Bridge of Clay

by Markus Zusak

  * * *

  —

  At the end of the wake, and its assortment of teas and coffee cakes, we stood outside the building.

  All of us in black pants.

  All of us in white shirts.

  We looked like a bunch of Mormons, but without the generous thoughts:

  Rory was angry and quiet.

  Me, like one more tombstone, but my eyes agleam and burning.

  Henry looking outwards.

  Tommy still wet with streaks.

  And then, of course, there was Clay, who stood, then eased to a crouch. On the day of her death he’d found a peg in his hand, and he clenched it now till it hurt; then returned it soon to his pocket. Not one of us had seen it. It was bright and new—a yellow one—and he flipped it compulsively over. Like all of us he waited for our father, but our father had disappeared. We kicked our hearts around at our feet; like flesh, all soft and bloody. The city lay glittering below us.

  “Where the hell is he?”

  It was me who’d finally asked, when the wait became two hours.

  When he arrived, it was hard to look at us, and us to look at him.

  He was bent and broken-postured.

  He was a wasteland in a suit.

  * * *

  —

  It’s funny, the time beyond a funeral.

  There are bodies and the injured everywhere.

  Our lounge room was more like a hospital ward, but one like you’d see in a movie. There were boys all torrid, diagonal. We were molded to whatever we lay on.

  The sun not right, but shining.

  * * *

  —

  As for Michael Dunbar, it surprised us how fast the cracks appeared, even given the state of him.

  Our father became a half father.

  The other half dead with Penny.

  One evening, a few days after the funeral, he left again, and the five of us went out looking, and first we tried the cemetery, and then the Naked Arms (our reasoning still to come).

  When we did find him, it was a shock to open the garage, and he lay beside an oil stain, since the police had taken her car. The only thing missing was a gallery of Penny Dunbars, but then, he never did paint her, did he?

  For a while he still went to work.

  The others went back to school.

  I’d already been working a long time by then, for a company of floorboards and carpet. I’d even bought the old station wagon, from a guy I sometimes worked with.

  * * *

  —

  Early on, our father was called to the schools, and he was the perfect post-war charlatan: well-dressed, clean-shaven. In control. We’re coping, he’d said, and principals nodded, teachers were fooled; they could never quite see the abyss in him. It was hidden beneath his clothes.

  He wasn’t like so many men, who set themselves free with drink, or outbursts and abuse. No, for him it was easier to withdraw; he was there but never there. He sat in the empty garage, with a glass he never drank from. We called him in for dinner, and even Houdini would have been impressed. It was a slow and steady vanishing act.

  He left us like that, in increments.

  * * *

  —

  As for us Dunbar boys those first six months, we looked a lot like this:

  Tommy’s primary school teacher kept an eye on him.

  She reported he was doing okay.

  For the three of them in high school, they each had to see a teacher, who doubled as a kind of psychologist. There’d also been one previous to this, but that guy had since moved on, replaced by a total sweetheart; the warm-armed Claudia Kirkby. Back then, she was still just twenty-one. She was brown-haired, and quite tall. Not too much makeup, but always wore high heels. In her classroom there were the posters—Jane Austen and her barbell, and MINERVA MCGONAGALL IS GOD. On her desk there were books and projects, in various stages of marking.

  Often, at home, after they’d seen her, they had the sort of talks boys seem to have: talks but not talks at all.

  Henry: “Good old Claudia, ay?”

  Rory: “She’s got a good pair of legs.”

  Boxing gloves, legs and breasts.

  That’s all they ever bonded with.

  Me: “Shut up, for Christ’s sake.”

  But I imagined those legs, I had to.

  As for Claudia herself, up closer: She had an endearing sunspot on her cheek, right in the middle. Her eyes were kind and brown. She taught a hell of an English unit on Island of the Blue Dolphins and Romeo and Juliet. As a counselor, she smiled a lot, but didn’t have much idea; at university, she’d done one small unit of psychology, which made her qualified for disasters like these. Most likely, she was the newest teacher at the school, and handed the extra work—and probably more out of hope than anything else, if the boys said they were fine, she wanted quite badly to believe them; and two of them actually were fine, given the circumstance, and one was nowhere near it.

  * * *

  —

  And maybe it’s the little things that kill you in the end—as the months dropped down to winter. It was seeing him arrive home from work.

  Sitting in his car, sometimes for hours.

  His powdery hands at the wheel:

  No more Anticols.

  Not a single Tic Tac left.

  It was me paying the water bill, instead of him.

  Then the electricity.

  It was the sideline at weekend football games:

  He watched but didn’t see, then didn’t show up at all.

  His arms became uncharged; they were limp and starved of meaning. His concrete stomach mortared. It was death by becoming not him.

  He forgot our birthdays; even my eighteenth.

  The gateway into adulthood.

  He ate with us sometimes, he always did the dishes, but then he’d go outside, back to the garage, or stand below the clothesline, and Clay would go there with him—because Clay knew something we didn’t. It was Clay our father feared.

