Bridge of Triangles (8 page)

Canon Wilson gave everyone a little card with a gold border. Chris's had a picture of a sheep carrying a red and white flag. He looked at Barry sideways and knew he would have to find out what all this meant.

One sunny Saturday morning after a night of Sydney showers the boys set off as usual to the quarry over behind the wasteland. They were a cheerful enough band, punching each other and laughing in the light. As they swung back and forwards and finally sailed from the ramp rails they saw the gangling boy sitting in his overalls. He sat on the top step leading into his hut and his feet in their big boots lay at angles on the bottom step. He looked up at the shouting happy kids. Chris saw his face. His eyes had a distant haunted look and untidy downy hair grow on his cheeks and top lip.

“There he is,” whispered Barry. “Just sitting there.”

“Yeh,” breathed the others, “what a gallah.”

The gangly boy did not look up. The kids ran laughing between the huts and away to the quarry.

The great scar in the earth surrounded by its wasteland attracted kids from both the settlement and the real houses which started on the other side of the school. A few of the kids from these other houses went to the settlement school but most attended toffs hill school. As usual a gang of toffs hill kids arrived at the quarry and the two groups of boys spent a glorious morning throwing rocks and abuse at each other across the yawning hole.

Barry was by far the best thrower. It was a harmless enough game though because the kids kept the width of the quarry between them and there was always time to dodge the coming barrage of rocks and clods. Each boy gathered up his ammo in a pile beside him. By a silent agreement only throwing was allowed. Each kids owned a shanghai but these were only taken from their owners' pockets when birds or lizards or jam tins or bottles were the targets. Chris hated it when the kids shot at the animals and hated it even more when the broken body of a starling or sparrow was hurled over the gaping walls of the quarry to fall in an un-bird like flight to the bottom of the pit. But
this was only a small part of the morning: there were car bodies to play in and fires to light and new routes to the bottom to discover.

“Ya don't like killing things do ya?” Barry observed.

“Naw, not much,” and Chris felt his face burning.

“But you're from the bush and everything.”

“Yeh, I know but...” Chris didn't know what to say. He wished he could want to kill things like the others. He feared that this difference would cut him off from his friends, that he would lose them.

“Doesn't matter mate, I can kill enough for everyone—I can kill everything. You stick with me.”

Chris looked at his friend and felt a surge of ambivalent gratefulness. He became expert at finding tins and bottles to aim at with their shanghais. He never once wantonly killed a thing that flew or ran or crawled. Years later he would go rabbitting and fishing and shoot magpie geese and learn the differences between cruelty and hunting.

About midday the sun and the need for food got the kids filing with their various little arguments back across the wasteland to the settlement. It was as they came out of the low scrubby she-oaks on the far side of the bullring that they saw the ambulance. It stood a little way off from the boy's hut. A huddle of people stood on the ramp looking. A couple of the men up on the ramp were smoking. Women with snotty nosed kids clutching at their dresses stood and stared. The two back doors of the ambulance gaped open.

“Jesus,” whispered Barry. “He's kil't himself.”

Even as he spoke two uniformed men came down the steps of the hut with a form covered by green material. The little crowd on the ramp breathed in. They stared harder.

A cold dread gripped Chris's guts. His head was suddenly swathed in an icy bandage. What insight did Barry have into human nature that his utterances were so brutally correct? Later the whole settlement would talk openly of how they
had to bring a ladder to cut down the rope in the kid's room and how his mother had walked in and there he was hanging cold as anything already and how she'd been carted off and locked up because you never knew, she might do herself in too. And the rough wooden ramps echoed as the explanations and theories grew wilder.

“Poor bloody bugger,” said Sissy, as she got herself ready to go out that Saturday afternoon. “Now youse kids stay away from that place. I don't want youse pokin' round there. I'm not surprised with these bloody rafters up in the roof and everything.”

Chris looked up at the exposed beams and joints in the roof. Their triangular shapes held up the deep grey speckled fibro of the roof. Sissy had the bare bulb burning to help her with her make-up. It was quite unneccesary.

Suddenly Chris saw the green sheet being lifted gently by the sunny breeze and there was one big boot at an angle on the end of the stretcher. And the yawning doors of the ambulance were a gaping hole in a wasted landscape and a poor little broken bird was slowly floating to the rubbish at the bottom of the pit.

Outside the hut it was still quite sunny. Sissy was nearly ready.

“G'day youse lot, 'ow ya goin'?” Aunty Rose, whom everyone said later looked just like a lovely pearl, came into the hut.

