—
On the roof he showed her where he liked to sit down, part hidden amongst the tiles, and Carey listened and looked at the city. She saw those pinpricks of light.
“Look there,” she said, “Bernborough Park.”
“And there,” he said, he couldn’t stop himself, “the cemetery. We can go—if you don’t mind, that is. I’ll show you the way to the gravestone.”
Pulling her into the sadness made him guilty—more guilty than he already was—but Carey was open, oblivious. She’d treated knowing him like some kind of privilege—and she was right to, I’m glad that she did.
* * *
—
There were moments when Clay was torn open—so much he’d kept from the surface. But now it was all flooding outwards; she could see in him what others couldn’t.
It happened that night on the roof.
“Hey, Clay?” She looked out at the city. “What have you got there, in your pocket?”
In months ahead, she would push too soon.
* * *
—
At Bernborough, late March, she raced him.
She ran like a girl who could run the 400, and didn’t mind suffering for doing it.
He chased her freckly outline.
He watched her bony calves.
Only when they passed the discus net did he come round her, and she said, “Don’t you dare take it easy on me,” and he didn’t. He took the turn and accelerated; at the end they were bent and hurting. Their lungs were sore and hopeful, and did what they were there for:
Two pairs of burning breath.
She looked over and said, “Again?”
“No, I think that one’ll do us.”
It was the first time she would reach for him, and link her arm through his. If only she’d known how right she was:
“Thank God,” she said, “I’m dying.”
* * *
—
And then to April, and a race day, which was something she’d been saving.
“Wait’ll you see this horse,” she said, and she spoke, of course, of Matador.
She loved to watch the bookies and the punters, and those spendthrift men in their fifties: all of them unshaven arse-scratchers, their odor of drunken westerlies. Whole ecosystems in their armpits. She watched them with sadness and affection….The sun was setting around them, in many more ways than one.
Her favorite was standing at the fence, the grandstand at her back, while the horses entered the straight:
The turn was the sound of a landslide.