—
And what else?
What else was there, as we skip the years like stones?
Did I mention how sometimes we’d sit on the back fence, for end-of-morning trackwork? Did I say how we’d watched as it all got packed up, to be another forgotten field?
Did I mention the Connect Four war when Clay was seven?
Or the game of Trouble that lasted four hours, maybe more?
Did I mention how it was Penny and Tommy who won that battle at long last, with our dad and Clay second, me third, and Henry and Rory (who were forced to play together) last? Did I mention that they both blamed each other for being crap at hitting the bubble?
As for what happened with Connect Four, let’s just say we were still finding the pieces months later.
“Hey, look!” we’d call, from the hallway or kitchen. “There’s even one in here!”
“Go pick it up, Rory.”
“You go pick it up.”
“I’m not pickin’ it up—that’s one of yours.”
And on. And on.
And on.
* * *
—
Clay remembered summer, and Tommy asking who Rosy was, when Penny read from The Iliad. We were up late, in the lounge room, and Tommy’s head was in her lap, his feet across my legs, and Clay was down on the floor.
Penny tilted and stroked Tommy’s hair.
I told him, “It’s not a person, stupid, it’s the sky.”
“What do you mean?”
This time it was Clay, and Penelope explained.
“It’s because,” she said, “you know how at sunrise and sunset the sky goes orange and yellow, and sometimes red?”
He nodded from under the window.
“Well, when it’s red, it’s rosy, and that’s all he meant. It’s great, isn’t it?” and Clay smiled then, and so did Penny.
Tommy, again, was concentrating. “Is Hector a word for the sky, too?”
That was it, I got up. “Did there really need to be five of us?”
Penny Dunbar only laughed.
* * *
—
The next winter there was all the organized football again, and the winning and training and losing. Clay didn’t especially love the game, but did it because the rest of us did, and I guess that’s what younger siblings do for a time—they photocopy their elders. In that respect, I should say that although he was set apart from us, he could also be just the same. Sometimes, mid-household-football-game, when a player was secretly punched or elbowed, Henry and Rory would go at it—“It wasn’t me!” and “Oh, bullshit!”—but me, I’d seen it was Clay. Already then his elbows were ferocious, and deliverable in many ways; it was hard to see them coming.