—yeah…” He conjured up the energy. “Well, anyway, you know, they wouldn’t hit me, so I just went over to her—I was pretty drunk by then—and I thought I might press the flesh, so to speak….”
“And?” Rory asked. “How was it?”
“I don’t know—I hesitated.” He had a good think about it.
“Then what?”
Henry, half-grin, half-grim. “Well, she’d seen I was coming in.” He swallowed and felt it all over again. “So she punched me four times in the balls, and three times in the face.”
There was a genuine outcry of “Jesus!”
“I know—she threw the whole bloody display at me.”
Rory, especially, got excited. “See that, Clay? Four! That’s commitment! None of this two-times-in-the-coins shit.”
Clay actually laughed; out loud.
“And then,” Henry finally went on, “old Starkers and Schwartz, they finished me off—they had to.”
I was perplexed. “Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Henry was matter-of-fact. “They were worried they were next.”
* * *
—
In the bedroom again, it was well past midnight, and Henry sat up, abruptly.
“Bugger this,” he said, “I’m sober enough, I’m going out to get the car.”
Clay sighed and rolled from bed.
There was rain like a ghost you could walk through.
Almost dry when it hit the ground.
* * *
—
Earlier, not long after the enigma of Henry’s head, and the talk of well-baked chests, there was scratching at the back door, and knocking at the front.
At the back were both Rosy and Achilles, standing and thoroughly expectant.
To the dog: “You—in.”
To the mule: “You—get it through your thick head. Kitchen’s closed.”
As to the front, the knocking came with calling out:
“Matthew, it’s Mrs. Chilman!”
I opened up to the small squat woman with her ever-present wrinkles and shining eyes, and no incrimination. She was too aware that a whole other world existed in this house, and who was she to judge? Even when she’d first realized we were down to just us Dunbar boys, she’d never questioned me on how we lived. Mrs. Chilman wore the wisdom of old school—she’d seen boys the age of Rory and me sent off to be shot at overseas. Early on she’d brought us soup sometimes (tremendously chunky and hot) and would call us for help with opening jars until her dying day.
On this night, she was ready for business.
She spoke at me economically:
“Hi, Matthew, how are you, I thought I might get a look at Clay, he’s a bit banged up, is he? Then I’ll look at your hands.”
That was when the voice arrived from the couch, and attached to it, happily, was Henry.
“Me first, Mrs. Chilman!”
“Jesus!”
What was it about our house?
It brought the blasphemy out in everyone.
* * *
—
The car was in the Bernborough Park car park, and they walked to it through the moisture.
“Feel like doing a few laps?” Clay asked.
Henry tripped on a laugh.
“Only if we can drive ’em.”
In the car they traveled in silence, they took each street and laneway, and Clay catalogued the names. There was Empire, Carbine, Chatham Street, and onto Gloaming Road: the site of Hennessey and the Naked Arms. He remembered all the times he’d walked these streets with the just-arrived Carey Novac.
Still they drove meanderingly on, and Clay looked over between them.
“Hey,” he said, “hey, Henry,” when they stopped at the Flight Street traffic lights, but he spoke toward the dash. “Thanks for what you did.”
And you had to give it to Henry, especially at times like these; he gave him a black-eyed wink. “Good old Starkey’s girl, ay?”
Their last stop before heading home was the edge of Peter Pan Square, where they sat and watched the windshield, and the statue out in the middle. Through the sheath of rain, Clay could just make out the cobblestones, and the horse the square was named for. On the mounting block it said this:
PETER PAN
A VERY GALLANT HORSE
TWICE WINNER OF THE RACE
THAT STOPS THE NATION
1932, 1934
It felt like he was watching them, too, his head turned sideways, but Clay knew—the horse was after attention, or a bite of one of his rivals. Especially Rogilla. Peter Pan hated Rogilla.
Up top, Darby Munro, the jockey, seemed to be watching the car as well, and Henry turned the key. When the engine ran, the wipers clocked over maybe every four seconds, and horse and rider, they cleared and obscured, cleared and obscured, till Henry finally spoke.
“Hey, Clay,” he said, and shook his head, and smiled just slight and slightedly. “Tell me what he’s like these days.”
In later years, it was understandable.
People got it wrong.
They thought it was Penny’s death and our father leaving that made us what we were—and sure, it definitely made us rowdier and harder and hardier, and gave us a sense of fight—but it isn’t what made us tough. No, in the beginning it was something more.
