Bridge of Clay(49)
“What?”
It would come to him often, halfway through dinner, or brushing his teeth.
“She just left him?”
“Poor guy.”
“Well, we can’t say we didn’t see it coming….She was wild, and he was, well, he was never the quickest of cats, was he?”
No, it was better to stay in the city. Better to stay in the house, and catch the scent of her less each day. After all, there was always work. The city grew. There was always a beer or two, alone at home, or with Bob and Spiro and Phil—just men from work, with wives and kids, or nothing, like him.
* * *
—
It was only to visit his mother that he returned to Featherton every now and then. He was happy to see her involved with the usual array of small-town escapades. Cake stalls. Anzac Day parades. Lawn bowls with Dr. Weinrauch on Sundays. That was the life.
When he told her about Abbey, she didn’t say much.
Her hand rested on his.
She was most likely thinking of her own husband, who’d walked into the flames. No one knew why some went in and didn’t come out. Did they want to come out that little bit less than the others? If nothing else, Michael Dunbar was never of two minds about Abbey.
* * *
—
Next, the paintings, which he couldn’t look at anymore.
Her image would start him wondering.
Where she was.
Who she was with.
The temptation was to imagine her in motion, with another man. A better man. No niceties.
He wanted to be less superficial than that, to say that such things didn’t matter, but they did. They reached below, at something deeper, and they were places he didn’t want to be.
One night, about three years in, he pulled the paintings to one side of the garage, and covered them end to end, with bedsheets: a life behind a curtain. Even when the job was done, he still couldn’t quite resist; he took one last look inside, he ran a palm across the biggest, where she stood, shoes in hand, on the shoreline.
“Go on then,” she said, “take them.”
But there was nothing left to have.
He pulled the sheets back down.
* * *
—
As the remaining time climbed by, he was swallowed by the city.
He worked, he drove.
He mowed the lawn; a nice boy, a good tenant.
And how could he ever know?
How could he know that two years later again, an immigrant girl’s father would be dead on a European park bench? How could he know that she’d go out in a fit of love and despair, and buy a piano, and have it delivered not to her, but to him—and that she’d be standing in the middle of Pepper Street, with a trio of useless piano men?
In many ways he’d never left that garage floor, and so often I can’t help seeing it: He crouches and gets to his feet.
The sound of faraway traffic—so much like the ocean—a long five years behind him, and I think it, again and again: Do it, do it now.
Go to that woman and piano.
If you don’t go now there’ll be none of us—no brothers, no Penny, no father or sons—and all that there is is to have it, to make it, and to run with it as long as you can.
On that Monday, after Michael had left in the dark, and Clay saw the sketch in the kitchen, he’d made breakfast and walked to the lounge room. The Murderer’s notes, sheets, and workings were in seven separate stacks on the coffee table. Some were taller than others, but all had a title on top. On each stack was a rock, or stapler, or scissors, to keep them from flying off. Slowly, he read each title:
MATERIALS
COUNCIL
SCAFFOLD
THE OLD PLAN (TRESTLE) THE NEW PLAN (ARCHES)
RIVER
and
CLAY
Clay sat down.
He let the couch devour him.
He spelt Carey’s name out in his toast crumbs, then reached for the pile called SCAFFOLD.
* * *
—
From there, he read all day.
He didn’t eat or go to the bathroom.
He just read and watched and learned everything about the bridge in Michael Dunbar’s mind, and it was a great mess of charcoal and thick-set pencil. Especially THE OLD PLAN. That stack was 113 pages (he counted them), full of wood costs, techniques, and pulley systems, and why the previous bridge might have failed.
THE NEW PLAN was six sheets altogether—composed the night before. The first page of that small stack of paper said only one thing, several times.
PONT DU GARD.
The pages that followed were littered with sketches and drawings, and a list of definitions: Spandrels and voussoirs.
Springing and falsework.
Crown and keystone.
Old favorites like abutment and span.
In short, the spandrels were standard stone blocks; the voussoirs were contoured for the arching. The springing was the final pressure point, of arches-meeting-pier. His favorite was somehow the falsework, though—the mold the arches were built on; a curvature of wooden construction. It would hold, then be taken from under it: the first test of each arch and survival.