by Markus Zusak
He was tight but thrilled in his navy blue suit.
He could almost read his lips.
“Don’t even think of hugging me.”
“Don’t worry,” she’d said, “not this time.”
* * *
—
Afterwards, Clay walked home.
He crossed the Hennessey floodgates, out through the smoke of the car park, and the bright red rows of taillights. He turned onto Gloaming Road, which was suitably noisy and choked.
Hands in pockets.
The city folding in, at evening, then—
“Hey!”
He turned.
“Clay!”
She appeared from around the gate.
She’d changed from out of her racing silks, in jeans and shirt, but barefoot. Her smile, again, like the straight.
“Wait up, Clay! Wait up—” And he could feel the heat and blood in her, as she caught him and stood five meters away, and he said to her, “Blood on the Brain.” Then smiled, and told her, “Arkansas.”
* * *
—
She stepped through the dark, and half leapt at him.
She almost tackled him down.
Her heartbeat like a storm front—but warm, inside his jacket—and that traffic still trapped, still standstill.
She hugged him terribly hard.
People walked past and saw, but neither of them cared to notice.
Her feet were on his shoes.
What she said in the pool of his collarbone.
He felt the beams of her bony ribcage, a scaffolding all of its own, as she hugged him fierce and friendless:
“I missed you, do you know that?”
He squeezed her and it hurt but they liked it; and the soft of her chest hardened flat.
He said, “I missed you, too.”
When they lessened, she asked him, “Later?”
And, “Of course,” he said. “I’ll go there.”
They would go there and they’d be disciplined—their rules and regulations; unsaid but always sensed. She would itch but nothing-more him. Nothing more but tell him everything, and not saying that this was the best of it—her feet on top of his.
In the past there were hardening facts.
Our mother was dead.
Our father had fled.
Clay searched for him after a week.
In its lead-up, with every passing hour, something in him was building, but he didn’t quite know what it was; like nerves before a football game, but it never seemed able to dissolve. Maybe the difference was that football games were played. You ran out onto the field; it began, it ended. But not this. This was constant beginning.
* * *
—
Like all of us, Clay missed him in a strangely worn-out way.
It was hard enough missing Penny.
At least with her you knew what to do with it; the beauty of death—it’s definite. With our dad there were too many questions, and thoughts were much more dangerous:
How could he leave us?
Where did he go?
Was he okay?
That morning a week later, when Clay found himself awake, he stood and dressed in the bedroom. Soon, he made his way out; he had to fill that space. His reaction was sudden and simple.
He got to the street and ran.
* * *
—
As I said, he went Dad! DAD! WHERE ARE YOU, DAD?!
But he wasn’t quite able to shout.
The morning was cool with spring.
He’d run hard when he first slipped out, then walked the early darkness. In a rush of fear and excitement, he didn’t know where he was going. When he’d started the internal calling, he’d soon discovered he was lost. He got lucky and wandered home.
Upon arrival, I was on the porch.
I walked down and took his collar.
I held him, one-armed, against me.
Like I said, I’d turned eighteen.
I thought I should try to act it.
“You okay?” I asked, and he’d nodded.
The stomach-feeling had eased.
* * *
—
The second time he did it, the very next day, I wasn’t quite as forgiving; there was still a reach for his collar, but I dragged him across the lawn.
“What the hell are you thinking?” I asked. “What the hell are you doing?”
But Clay was happy, he couldn’t help it; he’d quelled it again, momentarily.
“Are you even listening?”
We stopped at the fly-screen door.
The boy was barefoot-dirty.
I said, “You have to promise me.”
“Promise what?”
It was the first time he noticed the blood down there, like rust between his toes; he liked it and he smiled at it, he liked that blood a lot.
“Take a Goddamn guess! Stop bloody disappearing!”
It’s bad enough he’s disappeared.
I thought it but couldn’t yet say it.
“Okay,” he said, “I won’t.”
Clay promised.
Clay lied.
He did it every morning for weeks.
* * *
—
Sometimes we went out, we searched for him.
Looking back, I wonder why.
He wasn’t in abject peril—the worst would be losing his way again—but it somehow felt important; another holding-on. We’d lost our mother and then our father, so we couldn’t lose any more. We simply wouldn’t allow it. That said, we wouldn’t be nice to him, either; he got dead-legged upon return, at the mercy of Rory and Henry.
The problem, already back then, though, was that it didn’t matter how much we hurt him; we couldn’t hurt him. Or how much we held him; we couldn’t hold him. He’d be gone next day again.
Once, we actually found him out there.
It was a Tuesday, seven a.m.
I was going to be late for work.
