The Idea of Perfection (22 page)

She had not had anything to drink, but getting into the hot car at the end of the afternoon — now she realised why everyone else had parked further over, where the shade had come around — she felt a little light-headed.

In Sydney she was used to people one at a time, and only the ones she already knew. She seemed to have stopped meeting fresh people. All the ones she saw knew the story about Philip.
Oh, it’s Harley,
she saw them think.
And there was Philip.
The story lay like a stain across everything they said and everything she said. Certain words created a certain kind of silence. Conversations inched forwards carefully across a chasm.

Everyone knowing had its good side. No one expected a great deal. If things came out sounding peculiar, allowances were made. But it had its bad side too. It was like being attached, permanently and irrevocably, to a big lump of something dead and ugly.

A long afternoon in the company of so many new people, none of whom knew anything about her — how dangerous she was, for example — had left her feeling that her head was not quite attached to her body, or perhaps it was that her face was not attached to her head. That face had created small speeches of a blameless kind, smiled at things other people had said, had managed to be nothing worse than perfectly normal.

She was still smiling as she drove back through all the gates, still holding herself ready to be agreeable, still arranging innocuous sentences in her mind. Apprehension had become a habit that created its own difficulties, but nothing had been asked of her this afternoon that she could not manage. In a small way it was something to be proud of.

At the last gate, as she was looping the piece of fencing-wire over the rusted bolt, she suddenly wondered whether she had closed the very first gate, back near the house, the one with the piece of chain and the little fencing-wire hook. She had been smiling, and teasing herself with the idea that life might be different if you lived in the country, and she had not been paying attention to the gates. She stood with her hand on the warm metal of this last one, trying to remember.

A sheep came towards her and went
baa
in a tremulous way at her. It made it hard to concentrate. She frowned at it and it became indignant.
Baa-aaah! Baa!

She could remember undoing the chain on that first gate, working out the way the hook went, and even remembered pushing the gate open. It hung too low and you had to heave it up, but the corner still dragged along through a groove in the dirt. She remembered that, and she remembered driving through it. Then her memory went blank.

She stood for a long time, staring down at the dirt.

Finally she undid the last gate again, got into the car, and went all the way back through the three gates, being careful to close each one. When she got to the third one, hoping Donna was not watching the smoke-signals of her dust, she found that she had closed it after all, the hook fast on the chain.

By the time she got back to the road, she felt she had been opening and closing gates all afternoon. But at least she had not done anything unforgivable.

OUT AT THE Bent Bridge, the men were having their smoko. They had got the fire going, twigs crackling under the billy, the flames invisible in the brilliant morning light. Smoke drifted away blue under the trees and turned the slanting sunlight into great organ-pipes of powdery light.

The red-headed one they all called Blue opened his sandwich up, showing the flap of grainy grey devon inside. He had caught the sun across his bare freckled back and his eyes were bloodshot.

Er, yuk, he said, and peeled it off the bread.

It was stuck like wallpaper.

Keep telling Mum I hate devon.

He flung it into the fire where it lay across a stick, curling, darkening, starting to sizzle. He stuck the two slices of bread back against each other.

The sauce is all right but, he said, and bit.

With the bulldozer shut down, it was very quiet. When one of the men leaned forward and lifted the lid off the billy with a stick to toss in a handful of tea-leaves, the metallic clink was like a single clear note of music.

Douglas unwrapped the sandwiches the woman had made for him at the Acropolis Cafe. Curried egg and lettuce. They slipped down, insubstantial. The bread was slimy in his mouth, smooth and white. Nothing to chew on. He was generally a bit fussy about his bread but there was nothing but Tip Top at the Acropolis Cafe, although you did have the choice of white or brown.

There had been a snow-dome on a shelf in the window, with a tiny plastic Parthenon in it, and a pair of dolls dressed in the little white tennis-skirts of Greek guards. He had slowed down on his way in, to glance at them, and had seen the poster, up behind the Parthenon. SAVE THE BENT BRIDGE.

He had jerked in mid-step and stopped to read it. HERI TAGE, it said, and there was a grainy black-and-white photo. Along the bottom, in red, it said TOURISM POTENTIAL OUR LIFEBLOOD.

He had glanced around as if caught out. A tall thin man, all chin and ears, was leaning against the boot of a car, scratching his chest through his shirt and staring. Douglas met his eye and looked away quickly up the street. In that direction two men with bellies that hung comfortably over their belts were standing beside a ute where a black and white dog panted in the tray. They stopped talking and seemed to be watching him, too, their faces unreadable under their hats.

Chook had said
a lot of old women,
but he might have been speaking figuratively.

The woman who made his sandwiches had brown hair like the icing on one of her own cakes, with lush little waves and crests, and a gold inlay that showed when she smiled. He felt the poster blazing behind him in the window as he stood there watching her slicing and filling.

He hoped that she might think he was from the Pastures Board, or the phone company. But after she had given him his change she had said
Nice day for it, out at the river,
and he had known that she knew.

In a place this size, you had to assume everyone knew.

Still, she’d been nice enough. She had made his sandwiches carefully, with the filling all the way to the crusts, and had picked out the least chipped lamington for him.

 

 

Today Chook was wearing a tee-shirt that said I’D RATHER BE FISHING. He had introduced the men, but had gone too quickly. Now it seemed to Douglas that they had all been called Stan or Len, except for Blue and a tiny little sharp-faced man they called Lofty.

