Bridge of Clay(50)

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—

Then CLAY.

He kept his eye on that CLAY stack, many times, as he read through everything else. The thought of picking it up excited him, but also held him just short. On top, its paperweight was a rusty old key, and below, a single sheet.

When Clay finally read it, it was evening.

He removed the key and held it slackly in his palm, and when he turned the title page, this was written beneath:


Clay—

See page 49 of THE OLD PLAN.

Good luck.



Michael Dunbar





Page forty-nine.

That was where it explained the importance of digging a trench across the forty-meter width of the river—to be working, all times, on the bedrock. As first-time bridge builders, it stated, they should go beyond where experts would, to be sure they weren’t taking chances. There was even a sketch: forty by twenty meters.

He read that passage many times, then paused until he thought it: Forty by twenty.

And God knows how deep.

I should have looked at that pile first.

He’d lost a whole day of digging.



* * *



—

After a brief search, the key opened a shed behind the house, and when Clay went in, he found the shovel, lying benignly on the workbench. He handled it and looked around. A pick was also close by, and a wheelbarrow.

He walked back out, and in the last light of evening-afternoon, he made it to the riverbed. There was now a perimeter marked with bright orange spray. He hadn’t noticed from being inside all day.

Forty by twenty.

He thought it as he walked the borders.

Clay crouched, he stood, he watched the rising moon—but soon the toil invited him. He half grinned and thought of Henry, and how he knew he’d count him down.

He was out there all alone, as the past behind him converged—then three more seconds, and, now.

The shovel and splice of the earth.





In the tide of Dunbar past, they intersected, Michael and Penelope, and of course it started with the piano. I should also say it’s always been a kind of mystery to me, this starting-out time, and the lure of lasting happiness. I guess it’s like all our parents’ time together—their lives before they had us.

On that sunny afternoon, here in the city, they pushed the instrument down Pepper Street, and watched each other in glimpses, and the piano movers bickered: “Oi!”

“What?”

“You’re not here for your looks, you know.”

“What’s that s’posed to mean?”

“It means push! Move it this way, idiot. Over here.”

One to the other, secretively: “The pay’s nowhere near enough for putting up with him, is it?”

“I know, no way.”

“Come on then! The girl’s putting more into it than you two combined.” Now to Penelope, from the upright girth of the piano. “Hey, do you need a job by any chance?”

She smiled, mildly. “Oh, no thanks, I have already a few.”

“It shows. Unlike these two useless— Oi! This way!”

And there, right there, she looked over, and the man from number thirty-seven gave her the crease of a collegial smile, then tucked it back inside him.



* * *



—

    At the apartment, though, with the piano in place by the window, Michael Dunbar didn’t stay. She asked what she might give him as a gift for helping, whether wine or maybe beer, or wódka (had she really said that?), but he wouldn’t hear a word of it. He said goodbye and left, but when she played she saw him listening; her first experimental notes. The piano still in need of retuning.

He was out by the line-up of garbage bins.

When she stood to look closer he was gone.



* * *



—

In the weeks that followed, there was definitely a sense of something.

They’d never seen each other till the day of the piano, but now it was happening everywhere. If he was in line at Woolworths with toilet paper under his arm, she was at the next checkout with a bag of oranges and a packet of Iced VoVos. After work, when she walked onto Pepper Street, he would step from his car, further up.

In Penelope’s case (and this embarrassed her) she would often wander around the block a few times, purely for the handful of seconds it took to walk by the front of his house. Would he be on the porch? Would the light be on in the kitchen? Would he come out and ask her inside for coffee or tea, or anything at all? There was a synergy to it, of course, given Michael and Moon, and the walks through long-ago Featherton. Even when she sat at the piano, she often checked; he might be by the bins again.



* * *



—

As for Michael, he resisted.

He didn’t want to be back there anymore, where all was good but ruinable. In his kitchen he thought of Penelope, and the piano, and his haunted halls of Abbey. He saw this new woman’s arms, and the love in her hands, helping the instrument down the road…but he could make himself not go to her.



* * *



—

Eventually, months later, in April, Penny put jeans and a shirt on.

She walked up Pepper Street.