A thick oil cloth hung over the table’s edge in fibrous little serrations and the beer bottles stood hard and brown on it. Chris saw that they should stand there just like that. Paula’s laughter seemed to wrap around the bottles. The boy saw Billy, his man shoulders moving at the cupboard, reaching up to the mugs. The Old Granny, waiting; the bottles standing; his mum rolling a cigarette; the dogs near the back door; Paula’s shapeless green dress sweat-stained under the arms. He touched it all with his eyes. Later, as Sissy and her four kids, and Rose and her two set off home across the dirty whiteness of the river flats, the sky receded to where the darkening macrocarpas pierced it hard. Chris felt the need to run to where it was, where he could be it and know it and hold on to it. But as they came into the shade and swung round towards the bridge the bitter smell of pine needles mingled with the sharp sweet smell of river grasses. He was so close—so close but when he breathed his body only filled with longing. He couldn’t get any closer. High above, the great black branches radiated against the burning distant sky. He saw the twigs and slender fronds high above, sticking out like nails against the silent sky holding nothing but a distant orange shimmering.
Sissy knew that one day Rose would return to Sydney. And that she would follow. The big obstacle was the train fare but somehow she would get it. Why this need to escape? What was she leaving? Where was she going? Her flight to a future filled with lights and nights began even before her mother, the Old Granny was born. Sissy’s unbelonging to both herself and her people started way back before her birth when the town built its first pub, and named it The Empire, and shearers and cooks needed more than the comforts of the grog. Lurching back to quarters in the lonely night-time paddocks where sheep now bleated it was easy pickings with a bottle of sweet sherry or rum. And so another wagon was hooked up to a distant waiting train to Sydney. Through shame and troubled mind the Old Granny never told Sissy much of the place where she herself had been taken as a girl. That tall chimneyed home of fatty stews and confusion so far from her river gum beginnings. Yet it had become her home and shaped her with its harsh discipline and shallow wisdom. This she ambivalently valued and tried pathetically to pass on to her own children. But that first dribble of sherry under a twinkling river night, a night which thumped not just with shadowed kangaroos nor cried out only from the lonely throats of sheep, flowed on. As her mother had become the property of uncaring white men so she too had become the property of a white man. The essential difference was that Jack cared too much but did not know how to care. But that was years and years ago, wasn’t it?
The train has left many times and still the stream of exiles laugh and frown and wait and stamp on foggy platforms or smoke in railway refreshment rooms where the sherry still says come to me, come to me.
Another landscape saw tall ships tied up waiting but impatient, with night-time calls of readiness to sail with the tide to another Sydney. And these ships too had their exiles and that too was years and years and years ago, wasn’t it?
So Sissy lived for a while in her dreamings. Somehow in Sydney with her four kids everything would be better. She could finally be her own boss. But then the horse threw Jack and as he lay in the hospital up on the rise in his own twilight of partly death and partly life, an atavistic superstitious guilt rose up and grasped Sissy in a way that filled her with a fear she’d never known. Did she love this bloke? Was that it? Certainly she was tied to him in a way she did not understand. He represented something safe for the kids although she was not sure just what.
Why didn’t he die? What sort of woman was she that she could leave now—run away from something she deep down feared she’d caused. Her fear won and Sydney would have to wait. But she knew one day she would break free. But what about the kids? She didn’t know about the kids. They seemed different from her but she couldn’t be sure. She was confused.
The Old Granny had been right: her family was moving away. But she did not dream of the changes which her world would know before her own lonely departure. Even while Sissy planned the magical escape to Sydney with the kids the gap between the Old Granny and her family had widened into a chasm which separated the black from the white; the safe from the dangerous; the old from the modern.