The city was cool and cloudy, and it was Rory who caught a glimpse. We were several blocks east, where Rogilla met Hydrogen Avenue.
“There!” he said.
We chased him to Ajax Lane, with its backstreet line of milk crates, and tackled him into the fence; I got a thumbful of cold grey splinters.
“Shit!” cried Henry.
“What?”
“I think he just bit me!”
“That was my belt buckle.”
“Pin that knee!”
He didn’t know it, but somewhere, deep inside, Clay had made a vow; he’d never be pinned like that again, or at least not quite so easily.
* * *
—
That particular morning, though, when we pushed him back through the streets, he’d also made a mistake:
He thought it was over.
It wasn’t.
If Michael Dunbar couldn’t haul him through the house in the months that came beforehand, I could help him out; I shoved him down the hallway, slung him out the back, and banged a ladder against the gutter.
“There,” I said to him. “Climb.”
“What—the roof?”
“Just do it, or I’ll break your legs. See how you go running then—” And his heart sank even deeper; because when Clay made it up to the ridge, he saw exactly what I meant.
“You get the idea? Do you see how big that city is?”
It reminded him of something five years earlier, when he’d wanted to do a project on every sport in the world, and asked Penelope for a new exercise book. He’d been under the impression that all he had to do was list every sport he knew, and halfway down the first page, he’d listed eight measly things, and realized it was hopeless—and so, he now realized, was th
is:
Up here, the city multiplied.
He could see it every side.
It was huge and massive and humongous. It was every expression he’d ever heard used, to describe something undefeatable.
For a moment or two, I was almost sorry, but I had to hammer it home. “You can go as far as you want, kid, but you’re never going to find him.” I looked out over the houses; the countless slants of rooves. “He’s gone, Clay, he killed us. He murdered us.” I forced myself to say it. I forced myself to like it. “What we were—there’s nothing left.”
The sky was blanket grey.
Around us, nothing but city.
Beside me, a boy and his feet.
He killed us hung between us, and we knew, somehow, it was real.
The birth that day of a nickname.
From the moment in the Hennessey car park, something new was set in motion. On the surface, all felt normal, as winter continued in full—the dark mornings, the clean sunlight—and bridge and tireless building.
In a steady stream of races, Carey won four, which took the total to six. As always she climbed from the radio; he loved to sit and imagine her. There were also three third placings, but never any seconds. The girl was incapable of finishing second.
On Wednesdays, when Michael was away, and Clay missed things more than usual, he took his radio and box to the trees. He held the lighter and held the peg. He smiled at the iron and feather. He sat amongst the shedded bark skins, like models or casts of body parts, like arms and fallen elbows. Sometimes he stood, the last furlong:
Come on, Carey, take him home.
A cavalcade of horses:
Kiama, Narwee, and Engadine.
(She had a knack, it seemed, for place names.)
The Lawnmower. The Kingsman.
Sometimes War of the Roses again.
She rode him hands-and-heels.
Then a day arrived, a horse arrived, when a jockey pulled out of a race; a dislocated shoulder. It was Carey who got the mount. The horse was named for a country town, out in the Riverina—and things were about to change for her, and change the course of here.
A horse called Cootamundra.
* * *
—
It was August by then, and the mornings close to frozen. There was wood and woodwork everywhere. There were masses of blocks and stone. They worked silently with only their hands, and it was like they were building a grandstand, and maybe they kind of were.
He held giant planks in place for him.
“Not there,” said Michael Dunbar. “There.”
He realigned.
Many nights, when his father turned in, Clay stayed out in the river. He planed wood where it needed planing, and rubbed stone against stone for exactness. Sometimes Michael brought tea out, and they sat on the stones and watched, surrounded by wooden monoliths.
Sometimes he climbed the falsework, which grew each day, each arch. The first was almost a testing mold (falsework for the falsework), and the second built faster and stronger; they learned their trade on the job. More than once he thought of a photo; the famous one of Bradfield—the man who planned the Coathanger. The great arch was coming together, and he’d stood one foot either side of it. The gap, like death, below.
* * *
—
As always, he listened to the radio, they played both sides of the tape. There were so many iconic tracks, but his favorite was “Beast of Burden”—maybe in tribute to Achilles, but more likely, a plea to Carey. She was buried inside the songs.
Then came Saturday, late in the month, and the radio on for the racing; there’d been a problem, in the sixth, in the barriers. A horse called Now You’re Dreaming. The jockey was Frank Eltham, and the horse was spooked by a seagull, and caused them a hell of a mess. Eltham did well to hang on, but just when he thought he’d recovered, he was bucked a final time, and that was it, the shoulder.
The horse was scratched, but survived.
The jockey was sent to the hospital.
