Bridge of Clay

by Markus Zusak

  “You know.” But now I was back onto Holland. It was afternoon and I’d come home from work early to be well-dressed and clean-shaven, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t tired. “If you don’t expel him this time, I’m going to jump over this desk, rip off that principal’s badge, pin it on me, and expel the bastard myself!”

  Rory was so excited he almost clapped.

  Claudia Kirkby somberly nodded.

  The principal felt for the badge. “Well, I’m, um, not so sure—”

  “Do it!” cried Rory.

  And to everyone’s surprise, she did.

  She methodically did the paperwork, and suggested surrounding schools, but I said we didn’t need them, he was going to work, and we shook hands and that was it; we left them both behind us.

  Halfway to the car park, I ran back. Was it for us, or Claudia Kirkby? I knocked on the door, I reentered the room, and they were both inside, still talking.

  I said, “Ms. Kirkby, Mrs. Holland, I apologize. I’m sorry for your trouble, and just—thanks.” It was crazy, but I started sweating. It was the truly sympathetic look on her face, I think, and the suit, and the gold-colored earrings. The small hoops that circled a glint there. “And also—and sorry to ask this now, but I’ve always been caught up with Rory—so I’ve never asked how Henry and Clay are doing.”

  Mrs. Holland deferred to Ms. Kirkby.

  “They’re doing fine, Matthew.” She’d stood up. “They’re good kids,” and she smiled and didn’t wink.

  “Believe it or not,” and I nodded to the doorway, “so’s that one out there.”

  “I know.”

  I know.

  She said I know, and it stayed with me a long time, but it started outside at the wall. For a while I hoped she’d come out, as I leaned, half bruising my shoulder blades, but there was only the voice of Rory.

  “Oi,” he said, “you coming?”

  At the car he asked, “Can I drive?”

  I said, “Don’t even Goddamn think about it.”

  He got a job by the end of the week.

  * * *

  —

  And so winter turned into spring.

  Clay’s times were still much slower, and it happened, a Sunday morning.

  Since Rory got his job as a panel beater, he worked hard at the trade of drinking. He started taking up and breaking up with girls. There were names and observations; one I remember was Pam, and Pam was blond hair and bad breath.

  “Shit,” said Henry, “did you tell her that?”

  “Yeah,” said Rory, “she slapped me. Then dumped me and asked for a mint. Not necessarily in that order.”

  He would stumble back home in the mornings—and the Sunday was mid-October. As Clay and I headed for Bernborough, Rory was staggering in.

  “Jesus, look at the state of you.”

  “Yeah, good one, Matthew, thanks. Where are you two bastards going?”

  Typical Rory:

  In jeans and a beer-soaked jacket, he had no problems staying with us—and Bernborough was typical, too.

  The sunrise looted the grandstand.

  We did the first 400 together.

  I told Clay, “Eric Liddell.”

  Rory grinned.

  It was more like a dirty smirk.

  On the second lap he entered the jungle.

  He had to take a leak.

  By the fourth he’d gone to sleep.

  Before the last 400, though, Rory seemed nearer to sober. He looked at Clay, he looked at me. He shook his head in contempt.

  On the fiery hue of the track, I said, “What’s the matter with you?”

  Again, that smirky smile.

  “You’re wrong,” he said, and he glanced at Clay, but the assault was aimed at me. “Matthew,” he said, “you’re kidding, aren’t you? You must know why it’s not happening.” He looked ready to come and shake me. “Come on, Matthew, think. All that nice romantic shit. He won State—so fucking what? He couldn’t care any less.”

  But how could this be happening?

  How could Rory be knowing such perfect things, and altering Dunbar history?

  “Look at him!” he said.

  I looked.

  “He doesn’t want this—this…goodness.” To Clay now. “Do you want it, kid?”

  And Clay had shaken his head.

  And Rory didn’t relent.

  He shoved a hand right into my heart. “He needs to feel it here.” There was suddenly such gravity, such pain in him, and it came like the force of a piano. The quietest words were the worst. “He needs to hurt nearly enough to kill him,” he said, “because that’s how we Goddamn live.”

  I worked to make an argument.

  Not a single thought came out.

  “If you can’t do it, I’ll do it for you.” He breathed stiffly, strugglingly, inwards. “You don’t need to be running with him, Matthew,” and he looked at the boy crouched by me, at the fire inside his eyes. “You have to try and stop him.”

  * * *

  —

  That evening Clay had told me.

  I was watching Alien in the lounge room.

  (Talk about suitably grim!)

  He said he was grateful and sorry—and I spoke toward the TV. A smile to keep it together.

  “At least I can have a rest now—my legs and my back are killing me.”

  He placed a look down onto my shoulder.

  I’d lied; we pretended to believe it.

  * * *

  —

  To the training itself, it was genius:

  There were three boys at the 100 mark.

  Two at the 200.

  Then Rory, the final stretch.

