by Markus Zusak
Me, I had to be honest. “It’s the nipple cripples that really hurt….”
She looked down into her tea. “Why didn’t you ever tell us?”
But my dad was a clear-eyed genius.
“He’s a boy,” he said, and he winked at me, and everything would be okay. “Am I right, or am I right?”
And Penelope understood.
She admonished herself, and quickly.
“Of course,” she whispered, “like them…”
The boys from Hyperno High.
* * *
—
In the end, it was decided in the time she drank her tea. There was the abject knowledge of only one way to help me, and it wasn’t them going to the school. It wasn’t seeking protection.
Michael said okay.
A quiet declaration.
He went on to say there was nothing that could be done but to mix it up with Jimmy Hartnell, and put the matter to rest. It was mostly just a monologue, and Penelope agreed. At one point she almost laughed.
Was she proud of him and his speech?
Was she happy for what I would go through?
No.
Looking back, I think it was more just a sign of life—to picture fronting the scary bits, which, of course, was the easiest part:
Imagining was one thing.
Actually doing it felt almost impossible.
Even when Michael finished, and asked, “What do you think?” she’d sighed, but was mostly relieved. There was nothing here to be joking about, but joking was what she did.
“Well, if fighting that kid will get him to the piano again, I guess that’s all there is.” She was embarrassed, but also impressed; I was completely, utterly dismayed.
My parents, who were there to protect me, and raise me the right way, were sending me, without a moment’s more hesitation, into imminent schoolyard defeat. I was torn between love and hatred for them, but now I just see it was training.
After all, Penelope would die.
Michael would leave.
And I, of course, would stay.
Before any of that could happen, though, he would teach me and train me for Hartnell.
This was going to be great.
Next morning, both Henry and Clay woke up swollen.
One of them would go to school, all bashed and quiet and bruised, and one would work with me, all bashed and quiet and bruised. He’d start the wait for Saturday.
This time, though, it was different:
The wait to see her race.
* * *
—
There was much to come that initial day, due mostly to Claudia Kirkby. But first Clay met with Achilles.
I was working close to home, so we could leave a little later, and Clay went out to the yard. The sunshine bathed the animals, but beat Clay up in the face. Soon it would soothe the soreness.
First he patted Rosy, until she lapped the grass.
The mule smiled below the clothesline.
He watched him, he said, You’re back.
Clay stroked him on the mane.
I’m back…but not for long.
He bent down, he checked the mule’s feet, and Henry came calling out to him.
“Hooves all good?”
“All good.”
“He speaks! I should get myself down to the newsagent’s!”
Clay even gave him more, looking up from the front right hoof. “Hey, Henry—one to six.”
Henry grinned. “You bet.”
* * *
—
As for Claudia Kirkby, at lunch, Clay and I were sitting in a house, amongst the delivery of flooring. When I stood to wash my hands, my phone rang and I got Clay to answer; it was the teacher who doubled as counselor. To her surprise at Clay being home, he told her it was only temporary. As for the point of the phone call, she’d seen Henry, she said, and wondered if all was okay.
“At home?” Clay asked.
“Well…yes.”
Clay looked over and half smiled. “No, no one roughed Henry up at home. No one here would ever do anything like that.”
I had to walk across. “Give me the Goddamn phone.”
He did it.
“Ms. Kirkby?…Okay, Claudia, no, it’s all okay, he just had a small problem in the neighborhood. You know how stupid boys can be.”
“Oh, yes.”
For a few minutes, we talked, and her voice was calm—quiet but sure—and I imagined her through the phone. Was she wearing her dark skirt and cream shirt? And why did I imagine her calves? When I was about to hang up, Clay made me wait, to tell her he’d brought back the books she’d lent him.
“Does he want new ones?”
He’d heard her, and thought, then nodded.
“Which one did he like the most?”
He said, “The Battle of East Fifteenth Street.”
“That’s a good one.”
“I liked the old chess player in it.” A touch louder this time. “Billy Wintergreen.”
“Oh, he’s so good,” said Claudia Kirkby; I was standing, caught in the middle.
“Are you two quite all right?” I asked (not unlike between Henry and Rory, the night when Clay had come home), and she smiled inside the phone line.
“Come and get the books tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll be here for a while, after work.” On Fridays the staff stayed for drinks.
When I hung up, he was weirdly smiling.
“Stop that stupid grin.”
“What?” he asked.
“Don’t what me—just grab that Goddamn end.”
We carried floorboards up the stairs.
* * *
—
Next afternoon, I sat in the car when Clay went into the schoolyard.
“You’re not coming?”
She was down by the side of the car park.
She held her hand up, high in the light, and they made the exchange of books; she said, “God, what happened to you?”
“It’s okay, Ms. Kirkby, it had to be done.”
