by Markus Zusak
Here, at 18 Archer Street, there were five of us who remained.
We were the Dunbar boys, we lived on.
Each in ways of our own.
Clay, of course, was the quiet one, but not before he was the strange one—the one who ran the racing quarter, and the boy you’d find on the roof. What a mistake to take him up there that day—he turned it forcefully straight into habit. As for his running the suburbs, we knew he would always come back now, to sit with the tiles and the view.
When I asked if I might run with him, he’d shrugged and we soon became:
It was training, it was escaping.
It was perfect pain and happiness.
* * *
—
First, in between, there was Rory.
His goal was expulsion from school; he’d wanted to leave since kindergarten, and would take the opportunity. He made it clear I wasn’t his guardian, or parent by hostile takeover. He was frank and undeniable:
Vandalism. Constant truancy.
Telling teachers where to stick their assignments.
Alcohol on school grounds.
(“It’s just a beer, I don’t see what you’re all so upset about!”)
Of course, the only good thing to come of it was my meeting Claudia Kirkby; the first time he was suspended.
I remember knocking on her door, and going in, and the essays strewn on the desk. It was something on Great Expectations, and the top one got four out of twenty.
“Jesus, that isn’t Rory’s, is it?”
She made an attempt to tidy them. “No, Rory actually got one out of twenty—and that was for handing in paper. What he wrote was totally worthless.”
But we weren’t here for the essay.
“Suspended?” I asked.
“Suspended.”
She was candid but very friendly; it amazed me that she spoke with humor. Suspension was no laughing matter, but there was something in the tone of her. I think she was reassuring me. There were twelfth graders in this place who looked older than her, which made me strangely happy; if I’d stayed till the end myself, I’d have finished the previous year. Somehow that felt important.
Soon she got down to business, though.
“So, you’re okay with the suspension?”
I nodded.
“And your—”
I could tell she was about to say father. I hadn’t notified the school yet that he’d left us; they would find that out in due course.
“He’s away at the moment—and besides, I think I can cover it.”
“You’re—”
“I’m eighteen.”
It didn’t need to be justified, given I looked a little older, or maybe that’s just my perception. To me, Clay and Tommy always looked younger than they were. Even now, all these years later, I remind myself Tommy’s not six.
In her classroom, we talked on.
She told me it was only two days.
But then, of course, the other business:
They were certainly something to see—her calves, her shins—but not what I’d first imagined. They were just, I don’t know, hers. There’s no other way to say it.
“So you’ve seen the principal?” she interrupted, for I was lost in my glance down floorwards. When I looked up, I saw the writing on the board. It was neat and looped, in cursive. Something about Ralph and Piggy; the theme of Christianity. “You’ve spoken to Mrs. Holland?”
Again, I nodded.
“And, you know—I have to ask. Is it…do you think it’s because—”
I was caught in the warmth of her eyes.
She was like your morning coffee.
I recovered.
“Our mother dying?”
She didn’t say anything else then, but she didn’t look away from me, either. I spoke to the desk and its pages:
“No.” I even went to touch one, to read it, but stopped myself in time. “He’s always been like this; it’s just now I think he’s decided.”
Twice more he would be suspended; more visits for me to the school—and to be honest, I wasn’t complaining.
It was Rory at his most romantic.
He was Puck with a pair of fists.
* * *
—
Next Henry, and Henry was on his way.
He was stick-skinny. A sinewy mind.
His first touch of genius was making money at the Naked Arms. It was all the middle-aged drinkers there, standing out the front. He noticed they all had dogs with them, and the dogs were overweight; as diabetic as their owners.
When he, Clay and Rory came back from the shops one night, he put his shopping bags down on the ground.
“What the hell are you doin’?” said Rory. “Pick those bloody bags up.”
Henry looked over. “Check that bunch of blokes out.” He was fourteen years old, and a mouth. “Look—they’ve all told the missus they’re walking the dog.”
“What?”
“Look there, are your eyes painted on? They go out for a walk, but come to the pub and drink. Look at the state of those retrievers!” Now he walked over. He gave them a turn of his smile, for the first but not the last time. “Any of you lazy bastards want me to walk your dogs?”
Of course, they loved him, they fell for him.
They were amused by the sheer audacity.
He made twenty a night for months.
* * *
—
Then Tommy, and what was to come:
Tommy got lost in the city; he was trying to find the museum.
He was only ten then, and it was bad enough we’d had Clay disappearing, though at least Tommy actually called. He was in a phone booth many miles away, and we drove there to pick him up.
“Hey, Tommy!” Henry called. “I didn’t know you knew what a phone booth was,” and it was great, that afternoon. We drove for a few good hours, through the city and by the coast. We promised we’d take him another day.
