Bridge of Clay(117)
The girl stared down and smiled.
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?”
“You’re not deaf, are you?”
She was giving him a hiding!
But a small one, a happy one, and one he was willing to answer.
“No.”
“You’re not harboring a mule?”
“No,” he said, “I’m not deaf—we’ve had the mule for a while. We’ve also got a border collie, a cat, a pigeon, and a goldfish.”
“A pigeon?”
He struck back. “You’re not deaf, are you? He’s called Telemachus—our animals have got the worst names you ever heard, except maybe Rosy, or Achilles. Achilles is a beautiful name.”
“Is Achilles the name of the mule?”
He nodded; the girl was closer.
She’d turned outwards, toward the suburbs.
Without thought, they both started walking.
* * *
—
When they got to the mouth of Archer Street, Clay looked at her legs in her jeans; he was a boy, after all, he noticed. He also saw the tapering at her ankles, the worn-out sandshoes—the Volleys. He was aware when she moved, of the singlet she wore, and materials he glimpsed beneath.
“It’s pretty great,” she said at the corner, “to end up living on Archer Street.” She was lit by the glow of the streetlight. “First horse who ever won it: the Race That Stops the Nation.”
Clay then tried to impress her. “Twice. The first and the second.”
It worked, but only to a degree.
“Do you also know who trained him?”
On that one he was no chance.
“De Mestre,” she said. “He won five and no one knows it.”
* * *
—
From there they walked the racing quarter, down streets all named for Thoroughbreds. Poseidon, the horse, was a champion, and there were shops with names they loved, like the Saddle and Trident Café, the Horse Head Haberdashery, and a clear and present winner—the barbershop: the Racing Quarter Shorter.
Near the end, close to Entreaty Avenue, which led up to the cemetery, there was a small right turn beside them; an alley called Bobby’s Lane, where Carey stopped and waited.
“It’s perfect,” she said, and she leaned on the fence, into its sheet of palings. “They called it Bobby’s Lane.”
Clay leaned a few meters next to her.
The girl looked into the sky.
“Phar Lap,” she said, and when he thought she might be teary, her eyes were giving and green. “And look, it’s an alley, not even a street; and they called it after his stable name. How can you not like that?”
For a while there was close to silence, just the air of urban decay. Clay knew, of course, what most of us know, about the iconic horse of our country. He knew about Phar Lap’s winning streaks, how the racing board almost crippled him, from the force of too much weight. He knew about America, how he went there, won a race, and died seemingly the very next day. (It was actually just over two weeks.) He loved, like most of us, what people say, for courage, or trying with everything: You’ve got a heart as big as Phar Lap.