As I said, though, such moments were isolated, and they would soon reconvene at the piano: Our symbol of boyhood misery.
But their island of calm in the maelstrom.
Once, he’d stood beside her, as she recovered by playing some Mozart; then he placed his hands on the instrument, in the sun on the lid by the window.
“I’d write the words I’m sorry,” he’d said, “but I’ve forgotten where all the paint is—” and Penelope stopped, momentarily. An inkling of smile at the memory.
“Well, that and there’s really no room,” she said, and played on, on the handwritten keys.
* * *
—
Yes, she played on, that one-woman band, and while sometimes the chaos spilled over, there were also what we’d call normal arguments—normal fights—mostly between us boys.
In that regard, at six years old, Clay had started football, both the organized kind, and the one we played at home, front to back, around the house. As time went by it was our father, Tommy, and Rory versus Henry, Clay, and me. On the last tackle, you could kick the ball over the roof, but only if Penny wasn’t reading on a lawn chair, or marking that flow of assignments.
“Hey, Rory,” Henry would say, “run at me so I can smash you,” and Rory would do it, and run straight over the top of him, or be driven back into the ground. Every game, without fail, they would need to be prized apart—
“Right.”
Our father looked at both of them, back and forth:
Henry all blond and bloody.
Rory the color of a cyclone.
“Right what?”
“You know what.” He’d be breathing hoarse and heavily, with scratch marks on his arms. “Shake hands. Now.”
And they would.
They’d shake hands, say sorry, and then, “Yeah, sorry I had to shake your hand, dickhead!” and it was on again, and this time they’d be dragged out back where Penelope sat, the assignments littered around her.
“Now what have you two been up to this time?” she’d ask, in a dress, and barefoot in the sun. “Rory?”
“Yeah?”
She gave him a look.
“I mean, yes?”
“Take my chair.” She started walking inside. “Henry?”
“I know, I know.”
He was already on hands and knees, collating the fallen sheets.
She lengthened a look at Michael, and a collegial, cahootsful wink.
“Goddamn bloody boys.”
No wonder I got a taste for blasphemy.
* * *
—
And what else?
What else was there, as we skip the years like stones?
Did I mention how sometimes we’d sit on the back fence, for end-of-morning trackwork? Did I say how we’d watched as it all got packed up, to be another forgotten field?
Did I mention the Connect Four war when Clay was seven?
Or the game of Trouble that lasted four hours, maybe more?
Did I mention how it was Penny and Tommy who won that battle at long last, with our dad and Clay second, me third, and Henry and Rory (who were forced to play together) last? Did I mention that they both blamed each other for being crap at hitting the bubble?
As for what happened with Connect Four, let’s just say we were still finding the pieces months later.
“Hey, look!” we’d call, from the hallway or kitchen. “There’s even one in here!”
“Go pick it up, Rory.”
“You go pick it up.”
“I’m not pickin’ it up—that’s one of yours.”
And on. And on.
And on.
* * *
—
Clay remembered summer, and Tommy asking who Rosy was, when Penny read from The Iliad. We were up late, in the lounge room, and Tommy’s head was in her lap, his feet across my legs, and Clay was down on the floor.
Penny tilted and stroked Tommy’s hair.
I told him, “It’s not a person, stupid, it’s the sky.”
“What do you mean?”
This time it was Clay, and Penelope explained.
“It’s because,” she said, “you know how at sunrise and sunset the sky goes orange and yellow, and sometimes red?”
He nodded from under the window.
“Well, when it’s red, it’s rosy, and that’s all he meant. It’s great, isn’t it?” and Clay smiled then, and so did Penny.
Tommy, again, was concentrating. “Is Hector a word for the sky, too?”
That was it, I got up. “Did there really need to be five of us?”
Penny Dunbar only laughed.
* * *
—
The next winter there was all the organized football again, and the winning and training and losing. Clay didn’t especially love the game, but did it because the rest of us did, and I guess that’s what younger siblings do for a time—they photocopy their elders. In that respect, I should say that although he was set apart from us, he could also be just the same. Sometimes, mid-household-football-game, when a player was secretly punched or elbowed, Henry and Rory would go at it—“It wasn’t me!” and “Oh, bullshit!”—but me, I’d seen it was Clay. Already then his elbows were ferocious, and deliverable in many ways; it was hard to see them coming.
A few times he’d admit it.
He’d say, “Hey, Rory, it was me.”
You don’t know what I’m capable of.
But Rory wouldn’t have it; it was easier fighting with Henry.
* * *
—
To that end (and this one), it was proper, really, that Henry was publicly infamous back then, when it came to sport and leisure—sent off for pushing the ref. Then ostracized by his teammates, for the greatest of footballing sins; at halftime the manager asked them: “Hey, where’s the oranges?”
“What oranges?”
“Don’t get smart—you know, the quarters.”
But then someone noticed.
“Look, there’s a big pile a peels there! It was Henry, it was bloody Henry!”
Boys, men and women, they all glared.
It was great suburban chagrin.
“Is that true?”
There was no point denying it; his hands spoke for themselves. “I got hungry.”
The ground was six or seven kilometers away, and we’d caught the train, and Henry was made to go home on foot, and the rest of us as well. When one of us did something like that, we all seemed to suffer, and we walked the Princes Highway.
“Why’d you push the ref like that, anyway?” I asked.
“He kept treading on my foot—he was wearing steel studs.”
Now Rory: “Why’d you have to eat all the oranges, then?”
“Because I knew you’d have to walk home, too, shithead.”
Michael: “Oi!”
“Oh, yeah—sorry.”
But this time there was no retraction of the sorry, and I think we were all somehow happy that day, though we were soon to start coming undone; even Henry throwing up in the gutter. Penny was kneeling next to him, our father’s voice beside her: “I guess these are the spoils of freedom.”
And how could we ever know?
We were just a bunch of Dunbars, oblivious of all to come.
“Clay? You awake?”
At first there was no answer, but Henry knew he was. One thing with Clay was that he was pretty much always awake. What surprised him was the reading light coming on, and Clay having something to say: “How you feeling?”
Henry smiled. “Burning. You?”
“I smell like hospital.”
“Good old Mrs. Chilman. That was pretty hurtful, that stuff she put on, wasn’t it?”
Clay felt a hot streak on the side of his face. “Still better than metho spirits,” he said, “or Matthew’s Listerine.”
* * *
—
Earlier, a fair few things had happened: The lounge room was cleaned up.
We convinced both the fish and bird to stay.
The story of Henry’s exploits came out in the kitchen, and Mrs. Chilman dropped in from next door. She’d come to patch up Clay, but Henry needed it more.
* * *
—
First to the kitchen, though, and before anything else, Henry had to explain himself, and this time he mentioned more than said it; he talked about Schwartz and Starkey, and the girl, and he was a lot less jovial now, and so was I. Actually, I was ready to throw the kettle, or smack him in the head with the toaster.
“You did what?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “I thought you were one of the smarter ones here—this I’d expect from Rory.”
“Hey!”