“You Dunbars, you surprise me every time.” Now she noticed the car. “Hi, Matthew!” Damn it, I had to get out. This time I took note of the titles:
The Hay-Maker.
The See-Sawer.
(Both by the same author.)
Sonnyboy and Chief.
As for Claudia Kirkby, she shook my hand and her arms looked warm, as evening flooded the trees. She asked how everything was, and was it good having Clay back home again, and of course I said of course, but he wouldn’t be home for long.
Just before we left, she lasted Clay a look.
She thought, decided, and reached.
“Here,” she said, “give me one of those books.”
On a slip of paper, she wrote her phone number and a message, then placed it in Sonnyboy and Chief:
In case of an emergency
(like you keep running out of books)
ck
And she had been wearing that suit, just like I’d hoped, and there was that sunspot center-cheek.
Her hair was brown and shoulder-length.
I died as we drove away.
* * *
—
On Saturday the moment came, and all five of us went to Royal Hennessey, because word had gotten around; McAndrew had a gun new apprentice, and she was the girl from 11 Archer Street.
The track had two different grandstands:
The members and the muck.
In the members there was class, or at least pretend-class, and stale champagne. There were men in suits, women in hats, and some that weren’t even hats at all. As Tommy had stopped and asked: what were those strange things, anyway?
* * *
—
Together, we walked to the muck—the paint-flaked public grandstand—with its punters and grinners, winners and losers, and most of them fat and fashionless. They were beer and clouds and five-dollar notes, and mouthfuls of meat and smoke.
In between, of course, was the mounting yard, where horses were led by grooms, doing slow, deliberate laps. Jockeys stood with trainers. Trainers stood with owners. There was color and chestnut. Saddles and black. Stirrups. Instructions. Much nodding.
* * *
—
At one point, Clay saw Carey’s father (known for a time as Trackwork Ted), and he was tall for an ex-jockey, short for a man, as Carey once had told him. He was wearing a suit, he leaned on the fence, with the heft of his infamous hands.
After a minute or so, his wife appeared too, in a pale green dress, and ginger-blond hair that flowed but was cut with control: the formidable Catherine Novac. She bounced a matching purse at her side, uneasy, part angry and quiet. At one point she put the purse in her mouth, and it was something a bit like a sandwich bite. You could tell she hated race days.
* * *
—
We walked up and sat at the back of the grandstand, on broken seats with water stains. The sky was dark, but no rain. We pooled our money, Rory put it on, and we watched her in the mounting yard. She was standing with old McAndrew, who said nothing at first, just staring. A broomstick of a man, his arms and legs were like clock hands. When he turned away, and Clay caught his eyes, and they were crisp and clean, blue-grey.
He recalled something McAndrew had said once, not only in Clay’s earshot, but by his face. Something about time and work and cutting out the dead wood. He’d somehow come to like it.
Of course, Clay smiled when he saw her.
McAndrew called her closer.
When he gave her the orders, it was seven or eight short syllables, no less than that, and no more.
Carey Novac nodded.
In one movement she strode at the horse and climbed aboard.
She trotted him out the gate.
In the past, we couldn’t know.
An oncoming world was coming.
While I began the task of taking on Jimmy Hartnell, our mother would soon start dying.
For Penelope, it was so innocuous.
We traced it back to this:
I was twelve, and in training, and Rory was ten, Henry nine, Clay was eight, and Tommy five, and our mother’s time had shown itself.
It was Sunday morning, late September.
Michael Dunbar woke to the sound of TV. Clay was watching cartoons: Rocky Reuben—Space Dog. It was just past six-fifteen.
“Clay?”
Nothing. His eyes were wide with screen.
This time he whispered more harshly—“Clay!”—and now the boy looked over. “Could you turn that thing down a bit?”
“Oh—sorry. Okay.”
By the time he’d adjusted it, Michael had woken up an extra notch, so he went there and sat with him, and when Clay asked for a story, he spoke of Moon and snake and Featherton, and didn’t even contemplate skipping bits. Clay always knew if he missed something, and fixing it would only take longer.
When he was done they sat and watched, his arm slung round Clay’s shoulders. Clay stared at the bright-blond dog; Michael dozed but soon awoke.
“Here,” he said, “it’s the end.” He pointed at the TV. “They’re shooting him back to Mars.”
A voice came quietly between them. “It’s Neptune, idiot.”
Clay and Michael Dunbar, they grinned and turned, to the woman behind, in the hallway. She was in her oldest pajamas. She said, “Don’t you remember anything?”
On that particular morning, the milk was off, so Penny made pancakes, and when the rest of us came in, we argued, spilt orange juice and laid blame. Penny cleaned up and called over: “You spilt the bloody orange chooce again!” and we laughed and none of us knew:
So she dropped an egg between Rory’s toes.
So she lost control of a plate.
