The Idea of Perfection (11 page)

Too long, too far, too late.

If you were privileged with a second chance, you were obliged to be pleased, and be properly grateful, doing the walks and the unwinding. But after that no one could hold you responsible. You were not to blame if you did not get a third chance.

The dog did not seem to realise she could be having another heart attack. It came up and stood in front of her, panting up cheerfully as if nothing was the matter. Then it jerked its head around to snap at a fly and collapsed suddenly on its haunches, scratching convulsively behind its ear. Hair and dust flew out, each speck lit up radiantly by the sun.

Fleas, she thought. Nothing to do with me.

It looked as though she was not having another heart attack, after all.

 

 

 

She looked away up into the sky: the palest kind of blue, a big quiet light. High up, two birds were flying together, drawing a straight line through the air like aircraft in formation.

Just over the brow of the hill was a fork in the road and a flaking wooden sign. One fork pointed downhill towards CASCADE RIVULET, the other uphill, to HANGING ROCK. Someone had tied a stone on the end of a bit of string and hung it from the sign. She laughed aloud, suddenly, a noise like a bark.

The dog twisted its head to look up at her in surprise and she stopped laughing. She glanced around, as if someone might have heard her, laughing on an empty road, and looked at the rock again. It was not really all that funny.

Below her, she could see Cascade Rivulet glinting metallically between the trees. The road ahead of her turned a sudden sharp corner down the slope, so steep it had washed away into long corrugations, and then all at once there was the river, and the bridge.

She recognised it straight away from its picture in the paper, a humble little thing, the bend giving it an apologetic look. It was hard to see why the town was
split
on it.

She walked down to it, feeling stones rolling away from under her shoes down the slope. A white ute was parked at the far end of the bridge but there was no sign of anyone, only a flat paddock in which some cows stood all lined up the same way like ornaments along a mantelpiece.

She stopped in the middle of the bridge and looked down at the river. Sun shone through the transparent amber water and lit up rounded rocks just under the surface, and fans of white sand. Where a band of sun cast a slice of black shadow, the water was dark and secretive.

She wanted to go down there, under the bridge, and saw that the fence at one end had collapsed, the wooden posts leaning crookedly where the bank had been scoured out by flood. She would not have actually forced her way through anyone’s fence. She knew how farmers felt about them, and about city folk who had no respect for them. But someone had been there before her. She could see where the post had been eased further sideways in the soft ground, and a rip down the dirt of the bank, where someone’s heels had slid.

Underneath, the bridge was a quaint, clumsy thing, a clutter of primitive timbers wedged against each other into crude simple joints. Where each horizontal met a vertical, each had had a piece removed so they were locked tightly together.

It was like two people holding hands.

From a distance the old wood looked nothing more interesting than grey, but close up, each timber had its own colour and its own personality. One was pink-grey with fine streaks of red like dried blood in the grain. Another was green-grey with circular blooms of brown-grey lichen, the next was the bleached blue-grey with a kinked grain like an old-fashioned marcel wave.

She stood with her shoes sinking slowly in the damp sand, looking up into the underbelly of the bridge, feeling the muscles twitching in her thighs after the fast walk. It was all coarse and clumsy, but as well as the subtle textures of the grain, the shapes fitted together in a satisfying way, and there was what they called at the Museum an
interplay
between the light and the shadow that drew the eye back to look again and again.

She got a notebook and pencil out of her pocket and stood drawing squares and long rectangles that interlinked and interlocked, glancing between her page and the pencil.

When she had filled a page she turned over and started again. She spent a long time getting the angles right where one rectangle came in and locked into another. It looked so simple as to be not worth a second glance, but drawing it showed how complicated it really was.

When she had covered the third page she felt she had the shapes right, and started to shade the squares and rectangles with her pencil.
Light, dark, light, dark.
It was in no way a realistic drawing of the way the bridge looked, but it was what it might look like if you reduced it to its essence: simple squares and rectangles, simple lights and darks, arranged in a way that was not as simple as it seemed.

Suddenly the dog was down there with her, nudging her knee with its nose, and a piece of shading jerked past its border.

Bugger off, she said without looking, and kept going with the shading.

It licked its nose with a long rubbery tongue and panted up at her, but she went on steadfastly taking no notice. At last it pushed with its nose at her knee again.

Bugger off! she said

This time it was loud and angry, and she looked down frowning.

Then she saw that her feet were sinking into the damp sand. Water was seeping up around them and was about to come in over the top of her shoe. She stepped back to where the sand was drier, her shoes making wet sucking noises as they pulled out of the sand.

The dog watched with interest. It cocked its ears at the sucking noise and went on watching the shoe-shaped holes she had left, as if they might make some other kind of interesting noise.

She glanced down at the dog at the same moment that the dog looked up. It closed its mouth and stopped panting, as if it thought she was going to say something.
Thank you, dog,
for example.

But she did not believe in talking to animals, much less thanking them. She turned away, put the notebook back in her pocket, and climbed up to the roadway.

From up on top, you would never guess how interesting it was underneath. The long squared timbers had been laid side by side in a plain way, and were simply held in place with big brown bolts. When the flood had come, and the bridge had decided to bend rather than break, each timber had swivelled slightly on its bolt. Some parts had been squeezed together, and in others long wedge-shaped cracks had opened up. But each individual beam had not moved very far. Beam by beam they hardly bent at all. To see that, you had to look along the whole bridge.

On the far side of the bridge she could see that another, more substantial road ran along beside the river on the other bank, joined by the bridge to the one she had used, making a big H-shape. She decided to take the other road back to Karakarook. There could be something wearisome about repeating yourself.