He was riding a real prospect—the up-and-coming Cootamundra—in the last race of the day, and the owner was at the trainer, for the best McAndrew could get.
“There is no one to get. This is all I have.”
Every seasoned jockey was already booked; they’d have to go with the apprentice.
The old man called behind him:
“Hey, Carey.”
She was bursting for the ride.
When she was handed the colors of red-green-white, she walked straight back to the Shit Can—the name for the female jockey room, for that’s exactly what it was, an old toilet—and she walked out ready to run.
And she knew.
The horse was going to win.
Sometimes, she said, you just feel it.
McAndrew felt it, too.
He was quiet but witheringly forceful:
“Take him straight to the front, and don’t stop till you hit Gloaming Road,” and Carey Novac nodded.
He smacked her on the back as she went.
* * *
—
In Silver, at the Amahnu, they heard the late inclusion, and when Clay stopped work on the molding, Michael Dunbar fully realized.
It’s her.
Carey Novac.
That’s the name.
For the race they sat and listened, and it was just as McAndrew had said; she took him to the front. The horse was never headed. He was big, deep brown—a bay. He was courageous and full of running. He won by four good lengths.
* * *
—
From there, this is what happened:
Through September, at the river, whenever Michael returned from the mines, they shook hands, and worked like madmen.
They cut and measured and sawed.
They sliced off edges of stones; they worked in perfect rhythm.
When they finished up work on the pulley system, they tested the weight of a spandrel. There were half nods—then nods—of happiness; the ropes were as tough as the Trojans, the wheels were discounted steel.
“Sometimes the mines are good for us,” said Michael, and Clay could only agree.
There were moments when they noticed the light change; of sun being swallowed in the sky. Dark clouds would meet at the mountains, then seemingly trudge away. No business yet to be here, but their day was surely coming.
In time, they planned the deck—what to lay on top:
“Wood?” said Michael Dunbar.
“No.”
“Concrete?”
Nothing but sandstone would do.
* * *
—
And from there, this is what happened:
The owner loved the jockey.
His name was Harris Sinclair.
He said she was fearless, and lucky.
He liked her garrulous hair (you’d think it was hair that talked, he said), and she was skinny and country-real.
In the lead-up to spring carnival, Cootamundra won twice more, against better, more experienced fields. She told Clay she loved this kind of front-running horse, how they were the bravest ones. It was a howling Saturday night. The pair of them at The Surrounds. “He just gets out and runs,” she’d said, and the wind flung up the words.
Even when he ran second (the first time ever for Carey), the owner presented her with a gift: a fresh-bought consolation beer.
“Really?” said old McAndrew. “Give that bloody thing here.”
“Oh, shit—sorry, kid.”
He was one of those hard-boiled businessmen, a lawyer—deep-voiced and commanding—and always like he’d just had lunch; and you could bet it had been a good one.
* * *
—
By October, the bridge was slowly forming, and the prestigious spring races star
ted.
It was partly here at home, but mostly south at Flemington, and other fabled tracks down there; like Caulfield, Moonee Valley.
McAndrew was taking three horses.
One was Cootamundra.
There was discussion now with Sinclair. Where before he’d seen Carey’s promise—and self-glory through association—that second-placing had got him wondering. Till now they could often claim; that is, they could race him at lighter weight, because the jockey was only an apprentice. In the big ones that wasn’t the case. One afternoon, she heard them; it was in McAndrew’s office, of schedules and unwashed breakfast plates. Carey was outside, eavesdropping, her ear against the fly screen.
“Look, I’m just exploring the options, okay?” said the thick-voiced Harris Sinclair. “I know she’s good, Ennis, but this is Group One.”
“It’s a horse race.”
“It’s the Sunline-Northerly Stakes!”
“Yes, but—”
“Ennis, listen—”
“No, you listen.” The scarecrow voice cut through her. “This isn’t emotional, it’s because she’s the rider of the horse—that’s it. If she’s injured, suspended, or turns into a cake shop in the next three weeks, fair enough, we’ll change her, but as it is? The thing isn’t broken so I’m not gonna fix it. You have to trust me on this one, okay?”
There was a chasm of doubtful silence, before McAndrew spoke again.
“Who’s the bloody trainer, anyway?”
“Okay…,” said Harris Sinclair—and the girl tripped back and ran.
She forgot all about her bike chained up at the fence line, and ran home to Ted and Catherine. Even in the night, the thrill of it was too much, she couldn’t sleep, so she escaped, she went out, she lay down on her own at The Surrounds.
Unfortunately, what she hadn’t heard were the words that were spoken next.
“But, Ennis,” said Harris Sinclair, “I’m the owner.”
She was close, so close, then replaced.
