Bridge of Clay(98)

That sick and unslept feeling.

The outline of trees in the dark.

Already the traditional smell inside, of carpeting, woodwork and varnish.

I remember how we ran the sand dunes, and they were cool in the sunrise, but punishing; by the top we were both on our knees.

At one point, Clay beat me to the peak, and he didn’t just lie there, or capsize, which was more than appealing, believe me. No, instead, he turned and reached for me, and the backdrop of shore and ocean; his hand came down, and he pulled me up, and we lay at the top with the suffering.

When he talked to me about that later—when he spoke and told me of everything—he’d said, “It was one of our greatest moments, I think. Both you and the sea were burning.”



* * *



—

By that point, Hector wasn’t just back.

It was clear he’d never leave us, ever.

There seemed to be fourteen different versions of that bloody cat, because wherever you went, he appeared. If you walked toward the toaster, he was sitting just left or right of it, amongst the surrounding crumbs. If you went to sit on the couch, he was purring on top of the remote. Even once, I went to the toilet, and he watched from up on the cistern.

Then Rosy was running the clothesline, rounding its stenciled shadows up. We could walk that dog for miles on end: black legs, white paws, and flecks of eyes and gold. But still she’d come back and run. Only now do I see the significance. She was likely corralling memory—or at the very least, the scent of it—or worse, the restless spirits.

    In that sense, there was always something stirring by then, at the house at 18 Archer Street. To me it was death and goneness, and a compulsory sense of mischief. It would lead to the madness of Christmas, and specifically Christmas Eve—when they brought home the bird and the fish.

Me, I arrived from work.

Henry was beaming, delirious.

I said my maiden “Je-sus Christ!”

Apparently, they’d gone to the pet shop, to buy the goldfish to add to the list—but Tommy loved the resident pigeon. It had hopped down onto his finger as he listened to the story—how a mob of hoodlum mynah birds had been picking on him over on Chatham Street, so the pet shop owner went in.

“Did you think he might have deserved it?” said Rory, but Tommy was following instinct. He was over, examining the fish. The pigeon clung sideways to his arm.

“Here,” he told them, “this one.”

The goldfish had scales like plumage.

He had a tail like a golden rake.

Which left only bringing them home, and me standing in the doorway; and where could I turn but to blasphemy, while Tommy provided the names.

By then he’d made sense of everything:

They were neither of them close to an Achilles.

“The goldfish is Agamemnon,” he informed me, “and the pigeon, I’m calling Telemachus.”

The king of men, and the boy from Ithaca: The son of Penelope and Odysseus.

The sky was hit by sunset, and Rory was looking at Henry.

“I’m gonna kill that little shit.”





After the spectacular failure of seventh placing in Group One company, Cootamundra was spelled for summer. On return he was ridden by Carey—four times, for three wins and a third.

And now she was becoming sought-after.



* * *



—

For Clay, there was radio and riverbed, city and Surrounds.

There was the silence of the Amahnu, and the stories he’d heard in the kitchen—for they’d stayed up the entire night that night, when he’d asked about the Slaves and David; they drank coffee. Michael told him of finding the calendar. Emil Zátopek. Einstein. All the rest of them. There was a girl who once broke a boy’s spaceship, and sat down the front in English; she had hair down to her waist.

He didn’t do details like Penelope did—he wasn’t dying, so wouldn’t go as far—but the effort was true, and truthful. He said, “I don’t know why I never told you these things.”

“You would have,” said Clay, “if you’d stayed.”

But he wasn’t intending to puncture him; he’d meant they were stories for when he was older.

And you’re telling them to me now.

He was sure he’d understood.

It was dawn when they talked of the David, and the Slaves imprisoned in the marble. “Those twisted, struggling bodies,” said Michael, “fighting from out of the stone.” He said he hadn’t thought of them for decades, but they were somehow always there. “I’d die to find greatness, like the David someday—even for just a moment.” He watched the boy’s eyes, in front of him. “But I know—I know…”

    Clay answered.

It hit them both hard, but he had to.

“We live the lives of the Slaves.”

The bridge was all they had.



* * *



—

There was the week in mid-January, when it rained up in the mountains, and the Amahnu started to flow. They saw the great sky coming. They stood out on the scaffold, and the heavy wooden falsework, with the splinters of rain around them.

“It could all be washed away.”

Clay was quiet but certain. “It won’t be.”