“'ere I am, dressed to kill.” She carried a shiny black bag with a lacy hankie showing nicely from the folded-over top. Tucked into her hair were a few shiny feathers emanating from some sort of golden ornament.

The Sydney days for the Leetons drifted towards their first city Christmas. The radio screamed its messages as hollow as the snow was unreal. It played the music which was sweeping the world and changing it forever. It told them of plane crashes and wars and the world grew into proportions never dreamed of down by the slow flowing river where the disasters were floods or dry winters. Joe grew tall and refused to go to school any more and got a job serving in a big variety store. After three weeks he was sacked when he couldn't explain how he had five pounds in his pocket and his till was short of five pounds. He bought a shiny yellow guitar with a fancy curved plastic scratch board and sparkling tuning pegs. He picked up some of the radio songs as he sat on his bed under the window, with his back against the window sill and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He strummed and gently sang his songs until his fingers hardened and his confidence grew and his heart and body reached almost breaking point in its animal need to expand out into the huge world he now knew to be there. Occasionally he would pin his cigarette onto a stray string-end and shut his eyes. He would sit quite still against the window. The cigarette smoke climbed towards the window in the thinnest, purest line of white. His brown hands were at rest on the warm timber of the guitar. The square behind him was a frame for the bluest sky with wisps of bleached clouds. Out there the whole planet existed for him with all its girls and beaches and cars and roads that led off to anywhere and everywhere and possibly nowhere. He got to staying out later and later and sometimes returned home through the pre-dawn settlement to the back room with hamburgers and fizzy drinks for the other kids. “Boy! youse kids should've 'eard me tonight. In this club in town and everyone was clapping for more and me and Johnny—well we just gave 'em what they wanted. And it was like a competition youse know—they 'ad other blokes there too
but they wasn't as good as us. Everyone clapped us the most. And Johnny, 'e gave me this sports coat before we sang and afterwards we went everywhere—just everywhere, eh. Youse shoulda been there.”

Frequently Mary failed to return to the hut at nights. She had pasted pictures of filmstars and singers onto the wall with a mixture of water and flour, and roamed around with her lot who'd done the same and crimped their hair and swapped tight peddle-pusher pants.

Sissy and her daughter argued.

“If ya don't like it 'ere you can git out and find ya father.” Mary had been told about her father back when she and Joe were led off into the courthouse.

“Yeh, well I might do that one day too. Don't tempt me—just don't tempt me.”

“Don't ya speak to me like that—I'm still ya bloody mother ya know.” Sissy softened, aware that the city was winning both against herself and her kids. “Anyway Mare—ya gettin' to be ya own boss now. I don't wanta argue with ya all the time. Ya growin' up—youse are all growin' up I s'pose. 'cept for my babies.”

“We're not babies,” shouted Chris and Keith together.

“Yeh youse are—you'll always be my babies—my little babies all of yas. An' I'm ya mum and that's that.”

So Sissy clung desperately to those who were still too young to walk away and find a path through the myriad offerings of that metropolis with its tall canyons carrying grit and paper and the silent screams of its citizens past shiny windows full of cars and televisions which they could never have. But still these things attracted—perhaps one day a substance might form from the dream. For Joe and Mary Leeton, just like their mother, the essential lie that was the city, began to work its subtle promises. Began to seem as true as the cheap sparkling wine, or third tall brown
bottle of beer clouded the littleness and limitations of the Leetons' reality.

At first Sissy never thought that she would not be able to transform herself into someone new. Years ago, when the kids were younger, before Sissy saw herself clearly mirrored in their life pattern, she imagined that she would take them, and they would take her, into that new place and time where the change would happen. But it wasn't happening. But she had to live in the happy lie of the song-sung pub evenings even though they were never part of her conscious plans. Sure, she had more money now than she'd ever had before; a few nice dresses; an array of shiny jewellery; high-heeled shoes and packets of stuff to set her hair. And there was always a few bob left for a drink, or at least to get to the pub with the crowd where someone would buy you a drink or lend you the wherewithall.

Eventually of course, Joe drifted off more and more with his Koori friends and finally took the soft tartan bag down from the top of Sissy's wardrobe and filled it with a few clothes and his bottle of after-shave. A mate revved up and they piled the bag, the guitar and their bodies into the patchy wreck of a car and took off. With the lingering smell of blue smoke floating over the bullring and in through the square window the battered car joined the stream of traffic on the main road. Sissy never saw her eldest son again. In the first few weeks she would not let the other kids speak about Joe or speculate where he might have taken off to.

“Let him go to buggery for all I care.” Her eyes and her increasing frequency at the pub showed she did care. And that was years and years ago. The ache of his leaving moved in to live permanently in Sissy's heart.