What was it the two women wanted? Yes, Rose had spent some time in Sydney with Clarrie and knew the bright lights. Lights that shed no light on who newcomers really were. Pub lights in the city which threw no light but a kind of freedom to forget. A jangling call to bars where smoke and music and bitter laughter camouflaged the fact that all the maps were lost. Rose and Clarrie in Sydney. How was Sissy to know that Rose only sometimes spent the night at their fibro house with its uncut grass and leaking gas out in the post-war black and white TV, fish and chips, Coca Cola suburbs? Finally Rose saw Clarrie as a gaoler, and in the same way Sissy needed to escape from Jack she had broken free of Clarrie. Only Clarrie didn’t give a damn. When Rose finally died Clarrie didn’t come to the burial. After all she had it coming didn’t she? How was Sissy to know that beyond and beyond and forever, all around her sister’s Aussie dream home, stretched countless mirrored images of their own tiled-roofed loneliness? That even the city ached for something it had quite forgotten. That the velvet seats in cinemas and the ferry to Luna Park and Manly once every fifteen months and Marks Foys’ Christmas decorations and the pub-sung Saturday nights were not enough? That the men in pubs were not soldiers recent from the war but more often those washing down shame because they’d not been soldiers ever. Or had been. Men who often cried into their beer as yet another true blue Aussie sang “Danny Boy”. How could Sissy know that even those in the city were exiled in the shadow of a half remembered world, where they once all belonged?
The details of the Old Granny’s intuitive knowledge began to take further form one morning all those years ago when Sissy sat in the pale sun going through the kids’ hair. They sat as a group on the splintery floor boards. Rose and Clarrie drove up the dusty road. Rose, in a bright yellow suit left Clarrie in the car and clicked up the brick path to the veranda. She carried a bundle of rags.
“What’s up?” Sissy’s hands rested on the girl’s head.
Rose dropped the bundle on the wooden veranda. “A few jumpers there for the kids. We’re shooting through.”
“What d’ya mean, shooting through? Leavin’ now? Pis-sin’ off?”
“Yeh. Clarrie says he’s sick of everything and, well, we’re shooting through. Car’s all packed and we’re goin’ back to the big smoke.”
Sissy looked at the children whose eyes were screwed up against the watery light. “Well, what about, you know—our plan?”
“Look. I can’t talk now. Clarrie’s waitin’, but don’t worry. You still come. But leave it a for a bit—let me get back and sort out things—but still come. Look I’ve gotta go. But don’t worry Sis, I’ll drop you a line, promise. Nothin’s changed. Well, ta-ta youse kids. Come and give your aunty a kiss.”
Rose stooped down and kissed the children on their mouths one after another. She had a lace handkerchief half hanging out of the corner of her black handbag—very smart and no doubt her renewed homage to the big smoke. Rose, in a show of affection, held the girl’s head between both hands as she kissed her. “Oh, I hope you’ve been done!” she said as she wiped her red nailed fingers down her yellow skirt. “Now youse kids remember to behave yourselves. Ta-ta.” Yes Rose had sure left sitting on the ground with family far far behind.
Sissy had not stopped looking at her sister and as Rose walked to the red car which held Clarrie and the two little blond boys she said, “Well bugger me, you might see me a bit sooner than you think.”
But Jack still lay in the hospital.
The next day Sissy got a job in Brown’s laundry. She operated a mangle and took to wearing a scarf and an even more worried face. She stored most of the few pounds she got each week in a tea caddy where the young Queen’s face smiled in its golden border. She told Jack of her job but nothing, of course, about her Sydney sche
mes and dreams.
It was way back then, as the winter set in and the white track in front of the saleyards turned to red mud and July clouds brought lightning that lit up all the fences and trailing power poles in the winter nights that the kids went over to the Old Granny’s place. Dimly Jack knew Sissy was working and so naturally Paula and the Old Granny stepped in. Or sometimes the kids would be taken over to Mrs Ladell’s who had a daughter who lived in a wheelchair with her legs covered by a tartan rug. The beautiful child’s feet stuck out from the rug in shiny blue satin slippers and this seemed somehow obscene to Chris. Did all the world have a secret, imperfect centre? But Mrs Ladell was kind and gave the kids rock cakes and let them help shake the rag mats that she and her alabaster daughter made. They lived near the big bridge and Chris could see its great white wooden girders standing up above the willow-swept dark waters down behind Mrs Ladell’s back fence. That was years before Mrs Ladell died in giving the life from her own bones for her child’s.
