Bridge of Clay(74)

    On the night before it happened, when I was finally to face Jimmy Hartnell, my dad came into my bedroom, which I shared with Clay and Tommy. The other two were asleep at the bottom two slots of the triple bunk, and I lay awake on top. As most kids do, I closed my eyes when he came in, and he gently shook me and spoke: “Hey, Matthew, a bit more training?”

I didn’t need any talking into it.

The difference was, when I reached for the gloves, he told me I wouldn’t need them.

“What?” I whispered. “Bare fists?”

“They’ll be bare when the moment comes,” he said, but now he spoke quite slowly. “I’ve been for a visit to the library.”

I followed him to the lounge room, where he pointed to an old video cassette, and an old video machine (a black-and-silver ancient thing), and told me to get it working. As it turned out, he actually bought the machine with some scratched-together pay; the start of Christmas savings. Even as I looked down at the video’s name, The Last Great Famous Pugilists, I could feel my father smiling.

“Pretty good, huh?”

I watched it swallow the tape. “Pretty good.”

“Now just press play,” and soon we sat in silence as boxers paraded the screen; they arrived like presidents of men. Some were in black-and-white, from Joe Louis to Johnny Famechon, Lionel Rose to Sugar Ray. Then color and Smokin’ Joe. Jeff Harding, Dennis Andries. Technicolor Roberto Durán. The ropes flexed under their weight. In so many of the fights, the boxers went down, but climbed back up to their feet. Such brave and desperate weaving.

Near the end I looked at him.

The glint in my father’s eye.

He’d turned the sound right down.

    He held my face, but calmly.

He held my jaws in his hands.

For a moment I thought he might echo the screen, saying something like the commentary. But all he did was hold me like that, my face in his hands in the darkness.

“I gotta give it to you, kid—you’ve got heart.”

The before-the-beginning of that one.



* * *



—

Leading up to that moment, there was a day for Penny Dunbar, a morning, with a sweetheart named Jodie Etchells. She was one of her favorite kids, held back because of dyslexia, and she worked with her twice a week. She had hurt eyes, tall bones, and a big long braid down her back.

That morning, they were reading with the metronome—the old familiar trick—when Penny got up for a thesaurus. Next, she was shaken awake.

“Miss,” said Jodie Etchells, “Miss,” and “Miss!”

Penny came to, she looked in her face, and the book a few meters away. Poor young Jodie Etchells. She seemed near to collapsing herself.

“Are you okay, Miss, are you okay?”

Her teeth were perfectly paved.

Penelope tried reaching over, but her arm was somehow confused.

“I’m fine, Jodie,” and she should have sent her out, for help, or a drink of water, or anything to at least distract her. Instead, though—and talk about typical Penny—she said, “Open up that book, okay, and look up, let’s see, how about cheerful? Or gloomy? Which would you prefer?”

The girl, her mouth and symmetry.

“Maybe cheerful,” she said, and read the alternatives aloud. “Happy…joyful…merry.”

“That’s good, very good.”

Her arm still wasn’t moving.



* * *



—

Then school, it came, a Friday.

I was taunted, by Hartnell and his mates:

    There was piano and playing and poofter.

They were virtuosos of alliteration and didn’t know it.

Jimmy Hartnell had that fringe a little longer then—he was a few days shy of a haircut—and he’d leaned and muscled down. His mouth was small and slit-like, like a can just partly opened. It widened soon into a smile. I walked my way toward him, and found the courage to speak.

“I’ll fight you in the nets at lunch,” I said.

Best news he’d ever had.



* * *



—

Then to an afternoon:

As she often did, she read to those kids, as they waited for sight of the buses. This time it was The Odyssey. The chapter about the Cyclops.

There were boys and girls in green and white.

The usual foray of hairstyles.

As she read about Odysseus, and his trickery of the monster in his lair, the print swam over the page; her throat became the cave.

When she coughed she saw the blood.

It splashed down onto the paper.

She was strangely shocked by its redness; it was just so bright and brutal. Her next thought was back to the train, the first time she’d ever seen it; those titles typed in English.



* * *



—

And what was my blood to that blood?

It was nothing, nothing at all.

It was windy that day, I remember, when clouds move fast through the sky. One minute white, one minute blue; a lot of shifting light. There was one cloud like a coal mine, as I walked down to the cricket nets, in the darkest patch of shade.

At first I didn’t see Jimmy Hartnell, but he was there on the concrete pitch. He was grinning the width of his fringe.