And Rory didn’t relent.
He shoved a hand right into my heart. “He needs to feel it here.” There was suddenly such gravity, such pain in him, and it came like the force of a piano. The quietest words were the worst. “He needs to hurt nearly enough to kill him,” he said, “because that’s how we Goddamn live.”
I worked to make an argument.
Not a single thought came out.
“If you can’t do it, I’ll do it for you.” He breathed stiffly, strugglingly, inwards. “You don’t need to be running with him, Matthew,” and he looked at the boy crouched by me, at the fire inside his eyes. “You have to try and stop him.”
* * *
—
That evening Clay had told me.
I was watching Alien in the lounge room.
(Talk about suitably grim!)
He said he was grateful and sorry—and I spoke toward the TV. A smile to keep it together.
“At least I can have a rest now—my legs and my back are killing me.”
He placed a look down onto my shoulder.
I’d lied; we pretended to believe it.
* * *
—
To the training itself, it was genius:
There were three boys at the 100 mark.
Two at the 200.
Then Rory, the final stretch.
It wasn’t hard to find boys who would hurt him, either; he’d come home with groups of bruises, or a burn down the side of his face. They punished him till he was smiling—and that was when training finished.
* * *
—
One night we were in the kitchen.
Clay washed and I dried the plates.
“Hey, Matthew,” he said quite quietly. “I’m running tomorrow, at Bernborough—no one stopping me. I’m trying for the time I won State.”
And me, I didn’t look at him, but I couldn’t look somehow away.
“I’m wondering,” he said, “if you don’t mind,” and the look on his face said everything. “I thought maybe you’d tape my feet.”
* * *
—
At Bernborough, next morning, I watched.
I sat in the flames of the grandstand.
I’d taped him my very best.
I was somewhere between knowing it was the last time I’d ever do it, and the truth it was also one extra. I could watch in a different way now, too; I saw him run just to see him run. Like Liddell and Budd put together.
As for the time, he broke his best by more than a second, on a track that lay sick and dying. When he crossed the line, Rory was smiling, hands in pockets; Henry shouted the numbers. Tommy ran over with Rosy. All of them hugged and carried him.
“Hey, Matthew!” Henry called. “New State record!”
Rory’s hair was wild and rusty.
His eyes the best metal for years.
And me, I walked out of the grandstand, and shook Clay’s, then Rory’s hand. I said, “Look at the state of you,” and I meant it, every word. “Best run I’ve ever seen.”
After that he’d crouched and waited, on the track just before the line—so close he could smell the paint. In well past twelve months’ time, he’d be back here training with Henry, and the boys and chalk and bets.
For a while there was an eerie quiet, as dawn broke down into day.
On the Tartan, he remained, he felt for it:
The peg, intact, within.
Soon he would stand, soon he would walk, to a clear-eyed sky in front of him.
Beyond the bike combination, there were two front doors to negotiate, and the first was Ennis McAndrew’s, just outside the racing quarter.
The house was one of the bigger ones.
It was old and beautiful, tin-roofed.
A giant wooden veranda.
Clay did laps around the block.
There were camellias in all the front yards around there, a few enormous magnolias. Many old-fashioned letterboxes. Rory would certainly have approved.
He didn’t count how many times he walked that block—walking just like Penny had once, like Michael had—to a certain front door in the night.
This door was a heavy red one.
At times he could see the brushstrokes.
Those other front doors got glorious.
Clay knew that his one wouldn’t.
* * *
—
Then the second front door:
Diagonally down on Archer Street.
Ted and Catherine Novac.
He watched it from the porch, and weeks were molded from days, as Clay came to work with me. There was no return to Bernborough yet, no cemetery, no roof. Certainly not The Surrounds. He dragged the guilt behind him.
At one point I buckled; I asked if he’d return to the bridge, and Clay could only shrug.
I know—I’d beaten him up once, for leaving.
But it was clear he had to finish.
No one could live like this.
* * *
—
Finally, he did it, he traversed the McAndrew steps.
An old lady answered the door.
She had permed and colored hair—and me, I disagree with him, for this door, it did get glorious, and it was all in the showing up for it.
“Can I help you?”
And Clay, at his very worst, and very best, said, “I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs. McAndrew, but if you don’t mind, is there a chance I could talk to your husband? My name’s Clay Dunbar.”
The old man in the house knew the name.
* * *
—
At the Novacs’ place, they knew him, too, but as the boy they’d seen on the roof.
“Come in,” they said, and they were both so maddeningly sweet to him; so kind to him it hurt. They made tea, and Ted shook his hand, and asked how he was. And Catherine Novac smiled, and it was a smile to keep from dying, or crying, or maybe both; he couldn’t quite decide.
Either way, when he told them, he made sure not to look where she’d sat that day, when they’d listened to the race down south—when the big bay horse had failed. His tea was cold and untouched.
He told them what Saturday night meant.
The mattress, the plastic sheet.
He told them of Matador in the fifth.
He said he loved her from the very first time she’d talked to him, and it was his fault, it was all his fault. Clay cracked, but didn’t break, because he deserved no tears or sympathy. “The night before she fell,” he said, “we met there, we were naked there, and—”
He stopped because Catherine Novac—in a shift of ginger-blondness—had stood and she’d walked toward him. She lifted him gently out of his chair and hugged him hard, so hard, and she patted his short flat hair, and it was so damn nice it hurt.
She said, “You came to us, you came.”
See, for Ted and Catherine Novac, there was no incrimination, at least not for this poor boy.
It was they who brought her to the city.
It was they who knew the risk.
* * *
—
Then there was McAndrew.
Picture frames with horses.
Picture frames with jockeys.
The light inside was orange.
“I know you,” he said, and the man himself looked smaller now, like a broken twig in a lounge chair. In the very next chapter you’ll see it back there—what Ennis McAndrew once explained. “You’re the dead wood I told her to cut out.” His hair was yellow-white. He wore glasses. A pen in his pocket. The eyes gleamed, but not very happily. “I guess you’ve come to blame me, have you?”
Clay sat on the lounge chair opposite.
He watched him, stiffly straight.
“No, sir, I came to tell you you were right,” and McAndrew was caught by surprise.
He looked keenly across, and said, “What?”
“Sir, I—”
“Call me Ennis, for Christ’s sake, and speak up.”
“Okay, well…”
“I said speak up.”
Clay swallowed. “It wasn’t your fault, it was mine.”
He didn’t tell him what he told the Novacs, but made sure McAndrew saw. “She never could quite get rid of me, you know, and that was how it happened. She must have been overtired, or couldn’t concentrate—”
McAndrew slowly nodded. “She lost herself, in the saddle.”
“Yes. I think she did.”
“You were out with her the previous night.”
“Yes,” Clay said, and he left.
He left, but at the bottom of the steps, both Ennis and his wife came out, and the old man shouted down to him.
“Hey! Clay Dunbar!”