As Jack improved in the hospital Sissy felt vaguely cheated. She realised this and then felt guilty. But because whenever she was with him she had to fight him she said, “You haven’t changed. I thought you might get some sense knocked into you by now.”
Jack, who’d really stopped living just after returning from New Guinea, spoke at last and merely said, “Be quiet woman.” It was as if he thought that the woman could never become a real Leeton—ever.
And that’s the way they’d been for years. Jack loved his wife in the only way he could—with a sense of tired duty which had long since replaced passion. She’d grown to hate his solid back and refusal to involve himself, apart from when she’d come home drunk after two or three days with her mob. Then he’d hit her across the face and call her a drunk black bitch and then they could finally and briefly try to love each other.
“Now stay shut up will you?”
But Sissy never could. She hated his broad back and his acceptance of her two oldest kids. She was frightened he’d destroy in the kids that which he couldn’t destroy within her. That the little she valued about herself—her real self—and which might possibly have been born into her kids, would be destroyed. She hated him because she could not be herself. She knew she would completely forget just what that self was if she did not leave.
Sissy hated him almost as much as his own family tried to hate him for getting mixed up with Girlie’s mob. There were two things the Leetons would never forgive—marrying an Abo and marrying a Catholic. Sissy was both. But even in old Mrs Leeton’s acidic mind not even an Abo Catholic could marry a bloke while carrying someone else’s baby. Yet Sissy did just that two days before Jack flew to fight the Japanese in New Guinea. The boy was born a few shades darker than his mother. When Jack limped in from the war and saw this boy child and a girl child already crawling he said not a word. Instead he bought a strong horse and a second-hand spring cart with his final army pay. The horse was hobbled over on the flats and the cart stood in the oleander backyard. By the time the dreaming boy was born into his world of fire Jack had been fettling on the railway for a good year. Sissy at last could centre her bitterness for all the world on something real—and it was Jack Leeton.
Jack finally took to the drink himself but that was years after all the kids had grown up. It killed him in the end. But way back then, when Sissy taunted him and he himself wondered why he’d lived, he was still a young, strong man. With reponsibility for four kids. And a landlord who wanted rent for the oleander yarded house opposite the saleyards.
“Let him come and chuck us out. Just see how far he gets with me!”
“Be quiet woman,” and Jack continued to pack tea chests onto the spring cart.
“And just where the bloody hell are we gonna live? Just tell me that?”
But she knew he had plans to pitch a tent down by the river.
“You won’t catch me living down with all them blacks...” and then she laughed. “Jesus, what a joke. Anyway, I’m not leavin’ this house and neither are my kids, so tell old Cooper to go to buggery.”
Jack ignored her and kept carrying mattresses and boxes out to the cart.
Eventually Sissy started to carry things out too. “Just stay out from under my bloody feet youse kids!”
As the woman carried out blankets and clothes and a billy full of cutlery she kept at the silent man.
“A fine mess you’ve got us into. Why couldn’t you have stayed on the horse—or at least have done the bloody job properly?”
“Be quiet woman.”
Early in the afternoon the man drove the cart out onto the road and headed right towards the river. The saleyards were deserted and a dirty wind worried the puddles along the road and pushed the huge sky away so it could not be touched by the torments of this world. The kids perched on mattresses and stared with a kind of dumb trust at their parents’ backs. The horse trotted along never minding if it went through mud holes or dry dirt. Then they swung onto the tarred stretch and the feeling that something important was happening occurred to the dreaming boy. The horse easily carried its burden up the approach to the bridge and there Chris saw the great white timber triangles from which the road was suspended over the water. The cart swayed on past each ancient beam and the sound from the wheels on the wooden slats was a type of soft hammering. The man pulled gently on the right rein and they swung to where the road was bordered with tall macrocarpas. Behind the trees was the river flat with its sweet sour scent of dark green winter grasses.