  It wasn’t hard to find boys who would hurt him, either; he’d come home with groups of bruises, or a burn down the side of his face. They punished him till he was smiling—and that was when training finished.

  * * *

  —

  One night we were in the kitchen.

  Clay washed and I dried the plates.

  “Hey, Matthew,” he said quite quietly. “I’m running tomorrow, at Bernborough—no one stopping me. I’m trying for the time I won State.”

  And me, I didn’t look at him, but I couldn’t look somehow away.

  “I’m wondering,” he said, “if you don’t mind,” and the look on his face said everything. “I thought maybe you’d tape my feet.”

  * * *

  —

  At Bernborough, next morning, I watched.

  I sat in the flames of the grandstand.

  I’d taped him my very best.

  I was somewhere between knowing it was the last time I’d ever do it, and the truth it was also one extra. I could watch in a different way now, too; I saw him run just to see him run. Like Liddell and Budd put together.

  As for the time, he broke his best by more than a second, on a track that lay sick and dying. When he crossed the line, Rory was smiling, hands in pockets; Henry shouted the numbers. Tommy ran over with Rosy. All of them hugged and carried him.

  “Hey, Matthew!” Henry called. “New State record!”

  Rory’s hair was wild and rusty.

  His eyes the best metal for years.

  And me, I walked out of the grandstand, and shook Clay’s, then Rory’s hand. I said, “Look at the state of you,” and I meant it, every word. “Best run I’ve ever seen.”

  After that he’d crouched and waited, on the track just before the line—so close he could smell the paint. In well past twelve months’ time, he’d be back here training with Henry, and the boys and chalk and bets.

  For a while there was an eerie quiet, as dawn broke down into day.

  On the Tartan, he remained, he felt for it:

  The peg, intact, within.


  Soon he would stand, soon he would walk, to a clear-eyed sky in front of him.

  Beyond the bike combination, there were two front doors to negotiate, and the first was Ennis McAndrew’s, just outside the racing quarter.

  The house was one of the bigger ones.

  It was old and beautiful, tin-roofed.

  A giant wooden veranda.

  Clay did laps around the block.

  There were camellias in all the front yards around there, a few enormous magnolias. Many old-fashioned letterboxes. Rory would certainly have approved.

  He didn’t count how many times he walked that block—walking just like Penny had once, like Michael had—to a certain front door in the night.

  This door was a heavy red one.

  At times he could see the brushstrokes.

  Those other front doors got glorious.

  Clay knew that his one wouldn’t.

  * * *

  —

  Then the second front door:

  Diagonally down on Archer Street.

  Ted and Catherine Novac.

  He watched it from the porch, and weeks were molded from days, as Clay came to work with me. There was no return to Bernborough yet, no cemetery, no roof. Certainly not The Surrounds. He dragged the guilt behind him.

  At one point I buckled; I asked if he’d return to the bridge, and Clay could only shrug.

  I know—I’d beaten him up once, for leaving.

  But it was clear he had to finish.

  No one could live like this.

  * * *

  —

  Finally, he did it, he traversed the McAndrew steps.

  An old lady answered the door.

  She had permed and colored hair—and me, I disagree with him, for this door, it did get glorious, and it was all in the showing up for it.

  “Can I help you?”

  And Clay, at his very worst, and very best, said, “I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs. McAndrew, but if you don’t mind, is there a chance I could talk to your husband? My name’s Clay Dunbar.”

  The old man in the house knew the name.

  * * *

  —

  At the Novacs’ place, they knew him, too, but as the boy they’d seen on the roof.

  “Come in,” they said, and they were both so maddeningly sweet to him; so kind to him it hurt. They made tea, and Ted shook his hand, and asked how he was. And Catherine Novac smiled, and it was a smile to keep from dying, or crying, or maybe both; he couldn’t quite decide.

  Either way, when he told them, he made sure not to look where she’d sat that day, when they’d listened to the race down south—when the big bay horse had failed. His tea was cold and untouched.

  He told them what Saturday night meant.

  The mattress, the plastic sheet.

  He told them of Matador in the fifth.

  He said he loved her from the very first time she’d talked to him, and it was his fault, it was all his fault. Clay cracked, but didn’t break, because he deserved no tears or sympathy. “The night before she fell,” he said, “we met there, we were naked there, and—”

  He stopped because Catherine Novac—in a shift of ginger-blondness—had stood and she’d walked toward him. She lifted him gently out of his chair and hugged him hard, so hard, and she patted his short flat hair, and it was so damn nice it hurt.

  She said, “You came to us, you came.”

  See, for Ted and Catherine Novac, there was no incrimination, at least not for this poor boy.

  It was they who brought her to the city.

  It was they who knew the risk.

  * * *

  —

  Then there was McAndrew.

  Picture frames with horses.

  Picture frames with jockeys.

  The light inside was orange.

