Our mother.
All those years ago:
In the hallway, in the morning.
And here was Clay, in afternoon, in a hallway of his own, or as he preferred it himself, a corridor.
The corridor of strapping eucalypts.
* * *
—
It was Ennis McAndrew who drove him there, in a truck and horse trailer combined. At least three months had passed them by since Clay had gone and faced him.
The great thing was that McAndrew was training again, and when he saw him with Achilles at Hennessey, he shook his head and came over, and dropped everything.
He said, “Well, look what the bloody cat dragged in.”
* * *
—
They’d driven much of the way in silence, and when they spoke, they spoke looking outwards; the world beyond the windshield.
Clay asked him about The Spaniard.
And the opera singer, Pavarotti.
“Pava-what?”
His knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
“You called Trackwork Ted that once—when you saw him at Gallery Road. You took two young jockeys to see him, remember? To watch him, and learn to ride?” But now Clay looked away from the windshield, and out the window instead. Those reams of empty space. “Once, she told me the story.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Ennis McAndrew, and he drove on very thoughtfully. “Those jockeys were effing worthless.”
“Effing?”
“Worthless.”
But then they returned to hurting again.
There was guilt for enjoying anything.
Especially the joy of forgetting.
* * *
—
When they made it to the turnoff, Clay said he could take it from there, but Ennis wouldn’t have a bar of it. “I want to meet your father,” he said. “I want to see this bridge. Might as bloody well…We’ve come too far for me not to.”
They drove the open hill, then turned down into the corridor, and the eucalypts were always the same. They were gathered, and waited around down there, like muscled-up thighs in the shade. A football team of trees.
When McAndrew saw them, he noticed.
“Jesus,” he said, “look at them.”
* * *
—
On the other side, in the light, they saw him in the riverbed, and the bridge remained the same. No work had been done for several months, since I’d sunk to my knees in the dirt: The curvature, the wood and stone.
The pieces stood waiting for this.
They climbed from out of the truck.
When they stood by the riverbed and looked, it was Ennis who’d spoken first. “When it’s finished, it’s going to be magnificent, isn’t it?” and Clay was matter-of-fact.
He answered only “Yes.”
* * *
—
When they opened the trailer, and brought the animal out, they walked him down to the bedrock, and the mule looked dutifully around. He studied the dry of the river. It was Clay with a pair of questions.
“What?” he asked the animal.
“What’s so unusual about this?”
Well, where’s the bloody water?
But Clay knew it was coming, and at some point, so would the mule.
* * *
—
In the meantime, Ennis shook hands with Michael.
They spoke drily, like friends, as equals.
McAndrew had quoted Henry.
He pointed to the bridles and hay.
He said, “That stuff you can probably do something with, but the animal’s totally useless.”
Michael Dunbar knew how to answer, though, and almost absently, he looked at Clay, and the knowingness embodied in the mule. He said, “You know, I wouldn’t be totally sure of that—he’s pretty good at breaking and entering.”
But again there was guilt and embarrassment, and if McAndrew and Clay knew to quell it, the Murderer knew he should, too.
* * *
—
For a while they watched the mule—the slow and meandering Achilles—as he steadily climbed from the riverbed and began his work in the field; he stooped and mildly chewed.
Without thinking, McAndrew spoke; he motioned slightly but surely at the boy.
“Mr. Dunbar, take it easy on him, okay—” and this time, finally, he said it. “He’s got a heart like Goddamn Phar Lap.”
And Michael Dunbar agreed.
“You don’t even know the half of it.”
* * *
—
Ten minutes later, once coffee and tea had been offered, and declined, McAndrew started for home. He shook hands with the boy and his father again, and made his way back into the trees; Clay went running after him.
“Mr. McAndrew!”
In the shade, the truck stopped, and the broomstick trainer got out. He walked from the dark to the light. He exhaled. “Call me Ennis, for Christ’s sake.”
“Okay, Ennis,” and now Clay looked away. The pair of them were baked in sunshine, like kindling of boy and old man. He said, “You know—you know Carey…”—and it hurt just to say her name—“you know her bike?” Ennis nodded and came closer. “I know the combination for the lock—it’s thirty-five-twenty-seven,” and Ennis knew the number immediately.
Those figures, that horse.
He walked back to the truck in the shade.
“I’ll tell Ted, I’ll tell Catherine, okay? But I don’t think they’ll ever take it. It’s yours when you come and unlock it.”
* * *
—
And that was how he drove away:
He climbed inside the truck again.
He held a broom-hand, fleetingly, up.
He waved to the boy out the window, and the boy walked gradually back.
So they gave her six months—and maybe that would have been better. It certainly would have hurt less, or at least shorter than her epic Hartnell job, of death but never dying.
There were all the sordid details, of course.
I pay them scant regard:
The drugs all sound the same in the end; an index of variations. It’s like learning another language, I guess, when you’re watching someone die; a whole new kind of training. You build towers out of prescription boxes, count pills and poisonous liquids. Then minutes-to-hours in hospital wards, and how long the longest night is.
For Penelope it was mostly the language, I think.
There was death and its own vernacular:
Her pills were called The Chemist Shop.
Each drug was an oxymoron.
The first time she’d said that was in the kitchen, and she’d studied them almost happily; all those stickered boxes. She read the names aloud, from Cyclotassin to Exentium to Dystrepsia 409.
“Hey,” she said, and configured them; her first stab at a towering pharmacy. It was like she’d been duped (and let’s face it, she really had). “They all just sound the same.”
In so many ways, she’d found the perfect name for them, too, because they did all sound like anagrams, of oxy and moron combined. The ridiculous element, too—the moronic nature of fighting it—of killing yourself to survive. They really should come with warnings, like the ones on cigarettes. Take this and slowly die.
* * *
—
As futile as it was, there was still one operation, and the taste of warmed-up hospital.
See, don’t ever let them fool you, when people talk of the smell of hospitals. There’s a point where you go beyond it, when you feel it in your clothes. Weeks later, you’re back at home, and something just feels like—it.
There was once, one morning, at the table, when Rory got a rash of the shivers. As they rose, then fell on his arms, Penelope pointed across.
“You want to know what that is?” she asked. She’d been staring at a bowl of cornflakes; the riddle of trying to eat them. “It means a doctor just turned in his sleep.”
“Or worse,” said Dad, “an anesthesiologist.”
And “Yeah,” said Rory, so willingly, as he stole from our mother’s breakfast. “I hate those dirty bastards the most!”
“Hey—you’re eating all my Goddamn cornflakes, kid.”
She pushed the bowl at him, and gave him a wink.
* * *
—
Then the treatments came in waves again, and the first were wild and whip-like, like a body gone down in a riot. Then slowly more professional; a casual breaking down.
In time they came like terrorism.
A calculated mess.
Our mother, burning, falling.