by Markus Zusak
I remember we’d watched from the corridor, and their uniforms green and white; those overgrown boys, the perfumed girls, and covered-up cigarette. Just before they left, it was the girl I mentioned earlier, the lovely Jodie Etchells, who pulled out a strange-looking present.
“Here, Miss,” she said, but she unwrapped it herself; Penny’s hands were inside the blankets.
And soon, our mother’s lips.
They cracked, so dry and smiley:
They’d brought her in the metronome, and it was one of the boys who said it. I think his name was Carlos.
“Breathe in time with this, Miss.”
* * *
—
It was evenings at home were the best, though.
They were blond and black hair greying.
If they weren’t asleep on the couch, they were in the kitchen playing Scrabble, or punishing each other at Monopoly. Or sometimes they’d actually be awake on the couch, watching movies into the night.
For Clay, there were clearer standout moments, and they came on Friday nights. One was the end of a movie they’d watched, as the credits rolled up the screen; I think it was Good Bye, Lenin!
Both Clay and I were in the hallway, after hearing the rise in volume.
We saw the lounge room, then we saw them:
Hard-held in front of the TV.
They were standing, they were dancing, but slowly—barely—and her hair hung on to its yellowness. She looked so weak and brittle; a woman all arms and shins. Their bodies were pressed together, and soon our father saw us. He signaled a silent hello.
He even mouthed the words—
Have a look at this gorgeous girl!
And I guess I have to admit it:
Through the tired and ache, in the joy of that look, Michael Dunbar was truly handsome back then, and not too bad a dancer.
* * *
—
Then the next, it was out front, on the steps, and the mist of coolest winter.
At Hyperno a few days earlier, Penelope was back as a substitute, and had confiscated cigarettes. To be honest she didn’t really think it her place—to tell these kids not to smoke. Whenever she took such things from them, she said to come back later. Was that plain irresponsible? Or showing them proper respect? No wonder they all came to love her.
In any case, whether the student had been embarrassed, or ashamed, no one came back for those Winfield Blues, and Penny found them in the evening. They were crushed at the bottom of her handbag. As she took out her wallet and keys before bed, she held the cigarettes.
“And what the hell is this?”
Michael had promptly caught her.
And call them impulsive, or ridiculous, but I love them so much for this one. The sickness was gone away in that time, and they went out front to the porch. They smoked, they coughed and woke him.
On the way in, a few minutes later, Penny went to throw them out, but for some reason Michael stopped her. He said, “How about we just hide them?” A conspiratorial wink. “You never know when we might need one again—it can be our little secret.”
But a boy was in on it, too.
See, even when they lifted the piano lid, and deposited the packet beneath, they still had no idea; he watched them from the hallway, and one thing, at that point, was clear:
Our parents might have danced well.
But their smoking was amateur at best.
Clay was tempted to stay longer, but couldn’t.
The hardest was knowing he’d miss Carey’s next race meeting, out at Warwick Farm, but again, she expected him to go. When she left him at The Surrounds that Saturday night, she’d said, “See you when you’re here, Clay. I’ll be here, too, I promise.”
He watched her down the laneway.
* * *
—
Leaving us was the same as last time.
We knew without saying anything.
But also totally different.
This time there was obviously a lot less gravity, for what needed to be done was done. We could go on.
It was Monday night when we finally got around to finishing Bachelor Party, and Clay got up to leave. His things were in the hallway. Rory looked over, appalled.
“You’re not leaving now, are you? They haven’t even put the mule in the lift yet!”
(It’s actually quite scary how similar our lives were to that movie.)
“It’s a donkey,” said Tommy.
Rory again: “I don’t care if it’s a quarter horse crossed with a Shetland bloody pony!”
Both he and Tommy laughed.
Then Henry:
“Here, Clay—put your feet up,” and as he faked his way to the kitchen, he threw him to the couch, twice—once as he’d tried to get up again. Even when he did manage to break free, Henry got him in a headlock and ran him round. “How does that feel, y’ little shit? We’re not in Crapper’s building now, are we?”
Behind them, the Bachelor Party high jinks got dumber and dumber, and as Hector streaked away, Tommy jumped on Clay’s back, and Rory called over to me.
“Oi, give us a bloody hand, huh?”
I stood in the lounge room doorway.
I leaned against the frame.
“Come on, Matthew, help us pin him down!”
Given Clay’s form as an opponent, their breath came deep from within, and finally I walked toward them.
“All right, Clay, let’s beat these bastards up.”
* * *
—
Eventually, when the struggle was over, and the movie, too, we’d driven him to Central; the one and only time.
It was Henry’s car.
He and I in the front.
The other three in back, with Rosy.
“Shit, Tommy, does that dog have to pant so bloody loud?”
