Bridge of Triangles

by John Muk Muk Burke

  Could it be that for these people just to be alive—to have been born at all, was somehow a great wrong? Existence was a burden. He looked at his father. The boy’s heart ached to love him. But how could he ever get close enough to try?

  His grandfather had at first not seen the opportunity as representing the chance for escape. Then the possibilities started to make themselves apparent. Yes, in the hospital he would do and say all those things he had felt like doing for years. He’d throw his piss bottle on the wall; swear at the young women in their clean white dresses; refuse to put his slippers on; toss food around; wander off against rules.

  Perhaps everyone needs to escape? Where had his father escaped to and when and, that question which the boy achingly asked himself, why? And why couldn’t the old man stay in his own house and wash his car and sit under the apple tree. And why couldn’t the old lady perhaps even break a branch off one of those scented trees at Christmastime and hang pretty paper on it? Had they ever done anything like that? And if he was mad why couldn’t the old lady just scream at him and tell him to piss off into his garage and go to buggery out of her way? His madness would be seen for what it was—a constricted tortured silently screaming need to relate. But she had no time for talk like that: tight lipped, there was always the washing to be folded or the hallway runner to be beaten on the clothes line and heaven to be gained. Everything untidy, dirty, not under control must be washed and scrubbed and stored away in a cupboard which had been wiped out with disinfectant and scattered with mothballs. The anger must be controlled.

  But what was the source of the cancerous anger? Was it an anger and hatred directed at their betters, blacks, God and the Church? Didn’t they know they had no betters; that at least the blacks could believe happiness was attainable—even if at the end of a bottle or in holding paper money or learning a few chords on the guitar. Didn’t they know that their God needn’t have been living in a heaven where crumbs were never dropped on the floor and children never laughed? Yes, that was the wearing sadness—to try to escape into respectability and goodness. Yet was their misery the formula for a kind of happiness? Had the Old Granny and Paula been happy? Hadn’t Billy died slowly swinging from the end of a rope in a stinking piss-smell cell? Hadn’t lovely Aunty Rose been brutally murdered by one of her good-time men? A man who didn’t want to play life by her rules—a white man who owned her in life and death? at was it that was different? Certainly the Leetons and those like them would never say the Old Granny was respectable. But were they not somehow more real, closer to the earth, able to laugh and cry and get drunk and hate and love and take risks with an intensity these others would never know? Would old lady Leeton ever be unhappy in the deepest blackest sense or was she wrapped up in a constant sort of grey unhappiness, a world weariness, a form of security? Would she ever know that the minister, lightly pressing the wafer into her arthritic hand sometimes had a hangover and that when he awoke for service he sometimes thought fuck, to himself and then smiled at his humanity? And he a white man? No, the Old Granny and Aunty Paula were never world weary.

  “Will we see Mum in Sydney?”

  “Don’t be so bloody stupid. We’re dropping your grand-father off. That’s why we’re going to bloody Sydney. Not for nonsense and wasting time.” In controlling the boy the man was attempting to control himself.

  The boy knew they would stay at Peter’s, the old man’s brother. Then his grandfather would be driven to the hospital. Packed away out of sight. He’d had a whiff of mothballs when the old man lifted the tartan rug and small suitcase. And that’s where he was going. Into a mothball drawer with other carefully washed and folded old people, like a grey cardigan the owner couldn’t quite manage to throw away.

  The boy pushed himself into the leather of the seat and the windscreen wipers brushed back the drizzling rain. There was an aftertaste of rock cake in his mouth.

  It was Keith who dared to escape first. Keith who showed no interest in school and didn’t so much hate the teachers as find them an irrelevance. This boy and his Koori mates whom the teachers classed as unruly and incorrigable. Little escapes at first, like wagging school to spend the afternoons swinging from the trailing willows that strained the froth from the broad brown river; stealing Chinese apples and milk money; roaming with laneway-swearing mates and shanghais and laughter. The truth was that often not a few teachers couldn’t have cared less—one less trouble maker to deal with. Let them muck around the river all day—at least they’re not mucking around at school. Those who did care knew that this kid was from a home with no books. No lights. No homework table. No conversation. They knew more than the kids did, that under those conditions school was pretty well meaningless. But what, they asked, could they do? They were part of a system which would eventually destroy them if they didn’t, like Keith and his mates, escape from it.

  Keith had always liked machines. It was he who could get a decrepit bike back on the road by tinkering with a couple of spanners through a foggy afternoon when he should have been at school. Or pass the right bits to his father when he helped strip down the carburettor of the ute. Keith early set his heart on driving a car. He’d never really wanted to own one—just drive and have fun. And so it was that one Saturday night he and his mates got one. Five Koori kids who’d palled up at school and drew courage from one another.

  They’d driven a good distance towards the town Ted lived in. Away over the paddocks great displays of sheet lightning lit up the late afternoon clouds. Speeding on. Passing cigarettes and a bottle of warm beer around inside the car. Nervous laughing and eyes averting eyes. Chance glance in the mirror.