  On one of the rare nights he was home, the boy found him at the piano, staring at the handwritten keys, and he stood there, close behind him. His fingers were stalled, mid-MARRY.

  “Dad?”

  Nothing.

  He wanted to tell him—Dad, it’s okay, it’s okay what happened, it’s okay, it’s okay, I won’t tell anyone. Anything. Ever. I won’t tell them.

  Again, the peg was there.

  He slept with it, it never left him.

  Some mornings, after lying on it through the night, he examined his leg in the bathroom—like a drawing, stenciled to his thigh. Sometimes he wished he would come to him in the dark, and reef him, awake, from his bed. If only our dad would have hauled him through the house, out the back; he wouldn’t care if he was only in underpants, with the peg tucked in at the elastic.

  Maybe then he could be just a kid again.

  He could be skinny arms and boyish legs; he’d hit the clothesline pole so hard. His body would catch the handle. The metal in his ribs. He’d look up and inside those lines up there—the silent ranks of pegs. The darkness wouldn’t matter; he’d see only shape and color. For hours he could let it happen, beaten gladly through till morning, when the pegs could eclipse the city—till they took on the sun, and won.

  But that was exactly the thing.

  Our father never came and took him like that.

  There was nothing but the measure of increments.

  Michael Dunbar was soon to leave us.

  But first he left us alone.

  * * *

  —

  By the end it was almost six months to the day since her death:

  Autumn was winter, then spring, and he left us barely saying anything.

  It was a Saturday.

  It was in that
crossover between very late, and very early.

  We still had the triple bunk at that stage, and Clay was asleep in the middle. Around quarter to four, he awoke. He saw him beside the bedsides; he spoke to the shirt and torso.

  “Dad?”

  “Go back to sleep.”

  The moon was in the curtains. The man stood motionless, and Clay knew, he closed his eyes, he did what he was told, but talked on. “You’re leaving, Dad, aren’t you?”

  “Be quiet.”

  For the first time in months, he touched him.

  Our father leaned in and touched him, both hands—and they were hangman’s hands, sure enough—on his head and over his back. They were powdery and hard. Warm but worn-out. Loving but cruel, and loveless.

  For a long time, he stayed, but when Clay opened his eyes again, he was gone; the job was officially done. Somehow he still felt the hands, though, who had held and touched his head.

  There were five of us in that house then.

  We dreamed in our rooms and slept.

  We were boys but also miraculous:

  We lay there, living and breathing—

  For that was the night he’d killed us.

  He’d murdered us all in our beds.

  At Silver, in the dry riverbed, they built days into weeks, weeks to a month. For Clay there became a compromise—he went home for The Surrounds on Saturdays, but only when Michael was at the mines.

  Other than that, they were up every day before sunrise.

  They came in long after dark.

  When winter set in, they built fires down there, and worked hours into the night. The insects had long since quieted. There were cool red sunsets, and the smell of smoke through the morning; and very slowly, very surely, a bridge was forming—but you wouldn’t know to see it. The riverbed was more like a bedroom, a teenager’s; but instead of socks and clothes, it was scattered with shifted earth, and crossworks and angles of wood.

  Each dawn they arrived and stood with it.

  It was a boy, a man, and two coffee mugs.

  “That’s pretty much all you need,” he said, but they knew the Murderer was lying.

  They also needed a radio.

  * * *

  —

  On a Friday, they drove into town.

  He found it in St. Vincent de Paul:

  It was long, black, and crusty-looking—a broken tape deck that somehow worked, but only if you forced it with Blu-Tack. There was even a tape still in it: a homemade best of the Rolling Stones.

  Every Wednesday and Saturday, though, the antenna was always outwards, at forty-five degrees. The Murderer soon came to know; he knew which races had meaning.

  * * *

  —

  In the intervals, when Clay came home to Archer Street, he was shockingly alive and worn; he was powdery. His pockets were full of dust. He took clothes, he bought boots, and they were brown, then tan, then faded. He always brought the radio, and if she raced at Hennessey he’d go there. If it was somewhere else—Rosehill, Warwick Farm, or Randwick—he’d listen, inside, in the kitchen, or alone out back, on the porch. Then wait for her at The Surrounds.

  She’d go there and she’d lie with him.

  She told him about the horses.

  He’d look at the sky and not mention it; that none of her mounts were winning. He could see how it weighed her down, but saying it would make it worse.

  It was cold but they never complained; they lay in jeans and heavy jackets. Her puzzle of blood-lit freckles. Sometimes she had a hood on, and lengths of hair climbed out. They itched against his neck. She always found a way.

  It was typical Carey Novac.

  * * *

  —

  In July, on a night he’d gone to the mines, Michael Dunbar left new notes, to add to his plans for the scaffold, and dimensions for the molds and arches. Clay smiled at the drawing of falsework. But sadly, he had to start digging again—this time to build a ramp, for delivery of blocks of stone.

