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?”