Jack turned up to take Chris and Keith out for a day. He'd driven up from the bush in his first car but his courage failed just outside the city and he'd taken a train for the last leg of his trip to the settlement and his two sons.

Jack and the two boys took the train to the city. He allowed them to eat whatever they wanted in a cafe. Later they walked over the great steel bridge. Chris and Keith peered down the airy distance to the water. Below the bridge the water stretched away in a huge polished sheet of black and silver flatness. The sun shot silver and blinding white as the little group moved past the rails and wire mesh of the walkway. Overhead the great triangles hung grimy and salt-encrusted against the sky. Trains roared across this steel ribbon which floated in the air.

“We're higher than the birds,” said Keith.

Chris looked sideways at his father. This stranger in a coat and hat who was now saying to his brother words which tried to connect him to them.

“Yeh, that's how high we are.”

This was followed by a barrage of words. There were more words from the man that afternoon than all the afternoons of years before. He told them of the midget submarines and torpedoes and a ferry that had been sunk.

“And look, now, bloody Jap tyres advertised everywhere.” He seemed abjectly bitter, truly confused, a pawn in a game others were playing. A game others would always play. The man stood, small on the mightly steel bridge. And looked and glimpsed himself. He felt used.

And how the man on a horse cut the ceremonial ribbon when the bridge was being opened and how there were white cats walking around the top of the pylon of the bridge.

“Can we see them—can we see them?” chanted Keith.

“Alright, we'll go up on the way back then.” So the day was filled in. They returned to the hut and Jack left them near the bullring and walked off into the early evening. On the road beyond the patch of wasteland cars sped after their own lights. A bus protested at gear changes as it edged its way into a stop. He knew he could not get there before it
pulled out. He silently swore. Bloody city. No place for a man or his kids. In the gathering gloom of an early Saturday night he waited for another bus.

After Jack's departure Sissy felt a kind of foreboding. Something was about to happen—some event of shattering significance. She wasn't only worried about Jack and what he might do with the boys. But for a time things went on normally: Sissy rose early and travelled to the frypan factory, returning in the late afternoon to try to give the dregs of her energy to the boys. It was all she could do to peel a few potatoes and fry some chops. The boys were at home more often than they were at school but Sissy hardly had the energy to argue. They lied to her in any case. Rose arrived periodically on a Friday night or Saturday afternoon and, while the races blared out from the radio the two sisters would spend time on their faces and clothes. One Saturday Rose arrived with a new boyfriend. Sissy didn't take to him and said she wouldn't go out that night.

“Alright then Sis, we can look after ourselves, can't we love,” Rose looked at her new man. “Anyway if you're not comin' then I'll take your coat. It's gonna be cold tonight.” The fluffy white coat had been much admired and touched when Sissy finally took it off lay-by. Sissy went and got it from the wardrobe.

“'ere ya'are then Rose—don't forget who bloody owns it!”

She put the coat on straight away, and with her hair piled up and decorated with a spangly clip which held a couple of lemon-coloured feathers, and the big chunky beads around her throat everyone agreed Rose looked lovely.

“I'll bring it back tomorra—about dinner time. Give meself a chance to recover from tonight—won't I love?”

The boyfriend wrapped an arm round Rose's shoulder. “Yeh, sure, I'll make sure she gets it back. I'll be sticking round from now on won't I—won't let her out of my sights.” His oiled hair gleamed under the electric light and his fingers tightened against the soft cloth.

Rose pulled back slightly and gently pushed him in the
centre of his chest with a long polished nail. “Who's a fast worker then, eh?”

By dinner time on Sunday there was still no sign of Rose. It was about three in the afternoon when Sissy was sitting out on the ramp having a smoke to try to dispel her sense of unease. She was joined by her neighbour who clutched a young baby that was crying.

“Can't get the young tyke to stop. Rockin' him all bloody day but it's no good.” She settled down on the ramp next to Sissy. “Here, hold him a sec will ya, I'll just roll a smoke.” Sissy took the crying child. It looked up at her big face and the crying subsided.

“You've sure got a way with kids Sis. Terrible murder in the national park last night wasn't it? All over the front page this mornin'.”

Then Sissy knew. The baby was smiling by now. She looked at it and wondered why it was smiling. Her head had gone quite cold. She held the child perfectly still. A pale blue sky framed the child's head. Sissy saw the line of little yellow buttons down the middle of its jump suit.

“Did himself in too—after. Here—I'll go and get it. I've read it. You can have it. Jeez you're good with that kid.”

