“Son?”
He looked up.
“Would you like to borrow any of those? It’s nine o’clock. It’s time to close.”
At home, he struggled through the door, he didn’t turn on the light. His blue sports bag flowed over with books. He’d told the librarian he’d be gone a long time, and was given a lengthy extension.
As luck would have it, when he came in, I was the first one he saw, prowling the hallway like the Minotaur.
We stopped; we both looked down.
A bag that heavy announced itself.
In the half darkness, my body was blunt, but my eyes were lit. I was tired that night, much older than twenty; I was ancient, stricken and grizzled. “Come on through.”
On his way past, he’d seen I was holding a wrench; I was fixing the tap in the bathroom. I was no Minotaur, I was the Goddamn maintenance man. And still we both watched that book bag, and the hallway felt tighter around us.
* * *
—
Then, Saturday, and waiting for Carey.
In the morning Clay drove around with Henry, for his books and records at garage sales; he watched him talk them down. In one converted driveway there was a collection of short stories called The Steeplechaser, a nice paperback, with a hurdler embossed on the cover. He paid a dollar and handed it to Henry, who held it, opened it, and smiled.
“Kid,” he said, “you’re a gentleman.”
* * *
—
From there, the hours fell.
But they also needed conquering.
In the afternoon he went to Bernborough, for several laps of the track. He read his books up in the grandstand, and started to comprehend. Terms like compression, truss, and abutment were slowly making sense.
At one point, he sprinted the channel of stairs, between the splintery benches. He remembered Starkey’s girl there, and smiled because of her lips. A breeze shuffled through the infield, as he left and quickened on the straight.
It was down to not much longer.
He would soon be at The Surrounds.
Penelope made it through summer.
Its test was the choice of enjoying it.
Her first effort at the beach was a typical double hit; a mix-up of sunburn and southerly. She’d never seen so many people move so fast, or be swept with so much sand. On the bright side, it could have been worse; at first, when she saw the bluebottles floating serenely in the water, they looked so pure and otherworldly. Only when children came running up the beach, in varied states of distress, did she realize they’d all been stung. Biedne dzieci, she thought, poor children, as they sprinted toward their parents. While most of them shivered under the showers, and cried and sobbed unedited, one mother, especially, kept her daughter from rubbing sand in. She’d reached down for panicked handfuls of it and raked it over her skin.
Penelope watched helplessly on.
The mother took care of everything.
She calmed her and kept her close, and when she had her and knew she had her, she looked up, at the immigrant close at hand. No more talk, just a crouch, and stroking the girl’s tangled hair. She saw Penelope and nodded, and carried the child away. It would be years before Penelope learned that bad bluebottle days were rare.
The other fact that amazed her was that most of the children went back in the water, but this time not for long, on account of the howling wind; it came up seemingly from nowhere, carrying darkening lumps of sky.
To top it all off, she lay awake that night, throbbing hotly amongst her sunburn, and the pitter-patter of insect feet.