He thought of boys, backyards, and clothesline pegs.
He looked into him and said, “Don’t you?”
* * *
—
Early, very early in the morning, close to three o’clock, Clay noticed the shadow of the Murderer, standing next to his bed. He wondered if it recalled in him, as it did in himself, the last time he’d stood just like that, on the terrible night when he’d left us.
At first he’d thought it was an intruder, but soon he was able to see. He knew those hangman’s hands anywhere. He heard the fallen voice: “Pont du Gard?”
Quiet, so quiet.
So he’d seen him after all.
“Is that your favorite?”
Clay swallowed, he nodded in the darkness. “Yes.”
“Any others?”
“The Regensburg. The Pilgrim’s Bridge.”
“That’s three arches.”
“Yes.”
More thoughts, back to back. “Do you like the Coathanger then?”
The Coathanger.
The great bridge of the city.
The great bridge of home:
A different kind of arch, a metal one, who rose above the road.
“I love her.”
“It’s female?”
“She is to me.”
“Why?”
Clay tightened his eyes, then opened them.
Penny, he thought.
Penelope.
“She just is.”
Why did it need explaining?
* * *
—
Slowly, the Murderer backed away, into the rest of the house, and told him, “See you soon.” But then he added, in a moment of hope and recklessness, “Do you know the legend of Pont du Gard?”
“I need to sleep.”
Of course he Goddamn knew.
* * *
—
In the morning, though, in the empty house, Clay stopped in the kitchen when he saw it—on paper, in thick black charcoal.
He let a finger fall, and he touched them:
Final Bridge Plan: First Sketch
He thought of Carey and thought of arches, and again his voice surprised him: “The bridge will be made of you.”
Five long years he lay in that garage, on the floor, till it happened.
Something made him get up:
The piano.
A muddled address.
The light of afternoon.
Here came a woman with music and two epics on her side, and what else could Michael Dunbar do?
As far as second chances go, he couldn’t have been luckier.
* * *
—
But okay, what happened in those five years in between?
He signed the lawyer forms, hands trembling.
He stopped painting altogether.
He was tempted to return to Featherton, but also remembered the voice in the dark, and the head down on his neck: Maybe you’d still be there.
And then the humiliation.
Returning without the girl.
“Where is she?” people would ask.
“What happened?”
No, he could never go back for good. Word would get around, but that didn’t mean he wanted to hear it. It was bad enough listening to the thoughts that lay within.
“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.
* * *
—
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: