The Idea of Perfection (9 page)

In the beginning, he had tried to get Marjorie interested in the bridges, but she had glazed over more and more as time went on. She had always made him promise not to
start on about your everlasting bridges,
when they’d gone out with other couples.
Just give it a rest, Douglas, people aren’t that interested.

He had bored her to death. It had been unreasonable to expect her to be interested.
Oh Douglas,
she had cried in exasperation one windy day on the Glebe Island Bridge.
Doug-las!
She had had a way of spinning out his name that had always filled him with apprehension. He blamed himself, now, for not catching on sooner.

In the end the pleasure of a good bridge had become one more private thing that you did not try to share.

 

 

He walked out on to the middle of the bridge, being careful to stay in the centre of the roadway. There was no guard-rail and, with the vertigo, he had learned to steer well clear of edges. He watched his boots, moving along the old timbers to the middle of the bridge. You were generally all right if you kept something in the foreground. When he was safely in the middle of the bridge he stopped, turned around, and carefully looked up. There was the ute, already dusty, and Chook leaning on the bonnet rolling another cigarette. Beside it was a tussocky paddock full of cows, and further back there was a rise with a ruined chimney and some poplar trees.

He suppressed the impulse to wave idiotically at Chook, and turned cautiously around, until he was looking at the other bank. A steep slope of bush, still in shadow at this hour, slanted down towards the bridge, with the road skewing around sharply through it, washed away into deep corrugations. It had been poorly planned in the first place, he could see that, with no thought for drainage. He knew without looking that the plans called for a new alignment that would cut in around the slope less steeply. The surveyor had marked it all out with fluorescent orange tapes that flut tered around the trunks of the trees that would have to be cut down.

He wondered if the Heritage Committee knew about the trees having to go, as well as the bridge.

He looked down at his boots and watched as they carried him steadily, calmly, along the middle of the bridge. At the far end there was a loose fence-post that he pushed sideways, and he slid down the bank. It was steeper than he thought, and he arrived at the bottom in a shower of pebbles and dirt. In the silence he could hear them continuing to pour down the slope behind him.

Under the bridge it was cool and dank, full of rich organic smells. He stood with his boots sinking in the soft sand. The piers spanned a small glassy pool, each one disappearing into its own reflection. He looked at them with sympathy. His own teeth were somewhat similar, ringbarked at gum-line from years of unscientific brushing.

Pale sand fanned out underwater where the current slowed and shelved away into deeper, darker brown water against the far bank. Over there a dragonfly danced above a pucker of current. Upstream and downstream of the pool, the water bubbled mildly down through slopes of rounded stones.

There was a quiet secretive feel under here, crouching on the strip of damp sand. It was like hide-and-seek. He had always preferred to be the one doing the hiding. The water bubbling through the stones was like someone talking to you, keeping you company. Pale bands and twists of light reflected upwards from the water, stippling and shimmering over the dark timbers, making a secret upside-down world.

As he watched, a leaf twirled down out of the trees. It floated under the bridge where the water went black, and he waited for it to come out into the light on the other side.

He looked at the uprights, each one a whole tree trunk. Even after a hundred years shreds of bark still clung to them in places, and you could still see the knobs where branches had been roughly lopped off. It was not so much a bridge made of timber as a bridge made of trees.

There was no great engineering in these old bridges but he had noticed how often there was exceptional workmanship. Here, for instance, a neat bit of squaring had been done on the timbers of a joint so each one slotted in snugly against the other. The long-dead men who had built this bridge had even gone to the trouble of countersinking the bolt-heads, pecking out a tidy hole to get it all as tight as a piece of cabinetwork. It was tricky, working hardwood like that, but they had thought it worth doing.

True
was the word carpenters used. It was as if they thought there was something moral about it.

In his books about bridges he had seen photos of the old-style timber-cutters with their axes, posing beside the stumps of huge trees. They stood in their waistcoats, the foreman with his jacket on, holding their axes. Under the heavy moustaches their faces were serious.

Now the Inspector had declared it
Past Repair,
stamped the words in red on the file, and Douglas Cheeseman had come along to knock it down.

It seemed like a mark of respect to confirm that the bridge was dead. He got out his Swiss Army Knife and was thorough, spiking his way along the underside of the bridge as far as he could go. In some places he came across rows of little holes where the Inspector had been there before him. When he had finished poking, he tapped with his knuckle and listened, like a man at a strange front door.

The corbels had had the worst of it, lying horizontally between the roadway and the tops of the piers. At first glance they looked sound, massive pieces of squared timber in which you could still see the marks of the adze. But the spike sank in up to the hilt, and when you looked closely you could see how the wood was mottled with rot, and the way the fibres were shrivelling away, contracting secretively into tiny cubes. When he knocked, the wood did not answer, only swallowed the sound like a sponge. He reached up and broke off a handful that went to powder in his hand.

He could see why the Inspector had got out the big red stamp. Replacing the corbels would be expensive. There was a high price on hardwood now that it was scarce, and on the skilled labour to work it, too. Not many people did anything with axes these days.

Even if you put new corbels in, you still had the problem of the water coming through the roadway and starting the rot all over again. The Shire Council had known what it was doing, demanding a concrete beam. Rain could pour down on it as long as it liked, and a flood might make it go a funny colour, but it would never rot and never bulge in the middle. No one would ever have to do any maintenance, or even notice it again.

