Bridge of Clay(111)

* * *



—

At home, when we arrived, we sat in the car a long time.

We turned into our father, after Penny died.

Just sitting. Just staring.

    Even if there had been Tic Tacs or Anticols, I’m sure we wouldn’t have eaten them.

Clay thought it, over and again:

It wasn’t the game, it was me, it was me.

And credit to the rest of them, they came.

They came and sat in the car with us, and at first all they said was “Hi, Clay.” Tommy, as the youngest and greenest, tried to talk about the good things, like the day she came and met us—in waters still to come—and how she’d walked right through the house.

“Remember that, Clay?”

Clay said nothing.

“Remember when she met Achilles?”



* * *



—

This time he didn’t run anymore, he only walked the maze of suburbs; the streets and fields of the racing quarter.

He didn’t eat, and didn’t sleep, and couldn’t shake that feeling of seeing her. She was a girl at the edge of everything.

As for the rest of us, it was so clear how hard it had hit him, but we barely knew the half of it—and how could we understand? We didn’t know that they met at The Surrounds. We didn’t know about the night before, or the lighter, or Kingston Town or Matador, or Carey Novac in the eighth. Or the bed we’d failed to burn.

When our father called us up, a few nights in a row, Clay just shook his head at me. I said we’d take good care of him.



* * *



—

And the funeral?

It could only be one of those bright-lit things, even if they held it indoors.

The church was totally packed.

People came out of the woodwork, from racing identities to radio hosts. Everyone wanted to know her. So many knew her best.

No one even saw us.

    They didn’t hear his countless confessions.

We were buried down deep in the back.



* * *



—

For a long time, he couldn’t face it.

He would never go back to the bridge.

What he did was feign alrightness:

He came to work with me.

When our father called, he talked to him.

He was the perfect teenage charlatan.

In the night, he watched the house diagonally across the street, and the shadows moving within. He wondered where the lighter was. Had she left it under her bed? Was it still in the old wooden box down there, with the letter folded within?

There was no sitting on the roof, not anymore—only the front porch, and not sitting, but standing, leaning forward.



* * *



—

One evening he walked to Hennessey, the grandstands gaping casually.

A small crowd was by the stables.

They gathered at the fence.

Grooms and apprentice jockeys all bent down, and for twenty minutes, he watched them, and when they’d dispersed he came to realize; they were trying to free her bike.

Despite every internal talking-to, and the desolate void in his stomach, he found himself gently crouching, and touching the four-digit gauge—and he knew the number instantly. She’d have gone right back to the start of things, and the horse and the Cox Plate without him: Out of thirty-five races, The Spaniard won twenty-seven.

It was 3527.

The lock came out so easily.

He pushed it back in and muddled it.

The grandstands felt much closer then; both open in the darkness.





In many ways it feels ridiculous, almost trivial—to come back to 18 Archer Street, in the time before her arrival. If there’s one thing I’ve come to learn, though, it’s that if life goes on in our aftermaths, it goes on in our worlds before it.

It was a period when all was changing.

A kind of preparation.

His before the beginning of Carey.

It starts, as it must, with Achilles.



* * *



—

To be honest, I might not have been too impressed with that dubious two hundred bucks we spent, but there was one part I’ll always cherish; it was Rory at the kitchen window, the morning we’d brought him home.

As was common for a Saturday, he staggered through the hallway around eleven, then thought he was still drunk, and dreaming.

Is that?

(He shook his head.)

What the hell?

(He wrung his eyes out.)

Until finally he shouted behind him:

“Oi, Tommy, what’s goin’ on ’ere?”

“What?”

“What-a-y’ mean what, are you shitting me? There’s a donkey in the backyard!”

“He’s not a donkey, he’s a mule.”

    The query was stuck to his beer breath. “What’s the difference?”

“A donkey’s a donkey, a mule’s a cross between—”

“I don’t care if it’s a quarter horse crossed with a Shetland bloody pony!…”

Behind them, we were in stitches, till Henry eventually settled it. “Rory,” he said, “meet Achilles.”

By the end of the day he’d forgiven us—or at least enough to stay in. Or at least to stay in and complain.