At the station, all was how you’d imagine:
The coffee smell of brakes.
The overnight train.
The orange globes of light.
Clay had his sports bag, and there were no clothes in it; only the wooden box, the books of Claudia Kirkby and The Quarryman.
The train was ready to leave.
We shook hands—all of us and him.
Halfway to the last carriage, it was Rory who called out.
“Oi, Clay!”
He turned back.
“The coins, remember?”
And happily, he boarded the train.
And again, again, the mystery—how the four of us all stood watch there, with the smell of the brakes and a dog.
By the end of my first year of high school, it was apparent we were in serious trouble. There was so much air in her clothes by then; she’d be better less and less. There were times, it seemed, that were normal, or something we kind of mimicked. Pretend-normal, or normal-pretend, I’m not sure how we did it.
Maybe it was just that we all had lives, we had to get by, and that included Penelope; us boys kept being kids. We kept it all together:
There was the haircut, there was Beethoven.
There was for all of us something personal.
You know your mother’s dying when she takes you out individually.
We skip the moments like stones.
* * *
—
The others were all still in primary school (Rory, his last year), and expected still to piano, even when she was in the hospital. In later years, Henry swore she’d stayed alive just to torture them with practice, or even just to ask about it, no matter which bed she lay in—the faded sheets of home, or the other ones, the bitter ones, so perfect, bleached and white.
The problem was (and Penelope finally resigned herself to it) that she had to face the reality:
They were so much better at fighting.
As for all the questioning, it was pretty much reduced to ritual.
Mostly in the hospital, she’d ask if they’d practiced, and they lied and said they had. Often they showed up and their lips were cut and their knuckles split, and Penny was damp and jaundiced-looking, but also rightly suspicious. “What on earth is going on?”
“Nothing, Mum. Really.”
“Are you practicing?”
“Practicing what?”
“You know.”
“Of course.” Henry did the talking. He motioned to his bruises. “What do you think all this is?” That smile, it swerved already.
“What do you mean?”
“Beethoven,” he said. “You know how tough that guy is.”
Her nose bled when she grinned.
* * *
—
Still, when she made it back home, she had them sit there again to prove themselves, while she frayed in the chair beside them.
“You never practiced,” she said to Rory, with half-amused disdain.
He looked down and admitted it. “You’re absolutely right.”
Once, Clay stopped, midsong.
He was butchering it anyway.
He, too, had a light shadow of navy blue below his eye, after a fight—roped in with Henry.
“Why’d you stop?” But quickly then, she softened. “A story?”
“No, not that.” He gulped and looked at the keys. “I thought—maybe you could play.”
And she did.
Minuet in G.
Perfect.
Note for note.
It had been a long time, but he kneeled and laid his head there.
Her thighs were paper-thin.
* * *
—
In that period there’d been one last memorable fight, on the way back home from school. Rory, Henry and Clay. Four other guys against them. Tommy was off to the side. A woman sprayed them with her garden hose; a good one, a good nozzle. Good pressure. “Go on!” she shouted. “Git out of it.”
“Git out of it,” repeated Henry, and he got another blast. “Hey! What the hell was that for?”
She was in a nightgown and worn-out flip-flops, at three-thirty in the afternoon. “Being smart,” and again she blasted him. “And that one’s for the blasphemy.”
“That’s a good hose you got there.”
“Thanks—now piss off.”
Clay helped him up.
Rory was out ahead, feeling at his jawline, and at home there was a note. She was back in. The dreaded white sheets. At the bottom was a smiley face, with long hair either side of it. Beneath, it said:
OKAY! YOU CAN QUIT THE PIANO!
BUT YOU’LL REGRET IT, YOU LITTLE BASTARDS!
In a way it was kind of poetry, but not in the nicest sense.
She’d taught us Mozart and Beethoven.
We’d steadily improved her swearing.
* * *
—
Soon after, she made a decision:
She would do something once with each of us. Maybe it was to give us one memory that was ours, and ours alone, but I hope she did it for herself.
In my case, it was a movie.
There was an old cinema further in the city.
They called it the Halfway Twin.
Every Wednesday night there was an older film shown there, usually from another country. On the night we went, it was Swedish. It was called My Life as a Dog.
We sat with a dozen people.
I finished the popcorn before it started.
Penny struggled hard with a Choc-Top.
I fell in love with the tomboy girl named Saga in that movie, and struggled with the pace of the subtitles.
At the end, in the dark, we stayed.
To this day, I stay for the credits.
“And?” Penelope said. “What did you make of it?”
“It was great,” I said, because it was.
“Did you fall in love with Saga?” The ice cream was dead in its plastic.
My mouth fell silent, my face felt red.
My mother was a kind of miracle, of long but breakable hair.
She took my hand and whispered.