Certainly, no one would ever think of making rude jokes about it.

He wished again that he had not laughed.

He laid his palm against one of the timbers, gently, as if it was an animal to be reassured.

Course, they had the timber for it back then, Chook said suddenly from behind him.

For a big man, Chook could move quietly. Douglas snatched his hand off the wood. He wondered how long Chook had been there, watching.

He moved away and felt his boots tear up out of the mud. A fly started to pester him around the eyes and he flapped at it. No matter how early you got up, the flies were always there before you.

Plus, no chain saws, Chook went on.

He laughed, not unkindly.

Poor buggers, he said. They’d have been all day, buggerising around with the axes and that.

The fly was now several flies, and one was trying to get up his nose. It was funny, the way they left you alone until you needed to have your wits about you. They seemed to know when things were already tricky, and made sure they made them worse.

Hey, Chook said.

His face had taken on stern folds under his hat. He got out his pouch and teased out a shred of tobacco. Douglas waited. Chook was in no hurry. He slid the packet of papers out and wedged it under his armpit, sticking a square of paper to his bottom lip.

Know what the definition of a wilderness is, Doug?

The paper waggled on his lip like semaphore.

Can’t say, Douglas said in a discouraging way.

He never liked jokes. He had been known to laugh long before the punch-line, out of sheer anxiety.

He watched Chook roll the tobacco into the paper and crease it carefully around, licking the paper with relish. He waited again. Chook lit up slowly, spinning it out.

What’s between a greenie’s ears!

Chook waited for him to laugh, and he did, but reluctantly. It was a forced and unamused laugh, cut short when a fly flew into his mouth and out again. He shut his mouth quickly and looked down. Where he had been standing thinking about the bridge he had left two perfect casts of his boots pressed into the mud, like the scene of a crime.

Chook tapped at ash that had not had a chance to form.

My wife’s in with them, he said.

It was the most casual thing in the world.

The Heritage mob. Think we can get the bloody tourists here looking at the bloody bridge.

He put the cigarette back in his mouth and glanced at Douglas.

You know women, he said. What they’re like.

Douglas nodded, although he would not have said he knew anything at all about women, what they were
like.
He and Marjorie had always been like an amateur job of carpentry, all gaps and putty that fell out after a while.

Tea-towels, Chook said suddenly. Pictures of the bloody bridge on bloody tea-towels. Mugs, drink coasters, the lot. She’s gone right into it.

They stood in silence, looking across at the water.

Chook had the cigarette pinched between his lips, letting out big puffs of smoke every now and then like a boiler.

Playing-cards. On the back.

Douglas had the feeling that there was something else Chook wanted to say, possibly on the subject of women, and what they were like, but he did not want to hear it, and he himself had nothing useful to contribute.

In the silence the sound of the water bubbling down over the stones reasserted itself. Over against the bank where the water lay brown and still, a small fleet bird skimmed the surface, kissed its own reflection and spun away. A bubble broke the surface, then another.

They climbed back up the bank. Watching Chook’s broad back, on which a collection of small black flies was travelling, Douglas was planning his move. He would slip quickly into the driver’s seat before Chook could get there.
I’ll drive,
he’d say. It would be the most natural thing in the world.

But as he drew level with Chook, putting on a spurt so as to beat him to the driver’s side of the ute, a small truck came bouncing along the potholes towards them and pulled up. Somehow he and Chook ended up with the truck between them, and Chook was having a conversation with the driver that Douglas could not hear. He saw them gesturing, saw the driver point toward him, saw Chook shake his head.

Hey, mate, Chook called. Stan needs a hand with some cattle that got out last night. Reckon you’ll be right to get back to town on your own?

Yes, mate. Go ahead.

He had to try to keep the gladness out of his voice.

Go right ahead!

He liked the idea of poking around on his own, having a look at the ruined house, exploring. He watched the truck grind along through its gears over the bridge and up around the washed-out corner of road. For a long time after it had disappeared into the trees he could hear the gear changes, up the hill and off into the distance.

With the truck gone, he felt wonderfully alone. The sun glinted among the trees on the hillside, the bright new top leaves tossing themselves around on their stems as if waving. In the thick, shadowy undergrowth he could see the fluorescent tapes fluttering bright, like someone beckoning.

HARLEY WOKE UP when a finger of white sunlight slanted in the window on to her eye and she was confused, feeling the stiff bedcover against her chin, seeing the light spread in an unfamiliar way on the ceiling. Outside, birds carolled and whooped in long melodious undulations of liquid notes. Somewhere further off, two kookaburras took it in turns to cackle and peal.

She got up and looked out at the backyard. It was still quite early, the sky a pale blue, sun slanting in low shafts along the dry grass, making haloes around the bushes. A big black bird swooped low out of a tree and posed for a moment on the top of the wire archway, then with a laborious flapping took off back up into the tree.

The dog was standing there, watching the window. She had not seen it at first because of the way it was not moving. It was as if it had been standing there, watching the window, all night. Its shadow stretched away, neat and crisp, from each of its paws. When it saw her at the window, it started to wave its tail backwards and forwards.

She had had to feed it the night before, of course.
But just this once,
she had told herself as she stood out in the dark backyard, giving it a tin of Pal she had found in the cupboard.
Definitely just this once.