It was the wooden, the upright.
The piano.
* * *
—
As it was, it started with me, in sixth grade, and now, as I type, I’m guilty; I apologize. This, after all, is Clay’s story, and now I write for myself—but it somehow feels important. It leads us somewhere else.
At school till then it was easy. Class was fine, I was in on every football game. I’d barely had an argument, till someone cared to notice: I was ribbed for learning the piano.
Never mind that we were forced to, or that the piano, as an instrument, had a long history of rebellion—Ray Charles was coolness personified; Jerry Lee Lewis set the thing on fire. As a kid growing up in the racing quarter, only one type of boy played the piano; it didn’t matter how much the world had advanced. It didn’t matter if you were the school football captain or a juvenile amateur boxer—the piano made you one thing, and that thing, of course, was this:
You were clearly a homosexual.
* * *
—
It had actually been known for years that we’d learned, even if we weren’t much good. None of that really mattered,
though, given that childhoods latch on to things at different times. You can be left alone for a decade, only to be hung out to dry in your teens. You could collect stamps and have it labeled interesting in first grade, and have it haunt you in ninth.
For me, as I said, it was sixth grade.
All it took was a kid a few inches shorter, but a lot more powerful, who actually was a juvenile boxer—a kid named Jimmy Hartnell. His father, Jimmy Hartnell Sr., owned the Tri-Colors Boxing Gym, over on Poseidon Road.
And Jimmy, what a kid.
He was built like a very small supermarket:
Compact; expensive if you crossed him.
His hair was a ginger fringe.
In terms of how it started, there were boys and girls in the corridor, and angles of dust and sun. There were uniforms and callings-out, and countless moving bodies. It was beautiful in that off-putting way, how the light came streaking in; those perfect, long-lit beams.
Jimmy Hartnell strode the hallway, freckly, confident, toward me. White-shirted, grey-shorted. The look he wore was pleased. He was perfect schoolish thuggery; his smell the smell of breakfast, his arms all blood and meat.
“Hey,” he said, “isn’t that that Dunbar kid? The one who plays the piano?” He rolled a shoulder, givingly, into me. “What a fucking poofter!”
That kid was made for italics.
* * *
—
It went on like that for weeks, maybe a month, and always a little bit further. The shoulder became an elbow, the elbow a punch in the balls (although not nearly as lethal as old Bread Rolls), which soon became standard favorites—nipple cripples in the boys’ toilets, here and there a headlock; choker holds in the hall.
In so many ways, looking back, it was just the spoils of childhood, to be twisted and rightfully ruled. It’s not unlike that dust in the sun, being tumbled through the room.
But that didn’t mean I enjoyed it.
Or even more, that I wouldn’t react.
For me, like so many in that situation, I didn’t face the problem directly, or at least I didn’t yet. No, that would have been pure stupidity, so I fought back where I could.
In short I blamed Penelope.
I railed against the piano.
* * *
—
Of course, there are problems and there are problems, and my problem now was this:
Next to Penelope, Jimmy Hartnell was a Goddamn softy.
Even if she could never quite tame us at the piano, she always made us practice. She clung to an edge of Europe, or a city, at least, in the East. By then there was even a mantra she had (and by God we had it too):
“You can quit if you want by high school.”
But that didn’t help me now.
We were halfway through first term, which meant most of the year to survive.
* * *
—
My attempts had started lamely:
Going to the toilet midpractice.
Arriving late.
Playing poorly on purpose.
Soon I was outright defying her; not playing certain pieces, and then not playing at all. She had all the patience in the world for those troubled and troublesome Hyperno kids, but they hadn’t prepared her for this.
At first she tried talking to me; she’d say, “What’s gotten into you lately?” and “Come on, Matthew, you’re better than that.”
Of course I told her nothing.
I had a bruise in the middle of my back.
For a good week or so, we sat, me on the right, Penny on the left, and I’d look at the language of music; the quavers, the rhythm of crotchets. I remember the look on my dad’s face, too, when he came in from the torture chamber, and found us both at war.
“Again?” he’d say.
“Again,” she’d say, and looked not at him, but ahead.
“You want a coffee?”
“No thanks.”
“Some tea?”
“No.”
She sat with a face like a statue.
* * *
—
There were words now and then, in clenches, and most of them coming from me. When Penelope spoke, it was calmly.
“You don’t want to play?” she’d say. “Okay. We’ll sit here.” Her stillness became infuriating. “We’ll sit here each day till you break.”