  “Jesus Christ, coppers.”

  They were approaching with intentioned speed.

  Five separate boys with a warm bottle of beer.

  Having an interest in machines was not enough to bring out driving skills which had not yet had time to develop in a fourteen-year-old boy. Keith’s whole body urged the accellerator towards the floor. The back wheels gripped the tar and the shiny mascot in the form of a plane rose aggressively higher into the air. The five boys withdrew into their own stomach-sickening feelings and elemental perceptions which replaced all thought.

  The police pursued the stolen car for about half a mile before Keith saw the lane on the left. He veered the car savagely off the tar and hit the gravel. The first thick black rubber stains appeared on the road as it attempted to obey the laws of physics and continue on the tarred surface. It behaved as if it would wrench itself into two separate parts: one hurtling towards the rutted laneway, the other determinedly aimed at the kurrajong tree town where red-caped nurses were changing shifts in the small local hospital.

  The five boys inside sensed rather than thought that something of significance, something utterly irreversible, something mind-numbingly terrifying was accompanying their floating towards the fawn felt roof. Was it up? But sharp stones were striking skin and glass. One boy, in seemingly slow-motion, floated right on out through a back door which had wrenched itself open. His slender brown neck with its soft fuzz of black hair in a line down to his shirt collar cracked like a springtime sapling when his head hit the ground. The packet of cigarettes, the first he had ever bought, fell out of his shirt pocket and squashed against the dirt. The car continued to roll and the heavy chromed back bumper bar gouged a large portion of his young chest out like an ice-cream scoop. A second boy had both legs snapped and his left arm almost completely severed as he too was hurtled out and onto the stone embedded track. His blood pulsated out into the encroaching night as he, with a sense of calm mystery and wonder and a little sadness he could not quite touch, melted into the towering blackness. Away off somewhere in the distance he could hear the dying hum of a front wheel still spinning as night closed in. Already ants were lightly wavering their feelers towards the thick dark liquid.

  The other three didn’t die along that red dirt road on that early evening all those years ago. The lightning flashed intermittently beyond the horizon an
d the dull crack of distant thunder seemed to be completely separate from this little little event.

  With the help of steel pins and plates and bits of catgut Keith and the other two were eventually made whole enough to be sent to separate correction centres. Keith had to give eighteen months before he completed his escape. It was not too great a price he reckoned. The deaths of his two mates were contextualised in the brutish environment of his prison. An environment which kept all the pain at a manageable distance. But, like a storm which is stripping leaves off the screaming gums to send them flying wildly to where the storm is still merely threatening, there were connections. Or when, up where the waters rise, a deluge pushes the muddied flow at a disturbing pace with a few too many sticks and twigs, down towards the innocent town, there was a way in which the human hurt and pain could never be separate. Not from those closest to the events nor to those who seemed furthest away. Connections are finally made. The cry echoes out into the deepest recesses of the galaxies and star clusters and unimaginable distances. But distances are only such because of the patterns of those pieces connected by the distances.

  Chris tried to hold on to the thought, what if there were nothing? Nothing. Fleetingly he felt the is-ness of it all. And he knew that the idea of nothingness brought into inseparable being the little that was everything. He knew his brother suffered. Much later he would ask himself if the patterns his other knowledge revealed were indeed patterns. Or if the chaotic division of time and space and events were cajoled into an order which pitifully diminished the suffering. An order which gave those who walked upon the earth a sense of control. But had he glimpsed the chaos? He came to feel that he had. That in rocking through the vastness he’d seen that order, safety, predictability and the ensuing moments’ certainties were merely fictions. Oh yes—what if after all the is-ness was a fiction? at of the rituals of feet stamping into a sandy soil, kicking up the dust on ochred shins, lifting high the ceremonial feathers past the dancers face. Or the ritual of an old lady shuffling down the stone-bordered path to bring in the milk. Was there much difference ultimately? Were not both these actions merely degrees of ceremony that seemed to tame the chaos? That promised a kind of salvation?

  But Keith—how did he live his life in the up-at-six workaday life of the prison through which he continued his escape? Everyone there it seemed had matching stories of death and mayhem and escapes. And he early learned to glibly assert that when your time was up it was up. It seemed that Keith’s time was only sort of up. The ripples from his youth would travel their own vast distances and times and the connections would not be made for him for many a year yet.

  Christopher Micky, male-child of Sissy, Wiradjuri woman and Jack Leeton, Irishman, drifted towards his manhood. At the age of fifteen he began his own wanderings. He discovered some fleeting little deaths through girl-warm imaginings down among the creek weeds. He tried standing at the mirror with a cigarette. He started to shave and push his hair this way and another. School didn’t want to know him after he reached the legal age for leaving. But that didn’t matter: none of his friends was going on and most had left anyway. The time for his escape was approaching. Bigger than his father now, although not as strong, a type of silent agreement that the boy would leave was reached. Strangely, the Chinese market gardener whose apples Chris had raided gave the boy a job picking the shiny fruit and packing it into splintery boxes. The pay was miserable but it was constant. Chris carefully stored the bulk of his earnings under a brick where the concrete floor had broken away. He allowed himself a little for cigarettes.