At the same time the woman returned with the newspaper the police car began to edge its way through the winter mud behind the straggling geraniums that more or less marked off the Leeton's own bit of yard. That's when Sissy started to scream.

Not long after Rose's funeral the Welfare lady turned up at the flat. It was no good arguing, there had been a complaint from the children's father. They would to go a Home until everything had been sorted out. And a record had been kept over the last two years she would have to realise. Yes it would need a court case and yes the complaint had come from the boys' father and it was no good abusing her—she
was only doing her job. The boys would be picked up next week. In the light of what had happened to the older two it was unlikely that Mrs Leeton would be permitted to keep the boys—but that of course was up to the courts. But look at them—wouldn't it be better if they had a bit of security in their lives—good hot showers—a thorough check up at the doctor's? Yes she realised she was their mother but sometimes the hard decision had to be made—and there was those who would make it too if certain people couldn't or wouldn't see reason.

Perhaps it was the smell of Aunty Rose, and the memory of Joe and Mary, a sort of madness in that low hut, which made Sissy pack the battered suitcase with the barest collection of necessities for herself and her two boys.

Perhaps she thought she could avoid the courtroom and the welfare and her pain and somehow keep the remnants of her little family close to her. Whatever the reason, Sissy felt she had to move out to go on living. She had to act. Yes, Rose was dead, Joe had gone and what in God's name had happened to Mary? Had she found her father?

It wasn't for years that Sissy heard that Mary had found her father out in the opal fields. He'd been a drifter all his life. Drifting into small towns and leaving them and his women as easily as a drained glass of beer is left in a closing pub. Mary hadn't had much chance to know her father though. Not long after they had met he was caught cheating a mate who retaliated by bashing his brains out with a pick.

Sissy's actions were those of a desperate woman. Every new flat she looked at was dearer than the settlement huts. Eventually she rented a bed-sitting room in a worn, paint peeling inner suburb. It was the closed-in veranda of a converted suburban house which had once stood proud and neat in a row with others almost identical. It dressed itself up with weathered floral curtains and brown lino worn paper thin, a chest of drawers and a bulky ornate wardrobe.
When the landlady learned that the two boys shared the double bed and Sissy slept on the floor she insisted that this flat was “for a single lady only—no pets or kids allowed—I told you that. I'll have to speak to the Child Welfare about them kids you know.”

“Don't you worry yaself lady—I'll be speaking to them meself.” Sissy knew she was finally defeated. Deep within herself she had known it would come to this.

From Rose's house Sissy had taken almost nothing other than two white and gold ornamental angels, possibly won in some coconut shy years before. These fragile little figures finally enabled Sissy to speak to her kids—it was some weeks after the funeral.

They were eating their tea. Sissy had moved the tiny kitchen table between the bed and the one chair and put a loaf of bread and devon sausage on a plate. She let them eat a few slices of the bread and meat before she told Keith and Chris that they would have to go away. Like a sort of trip or holiday. Now that Aunty Rose was an angel, and she held one of the shiny little dolls to her breast, then she didn't know what was going to happen anymore. She couldn't go on. Anyway they were going to a place where they could swim in the sea and it would be nice. And why were they looking at her like that? Keith began to break up a piece of bread. His little fingers rolled the doughy pieces into soft grey pellets. Chris looked at his mother and saw her. This woman whose big round face was wet with tears. On the radio a man was singing about a girl called Mary Ann. The woman and the two male children were silent, thankful that there was a radio. Chris looked at his young brother. He tried only to hear the song.

The Welfare came with a voucher for brand new clothes for the boys. Sissy and Chris and Keith returned from the shop with the strange smelling short pants, shirts, pyjamas, underwear—a new suitcase. Tomorrow Chris and Keith
would go away with that suitcase. It was now dark in the little room so Sissy reluctantly switched on the electric light.

A government car's back door was slammed by the Welfare lady. She lowered herself into the front and neatly arranged her nylon legs. The mother rushed towards the house. As she wrenched open the screen door the car's engine started. A mother heard a car drive away. On the back seat were two boys leaving their mother. A small boy's hand reached out. An older boy took it and smiled through his tears. “Don't cry, don't cry mate, please don't cry. She's gonna be alright. Everything's gonna be alright. You'll see.”

