Bridge of Triangles

by John Muk Muk Burke

  Sundays were usually hungry days. Sunday was often the day when Weet Bix were eaten. There was food in the house but the kids just ate what was quickest and easiest.

  It was Barry who knew all the places to go. A boy who was never one to sit around, he introduced Chris to everything going on in the settlement. He knew where men were putting in a new light pole; where a dog had been splattered on the road; where some people had only just moved out of their hut because a Commission Home had come up for them, and they might have left something good behind. Barry could always get through the windows. There was something light-headed and unreal about creeping through a deserted house which still held smells and signs of the recent occupants.

  “This was the room where the mother and father slept,” said Barry when he and Chris had shinned up the wall and through a window which was conveniently broken.

  “This is where their bed was,” Barry grinned at Chris. “This is where they made babies. Do you know how you get babies?”

  Chris had asked his mum when he’d been very small but he’d been told that he had been brought home from the hospital. Since the lady in the hut next door had been the subject of Sissy’s and Rose’s speculations as to when her baby would be born, Chris had pondered hard and often on the matter of babies’ origins. Now Barry was about to tell him. At last he would know just how the hospital was able to give a lady a new baby. A baby which had once floated beyond the great dreaming sky-hill where the magic and light of orange peel scalloped clouds promised hints of other worlds—where all things began and to which all things belonged eternally.

  There was nothing anatomically wrong with Barry’s explanation. The basics were absolutely correct. In that empty room, standing on those stained floorboards, listening to this grinning eleven-year-old Sydney boy whom Chris had no doubt knew everything in the world, a turmoil and a grey floating unreality gripped the atmosphere. The last stage of Chris’s arrival in the world had been reached. Was there really no magic? Did he not begin beyond the great looming sky-hill which dipped down to touch the rim of the world? No, everything screamed that Barry was wrong—and yet perhaps he was right for Sydney. Yes, that was it—in Sydney everything was changed. But back home—his real home where the Old Granny’s kewpie dolls had hung around the walls and the great laughing Paula had stooped over the mint-perfumed washing tub and where the rocking sky was huge and clean in its infiniteness—why back there things were as they really were. Sydney was all wrong. His soul tried to resist it.

  When Jack started sending maintenance Sissy allowed Joe first and then Mary to take the train to the court house and pick up the money. But Joe returned with practically none of it and Mary with about half. So it was established that Chris would go. The money was due for collection every second Wednesday and Sissy could not be away from the frypan factory so regularly. The boy missed half a day’s school to take the dull red train across the sprawling suburbs. He would make his way to the courthouse. At the end of the veranda was a glassed-in office. Here Chris learned to sign his name in a large book in exchange for the precious brown envelope. Sissy had told him to fold it up and carry it in his pocket. Chris knew the money was from his father.

  Who was his father? Chris sensed that he was a man more acted upon than acting. That his father resented being organised showed in the man’s quiet determination never to find merit in the actions of others. After all to recognise any inherent goodness in others might allow them to come too close to him—to discover that his bullying strength was a flimsy front. That they might not find he was all good in a world he sharply divided into good and evil. Jack Leeton was a man who could not live with his own faults, the awareness of which drained him of his life energy. His children were there—constant accusers of his culpability and weakness. He attempted to deal with his perceived inner emptiness by instigating a simple formula for what he called honesty. And this worked when dealing with horse flesh or the man who sold chicken mash, or the general store which permitted him to put things on tick because “Jack is so reliable”. The subtlety of his dishonesty in relationships naturally eluded him because of his fear of human closeness. He never discovered that he could work out his own rules for living. He lived by the rules of others while all the time telling them to get fucked. Yet where Sissy was concerned things were different: she could stick around if she wanted to. But she must question nothing. She must never attack the fabric of his flimsy fortifications. And for a while it seemed to do. He was a strong man not afraid of hard work. He was the father for her kids. He might really love her. In the beginning she did not realise the price she was being asked to pay—how far she would move from her country and people.

  When Jack was a boy he’d been led off to where the Good Shepherd lived. He early perceived that this invisible man was white. And the Good Shepherd’s Father had the face of Jack’s father and probably spent his time too sinking wells in heaven. No time for talk or sitting. No need for Grandma Leeton to sit in the cane chair and search the hair of her children. God was made of soap. Oh yes, the Good Shepherd taught her all about right and wrong. Her lot got three good plain meals a day and a bed with cold white sheets to sleep in. And learned their prayers.

  So Jack grew up secure in the values of those who were right. And then the jungle floor soaked up the bright frothing blood of other honest men. Was there enough soap in the universe now? Unquestioned obedience to duty. God, King and Country.

