by Markus Zusak
We stood and we looked at Clay.
And Tommy was running down after him.
“Clay!” he screamed. “Hey, Clay!”
And of course he was taking Achilles—and the mule, amazingly, was running. He was running! You could hear the hollowing hoofbeats, as the boy ran him down the street; and Clay had turned to meet them, and looked at the boy and the beast.
There wasn’t even a moment.
Not a second of hesitation.
It was how it was meant to be, and his hand came out for the reins.
“Thanks, Tommy.”
It was quiet but all of us heard, and he turned and he walked and took him, as full morning had come to hit Archer Street—and we all went downwards to Tommy. We watched as they left us behind.
In there, out in the suburbs-world, a boy walked the streets with a mule. They set out for a bridge in Silver, and took the darkest waters with them.
Once—and I write this at least ALMOST for the last few times—in the tide of Dunbar past, there was a woman who told us she would die, and the world ended that night, in that kitchen. There were boys on the floor, they were burning; and the sun came up the next morning.
All of us woke up early.
Our dreams were like flight, like turbulence.
By six o’clock, even Henry and Rory were mostly awake; our notorious sleeper-inners.
It was March, and awash with leftovers from summer, and we stood together, in the hallway—skinny arms and anchored shoulders. We stood but we were stuck there. We wondered what to do.
Our dad came out and tried; a hand on each of our necks.
An attempt at some sort of comfort.
The problem was, when he walked away, we saw him take hold of the curtains, and one hand on the piano; he hung on, his body was shaking. The sun was warm and wavy, and we were quiet in the hall, behind him.
He assured us he was okay.
When he turned and came to face us, though, his aqua eyes were lightless.
* * *
—
As for us:
Henry, Clay, and I were in singlets and old shorts.
Rory and Tommy wore just underwear.
It was what they’d gone to sleep in.
All of us tightened our jaws.
The hallway was full of tiredness, of boyish legs and shins. All outside their bedroom—strung toward the kitchen.
* * *
—
When she came out, she was dressed for work, in jeans and a dark blue shirt. The buttons were slits of metal. Her hair was braided down the back; she looked ready to go out riding or something, and cautiously, we watched her—and Penelope couldn’t help it.
She was blond and braidwork, beaming.
“What’s got into you lot?” she asked. “No one died, did they?”
And that was what eventually did it:
She laughed but Tommy cried, and she crouched down close and held him—and then came all the rest of us, in singlets, shorts and falling.
“Too much?” she asked, and she knew it was, from being smeared by all those bodies.
She felt the clench of boys’ arms.
Our dad looked helplessly on.
So there she was.
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.”
<
br /> * * *
—
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.
A human nine-eleven.
Or a woman becomes a country, and you see her leaving herself. Like the winters of old in the Eastern Bloc, the threats came on more quickly:
The boils, they rose like battlegrounds.
They blitzkrieged over her back.
The drugs wreaked havoc with her thermostat; they scorched her, then froze, then paralyzed, and when she walked from bed she collapsed—her hair like a nest on the pillow, or feathers on the lawn, from the cat.
For Penny you could see it was betrayal. It was there in the green-gone eyes; and the worst was the sheer disappointment. How could she be let down like this, by the world and by her body?
Again, like The Odyssey and The Iliad, where gods would intervene—till something spiraled to catastrophe—so it was with here. She tried to reassemble herself, to resemble herself, and sometimes she even believed it. At best we soon were jaded:
The stupid light of hospital wards.
The souls of lovely nurses.
How I hated the way they walked:
The stockinged legs of matrons!
But some, you had to admire them—how we hated to love the special ones. Even now, as I punch what happened out, I’m grateful to all those nurses; how they lifted her in the pillows, like the breakable thing she was. How they held her hand and spoke to her, in the face of all our hatred. They warmed her up, put fires out, and like us, they lived and waited.
* * *
—
One morning, when the toll hit close to breaking point, Rory stole a stethoscope—taking something back, I guess—as our mother became an impostor. By then she was the color of jaundice, and never again the color she was. We’d come to know the difference by then, between yellowness and blond.
She held on to us by our forearms, or the flesh of our palms and our wrists. Again, the education—so easy to count the knuckles, and the bones in both of her hands. She looked out through the window, at the world so bright and careless.
* * *
—
It’s also a thing to see, when you see your father change.
You watch him fold in different places.
You see him sleep another way:
He leans forward onto the ward bed.
He takes air but doesn’t breathe it.
Such pressure all held within.
It’s something fatigued and trodden-looking, and clothes that sigh at the seams. Like Penny would never be blond again, our dad would lose his physique. They were the dying of color and shape. It’s not just the death of them you see when you watch a person dying.
* * *
—
But then—she’d make it out.
Somehow, she’d climb from all of it, and traverse the hospital doors. She’d go straight back to work, of course, though death was at her shoulder.
No more hanging from the power lines for that old guy.
Or draping round the fridge.
But he was always out there somewhere:
On a train or a bus, or footpath.
On the way back home to here.
* * *
—
By November she was miraculous.
Eight months and she’d managed to live.
There was another two-week hospital stint, and the doctors were noncommittal, but sometimes they’d stop and tell us:
“I don’t know how she’s done it. I’ve never seen anything so—”
“If you say aggressive,” said our dad, and he’d pointed, calmly, at Rory, “I’m going to— See that kid?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m going to tell him to beat you up.”
“Sorry—what?”
<
br /> The doctor was quite alarmed, and Rory suddenly awoke—that sentence was better than smelling salts.
“Really?” He was almost rubbing his hands together. “Can I?”
“Of course not, I’m joking.”
But Rory tried to sell it. “Come on, Doc, after a while you won’t even feel it.”
“You people,” said that particular specialist, “are totally out of your minds.”
To his left there was Penny’s laughter.
She laughed, then quelled the pain.
“Maybe that,” she said to the doctor, “is how I’ve been able to do it.”
She was a happy-sad creature in blankets.
* * *
—
On that occasion, when she came home, we’d decked out the entire house:
Streamers, balloons, Tommy made a sign.
“You spelt welcome wrong,” said Henry.
“What?”
“It’s only one L.”
Penelope didn’t mind.
Our father carried her from the car, and for the first time, she actually let him—and next morning we all heard it, before first light had hit the house:
Penny was playing the piano.
She played through the sunrise, she played through our fights. She played through breakfast, and then long past it, and none of us knew the music. Maybe it was a misspent rationale, that when she was playing she wasn’t dying—for we knew it would soon be back again, having swung from wire to wire.
There was no point closing the curtains, or locking any of the doors.
It was in there, out there, waiting.
It lived on our front porch.
When Clay ran back from McAndrew, our father was standing with Achilles.
He asked if Clay was okay.
He told him he’d really missed him.
