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.
It was dark.
She told herself she was ridiculous, that she was a woman, not a girl. She’d traveled thousands of miles to get here. She’d stood ankle-deep on a wine-dark toilet floor, so this was nothing, nothing in comparison. Surely she could breach the gate and knock on a man’s front door.
Surely.
She did.
* * *
—
“Hallo?” she said. “But I think…I hope you remember me?”
He was quiet and so was the light; the space behind him in the hallway. And there again, that smile. At once surfaced, then lost. “Of course I do…the piano.”
“Yes.” She was getting flustered and it wasn’t English forming in her mouth; each sentence was exactly that—its own small punishment. She’d had to plant her own language in the middle and work her way around it. Somehow she managed to ask if he might like to come and visit her. She could play the piano, that is, if he liked the piano, and she had coffee and raisin toast and— “Iced VoVos?”
“Yes…” Why so embarrassed? “Yes. Yes, I have some.” He’d remembered. He’d remembered.
He’d remembered, and now, despite all self-warning and discipline, the smile he’d held fell out. It was almost like those army movies—the comedy ones—where the hopeless, hapless recruit struggles over a wall and flops to the other side; stupid and clumsy but grateful.
And Michael Dunbar succumbed:
“I’d love to come and hear you play—I only heard a few notes that first day, when they delivered it.” Then, a moment, a long one. “Here. Why don’t you come in?”
* * *
—
In his house there was a friendliness, but also something unnerving. Penelope couldn’t quite place it, but Michael certainly could. A life once had, now gone.
In the kitchen, they introduced themselves.
He motioned to a chair.
He caught sight of her catching sight of his rough, powdery hands, and just like that, it began. For quite a while, three hours at least, they sat at the table, which was scratched-up, wooden and warm. They drank tea with milk and biscuits, and spoke of Pepper Street and the city. Construction work and cleaning. It actually surprised him how easily it came to her once she’d stopped worrying about her English. After all, there was plenty to tell him: A new country, and seeing the ocean.
The shock and awe of the southerly.
At one point he asked her more about where she’d come from, and how she got here, and Penelope felt at her face. She moved a blond patch of hair from her eye, and the tide pulled slowly away. She remembered the pale young girl who listened to those books that were read, and read again; she thought about Vienna, and its army of laid-out bunk beds. Mostly, though, she talked of the piano, and the cold barren world at the window. She talked about a man and mustache, and love without emotion.
Very quiet and very calmly, she said: “I grew up with the statue of Stalin.”
* * *
—
As the night wore on, they each told their stories about why and where they were made of. Michael spoke of Featherton—the fires, the mines. The sound of the birds by the river. He didn’t mention Abbey, not yet, but she was there at the edge of everything.