  The apples were finally all packed. The deep green trees stood robbed of their fruit and the pickers, mostly women, were payed off.

  “You stay if like, help sweep and odd job round tree. Cut grass.”

  But the boy had enough to take off.

  Not many days after his leaving the Chinese orchard he knew the time had come. The brick was edged out of its concrete socket and the notes dusted off and folded with his last pay. As the boy began to replace the brick a glistening lizard, with its quick jerky head and shiny black eye dots scuttled from the recess and slipped under the tin wall gap. Light shafted through old nail holes in the grey metal. The boy noted the stamped crown on the undulating wall.

  Jack gave his son a lift into the town.

  The two were almost silent on the platform.

  “Smoke?”

  “Yeh.”

  Jack smoked cigarettes with the young man.

  “While since you were in the big smoke?”

  “Yeh. It’ll be alright.”

  “You be right now?”

  “Yeh.”

  “Right then. S’pose it’s time to say hooroo.”

  “S’pose.”

  “Yeh, well, hooroo then...”

  The man reached out with his right hand. Rough. Chris reached out with his right hand. Still young, slim. It was one of the rare times the two had ever touched.

  The man walked in through the waiting room and out into the winter sunshine.

  It was a winter afternoon. The boy lit another cigarette and waited alone for the train. A sprinkling of others waited too. And travelled through the night, separately. On one train. Perhaps he would run into Sissy, even Joe? Would he know them? Recognise them? He was still young enough for Christmas to be a long way off. Mary was who knows where, but Keith’s time in the correction home was nearly up. Perhaps he’d meet that one of his family? Did he care much either way? Time was when family seemed fixed as the stars and the sun. A long long time past. But now—was he not growing up? Did adults need their families? He told himself he didn’t care. Who was his family now anyway? It would be years and years before he cared again. Before the story of his roots would become an urgent need again. Now he needed no one. And he remembered when he felt the need and how much it had hurt then. He was glad he had left such weakness behind him. He felt glad he was alone anyway. He was a man now and now he was going to the city. Alone. To what? Who knew? Something would turn up. Sydney was a big place. Oh yes, he was glad he was fifteen and a man and able to leave his childhood behind. He caught a glimpse of his face in the train window. A dark face in a dark window. And suddenly his face seemed so small. Framed by sooty varnished timber. Yes, I’m so glad. I wonder if I’ll be able to find Mum? The train thundered over a tall bridge carried in the cold night sky by its great steel girders.

  Christopher Micky Leeton ambled down the street of an inner city suburb. The trees looked cold and bare and dead but the earliest swellings of brand new buds were pushing through the black bark. In a few places there were even a few leaves of the lightest, purest green.

  It was late afternoon. A gritty sort of breeze was at his back. The collar of his corduroy jacket was turned up to his ears. His hands were thrust into his pockets. His fingers felt the bit of paper with the address on it. Clarrie had thought that yes, maybe she was still at the last address he’d got. But no, he hadn’t seen her for ages and didn’t particularly care if he ever did. And what was he going to do now he’d come back to the big smoke? Chris knew the man didn’t really want an answer so he just mumbled and shuffled until Clarrie gave him the dirty slip of paper.

  At first he walked past the gap in the yellow fence where once a gate had swung. But when he saw the number on the next few places he knew he’d gone past where he wanted. He turned back and looked up at the dry orange brick house with its black wrought iron veranda. He crossed the tiny cemented frontyard. He touched lightly the slight bulge of paper notes in his pocket. Taking the cigarette from his lips he tossed it down among the scraps of paper and pushed down on it with his shoe.

  The wooden door, its fairly new red paint slightly grimy didn’t seem to be completely shut. A milk bottle stood on the concrete step. The door had two narrow panes of golden frosted glass in its top half. The thumping bass of a radio’s song pushed out into the city air. Running his hand through his thick hair, the boy went up the three steps to the door. A carton of empty wine an
d beer bottles lay to the right of the door at the top of the steps. A couple of bottles stood next to the box too. He touched the notes in his pocket once more with his left hand while his right hand prepared to knock on the door into whatever waited ahead.

  First published 1994 by University of Queensland Press

  PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

  www.uqp.com.au

  © John Muk Muk Burke, 1994

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Typeset by University of Queensland Press

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Publication of this title was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

  The David Unaipon Award receives financial assistance from the Queensland Government through the Minister for the Arts

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  National Library of Australia

  Burke, John, 1946–.

  Bridge of triangles.