A few miles on and Jack reined the beast slowly over a culvert and onto the stony verge. The cart lurched slightly and boxes of utensils shifted and settled with metallic scrapings. The rubber tyres crunched in the stones.
“Why don’t you tip us all out and be done with it?” Sissy taunted.
“Be quiet woman.”
A fine misty rain began to fall, together the man and the woman pitched the tent under a low twisting river gum. The eldest child led the other kids away to explore the area. When they returned with hands full of golf balls the horse was hobbled some way off and the man and woman were stretching the fly over the heavy canvas tent.
“Youse kids scout around and get some chips.” And the kids rushed off to drag back fine leached logs and brambles and piled them some way from the tent where Sissy directed. Jack dragged up a number of heavy logs from nearer to the river. He set about chopping them into a neat pile with his axe. He was a strong man. Sissy got a fire going and Jack made a tripod from some straight sticks. From its centre he hung a piece of number eight fencing wire with a hooked end.
“Deal with the billy while I get some kero for the lantern,” Jack said to Sissy. He was a man who never said eight words if seven would do.
“There’s no bloody snakes in them logs is there?” Sissy pushed the hair back from her forehead and frowned. She looked vaguely demented and sweat stood out on her face.
“Jesus woman.” Jack started to walk across the grass. Back along the road a mile or so was a garage. Here he would buy an imperial gallon of kerosene. His back disappeared into the winter’s afternoon. He wore his khaki army coat and carried the square battered tin for the kero.
Sissy watched him go. “Youse kids don’t go too far away. It’s gonna be dark soon. Might rain.” Sissy picked through one of the boxes and found the billycan. She looked across at the river. An abundance of logs were strewn all along the banks, left there by the constant rise and fall of the river. They jammed against trees and some hung high in the twisted forks of gums. That’s how much the great river rose when it left off from being a peaceful stream flowing broad and brown across the state. In floodtime no one could believe this was the same waterway that bubbled peacefully under soft willows or held gentle sandy beaches in its many elbows. She came to the edge and stooped to fill the billy. Sissy stared across the water.
The woman felt the optimism of somewhere in the past leap in her heart. She was opposite that part of the river the townspeople called the lake. It was here that
the river seemed to relax a little as it left a spread of soft white sand in a wide and gentle curve. A bit out from the opposite bank, long before Sissy’s time, the people had moored a raft and up the grassy hill they’d erected sheds for changing and even one they labelled “kiosk”. Now the paint was green chalk and spiders lined up in the beams. It seemed the lake had been there forever. The woman saw a younger Jack, walking on his hands across the raft, showing off his strength and manhood as he flipped into the summer depths. How safe life had all seemed then.
And now the raft was there still. She remembered Lenny Dingall waving farewell to the town as the river carried him away to the mystery of his death. Like her father. But then hardly a summer passed but some youth brown and brave with muscled limbs would become another victim of the snags and sudden depths of the water’s hidden treachery.
Way back then, all those years ago, some girls had joined in the tom foolery too. But Sissy and Rose and sometimes Paula just sat and watched in their own private landscape of shaded hills and secret valleys warmed and warmed by the sun. They liked to flick their wet hair back and let the movement show the soft fabric of their woollen bathing suits taut across their form. They’d scoop up hands of sand and let it trickle through their thistle hands. The sun shone and warmed the lanes and hills and made the secret hollows dark and wild with the sweetest summer bushes. The girls knew all these places and they spoke with their eyes to each other and laughed their smoky laughs behind earth brown hands.
The shadows lengthened across the lake and a few late birds dipped towards the water and flew into the deep green gloom and the day drew in. Was it all so long ago? The water pulled against the billy and the winter wind stirred leaves above. A few sticks floated by.
Bridge of Triangles Page 3