  He cut into the walls of the riverbed, and gently fashioned a road; it wasn’t just the bridge, it was everything around it—and he’d work at these things, even harder, when he was left in the river alone. He worked and listened, and staggered inside. He collapsed to the sunken couch.

  * * *

  —

  Since Settignano, there’d been an unspoken understanding.

  The Murderer wouldn’t mention it.

  He wouldn’t ask what Clay had learned:

  How much of The Quarryman, and Michelangelo? And Abbey Hanley, Abbey Dunbar? And painting? His paintings.

  In Michael’s absence, Clay read his favorite chapters, and the favorite chapters of Carey.

  For her it was still the earlier ones:

  The city and his upbringing.

  The teenage broken nose.

  The carving of the Pietà, the Christ—like liquid—in Mary’s arms.

  For Clay, it was still the David.

  The David and the Slaves.

  He loved them like his father did.

  He loved another of the book’s descriptions, too, of where those statues stood today—in Florence, in the Accademia:

  Today, the David remains, at the end of the gallery’s corridor, in a dome of light and space. Still in the grip of decision: forever fearing, forever defiant and deciding. Can he take on the might of Goliath? He stares over us, far away, and the Prisoners wait in the distance. They’ve struggled and waited for centuries—for the sculptor to return and finish them—and must wait a few centuries longer….

  * * *

  —

  At home, when he was here, in the evenings, sometimes he went to the roof. Sometimes he read on one side of the couch, while I read on the other.

  Often we all watched movies together.

  Sometimes a double feature:

  Misery and Mad Max 2.

  City of God. (“What?” called Henry from the kitchen. “Not something made this century for a change!”) And later, for balance, Weird Science. (“That’s a bit bloody better—1985!”) That last one had been a gift again, this time for a birthday, from Rory and Henry combined.

  The night of the second double feature was a great one.

  We all sat, we gaped and watched.

  We were floored by the slums of Rio.

  Then marveled at Kelly LeBrock.

  “Hey,” said Rory, “take that bit back!” and “This shit shoulda won Oscars!”

  * * *

  —

  At the river, by the radio, out of handfuls, then dozens of races, her first win would remain elusive. That first afternoon at Hennessey—when she’d veered and lost to the protest—felt suddenly, seemingly years ago, yet near enough to still burn.

  Once, when she came storming through the field, on a mare by the name of Stun Gun, a jockey lost his whip in front of her, and it struck her below the chin. It caused her a moment’s distraction, and loss of the horse’s momentum.

  She finished fourth, but alive, and pissed off.

  * * *

  —

  At last, it came, though, it had to.

  A Wednesday afternoon.

  The meeting was at Rosehill, and the horse was a miler named Arkansas.

  Clay was alone in the riverbed.

  It had rained in the city for days, and she’d kept him on the inside run. While the other jockeys took their horses, quite rightly, out to firmer ground, Carey had listened to McAndrew. He’d told her wise and drily:

  “Just take him right through the slop, kid. Keep him on the rail—I almost want paint marks on him when you bring him in, got it?”

  “Got it.”

  But McAndrew could see the doubt in her. “Look—no one’s run there all day, it might hold up, and you’ll be racing him a few strides shorter.”r />
  “Peter Pan once won the Cup like that.”

  “No,” he corrected her, “he didn’t—he did the opposite, he ran out wide, but the whole track was slopped to bits.”

  For Carey this was a rare mistake; it must have been nerves, and McAndrew smiled, halfway—as much as he ever did on race day. A lot of his jockeys didn’t even know who Peter Pan was. The horse or the fictional character.

  “Just win the bloody thing.”

  And she did.

  * * *

  —

  In the riverbed, Clay rejoiced:

  He laid a hand on a plank of the scaffold. He’d heard drinking men say things like “Just give me four beers and you’ll never get the smile off me,” and that was how this was for him.

  She’d won one.

  He imagined her bringing him in, and the gleam and the clock hands, McAndrew. On the radio, they would soon cross to Flemington, down south, and the commentator finished with laughter. He said, “Look at her, the jockey, she’s hugging the tough old trainer—and take a look at McAndrew! Did you ever see someone look so uncomfortable?”

  The radio laughed, and Clay laughed, too.

  A pause, then back to work.

  * * *

  —

  The next time he came home, he thought and dreamed on the train. He concocted a great many moments, for celebrating the win of Arkansas, but should have known it would always be different.

  He went straight to the stands of Hennessey.

  He watched her race for two fourths and a third. And then her second first. It was a sprinter called Blood on the Brain, owned by a wealthy undertaker. Apparently, all the horses he owned were named for fatal conditions: Embolism, Heart Attack, Aneurysm. His favorite was Influenza. “Very underrated,” he’d say, “but a killer.”

  For Blood on the Brain, she’d kept him nice and relaxed, and brought him through on the turn. When she came in, Clay watched McAndrew.