“That’s good, I loved her, too.”
* * *
—
For Rory it was a football game, high up in the stands.
For Henry it was out to a garage sale, where he bargained and talked them down:
“A buck for that lousy yo-yo? Look at the state of my mum.”
“Henry,” she mocked him, “come on. That’s low, even for you.”
“Shit, Penny, you’re no fun,” but there was laughter, cahoots, between them. And he got it for thirty-five cents.
If I had to choose, though, I’d say it was what she did for Tommy that had the most influence on things, apart from her time with Clay. See, for Tommy, she took him to the museum; and his favorite was the hall named Wild Planet.
For hours, they walked the corridors:
An assembly line of animals.
A journey of fur and taxidermy.
There were too many to list as a favorite, but the dingo and lions ranked highly, and the weird and wonderful thylacine. In bed that night, he kept talking; he gave us facts on Tasmanian tigers. He said thylacine over and over. He said they looked more like a dog.
“A dog!” he almost shouted.
Our room was dark and quiet.
He fell asleep midsentence—and the love for those animals would lead to them; to Rosy and Hector, Telemachus, Agamemnon, and of course, to the great but mulish one. It could only all end with Achilles.
* * *
—
As for Clay, she took him many places and nowhere.
The rest of us all went out.
Michael took us to the beach.
Once we were gone, Penelope invited him; she said, “Hey, Clay, make me some tea and come out front.” But it was more a kind of warm-up.
When he got there, she was already on the porch floor, her back against the wall, and the sun was out all over her. There were pigeons on the power lines. The city was open-ended; they could hear its distant singing.
When she drank, she swallowed a reservoir, but it helped her tell the stories, and Clay had listened hard. When she asked him how old he was, he’d answered he was nine. She said, “I guess that’s old enough—to at least start knowing there’s more—” and from there, she did what she always did, she went on with paper houses, and at the end she reminded him this:
“One day I’m going to tell you, Clay, a few things no one knows, but only if you want to hear them….”
In short, the almost-everythings.
How privileged he really was.
She swept her hand through his boyish hair, and the sun was now much lower. Her tea had fallen over, and the boy had solemnly nodded.
* * *
—
By evening we were all back home, beach and sandy tired, and Penny and Clay were asleep. They looked knotted together on the couch.
A few days later, he’d almost approached her, about when the last stories might come, but was disciplined enough not to ask. Maybe in some way he knew—they would come at the near-to-the-end.
No, instead, there was our regular overrunness, as weeks were made into months, and again she was leaving for treatments.
Those singular moments were gone now.
We were used to uncomfortable news.
“Well,” she said, quite bluntly, “they’re going to take my hair—so now I think it’s your turn. We might as well beat them to it.”
Between us we formed a queue; it was the opposite of the world, as the barbers lined up to cut. You could see us all w
aiting in the toaster.
There are a few things I remember of that night—how Tommy went first, unwillingly. She got him to laugh at a joke, though, of a dog and a sheep in a bar. He was still in those damn Hawaiian shorts, and he cut so crooked it hurt.
Next went Clay, then Henry; then Rory said, “Going to the army?”
“Sure,” said Penny, “why not?”
She said, “Rory, let me see,” and she peered inside his eyes. “You’ve got the strangest eyes of all of you.” They were heavy but soft, like silver. Her hair was short and vanishing.
When it was my turn, she reached for the toaster, to look at her mirrored image. She begged me to show some mercy. “Make it neat and make it quick.”
To finish, it was our father, and he stood and didn’t shirk it; he positioned her head, nice and straight, and when he was done he slowly rubbed her; he massaged the boyish haircut, and Penny leaned forward, she enjoyed it. She couldn’t see the man behind her, and the chop-and-change of his face, or the dead blond hair at his shoes. She couldn’t ever see how broken he was, while the rest of us stood and watched them. She was in jeans, bare feet and T-shirt, and maybe that’s what finished us off.
She looked just like a Dunbar boy.
With that haircut she was one of us.
This time he didn’t wait in the trees but walked the corridor of eucalypts, and burst quietly into the light.
The ditch was still there, clean-cut and clear, but now more had been dug out, both up and down the Amahnu, to give them more room in the riverbed. The remaining debris—the dirt and sticks, the branches and rocks—had been removed or leveled out. In one place he brushed a hand across, on smoothened-over land. To his right he saw the tire tracks.
In the riverbed, he stopped again, he crouched in all its colors. He hadn’t realized before what a multitude it was; a history lesson of rocks. He smiled and said, “Hi, river.”
As for our father, he was in the house, asleep on the couch, with half a mug of coffee. Clay watched him a moment and put his bag down in the bedroom. He took out the books and the old wooden box, but left The Quarryman in the bag, well hidden.