What can we say about him?
Where and how did life begin again the next day?
It was pretty simple, really, with a multitude lying in wait:
He woke up in the biggest bedroom in the city.
* * *
—
For Clay, it was perfect, another strange but sacred site: it was a bed, in a field, with the ignition of dawn and distant rooftops; or, more accurately, it was an old mattress, lying faded in the earth.
In truth, he went often (and always on Saturday nights), but it was many months since he’d stayed till morning, in the field behind our house. Even so, it was still an oddly comforting privilege; this mattress had survived much longer than it had the right.
In that spirit all appeared normal when he’d first opened his eyes.
Everything was quiet, the world was still as a painting.
But then it all came stumbling up, and falling down.
What have I gone and done?
* * *
—
Officially it was called The Surrounds.
One practice track, and one adjoining stables.
But that was years ago, another life.
Back then, this was where all the cash-strapped owners, struggling trainers, and two-bit jockeys came to work and pray:
One lazy sprinter. One honest stayer. Please, for the love of God, could just one of them rise above the heap?
What they got was a special gift from the National Jockey Club.
Foreclosure. Devastation.
The plan was to sell it off, but that took the better part of a decade, and typically, as far as the city went, nothing yet had come of it. All that remained was an emptiness—a giant, uneven paddock, and a sculpture garden of household waste:
Troubled televisions. Battered washing machines.
Catapulted microwaves.
One enduring mattress.
All of that and more was stationed, sporadically, acr
oss the terrain, and while most people viewed it as just another scene of suburban neglect, to Clay it was keepsake, it was memory. After all, this was where Penelope had peered over the fence and decided to live on Archer Street. It was where we’d all stood together one day, with a burning match in a westerly.
Another point of note was that ever since its abandonment, the grass at The Surrounds hadn’t much grown; it was the anti–Bernborough Park: low and gaunt in some areas, knee-high and stringy in others, the latter of which where Clay had just woken up.
Years later, when I asked him about that, he stayed silent for quite a while. He looked over, across this table. “I don’t know,” he said, “maybe it just got too sad to grow—” but he cut the idea off there. For him that was a tirade of sentimentality. “Actually, forget I ever said that.”
But I can’t.