They all sat around the fire with the sandwiches. He was glad of the fire. It gave you something to look at other than the faces of all these strangers.

He seemed part of the circle of men, but he was not, not really. He sat on his share of the log they had rolled over near the fire, and smiled uneasily when he was not dealing with the curried egg and lettuce. They talked among themselves, jerking out the words too quickly for him to catch, getting rid of them as if they were hot. They had no problems understanding each other, but to Douglas it was like a foreign language of which he could only catch the odd phrase.
That is piss-poor,
he heard.
My word.

He kept his eyes on the fire, trying not to bolt down his curried egg and lettuce.

Wests have got a ton of guts, eh? the man next to him on the log said, and Douglas had to ask
Pardon? again.

This man was wearing a tee-shirt that said TOO MUCH SEX MAKES YOUR EYES GO FUZZY in fuzzy letters. The second time, he said it more clearly, so Douglas could understand the words. Now the problem was, what did they mean?

It was always like this out on site with the men. He made a point of reading the sports page for just these moments, and tried to memorise a few things so he could say
Vaughan’s peaked,
or
They’d be better off sacking Stannard
. But when it came to it, the conversation always seemed to go in some other direction and needed information he had not memorised, or when it came to the moment, he could not remember if it was Vaughan or Stannard who had
peaked.

Ah, he said. Ah, could be, you know.

He crushed up the paper from the sandwiches and threw it into the fire.

Could certainly be. Yep.

It was not what you would call
scintillating.

A different kind of man, a man who was
good with people,
would know all about
Wests
and their
guts,
and would have a few jokes ready for a situation like this. He’d take the initiative. The Stans and Lens would be turned towards such a man, listening, laughing, giving each other glances that said,
Good bloke, eh.

However, he was not that man, never had been, never would be, no matter how many sports pages he read up on. It was one of the reasons he was not back in Sydney striding around in a hard hat on a big job, with a hundred men waiting for him to point his ruler. It was one reason he’d been given this tinpot little bridge to do.

That, and the vertigo, of course.

He’d never liked heights, and had been prepared to confess to it. But his mother had told him he would grow out of it, and the professor had told him he would get used to it. He had told Marjorie, not long after they were married, but she had just laughed.
An engineer, scared of heights?
He had laughed, too. She was right. It was funny.

He had tried to pretend it was a weakness he did not have, and pretending had worked, until the job came up on the Port Gordon Bridge.

The South Tower was a smooth concrete thing, with a temporary lift that crawled up and down, just a tin box with wire mesh on the sides. When he and the Site Engineer stepped in he felt it sink and tremble under their weight. On the green fibreglass of the Site Engineer’s helmet there was a red cross and
First Aid
stencilled in authoritative white letters.

You could see it as reassuring. Or not.

Licensed to carry total 750 kgs,
a chipped enamel sign said, and he had started a complicated sum in his head incorporating the estimated weight of himself and the Site Engineer, plus the big drum full of chain in the corner. As a rule, numbers lined up neatly in his mind’s eye, but now the numbers were evaporating from one end of the sum as soon as he got the other end right.

Then, with the sum still not finished, the Site Engineer was winding a lever with a black knob around through half a circle and, after a sickening jerk, the lift began to move slowly upwards.

He had prepared for this moment, the night before. He had explained it to himself. The lift would not be moving relative to the people inside it, so the trick was not to look out. If the people inside the lift kept their eyes fixed on their own shoes, they would not have to know that they were teetering up through the air.

Do not look down,
he told himself.
Do not look down,
the order went out to the eyes. But they looked down just the same.

Things on the ground had already become shockingly tiny. Big drums were shrinking to cotton-reel size as he watched. Men’s helmets were like pimples bobbing around on the ground. A concrete truck was no bigger than a matchbox toy.

A tingle like an electric shock ran up from the soles of his feet, into the backs of his knees, a horrible creeping feeling, as he watched the tiny helmets shrinking away beneath him.

When the lift jerked and stopped dead at the top of the tower, he held his breath.

Here we go, mate, he heard the Site Engineer say. I said, here we go.

He remembered in time how to nod and smile, and erased from his mind the fact that he was about to step from the lift to the tower, across 120 metres of empty air. He would fall at the rate of 10 metres per second per second, more or less. It would probably seem like a long time.

The platform at the top of the tower ran around the four sides of a hole in which men were working on a tangle of reinforcing rods. As soon as he got out of the lift he grasped the scaffolding-pipe railing. It felt solid. But he knew the whole platform, and the railing he was hanging on to, was only a flimsy temporary thing. It could easily break away from the tower and shred apart. Everyone on it would be little dolls tumbling headfirst, legs and arms spreadeagled, bouncing down the sides of the tower at 10 metres per second per second, more or less, until they hit the ground and broke.

There was always someone passing with a camera. As a child he had pored over the books in the library, drawn to them with a sick fascination: people caught by the camera falling from windows, off ladders, out of the arms of firemen.

He had his hand gripping the railing. He hoped it looked casual.

Don’t look down,
he instructed himself, but he caught a flash of light from below, and looked straight down at the waters of Port Gordon, bright and wrinkled with sunlight. Miles down he could see a little splinter of darkness gliding along the brightness, giving out flashes of light that dipped and flared together, the oars of a boat so tiny it was invisible except for the sparks it was giving off.