* * *
—
As for Clay, and for me, the training started one morning.
I’d caught him, midescape.
It was first light, and he came out front, and if he was surprised to see me by the letterbox, he was able not to show it; he only walked casually on. At least, by then, he wore shoes.
“You want some company?” I asked.
He shrugged, looked away, and we ran.
We ran together each morning, and me, I came back to the kitchen, I drank coffee, and Clay came back to the roof—and honestly, I saw the attraction:
First, the legs, they lit with pain.
Then the throat and lungs.
You knew you were running hard when you felt it in your arms.
We ran up to the cemetery. We ran Poseidon Road. On Carbine we ran the middle; a car once blew its horn at us, and we parted, we veered, each side. We pounded the rotten frangipanis. From the cemetery, we watched the city.
Then there were the other great mornings, seeing boxers from up at the Tri-Colors, as they ran their early roadwork.
“Hey, boys,” they’d say, “hey, boys.”
Hunched backs and healing cheekbones.
The steps of broken-nosed boxers.
Of course, one of them was Jimmy Hartnell, and once he ran backwards and called to me. Like most of them he wore a lake there, of sweat round the rim of his T-shirt. “Hey, Piano!” he called. “Hey, Dunbar!” Then waved, and carried on. Other times when we crossed, we tapped hands like replacement footballers; one of us on, one off. We ran through all our problems.
Sometimes there were extras, too—young jockeys apprenticed to McAndrew. That was one of his requirements: in the first year of your jockey trade, you ran with the Tri-Colors boys, alternate days of the week. There wouldn’t be any exceptions.
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I remember when we first ran to Bernborough, too:
It was a Sunday, an arsonist sunrise.
The grandstand burned like a tenement—like the criminals had lit the place up—and the track was already awash: with weeds, and bedsores and eczema. The infield not quite a jungle, but certainly well on its way.
We did eight 400 meters.
Thirty seconds of rest.
“Again?” I asked.
Clay nodded.
That world in his stomach was gone from him, and the suffering a perfect beauty. At Bernborough, he switched back to barefoot, too, with the peg in the pocket of his shorts…and sometimes I think he planned it. Sometimes I think he knew:
We would run through the streets of the racing quarter.
He would search for him up from on the roof.
In the guise of looking for our father, I think Clay knew something was out there, and now I know it, too—because in there, out in the suburbs-world, we trained our way toward him:
We ran and we searched to a mule.
On the weekend that Cootamundra ran in the racing capital down south, Ennis McAndrew made a decision, a shrewd one:
Carey wouldn’t ride at all.
She’d been robbed of a ride in the Sunline-Northerly Stakes—her first Group One—and she was still just seventeen. He wouldn’t be here in the city for her, and he wouldn’t be taking her along. That surely would have killed her; watching the big bay horse hit the turn.
No, instead he told her simply.
“I think you’ve earned a weekend off.”
He wasn’t your average trainer.
* * *
—
Clay made a special point of coming back that Saturday, and there’d been talk in the week on the radio, of the horse and replacement rider.
On Friday night, when he left, Michael Dunbar surprised him.
He drove him into town, and they were their usual silent selves, but when they made it to the railway, he pulled an envelope from out of the glove box; he placed it on Clay’s lap. On top it said Carey Novac.
“What’s—”
“Just give it to her, okay? She’ll like it. I promise.”
There was no thought of think that one over, just a nod, just barely, across. The lights of the station felt miles away, and the town was mostly quiet. Only murmurs from a distant pub. He looked something like he once had, and Clay gave something back.
In plain sight, he pulled out The Quarryman.
He slid the envelope gently inside.
* * *
—
On Archer Street, next day, Ted and Catherine were both out working, so it was Carey and Clay in her kitchen.
They’d set up the scrappy black radio.
There was a nice small stereo in the lounge room, with digital and all the rest, but they chose to hear it on his. As he sat he realized quickly—this kitchen was amazingly clean.
Between them they exchanged short glances.
Neither of them wanted to speak.
The rider was a consummate professional, Jack Bird, and when the race was run, close to three o’clock, he didn’t let the horse out early, and the lead wasn’t quite enough; he was pocketed on the turn. When he asked him to give there was nothing left, and Clay listened but mostly watched her. He watched her distance of mile-long hair, the forearms above the table, and her face cupped tight in her palms; she was caught between wistful and miserable, but all she said was “Damn.”
* * *
—
They went to a movie not long after.
She reached over, she held his hand.
When he looked at her, she was watching the screen, but a tear was down her face.
It was such a strange thing that happened.
He leaned over and kissed her cheek.
It wasn’t a breach of the rules, though, and both of them somehow knew. He could taste its hurt and saltiness, then looked at her hand in his.