  “I know you,” he said, and the man himself looked smaller now, like a broken twig in a lounge chair. In the very next chapter you’ll see it back there—what Ennis McAndrew once explained. “You’re the dead wood I told her to cut out.” His hair was yellow-white. He wore glasses. A pen in his pocket. The eyes gleamed, but not very happily. “I guess you’ve come to blame me, have you?”

  Clay sat on the lounge chair opposite.

  He watched him, stiffly straight.

  “No, sir, I came to tell you you were right,” and McAndrew was caught by surprise.

  He looked keenly across, and said, “What?”

  “Sir, I—”

  “Call me Ennis, for Christ’s sake, and speak up.”

  “Okay, well…”

  “I said speak up.”

  Clay swallowed. “It wasn’t your fault, it was mine.”

  He didn’t tell him what he told the Novacs, but made sure McAndrew saw. “She never could quite get rid of me, you know, and that was how it happened. She must have been overtired, or couldn’t concentrate—”

  McAndrew slowly nodded. “She lost herself, in the saddle.”

  “Yes. I think she did.”

  “You were out with her the previous night.”

  “Yes,” Clay said, and he left.

  He left, but at the bottom of the steps, both Ennis and his wife came out, and the old man shouted down to him.

  “Hey! Clay Dunbar!”

  Clay turned.

  “You have no idea what I’ve seen jockeys get up to over the years, and they did it”—he was suddenly so empathetic—“for things worth much less than you.” He even came down the steps; he met him at the gate. He said, “Listen to me, son.” For the first time, Clay noticed a silver tooth in McAndrew’s mouth, deep and leaning on the right. “I can’t imagine what it took to come and tell me that.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Come back in, won’t you?”

  “I’d better get home.”

  “Okay, but if there’s ever anything—anything—I can do for you, let me know.”

  “Mr. McAndrew?”

  Now the old man stopped, and the paper was under his arm. He raised his head just a touch.

  Clay nearly asked just how good Carey was, or might have been, but knew that neither of them could bear it—so he tried for something else. “Could you carry on training?” he asked. “It wouldn’t be right if you didn’t. It wasn’t your—”

  And Ennis McAndrew propped, readjusted the paper, and walked back up the path. He said to himself, “Clay Dunbar,” but I wish he’d been more obvious.

  He should have said something of Phar Lap.

  (In waters so soon to come.)

  * * *

  —

  At Ted and Catherine Novac’s house, the last could only be finding them:

  The lighter, the box and Clay’s letter.

  They didn’t know because they hadn’t touched her bed yet, and it lay on the floor, beneath.

  Matador in the fifth.

  Carey Novac in the eighth.

  Kingston Town can’t win.

  Ted touched the words.

  For Clay, though, what puzzled him most, and ultimately gave him something, was the second of two more items now that lay inside the box. The first was the photo his father had sent, of the boy on top of the bridge—but the second he’d never given her; it was something she’d actually stolen, and he would never know exactly when.

  It was pale but green and elongated.

  She’d been here, 18 Archer Street.

  She’d stolen a Goddamn peg.

  For Ted and Catherine Novac, the choice would make itself. If she wasn’t apprenticed to McAndrew, it would only be someone else; it might as well be the best.

  When they told her, there was kitchen and coffee cups.

  The clock ticked loudly behind them.

  The girl stared down and smi
led.

  She was pretty much sixteen, early December, when she stood on a lawn in the city, in the racing quarter, with the toaster plug at her feet. She stopped, looked harder, and spoke.

  “Look,” she said, “up there….”

  * * *

  —

  The next time, of course, was evening, when she came across the road.

  “And? You don’t want to know my name?”

  The third was a Tuesday, at dawn.

  Her apprenticeship didn’t start till the beginning of next year, but she was already running with the Tri-Colors boys, weeks earlier than instructed by McAndrew.

  “Jockeys and boxers,” he was known to say, “they’re almost the bloody same.” Both had obsessions with weight. Both had to fight to survive; and there was danger, and death, close at hand.

  That Tuesday, mid-December, she was running with those lake-necked boxers. Her hair was out—she almost always wore it out—and she fought to hold ground behind them. They came down Poseidon Road. There were the usual fumes, of baking bread and metalworks, and at the corner of Nightmarch Avenue, it was Clay who first saw her. At that time he trained alone. He’d quit the athletics club altogether. She was in shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. When she looked up, she saw him see her.

  Her T-shirt was faded blue.

  Her shorts were cut from jeans.

  For a moment she turned and watched him.

  “Hey, boy!” called one of the boxers.

  “Hey, boys,” but quiet, to Carey.

  * * *

  —

  The next time he was on the roof, it was warm and close to darkness, and he climbed back down to meet her; she was standing alone on the footpath.

  “Hey, Carey.”

  “Hi, Clay Dunbar.”

  The air twitched.

  “You know my last name?”

  Again, he noted the teeth of her; the not-quite-straight and sea glass.

  “Oh yeah, people know you Dunbar boys, you know.” She almost laughed. “Is it true you’re harboring a mule?”

  “Harboring?”