  And so when Chris signed the book, and the court official handed over the brown envelope with a bewildered expression, the most fragile link between man and boy was maintained. Every second Wednesday was a feast day in that small hut all those years and years ago. Bags with juicy peaches, a big bottle of drink, the extravagance of a whole pineapple and the largest block of chocolate were carried triumphantly by Chris into that low mean hut. And if Jack Leeton ever knew then it is certain he approved of the joy with which those kids attacked the stuff his labour had bought.

  It was Barry who told Chris about the cordial and the biscuits every Sunday morning. It only cost a penny he said. And so it was that the boy went to his first church service. And so it was too that the first awakening notion of the real cost of sustenance and nourishment was formed.

  Across the main road was another sprawl of huts. Over on that side there were no ramps connecting the huts. There was a barbershop with a red and white pole where it cost two shillings to get a hair cut. Here too was a doctor’s surgery and post office. One end of the block had wide double doors. These opened into a long room across the width of the hut. Above the doors a wooden cross was bolted to the wall. A faded sign announced that a meeting would be held every Sunday at “9.30AM GOD WILLING”. Chris wondered about that. He was beginning to wonder more and more about all things.

  His relationship with Barry had subtly changed since the talk about babies. It would be years before the ineffability and utter mystery of the physical world worked its way into his conscious mind: until he accommodated the inexorable truth that he was to walk the earth for a time and that the innocence which Barry’s words had cut into like a jagged bread knife was no real innocence. So much pain in accepting that there would never, could never be the return his child soul yearned for. It would be years and years before he dimly began to see that notions of forward and return were ultimately without meaning. That all is a constant now. Fragments of a memory of a memory, felt at first as a consuming pain, filtered through the voices of birds and lizards, the moving air and leaves and even the rocks themselves. Something of what he’d learned to call the past informed him. And in the centre of all this confusion was a tiny light which no matter how much it flickered and threatened to go out, danced back with fitful flames. It seemed to say that somewhere a meaning to the swirling events which were the sum total of his walk on the world was waiting to be found. He reached out for any rock which that light happened to flicker on and illuminate.

  So he tagged along with Barry because now there were empty days tha
t yawned into what he’d learned to call the future. His memories of the past became ghostly and insubstantial. It was a strange liaison because Barry showed a certain contempt for everything, especially school. Chris had grown to like school, most of all the reading and art. Maths was a mystery, but later, after Barry’s parents got their Commission Home and Chris became friends with a boy who was good at maths, he got a little better.

  The interior of the place where you could get cordial and biscuits for a penny smelled a bit like the flat when the Welfare lady had first taken them there; musty and unused and yet slightly of other people. The place echoed if you even thought and every sound bounced back from the small windows and the high roof. Black steel rods tied the upper portion of the room together and the bare board floor had wooden forms arranged so they focussed on a cloth-draped table at the front. A large book stood on the table along with a wooden bowl. There was a tall wooden cupboard labelled “Sunday School Press” over in one corner.

  The man’s eyes were set close together and his ginger hair grew sticking up and thick above a high earnest forehead sprinkled with freckles. The twenty or so kids had wonderfully raised the dust in the room and now they seemed determined to drive the floor into the earth as they confirmed that, yes, they were happy and glad by stamping their feet. They’d already clapped their hands, nodded their heads and as Barry had whispered to Chris in the back row, shown their joy by “waving your dick”. Barry was daring. Chris eyed him like some sort of city hero.

  Canon Wilson seemed not to notice any of the present tom-foolery, pinching and plait pulling. Instead he spoke of the utter wickedness of all people and how they were going to be cast into the everlasting pit. Yes, even little children unless they knocked at the door and heard the shepherd and became as little children and turned the other cheek as they passed through the eye of a needle.

  “What’s he talking about Barry?” Chris’s knowledge of the other had always been there—unformed but certain and sure. Barry’s seemingly simple bonding to the earth had first awakened the thought that people attempted to give shape to the unformed knowledge. Chris was beginning to see that these other people—these whites—were grasping to grasp some notion with which he had been born. The certainty that there was more than this sad sad world where people hated and killed one another, where little children were left hungry and lonely and reaching out to be loved, where everyone died and that was that. And now Canon Wilson seemed to say yes—there is more than this but it can never be now. Perhaps he was right. It never could be now—now that the old families were all but gone. The big faces wise and accepting—the big hands breaking the bread and sharing—the small hands clutching secure thick black curls as babes were carried strong and safe across the earth’s surface. Yes this was all gone. And the only hope was in a place called heaven.

  “Bullshit,” whispered Barry, “got your penny? Ya gotta pay now.”

  Canon Wilson passed the wooden bowl to a child and led the crowd in a song about pennies dropping one by one. As Chris’s penny fell down amongst the others with a bright clink, a mixture of relief and anticipation swept over him. Had he bought a little time away from the bottomless pit? And had the time come at last for the drink and biscuits?

  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 bi
g 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.”