* * *
—
Later, they went to The Surrounds, and she lay down close beside him. She was ready to say some more now, a number she spoke like a grievance:
“Seventh.”
Seventh, an abject failure.
At one point he counted her freckles, and there were fifteen on her face, but so tiny you had to search. There was a sixteenth down on her neck. They were so much redder than her hair, that blood against bronzy sunshine.
“I know,” she said, “there are worse things,” and there were, there definitely were.
For a while she lay with her head on him.
As always, Clay felt her breathing; the warmth of it, the gait.
It seems silly to talk about breath that way—like stride, like length in a race—but that was how he described it.
For a moment he looked down.
Again, that sixteenth blood spot—he wanted to touch it, to let his hand fall, but found himself suddenly speaking. What only she could understand.
“Bonecrusher,” he told her, “Our Waverley Star,” and expected the girl to stir. “That was a two-horse war.” Then, “Saintly,” he said, “and Carbine…” He was talking about a certain race, and horses who had won it. She’d told him only once of it—the first time they’d walked the racing quarter. “And Phar Lap, the greatest of them all.” Then he swallowed and said, “The Spaniard,” and that one almost hurt; The Spaniard, the bloodline of Matador—but still, he had to go further. “Hey,” he said, and he held her; he brought her closer, briefly. He clenched her flannelette arm. “But your favorite’s never changed, I think—it’s always Kingston Town.”
And finally, a last beat longer.
He felt the checkered squares.
“God,” she said, “you remember.”
With her he remembered everything. And he would always know how she’d quickened, when she answered about the Cox Plate, in 1982. How fitting to be in that period, when Penelope came to live here—and Carey now said what the commentary said, which was “Kingston Town can’t win.”
He held her, parceled up there.
His voice, part-voice, part-whisper:
“I always hear the crowd,” he said, “going crazy as he came from nowhere.”
* * *
—
Soon he got up, and he got her up, too, and they made the mattress bed; they shoved the heavy plastic down and tucked it into the ground.
“Come on,” he said as they hit the lane, and the book was in beside him, the envelope still within.
They walked to the bottom of Archer Street, onto Poseidon Road.
During the movie she held his hand, but now she did what she used to do, when first they’d come to be friends; she linked her arm through his. He smiled and didn’t worry. There was no thought of looking like an old couple, or any such misunderstanding. She did such unusual things.
And there were streets so known, and storied—like Empire, Chatham, and Tulloch—and places they’d gone the first time, up further, like Bobby’s Lane. At one point they passed a barber’s shop, with a name they knew and loved; but all of it led to Bernborough, where the moon hung into the grass.
On the straight he opened the book.
She was up a few meters ahead.
It was somewhere close to the finish line, when he called to her, “Hey, Carey.”
She swiveled, but did it slowly.
He caught up and gave her the envelope.
She studied it down in her palm.
She read her name out, out loud, and on the red rubber track at Bernborough, she’d somehow made her comeback:
He caught the glint of sea glass.
“Is this your father’s writing?”
Clay nodded but didn’t speak, and she opened the thin white package, and looked at the photo within
. I imagine what she must have thought, too—thoughts like beautiful or magnificent or I wish I could be there to see you like that—but for now all she did was hold it, then pass it slowly to him.
Her hand, it slightly wavered.
“You,” she whispered, and “the bridge.”
As spring turned into summer, it was life in tracks of two.
There was running, there was living.
There was discipline, perfect idiots.
At home we were almost rudderless; there was always something to argue for, or laugh about, and sometimes both, parallel.
In the racing quarter it was different:
When we ran, we knew where we were.
It was really the perfect blend, I guess, of love in the time of chaos, love in the time of control; we were pulled each way, between them.
* * *
—
In the running, we ran at October, when Clay enrolled in athletics—not remotely excited, nor reticent. The club wasn’t down at Bernborough (far too rundown), but at Chisholm, near the airport.
Everyone over there hated him:
He ran only in the 400, and hardly spoke.
He knew a kid, an animal-boy named Starkey:
He was the mountainous shot put, discus guy.
The gun 400-meter runner was a kid called Spencer.
Clay took off with 300 to go.
“Shit,” they said, the whole clubful of them.
He won by half the straight.
* * *
—
At home it was afternoon.
Just one in a series of many:
Fight 278.
Rory and Henry were having it out.
There was a ruckus coming from their bedroom, which was well and truly a boys’ bedroom bedroom—of beached and forgotten clothing, lost socks and fumes and headlocks. The words like strangulation:
“I told you to keep your shit with the rest of your shit and it keeps encroaching onto my side,” and “Like I’d want my shit encroaching (have a listen to you!) on your stupid side anyway—the state of it,” and “You got a problem with my stupid side, you’d think you’d keep your shit away from it!”