She could feel the sun on her back now, starting to get hot and harsh in her eyes. It was hard to leave the bridge, the water, the sense of stillness. The slice of shadow underneath was already smaller, shrinking in beneath, and blacker. In the middle of that crisp line of shade, the shape of her own head provided a knob, like a handle, of extra shadow.

From up here she could see the two shoe-shaped dents she had left in the sand, slowly filling with water but keeping their shape. Beside them were four smaller holes where the dog had stood. She could drop down dead, right now this minute, with another
infarction,
and long after she herself had been reduced to a smudge of smoke from a big busy chimney, the shape of her shoes would still be here. The shape of her shoes would go on proving she had been there, day and night, in light and in darkness, until the river rose and washed them away as if she had never been.

No one would know, though, except the dog.

Where the shadow met the light on the sand further along, she saw that there were two other holes in the shape of shoes, also filled with water. They were just like hers, but they were not hers.

As she watched, two big bumbling insects dipped quickly into the water in one of the other footprints, as if tasting it, and up again. Twining around each other they dropped into one of her own prints, hovered, and danced together out of sight under the bridge.

She moved her head and watched the shadow on the sand move too. A fly spun into her ear as if with an urgent message, then it was gone, leaving silence behind.

The sky was thickening into a hard blue. A cicada started up, stopped, started again, was joined by another on a different pitch.

She decided to take it slowly on the way back. There was something to be said for having respect for a
dicky ticker.

DOUGLAS WAITED UNTIL the dust of the truck’s passage up the hill had settled, then walked a little way along the river-bank. When he came to a fence, he thought for a moment he would have to go back, but he found a sagging strand of wire and forced it down with his foot so he could get through.

He felt light-hearted, adventurous. He was a cautious man. It did not take much to make him feel he was having an
adventure.
There’d been no bush in his suburb, just street after street of tidy houses with red-tiled roofs and a front path with a curve that it did not need. But he’d been a conscientious Scout as a boy. He’d got his
Fire-Lighting
Badge and his
Tent-Erecting
Badge and had got a
Special Mention
for
Knots.

The grass in the paddock was long, perfect for snakes. He thumped along, stamping his feet the way they had shown them at Scouts. He imagined the snakes, all over the paddock, waking up in the long grass, feeling the vibrations along the ground, sliding away.

Fire-Lighting,
and
Tent-Erecting,
and
Knots.
He felt pretty confident about any of those, and he was all right on
Snakes,
too.

He was heading for the chimney of the ruined house, but the river drew him. He sat on a log, listening to the water chinkering over the stones, enjoying the way the casuarinas swept back and forth overhead with a soft whistling sound.

Over the river in the bush covering the steep hillside, a bird was making a lot of noise. The books always talked about birds
singing,
but you would not call this
singing.
This was little strong pulses of sound, like a small dense steel object being struck with a small dense brass hammer.

He tried it.
Bong. Ping.
That was hopeless. He did a kind of sucking-and-clucking sound with his mouth. That did not sound right either, and he was glad there was no one nearby to hear it.

He thought perhaps he would get a book about birds. It would be something to do while he was here, get a book and look up the different bird noises.

Around him the landscape ticked and hummed secretively, getting on with its own mysterious life. A line of tiny black ants ran along a stick, up and down two sides of a stone, and ringed a morsel of something. Two white butterflies twisted and flirted above a bush.

The breeze on his face, the murmur of the river, the big sky overhead:
Nature
was all around him, expansive, generous, like a hospitable host. He was glad Chook had gone, and glad he had stayed out here rather than going straight back to Room 8 and pretending the
Engineering Digest
had his full attention.

Suddenly he was aware that he was not alone. Not far away a group of cows was staring at him. A
herd.
He supposed you called it a
herd.

They seemed to have horns. He wondered if that made them bulls. He did not like the way they were watching him. If they had been humans it would have been extremely bad-mannered.

All at once he was sick of sitting on the log watching the ants, but he did not want to move. Moving could be an inflammatory thing to do.

A
herd
of bulls did not sound right. Perhaps cows as well as bulls could have horns. Some of these had horns and some did not. He would have liked to know what that meant. Underneath, they all had a twist of hair. He did not know what that meant either.

He had seen cows before on other country jobs. He had seen them in paddocks, chewing. He had seen them staring over fences as he drove past. He had even seen them close up, at the Sydney Show, standing in their stalls draped in prize ribbons, too fat to move, and a man waiting with a shovel held out under their rear end.

But he had never seen cows at such close quarters, and he had certainly never encountered cows who were so embarrassingly interested in him.

He sat looking hard at the ants. He was going to be as boring as possible, so that the cows would lose interest. It would be easy. He could go on being boring for as long as it took.

He sat very still and made his face go blank. A fly landed on his chin but he did not move. It crawled up on to the corner of his mouth like a slow torture, but he was determined not to brush it off. That might be interesting.

He thought of Chook Henderson. A man like that would not even notice a few cows looking at him. He would think it was ridiculous to give them a second thought.

Perhaps the hat was the problem. It had looked harmless enough in the shop, the most neutral sort of country-person’s flat-topped felt hat, but it seemed to be causing tremendous interest here. He wondered if he should take it off, but taking it off might be even more interesting.

He stared at the ants, but he was not concentrating. A big foot struck the ground behind him and he glanced around. One cow had come up in front of the others. As he watched, it took another step towards him. It was a very solid foot with a lot of weight behind it, and it came down hard. The animal it belonged to was close enough now that he could see the long curly eyelashes, and a smudge of mud on its nose.