“But I won’t break.”
“You will.”
Now I look back and see me there, at the written-on keys of the piano. Messy dark hair and gangly, eyes gleaming—and they were definitely a sort of color back then, they were blue and pale like his. I see me taut and miserable, as I assure her again, “I won’t.”
“The boredom,” she countered, “will beat you—it’ll be easier to play than not.”
“That’s what you think.”
“Sorry?” She hadn’t heard me. “What did you say?”
“I said,” I said, and turned to her, “that’s what you fucking think.”
And she stood.
She wanted to explode beside me, but she’d channeled him so well by then, and gave nothing, not a spark, away. She sat back down and watched me. “Okay,” she said, “we’ll stay then. We’ll stay here and we’ll wait.”
“I hate the piano,” I whispered. “I hate the piano and I hate you.”
It was Michael Dunbar who heard me.
He was over on the couch, and now he became America, he entered the war with force; he leapt across the lounge room, and dragged me out the back, and he could have been Jimmy Hartnell, pushing me past the clothesline, and hauling me under its pegs. There were great big shrugs of breaths of him; my hands against the fence.
“Don’t you—ever—talk to your mum like that,” as he pushed me, harder, again.
Do it, I thought. Hit me.
But Penny was near at arms.
She looked at me, she studied me.
“Hey,” she said, “hey, Matthew?”
I looked back, I couldn’t help myself.
The weapon of unexpectedness:
“Get up and get back in there—we’ve got ten fucking minutes left.”
* * *
—
Inside again, I was wrong.
I knew it was wrong to admit it—to buckle—but I did.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
She was staring straight ahead.
“You know. Fucking.”
Still, she stared forward, that music-language, unblinking. “And?”
“Saying I hate you.”
She made the slightest of moves toward me.
A move with no movement at all.
“You can swear all day, and hate me all day, if only you would play.”
* * *
—
But I didn’t play, not that night, or the next.
I didn’t play the piano for weeks, then months, and if only Jimmy Hartnell could have seen. If only he knew the pains I was going to, to free myself from him:
Damn her in those slim-cut jeans, and the smoothness of her feet; and damn the sound of her breathing. Damn those murmurs in the kitchen—with Michael, my father, who backed her to the hilt—and while we’re at it, damn him too, that groveler, and his sticking up for Penelope. About the only thing he did right in that period was giving Rory and Henry a clip on the ear when they refused it, too. It was my war, not theirs, not yet. And they could come up with their own shit, of which, believe me, they were capable.
No, for me, those months were endless.
The days shortened into winter, then lengthened into spring, and still Jimmy Hartnell went for me; he never got bored or impatient. He nippled me in those toilets, and his punches bruised my groin; he was good at boxing’s low blows, all right, as both he and
Penelope waited; I was there to be pushed, and broken.
How I wanted her to erupt!
How I wanted her to slap her thigh, or tear at her shampooed hair.
But no, oh no, she did him justice this time, that monument of communist silence. She’d even changed the rules on me—the practice hours were extended. She would wait in the chair beside me, and my father would bring her coffee, and toast with jam, and tea. He’d bring her biscuits, and fruit, and chocolates. The lessons were journeys of backache.
One night, we sat till midnight, and this was the night it came. My brothers were all in bed, and as always, she waited me out; Penelope was still upright when I stood and staggered to the couch.
“Hey,” she said, “that’s cheating—it’s piano or off to bed,” and it was then I made myself known; I crumbled and felt the mistake.
Disgruntled, I got up; I walked past her, into the hall, unbuttoning my shirt, and she saw what lay within—for there, on the right side of my chest, were the marks and signature fingerprints of a ginger-fringed schoolboy nemesis.
Quickly, she slung out an arm.
Her slender and delicate fingers.
She’d stopped me beside the instrument.
“What,” said Penelope, “is that?”
* * *
—
As I’ve told you before, our parents back then, they were certainly something else.
Did I hate them for the piano?
Of course I did.
Did I love them for what they did next?
Bet your house, your car, and your hands on it.
Because next came moments like this.
* * *
—
I remember sitting in the kitchen, in the river mouth of light.
I sat and spoke down all of it, and they listened intently, in silence. Even Jimmy Hartnell’s boxing prowess, there was first only taking it in.
“Poofters,” said Penelope, eventually. “Don’t you know that’s bloody stupid—and wrong, and…” She was searching, it seemed, for more—its greatest crime of all. “Unimaginative?”