by Markus Zusak
One part I remember clearly is how they used to cut our hair; a barber would have cost too much. It was set up in the kitchen—an assembly line, and two chairs—and we’d sit, first Rory and me, then Henry and Clay. Then, when it came to Tommy’s turn, Michael would cut Tommy’s, to give Penny a small reprieve, and then she’d resume and cut his.
“Hold still!” said our father to Tommy.
“Hold still,” said Penny to Michael.
Our hair lay in lumps in the kitchen.
* * *
—
Sometimes, and this one comes so happily it hurts, I remember when we all got into one car, the entire lot of us, piled in. In so many ways I can’t help but love the idea of it—how Penny and Michael, they were both completely law-abiding, but then they did things like this. It’s one of those perfect things, really, a car with too many people. Whenever you see a group squashed in like that—an accident waiting to happen—they’re always shouting and laughing.
In our case, in the front, through the gaps, you could see their hand-held hands.
It was Penelope’s fragile, piano-playing hand.
Our father’s powdery work hand.
And a scrum of boys around them, of blended arms and legs.
In the ashtray there were lollies, usually Anticols, sometimes Tic Tacs. The windshield was never clean in that car, but the air was always fresh; it was boys all sucking on cough drops, or a festival of mint.
* * *
—
Some of Clay’s fondest memories of our dad, though, were the nights, just before bed, when Michael wouldn’t believe him. He’d crouch and speak to him quietly: “Do you need to go to the toilet, kid?” and Clay would shake his head. Even as the boy was refusing, he’d be led to the small bathroom, and cracked tiling, and proceed to piss like a racehorse.
“Hey, Penny!” Michael would call. “We’ve got bloody Phar Lap here!” And he’d wash the boy’s hands and crouch again, not saying another thing—and Clay knew what it meant. Every night, for a long, long time, he was piggybacked into bed:
“Can you tell me about old Moon again, Dad?”
* * *
—
Then to us, his brothers, we were bruises, we were beatings, in the house at 18 Archer Street. As older siblings do, we marauded all that was his. We’d pick him up by his T-shirt, right in the middle of his back, and deposit him somewhere else. When Tommy arrived, three years later, we did the same to him. All through Tommy’s childhood, we craned him behind the TV, or dropped him out the back. If he cried he was dragged to the bathroom, a horsey bite at the ready; Rory was stretching his hands.
“Boys?” would come the call. “Boys, have you seen Tommy?”
Henry did the whispering, by the long blond hairs in the sink.
“Not one word, y’ little prick.”
Nodding. Fast nodding.
That was the way to live.
* * *
—
At five years old, like all of us, Clay began the piano.
We hated it but did it.
The MARRY ME keys and Penny.
When we were very young, she’d spoken her old language to us, but only as we went to sleep. Now and then she’d stop and explain something of it, but it left us year by year. Music, on the other hand, was nonnegotiable, and there’d been varying degrees of success:
I was close to competent.
Rory was downright violent.
Henry might have been brilliant, if only he could have cared.
Clay was quite slow to get things, but once he did he would never forget.
Later, Tommy had only done a few years when Penny fell sick, and maybe she was already broken by then, mostly, I think, by Rory.
“All right!” she’d call from next to him, through the barrage of battered music. “Time’s up!”
“What?” He was desecrating that marriage proposal, which was fading by then, and fast, but would never fade completely. “What was that?”
“I said time’s up!”
Often she wondered what Waldek Lesciuszko would have made of him, or more to the point, of her. Where was her patience? Where was the branch of a spruce tree? Or in this place, a bottlebrush or eucalypt? She knew there was a big difference between five boyish boys and a father’s studious girl, but there was still a disappointment, as she watched him swagger away.
For Clay, sitting in the corner of the lounge room was a duty, but one he was willing to endure; he tried at least to try. When he was finished, he’d trail her to the kitchen, and ask his two-word question:
“Hey, Mum?”
Penny would stop at the sink. She’d hand him a checkered tea towel. “I think,” she’d say, “I’ll tell you about the houses today, and how I thought they were made of paper….”
“And the cockroaches?”
She couldn’t help herself. “So big!”
* * *
—
But sometimes I think they wondered, our parents, about why they’d chosen to live like this. Most often they would snap over minor things, as the mess and frustration mounted.
I remember how once it rained a whole fortnight, in summer, and we came home deep-fried in mud. Penny had duly lost it with us, and resorted to the wooden spoon. She gave it to us on the arms, on the legs—everywhere she could (and the dirt, like crossfire, like shrapnel)—till finally she’d splintered two of those spoons, and threw a boot down the hall instead. As it tumbled, end over end, it somehow gathered momentum, and elevation, hitting Henry, a thud in the face. His mouth was bleeding, and he’d swallowed a loose tooth, and Penny sat down near the bathroom. When a few of us went to console her, she sprang up and said, “Go to hell!”
It was hours till finally she’d checked on him, and Henry was still deciding. Was he ridden with guilt, or furious? After all, losing teeth was good for business. He said, “I won’t even get paid by the Tooth Fairy!” and showed her the gap within.
“The Tooth Fairy,” she said, “will know.”
“Do you think you get more if you swallow it?”
“Not when you’re covered in mud.”
* * *
—
For me, the most memorable arguments our parents had were linked often to Hyperno High. The endless marking. Abusive parents. Or injuries from breaking up fights.
“Jesus, why don’t you just let ’em kill each other?” our dad said once. “How could you be so—” and Penny was starting to seethe.
“So—what?”
“I don’t know—naïve, and just, stupid—to think you can make a difference.” He was tired, and sore, from building work, and putting up with the rest of us. He waved a hand back out through the house. “You spend all that extra time marking, and trying to help them, and look here—look at this place.” He was right; there was Lego everywhere, and a scattergun of clothes and dust. Our toilet recalled those public ones, in the time of her spoils of freedom; not one of us aware of the brush.
“And what? So I should stay home and do the cleaning?”
“Well, no, that’s not what I—”
“Should I get the bloody vacuum?”
“Oh, shit, that’s not what I meant.”
“WELL, WHAT DID YOU MEAN?” she roared. “HUH?”
It was the sound that makes a boy look up, when anger spills over to rage. This time they really mean it.
And still it wasn’t quite over.
“YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE ON MY SIDE, MICHAEL!”
“I am!” he said. “…I am.”
And the quieted voice, even worse. “Then how about actually showing it.”
Then after-storm, and silence.
* * *
—
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!”
“Yeah,” agreed Henry, “show a bit of respect—”
“I wouldn’t start any shit like that right now if I were you.” I had my eye on the frying pan, too, lounging around on the stove. It wouldn’t be hard giving it something to do. “What the hell happened, anyway? Did they beat you up, or run you over with a truck?”
Henry touched a cut, almost fondly. “Okay, look—Schwartz and Starkey are good guys. I asked them, we got drinking, and then”—he took a breath—“neither of them would do it, so I sort of started in on the girl.” He looked at Clay and Rory. “You know—the one with the lips.”
You mean the bra strap, thought Clay.
“You mean the tits,” said Rory.
“That’s her.” Henry nodded happily.
“And?” I asked. “What did you do?”
Rory again. “She’s got tits like bread rolls, that chick.”
Henry: “You think? Bread rolls? I’ve never heard such a thing.”