What could that mean, if anything?
But looking back now, it meant plenty.
She’d started leaving us that morning, and death was moving in:
He was perched there on a curtain rod.
Dangling in the sun.
Later, he was leaning, close but casual, an arm draped over the fridge; if he was minding the beer he was doing a bloody good job.
* * *
—
On the other side, on the incoming fight with Hartnell, it was just as I’d thought, it was great. In the lead-up to that seemingly ordinary Sunday, we’d bought two pairs of boxing gloves.
We punched, we circled.
We weaved.
I lived in those giant red gloves back then, like cabins strapped to my wrists.
“He’s gonna kill me,” I said, but my dad, he wouldn’t allow it. He was truly just my dad back then, and maybe that’s all I can say; it’s the best thing I can tell you.
It was moments like those he’d stop.
He put his boxing-gloved hand on my neck.
“Well.” He thought, and talked to me quietly. “Then you’ve gotta start thinking like this. You have to make up your mind.” The encouragement came so easily to him, as he touched the back of my head. It was all so very tender, very sweet. A lot of love beside me. “He can kill you all he wants to—but you’re not going to die.”
He was good at before-the-beginnings.
* * *
—
For Penny, it kept coming on, and for us it was vaguely noticeable. The woman we’d known our whole short lives—who had barely had a cold—was sometimes looking shaky. But as fast, she’d ward it off.
There were moments of apparent wooziness.
Or sometimes a distant cough.
There was a sleepiness midmorning, but she worked so long and hard—and that, we’d thought, explained it. Who were we to say that it wasn’t the working at Hyperno—the proximity of germs and kids. She was always up late with her marking.
She was only in need of rest.
* * *
—
At the same time, you can imagine how gloriously we trained:
We fought in the yard, we fought on the porch.
We fought beneath the clothesline, sometimes in the house—everywhere we could—and first it was Dad and me, but then everyone had a crack. Even Tommy. Even Penelope. Her blond was slightly greying.
“Watch out for her,” said our dad one day, “she’s got a frightening overhand left.”
As for Rory and Henry, they’d never gotten on so well, as they rounded, fought, and clapped each other, clashing arms and forearms. Rory even apologized once, and willingly, too—a miracle—when he’d hit him that little too low.
In the meantime, at school, I took it best I could—and at home we did defense work (“Keep your hands up, watch your footwork”) and attack (“Make that jab all day”) till it was close to now-or-never.
On the night before it happened, when I was finally to face Jimmy Hartnell, my dad came into my bedroom, which I shared with Clay and Tommy. The other two were asleep at the bottom two slots of the triple bunk, and I lay awake on top. As most kids do, I closed my eyes when he came in, and he gently shook me and spoke:
“Hey, Matthew, a bit more training?”
I didn’t need any talking into it.
The difference was, when I reached for the gloves, he told me I wouldn’t need them.
“What?” I whispered. “Bare fists?”
“They’ll be bare when the moment comes,” he said, but now he spoke quite slowly. “I’ve been for a visit to the library.”
I followed him to the lounge room, where he pointed to an old video cassette, and an old video machine (a black-and-silver ancient thing), and told me t
o get it working. As it turned out, he actually bought the machine with some scratched-together pay; the start of Christmas savings. Even as I looked down at the video’s name, The Last Great Famous Pugilists, I could feel my father smiling.
“Pretty good, huh?”
I watched it swallow the tape. “Pretty good.”
“Now just press play,” and soon we sat in silence as boxers paraded the screen; they arrived like presidents of men. Some were in black-and-white, from Joe Louis to Johnny Famechon, Lionel Rose to Sugar Ray. Then color and Smokin’ Joe. Jeff Harding, Dennis Andries. Technicolor Roberto Durán. The ropes flexed under their weight. In so many of the fights, the boxers went down, but climbed back up to their feet. Such brave and desperate weaving.
Near the end I looked at him.
The glint in my father’s eye.
He’d turned the sound right down.
He held my face, but calmly.
He held my jaws in his hands.
For a moment I thought he might echo the screen, saying something like the commentary. But all he did was hold me like that, my face in his hands in the darkness.
“I gotta give it to you, kid—you’ve got heart.”
The before-the-beginning of that one.
* * *
—
Leading up to that moment, there was a day for Penny Dunbar, a morning, with a sweetheart named Jodie Etchells. She was one of her favorite kids, held back because of dyslexia, and she worked with her twice a week. She had hurt eyes, tall bones, and a big long braid down her back.
That morning, they were reading with the metronome—the old familiar trick—when Penny got up for a thesaurus. Next, she was shaken awake.
“Miss,” said Jodie Etchells, “Miss,” and “Miss!”
Penny came to, she looked in her face, and the book a few meters away. Poor young Jodie Etchells. She seemed near to collapsing herself.