The race was at four-fifty and we got there for three, and I paid the admission. When we pooled our money near the bookies, Henry took the roll out. He gave Clay a certain wink. “Don’t worry, boys, I’ve got this.”
When it was done, we made our way over, and up, past the members, to the muck. Both stands were close to packed. We found seats in the very top row.
By four the sun was dropping, but still white.
By four-thirty, with Carey stock-still in the mounting yard, it was starting to yellow, behind us.
In the color and noise and movement, McAndrew was in his suit. He said not a single word to her, just a hand down onto her shoulder. Petey Simms, his best groom, was there, too, but McAndrew lifted her upwards, to the breadth of Cootamundra.
She trotted him lightly away.
* * *
—
At the jump, the crowd all stood.
Clay’s heart was out of its gate.
The deep-brown horse, and rider on top, went straight out to the front. The colors, red-green-white. “As expected,” the course caller informed them, “but this is no ordinary field, let’s see what Cootamundra’s got for us….Let’s see what the young apprentice has—Red Centre three lengths second.”
In the grandstand shade we watched.
The horses ran in the light.
“Jesus,” said the man standing next to me. “Five lengths bloody ahead.”
“Come on, Coota, you big brown bastard!”
That, I think, was Rory.
At the turn, they all closed in.
In the straight, she asked him for more.
Two horses—Red Centre and Diamond Game—climbed forward, and the crowd called all of them home. Even me. Even Tommy. The shouts of Henry and Rory. We roared for Cootamundra.
And Clay.
Clay was in the middle of us, he was standing on his seat.
He didn’t move.
He didn’t make a sound.
Hands-and-heels and she brought him home.
Two lengths and girl and sea glass.
Carey Novac in the eighth.
* * *
—
It had been a long time since he’d sat on the roof, but he did that Monday night; he was camouflaged amongst the tiles.
But Carey Novac saw him.
When she’d pulled up with Catherine and Trackwork Ted, she’d stood on the porch, alone. She held her hand up, fleetingly.
We won, we won.
Then, in.
Dear Carey,
If you’ve done the right thing (and I know you have), you’re reading this when you get home, and Cootamundra has won. You took it away from them in the first furlong. I know you like that style of racing. You always liked the great front-runners. You said they were the bravest ones.
See? I remember everything.
I remember what you said when you first saw me: There’s a boy up there on that roof.
I eat toast sometimes just to write your name in the crumbs.
I remember everything you’ve told me, about the town you grew up in, and your mum and dad, your brothers—everything. I remember how you said, “And? You don’t want to know my name?” It was the first time we spoke on Archer Street.
There are so many times I wish Penny Dunbar was still around, just so you could talk to her, and she’d have told you a few of her stories. You’d have been in our kitchen for hours….She’d have tried to teach you the piano.
Anyway—I want you to keep the lighter.
I never really had many friends.
I have my brothers and you and that’s all.
But okay, I’ll stop talking now, except to say that if Cootamundra didn’t win by some chance, I know there’ll be other days. My brothers and I, we’ll have put some money on, but we didn’t bet on the horse.
Love,
Clay
And sometimes, you know, I imagine it.
I like to think she hugged her parents for the last time that night, and that Catherine Novac was happy, and that her father couldn’t have been prouder. I see her in her room; her flannel shirt, jeans, and forearms. I see her holding the lighter, and reading the letter, and thinking Clay was something else.
How many times did she read it? I wonder.
I don’t know.
We’ll never know.
No, all I know is that she left the house that night and the Saturday rule was broken: Saturday night at The Surrounds.
Not Monday.
Never Monday.
And Clay?
Clay should have gone back.
He should have been on a train that night—back to Silver, to the Amahnu, on his way to finish a bridge, to shake our father’s hand—but he, too, was at The Surrounds, and she came with a rustle of feet.
And us?
We can’t do anything.
One of us writes, and one of us reads.
We can’t do anything but me tell it, and you see it.
We hit it, like this, for the now.
As we watch them both walk toward it—The Surrounds, the very last time—the past tucks close inside me. So much of that time would lead them there: to each approaching footsteps.
There was Zone and then the Regionals.
Anniversary and State.
There was Tommy’s quadruple animals.
As New Year passed into February, there was Clay and the nuisance of injury (a boy with broken-glass feet), and the promise, or more like a warning: “I win State and we’ll go and get him, okay?”
He was referring, of course, to Achilles.
* * *
—
I could go in all sorts of orders here, in many kinds of ways, but it just feels right to start there, and thread the rest toward it: How it was on the anniversary.
A year since Penelope’s death.
In the morning that day in March, all of us woke up early. No work that day, and no school, and by seven we’d been to the cemetery; we’d climbed up over the graves. We put daisies down in front of her, and Tommy looked out for our dad. I told him he should forget it.
By eight we started cleaning; the house was filthy, we had to be ruthless. We threw out clothes and sheets. We stamped out knickknacks and other crap, but preserved her books and bookshelves. The books, we knew, were sacred.
There was a moment when all of us stopped, though, and sat on the bed, on the edges. I was holding The Odyssey and The Iliad.
“Go on,” said Henry, “read some.”
The Odyssey, book twelve: “From the flowing waters of the River of Ocean my ship hit the open sea…where ever-fresh Dawn has her dancing lawns, and the sun would soon be rising….”
Even Rory was silent, and stayed.
The words plowed on and the pages turned; and us, in the house, and drifting.
That bedroom went floating down Archer Street.
* * *
—
In the meantime, Clay stopped competing barefoot, but hadn’t been wearing shoes.
In the training, we’d kept it simple.
We ran the early mornings.
400s down at Bernborough.
In the evenings, we watched the movies.
The beginning and end of Gallipoli—Jesus, what an ending!
The entire Chariots of Fire.
Rory and Henry claimed that both were boring as bat shit, but they always came around; I caught their captured faces.
On the Thursday before Zone there was a problem, just two days out from racing, because kids had got drunk at Bernborough; there was glass all over the track. Clay hadn’t even seen it, and he didn’t notice the blood. Later, it took us hours to pick the pieces out. In the process I remembered what I had to—a moment from a documentary (and one that we still had at home): Olympic Highs and Lows.
Again, all of us were in the lounge room, and I pulled out the old footage, of the amazing but tragic race, in Los Angeles. You might know the one I mean. Those women. The 3,000 meters.
As it is, the athlete who won the event (the awesomely upright Romanian, Maricica Puic?) wasn’t as famous for that race, but two of the others were: Mary Decker and Zola Budd. We all stared on in the darkness—and Clay, especially, in horror—as the so-called controversial Budd was accused of deliberately tripping Decker in the jostle, on the straight of the Olympic stadium. (Of course she did no such thing.)
But also, and most importantly:
Clay saw.
He saw what I hoped he would see.
He said, “Pause it—quick,” and looked closer, at the legs of Zola Budd’s running. “Is that…tape there, under her feet?”
* * *
—