“Shut up, Rory….Tommy! Come clean this shit up!”) He meowed all hours of the night—such pathetic and high-pitched meowing! And then all the ball-tearing happy-pawing, on anyone’s lap he could find. Sometimes, when we watched TV, he’d move from boy to boy, sleeping and purring the house down. It was Rory who despised him most, though, and summed up all of us best: “If that cat starts slicing up my balls again, Tommy, I’m gonna kill the bastard, I swear it—and trust me, you’ll be next.”
But Tommy was looking much happier; and Henry had taught him to reply: “He’s only trying to find ’em, Rory,” and even Rory couldn’t resist—he laughed—and actually gave the big tabby a pat there, as he clawed through the shorts on his lap. There was the fish and the bird and Achilles to come, but next in line was the dog. It was Hector who paved the way home.
* * *
—
By then we’d hit December, and there was a single, immutable fact: Clay was a 400 specialist.
He took the distance apart.
There was no one at Chisholm who could go with him, but challengers would soon be coming. The new year would bring Zone and Regionals, and if good enough, he’d make it to State. I looked for new ways of training him, and harked back to old motivations. I started, where he had, the library: I looked at books and articles.
I scoured the DVDs.
All I could find on athletics, till a woman was standing behind me.
“Hello?” she said. “Young man? It’s nine o’clock. It’s time to close.”
* * *
—
In the lead-up to Christmas, he did it.
Hector went out and went missing.
All of us took to searching, and it was something like looking for Clay, except Clay, this time, was with us. We all went out in the mornings, and the others went out after school; I joined them when I came home. We even drove back to Wetherill, but the cat had up and vanished. Even jokes were falling flat.
“Hey, Rory,” Henry said, as we wandered the streets. “At least your balls have had a chance to recover.”
“I know, good bloody riddance.”
Tommy was out on the outskirts of us, and mad and sad as hell. As they spoke he’d come running over, and tried tackling them down to the ground.
“You bastards!” He spat the hurt out. He flailed and punched away. He swung his boyish arms. “You bastards, you fucking pricks!”
At first they just made light of it, in the darkened street around us.
“Shit! I didn’t know Tommy could swear so well!”
“I know—that’s pretty good work!”
But then they felt the eyes of him, and the pain in his ten-year-old soul. Much as Clay had broken that night, in the future, in the kitchen, in Silver, Tommy was breaking now. As he fell to the road on hands and knees, it was Henry who bent and reached for him; then Rory who held his shoulders.
“We’ll find him, Tommy, we’ll find him.”
“I miss them,” he said.
We all fell on him.
We walked home that night in silence.
* * *
—
When the others all went to bed, Clay and I watched the movies I’d borrowed, we read the small crowd of books. We watched films about the Olympics, and endless documentaries. Anything to do with running.
My favorite was Gallipoli, recommended by the librarian. World War I and athletics. I loved Archy Hamilton’s uncle—the tough-faced, stopwatched trainer.
“What are your legs?” he’d say to Archy.
Archy would say, “Steel springs.”
We watched it many times over.
For Clay it was Chariots of Fire.
1924.
Eric Liddell, Harold Abrahams.
He loved two particular things:
The first was when Abrahams first saw Liddell run, and said, “Liddell? I’ve never seen such drive, such commitment in a runner….He runs like a wild animal.”
Then his favorite Eric Liddell:
“So where does the power come from, to see the race to its end?
From within.”
Or as the actor Ian Charleson delivered it, with the amazing Scottish accent: From wethun.
* * *
—
As time went by, we wondered.
Should we place an ad in the RQT, for a lost but annoying tabby?
No—we would never do anything so logical.
Instead there was Clay and me.
We’d look at what remained in that classifieds section, which culminated, always, in the mule. When we ran he’d be steering us over there, and I’d stop and call to him, “NO!”
He’d look at me, disappointedly.
He’d shrug, he’d go, come on.
To ward him off, I softened when something else arrived, in an ad that was placed by the pound: A female, three-year-old border collie.
I drove there myself and picked her up, and came home to the shock of my life—for there, right in front of me, on the porch, they were all out laughing and celebrating, and between them, the Goddamn cat. The bastard had come back!
I got out of the car.
I watched the beaten-up, collarless tabby.
He looked at me; he knew all along.
He was a cat with particular schadenfreude.
For a moment I expected a salute.
“I s’pose I’ll just take the dog back,” I said, and Rory threw Hector sideways; he went flying a good five meters—and there was high-pitched, bloodcurdled meowing. (I bet he was glad to be home.) Then Rory came stalking over.
“You got the little bastard a dog now?” But he was also partly congratulatory.
And Tommy?
Well, Tommy picked up Hector, and shielded him from the rest of us, and came over and opened the car. He hugged the cat and the dog simultaneously, and said, “God, I can’t believe it.” He looked over at Clay and asked; it’s so strange how he knew what to do: “Achilles?”
Again, a shake of the head.
I said, “This one’s actually a girl.”
“Okay then, I’m calling her Rosy.”
“You know that isn’t—”
“I know, I know, it’s the sky,” and we were back for a moment together: His head in her lap in the lounge.
* * *
—
Mid-December, a Sunday, early morning, we drove to a beach in the south, in the depths of the national park. Its official name was Prospector, but the locals called it Anzacs.
I remember the car and the drive there:
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.”