And indeed the great trees still stood immoveable by the river. The bridge with its strong white triangles still stood solid above the treacherous swirling waters. The bull ants still swarmed across the plains and logs and goannas lumbered through the bush. In the clear blue sky the cry and scream of birds still floated to the clouds and echoed in the woodland. He would feel and see and touch that again and then he, the boy, would remember that there was his home and he would return because he had never really left. His vision of the oneness had been cut off for a time. He would feel again that joyous ache which so powerfully had filled his heart and soul. And somehow the unbroken threads which tied him to the Old Granny, Paula, Prince and Billy, Aunty Rose and his mum—all the young world—would come again into view and all would be well.

Life in the Home for Chris and Keith indeed seemed to be a never-ending series of hot soapy showers. The kids had never showered before and after a few of these sessions where all the naked little bodies lined up shivering and shyacking, they grew to enjoy them. The Home contained many other ritual to be initiated into as well: cooked breakfasts, fruit, crisp white sheets on a bed you had to yourself. Marching up the curving white staircase to the big airy room where Chris' bed stood neat and stiff with the others.

The teachers took them on long rambling walks along the beach and they discovered octopuses hiding under rocks and star fish and scuttling crabs. They had ice-creams and swims and learned to wash their hands before meals and were given toothbrushes and pyjamas. Chris decided he liked the clean smell of bedtime.

He was being molded to forget. Bit by bit his world over the past years had been undone like an onion being peeled back and back. In the end there may be nothing. He tried to cling to the memory of the knowledge he had once felt—that knowledge he seemed to share with the Old Grany and Aunty Paula. But here around the Home there were no trees which had existed forever to remind him. To inform him that the place where was once more real than reflected water in a rough really did exist. He had merely forgotten how to touch it and drink deeply of it.

In his upstairs dormitory a wide window opened out to a view of the ocean and let its roaring in to inhabit the Home. The sea drew him into its mystery as he lay and listened to its ceaseless pounding. It was crashing against the sand as he waited for sleep, reminding him of a story his mother had told of long ago, about when she was a girl. He was disturbed. The vastness of the sea and his mum and Canon Wilson's talk of God all got mixed up. He tried to recall what the man had said about praying. He must pray to this God—this Grandfather Leeton figure, and ask him to look after his mum and brothers and sister. But what about his dad? It was years before he decided that his dad and all that lot needed prayers far more than his mum's mob.

And Aunty Rose floated on the sound of the sea and came into that long upstairs room. There she was, in her polished box being lowered into the earth. Surprising how it should be so dry when you get down a bit. Now he wondered what it meant. Death. It only exists for the living.
And since Rose's death Sissy was only partly living. Pray for us now in the eternal moment of our partly dying. He dreamt—remembered the boy in his oversized boots and the talk of rafters and ropes and a fear rippled across his young mind. He tried to concentrate on the indistinct flowers sprinkling across the wall and listen to the gentle moving slatted blind but death kept coming back. Chris fell asleep frightened and in the white-sky mornings the great ocean's sound was still there.

It was years and years before he realised that the great tragedy was not that Aunty Rose had died but that her death had been so alien. Sissy needed the Old Granny and Paula beside her to wail and keen for the death of Rose. But they were not there. The people were scattered—scattered into separate little sprinklings who did not know, could not remember, who they were. They were liked caged birds, suddenly released into a storm. The screaming wind tore at the flimsy fabric of their being and scattered them terrified and one into the chaotic landscape. If only the people could have buried their dead like a people—with the flag and soul-rending singing and a real gathering back in a loungeroom or backyard where big friendly faces kissed you and great fat arms embraced you and contained your pain. But no, poor little Rose was all one and Sissy was all alone. Mockingly the surrounding black of that day was the shiny car and the huge massed summer clouds behind the pines fringing the cemetery.

He came to realise that at that time all things in the city—throughout the land, for his people, had lost their meaning. Even death. But finally he would see Aunty Rose in her own time. He came to understand that her time was when the soil was prepared. His people had been pushed back by the invaders. They had resisted until their numbers fell to almost nothing. The remnants had been rounded up and caged, like birds. A scattering of food was thrown their
way each day through the wire of their cages. And within the prisons and reserves and fringe camps, many, many in their time were lost. But the ground was being prepared. The scattering into a landscape which had almost transformed itself into something forever alien slowed, and in pockets about the land, reversed into a movement. The movement would grow and out of a desolate landscape would spring up a garden nourished with the blood of a people. All the lonely graves would finally be remembered and the spirits of the sad victims they contained would be truly mourned and honoured by those who had given them life. When the boy became a man Aunty Rose's death would grow into its fullest meaning. Not, after all, a little tragedy in time but a tragedy which flowed on and on through years and finally reshaped itself into a healing unction and an inspiration. There were those who would never forget. Years after when the paraphenalia of a white funeral had long been forgotten the death itself would take on a new life.